The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins
vanityfair.com
vanityfair.com
One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity."
Plus there's all the stuff about the miners shoveling bat poop for weeks and then dying of coronaviruses, and the Wuhan institute collecting and doing gain of function research on these similar-to-SARS samples. And then several of the lab's gain of function researchers became ill in late 2019. And there's the weird renaming of samples to hide the unmatched closeness of the mine samples and covid. This is just the absolute surface of the article. There's too much to list here
Edit: here's another amazement for the list: "Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories." And the article says "BSL-2 [is] roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office."
I can’t find sources for this right now but apparently Dr Anthony Fauci played a key role in getting the ban lifted. He’s also the head of the NIAID ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci ) which (apparently) is the ultimate source for all funding on gain of function research.
So the lead guy we’ve been listening to (and still are) for scientific advice on this pandemic is entangled in a massive conflict of interest.
Edit: I assume this is getting down-voted either because is sounds like conspiracy theory or just everyone has already heard it and it's not news. Fauci has already admitted having been involved in funding Wuhan - https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/fauci-admits-nih-funding-of-wu... - that on it's own should not have been something he first admitted to in May 2021, while holding such a responsible position. Looking for more sources right now...
Edit 2: In this article from December 2011 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-wor... - you have Fauci making the case for creating viruses in a lab;
> "Given these uncertainties, important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory."
It doesn't explicitly mention gain of function but - while raising the concerns, it's arguing for research which would include gain of function. Meanwhile listening to this panel discussion which included Fauci from Nov 2017 - https://www.c-span.org/video/?437187-1/johns-hopkins-forum-e... ... again he's arguing for more aggressive types of research
It's not muckraking. There is heavy smoke, and people denying the existence of fire while trying to get people to stop looking for it.
Whether or not anything shady was happening, the conflict of interest is clear.
As head of that agency, it's also his job to share his professional opinion with the public. For this, his reward is a public servant's salary. Seriously, what's he getting here for his supposed "deception"?
So it is not a conflict of interest because of the sum of money? Someone doesn't need to gain anything to be in conflict, by definition: "a situation in which the concerns or aims of two different parties are incompatible."
Do you at least think he had a duty to disclose his involvement/investment in gain of function research? Specifically with the Wuhan lab at the center of this?
> As head of that agency, it's also his job to share his professional opinion with the public. For this, his reward is a public servant's salary. Seriously, what's he getting here for his supposed "deception"?
Did you know he's the most highly paid government official? His measly public servant salary only paid him $417K. [0]
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-...
> His measly public servant salary only paid him $417K.
The top scientist in the country, with several Ph.Ds, 50 years of experience in a both public leadership and an incredibly complicated branch of biology, is making roughly what a staff engineer at a FAANG company makes...and you are complaining? That's the bargain of the century. He's a sick fuck for actually sticking it out - he could have bailed and consulted on "return to the office" for all the big tech and entertainment companies. He is 80 years old, working insane hours, and probably would have made more money in 6 months than he has in his whole public career from a really nice beach. You will never convince me that THIS is the smoking gun that proves Dr. Fauci corrupt, finally, after 50 years in public service. It's too stupid.
Maybe he's covering his own ass? Maybe he's trying to protect gain of function research? He was, after all, the most vocal proponent that the risks with gain of function research were worth it. [0]
> The top scientist in the country, with several Ph.Ds, 50 years of experience in a both public leadership and an incredibly complicated branch of biology, is making roughly what a staff engineer at a FAANG company makes...and you are complaining? That's the bargain of the century. He's a sick fuck for actually sticking it out - he could have bailed and consulted on "return to the office" for all the big tech and entertainment companies. He is 80 years old, working insane hours, and probably would have made more money in 6 months than he has in his whole public career from a really nice beach. You will never convince me that THIS is the smoking gun that proves Dr. Fauci corrupt, finally, after 50 years in public service. It's too stupid.
Oh, ok. So before his only reward was his "public servant salary", but now that you know he's the most highly paid government official (including the President) his salary is now being compared to FAANGs and he's underpaid. What a sacrifice.
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484390/
Edit: Fix typo.
I assumed this was a typo the first time, but since you repeated it - it's gain* of function. As in a virus gaining a new function.
Did you even read that paper? I doesn't say what you are claiming at all. It says they're going to hold a conference to determine if it's worth the risks, and says they should continue the moratorium while they do more research. Ah jeez.
> Oh, ok. So before his only reward was his "public servant salary", but now that you know he's the most highly paid government official (including the President) his salary is now being compared to FAANGs and he's underpaid. What a sacrifice.
Compared to what he could be making right now? Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate his sacrifice — he's criminally underpaid for how valuable his skills and experience are to the country.
He is far from the top paid government official. That honor, by a long shot, in nearly every state in the country, goes to college athletic coaches[1].
We do have representatives that are meant to have final say, but they went AWOL mentally.
Oh please. The median CEO pay at a pharmaceutical company is nearly $5 million. It take all the way up to nearly $50 million per year, which someone with the incredible experience (not to mention government contacts) of Dr Fauci would be on the upper end of, and that's not too mention the tens of millions in signing bonus and retirement packages. [1]
1. https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/biotech-pharma-ceo-employ...
Placing blame isn't really all that important. Making sure none of this happens again for the same reasons is.
If I was placing a bet, I'd say Wuhan researchers regularly got a handle on patents zero for cross species infection. In the course of the research a virus infected workers because of lax, sloppy, or otherwise inadequate controls; then despite the threat in order to save face government did everything they could to hide the mistake until it was far too late for anything to really be done about it.
The lancet letter was at best extraordinarily premature.
It’s called self-policing elsewhere, and anybody would see the conflict of interest immediately at FAANG, for example. Was FB causing teen depression? Researcher says no. (Then it turns out the researcher had done consulting work for FB or had been in contact with FB, advocating that they use the timeline feed to run experiments on unsuspecting teens…
It was a $3.7million dollar grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which I wouldn't doubt he was involved with. $600,000 was sent from EcoHealth to Wuhan Institute of Virology.
More explanation of that here... https://youtu.be/jMr-fGmRGco?t=246
In this case, Fauci has sort of a small, debatable conflict. His personal stake is not money per se, but his reputation and clear preference for gain-of-function research. If it came out that gain-of-function research caused the pandemic, and Fauci was one of the leading cheerleaders for that since the early aughts AND Fauci may have provided some of the funding for this particular research, then Fauci would stand to lose quite a bit of reputation and standing. That's a real adverse incentive to determine that lab leak of a gain-of-function virus is not possible.
If his job is to share his opinion to the public, then he has a conflict of interest with respect to that decision, since the public doesn't know if Fauci-the-expert is talking or Fauci-the-reputation-seeking-bureaucrat. If he had merely disclosed any of his involvement with restarting funding of gain-of-function research in 2017 or his past advocacy for gain-of-function research, that would significantly resolve the conflict.
In my opinion, Fauci is simply an opportunistic bureaucrat and a liar (I repeat myself), and the conflict of interest claim against him is weak. Peter Daszam has much, much more problematic conflicts of interest. This is a guy who (1) discredited fellow scientists in the Lancet for considering an alternative hypothesis and (2) led a sham WHO investigation into the WIV lab, all while funneling NIH grant money to WIV, not complying with disclosure and review requirements and standing to lose his career if gain-of-function were to be seriously discredited. It would be hard for him to be more conflicted.
Also, for what it's worth, Fauci is the highest paid federal employee. He makes more than the president. Most "public servants" make $150k/year or less. Not to mention, Fauci had also made a book deal as a result of his celebrity.
The ideology behind throwing around this kind of allegations is: all facts are fabricated by somebody, nobody can be trusted (they all have a conflict of interest), so we can as well make up our own "alternative facts" that fit our ideology best. In the end, it's just "us against them", so arguments and facts don't matter any more.
As a side-note: I doubt that Fauci just spontaneously pushes out his personal opinion about this kind of affairs, so I suppose his organization largely agrees with him. All corrupt and in a "conflict of interest"? And I think his position should definitely be paid better than the president. Why not?
None of this says anything about Fauci as a person. He might be opportunistic, a bureaucrat, and whatnot, but that is hardly relevant in this context (other than discrediting everything he says).
Yes. But not everyone becomes the leading figure in a global pandemic which has killed 3.7 million people and thrown the world into complete disarray. At the point where you realise you're in that position, the correct, ethical thing to do is put all your cards on the table.
EDIT: Please don't downvote Pyramus. He asked a legitimate question and as far as I can tell followed HN rules. There are ~7.7B people who are not in the US.
I'm not disagreeing with the importance of US R&D spending, which is huge (25-30% of global spend), or that Fauci is an important public health official.
I'm simply telling you that the rest of the world is mostly indifferent to the persona Fauci, based on what I'm observing in the EU & UK and extrapolating to Asia.
That isn't true at all. Mere disclosure (e.g. "Full disclosure: I ran gain of function research for years at NIH, a couple years ago got a ban on gain-of-function research lifted at the White House and our team is currently looking into whether WIV received our funding") is sufficient to mitigate most conflicts of interests. Conflicts of interest exist all the time, but they're fairly easy to disclose (as long as someone has an ethical backbone), and in extreme cases can be mitigated with things like divestment or blind trusts (in the case of financial conflicts of interest).
Suppose your doctor was also a paid consultant for a pharmaceutical company, advising them on their new drug X. One day, your doctor starts telling you all of the benefits of drug X for certain medical issues you have, and she's very enthusiastic about it. If she simply disclosed, "full disclosure: I'm consulting with the manufacturer on the effects of this drug; that said, I really believe in it," wouldn't that entirely change the ethical dynamic vis-a-vis nondisclosure? If she disclosed, you could get a (non-conflicted) second opinion, or maybe you implicitly trust your doctor and go along with her recommendation as is. But if she didn't disclose and you later learned some other way that she has this conflict, you would lose trust.
This is what happened with Fauci and the gain-of-function crowd. They stood on the pedestal of unbiased scientific expertise, failing to disclose their conflicts, and then enabled the browbeating of anyone with alternative hypotheses (literally anyone: scientists had their professional reputations and research funding threatened; social media users had their accounts suspended or posts deleted). Without alternative hypotheses, science entirely falters. Full disclosure on the part of Fauci and especially Daszak would have gone lightyears in evaluating their credibility.
I should note that conflicts of interest do not change facts or true scientific conclusions themselves; that would be ad hominem. But conclusions are typically dependent on myriad facts, and experts have a much better idea about the universe of discourse around these facts than laypeople. A conflicted expert may thus present cherry-picked facts that support his conclusions, ignoring those that cut against them. To be fair, non-conflicted scientists may do this as well, but their credibility is only harmed insofar as they should have addressed countervailing evidence when presenting conclusions. Having a non-disclosed conflict of interest undermines a scientist's credibility and a commitment to ethical inquiry.
In my opinion, the scientific community has severely undermined their ethical and persuasive capital over the past year and even longer. If disclosure were a normal part of scientific discourse where it impacted policy, we likely would have more people who believe that vaccines work, that climate change is a threat (though likely not an apocalyptic one) and that the scientific process generally works. Instead, we have this browbeating culture where not trusting the "experts" is like some sort of scarlet letter, at least until we learn the experts were looking out for their own interests and suddenly they lose their luster. I love science, so I wish the scientific community would get its fucking act together so that large segments of the population on my "side" start to believe in the scientific method again.
Finally, lost in all of this is the fact that gain-of-function was supposed to produce vaccines more rapidly. As far as I can tell, this never happened. The vaccines we received had been researched for a decade through a different program not funded by NIH, and did not depend on gain-of-function research, but instead used unmolested SARS viruses.
I would agree with the "even longer". I think it most noticeably started with the scientific community's intermixing of concerns regarding climate change with political forces who have had their own agendas. It's made it extremely difficult even for scientifically-minded and informed people like myself to sort through the bullshit vs the good information. People without even my background have no hope of knowing whom to trust, so they've fallen back to just trusting their political inclinations.
This past year and the politicization around pandemic issues has definitely seen an increase in the the problem, though. It's been a sad year for Science. Hard-won public trust in scientists has been thrown away. You can see it in the hesitancy to get the vaccine.
Humans are flawed, biased, and fundamentally limited creatures that are wrong a lot of the time. So we invented a system to evaluate hypothesis based on experiments, data, etc... A person speaking gospel or pushing a trust “The Science” while prematurely rejecting unproven hypothesis is NOT a scientist. They are no better than those who sought to banish or kill Galileo and the like.
Fauci has been covering this up since early on. Have you not followed the story of the released emails from the FOIA request? He knew this research was being conducted. He gave cover to those who attacked people like Sen Tom Cotton, who was trying to get this looked into from the beginning.
For this, his reward is a public servant's salary
Fauci is the highest paid employee in the Federal government.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-...
Zerohedge was reporting this early on, and Twitter banned them for "misinformation".
Local mainstream “fact checkers” have even called Covid-19 a “right-wing conspiracy theory” in early 2020.
There was no trend or array of stories. Just one lady who said she had someone denying it on their deathbed with zero corroboration, and then she got 2 days of news cycle.
So its not like this crazy stuff is hard to prove is prevalent (pun intended) among certain groups.
What is hard is actually putting figures on it when worldviews get so warped due to circular logic. This is bad, because there are real reasons people are upset. Underlying reasons that need to be properly addressed.
Hell, if you're rural, it's pretty likely to have a nurse who doesn't really believe the current understanding of COVID
Would love a citation or two. I remember the right-wing administration saying it would disappear as if by magic and Fox News saying "0 deaths" and that playing up covid was a left wing invention at least up to april or so.
At first the loosely defined right-wing were panicking about the virus. Myself included, although I wasn't really panicking, just getting myself mentally prepared that this might possibly be the second black plague that could wipe out a similar percentage of the population. Meanwhile the loosely defined left-wing was ridiculing it, laughing about it, saying that there is no evidence that the virus is dangerous and calling people fearmongers and racists (?). And then everything switched. As it turned out, the virus wasn't as nearly dangerous as I initially though it'd be and the left-wing suddenly started acting like we're all going to die.
Regarding:
> calling people fearmongers and racists (?)
I remember asian (or of asian descent) acquaintances being spit on and yelled at in the vein of "you're killing us!" on the subway for ostensibly looking Chinese (I'm guessing), at a time when the virus was already likelier to spread from other countries, and I'd say the more left leaning were pointing this out. People doing that don't reach that stage of racebased profiling independently without someone drumming up "chinavirus" as soon as it was no longer feasible to shrug it off. Is that maybe what you're referring to?
I've seen people talking about the rise in anti-asian hate crimes and it being incorrectly blamed on white supremacy, but that happened somewhat recently. At the point in time we're talking about I haven't really heard about anything too much, although it's not hard to imagine it being the case. I think it's to be expected, what are you supposed to do about it? Should you ignore the actions of Israel, because it's associated with Jews? Or actions of Russian government, because someone could discriminate a Russian person over that? Or what happens in some Islamic country? And we're fine with talking about about "systemic white supremacy", so I find these concerns to be hypocritical frankly. I also don't believe that pretending like the virus didn't originate in China would help anything. People might be stupid, but they're smart enough to figure out that this is just BS.
I think we are in disagreement. I don't remember such a switch, nor can identify one browsing backwards.
> I think it's to be expected, what are you supposed to do about it? Should you ignore the actions of Israel, because it's associated with Jews? Or actions of Russian government, because someone could discriminate a Russian person over that? Or what happens in some Islamic country?
I doubt everyone in Israel agrees with the decisions of the state of Israel, just as half of Americans don't agree with any current administration. Even further beyond that you shouldn't equate every jew with Israel, just as you shouldn't every muslim with Iran.
Talking about China as it relates to covid is fine. Calling it "chinavirus" (repeatedly) has no practical benefit, and is only used as a polemic.
> And we're fine with talking about about "systemic white supremacy", so I find these concerns to be hypocritical frankly.
I don't equate every white person with white supremacy, including myself. I don't see the hypocrisy.
Well, I definitely remember left-leaning people ridiculing it when people were buying out the toilet paper, saying that there is no virus and stuff.
> I don't equate every white person with white supremacy, including myself. I don't see the hypocrisy.
And I don't equate every Chinese person with the virus or the Chinese government. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the criticism is that the narrative or the words you use, even if factually correct, might cause some people to have prejudice against the members of a certain group. You're (maybe not you specifically, I don't know) concerned about backlash against Chinese people over the virus, but you aren't concerned about the backlash against white people over systemic racism theory. That's what I find hypocritical.
But yeah, "china virus" might be a little bit over the top.
I didn't even realize buying up toilet paper during early pandemics was partisan, but I definitely remember memes about how inconsiderate it is to buy up years worth of toilet paper at once, emptying the cache for everyone else with no indication that toilet paper manufacturing was affected. I admit I made fun of this too, but drew no political association to it. It had nothing to do with (the existence of) the virus.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the criticism is that the narrative or the words you use, even if factually correct, might cause some people to have prejudice against the members of a certain group.
Yeah, I guess, but I don't think there's any valid and accurate criticism that would lead anyone to blame random Chinese people.
> You're (maybe not you specifically, I don't know) concerned about backlash against Chinese people over the virus, but you aren't concerned about the backlash against white people over systemic racism theory. That's what I find hypocritical.
I haven't experienced any backlash against white people for any and all systemic racism built by other white people. I still do not see your point.
> I haven't experienced any backlash against white people for any and all systemic racism built by other white people. I still do not see your point.
And I'm really glad you didn't. Not every Chinese experienced any backlash either. That's great for them too. But not everyone was so fortunate. Example from a BLM protest: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5ebji8
I can't scroll to find the original tweets but many Trump loyalists were very early on the Covid concerns– while the left was ridiculing any concern with articles like what I linked above. See https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/03/coronavirus-mik... and https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/why-some-early-maga-.... Tucker Carlson talked constantly about the Covid from very early on as well.
From your vanityfair link:
> As Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and much of the GOP parroted the president’s no-worries line, MAGA originals like Steve Bannon and Mike Cernovich sounded the alarm.
I did notice the difference in Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity coverage, but you're right, there seems to have been a split within the grouping. Seeing as how many on the right are Trump loyalists (to a fault), that was the generalization I was drawing.
Yeah, the Vox one is bad.
Concerns about COVID were being cast as "racist" by the Left and the media (but I repeat myself) in the beginning: https://news.yahoo.com/pelosi-denies-she-downplayed-coronavi...
https://twitter.com/newsmax/status/1246131288664408064
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JZ0Ruh89f0
If you don't remember that, then you should question your information sources. I remember the accusations of racism online quite vividly as I voiced my concerns in early February that people should start taking precautions: buying quarantine supplies, PPE, etc.
Tucker Carlson had some early reports on COVID and was attacked for fear-mongering by his usual left-leaning political opponents.
This is Fauci (serving under Trump) saying in January 2020 that he didn't think it was a threat, or am I missing something?
Are you saying that a then Trump official, now Biden official was speaking out of partisanship?
> I remember the accusations of racism online quite vividly as I voiced my concerns in early February that people should start taking precautions: buying quarantine supplies, PPE, etc.
I stocked up on ~3-4 weeks worth of supplies too, and replenished bi-weekly since early february, as well as many of my friends, neither of whom politicised it.
> Tucker Carlson had some early reports on COVID and was attacked for fear-mongering by his usual left-leaning political opponents.
Do you mean his fellow network hosts?
https://i.insider.com/5e5959a6fee23d09e47eae94?width=951&for...
https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/imag...
There was an article from a popular outlet I've been particularly surprised about, since left-wing media otherwise mostly took the pandemic seriously here and around the world, and tried to stay science-based.
This article remained in my memory because they present themselves as fact checkers and are popular with many prominent people in my primary political and media spectrum.
They politicised covid early on and claimed it is just an anti-open-borders / anti-foreigners campaign: "The secret reasons why conservatives want you to be afraid of coronavirus": https://www.volksverpetzer.de/politik/rechte-panik-corona-vi...
This is from 27th January 2020, while many people here on HN likely have read the first concerning reports about this virus at the end of December 2019. I started being careful from mid January.
Until today this page self-righteously claims that "the available facts at that time" pointed towards nothing to be concerned about in the Western world, which is simple not true if you took your research seriously.
I mentioned that Men in Black scene. There were several other topics where I could find concerning evidence by carefully browsing otherwise questionable sources very early on – the lab leak theory (ProjectEvidence, Zerohedge), the aerosol transmission, that mask wearing is reasonable, the unclear and potentially harmful effects of the spike protein itself –, while I've been completely ignoring such websites before covid. ( Other things like people just dropping dead on Chinese streets did not turn out true ofc. )
The “engineered” component is about the Furin cleavage site on the sars-cov-2 spike protein.
The virus shares 92% genetic similarity to bat coronaviruses, except the spike protein, which is nearly identical to a pangolin coronavirus(which is otherwise only ~38% similar) with one key exception: The Furin cleavage site using “lab standard” sequences.
The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that are rarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair. For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.According to Andersen, the CGG codon isn't quite as rare in coronaviruses. He also comments that the stability of the CGG codon in the Furin cleavage site has been remarkably high over the course of the pandemic, which is a hint that the CGG codon may be selected for and crucial for the virus.
Quoting him:
> Now, the codons. Here, Baltimore is talking about the two codons coding for the first two arginines (R) following the P - CGG. The CGG codon is rare in viruses because it's an example of an unmethylated "CpG" site that can be bound by TLR9, leading to immune cell activation.
> Despite being rare, however, CGG codons are found in all coronaviruses, albeit at low frequency. Specifically, of all arginine codons, CGG is used at these frequencies in these viruses:
> SARS: 5% SARS2: 3% SARSr: 2% ccCoVs: 4% HKU9: 7% FCoV: 2%
> Nothing unusual here.
> Furthermore, if we go back to the FCoV sequences and compare them to SARS-CoV-2 at the nucleotide level you'll see that FCoV also uses CGG to code for R immediately following the P. The next R is CGA (non-CpG) in FCoV, while it's CGG in SARS-CoV-2 - one nucleotide difference.
> We see CGG multiple times in different ways - here's an example comparing another "PR" stretch between SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, and SARS-CoV in the N gene. Note how SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 both use CGG, while SARS-CoV-2 uses CGC for the first R, while later R's are coded by CGT or AGA
> One final point about the CGG codons in the FCS - if they were somehow "unnatural", we'd see SARS-CoV-2 evolve away from "CGG" during the ongoing pandemic. We have more than a million genomes to analyze, so what do we find if we look at synonymous mutations at the "CGG_CGG" site?
> Remarkably stable. Specifically, CGG is 99.87% conserved in the first codon and 99.84% conserved in the second.
> This is very strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 'prefers' CGG in these positions.
CGG-CGG is the most potent furin cleavage site because it works on the outer cell membranes and on the interior. Viruses that have it will outcompete all others -- but all this means is that SARS-Cov-2 with the CGG-CGG FCS has been well adapted to humans since the beginning of the pandemic and less potent mutations haven't been able to keep up. There's no "natural/unnatural" axis to consider. The most infectious virus "prefers" to be the most infectious, indeed. It's tautological. Evidence of efficacy doesn't disprove laboratory alteration.
It's something he'd likely be concerned about, because he's been a big booster of gain of function research, and the Institute famously houses China's first BSL-4 lab, although the article claims the Bat Lady said prior to the pandemic they were only using BSL-2 and -3 labs for their coronavirus research. This assumes she'd know about all that was going on the Institute.
Fauci's elevation to sainthood was way too premature. His constant media appearances where he hasn't been questioned on any of this should be an object lesson to the public on media bias and the subsequent narrative bubbles that impact our society.
It's not surprising that the same people pushing Michael Avenatti as the next great politician have been the same people promoting Fauci.
Nice try and trying to equate Fauci with Avenatti - please return to the cable Fox hole which you emerged from.
What you're doing is called "gas lighting".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrJwjYPQvhQ
Avenatti was ALL over the place in left-leaning media, receiving endless accolades.
Please don't repeat that. If you do even a little bit of research, you'll see that he didn't say that, and by repeating it you're lowering the dialog you want to raising.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177
Thanks for your unsubstantiated comment though
It's terrible how badly this was reported on.
No he was not.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/04/24/disinfectan...
"And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?
"So it'd be interesting to check that."
Pointing to his head, Mr Trump went on: "I'm not a doctor. But I'm, like, a person that has a good you-know-what."
Firstly, he has no excuse to be ignorant. Secondly, I’d wager every administrator and CEO who has any involvement with viral biomedical research were making urgent albeit possibly discreet inquiries into any possible involvement around February 2020.
The moratorium, referred to officially as a “pause,” specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. It defined gain-of-function very simply and broadly as “research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.”
But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”
This seemed to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the exemption in order to keep the money flowing to Dr. Shi’s gain-of-function research, and later to avoid notifying the Federal reporting system of her research.
If all of the 5B is spent on coronavirus research then it's a different story. Most likely it's spent on an incredibly wide array of topics.
The person at the top might not know what each recipient is doing, but is still accountable for the funding decisions that were made (and oversaw the people and process that made those decisions on the organisations behalf).
People are too quick to notice conflicts of interest. Everyone of us lives a life filled with such conflicts, yet we manage somehow to rise above, for the most part. Fauci seems like a nice guy to me.
Interestingly, the application is designed for a very specific workflow, audit and review as part of the intake, but has no facilities for auditing after the fact. The data and relationships exist and there is a wealth of information in the database including known conflicts of interest but there's no easy way to query or browse this data from the application unless you're reviewing a specific grant or application.
For example:
The application doesn't allow you to search for persons by location and doesn't show you grants associated with persons. Rather you can only see persons associated with grants.
You can search for institution by address but again, it doesn't show you grants associated with an institution.
These interfaces were designed to just update Persons or Institutions when changes occur. They weren't intended as a way to back into a Grant or Application.
> “So you are saying that the organisation you lead helped fund a lab that caused a pandemic, but that funding was without your oversight because you thought it wasn’t important/big enough for you to look at? Are you going to resign?”
Note, I don’t believe the above is a fair question, but Fauci has to be careful to not set himself up for a gotcha.
That's not to say it would have made any difference, unless per the article per the Bat Woman "The coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories," "our" includes all the WIV's coronavirus research—it's a fair size outfit with a number of labs and there's no reason to assume she was the Principle Investigator for all of its coronavirus research—and he or a direct report could have insisted the funded research would be done at the BSL-4 lab or maybe one of the BSL-3 labs. This assume the gain of function research was being done at a lower level, which starting with the 2011 bird flu work in the West has been too often true, one or both of those labs were BSL-2, one of the reasons it was controversial and so alarming to a lot of people watching this including myself.
But it turned out without his knowledge gain of function research there was being funded by his institute through the EcoHealth Alliance, and in another email he's thanked by it's leader Peter Daszak for helping to push the zoonotic transfer explanation, which the latter was or had arranged through a group letter to The Lancet to be the only acceptable narrative until around now.
It would also have been good if someone had done a gut check on the EcoHealth Alliance's MO, which as described by a Rutgers' biological chemistry professor was "looking for a gas leak with a lighted match" by as the author of the Vanity Fair article as "bringing samples from a remote area to an urban one, then sequencing and growing viruses and attempting to genetically modify them to make them more virulent."
Again, nothing unique to the Alliance or China, the US is in the process of moving the research on animal pathogens done at Plumb Island, New York to college town Manhattan, Kansas. Which I'm sure is a much more pleasant place to work at, but just happened to be in the heartland of American animal agriculture. Someday one or more Congressmen who fought to bring home the bacon may be called to account for this, to the extent that ever happens.
That seems to be the wrong word.
Regardless of whether this was a lab escape or not, there's a 100% chance of a pandemic virus happening again.
So if this COVID-19 origin hypothesis is true and it took only 8 to 19 years for a lab leak of a gain of function experiment to cause the worst pandemic in a century, we ought to be very interested in making sure this happens a lot less often. Ideally not at all, but I see no way to impose a world wide ban on this type of research.
That this should be done under the strictest protocols is obvious (and internationally-monitored, no less).
But pretending that dice aren't continually rolling in nature and hoping for the best seems shortsighted.
I would point out that the some primary points against GOF utility in the 2014 survey report weigh very differently now: (1) lack of viral genetic surveillance at national levels, (2) inability to quickly generate novel vaccines, (3) inability to distribute vaccines worldwide.
Whatever chilling effect it had, tall order at this stage of this general program of research or not, it's high time its advocates including yourself point to tangible progress of one sort or another, for we now can reasonably assess the risk side of the risk benefit trade off.
See this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398081 on why the advancements in vaccines don't even begin to cover the risks, or note as of now how long it looks it'll be before the Third World gets vaccinated against as much as is humanly possible, no sooner than sometime in 2022. Consider the possibility of a sufficiently good escape variant requiring another dose or two.
Consider how little the the whole world can afford the expense of a pandemic, and the Third World in particular, including viral surveillance of any sort, "molecular" (PRC based) tests or sequencing samples. And this time they're lucky, COVID-19 mortality risks are highly weighted with age, something that hits the young harder will hit them a lot harder.
Consider how many possible, probable, or proven lab escapes will it take before the world's governments clamp down on a lot more than gain of function research.
Yes, nature wants to kill us, although your itemized points also address that issue. It's just not very good at it, and almost all of that was before the germ theory of disease was accepted in the end of the 19th Century.
That doesn't mean we'll be able to provide safe vaccines for sufficiently novel pathogens, behind Moderna's candidate was a decade and a half of research into making safe vaccines for SARS type coronaviruses, with researchers at the NIH finding one solution in 2017 for the antibody-dependent enhancement issue that had been plaguing such attempts starting with SARS and inactivated whole virus vaccines.
A fast pandemic can also get a long distance before you can ramp up production and vaccinate 8 billion people, with vaccines that so far need freezing for shipping, and medical grade refrigeration afterwords until used. Plus you need to make at least 8 billion syringes and needles and so on.
My company wants to know if my brother in law works for a competitor. It won't change my job, but they will be careful to ensure that I don't work on things that it would matter if I let something slip over dinner.
The only true conflict would be Fauci's opinion on whether the virus was a lab leak. Which really only matters for political reasons.
That conflict would have no bearing on how to handle the covid pandemic.
We don't know that it was a lab leak or natural; and probably never will. There is the possibility the if it was a lab leak Fauci used his position to hide that evidence to protect himself.
Because of the above Fauci should have disclosed his potential conflict of interest. That way the rest of us can consider his actions to ensure we are more likely to catch him abusing his position.
The above is a normal thing that happens all the time. I'm accusing him of doing wrong by not disclosing this over a year ago. Do not expand that to accusing him of actually doing anything else wrong in handling the pandemic.
Hindsight is wonderfully clear.
Maybe you should be in charge since you are so clearsighted and clearly so wise.
I think yes. Perhaps not upfront, perhaps not in the following days or weeks. But if your organization had funded a laboratory's gain of function research, and that laboratory is suddenly the topic of global speculation for potentially leaking a virus, a virus which is ostensibly a product directly of your funding and became one of the deadliest global pandemics ever... I think it would be hard to not know at some point.
So maybe he finds out before making statements?
I've lost faith in Fauci when he admitted he lied about the efficacy of masks early on in the pandemic. He literally came out and stated he lied in order to make sure frontline healthcare workers had enough PPE. That was the most insane statement I've ever heard a public health leader make - lying about healthcare to the public that may result in more infections. That is how you destroy public trust.
What's sad is that the population would understand if you just told them the truth, namely that masks help, but our frontline works desperately need them so getting them masks and PPE is a priority.
Maybe elsewhere, but not in America. This is one of the most selfish/individualist countries on earth.
That's a disgusting statement. People are people. And the vast majority of people in every country are good people.
It's also not true, but even if it was, he has no right to lie to people about their healthcare and well-being. You can't do that because this kind of lie actually hurt people who would have wore a mask (homemade or otherwise) but didn't (and maybe got sick or died), all because they trusted him.
[0] “In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...
I don't like these "strategic" lies either. And I agree the population in general would understand, but I think there'd still have been plenty of people that would've hoarded every mask possible, and at the time they had to make decisions based on possible scenarios, whereas now we have hindsight. Especially if things were handled differently in the beginning and the mask vs non-mask polarization manifested differently, who knows.
And many people did hoard masks, and toilet paper, and sanitizers. So Fauci solved nothing except destroy trust in public health authorities. It also wasn't the last time that he lied for 'people's own good'.
I believed him. I did. I don't believe him anymore.
Here's an interview with her... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhwrICQTcQg ... her opening statement (paraphrased) is "saving lives in the context of vaccines ... is about firstly maximising benefit and secondly about fairness and equity" ... make of that what you will.
A situation in which you've (a) contributed to decision-making on multiple public funding priorities including this lab and (b) state a judgment that lab was not the source of the outbreak isn't a conflict of interest, it's everyday policy life. Especially given that there's nothing glaringly wrong with the reasoning Fauci gave for that judgment in the article you linked.
If you think that reasoning has shortcomings, by all means, feel free to actually come up with something resembling a counterargument instead of vaguely implying "whether or not anything shady was going on."
In this case the lab didn't even work for him, it just got some small amount of funding from his organisation's budget but he had no say in it's operations. So he can comment on the work of his organisation, but not about the work of an organisation he partly funded?
We know perfectly well he is not an external observer. That's not the capacity in which he's commenting, any more than a president is commenting in an external or impartial capacity about the work of the executive branches, or e.g. UN agencies partly funded by the US.
> Does it make any sense to say he can't comment on the work of an organisation he runs because he runs it?
Is a straw man argument, because what was said was that the conflict of interest should have been disclosed. And, not that he cannot make a comment.
It’s not unusual to expect scientists to collaborate openly across national borders despite political winds, and in fact it is desirable.
>In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario...
>Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.
So the basic risk calculation Fauci is using (which is disputed by many scientists and virologists) is this:
Lives saved by GoF research > lives lost by inevitable lab leak + lives lost by inevitable natural pandemic
Gain of function research has been going on for decades now. What evidence is there that this research has actually served its purpose to help save lives? Did GoF help us at all with the current pandemic?
Seems negligible as an outsider.
If they did doesn't that really mean Trump is either more responsible for Covid or equally as responsible as China?
Trump allowed the ban to be lifted after the Obama whitehouse explicitly shut down this kind of research. Fauci just worked for Trump. It was ultimately on Trump, not an employee of his.
How does any role he might (or might not have) played in GOF research create a conflict of interest in terms of his advice about the pandemic?
The conflict of interest is: was this statement actually what he believed to be true at the time, or was it to draw attention away from the Wuhan lab, so there wouldn't be ugly questions about why his organisation provided funding to it?
To me it seems like the right thing for Fauci to have done at the time was draw attention to the potential conflict of interest but that admission only became public last month - https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/fauci-admits-nih-funding-of-wu...
Is it your position that he was able to run it as some personal fiefdom?
Suppose that Fauci had known for a fact in May 2020 that SARS-COV-2 originated in that lab. How would that have changed the advice he (attempted to) offer regarding public health and safety?
If he had known the virus was being researched and escaped the lab, certainly his recommendation should have included requests for any and all research and records related to the virus research. As such records have been very pertinent to public health guidelines and guidance, if not potentially toward treatments and future vaccines.
Also there is the very real financial and legal component if that were the case. On a much smaller scale it would be on par with destroying video evidence of a slip and fall, denying it ever existed, then when caught claiming it’s immaterial to the medical treatment of the injured…that’s still fraud and at minimum a clear attempt to escape legal and financial liability.
He has been the head of the NIAID, the infectious diseases arm of the NIH, for ~37 years.
While the incident is ongoing, any attempts to prevent the problem from happening in the future are a complete distraction. Write down notes and ideas somewhere so we don't forget, but the priority is on solving the incident that actually happened and is causing problems. If you say "What if we fixed this longstanding piece of tech debt that led up to the incident," however reasonable it is to fix it in light of the fact that it caused an incident, it's useless to bring it up now if you can't fix the tech debt immediately to resolve the incident. Along the same lines, attribution is interesting if it will help you deal with what is going on (e.g., there's high load on a low-level system and you want to know if anyone deployed anything recently, so that you can ask them to roll back); it's not really interesting if you know what's broken (e.g., a machine is powered off and needs to be turned back on... figuring out who pressed the power button isn't yet relevant).
Similarly, "We should stop funding gain-of-function research" may (or may not) be a valid conclusion, but it wouldn't have dealt with COVID-19 in particular. It might be worth doing it to make sure there's no COVID-22.
Even if it turns out to be true that COVID-19 came directly from research that would not have happened if it were not for Fauci, absent a reason to believe that anyone's response to COVID-19 specifically would have been different if they knew that, I don't see any reason it was improper not to draw attention to it at the time, and quite a few reasons why it was proper to focus attention on the problem at hand.
His comments in that May 2020 article are spot-on. If we knew that it was engineered, then yes, publicizing the lab notes that were used to build it could perhaps speed up the process of a vaccine or other countermeasure (but COVID-19 had already been sequenced by January 2020 and the sequence published, and vaccines were already in development then). But theories like "what if the researchers brought it in from the wild, and then it escaped their lab" should just have prompted the response "yes, so what." It's interesting now to prevent the next COVID; it's irrelevant re COVID-19.
And I certainly don't see the conflict of interest - what was Fauci gaining? His continued role? Again, at the time, the role was not determining whether to fund gain-of-function research, the role was figuring out how to get rid of COVID-19.
You could say that the NIH should have paused all funding for new virus research projects (unless they specifically related to dealing with COVID-19 in the short term), but that would have been a good idea regardless of the NIH's previous role in funding.
Yes. Obviously you don't put an arsonist in charge of fighting fires, so if this information had come out early last year then he would have lost not only his role much sooner, but also his social status and career. If what's coming out now came out last year, Trump's replacement of him with Scott Atlas would have been more widely supported (maybe), and Biden may not have dared to put him back in his post.
That would have been a huge financial hit. Fauci does very well out of his position. "Very well" might even be an understatement. He is the highest paid federal employee [1], earning more in 2019 alone than the US President. Despite this fact, he has deflected questions about conflicts of interest by laughing it off and saying he has a "government salary", creating the impression he is paid far less than he really is.
Fauci charges between $50,000 and $100,000 per hour for motivational speeches [2].
Despite being theoretically in charge of a crisis situation in which nobody has time to ask how it started, Fauci has found time to write a book called, "Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward". He has also appeared on TV more than 300 times [3].
This is not a man who is too busy to investigate basic questions that may have direct relevance to developing treatments for the virus. And given that knowing where it came from would be of immense scientific value yet he has every incentive to cover it up, he is also not a man who should be running things.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-...
[2] https://leadingmotivationalspeakers.com/speakers/anthony-fau...
[3] https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-has-chalked-up-300-media-...
It's not like he took the vial home for lulz and dropped it on the subway. His role in the origin of this thing is so small it's irrelevant.
The only thing that's up for discussion is that he may not have been 100% correct during one of his many public statements, hardly something that can be held against him considering the shitcreek the whole world is in.
Personally I'd give the guy some credit for everything he's done right, I mean he's been at it since 1968.
What is there to gain by nailing him to the cross, or pointing out his income and book deals?
> It's not like he took the vial home for lulz and dropped it on the subway. His role in the origin of this thing is so small it's irrelevant.
By dissuading an investigation into the cause at the time, he might have shot down our only chance of ever knowing for sure. I sure as hell don't trust China to be truthful about it. There's no incentive on their part.
> The only thing that's up for discussion is that he may not have been 100% correct during one of his many public statements, hardly something that can be held against him considering the shitcreek the whole world is in.
He's been spreading mixed and misinformation for months and possibly lying to Congress. Many give him the benefit of the doubt by saying that he either did not know or he did it in the interests of the public as a whole (ex: We need the N95 masks so let's lie and say nobody else does). Neither is acceptable to some of us.
> Personally I'd give the guy some credit for everything he's done right, I mean he's been at it since 1968.
Past good behavior doesn't get you out of a trial. At best it's a factor during sentencing.
> What is there to gain by nailing him to the cross, or pointing out his income and book deals?
The book deal looks like a last minute cash grab before he gets sacked.
That very advice was offered here in Belgium as well and it smelled like BS. Obviously they had to make a hard choice: tell people they need masks, stocks get plundered and medical professionals have none. Or, say the opposite and grab every mask you can find for medical personnel. The second option was probably the best, hopefully you can understand that these kind of hard choices need to be made and this guy shouldn't lose his job over it.
Interestingly, in Jan / Fed before it really hit Europe and nobody was wearing masks in public they were already sold out in most places. At the time it was probably Chinese plundering EU stores and govt must have picked up on it.
There was never a mask crisis. Masks don't work, they have never worked, this had been known for a long time partially because the world went through this exact process with the Spanish flu. And scientists knew that which is why they originally said masks don't work.
This all fell apart quickly because they are collectivists at heart and were being lobbied by political forces that wanted something they could tell everyone to do. The WHO actually admitted this to the bbc! Masks seemed like a good fit, so the scientists promptly jumped on board and started saying masks worked. Problem: how to explain their prior position? So they came up with this double layered lie: we said masks didn't work because it was a noble lie to protect healthcare workers.
But it was never the case. All the documents before March 2020 are consistent on this, including the new Fauci emails.
The term "collectivist" has no particular meaning other than to those who have what they consider to be an opposite worldview.
This is just several lines of misinformation, the same nonsense that's been an issue since SARS-COV-2 emerged. It's all be debunked hundreds of thousands of times, both on HN and elsewhere.
Mask mandates don't work. If they did then the removal of masks would have caused a noticeable spike in cases in Texas, to pick just one example of many. The complete uselessness of masks has been "debunked" in the same vein the lab leak theory was "debunked" - a bunch of people asserting that scientists cannot be wrong, even as they say things that are clearly and very obviously wrong. Anyone can see the truth just by looking at government data sets for a while. It is ridiculous that people still aren't learning to think for themselves, even after all that's happened.
Their usefulness in non crowded spaces in open air is probably debatable but if you're in an elevator with 10 people sneezing wouldn't you rather wear one? Why does every surgeon in the world wear one?
So the question is in what exact circumstances are they useful. I'd say during a pandemic it's probably better to err on the safe side.
Many people have put together the charts with arrows indicating the dates when things changed, for example
https://rationalground.com/mask-charts/
That site is old now but there have been many since.
You can also find plenty of studies saying the same of course, but you can also find studies saying the opposite - academic research has failed on this topic. Fortunately the question in simple, so you don't need any research papers to see the truth: mask mandates do not work because if they worked, we could see it in the graphs, and we can't.
Wore mask at all times: 11% got infected Wore mask never: 23% got infected
Mask mandate doesn't mean people actually wore them. Maybe in shops they did cause it was illegal not to. If people kept having gatherings with friends & family then a mask mandate is meaningless.
And honestly, you should be ashamed to link to these type of websites. They don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny.
Mask mandate doesn't mean people actually wore them.
Well, people do wear them, that's been studied quite extensively. Compliance >95% in the studies I've seen. If mask mandates don't affect the data even with the very high levels of compliance seen during COVID times then they will never work, because compliance won't be higher in future.
But even if "not enough" people wore them or didn't wear them 24/7 or whatever, that still means mask mandates failed. People were forced to wear masks a whole lot, in any crowded space, and they had no impact on the data at all. Affecting the data was the only justification for mask mandates, so their failure to do so is fatal to the concept - why they failed might make for an interesting debate, but given how tiny viruses are, how much airflow can occur around masks and that most transmission happens inside homes, care homes and hospitals where mask wearing 24/7 is not practical, their failure is no big shock.
And honestly, you should be ashamed to link to these type of websites. They don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny.
Look in the mirror, my friend. I've linked to examples of actual case curves, which is what matters. Mask mandates aren't intended to affect opinion polls on obscure news sites, they're meant to affect whole countries. They do not. Therefore they have failed.
Fortunately, again, one more time. You do not need scientific studies to see the truth here. The goal of mask mandates was to change case curves. That was their only justification. In a large number of places mask mandates were added or removed without the case graphs changing. Therefore, they do not work. Everything beyond that is irrelevant and frequently confused, e.g. studies on masks are not relevant to the question of mask mandates.
Mind if I frame that on my wall?
However, it looks like Fauci has outlived his usefulness to the ruling class, and they are currently in the process of throwing him under the bus.
Sure, but to go back to my analogy, you absolutely do put the guy who hit the power button by mistake in charge of pressing it again - they know exactly where it is and they're already in the datacenter. You put the team that deployed a new service that's DoSing your infrastructure in charge of rolling it back. You don't say "You broke the system, so we're finding someone else to do the rollback."
If the allegation is that Fauci intentionally funded a lab in Wuhan to work on gain-of-function research with the express purpose of having the virus escape and cause a global pandemic because Fauci is a murderer rivaling Hitler, that's a very different (and much harder to substantiate) claim than that he merely was causally involved in an accident and like anyone else wants the accident to not have happened.
And if that is the claim, the "conflict of interest" argument becomes clearer: Fauci is on the side of COVID-19 and in charge of stopping it. It's the same conflict of interest as putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires.
Short of that, the idea that he had a conflict of interest is like the idea that the team that accidentally DoS'd the infrastructure has a conflict of interest because they each get Fauci-scale salaries and they might be fired. Technically yes, but we all know that firing them wouldn't help solve the problem and losing their expertise would make other things work, so it's not even on the table unless we suspect malice is involved.
(And if it is on the table, either at my workplace or in Fauci's case, so is criminal prosecution. Loss of salary is the least of your worries.)
You make comparison to tech workers. Sure, if someone makes a genuine honest mistake then you can argue they should be retained as they won't make that mistake again. But that does require deep and total honesty. If a tech worker caused an outage and then manipulated management for a year to cover up their involvement, there would be no such leniency.
And to get more particular, the reason you can't trust his advice about the pandemic is because you can't trust him to give advice that would be based on or would reveal information related to the conflict of interest. Pretending as if that's impossible is silly. It's obvious it could happen, whether it did or not.
There is exactly fuckoff zero evidence that funding wound up supporting gain of function research for anything.
And giving China money to study diseases in pigs happening in China that are closely related to a human disease that we were worried about it (or maybe a close relative) spilling over into humans only makes sense.
From the Fauci e-mails: People Fauci directly worked with seemed surprised and shocked to learn otherwise, and could not even instantly say if their funding had made it abroad.
There are papers resulting from GoF research of concern at the WIV. There are grant proposals, which specify the exact modifications they will do to Bat SARS to increase infectivity on mice with humanized lungs. How can you speak so certain, if you are unaware of this?
> And giving China money to study diseases in pigs happening in China that are closely related to a human disease that we were worried about it (or maybe a close relative) spilling over into humans only makes sense.
It makes sense, but you'll see through studying the records that it was the cover for military funding. What was the Defense Threat Reduction Agency funding doing at the WIV where military researchers shared floors with civilian researchers working on the same animals? Making sense to research spillover?
- There's no papers out of WIV indicating GOF research
> but you'll see through studying the records that it was the cover for military funding.
You're offering a blatant conspiracy theory now with no substantiation.
The funding to WIV had nothing to do with GoF and there's no evidence of anything else. But it HAD to be GoF research. Circular, evidence-free logic.
This is something I'm confused about. There are a bunch of papers from the WIV and the North Carolina lab which describe "reverse genetics", spike protein modification, and other obvious gain of function research which acknowledge funding from USAID and EcoHealth Alliance. (The most recently famous of these is Menachery et al, Nature 2015.) But it looks like the actual GoF was done at the Baric lab in North Carolina. The closest I could find was serial passaging experiments done at Wuhan to isolate viruses and test vaccines. One could argue that testing virus infectivity by serial passage is dangerous enough...
> The funding to WIV had nothing to do with GoF and there's no evidence of anything else.
The funding to EcoHealth Alliance specified GoF under such terms as "reverse genetics", "virus infection experiments ... humanized mice."
EHA may have put restrictions on how this money was used, but with the revelation in this article that WIV has lied about doing military research... I'm not so confident we can say no GoF was done there.
I'm not sure that claim aligns with historical NIH funding for gain of function research: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9819304
>Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO framework was largely met with shrugs and eye rolls, said a longtime agency official: “If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research anyway.”
This is an absurd strawman. If it were true, why have there been so many virologists calling GoF unethical and seeking to prohibit it?
> Fauci said the Trump administration will not only be challenged by ongoing global health threats such as influenza and HIV, but also a surprise disease outbreak.
https://www.healio.com/news/infectious-disease/20170111/fauc...
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/29/fact...
> But Fauci emphatically denied that the money went toward so-called “gain of function” research, which he described as “taking a virus that could infect humans and making it either more transmissible and/or pathogenic for humans.”
> “That categorically was not done,” he insisted.
> Earlier in the hearing, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins told Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) that researchers at the Wuhan lab “were not approved by NIH for doing “gain of function research” before adding “we are, of course, not aware of other sources of funds or other activities they might have undertaken outside of what our approved grant allowed.”
Are you saying these are still lies? It doesn't really matter if the NIH funded some other kind of research on coronaviruses if that research was not risky. Presumably the question is whether gain of function research performed there created covid-19. And the grant, which I assume is public record, is claimed not to be for that. Maybe there's more to the story, but seems like guilt-by-association at this point. If Wuhan used the funding for some research it was not supposed to be used for, then it might just as well have been funding for any other disease anyway.
I would imagine that is true and it's because how you are presenting it is absolutely conspiratorial. You seem to be very adamant about involving Fauci with weak evidence which is the MO for almost all other biased conspiracy theorists in regards to this topic.
Fauci seems to be a scapegoat for many peoples frustrations with very little rational reasoning - similar to Soros and BLM. Conspiracy theorists rarely talk about the repercussions of their perspectives or tangible calls to action and instead get obsessed with who to blame and nefarious-by-default tangential financial associations.
Maybe if you addressed some of the evidence in the article or even the content of the comment you are replying to then your comment wouldn't be perceived in the same light.
No
It was never really "banned", there was a moratorium on such research after a string of safety lapses in US laboratories, moratorium's are always only of a temporary nature [0].
The often mentioned "GoF research" involving bats with US participation and funding, didn't even fall under that moratorium [1].
> you have Fauci making the case for creating viruses in a lab
Of course he would make that case, because that's a useful tool to have in research. No offense, but trying to make this out as something so binary and only bad, reminds me a lot about the more radical and clueless takes on GMO that see "All GMO as bad".
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/10/17/3570109...
IMO it’s not clear anyone even approved the research. I wouldn’t be surprised if the NIH just pulled a fast one. There’s also no evidence Fauci never mentioned the research to anyone near the beginning of the pandemic. Several Trump officials came out and said they were never told.
It isn't a big if. The recently released e-mails support this line of reasoning but don't confirm it. To argue the opposite of this, you should have better than ad hominem attacks.
There's no need to politicize the discussion.
1) There's no evidence any recent president or cabinet member had a clue, or if they did have a clue it was off their radar anyway.
2) All this gain of function research was administered either in academic circles or at lower governmental circles where politicians are not involved. See for yourself. Fauci's own email from January 2020 referenced research already published in 2015. (That's during Obama's gain of function research ban, for those of you keeping score at home). Start at 5:00 into the referenced video.
EDIT: The paper was published after the ban was initiated. The research began before the ban, but apparently continued.
The whole video is well worth watching and walks trough Fauci's immediate responses as soon as it became apparent this is the real deal, and still 6 FULL WEEKS before the WHO declared a pandemic. A whole lot of CYA going on here. Fauci knew enough to reference this paper in the wee hours of the morning after a very busy day and before another hectic day he was headed for. Think he was familiar with the topic?
The ban was actually lifted by the Obama administration, _11 days prior_ to Trump taking office.
Source: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2017/01/09/recomme...
JANUARY 9, 2017 AT 9:06 Recommended Policy Guidance for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight
"Adoption of these recommendations will satisfy the requirements for lifting the current moratorium on certain life sciences research that could enhance a pathogen’s virulence and/or transmissibility to produce a potential pandemic pathogen (an enhanced PPP)."
The interesting part of this - and I'm curious about the personal experience of others here - is that the scientists I know have been the strongest questioners of the wet market theory from the get-go.
I don't think anything resembling scientific unanimity ever emerged, or even appeared to emerge.
Heck, here on HN we've been talking about this consistently at least since the PNAS letter, and probably since the beginning of the pandemic.
But yeah, I agree. I’m just a lowly PhD student (an older one, though) but it’s pretty clear from my limited experience that “scientific consensus” is a PR term that bears little relationship to how scientists perform their work and engage with their colleagues.
There is _very_ high probability that this is just a human error.
The highest probability is this virus originated like every other virus in history.
If an outbreak were to happen in the United states just about everywhere would be near a CDC location: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&tbs=lf:1,lf...]
You've artificially limited the number of possible labs to those doing bioweapon research. If this isn't your claim there is no reason to do so and if there are more labs studying coronavirus it's far less coincidental.
But again, you really should read the article to understand what gain of function research is instead of insinuating I said COVID was a bioweapon.
In any case, beyond gain-of-function, the WIV and Wuhan CDC also had the biggest program in the world to sample novel SARS-like coronaviruses from nature, from remote bat caves that no other humans had any reason to enter.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronaviru...
If SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus accidentally released by scientists, then Wuhan is the obvious place for it to emerge. That could have been directly from a lab, or a researcher could have become infected on a sampling trip, traveled home from the sampling sites (~900 miles away, to be clear; Wuhan was not an expected natural spillover region), and seeded the infection there. None of this is anywhere close to proven, but the previous dismissal of any unnatural origin as a "conspiracy theory" was an outrageous, unscientific smear.
That's one of the independent vectors the author mentions that makes so many of us suspect very specifically a lab leak of a gain of function experiment: the virus started out very well adapted to humans.
Most virologists say the way this virus works is unlike anything they’ve seen or expected so they can’t imagine how a human would have engineered it. Why do you think your feeling about the virus’s level of adaptation trumps the experts opinions?
It's a long article so I don't expect you to find the argument in it; it highlights the work of Alina Chan who compared a fast mutation rate of SARS-CoV as it better adapted itself to human to SARS-CoV-2. Here are titles of three of them I've saved but not read, May through September of last year:
SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans. What does this mean for re-emergence?
Single source of pangolin CoVs with a near identical Spike RBD to SARS-CoV-2
COVID-19 CG: Tracking SARS-CoV-2 mutations by locations and dates of interest
This is literally not true.
Most virologists say the way this virus works is unlike anything they’ve seen or expected so they can’t imagine how a human would have engineered it. Why do you think your feeling about the virus’s level of adaptation trumps the experts opinions?
1) Citation on "most" please. The world is a big place, so you will be able to find a citation for any opinion. If you are going to say "most" then please back it up with a source.
2) gain-of-function research doesn't require a human to engineer a new virus. It is a way to essentially speed up evolution and allow nature to do the heavy lifting. You're arguing points that no on here is making.
The WIV and Wuhan CDC sent grad students to hike through the wilderness to remote bat caves too far from any road or farm to have been exploited yet for any practical use. They chose those caves based on their expert predictions of where they expected to see the greatest diversity of novel coronaviruses.
There's obviously far fewer WIV grad students than guano harvesters; but the risk per person seems orders of magnitude higher, for an expert deliberately seeking a virus vs. a merely indifferent laborer. So that seems like a new and non-negligible risk to me, and thus one that requires investigation. Note that I'm not alone in this; Marc Lipsitch, for example, often mentions this possible pathway.
How do I square that with this claim from the article?
> Eleven of its 23 coauthors worked for the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the Chinese army’s medical research institute. Using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs, then studied their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. As the NSC officials worked backward from the date of publication to establish a timeline for the study, it became clear that the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic even started. The NSC officials were left wondering: Had the Chinese military been running viruses through humanized mouse models, to see which might be infectious to humans?"
What this describes seems like it could be circumstantial evidence of the PLA developing bioweapons. Certainly it isn't proof of anything, and as evidence it's not very strong. But I wouldn't call it 'zero.'
https://www.pnas.org/content/102/23/8073
So if the Chinese military had in fact been doing this, I'd guess it was just basic research, in the same way that lots of American basic research links back to DARPA. Of course they fund it because they believe there might be a military application, but I see no reason to think that application would be bioweapons (vs. the same kind of beneficial applications described in the open literature).
They don't seem like obvious candidates to me, though. Both SARS v1 and SARS-CoV-2 show unpredictable, stochastic person-to-person spread, via super-spreader events. For a bioweapon that would ideally infect all the enemy but no one else, that's the last thing you want, hard to reliably get started and hard to reliably stop once it starts. So that reinforces my belief that if SARS-CoV-2 was of unnatural origin, it was almost certainly an accident during basic research.
Honestly, this is not a difficult distinction to understand. You have to wonder why people are so eager to conflate the two.
For a virus to originate in a city with one of three labs in the entire world conducting heavy-duty researching involving the exact kind of virus that unleashed this pandemic, with the stated intention of working with said viruses to make them more infectious (NOT for the purposes of making a bioweapon) that deserves special consideration. Especially with the fact that the animal the virus is thought to come from ranges 1500 miles south from said city, and started during a time that animal is typically hybernating.
Why is this relevant unless you're claiming that the virus that we've observed has been engineered in that way? Otherwise it seems like the chance of a coronavirus outbreak caused by poor handling in a lab is the same for any lab that's studying them for any purpose.
> Of 23 samples that came from Wuhan, only three were type A, the rest were type B, a version two mutations from A. But in other parts of China, Forster says, initially A was the predominant strain. For instance, of nine genome samples in Guangdong, some 600 miles south of Wuhan, five were A types. [0]
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
If there were more evidence that it was lab made then the location would be another point, not to me without further evidence it doesn’t mean all that much.
And there have been 2 emerging coronavirus outbreaks in the last 20 years due to natural origin. Why is it so hard to believe there would be another one.
Have you actually read any of these articles? The location of the lab is like the tip of the iceberg.
I’m not saying it is impossible, just unlikely. And automatically degrading the opinions of experts who have detailed their arguments because you think they are biased is not proof of anything either.
Is that really so for animal-borne viruses though? I thought they came from place with lots of animals, hence the focus on the market. If it just showed up on some random high-rise employee downtown that would be hard to believe.
And after it starts, of course a highly-infectious virus shows up at densely populated places quickly. But for the same reason, I would also think it's hard for the first cases to travel to dense areas and spread the disease there without leaving a trail of cases along the trip. Ultimately they should point back to the animals they came from and testing can confirm it. Or at least rule various places out, if the govt was accommodating.
Plus wasn't the first US case somewhere in Washington state.
In China before there was a huge outbreak there is absolutely no way you can expect a small number of cases of a virus that nobody knows exists to be picked up. By the time of the big Wuhan outbreak there are already different variations in the virus. It had been in some population for a while before it broke out.
So the first outbreak in NYC is analogous to Wuhan. It could have started in Wuhan or it could have started anywhere else and then Wuhan had the right combination of factors for the outbreak to surge. We don’t know for sure.
>There are two subclusters of A which are distinguished by the synonymous mutation T29095C. In the T-allele subcluster, four Chinese individuals (from the southern coastal Chinese province of Guangdong)
It's not hard to believe that there could be another spillover event, and I don't have any certainty where covid-19 came from, but you're unfairly downplaying the level of circumferential evidence that does exist. There has been a significant effort against evaluating the lab-leak as a reasonable hypothesis (I say that in the scientific meaning of the word), and that effort has significantly damaged the reputation of scientific institutions around the world, and for good reason.
For an epidemic to occur, you need not just a lab leak, but a population sufficiently naive to the pathogen. H1N1 was displaced by H2N2 in the late 1950's pandemic, which in turn was displaced by H3N2 in the late 1960s pandemic. Thus it hit the cohort of people aged 25-6 or less who'd never been exposed to H1N1.
I found an NIH article that says the likelier origin is that the 1950 virus was used to produce a weakened live virus vaccine candidate that lead to the reemergence and not an accidental leak. It also concludes by saying there has never been a likely lab leak epidemic ever observed.
Those details do inform some details of the correct policy response. For example, they determine the relative importance of better PPE at the bench vs. better QA before allowing the vaccine to leave the lab. They don't change the overall question of whether scientific research has ever caused a pandemic, though. That causality is what matters, not whether the sign on the door said "lab" vs. "experimental vaccine nurse".
For example, if the pandemic originated from a WIV researcher who became infected in the field (during their many expeditions to remote bat caves that no other humans would routinely enter), was that a "lab leak"? Literally no, since they weren't in the lab. The causality would still be the same, though--if not for that scientific research, that virus would likely have never left the cave.
To avoid such confusion, it's probably better to say something like "unnatural origin", or "origin arising from scientific research". A much bigger mouthful than "lab leak", though.
The article's abstract opens with the statement 'The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event'.
A small number of SARS infections in 2003-2004 are also believed to have been due to laboratory accidents [2].
This article [3] gives an introduction to the subject from the perspective of a journalist who has reported on laboratory safety in the US.
This article [4] published in Nature in January 2012 by members of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity reviews the risk of a release of an engineered form of H5N1 influenza. It includes some alarming remarks such as:
'We found the potential risk of public harm to be of unusually high magnitude' and;
'A pandemic, or the deliberate release of a transmissible highly pathogenic influenza A/H5N1 virus, would be an unimaginable catastrophe for which the world is currently inadequately prepared'
The authors take the possibility of release of a dangerous pathogen from a laboratory seriously, though the article is prospective rather than retrospective.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
[3] https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2021/03/22/why-covi...
Put differently, if scientists there hadn't been experimenting with monkeys, Ebola Reston wouldn't have entered humans there. We don't absolve exotic wildlife traffickers or farmers of the consequences of their actions in releasing novel, naturally-evolved viruses; so I'm not sure why we'd absolve scientific researchers.
> 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...
The closest animal virus to SARS-CoV-2 was found in nature about 900 miles from Wuhan (RaTG13, in Mojiang), closer to Chongqing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, or HK.
This is an argument from incredulity.
I mean sure, anything’s possible, but we have only circumstantial evidence right now and this observation isn’t a smoking gun, but it ain’t worth nothing.
SARS after all was found in civets, and then later several other species as well despite originating in bats.
We can’t rule it out, ie. we only have evidence right now to try to make a determination based on the preponderance of evidence, not beyond a reasonable doubt. The story that is emerging is that we may never be able to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt because the debate was quashed for a year by political concerns, institutional biases, and motivated reasoning.
This one was, yeah, this is a virology institute, we study corona viruses, we were hiring for corona virus experts, we do GoF work, but trust us, just because it first appeared blocks from our facility, it did not come from us. Also, don't believe our former virologists who skipped town.
I'm not saying you should calculate it like P(10 000 tails coin flip) * P(1 000 000 tails coin flip). That can be done numerically. I'm saying that based on everything I've read, the highest probability hypothesis according to my own evaluation is the unintentional lab leak. To me, that's as uncontroversial as it gets. Human error happens _all the time_. Arguing against the lab leak, knowing what we know about China's refusal to allow an actual thorough scientific investigation into it, seems quite a bit more controversial to me.
Labs burn down, medical errors happen, bridges collapse, whatever. That's just reality.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
Edit: It looks like Twitter is suspending the account of the Fauci email leaker(s). So the MoT is still on it.
lol, have you ever been to a wet market? Are you sure you even know what they are? It’s a typical Asian stall market that they hose off every night.
I’ve been to “dry” markets that they’re still cutting the faces off hogs and slaughtering chickens next to fruit vendors. That’s not particularly better.
I’m not sure if you think “banning wet markets” is a thing, but it’s definitely not.
Meaning, you'd change nothing besides forcing Chinese to use more transport and freezer cars.
The media is supposed to be a bit more skeptical of their sources than that. At this point I follow rules that look a lot like these:
https://info.publicintelligence.net/USArmy-IntelAnalysis.pdf
CCP owns Hong Kong, that was over in 1997, the only surprising thing about HK is that China waited this long to make it better known. Now... The country of Taiwan on the other hand, it’s going to be a bit more tense there for some time.
EDIT: Added links from Jan, most videos have been removed but the articles and screenshots are there. The one I specifically wanted was removed from YouTube and I can’t find it, showed a guy being checked by a PPE marshmallow then nearly immediately going into spasms in his car.
EDIT2: To whoever might have been upset at my thoughts on Taiwan; I updated it with some italics for you.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7923981/Coronavirus...
https://www.ibtimes.sg/china-virusnew-videos-wuhan-show-coro...
Here is snopes with an eye roll worthy fact check https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/people-collapsing-coronavi... “Unproven” ok, thanks for that guys.
Could you provide a link? I never saw such video on YouTube.
I think the problem was the world also didn't believe it. Perhaps if every other country had had the balls to just shut down travel in/out of China for a month or so back at the very start it might never have been so bad. I remember when the very first reports of a novel Coronavirus in Wuhan were making the news that it had the potential to be really bad, but also had some wishful thinking that it was probably just a storm in a teacup.
And how weird that Zuckerburg sent an email to Fauci about vaccine funding and offers of help exactly the same time Nancy’s Pelosi was literally saying come to Chinatown and hug and Asian person. How were they talking about a vaccine at that point?
There seems to have been a lot of public and private statements going on, and everyone wants to memoryhole it.
Meanwhile, it took until March 11th to ban travel from Europe, which at the time was seeing ~10k new cases a day, with full freedom of movement from affected areas to unaffected ones.
The problem wasn't that he banned travel from China. The problem is that he didn't ban travel from Europe, until it got way worse than China.
Okay. Yes, you're a very pro-lockdown Seattlite with access to almost every comfort you could want without leaving your home. I believe that you were probably not mad at Trump for stopping flights, and wanted more to be stopped. That is within your character as read by your comments. I'm skeptical you understand what lockdowns actually meant for other people, but that's besides the point.
Me: [Democrats and the media called Trump racist for shutting down travel from China]
Okay, so we agree then? I don't think I said anything about Europe or if Trump Admin had gone far enough and when.
Was accusing him of racism for that particular thing on February 1st a bit early? Maybe.
Did history prove the critics right? Yeah. It did. It only took six weeks.
Addendum: I appreciate that you have gone to some length to research the context of my character and my previous posts, in order to best form a context in which to interpret my current ones. I suggest that perhaps Trump's critics on this subject may have done something similar. The man has given them a few years of material to work with by that point, after all.
It's a new acount which only posted this link - likely just some automated link spam detection. If you to to the comment's page (click the timestamp) there should be an option to vouch for it.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/people-collapsing-coronavi...
[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7923981/Coronavirus...
[3] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10808633/coronavirus-wuhan-zom...
[4] https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/2020/01/31/les-videos-di...
I am an ethnic Chinese, I don't see this impression at all.
Disclaimer: this is quite normal, China is huge with 1.4b people, there are a lot of social bubbles. And the readers should read this comment and the parent of proving that. Not that this comment or the parent is true.
The same standard would apply to your comment.
Realizing that, is the first step to reach any meaningful truth about China.
That's true even to native Chinese people. That's even more true to outsiders (obviously).
I would like to remind everybody that this happened in Milano just before the outbreak
Virus variants named after places on the other hand are apparently perfectly fine. So we don't have the Chinese virus but we do have British, Brazilian and Indian variants.
Saying "$origin virus" is _definitely_ easier to remember than - say - something like "Covid19".
Except that we were told that using "$origin" was racist, so we had to stop, and we had to use the non-easy-to-remember version.
Where we are the media has been happily talking about "the British variant" and "the Indian variant", but no-one seems to be calling _that_ racist. At least no-one who the media cares about.
This is basic PR, e.g. when Heartbleed was disclosed it was given a name so that people could discuss it and attach meaning to it.
What are you on about?
Not those variants, obviously.
I think naming diseases after places is a bad practice we should probably do away with, but it certainly has precedent. Offhand, there's also the Marburg virus. My understanding is also that it was unusual to name the Ebola virus after the nearby river instead of the nearby town.
which will now be re-named by Greek letter names
I agree. However, I can empathize with the media's position. Their business model has been under intense pressure for decades, so they're far too understaffed to do the kind of job we'd all like them to do; and viral disinformation/misinformation has become far more prevalent and influential in the last several years. Donald Trump also acted as a siren (in the Greek mythology sense) during his presidency to greatly exacerbate both difficulties. It's not surprising that, when they were faced with a crisis where they were arguably on one of the front lines, they were forced to take shortcuts out of expediency that were ultimately mistakes. After all the lab-leak theory is both 1) extremely plausible, 2) conspiracy-theory bait.
On the other hand, talking about "If X is true, then..." and spending the rest of the section talking about the lab leak hypothesis as if it was true" is much more exciting.
Especially given there are now three "lab leak" camps - Bioweapon, GoF Gone Wrong, and Genuine Accidental Release of a Natural Virus all of whom claim they have the smoking gun for three mutually exclusive theories.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-w... : Michael R. Gordon, WSJ on the "lab leak"
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-i... : Michael R. Gordon, NYT on "Iraq WMD"
The media are, in these cases, bad, but only because they've not adequately defended against the internal psyop by the US security agencies.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/apr/12/julianborger: CNN [and NPR] let army staff into newsroom
People are conflating the virus being bio-engineered (pretty sure this did not happen) with it coming from the Wuhan lab (might have happened, need more evidence).
It also seems The Lancet letter doesn't actual address the question of lab leak. Only that it wasn't engineered. That was a pretty hot conspiracy theory at the time and one that remains far fetched. They didn't positively say it couldn't be a naturally occurring virus that leaked. I don't know enough to comment on gain of function leaves any hallmarks but I'm guessing it doesn't since it tries to replicate evolution.
Medical practices and norms vary widely depending on the culture you live in.
there's numerous posts in previous discussions saying that in China people do, because they don't typically have a GP and so go to the hospital for any acute ailment.
The “engineered” comments refer to common amino acid sequences from lab practices, they leave a signature because ordinary biology is more random.
The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that arerarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair. For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1391507272887455746
Basically, it's somewhat rare but not wildly so. FCoV has an RR pair, the first is coded as CGG, and the second as CGA, a difference of one base pair.
Developed chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses
Conducted ’dangerous’ gain-of-function research on the SARS-CoV-1 virus, some of which had been funded by the US government (Asia Times)
Established a 96.2% match with SARS-CoV-2 and a virus they sampled from a cave over 1,000 miles away from Wuhan
Injected live piglets with bat coronaviruses as recently as July 2019
Published a paper on a close descendant of SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, in November 2019
Was hiring researchers to work on bat coronaviruses as recently as November 2019
There is absolutely no evidence in it. Just a pile of conjecture. It is absolutely the stuff of conspiracy theories.
The truly shocking thing is that world does not hold China liable for this disaster. It really doesn't matter if it started in a lab or in one of their wet markets; it was incompetence and negligence on China's part in either case. China should pay reparations to the world for turning it off for what looks to be like multiple years, and killing millions of people.
There is much more evidence in the article for a lab leak than there was for the wet market story which was uncritically parroted in the media for over a year.
There was zero evidence of a lab leak in the article, only conjecture. So the bar of "same amount of evidence as the article for lab leak" is pathetically easy to reach. The fact you are throwing the "parroting" term around is ridiculously ironic as well, the "lab leak" has been parroted around the world since day one.
More importantly, who gives a shit even if *was* a lab leak? It's literally the less evil/worse of the two possibilities (wet market vs lab leak). Since that means it was "only" a lapse in lab security (one which will probably be learned from and not repeated) rather than the result of negligence in keeping open these markets despite being told over and over again that they are going to cause outbreaks just like this one, and these markets are still open!
If it evolved in a lab, it is highly likely that the virus is better at infecting people in lab conditions, for example that would mean inside.
Which, coincidentally is exactly what we're seeing. People with masks on get infected inside buildings. Outside the risk is much much lower.
Zoonotic diseases jump from animal to human regularly. Countless recommendations from health organizations around the world warned about and predicted a zoonotic disease event base around one of these wet markets.
> If it evolved in a lab, it is highly likely that the virus is better at infecting people in lab conditions, for example that would mean inside.
Feels like you pulled that out of your ass. Random is random and evolution is a thing. The fact that covid is effective at infecting people means only that, it has no definitive statement on it's origin. Yes, we know that a virus can be engineered in a lab to be more infectious, but billions of humans come in contact with billions of animals so it don't matter if the chance of natural zoonotic boundary jump is small.
Dare we inquire how long you have lived. :)
But seriously, I am not sure that the scientific community, nor all national governments, have reached a clear consensus on gain of function research. It is still a developing issue. Welcome to be corrected on that. Such research could potentially help to prevent pandemics as well as accidentally start them. The idea that scientists in the US might have been working with scientists in other countries, including China, on GoF research is not shocking to me. Here is a paper from 2016 on the ethics of GoF research:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4996883/
Perhaps the old saying about mistakingly attributing malice to incompetence applies here.
As for the cover-up, it is difficult to imagine that David Baltimore is wrong. I used a textbook he co-authored when I was in school; he is one of the pioneers of the biotech industry. It seems unlikely this was not created in a lab. Then again, it is probably easier to prove someone in a lab made a mistake than to prove soemthing exists in nature.
I highly doubt it, in most cases "Reductio ad Trumperum" will remain a useful sleight of hand. This is a different matter, being "tough on China" is a bipartisan issue, it's just about showing how the other side was "doing it wrong". For instance, you could say that Trump had "no evidence" supporting his lab leak theory.
“Science” should be trusted within its domain, but it’s not a replacement for all of the processes western society has developed to address the reality that nobody can be trusted with power. Everyone needs to perform their roles. Reporters still need to be skeptical and question scientists’ motivations and investigate the story. And politicians still need to be in charge of translating scientists’ judgments as to various scenarios and probabilities into the political decisions of figuring out what to do accounting for the entire universe of economic and social considerations that are within their ambit.
The only difference is, in a trial, nobody would try and brand the other side as a conspiracy theorist, racist, denier, anti-xer, whatever the most popular inflammatory term is. Nobody would try and block dissent from all mainstream communication forums.
To me, that's the only thing that's new, is the institutional suppression of any suggestions outside of an orthodox version. And it's honestly way scarier than the idea that government labs are doing biological research, or that diseases can jump from animals to people.
The marketplace of ideas is better than trusting gatekeepers of knowledge. That’s one of the huge lessons of the enlightenment that we have somehow forgot. We think “it’s different this time.”
That's such a simplification of the real situation that it's harmful to apply as an axiom.
There are many levels of the marketplace of ideas. Ideally, the gatekeepers of knowledge also create a marketplace of ideas so that expert opinion is varied and shifts as new information come in. This is in inline with what we're seeing here.
The marketplace of ideas with no experts to guide discussion often results in crank ideas that seem plausible but heavily influenced by our biases bubbling to the top. That's how things like the Anti-vax movement gained a foothold.
Also, the "gatekeepers of knowledge" have a mostly.....negative past when you look at the sum of recorded human history. Are you arguing that humans today are just way better and far more trustworthy than the rest of history?
The gatekeepers of knowledge have a past that reflects those that are in power. People that challenge them can be on the right or wrong side of history. Just because they were wrong in the middle ages doesn't mean the gatekeepers of today are wrong. If the gatekeepers can and do apply scientific principles, then logically it is a self-correcting system. This is in theory what we see more or less today (or should at least).
Furthermore, the gatekeeper system is not mutually exclusive to the marketplace of ideas model, as the latter operates on many levels. However, by bringing down the gatekeeper model, it is harder to enforce discussion based on scientific principles, merit and sound arguments. This is the exact reason why we have moderation in almost all forums, and the ones that don't end up as cesspits of people shouting crazy ideas at each other and hence counterproductive places.
Giving everyone a voice doesn't necessarily mean we are bound to give everyone a equal voice in everything. Any weighing is in essence introducing a gatekeeper.
Marketplace of ideas is just measuring the average of views at best and fringe views may on occasion be valid, or not. It is also gameable by promoting "truthy" or plausible explanations with no data behind them.
In this case, it is irrelevant what the source of the pandemic was, securing the labs doing viral research to BSL-4 is prudent. The only issue faced is one of funding, which is vastly insufficient to maintain these facilities. Or at least placement in remote locations with quarantine in place to prevent leaks.
Data only weakly suggests a composite and does not categorically exclude natural origin. Leak of a natural or modified virus would be just as bad. Same if it's from consumption of rare animals sent from remote places or research on the samples from them. In either case, only different degree of luck is required for a pandemic.
It's very unlikely anyone was doing any research on directly using SARS-CoV2 as a weapon. It kills or maims too low a percentage of people to have tactical value, and it's too difficult to contain. (The most effective weapons severely handicap their victims and allow them to live into old age, taking fighters off the field, and turning them into long-term liabilities and living reminders for anyone who might think about fighting you in the future.)
I'm not saying SARS-CoV2 leaked from a lab, but if it did, it was probably more of a basic science/weapons background research rather than an engineered weapon itself. You might want to add some SARS-CoV2 characteristics to a bioweapon, but you'd want to start out with something with greater morbidity and more easily quarantined as a starting point for a weapon.
I do not believe that covid was intentionally designed and released as a bio weapon.
That being said, have you heard of long covid?
Why should I believe this is any more real than "chronic lyme"? There are a whole lot of hypochondriacs out there; something proponents of "long covid" and "chronic lyme" never seem willing to acknowledge.
The groups promoting both of these organize and operate the same way, and make similar claims. Huge lists of nonspecific generic symptoms and facebook groups full of uncritical believers mutually reinforcing each others' beliefs (parallel to the well understood phenomena of "support groups" which promote eating disorders and create social feedback loops for reinforcing/worsening body dismorphia.)
History says you are wrong to discount NATO countries (I include Japan as an unofficial member) using bio-weapons. They have a long history of deploying and supporting deployments of these kinds of weapons against military and economic foes.
The number of people with long COVID symptoms is a tiny tiny fraction of those exposed to SARS-CoV2. If it's a designed feature of SARS-CoV2, it's very poorly implemented, unless it's actually very specifically targeting some as-of-yet unidentified demographic. (This seems very unlikely.)
You seem to assume a bio-weapon has to cause mass death to be effective and meet the deployer's objectives...you are wrong in the case of economic attacks.
This scenario is just as plausible as the lab leak theory, and probably has just as much evidence.
Sorry, but the idea of NATO deploying the most idiotic weapon imaginable on the entire world vs. the idea of an accidental escape from a lab are NOT equally plausible at all. In fact, this entire article goes thru evidence that it was not NATO because of all of the internal investigations and such.
What you are suggesting is tin foil hat conspiracy theory crazy.
The Fauci emails in March 2020 that described the exact components of the virus with subject 'coronavirus bio-weapon production method' hints at the actual purpose of this release.
> https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/06/03/fac...
Any other crank sources you'd like to share?
I didn't argue that the email contained claims about the 'origin'.
Email Subject:
> "Coronavirus Bioweapon Production Method"
Dated March 11, 2020.
Screenshot of original email - https://i.imgur.com/HxUSoCv.png
https://www.pnas.org/content/102/33/11876
If you want to split hairs, you actually said:
> The Fauci emails in March 2020 that described the exact components of the virus ...
which is a complete lie. The email does NOT describe the components of the virus at all. You clearly are lacking in any sort of biochemical background as this is obvious. Do you actually fact check anything you are posting?
...
"Leak of a natural or modified virus would be just as bad. Same if it's from consumption of rare animals sent from remote places or research on the samples from them."
I disagree.
I actually think "lab leak" is better and more optimistic news than a natural outgrowth or animal consumption, etc.
Lab leaks are a problem we can fix - probably without too much trouble. They don't represent a fundamental problem with accelerating globalization, urbanization and travel.
On the other hand, a natural origin or a human-animal crossing due to animal husbandry in or near urban areas ... or "bush meat" consumption ... those vectors could indicate that globalization, urbanization and travel have crossed a threshold where events such as this become likely and will recur regularly.
Given the relatively recent emergence of SARS and MERS, I have been fearful that our very connected, urbanized and globalized world (which I enjoy greatly) is at risk.
If it's a lab leak? The rhetoric may shift to blaming China and trying to punish them (especially in more conservative circles). New Cold War, more Iron Curtains, less freedom of travel.
If it's just globalization making things risky? Then maybe we can't let people fly from Wuhan to Bergamo for public health reasons. Less freedom of travel, for an entirely different reason.
Perhaps it would've been easier for the scientists involved in gain of function research to remain unbiased, if they weren't fully aware that anything but total denial will make the world think they're responsible - as a profession and individuals - without as much as shred of evidence to support it.
> People have an idea that “trust the experts” can replace all the messy, gross, and often wrong processes we have developed to deal with the fact nobody can be trusted.
I observe the opposite. People seem to have the idea that experts are always in on it, or out to get something out of a crisis, and thus should be ignored. The alternative is, of course, to listen to whatever uninformed opinion piece confirms one's worldview the most. I think we'd all do better with trusting the experts more - they may be wrong, but they're also in the best position to discover and correct that. They may be also right. Most people - including journalists, pundits and bloggers - are not capable of telling whether experts are right or wrong. So trusting them seems like a better bet than trusting random opinions (unless yourself you have enough familiarity with the field, at which point your own interpretation may be valid too).
C.f. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
The Republicans (I can't tapdance around the direct call out with weasel words) and the right-wing media have lost all credibility because they often DO behave as racist, selfish, inconsistent conspiracy theorists. On those rare occasions when they are right or properly play the role of opposition rather than pushing an absurd agenda alongside their media manipulation, their prior behavior causes an automatic immune-like response. You can't trust anything they say or their intentions, and they are experts at the Gish Gallop (constantly coming up with new bs you have to respond to, when response takes far more effort) - why would this particular action be any different? Also, this seems more of a case of "a broken clock is right twice a day" than an indication that the right should be taken seriously as a general rule.
Non-credible actors that are known to be untrustworthy should never be the people who put forth any hypotheses if you want them to be taken seriously. The American far-right politicians/media and 4chan are not credible actors, and any idea associated with them will face an uphill battle.
Partisanship is a disease that is destroying our democracy.
That's not an excuse, just what I think is a partial explanation.
This isn't new at all. It's been a staple of many human cultures throughout history, including US culture for much of the 20th century (and, I would say, all of the 21st century). I think what's probably a new experience for most of us is just how all-encompassing the pandemic has been as an issue of discussion.
Take Fauci for example, is he a good scientist? Yes. But it’s also clear that he too subconsciously has pushed for the method of approaching pandemics that coincidentally he was good at, and now we are left with this mess. I doubt him or anyone in between is going to acknowledge it even if they realize it. I was downvoted here to oblivion for pointing this out weeks back but doesn’t matter. I threw away a decade of my life’s experience because I didn’t believe in this cult of an academic system, downvotes don’t hurt nearly as much.
1. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
Was there some other, better, established method?
Trump threw it all away very early on.
We may learn from Taiwan*.
Quote: "Extensive public health infrastructure established in Taiwan pre-COVID-19 enabled a fast coordinated response, particularly in the domains of early screening, effective methods for isolation/quarantine, digital technologies for identifying potential cases and mass mask use."
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6...
Unfortunately, all the media reporting on which countries have succeeded or failed and why seems to have been incredibly inaccurate and blatantly partisan.
These viruses and their potential recombinations are out there, we don't need some virologist to go out and maybe catch it. People will catch them, we'll just know even less about them when the next pandemic starts.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/why-i-h...
They were released under the FOIA, not leaked.
> the guy who thinks everyone should die by age 75 or else they're a waste of space
You linked to an article where he expresses the opinion that he personally doesn't want to live past the age of 75. That's a far cry from advocating mass murder of the elderly.
> Fauci was in regular correspondence... Discussing strategy on the pandemic
Emanuel is the head of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy. It would be unusual if he wasn't in regular correspondence.
Not what I said. But you obviously didn't read between the lines of why he feels that way, or his statements on the second order effects of a small % of people causing a large drain on the overall healthcare system. I still consider this "Interesting to note".
> is the head of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy
Why would an employee at a random private university be expected to have correspondence with a public official?
The greatest threat of our times is not the Corona pandemic or lies about it's origins. It is the loss of true journalism from mass media and free speech on social media. Mass media journalism and big tech are so terribly corrupted that due to that billions of people around the world are being fooled all the time. They are lying to you "for the greater good".
When you start reading alternative news sources you'll find out soon enough something is very wrong. From all over the world renowned scientists, doctors, politicians, lawyers, noble price winners, and many more, are being totally silenced and criminalized. It's truly horrifying.
The (non-rightwing) news orgs had constantly been going on about the evils of Trump and racism and fake news and virus misinformation how very bad it all was, the activists were convinced (because most people don't know how the "news" sausage is made and how it misleads) and pushed to stamp out what they saw as dangerous behaviour. The solution is probably to stop trusting the news media and bring back freedom of communication.
Also what is "freedom of communication"?
You realize everything you said was anecdotal without any shred of evidence. And infowars and its cohorts don't qualify as evidence.
This sentence literally tells me nothing. Which specific people are being "criminalized" and by whom?
From what I gather, Vanity Fair generally seeks to be as shocking as possible. It's part of their marketing strategy.
What did she mean when she said that the database is offline? It's not like the data would be gone if the service is not running?
Oddly, it went offline 12 September 2019 shortly _before_ the pandemic was announced in December 2019.
Ref: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gilles-Demaneuf/publica...
Not really clear why it hasn't been released, it would be technically trivial and save a lot of speculation.
There is a bit of a pattern of DRASTIC researchers finding interesting tidbits in various science portals, followed by those portals going offline or being restricted.
There's a lot of post-hoc engineering arguing for BSL-4 research into coronavirus when even if the lab leak theory proves true wasn't in evidence at the time.
[1] https://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/info-2021/... (point 7)
This is just about what I would expect from governments to behave (both US and China).
This kind of bullshit where people are more concerned about their departments future funding and prospects, and try to bury "unfortunate" incidents is happening in all the governments(and even inside larger companies) I am familiar with. It's a lot easier to bury if you can prevent investigation, than bury results of such investigation. As shocking as might sound this is pretty much businesses as usual in bureaucracy .
For me that doesn't even comes close to Snowden revelations (even though, again we suspected some of it).
Also, here on this forum, I was downvoted for saying it shouldn't be ruled out that the lab might be the source.
Couldn’t we ... just... check? Like maybe the UN or the group of 7 or something similar?
You shut down the globe for a year, seems like it’d be worth running down all the Rabit holes.
China has blocked any and all independent access to the site, the only group allowed access was the WHO research group that somehow happened to include the most rabid opponents of the lab leak theory (Peter Daszak, mentioned in the article).
Hollywood actor Cena just begged in Mandarin for forgiveness after mentioning Taiwan is a country (which it is). Local Amsterdam politicians are not allowed to go on the photo with Taiwanese politicians etc.
The Communist Party is overly controlling and will not allow anything that will challenge their vision.
While Europe and the US were busy with their internal quarrels the last decades, China has been making moves.
You mean directly funding China's transformation with an insatiable appetite for cheap shit?
China could have been forthright from the start (regardless if this was a lab-leak or not), but they weren't, and you can't make them.
You and others act like this is some elementary school incident where honesty is the best policy. But with politics involved and the already prevalent mass hysteria and propaganda going on everywhere, it makes sense, on a realist and not idealist level, why one would not be forthright.
There’s also the idea that the U.S. was terribly ill-prepared and ill-equipped to handle the virus. The U.S. needs to be prepared for such viruses, no matter their origin, because zoonotic crossover events will remain a possibility with even higher likelihood going forward. My worry is if the virus origin is or is even believed to be of lab-based origin, that will weaken the prerogative and narrative to be prepared for zoonotic diseases. Because then, it was something “done to us” rather than a natural event we should be prepared for, an event which remains a big possibility even if this particular virus was of lab origin.
What kind of an insane statement is that? Because that's the right thing to do when it comes to something like a GLOBAL pandemic.
>Without them addressing anything, the west, particularly the U.S., has had their pitchforks out and ready since day one.
Is that a rationalization for not being forthright about the pandemic and origins of the virus (regardless if it was accidentally from a lab, or came directly from nature)?
And China is not some timid wallflower. Stop pretending like they are. They are a global superpower that really fucked up here in multitude of ways and if they get some criticism then so be it - China is a big boy, it can take it.
>With our idiotic president calling it the Chinese virus from the start, why in the hell would China want to be upfront about what they knew about the origin if it indeed was a lab leak? I wouldn’t.
You would lie to the global public because you don't like Trump? How could you say something like that and even try to justify it. I'm flabbergasted. It's such an immoral statement that I'm surprised anyone would seriously make.
Trump said many dumb things but there's a lot of crazy shit that came out of very high-level Chinese officials as well, such as that the virus came from America. But that's all immaterial. They have a responsibility to be transparent.
>You and others act like this is some elementary school incident where honesty is the best policy.
It's a GLOBAL pandemic. It affects everyone. Transparency is critical! Fault the west for many things, but these kinds of things tend to have full transparency around them. Communist authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, can never find a way to be truthful. The truth always seems to be needed to be dragged out of them. This is shaping up as another Chernobyl moment for another authoritarian communist regime. Ultimately, it's everyone else that pays the price.
My comment is simply an observation of the way things are, not the way I would want them to be.
> Fault the west for many things, but these kinds of things tend to have full transparency around them.
If you believe that, then I don't know what to say.
When it comes to pandemics, this is how the world health authorities have done things. There very much was a lot of world collaboration and transparency around epidemics and pandemics. So don't gaslight and say that this is somehow 'naïve'. That's how everybody did things, until China decided it would be embarrassing to them. Hell they were silencing and incarcerating doctors and frontline workers when they suggested there is some sort of a new virus out there as late as January 2020.
This is the modus operandi of communist and authoritarian regimes.
>My comment is simply an observation of the way things are, not the way I would want them to be.
You literally said that had Trump insulted your honor you would have lied and obfuscated the same way that China did. Here's your statement (emphasis mine): "our idiotic president calling it the Chinese virus from the start, why in the hell would China want to be upfront about what they knew about the origin if it indeed was a lab leak? I WOULDN'T."
How is that not an immoral statement.
>If you believe that, then I don't know what to say.
I'm under no illusions when it comes to the general idea that nations are always truthful - they aren't. I didn't make a general statement. I scoped it to transparency around epidemics and pandemics. And yes, the vast majority of nations (not just the West) are very transparent on this point. China is a major outlier here.
And what you say I said about Trump is not at all what I said. You say I literally said something that I literally did not. My point is that he created a certain environment, a highly politicized and biased environment, not conducive in any way to discovering truths about the virus and damn near everything else. He was a catalyst for non-truths and has been his entire life. It has nothing to do with honor or insults.
" When Trump himself floated the lab-leak hypothesis last April, his divisiveness and lack of credibility made things more, not less, challenging for those seeking the truth."
For people who did not have their identity tied to either political side, the lab leak theory was always an obvious possibility.
This is important for another reason that may not be immediately obvious. The WIV (BSL-4) is ~8 miles from the Wuhan Market. There's a BSL-2 lab (the CCDC) that's literally just a few hundred yards from the market. If the lab leak theory is correct, it may have escaped from the latter rather than the former. Or a visiting worker may have inadvertently transmitted it from the former to the latter before it escaped from the latter.
the best I could do was 3km, but I don't recognize anything from google pictures https://imgur.com/KxOT84W
https://img-prod.tgcom24.mediaset.it/images/2020/02/16/11472...
And yes, I checked Google Maps and they are very much obscuring this now (they weren't several months ago when I last checked).
the Botao Xiao paper
He was a Soviet scientist in charge of creating bio-weapons- the book starts with him planning world war 3.
In one of the anecdotes talks about a lab leak they had, caused by someone not replacing a filter and the the lab accidentally pumping out anthrax all day and killing a lot of people.
The government blamed it on local meat sellers at the market and executed them all. Blaming the local market seems to be part of the bio-weapon-denial playbook.
It's a great (but terrifying) book - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0031RS5DI/ref=dp-kindle-redirec...
Guess what Chinese officials did? They called each individual country prime minister and said: Your news reporters are criticizing China, it seems like you don't want supplies.
So politicians will talk with the boss of the news Media and explain the situation, the journalist will shut up.
This happened in two big European countries I personally know of. I suspect the same happened in the rest.
This is a beautiful reminder that you should never outsource your strategic resources like essential food, energy or medical supplies and if you do, you better don't do that from totalitarian regimes.
I'm also going to attack the sources... This was strongly pushed by the Trump administration which was looking for this result. And originally reported by in the WSJ by Michael R. Gordon who is also one of the original reporters about the Iraq Aluminum tubes/centrifuge story that turned out to be wildly false.
It took about 15 years to trace the origins of SARS [1] to a specific bat cave. We cannot be this confident this early on SARS-CoV-2.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
Indeed, when I heard of the report about WIV workers being sick with covid-like symptom I immediately checked who reported that, and ended up with the same conclusion as you.
While a lab leak origin cannot be entirely dismissed, one should keep in mind that all this fuss is politicaly motivated.
IMO the most upsetting part about this is people like Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak being repeatedly caught in outright lies and coverup behavior. These people seemed to have the best of intentions at some point in their career but they are doing irreparable damage to their field and science in general with the public lies and coverups.
One example is Shi Zhengli publicly stating the the 6 miners that died after shoveling bat guano in a mine in Mojiang died from a fungal infection while the DRASTIC group was able to dig up two papers that specifically stated the miners died from a SARS-like virus. They also dug up evidence that Zhengli's lab visited the mine multiple times since 2012 to take samples after the miners died and retrieved as many as 9 unique Coronaviruses similar to SARS-Cov-2 from the mine.
The DRASTIC team's story is an amazing example of "open source intelligence," for that primarily focused on an anonymous Indian who goes by the handle The Seeker who dug up a bunch of papers and theses for the data scientists and others on the team to assemble into a picture that is more and more convincing about the lab leak hypothesis, although having wet lab experience I'm predisposed to suspect this over the zoonotic transfer hypothesis.
But speaking of predispositions, it's exactly the sort of thing the US intelligence community could have done if most of the government and world scientific establishment hadn't already decided on the zoonotic transfer narrative, which is detailed in the Vanity Fair article.
Also an example of how Silicon Valley censorship can backfire, his first posting on this to Reddit got his account permanently banned, which suggested to him he was on to something. On the other hand Twitter didn't have any problems mentioned in either of these articles hosting the discussions of the DRASTIC team.
"SARS-like" could mean quite a few things and without defining what they mean by that it strikes me as fear baiting or being intentionally misleading to further their thesis.
The only recent evidence it contains is the fact that 3 researchers from WIV sought hospital care back in autumn of 2019 with symptoms similar to COVID. However, this piece of evidence is hardly consequential without further details:
- First, most common symptoms of COVID are indistinguishable from common cold. If the researchers were known to have any "signature" symptoms like loss of smell the article would certainly mention it.
- Second and more importantly, China doesn't have a robust GP/family doctor system found in western countries. As a result, many people would go to hospitals directly whenever they're mildly sick.
Taking the evidence as we know it now, the straightforward explanation is that 3 researchers caught cold, got mildly sick, so went to the hospital to get prescriptions or doctor's notes for sick leave (in China it's common for employers to require a doctor's note even for a short sick leave).
That said, I believe the lab leak theory is still plausible, and shouldn't be ruled out unless a clear transmission path from bat to human has been identified (which was done for the 2002 SARS outbreak). But I also think that we may never know. I trust that some theories put forward were in good faith, but so far they are little more than speculations.
But medical visits are common so that is quite different.
I was under the impression that the symptoms were quite different to the common cold and more inline with influenza (fever, dry-cough, aches, no mucus production – symptoms that are rarely caused by the cold).
Doesn't take really detract from the points though.
The sudden shift is just baffling to me though. This huge new furor is due to anonymous CIA sources saying three people got sick? That's extremely tenuous evidence, as you state above.
As far as I can tell, the only biological evidence is the furin cleavage site, which is not uncommon in related viruses. Also, this has been known since the beginning, when the Chinese CDC released the first genome of the virus.
This seems more like people declaring victory because they're finally getting a hint of public support for their suspicions, rather than some truly damning evidence.
If you’re going to demand incontrovertible evidence that might never come up. But considering the scenario, viz. a cabal of careless scientists accidentally unleashed a plague that is killing millions , even the slightest hint of a cover up needs to be taken seriously.
Having worked with enough scientists I don’t for a moment doubt this hypothesis either. Ego and arrogance is what drives most of them, they’d rather choose self-perseverance over accidentally killing millions and go home to have lasagna as if it was just another Thursday without a sweat.
We’ve already had many mutations of COVID occur in the past year. Is it crazy to think virus which infected the miners couldn’t have mutated into what we know as COVID?
Consider for example what happened in the US, in Washington state at the beginning of the pandemic. The first local community transmissions were detected weeks after they had already started happening, even though there was already a relatively high degree of alertness. Without testing, it wouldn't have been detected at all until a similar superspreading event finally took place.
The very fact that miners got sick a few years ago makes it also sound likely, based on Wuhan's history and based on the virus's characteristics, that bat-to-human transmission took place in similar circumstances as the miners' a few weeks or months before the Wuhan wet market event, had some low-key human-to-human transmission simmering in the community which people wrote off as the flu (at worse), until that one superspreading event.
So, they don't really have much choice in this. They have to convincingly look like they're pushing to find the truth, or they'd be handing ammunition to the Trumpists.
I don't have strong views as it's incredibly difficult to prove a negative (that it was not a leak), essentially you would have to identify and prove exactly the actual vector and even then it might be difficult to be conclusive. Lab leak seems however like a very likely scenario and it is crazy how people try to dismiss it without any actual evidence either way - and China's approach to handling the investigation and information flow definitely should cause anyone to be suspicious.
I guess at this stage thr only way we cam find out is if in 10-20 years there's a whistleblower from the lab.
1. The Wuhan institute for virology collected a naturally occurring virus then did gain of function research which subsequently resulted in infected lab workers. There's not a known virus with close enough genome sequence similarity to SARS-Cov19 for this to be plausible. It would be a monumental undertaking to induce >1k mutations in the closest known relative virus. If someone pokes around WIV or a cave in the area and finds a virus with much, much higher but not identical sequence similarity, then that's very strong evidence for gain of function research followed by a leak. In the meantime it seems unlikely that WIV would start doing gain of function research without first publishing about their newly discovered virus.
2. SARS-Cov19 in more or less its current state was naturally occurring in a location that WIV researchers sampled. The virus then escaped while WIV researchers were characterizing it. This requires one to believe that WIV workers, in a biosafety lab, were the first humans to encounter and contract and spread this virus. This is in contrast to the alternate hypothesis that unprotected workers shoveling guano, or maybe a wet market vendor got the virus. I know which possibility I would bet money on.
The point is that we don't have to prove a negative, just weigh the evidence.
The wet market was likely the first superspreader event but the patient zero (from what we know today) had no connection to it.
Also lab leaks are a type of industrial accident. Industrial accidents happen even in the places with the most stringent security protocols. Were that lab's protocols the best in the world? Can't say. And those that are best in the world have contingency plans, for when shit hits the fan.
There have been two serious epidemics of coronavirus disease in recent history: SARS and MERS. There is overwhelming evidence that both have a natural origin. Indeed, the fear of further crossover events is precisely why there was a lab studying these viruses in Wuhan.
I'm not saying that this wasn't a lab accident. What I'm saying that is that if you were actually "considering the priors" (in the statistical or strictly literal sense), you'd be concluding the exact opposite of what you're saying in this post.
This supports the idea that a jump from animals is a possible explanation. It does nothing to indicate that a lab leak is a unlikely explanation (especially with a sample size of two.)
However, the fact that this arose in one of 3 cities on the planet where this research is conducted does provide significant evidence that lab leak is a likely explanation.
Given the lack of evidence, it seems irresponsible to make strong assertions that one theory is more likely than the other.
I think this is the main thing driving these comments. Instead of being totally against the idea, these articles are providing a shred of hope (despite not having any new proof as far as I can tell) for the people who are locked in on the lab leak theory. Definitely people getting overexcited about it and trying to claim they were right the whole time and were being "censored".
In the second case, you’re smearing proponents of the theory. That’s a form of censorship.
Doing it for a theory that was not in any way proven wrong (then or now) is professional misconduct.
In my opinion the most damning part of the article is the section about the human-adapted furin cleavage, I recommend reading that part. The working assumption is that we should find people with precursors to covid without that furin cleavage adaptation, and we don't. If China wants to prove it wasn't a lab leak, they'll need to find instances of the virus that predated that adaptation- as was the case with SARS.
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
It would seem to me that shows it's not the "smoking gun" many people believe it to be.
This is just one example I could find quickly, but there are many more... https://twitter.com/JoePCunningham/status/139718591836522496...
So let's not make the same mistake by eagerly jumping to conclusions that it was engineered in a lab based on assurances from a different set of scientists.
During a season when bats hibernate to areas thousands of miles away?
If you look at the circumstances behind this pandemic's origins, and do some basic back-of-the-envelope math, the lab-leak hypothesis is close to a certainty.
No, of course we are not "to believe" that. What we are to do is to consider it is a possibility. Or are we to believe that SARS-CoV-2 could only have emerged as a lab leak? Both the natural and the lab-leak hypotheses are feasible, but treating either of them with near certainty or as impossible is not justifiable with the current evidence.
Imagine an alternate universe where all events played out the same as in our own, with the exception that the Wuhan laboratory's existence was a perfectly kept secret by the PRC. In that case, would the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan lead to the certainty that there must be a secret facility nearby that specializes in novel bat-related coronaviruses?
To say nothing of the incredible coincidence of the WIV.
The natural emergence of a virus from an animal is much more likely than the existence of a secret, unknown research facility, but much less likely than a lab leak (particularly in the circumstances surrounding COVID19).
All these mistakes in reasoning that I keep seeing in these discussions is making me truly understand the definition of "gaslighting".
The first SARS outbreak happened in Guangzhou which has a BSL-3 lab, yet all evidence points to zoonotic transfer.
Well any evidence is probably long gone and cleaned up and swept under the rug now.
If you remember the lead-up to the Iraq was, it was the same surreal experience.
I've witnessed the same exact pattern multiple times in the last few years- often in relation to China. It's as if suddenly everyone not only shifts opinion, but exhibits the same amount of faith in it as if that opinion had been the most accepted for years.
This speaks volumes about 1) the ability of media (and possibly of powerful, interested parties) to sway the public opinion; 2) the easiness with which people align themselves to a (perceived) majority without ever looking back.
In particular, what has happened here is probably that the presence of Trump prevented half of the US from aligning to a narrative that would have been otherwise quite successful, given the political times. Trump gone, that half of the country suddenly was free to align itself with that narrative.
Which other coronaviruses even have arginine in their proteome?
Damns my credibility a bit, doesn't it? Well, I should have more accurately mentioned that the FCS insertion (CT CCT CGG CGG G (PRRA)) Is rather unusual by betacoronavirus standards in that arginine is not typically coded as CGG (~5% of the time), and that RR coded for as CGG-CGG has not been seen in any betacoronavirus to date.
I have more in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27393013
But my quality quotient on this thread has been all over the place. Probably too invested in getting people to consider the possibility of the lab leak as most probable until we see an animal population to prove the natural hypothesis.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...
The news articles that require the most analysis are the ones of which we are least critical (i.e. those which are prima facie the most factual), yet here you are with a lazy article about Rush Limbaugh. I mean come on, we know he was there to spread propaganda.
Now here's a CNN article, posted May 1, 2020. Let's lightly analyze it:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/politics/trump-intelligence-c...
My favorite part about this article is that, coming back to it today it's so easy to plausibly deny the associations they were making, but in the context of the time the conclusion from the article is that the lab leak theory is a conspiracy that the intelligence community is pushing back against.
>President Donald Trump contradicted a rare on-the-record statement from his own intelligence community by claiming Thursday that he has seen evidence that gives him a "high degree of confidence"
POP QUIZ!
1. Did Trump say he had a high degree of confidence that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the lab?
2. Why would CNN need to misrepresent something Trump said when he says enough BS the way it is?
Answer key: (1) No, watch the video (it was the interviewer who projected that statement onto Trump). (2) I don't know, but it doesn't seem like they have any good reason to do so.
The reporter drives the sentiment. The reporter is who the viewership listen to on how to feel about a particular statement. And what has the reporter done in this article? They have first suggested that Trump claims to have strong evidence the virus was leaked from the lab. Then they move on to suggest the intelligence community disagrees with this claim:
>In acknowledgment of that effort, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued an unprecedented public statement Thursday prior to Trump's comments making clear the intelligence community is currently exploring two possibilities but cannot yet assess if the outbreak "was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan" or began "through contact with infected animals."
Then they create an association with conspiracy theories:
>While the statement suggests the intelligence community has not yet developed a clear assessment as to how the outbreak started, it does say that officials have ruled out the possibility that the virus was "man-made or genetically modified," agreeing with a near consensus among scientists and refuting conspiracy theories.
The article says both theories are plausible! you might think, but the reporting brings us back to this central claim:
>But the lack of evidence to back up claims that the outbreak began in a Chinese lab has not stopped top administration officials, including Pompeo, and some Republican allies of the President from raising the possibility in public comments.
(emphasis on possibility is mine)
So when you say
>It wasn't against the possibility of a lab leak
I have to disagree. The mass media artfully manufactured the consensus that the possibility of the lab leak theory was unfounded. They did so while producing factual information that suggested we didn't have much evidence backing either theory, but used skillful narration to direct all attention to denying the possibility of the lab leak.
Also, in that CNN article video he is asked a question not asked in the above video. A very direct question and NOT leading:
> What gives you I high degree of confidence that this originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
> I can't tell you that. I'm not allowed to tell you that.
Seriously though, I was alive and not under a rock in 2020. I was paying attention to all of this while it was happening.
Let's not go into semantics and technicalities here - journalists know how to write and they know how to clarify. They had ample opportunity on air and in writing to say something to the effect of "while Trump is a fucking idiot and mischaracterizes the lab leak theory, we can not rule it out". Instead they manufactured an association and a denial instead of separating the valid parts of the theory away from what Trump claimed.
I wasn't posting that article as the word of god. It contains information about conspiracies and BS that was being spread around at the time. To add context to what was being pushed back against at the time. Interviewers will also setup questions like this:
> Last night so-and-so indicated he has seen evidence that China is responsible for the coronavirus outbreak and may have manufactured it in a lab and released it on purpose. Let me ask you this: What do you think of the lab leak theory?
> Sigh Let me be clear, there is NO EVIDENCE THAT THIS yada yada yada.
So now a year later, with all the context apparently down the memory hole, this is being shortened to:
> Let me ask you this: What do you think of the lab leak theory?
> Sigh Let me be clear, there is NO EVIDENCE THAT THIS yada yada yada.
"OMG, this was so-and-so then and look at him now:"
> I have never ruled out the possibility of a lab leak. I just thought then and now that the highest likelihood is a jump between species.
"Why so strong of a pushback then but not now?!"
#SomethingIsRotten #ThisStinks #iDidntWantToBelieveItBeforeButThisIsIncredibleReadItYourself #YouDecide
Even that is something people uncovered online and we were talking about a year ago.
Quick edit: Here's a video from April 2020 that touches on this at 6:38 (and a whole lot more otherwise): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU
The take away is that it doesn't matter whether it was from a lab or whether it was naturally originating. What matters is that it was (and still is) completely reasonable to question the official narative. The CDC chose to favor the CCP wet market story because they wanted to maintain a positive relationship in order to ensure they got accurate numbers -- they broadly lied to the American public about the certainty of the science in order to achieve political goals. The media, who should have kept the CDC accountable in such a situation, instead could not resist to tell a story about a disagreement between the Trump administration and the CDC/Fauci (both sides did this).
It does not matter where it originated. What matters is the media didn't do their job and the American public was intentionally misinformed by the federal government in a time of crisis, and the people who called out the government and called out the media were ostracized for it. American institutions broadly failed to meet their responsibilities to the public.
And then there's the completely over the top narrative building based on non-evidence (which also swings wildly based on current trends), legends about mavericks doing secret fact finding missions online etc... stuff that should stay in a bad movie script.
At the end of the day I still think the facts will come up with enough time. If for example the hypothesis is that it's through GoF research, then a group of experts can examine the plausibility and the genomic evidence, try to replicate some of the possible steps etc. Real world research is hard and incremental, it's not done with black magic no one can find out about.
- If there was any hard evidence actually proving they had SARS-CoV-2 in the lab before the pandemic, it will be long gone. Only an independent full access forensic level investigation would ever find any sign that evidence was destroyed, and that is never going to happen.
- It seems extremely unlikely to me that anyone from within China will A) blow the whistle or B) that we would hear about it.
- If a whistleblower were to escape the country, China would be able to claim they are lying, and it is a plot by the West to oppress the Chinese people etc. The chance that the whistleblower would be carrying irrefutable evidence of a lab leak is again almost zero.
We can keep shaking the tree, but I don't think anything truly satisfying is going to fall out. Consider that even if the USA for example had actual evidence of a lab leak, they would be better off using this as leverage over China secretly than releasing it publicly.
What actually can and should happen, is that some major change comes to virology research to absolutely minimise the chance of another lab origin pandemic. Wherever SARS-CoV-2 came from, we have had lab leaks before and we will have them again, that much is certain.
That seems unlikely to work.
It’s 96.2% similar not 98%. The issue is that coronaviruses in nature don’t mutate fast enough for that to be the missing link, and they have tested something like 80,000 animals since the outbreak without finding anything closer. One possibility is that the gap was closed through gain-of-function or serial passage research.
> Clues to the transition from bat virus RaTG13 to human virus SARS-CoV-2 may lie within the 4% of the genome sequences that diverge. Evolutionary biologists estimate it would have taken at least 50 years for the bat virus to have mutated itself into SARS-CoV-2, considering known, natural mutation rates of viral genomes.
It goes on to say, that it’s possible this virus is just different.
This paper states 20-50 years an an estimate. [1]
> Bats belong to the usual suspects for zoonosis, and indeed, a bat virus that shared 96% sequence identity with SARS-CoV-2 was isolated in Yunnan /China in 2013. However, a 4% sequence difference (>1000 bp) would indicate 20 to 50 years of separation from SARS-CoV-2, making this bat isolate an unlikely direct source for the nascent epidemic. Chinese researchers explored tissue and faecal samples from 227 bats representing 20 species living in China, collected between May and October 2019 and analysed them by metagenome sequencing. This investigation found that the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 in this sample set shared 93.3% sequence identity over the entire genome, less than the bat coronavirus isolated in 2013 from the same province, Yunnan (Zhou et al., 2020).
I’m not a virologist, just trying to keep up with this story. It seems like a consensus that 3.8% is a large chasm to cross in that time frame, but there could be things we don’t know or possibly viruses that are closer to SARS-CoV2 that we haven’t sequenced yet. I think the most important thing to note is that there hasn’t been enough evidence to rule out a gain-of-function lab leak hypothesis given what we know today about viruses and there wasn’t a year ago either.
[0] https://dnascience.plos.org/2021/04/15/3-possible-origins-of...
[1] https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/175...
(i.e. politically punished by the west for covering up facts is fine but scientifically concluding this proves a leak is not.)
Not to mention fixing all of the other failures that allowed COVID to kill millions worldwide. Everyone's pointing fingers but hardly anybody's talking about improving epidemiology and public health policy (which the US is long overdue for a reckoning on).
One of those failures, by the way, was the seeming assumption that whatever state a global health emergency started in would act in something resembling good faith. Regardless of how COVID came to be, China wasted precious time deflecting when it should have been diligently helping to sound the alarm and properly investigate.
And how many other countries might have prevaricated in the same fashion, if the pandemic had started within their borders? This is not a failure concerning China specifically. Indeed, there will come a point where blaming China for COVID, however cathartic that might be, will be counterproductive to preventing future catastrophes.
When it was still only Wuhan, everyone assumed it would go down like sars again, it's just "a Chinese thing" and could never happen in the developed world. We feasted on the images of overcrowded hospitals, people collapsing in waiting rooms, and felt good about or country.
Then when it became clear that China messed up containing the spread and it would not only hit other cities in China but the rest of the world too, we did.... Nothing. Like a toddler we tried solving the problem by ignoring it. Forgotten were the images of chaos and death from Wuhan, politicians would assure us "that it's under control and go away soon". Just how can you suddenly pull such a 180 as soon as it arrives at your country? Then the first cases popped up and "we did contact tracing and stopped the chain". Great, but hoe does it prevent new cases from entering the country?
I came from beijing back to germany on Feb 26, 2020. Getting out of the plane there was... nothing. No temperature checks, no masks, no form to fill in, no "hey please stay at home for two weeks". It went from sitting in a plane for 8 hours with a mask to just randomly boarding a train across germany with nobody giving a shit. It was unreal.
But then, when it eventually got real bad in the West, we pulled yet another 180 and stopped ignoring covid and started going "well China should have prevented it", when we got a head start of about a month where we could perfectly see what this virus does, yet didn't take any measures on our side whatsoever and just let it happen. I know, it's always easier to blame someone else across the planet, but I'm most surprised and disappointed by my own government. I'm wondering how things would have gone if this had originated in Germany.
You might hear about it, depending on where you get your news. You might also hear social media fact checkers dismissing it as conspiracy nuttery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Meng_Yan
https://nypost.com/2020/09/16/twitter-suspends-virologist-wh...
At the end of the day the only people who most likely know whether it was a lab leak or not are the chinese authorities. So we will likely know in 50 or 60 years if those archives are made public (like for the Katyn massacre). The CIA/NSA can possibly get its hand on incriminating communications, but who is going to trust those guys?
Also I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the chinese authorities got all covid lab samples destroyed without being analysed. The best way to not leak that you may be responsible is to ensure no one, even yourself, can ever know whether you were responsible.
> Within the scientific community, one thing leapt off the page. Wade quoted one of the world’s most famous microbiologists, Dr. David Baltimore, saying that he believed the furin cleavage site “was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus.” Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate and pioneer in molecular biology, was about as far from Steve Bannon and the conspiracy theorists as it was possible to get. His judgment, that the furin cleavage site raised the prospect of gene manipulation, had to be taken seriously.
Furin cleavage sites have evolved and are present in multiple coronaviruses:
- HCoV-OC43 (infects humans)
- HCoV-HKU1 (infects humans)
- MHV-A59
- ChRCoV-HKU24
- BtCoV-ENT
- BtNeCoV-PML-PHE1
- BtCoV-HKU4
- BtCoV-HKU5
- MERS-CoV
- BtHpCoV-Zhejiang2013
- SARS-CoV-2
Phylogenetic analysis suggests that it has evolved independently at least 6 times that we know of.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
After that article was published a team in Thailand found furin cleavage sites in sarbecoviruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 called RacCS203 (91.5% similarity to SARS-CoV-2) and RmYN02 (93.3% similarity to SARS-CoV-2)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7873279/
Furin cleavage sites are common, nature understands how to utilize that trick very well, and continuously has re-discovered it.
Because per se it does not prove the claim of bioengineering.
You are of course more likely correct about the alignment issue, I can't find my source now, and the above is probably much stronger evidence. For the alignment you'd have to be a virologist, probably one specializing in coronaviruses, to be able to really judge this. Of course a whole bunch of biologists have shifted their focus to coronaviruses in the last year and a half.
So still nothing to point out to bioengineering in my opinion.
The closest genetic match is only 3.8% similar. When it only has 29,903 base pairs, that's 1,136 mutations. I'm no bioscientist but my friends who are tell me that's a lot of changes, and that experiments might change a few base pairs or proteins at a time. A lab leak theory doesn't explain how gain of function study resulted in so many mutations, unless they were blasting these viruses with radiation, and what would be the point of that? Radiation mutations would cause too many changes to do useful science.
Everyone keeps looking at bats but the closest bat coronavorus is 20 years of evolution away. SARS and MERS came from palm covets and dromedary camels respectively, so what's the deal?
Every time I read about this I keep thinking "huh that's sketchy but circumstantial" and I've yet to find an answer to how the lab would've gotten to this point, undiscovered, with no published papers or research or notes or preprints anywhere
Or explicitly creating chimeric coronaviruses, which has been the state of the are for some time. Here's https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26552008/ one of the sources of smoke on this, a 2015 paper co-authored by the Bat Woman (2nd to last author), the key sentence from the abstract:
Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.
Have you read the fine article? It cites more than a few papers.
The mutations on covid 19 are Really Different compared to the known and studied viruses. If it was a lab leak of an engineered chimera, you'd be able to see that A proteins came from virus X and B proteins came from virus Y and Z, but that hasn't been shown to be the case. From what I understand there are a bunch of smaller mutations across a lot of proteins resulting in something that doesn't really line up with known and studied genomes.
This paper actually goes through and compares the DNA of covid 19 against several other studied viruses: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-00459-7
I guess I don't find the argument "we can't figure out how to reconstruct SARS-COV-2 from known viruses" very convincing on either side.
Sitting in a cave somewhere implies not being studied, right? Which is more the "natural mutation" thing.
Sitting in some government lab is a different story and depends on belief in scientific institutions to do science and publish peer reviewed papers and all that jazz.
It doesn't have to be crispr introducing reach mutation.
You don't get there by splicing an ACE2 spike onto an RaTG13 backbone and passing it through a dozen mice. That gives you something that still looks similar to RaTG13 and infects mice.
The ACE2 spike also looks most similar to a previously unknown ACE2-binding spike protein found in malaysian pangolins.
So WIV would have had to have discovered that pangolin spike-protein, kept it secret, spliced it into an RaTG13 backbone, then not used mice but passed it through a species like that had a human-like ACE2 for a decade and millions of animals.
An alternative hypothesis is that Charles Darwin did that experiment.
That likely did happen, but Charles Darwin was the geneticist that executed the gain of function experiment via serial passage through that many animals.
> Have you read the fine article? It cites more than a few papers.
Yes, i read it. The ability to construct bibliographic references is also a fairly widely-held and unimpressive skill.
According to the article, the database of sequences for the WIV samples had been deleted before the pandemic became widespread, so there was no way to verify this, but also somewhat suspicious.
>you then do not get SARS-CoV-2 out of passing that through mice, you get a mouse virus. You'd need to pass it serially through something with a human-like ACE2 like minks.
From the article:
>Using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs, then studied their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. As the NSC officials worked backward from the date of publication to establish a timeline for the study, it became clear that the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic even started.
So, it's likely they had mice with humanized lung and ACE2 receptors, no?
Keep in mind there is an estimated 1.5 million viruses that have not been identified yet. There might very well be a virus in nature which is the 'missing link'.
How did you come by 3.8%?
"But they also reported that it was 96.2% identical to a coronavirus sequence in their possession called RaTG13, which was previously detected in “Yunnan province.” They concluded that RaTG13 was the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2.
In the following months, as researchers around the world hunted for any known bat virus that might be a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2, Shi Zhengli offered shifting and sometimes contradictory accounts of where RaTG13 had come from and when it was fully sequenced. Searching a publicly available library of genetic sequences, several teams, including a group of DRASTIC researchers, soon realized that RaTG13 appeared identical to RaBtCoV/4991—the virus from the cave where the miners fell ill in 2012 with what looked like COVID-19.
In July, as questions mounted, Shi Zhengli told Science magazine that her lab had renamed the sample for clarity. But to skeptics, the renaming exercise looked like an effort to hide the sample’s connection to the Mojiang mine."
Also, "circumstantial" doesn't mean weak. It means "pertaining to circumstance". For example, the fact that the virus's origins are in the same area as the lab would be circumstantial evidence that it was created in that lab.
Many circumstances can point to a conclusion. Even the phrase "the smoking gun" which has been bandied about in the discussion of this article, is an example of circumstantial evidence. Circumstantial evidence is opposed by direct evidence, which would be eyewitnesses, video/photos of the thing taking place, etc. And eyewitness is actually one of the weakest forms of evidence because memory is faulty. So circumstantial evidence is usually the evidence that convicts a criminal.
To illustrate that, I like to point to my two favorite circumstantial convictions, Hans Reiser and Scott Peterson.
They convicted Scott Peterson based on buying porn, a dye job, and selling cars.
The convicted Hans Reiser of first degree murder of his wife, Nina, despite not even having any direct evidence that she was in fact dead. They only found the body after Reiser himself led them to Nina's body in exchange for pleading guilty to second-degree murder.
A cleaned car, a missing seat, and some books on murder investigations were the evidence they used. Entirely circumstantial. And they deduced that Nina was murdered from those same circumstances.
That does not mean it doesn't exist, just that we haven't found it.
We didn't know of any other sarbecoviruses that had furin cleavage sites, then we found them in bats in Thailand, then the goalposts moved to how this paricular furin cleavage site is weird.
Once a decade passes and we find animals with beta-coronviruses which have the same kinds of furin cleavage sites, I'm sure the goalposts will move again.
>There are several curious features about this insert but the oddest is that of the two side-by-side CGG codons. Only 5 percent of SARS2’s arginine codons are CGG, and the double codon CGG-CGG has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus. https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
Related threads:
The media's lab leak fiasco - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27307175 - May 2021 (696 comments)
Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before Covid-19 outbreak disclosed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259953 - May 2021 (343 comments)
How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27184998 - May 2021 (235 comments)
More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27160898 - May 2021 (341 comments)
The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 - May 2021 (537 comments)
Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26750452 - April 2021 (618 comments)
Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540458 - March 2021 (985 comments)
The Lab Leak Hypothesis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25640323 - Jan 2021 (229 comments)
Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25585833 - Dec 2020 (351 comments)
Wuhan lab did research on bat viruses, but no evidence of accidental release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23070031 - May 2020 (76 comments)
Experts disagree on whether Covid-19 could have leaked from a research lab - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22695825 - March 2020 (6 comments)
I've been wondering certain things, especially why Marc Lipsitch (one of the most consistently trustworthy voices throughout the pandemic) signed that Science letter, knowing that it would add weight to the "it's a lab leak" propaganda, and stood by the assertion that lab leak is plausible[1].
I hope we do get the true answers to these questions, though think it's not especially likely.
I'll say a couple other things. For an audience of honestly intellectually curious people, the Trumpian right-wingers did enormous damage to their theory, even if it was correct, by being racist and scientifically willfully stupid. Similarly, the Chinese authorities, even if they were correct did enormous damage to their theory by being authoritarian and stifling real communication. But it is very easy to see why both sides acted as they did: these mythical honest intellectually curious people are a tiny fraction of the entire audience, and have relatively little power, so they were quite incentivized to act as they did. And, maybe a little too early to say for sure, but it probably worked.
[1]: https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1398455815959367683
Eh? And no mention of American urban blue check marks who are being racist, scientifically willfully stupid and who are stifling real communication?
On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence.
There were tons of articles and threads on it everywhere including HN, no one was being silenced, give me a break. The oppression complex is really out of control, as if people were being visited by the secret police and forced to immediately cease all discussion about the lab leak theory. It just had no credibility due to lack of evidence. As more info comes to light it's being given more credence, simple as that.
Really seems many want to feel like they've been oppressed and silenced when that couldn't be further from reality, reaching absurd levels of delusion here.
The thing is, no new info supporting the lab-leak theory has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been. All the evidence still points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology not having had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic, and all the new evidence is consistent with the default prior - that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals, just like every other novel virus in history.
If you read the Nicholas Wade article, the PLOS blog, or even this article, you will know the evidence is not pointing in any one direction at the moment, but there is solid evidence of a cover-up and blame shifting by the Chinese government and the virology / national defense establishment.
This is an absurd equivalence. Viruses spill over from nature all the time. There are millions of people coming into contact every day with animal populations that harbor myriad SARS-related coronaviruses. Every known novel virus that has entered the human population has done so through spillover. This is the default hypothesis, which must be overwhelmingly favored at the outset of any discussion. Everything we know so far is perfectly consistent with this default assumption, and there is precisely zero evidence of a lab leak.
> If you read the Nicholas Wade article
I've read it, and it is appalling that an article by someone who does not understand the subject they are writing about is getting so much circulation.
> there is solid evidence of a cover-up
There is no evidence at all of a cover-up of a lab leak. Everything we know so far points to the lab not even having had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic. It appears to be a completely novel virus, not closely related to anything else known before, which is precisely what you'd expect for a novel virus that spilled over from an unknown animal population. If there were a major outbreak of a virus that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had (such as WIV-1), that would be a different matter, but there isn't.
Right. And so too do viruses not uncommonly spill over from labs into the public. SARS1 escaped the lab four times. Pandemic flu is thought to have escaped once.
> it is appalling that an article by someone who does not understand the subject they are writing about
In that case, a point by point rebuttal should be written by people who do know what they are writing about. The ad hominem isn't really persuasive.
> There is no evidence at all of a cover-up of a lab leak.
I did not refer to a cover-up of a lab leak. I referred to a cover-up of something, which may be a lab leak. There is certainly no denying that there is a cover-up:
1. WIV removed their virus database from the web on Sept 19, 2019, and their staff/student bios from the web in late Jan 2020.
2. China has mandated that all papers concerning Covid-19 be approved by the government before publication since Feb 2020.
3. Access of investigators to the WIV has been blocked. Free staff interviews with foreign investogators have not been permitted.
4. Statements made by the Shi lab are mutually inconsistent in their details.
5. The US gain of function establishment has pre-emptively sought to associate any talk of lab leaks with social stigma and conspiracy theories.
All these are detailed in the Vanity Fair article which started this comment chain. Thanks for revealing that you didn't read it.
No novel virus has ever spilled over from a lab. Every novel virus in history has been a zoonosis.
The only lab escapes were of existing, highly infectious viruses that were being intensively studied, cultured in large quantities, etc. Such escapes are rare, and there are very good systems in place to detect them. The Wuhan Institute of Virology regularly tests its workers for antibodies against various viruses (including coronaviruses), and the workers are negative for SARS-CoV-2. The pandemic flu you're talking about was likely the result of a large-scale vaccine study, not a lab leak.
There is no sign that anyone knew of SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak, much less that any lab was working with it. There is, on the contrary, good evidence that it was not known about. The WIV never published the genome of SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak, in contrast to other related coronaviruses (for example RaTG13 was published in 2016, and the WIV has never even isolated it - it exists purely as RNA fragments and data on a hard drive). The set of coronaviruses that the WIV works with are publicly known, and SARS-CoV-2 is not among those worked with pre-2020.
> The ad hominem isn't really persuasive.
If a person who clearly does not know anything about programming writes a long screed about programming, filled with basic errors that illustrate that the person does not understand basic programming concepts, it's not ad hominem to point out that the person doesn't know anything about programming. The question is why the media is hyping an article by someone who doesn't understand basic virology.
> WIV removed their virus database from the web on Sept 19, 2019
This part of the conspiracy theory requires the WIV to have known about a lab leak in September 2019. That really is stretching any sort of plausibility. This database was only online for a few months in the first place, and they say that they took it down because it was insecure. The alternative explanation that the conspiracy theorists are pushing - that the WIV knew about a lab leak months before anyone in China showed any sign whatsoever of reacting to the outbreak - is just not plausible.
> their staff/student bios from the web in late Jan 2020.
I don't know what bios you're talking about. However, there was a conspiracy theory about a postdoc who left the lab in 2015, whose picture was "missing" from the website. Based on this, internet conspiracy theorists jumped to the conclusion that she was patient zero, that she had been secretly cremated, and all sorts of other nonsense. The obvious explanation is that she left the lab years ago, and that for whatever reason, nobody has bothered to put her picture up on the website.
> Access of investigators to the WIV has been blocked. Free staff interviews with foreign investogators have not been permitted.
This is false. The WHO team was given full access to the lab, and interviewed many of the staff. They got detailed information about all the coronavirus research at the lab.
> The US gain of function establishment has pre-emptively sought to associate any talk of lab leaks with social stigma and conspiracy theories.
I don't know what the "gain of function establishment" is. Virologists generally view the lab leak as extremely unlikely and completely unsupported by evidence. Some virologists do what might be characterized as "gain-of-function" research. Does that make them the "gain of function establishment"? There isn't some big conspiracy to shut down truth-tellers. There are experts who are annoyed that an extremely unlikely theory that is unsupported by any evidence is being hyped by non-experts who don't know what they're talking about.
The "human story," conflicts of interests and such, gets most of the attention... unfortunately. Some of those interests were/are personal. The most onerous interests seem to be narrative. One narrative or the other suits a grander political narrative, for a variety of reasons. That kind of stuff sucks us in, unfortunately.
There can be a fine line between skepticism and orthodoxy though. Skepticism defaults to ambiguity. I'm sure that ambiguity is the majority position, but "I don't know" isn't a position that gets much journalistic and political attention.
Media, both new and traditional, gravitates towards hard positions... poop slinging and human conflict stories.
Saying you have ‘no evidence’ of something is not a reason to discard a hypothesis. On the contrary, it is a reason to figure out how to get more data, a reason to figure out how to falsify the hypothesis.
It’s a common logical fallacy to conflate absence of evidence with evidence of absence.
It was just the earliest suspected point of where the animal to human transmission happened, the reservoir was always presumed to be somewhere else.
Do you disagree? Do you think it might have been political?
Also, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is not exactly "nearby" the seafood market. It's 25 km away, well across the city and on its outskirts.
I like your reasoning. My question is: do you think that is why the mainstream media completely rejected the idea of lab leaked virus?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...
On hackernews the most you would get is downvotes. On Facebook or youtube? Things were deleted and banned.
Social medias implemented CCP-style censorship on their platform on anything related to the lab leak theory for more than a year.
Posts and comments were systematically deleted, users accounts were suspended.
At some point you couldn't even share a link in a private message as it was blocked.
You are the one reaching absurd levels of delusion here.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ends-ban-on-posts-asse...
Posts were removed for 'Asserting Covid-19 Was Man-Made' which is very different from discussing the possibility and calling for further investigation.
> Facebook in February began the ban on claims the virus was man-made or manufactured as part of a list of misleading health claims that aren’t allowed.
During that period with the widespread dangerous misinformation spreading all over socials (questioning mask usage, recommending false treatments etc) it's easy to see how this was caught by that web.
Still waiting for a citation of your claims of 'censorship on their platform on anything related to the lab leak theory for more than a year.' or users being suspended for discussing it, not asserting it, which are very different.
Until relatively recently lab leak discussion was censored from Twitter and Facebook. I didn't see much of it in the period Feb 2020 - May 2021.
> On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture
There was no brilliant evidence for any source of the coronavirus. Regardless of that, the idea of a lab leak was quickly ruled out and that was unjustified.
I think the problem for the media was that a controversial American president publicly endorsed the lab leak theory, as it supported his broader agenda, and that made people in the media prefer to disbelieve it, even to wrongly suggest that it was not credible. In short: bias.
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-br...
Here's one case of someone stating the true goals of those who promote the lab leak hypothesis is to promote anti Asian sentiments...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26547263
It's hard to believe how one can reach such a daft conclusion.
There are many others.
I think an unintentional lab leak is going to create less issues for Asians than the other theory of "dirty" Asians eating bats, don't you think?
Even if it turns out to be a false hypothesis, it’s outrageous that it was treated the way it was for so long, with such vitriol, and with such unanimity before any real investigation had been done.
I’ve got no dog in this fight, but the way this hypothesis was treated gets my libertarian hackles up.
What is absolutely terrible is for the media and big tech to ACT like they are the absolute authority in any field they have interest in. We're heading towards "ministry of truth" levels of censorship.
Virtually none of the evidence being discussed here, aside from 3 workers at the lab getting sick in November, is new. Its all the same info that has been available for well over a year. And much of it not coming from "misinfo merchants".
> Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence.
This cuts both ways. There have been many who haven't been saying that the lab-leak is definitively the source of the virus, but simply saying that its a credible possibility with at least as much evidence as any other theory, and should therefore be investigated. Throughout the last year, it was pretty consistently called a conspiracy theory or "debunked", when clearly it was neither. Declaring something to be misinformation when it is not, isn't any more skeptical that declaring something to be the truth with no evidence.
You can try and poo-poo all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the mainstream narrative, both on social media and in the mainstream media, has been wildly off about this for over a year, and virtually nothing has changed from an evidence perspective to warrant their about face. The general narrative was simply wrong, due to a combination of hubris, partisanship, and lack of skepticism.
If it came from a lab, does anything change? No, not really. It's still a virus that we need to protect against.
The only thing that would change any sort of response is if COVID was deliberately released. And that doesn't even change the medical side of the response, just the political side.
> HN has really gone downhill.
Yes, it has, but mentioning the reason for that will bring the brigade of the very same element that has made it go downhill.
> On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants.
As far as I can tell, it makes two logical errors, 1) that absence of evidence is reason to not take an idea seriously, in a space of known unknowns, & 2) that a possibility can be discredited because dishonest people are pushing it.
On the former point: "evidence = likely" does not necessarily imply "no evidence = unlikely" as you seem to believe (if by evidence you mean like courtroom evidence; we use probabilistic reasoning in the absence of such "evidence" for any one explanation.) we have gathered 0 evidence for many (probably most) true things.
Finally, there's a lack of understanding of how power works in the US. If you could get censored for saying something that the US government knew for months, then yes, you were being silenced, the absence of literal NKVD notwithstanding.
Excellent write up by Vanity Fair.
I don't remember dismissing the lab leak theory per se, but rather, taking it in as one of a massive spew of crackpot theories all coming from more or less one source. I'm reminded of the children's story, "The boy who cried wolf."
Looking back in hindsight, I wonder how we could have picked out the lab leak theory as being worthy of consideration, given the context. And whether a more scientifically minded public and government would have faced that dilemma.
Whatever your recollection of "rank-and-file scientists" attitudes is, the narrative on record is to the contrary.
There were a lot of threads to pull, and some of us were following it. For example, this video was posted in April 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU
By actually considering the idea based on the information available, rather than judging solely on the messenger. Things we've known for most of the past year now:
* The wet-market was likely not the origin of the outbreak. Earliest identified positive cases predate the market outbreak and have no connection with it.
* The lab in question was very near to the wet market where the largest outbreak occurred.
* The lab in question specifically researched coronaviruses in bats.
* The closest match to the SARS-COV-2 virus we've found in bats in nature are bats that live over a 1000 kilometers away from Wuhan. However, these bats are among those being researched at the virology lab there.
* The lab in question was the subject of concern among international inspectors years before the outbreak, who stated that they believed the lab didn't meet necessary safety and containment protocols, and didn't have the staff to do so.
* US intelligence agencies have been signalling that the Chinese government has been covering up the origins of the lab.
* The CCP themselves have demonstrated that they are actively working against the discovery of the origins of the disease. Soon after the wet-market outbreak, they closed the wet-market, prevented any international scientists and experts from examining it, and over their objections, purged all animals there and sanitized the entire place, making it impossible to determine what might have led to an outbreak at the market. They also cracked down internally on whistleblowers who said the situation in Wuhan early in the pandemic was much worse than being broadcasted. Finally, they have simultaneously insisted on the natural origin of the virus, while also pushing theories that it originated from non-Chinese sources, such as China, South Asian pangolin black market traders, and the US Army.
* The CCP prevented WHO investigators from actually entering the country to look for origins of the virus for nearly a year, didn't give them full access when they arrived, and the resulting report was declared largely useless by the international community immediately upon its release.
* All people claiming that the lab-leak theory had been "debunked" were actually referring to the theory that it was genetically engineered, which is not the same thing at all.
None of this proves a lab leak, but its strong enough circumstantial evidence that it is at least as plausible as any other origin. Virtually the only new information to have come out is that some of the workers in the lab got sick with Covid-like symptoms in November.
If you swapped China with the US and this lab with the CDC, people would have taken it far more seriously. Imagine a worldwide pandemic started down the street from the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, AND no one could find the origin of the virus but the closest match was in an animal native to Northern Ohio, AND that animal also happened to be at the CDC for studying the type of virus in question, AND whistleblowers had mentioned concerns about procedures there previously, AND the US government did everything in their power to prevent people from investigating. People would have zeroed in on the theory from day 1.
There was always plenty of reason to see it as worthy of consideration, and for those who weren't judging solely based on "Does Trump think this is true or not", they did. The biggest reason it wasn't was solely due to the fact that our media/social media can't function outside the scope of our current political/cultural wars. Information is being judged less and less on its own merits, and more and more on who is providing it.
That doesn't mean it cannot be true. It does mean that after 3 years and several thousand fully documented outright lies, the presumption of truth was no longer being granted.
Even so, in the intervening period, even when Trump was still president, several US agency reports concluded that the virus likely did not originate from a lab, and one assumes that they had more information than anybody else.
I used these three pieces of evidence to come to this conclusion for myself last year.
1. Wuhan is the epicenter of the outbreak.
2. Wuhan has a lab that works with bat covid.
3. China initally tooks steps to hide the virus from the world until that was no longer possible.
>several US agency reports concluded that the virus likely did not originate from a lab.
Keep that in mind next time.
The question of whether one of their viruses leaked out again (yes, again!) that was a bat coronavirus found right by the bat coronavirus lab, or whether it was a remarkable cascade of coincidences that still has no viable complete hypothesis (the “modified” virus doesn’t infect bats anymore), is not one of “conspiracy”.
And this differs from "new media" how? You don't like what certain social media and "old media orgs" did? Fine, no problem. There's no media on the planet that doesn't do this to some extent, least of all contemporary conservative US media outlets.
Whether you consider what was done to Trump and others regarding their posts/speeches about COVID and cures for it as censorship depends a lot on how you see the world. Your mileage may vary (because mine certainly does).
Or the idea that when COVID first hit it was the conspiracy theorists screaming the loudest about the lab leak origin and given the sudden interest of the US in xenophobia and specifically the anti-Chinese sentiment(hint: it’s not that sudden), it would have potentially resulted in violence against Asian people. And at the same time the crossover theory was pretty much as likely if not more based on what we knew then. Now that more info has been gathered everyone is doing an about-face on covering this issue since it’s become a serious conversation and not a crackpot fringe theory shared with the intent to spread hate.
Maybe what had happened was that initially we knew little and everyone was a bit panicked. Then the crackpots started spreading FUD via the most convenient COVID origin theory to their message. The old media mostly ignored this, dismissing it swiftly without giving it more airtime. Social media was too busy with conspiracy theorist and right wing activists spreading the lab leak theory so they viewed it as false (if 99% of the time what a person says is a lie, why would this particular thing be true?). Then articles like these revived that theory with new information. Most people took in the information as just “hey new data” and left it at that. A few people who were spreading the conspiracy theory version of this story felt vindicated while simultaneously upset because their low quality memes were not really allowed while new the WSJ, the NYT, and Vanity Faire is getting front page treatment because of course excellent writing is more compelling than some guy on YouTube angrily vaping in his mother’s basement.
Nothing was revived with any new information. The Venn diagram that includes the circle of people who were following and investigating this, and the circle of conspiracy theorist Trump supporters, did not ever overlap.
One of these circles was about some bill gates funded bioweapon to implant 5G or some nonsense which they suspected was being done in WIV.
The other was scientists who have known about the work at WIV for years, not based on suspicion, but based on the papers they kept releasing, media interviews, sequencing the genome, and doing science.
But you all TDS’d so hard that you wrote the latter off as the former, and the media went along with it.
It isn’t even a conspiracy theory. It had nothing to do with collusion by tech giants. Their hyper partisan employees just fell into the same TDS trap and decided “lab = conspiracy misinformation, no ifs ands or buts” and started purging people talking about it.
The Vanity Fair article is actually quite poorly researched and written, and misattributes much of the source and timeline, but at least people are snapping out of their partisan blindness on this issue now.
I understand not taking his word for anything. But it's such an important issue. To just dismiss it and not try to investigate it, even at the highest levels of our government and public health bureaucracies, strikes me as negligent at best.
But this is the opposite of what's happened.
These same people ridicule the Space Force, for example, despite it being a reorganization of US Space Command that had bipartisan approval years before Trump even ran for office.
A broken clock is still right twice a day.
Some folks who never supported Trump had their own reasons to examine this. They talked about it, and everyone assumed they got the idea from Trump, and therefore not only did they deserve no attention, but they also deserve no respect, and outright career sabotage by folks like Peter Daszak and to a lesser extent, Anthony Fauci. Many had to work on this in secret because the hyper partisans wouldn’t listen to them, and instead tried to attack them just for talking about it. Take a look at Yuri Deigin and Alina Chan on twitter and go back in their timelines to see how long they have been digging into this.
My hope is not that anyone acknowledges that Trump was correct, although I would view it as a sign of integrity if they did. But whether he was or wasn’t, and whether he got lucky or actually knew something, I don’t care. The real issue comes not from Trump, but their own prejudice, which many are still trying to make excuses for, made them so blind to what, in hindsight, is actually extremely obvious as the most likely explanation. Then they took it further and let their blind hate for Trump also caused them to hate half of their fellow citizens, and they extended that hate to anyone who they even perceived as having thoughts tangentially related to something Trump said.
I could easily come up with probably 5 more examples of something very similar that happened in his orbit that people who only follow left leaning mainstream news have no idea about, or that were spun into complete anti-trump lies by the media and are still believed by people today.
The media are absolutely full of shit. All of them. Real journalism died, hyper partisan “woke” activists have been graduating and taking writing jobs, groupthink and cult-like behavior has amplified, and the executives loved the sky high ratings and revenue they got for being anti-trump. Cancel culture further reinforced this culty groupthink and forced moderate voices out. Hell, people actually try to say Glenn Greenwald went right-wing crazy. Glenn Greenwald! They don’t even realize that it wasn’t him who changed, it was them.
It’s pervasive in tech. People are actually pro-censorship now. And they have convinced themselves that they are the good guys. It’s hard to believe how far we have fallen from rationality in such a short time.
Did Kevin Drum say otherwise?
It being engineered as a bioweapon is in the realm of a crackpot theory, but it being just a poorly contained natural research project was fairly reasonable. Some prominent people mixed the two up on purpose and eventually the whole thing - both ideas - got labeled a crackpot theory by people who just saw some headlines.
This is kind of how I remember things too I think, I feel like I'm being gaslit by the internet lately reading how certain some people are.
I guess I don't quite follow with how people would think that it being a weapon that spread intentionally or unintentionally is the base case.
Here's some good science sources:
- Comprehensive reddit post [0] from a virologist (table of contents, also linked as a 34 page pdf), referencing over 150 sources, with several sections going into the details of the genetic evidence, also interesting to read the comments.
- Here's an article [1] talking about different origin theories and the related genetic evidence, having a section I was interested in about the cleavage site and o-linked glycan, something apparently that has to develop in an animal with an immune system (this is something I haven't seen any lab-made proponents speak to yet).
- Lastly, here is an article [2], much more scientific than the Vanify Fair article, in favor of a lab connection (unfortunately, for me, this article doesn't mention the o-linked glycan, nor the genetic evidence that covid-19 may have originated hundreds of miles from Wuhan [3])
That's as far as I've gotten so far following the science. I'm hoping there will be more virologist commentary as more data comes out, perhaps something based on the full WHO report/data that I heard was released last week. I'd like to think that science will give us more definite answers eventually. It could take years.
I'm not so much interested in conjecture from politicians and journalists. I'm really taken back by all the inaccuracies, half-truth's, innuendo, and conspiracy theories floating around. Are we all led so easily by the headlines they feed us?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
[1] https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3
[2] https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
[3] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
“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.”
In fact this person does jackshit to methodologically prove that this lab was not run sloppily, just throws pedigree and “trust us we know she’s legit” crap. Let me tell you the majority of scientists anywhere should not be trusted in their ability maintain sterile techniques or keeping their lab secure. You can look at the vials that floated out of Galveston utmb in a flood, or the cdc shipping precontaminated Covid test kits because their techs didn’t use filter tips.
This is not just this PhD, it’s basically 97% of all scientists. Any statement that undermines the image that they don’t know what they are doing is taken personally with great prejudice.
The Reddit resource is great to suggest that no one deliberately engineered or even grew this virus. But it does nothing to disprove that they just leaked a sample they excavated in a cave and brought to the lab. And by combining both and collectively arguing against any malice or stupidity from these researchers they are not doing anyone a favor in trusting them. Also a real scientist would never categorically disregard a hypothesis without incontrovertible proof, which this and every other kiss-ass scientist does defending this wuhan cabal.
I’ve always said, focusing on the origins of “who was responsible” rather than dealing with containment first is counterproductive.
Such exposed dishonesty leads to more and more people completely losing faith in everything that the scientists say and turning into anti-vaccers etc.
also, terms like "anti-vaccers" don't help. just stop trying to bucket others as being stupid or outrageous. there are small but real, legitimate risks to every vaccine. that some folks can be overly self-assured and blow out those dangers for their own self-importance has no bearing on that fact. employ your rational brain to keep your emotional brain in check so you can see risks as they are, not as others want to use against you.
We can't just live in a world where my side is right and your side is evil.
The strength of the US system of government and any democracy comes from diversity of thought and opinion which is good enough and respectful enough to actually be interested in arriving at the truth.
Instead we have political process which is somewhere between a reality show, a sporting event, and a religion.
Social media was blocking posts that people wanted to read and even blocked private messages. That's privatized censorship; there's no other word for it.
I am honestly dumbfounded that people are excusing it.
And if you ever think of science as perfect, just look at the history of science. There was a time where most scientists knew for a 'fact' that certain races were objectively inferior to others. Science is always being refined, new things are being discovered, and the people doing it change. Invariably, there is some scientific knowledge that will be discredited and changed in the future.
The two are not equal, the virus could be of natural origin but leaked from a lab, that scenario is still very much possible even in the context of the Lancet statement.
Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist, then is cited as saying there is no evidence in the statement, when actually there are around 12 relevant citations in there. I guess a dozen is just not enough data for a data scientist?
The actual context of that statement also gets quite a bit embezzled with an off-hand remark about "xenophobia and climate denialism": Since the first case in the US, there had been a concentrated and very nasty effort to politicize the virus.
It was US senators and US new pundits who at first floated the claim of it being a bio weapon [0], that's what triggered said Lancet statement in the very first place. It didn't just come out of nowhere for no reason, as some people like to claim, to imply the statement itself is already evidence for a cover-up.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation#Wuhan_...
That's absolutely true, but one of the main corollary claims is also that SARS-CoV-2 may have resulted in part from gain of function research. People making that claim have said that the virus seems to be particularly effective against humans despite no intermediate forms discovered yet and that a natural virus leaking from a lab would be less likely to spread so widely. They've also cited the fact that the lab does do gain of function research on coronaviruses.
If it were true, that definitely wouldn't imply it's a bio-weapon (such research happens everywhere all the time, etc.), but it would be important to know.
But such forms were already discovered back in 2015 as a result of the research that's now labeled as "GoF research", even tho it didn't actually fall under the GoF moratorium back then [0].
Imho the whole thing has a very "shooting the messenger" vibe to it; The evidence we had for this being a very real possibility of happening is now turned into the alleged cause of it actually happening.
I think I'm having difficulty understanding what you mean. Your link is referring to an engineered SARS hybrid virus. If SARS-CoV-2 is indeed also an engineered virus or a descendant of one, then this 2015 virus wouldn't be an intermediate form; just another example of the same sort of thing.
>Imho the whole thing has a very "shooting the messenger" vibe to it; The evidence we had for this being a very real possibility of happening is now turned into the alleged cause of it actually happening.
Do you mean "gain of function-like research is what warned us this could happen"? If so, if SARS-CoV-2 is a result of that sort of research, wouldn't gain of function research be both the messenger and the source, here?
Isn't that the whole crux of the debate and dilemma in the first place? That such research can help us discover, study, and mitigate risks, and can also potentially create new risks.
It's not like researchers are "engineering a virus to do exactly what they want it to do", what they do is observe the evolution of cultures of viruses, in an environment that's conductive to it, to see where that ultimately leads.
All of that also constantly happens in nature, but in a controlled lab environment we can accelerate and observe this process, like in a simulation, to see what viruses might be capable of evolving to be dangerous to us in the long term.
Sure, an argument can be made how that's one way of how we could end up creating and releasing such a virus ourselves, but even then: Wouldn't it be preferable for that to happen in a controlled research environment, instead of it just emerging in some remote obscure place? At least then are in a way better position to understand why and how it happens, giving us an edge in fighting it.
No, I think some researchers are trying to do that. From the article you linked:
>In an article published in Nature Medicine1 on 9 November, scientists investigated a virus called SHC014, which is found in horseshoe bats in China. The researchers created a chimaeric virus, made up of a surface protein of SHC014 and the backbone of a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and to mimic human disease. The chimaera infected human airway cells — proving that the surface protein of SHC014 has the necessary structure to bind to a key receptor on the cells and to infect them.
This isn't merely observing viruses in a lab environment. It's combining parts of different viruses to create a new, more effective virus. This is gain of function research, and there's an allegation that SARS-CoV-2 may have been created in a similar way.
>Sure, an argument can be made how that's one way of how we could end up creating and releasing such a virus ourselves, but even then: Wouldn't it be preferable for that to happen in a controlled research environment, instead of it just emerging in some remote obscure place? At least then are in a way better position to understand why and how it happens, giving us an edge in fighting it.
Let's hypothetically assume SARS-CoV-2 was created through either this lab-monitoring method and/or gain of function methods. (Not saying it was or even that it's likely; just for the sake of argument.)
Would that adjust your stance towards the risks?
"Gain function" now means there's now a great way to confuse man-made and natural. I find it both a more concise scientific term, but anathema to politics.
Most of the actual science that all the articles cite are pop-sci simplifications at best. People talk about how parts from multiple viruses would be joined together etc, how base pairs are 97% identical, etc. These are all very high level summaries that don't really allow for detailed conclusions.
Now I'm not a subject matter expert myself, but from what I've learned about evolutionary genetics is that some scenarios would be pretty obvious when looking at the genome. For example, you could look at where in the genome the mutations occur.
I'd love to read an article that goes in depth on the actual scientific arguments, rather than just rehashes of rehashes like this.
Human stories about conflicts of interest, ideological takes focused on confluency with grander theories, politically factionalization and such make the better story. Hard positions make better stories than skeptical ambiguity.
That can't be helped. Most people are going to read the compelling story, so that will be what major publications print. We do need some sort of journalism that doesn't do this. Someone needs to research and investigate this without populist considerations playing a role. Not instead of what we have, in addition to.
I worked for many years in a lab, the accidental leak hypothesis was and still is what I consider the most probable. Calculate the joint probability of everything we know about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 happening and it should be obvious that the "lab leak" should be _thoroughly_ investigated before dismissing it.
We’ve never, despite years and years of trying, been able to identify an origin for Ebola. The basic reality is we don’t know anywhere near all the diseases that animals have.
China put sanctions on Australia that will and have cost their economy billions for implying that the lab leak hypothesis is plausible. Reasonable or not the Chinese government believes suppressing this theory to be a major policy goal. So I expect they’ve either spent orders of magnitude more effort than we ever spent on looking for Ebola’s origins, or they have some reason to believe they wouldn’t find anything.
This isn’t a smoking gun, but it is a dog that didn’t bark.
p(Epidemic started in Wuhan) * p(origin in market right next to lab) * p(lab is one of 3 in the world to conduct gain-of-function research on conronaviruses) * p(lab scientists were notably sick prior to outbreak) * p(no accident ever happening in a lab) * p(et cetera) = very small number.
That's not evidence per se, but it does show you how probable a human error is.
Calling the market “right next to the lab” is a bit of a stretch - it’s a three and a half hour walk.
The scientists getting sick early doesn’t actually seem to be confirmed - there’s still debate in the US intelligence community whether it’s true. And going to the hospital because you’re sick means something a bit different in China where primary care is rare.
And as for “against”... no mention of the virus not matching any backbones in use for genetic experimentation, or the suboptimal binding to humans, both of which would suggest against engineering.
Also, I never once mentioned engineering. There's a lab 280m away from the market that has one of the largest bat virus samples in the world.
I would have no problem revising my priors, but for the moment I still consider the lab leak human error hypothesis still the most reasonable explanation.
Are you going to cite sources? And then are you going to cite the other sources which have addressed both of these weak counter arguments? Some of us have done a lot of homework on this one, so you need to bring your A game.
The VF article specifically mentions that the closest known virus was 96% similar (vs 90% for SARS-CoV-1), and had actually been renamed by the scientists studying it and that fact hadn't been put forward to the community.
It can still be shown that this has a completely natural (i.e. no human error involved) origin, but the burden of proof gets higher every day. It's much more probable that human error is involved, which is something that happens every day.
The SARS-CoV-1 had a spike protein binding very efficiently to humans, but that was not the case for the other, hence the above said suboptimality.
> This argument [that SARS-CoV-2 must be natural since it doesn't use a known backbone] fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29246
Note also that the WIV's public database of viral genomes went offline in Sept 2019, and hasn't come back.
As to the binding, Andersen looked at the binding of SARS-CoV-2's RBD to human ACE2 in silico, and found that it was suboptimal. But that proves only that the RBD wasn't designed in silico using his software workflow. Among unnatural origins, it's far more likely that the RBD either evolved naturally (as Relman proposed above) in a different virus, or evolved quasi-naturally in the lab during culture in human cells or in humanized mice. Andersen's argument doesn't address these more likely possibilities.
[0]: https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-how-amateur-sleuths-broke...
All the above.
Vaccination rates are nearing immunity across the major US population centers. I can imagine "they" wanted to ensure orderly vaccinations and return to the normal economic activity before any possible disruption of the political order.
Far-fetched, I know. But if you had to have a theory, here is one.
During the election, most of the media decided to ignore anything they were afraid would help Trump or hurt Biden.
Whether an activist media is good or bad is left as an exercise for the reader.
“But Trump’s lies are cheeky and fun!
Yeah, and the establishment’s lies are cruel and tragic.”
Of course this is an overstatement; Trump’s lies were not pretty but the point is that obvious lies are significantly less damaging than well-hidden lies. It’s the skillful liars that one needs to be wary of.
Are you aware of the top cable news network, the newer smaller ones, the media holding companies that dominate local news affiliates and dictate conservative talking points through their hosts, the massively popular hard-right conservative influencers, Facebook, etc?
It’s not that the media wanted to avoid helping Trump or hurting Biden, even going so far as to withhold reporting the truth of the pandemic’s origin. But rather that the media had a higher threshold of evidence for publishing accusations of malfeasance against another nationstate than Trump did, and hadn’t met that threshold till recently.
Trump was notoriously flippant, with low or no standard for truth, or even merely diplomatic tact. His MO is not truth-finding but rather saying anything distressing to his political adversaries. He is an archetypal Internet troll with the soapbox of the US presidency.
He spent four years doing that, essentially crying wolf over and over. By the time the pandemic hit, the media was universally resistant to serving as a megaphone to amplify his trolling.
Thus they held back on this story until they could piece together and verify enough of it to meet their higher threshold of evidence. That simply took until now to do.
* A Wired article detailed how the whole basis for social distancing and masking was wrong, based on two unrelated facts that got mixed together 60 years ago: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
* Texas and Florida eliminated not just lockdowns but also all mask usage and the predicted spike in cases didn't happen.
* Fauci was caught lying to Congress about funding gain-of-function research.
* And probably the most direct trigger for this topic, Buzzfeed got and released Fauci's emails through a FoIA request just a couple days ago, which among other things revealed that he was warned about it possibly being a lab leak right at the beginning of the pandemic.
Thousands of social media accounts got banned on all the major platforms during months of suppression all because this theory didn't fit Big Tech's political agenda. Will they get unbanned? Will anyone of them apologise? No, it's business as usual for our corporate overlords. If you're on the wrong side of their agenda then you'll be cancelled even with paper thin reasoning.
Since very recently you also have a letter in the Science journal written in English, so it may help USA medias to consider the theory: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
Anyway, better late than never and this is a good story from vanity fair.
Spearheading and cosigning the statement: "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.", when you have specific career and financial interest in that statement being true, is a conflict of interest, is not scientific, and should be addressed publicly. But then privately saying “you, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.” Daszak added, “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.” displays clear intent to manipulate public opinion. Unbelievable.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/why-scientists-belie...
The one you link is about "Wuhan-Lab Coronavirus Origin Theory Is Highly Unlikely", that the science is "dubious" but doesn't seem to make any strong claims either way (but I only skimmed the article).
The one in the submission is about how conversations and debates about the "Wuhan-Lab Coronavirus Origin Theory" was silenced because many thought it was so obvious.
While the articles are about the same subject, they touch on the subject in two very different ways and are in no way contradictory.
What you are doing here is trying to add more gasoline on some fire, but that's not super helpful.
Here’s an episode of Bret’s podcast from June 2020 covering this in depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug
Edit: a word
But no one listened.
Its bewildering how blind people can be. I hope they start paying attentions and giving him credit because he is saying things today that no one in the mainstream is paying attention to... but I feel will have the exact same gravity of scandal later on.
Are these Chinese government agents? Overzealous students studying in North America? Gain-of-function grad students protecting their turf?
There were a smaller number of suspicious accounts that overzealously pushed the lab leak, possibly agents of Taiwan, but these were banned swiftly.
With the anti leak thought-policing editors, normal editors are intimidated into silence. Despite all the talk of dealing with organized manipulation around the 2020 election, the foundation hasn’t bothered intervening. Normal amateur editors don’t have the resources to push back against zealous state-actors.
This issue could pose a devastating blow to Wikipedia.
To the Editor — Since the first reports of novel pneumonia (COVID-19) in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, there has been considerable discussion on the origin of the causative virus, SARS-CoV-2 (also referred to as HCoV-19). Infections with SARS-CoV-2 are now widespread, and as of 11 March 2020, 121,564 cases have been confirmed in more than 110 countries, with 4,373 deaths.
SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans; SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 can cause severe disease, whereas HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E are associated with mild symptoms. Here we review what can be deduced about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 from comparative analysis of genomic data. We offer a perspective on the notable features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which they could have arisen. Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
"In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it."
In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (or "Who will guard the guards?")
I can't imagine being in those shoes while this unprecedented, global event unfolded with political and economic consequences on such an insane scale ...
1) If covid _did_ come out of lab - I'm emphatically not saying that I believe that it did - I have pretty high confidence in the ability of the any government to cover it up.
2) There is some class of people who will accept whatever 'evidence' of a lab leak as completely convincing for a variety of reasons (conspiracy minded thinking, anti-chinese sentiments, etc)
3) It seems impossible to strongly prove that the virus emerged naturally (we can't observe the case zero event again), _especially_ to the crowd mentioned in 2).
Given these 3 statements, it's really hard for me to see _any_ value in investigating this any further. It just seems like it'd just feed fuel to group 2), which is not something that I think would be particularly good for anyone in the long run.
I’m trying to be civil, but that’s the most conformist thing I’ve ever heard.
This is massively discrediting to the Lancet. Similar to the review of Linux patches from U of Minnesota, it would be prudent to review past publications by the scientists who published the Lancet statement.
If so, that would be a huge connection suggesting GoF and the template coronavirus SARS-Cov2 was based on
[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-w...
This is the same Michael R. Gordon who in 2002 wrote the famous NYTimes article saying US Intelligence had credible information that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (Thousands of aluminium tubes) [2] and led to the Iraq War.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-i...
It is totally within possibility that he is "writing about the information that the US intelligence offices were putting out" this time too, to make certain narrative that the US government wants.
https://www.wired.com/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-contin...
You can read more about how the intelligence community failed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Report_on_Pre-war_Intel...
For example, they thought that Iraq had restarted its nuclear weapons program, and there was nothing like that in the evidence you linked to.
https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/origins-of-covid-19-...
But it was flagged nearly immeditally. I wonder why and by whom. Do moderators here check for state sponsored bots that try to hide such stuff?
In this case the Chinese knew, in early December, they had a problem when they only had a handful of cases. HOW????
COVID presents like the flu, so there isn't a novel symptom to help them identify that something new is in play.
There wasn't a significant rise in cases or deaths. There couldn't be a significant rise in deaths because there weren't that many cases. A small cluster of flu cases escalating into pneumonia, and then death won't raise a red flag because it happens all the time. I've had multiple Chief Medial Officers tell me this.
With COVID presenting like the flu, and with so few cases the ONLY way they could know that a new virus was spreading was if they had prior knowledge. The only way they could get prior knowledge was because someone working at the lab got sick, and then people they came in contact with got sick.
If this really happened organically then it should have been spreading pretty damn fast, and because it presents like the flu it wouldn't have raised any eyebrows until either the case rates spiked or the death rates spiked. In the U.S. flu cases per year range from a low of 9.3M to a high of 45M and deaths of 12,000 up to 61,000.
I suspect that China sees the same fluctuations in yearly flu cases so localized spikes wouldn't have raised any eyebrows it wouldn't have gotten anyone's attention until hospitals started to get overwhelmed. But in early December they didn't have that many cases.
So how did they know?
Yeah, I don't see this ending well. A lab leak seems... inevitable, no?
I've read lots of comments on how major media organizations are hiding information or not covering stories to push a narrative. That the US media landscape is like China State TV. That Fauci must have been involved at a conspiratorial level. It's legit bananas and deeply concerning.
I always assume HN commentters broadly havev a scientific mindset (anything is possible - though many are unlikely, fact based, empirical evidence, probabilities) as I equated programming/computer engineering similar to scientific thinking.
However I realize through experience that many people here like to think they have a scientific thought process and in fact don't and truly harbor intense conspiracies.
There is a chance that the commenters are actually not that representative of the broader population and this story brings out the biases of people who have a conspiratorial Fauci angle.
I don't actually care much about the lab leak hypothesis. So I don't have a dog in that particular fight. I think contagion itself is a myth. See the work of Dr. Tom Cowan if you are interested. I just don't like the arrogant attitude I see on display here all the time, on so many topics. People wielding beliefs, opinions, and "scientific consensus" as if they were facts, and there is nothing left to discover about biology or wider sciences.
Guess what people, human understanding of the natural world is moved forward by those who DO NOT AGREE with scientific consensus of the day. The heretics are the interesting ones to follow, not the rest of you lot.
I'm quite frankly glad to see a bunch of you eating crow right now. You should.
Good day
If its just about getting to The Truth.
But its not.
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
While doubtful the consequences would lead to nuclear war that’s not outside the scope of possible outcomes. What’s more likely is the vast consumer public rejecting the relationship with the CCP, leading to a quicker downward spiral of relations leading to risky military situations and a lot of rich people with a stake in China trade becoming slightly less rich.
“To the heart and mind, ignorance is kind
There’s no comfort in the truth, pain is all you’ll find”
- careless whispers
There is much to be said in not cooperating in an investigation against yourself, but active measures to prevent the investigation is a step further.
Ultimately the problem will be cracked, artificial selection and natural selection can be discerned given enough time and effort.
Holyshit. We have created an atmosphere of censorship and suppression to the point where noble, well meaning people have been turned into monsters.
What in the world does that mean?!
The argument that it’d help detect risk doesn’t seem very good, we know these researchers published work on similar viruses and it doesn’t seem to have caused anything to change and increase safety.
The argument that it could contribute to vaccine research doesn’t seem to have held up either, AFAIK there’s no link between such research and the Covid-19 vaccines we now have.
I’m sure there are other arguments for the research, and I’m sure it won’t stop regardless of what people want given how the article says Obama’s moratorium was treated and the obvious military applications. But it seems that the experience of Covid-19 does drastically alter the risk/benefit calculation of that research given it seems to have had no benefit in practice.
Bullshit. It was the media which rejected this theory. How is this also Trump's fault for suggesting it? Are they also going to rewrite this part of the record?
- 4chan saw the pandemic coming in January 2020, and predicted it would be big
- 4chan knew it wasn't 'just another flu' in March 2020, when the media was downplaying it
- 4chan figured out the virus is transmitted via areosol, not just particulate
- 4chan worked out that Vitamin D can help (even Fauci admitted he takes it)
- Wuhan Lab hypothesis
That's just off the top of my head. Sure, 4chan got a lot wrong: but better to get all the (possible) facts, and sift through them. That's science. What are you going to do otherwise? Trust Fauci?
4chan isn't know for enormous deference to anyone, so the fact that "they" (collectivizing 4chan always irriates me, but whatever) got things right given the head-in-sand public attitude (*) of the administration isn't really surprising.
(*) Trump of course privately told Woodward that it was really bad.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/31/8016865...
Months after this came out, the media was proclaiming that the virus was no worse than the flu.
Retrospectively, most analyses that I've read have said that travel bans had essentially no effect, something most epidemiologists at the time were saying too. Was that covered? No. The administration said that a ban on travel from China was a good idea (it likely wasn't a bad one), and that was the end of the story, more or less.
Months after that announcement, Trump was proclaiming that the virus was no worse than the flu.
March 24th, 2020:
"We lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu. We don't turn the country off," Trump said from the Rose Garden. "And actually, this year we're having a bad flu season. But we lose thousands of people a year to the flu. We never turn the country off. We lose much more than that to automobile accidents… I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter."
It's pretty well known that trump was subsequently labeled racist for attempting that ban.
Where are you getting this idea that the media was deferential? It sounds...very far fetched, to put it nicely.
Hoping to have the country roaring back by easter 2020 didn't and doesn't strike me as evidence of someone taking COVID19 seriously.
Was it incorrect that part of Trump's motivation for the travel ban was racism (his own, or institutional)? I don't think we can really answer that question definitively at the moment, and we may never be able to. But again, this is another example of "the boy who cried wolf" syndrome. Maybe this time, his nationalistic, xenophobic language was rooted in a sincere, scientifically rooted belief about how best to protect the country. But when you've used the same kind of language throughout your administration to belittle, insult and denigrate, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that people interpret the same sort of behavior as more of the same.
The US media is almost always deferential. They lob softball questions at politicans, allow them to lie to the cameras without challenge, give outsize credibility to administration statements, and so much more. I grew up in the UK in the 60s, 70s and 80s. No US politician would survive the media climate in the UK back then.
Probably you're thinking of media actually calling Trump out on his lies, and yes, when they eventually got around to that, that was a little different. But then, he was a different sort of president, so hardly surprising.
I never read 4chan or many opinions in genral, but I knew all of those points (minus the vitamin D) on my own.
The quote of 'knew a picosecond after he heard' resonated with me, because my intuition - as a laymen - was exactly the same. The moment I heard of the wuhan institute, I basically was pretty sure what had happened. All that followed was disbelief and mild shock about my surroundings not coming to the same conclusions, or lets say suspicions and not hearing the sound of alarm bells.
I lost a lot of faith in the common sense of people through the pandemic.
what's what the internet used to be like. These days, only a few places are left that have this sort of level of community and capability.
I looked up the person (Li-Meng Yan)[1], the paper[2], and the Fox News Interview[3] where Tucker Carlson "gleefully flogged" the bioweapon theory that this article references as being part of Steve Bannon's faction of right wing cranks.
In the paper Yan describes "an unrestricted bioweapon" like so -
Although it is not easy for the public to accept SARS-CoV-2 as a bioweapon due to its relatively low lethality, this virus indeed meets the criteria of a bioweapon as described by Dr. Ruifu Yang. Aside from his appointment in the AMMS, Dr. Yang is also a key member of China’s National and Military Bioterrorism Response Consultant Group and had participated in the investigation of the Iraqi bioweapon program as a member of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1998. In 2005, Dr. Yang specified the criteria for a pathogen to qualify as a bioweapon:
1. It is significantly virulent and can cause large scale casualty.
2. It is highly contagious and transmits easily, often through respiratory routesin the form of aerosols. The most dangerous scenario would be that it allows human-to-human transmission.
3. It is relatively resistant to environmental changes, can sustain transportation, and is capable of supporting targeted release.
-------
I don't know that's the exact definition I'd give for "bioweapon" but it seems plausible, from a somewhat authoritative source, and fits covid. In other parts of the paper Yan addresses what she calls the "cover-up" of the lab origins of covid-19 and she points to elements of the cover-up that predate the outbreak and concludes "the unleashing of the virus must be a planned execution rather than accident."
On the Tucker Carlson interview the host listens to Yan's points and invites an expert on. The expert seems to basically ignore Yan's more exotic claims (i.e. that it was an intentional attack) and summarizes the situation at 3:39 as "We don't know" and gives two possible explanations as "Zoonotic transfer" or "Accidental lab release" and leans towards the latter. That seems exactly right to me.
I don't follow the "cover-up" part of Yan's argument (though I will read more about it) so I can't comment on her conclusion that it was an intentional attack. That's certainly not what other people I've read seem to think. The "bioweapon" definition seems a bit like an exaggeration or a technicality, if only because "bioweapon" conjures the idea of much more severe and lethal and viruses.
My point is that the right wing cranks actually come out looking pretty good on this topic - as far as I can tell. They immediately questioned the natural origins and advanced credible arguments for lab leak which are gaining support and evidence. I think it's wrong for this article and others to start out, and dedicate space in the opening of their argument, to try and balance things by saying, essentially, "Yes, maybe the experts were wrong here, but so were the crazy right-wing people." The people who are really and clearly wrong here are the mainstream media outlets who blindly trusted the authorities that told them this couldn't be a lab leak. Tucker Carlson talked to Yan, who may not really be a virus-expert (her degree seems to be in Ophthalmology) and may be over-zealous in her anti-China stance (e.g. concluding it was an intentional attack on what might not be very good evidence) but Tucker Carlson and his show explicitly call out the two main theories as what I believe they still are - i.e. zoonotic transfer and lab leak.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Meng_Yan
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Worse is that said broken clock embraced thoroughly xenophobic language that almost certainly led to a rise in anti-asian violence. It unfortunately made it easier for the public to discount these arguments because it was impossible to tell whether they were being made in good faith, not to mention that these arguments were often made out of a (justified) distrust of the Chinese government rather than an objective understanding of the known facts.
Yeah, it is wrong to claim it was certainly a lab leak when there is little evidence. However, it is also wrong to claim it certainly wasn't a leak for that same reason. Let's just hope the truth is found, and we learn from it.
It's hard to do, but simply being able to say "I was wrong" or "I messed up" would make the world a better place. This is actually something I've been working on.
When I'm wrong, I try to have the grace and maturity to say "I got this wrong. I got this wrong for reasons X, Y, and Z. Here is what I can do to prevent or mitigate X, Y, and Z in the future." I think an answer of that form builds credibility. People who see my mea culpa may gain confidence that I've learned my lesson and will do better in the future. If, instead, I were to say "A lot of people got this wrong. These people I hate were wrong too - kind of, I think they were wrong, they are pretty dumb. Anyway - a lot of people were wrong on this..." then that probably wouldn't inspire much confidence that I had learned my lesson. I read this article as more like the latter rather than the former.
I wish Trump had never commented on this stuff at all. I feel like what that did is take advantage of people's rage over Trump to sell them facts that they would have never otherwise bought.
Not everything is political, contrary to that foolish saying. I think politics ruins everything it touches, like Midas, except it turns everything to trash.
Today the Los Angeles Times published an article headlined "The lab-leak origin claim for COVID-19 is in the news, but it's still fact-free."
What's missing from all this reexamination and soul-searching is a fundamental fact: There is no evidence — not a smidgen — for the claim that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory in China or anywhere else, or that the China lab ever had the virus in its inventory... No one disputes that a lab leak is possible. Viruses have escaped from laboratories in the past, on occasion leading to human infection. But "zoonotic" transfers — that is, from animals to humans — are a much more common and well-documented pathway. That's why the virological community believes that it's vastly more likely that COVID-19 spilled over from an animal host to humans...
"We cannot prove that SARS-CoV-2 [the COVID-19 virus] has a natural origin and we cannot prove that its emergence was not the result of a lab leak," the lead author of the Nature paper, Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, told me by email. "However, while both scenarios are possible, they are not equally likely," Andersen said. "Precedence, data, and other evidence strongly favor natural emergence as a highly likely scientific theory for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, while the lab leak remains a speculative incomplete hypothesis with no credible evidence." Co-author Robert F. Garry of Tulane Medical School told several colleagues during a recent webcast: "Our conclusion that it didn't leak from the lab is even stronger today than it was when we wrote the paper." As the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski sums up the contest between the lab-leak and zoonotic theories, "the likelihood of the two hypotheses is nowhere near close to equal."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/column-the-lab-lea...
And Wired also ran a piece last week with a similar skeptical headline. "The Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory Is a Tale of Weaponized Uncertainty." Its subheading? "Scientists almost never say they’re sure, and it could take years to pin down the pandemic's origins. Until then: People are trying to scare you."
https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-lab-leak-theory-weaponi...
There were those who were sounding the alarm about this lab leak hypothesis well over a year ago. The overwhelming media narrative to look away from that hypothesis and smear those who talked about it was always artificially manufactured in a way that should have been obvious to most people.
But this kind of misinformation is really par for the course with the mainstream media. If you're only paying attention to ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, NYT, WaPo, etc. (and downstream from those sources) for your day-to-day news - you're in the worst manufactured media bubble in existence. Those big media companies are a locus of power that is manipulated to an incredible degree.
I'm not telling you to drink the koolaid and only watch Fox News while reading Breitbart. I'm definitely not telling you to waste your time on Alex Jones or someone like that. I'm saying to balance what you look at with other information sources with a variety of political slants. This WIV narrative is just one of many that the MSM has been pushing over the last few years. It scares me how gullible people have been on so many topics.
I know several people whose happiness is based upon whether or not the Atlanta Falcons or Braves are having a good season. It's bizarre to me, but there it is.
And again, I still don’t even know why this is more important than the task of dealing with the pandemic first. Pointing fingers directly led to a simpleton policy of blocking flights from China, which was the extent of public health measures for weeks. Cases were pouring in from italy without anyone doing quarantine follow up or contact tracing. It took months to get PPE and adequate testing in place.
Even today, as variants occur (hey, but nobody seems to care that those have origins too right?), there are literally Republicans fighting measures against public safety and calling into question the efficacy of vaccination.
If you view Fox News as one of many competing news outlets, sure, it's got a big voice. But I'd urge you to view it in terms of collective narrative. The left-leaning narrative bubble is far larger than Fox News by more than an order of magnitude. When CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, the AP, NYT, WaPo, ESPN, late-night comedy hosts, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are all driving the same narrative that it's conspiracy theory to consider the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a possible source of COVID... Fox News' mild protestations to the contrary are insignificant in terms of bandwidth into the American psyche.
Facebooks top groups are all conservative. I realize that they end up getting a lot of attention for the spread of misinformation and getting moderated into oblivion for it, but Facebook is a huge hub of conservative influence as the past two elections cycles pretty much demonstrated.
This is why I don’t hold conversations online. I had other points that weren’t worth addressing apparently and this isn’t really going to lead anywhere so good luck to you.
Big difference between the Fox News and Fox News news.
There's this general situation where yes, there is that ecosystem 1 and downstream sources OP mentioned, and there is the ecosystem 2 (Fox and downstream sources).
However, former POTUS and ecosystem 1 cycled between themselves a fair bit, ecosystem 2 and former POTUS cycle, so by proxy eco1 and eco2 are cross-linking to each other in a sense, and so on.
I'm not telling you that there is no good way to parse info sources out there, but I am telling you the "MSM vs. other" delineation that OP is calling for awareness of doesn't really exist if you study the actual information flow... which this team did.
If you want my advice, read primary sources on events that matter to you. Studies, court documents, and so on. It's what that whole confusing ecosystem uses as well, and you can get the raw data without the analysis.
- the study: https://cyber.harvard.edu/publication/2020/Mail-in-Voter-Fra...
- discussion on the study: https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-yochai-benkler-m...
In France, all the people involved in the lab construction "quit" any official functions they had before the virus. That's the legend, the doubt is quite strong.
People are just now refusing it could NOT be the lab. And are mounting into conspiracy theory etc just because not everyone rolls over the floor with their conviction.
No: the lab source is likely (suspicious communist behaviour, french handlers all disappeared, geographical proximity, thematical proximity - as in they studied these kind of virii), but not sure yet.
And I'm taking flak in my family for not jumping to the most "obvious" conclusion - probably because they live in France and I live in China hehe. I think the communists are equally able to be stupid enough to refuse any investigation, to have put military command of the lab to actually be ready to study a natural virus under military command, that they were not quite competent enough to raise the virus to that particular gain of function, and that the french handlers left their ministerial position out of precaution.
It was split in two.
1. Calling it "the china virus", as the former president was wont to do, was labelled racist/bigoted/nationalistic by those who did not simply agree with anything he said.
2. The claim that it originated in the Wuhan lab was viewed as unlikely, and there was (is) an alternative biological origin story which at the time seemed credible and more likely.
https://in.news.yahoo.com/italy-launched-hug-chinese-campaig...
And yes, such manipulation and corruption of debate is the general problem with liars being awarded leadership positions.
While the racist violence that happened was deplorable, it is entirely amusing to me that we are fine with calling it UK/Brazil/South African/Indian variant but not call it the China virus/flu.
The same publications like Guardian which did not use the term China virus/flu because it was considered racist had no problem in using Brazil/Indian variant as the names of the variant. They are still doing it even after WHO came up with different non country based names for each variants.
> The claim that it originated in the Wuhan lab was viewed as unlikely, and there was (is) an alternative biological origin story which at the time seemed credible and more likely
Wuhan lab leak being shot down so easily was the thing I found non convincing and the fact that so many journalists didn't cover it was surprising. While we might be able to ascertain that the virus is natural or man made easily, but a natural virus leaking out would seem high on the probability list to me as there is conveniently a lab at the same place where the outbreak first happened; and it was doing research on the same thing.
Not anymore. They're getting Greek letter designations now.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/01/covid-19-varia...
By the time the variants started to emerge, the virus' biological structure and mechanism was sufficiently well understood that seeking to blame any particular locale for the emergence of a variant was seen to be pointless.
About pointless as blaming China for the virus itself appeared to be at the time, even if that may no longer be the case.
My point was, the same concerns people had for not using the country name on virus were applicable for variants too. If we chose one standard for the virus, we should have kept the same for variants too, after all there are some variants which are considered more dangerous than the others.
"the virus that killed at least 3.5M people worldwide came from <COUNTRY>"
and
"as the pandemic spread globally, and as expected for almost any virus and for coronaviruses in particular, variants of the virus emerged in <COUNTRY A>, <COUNTRY B> and <COUNTRY C>"
?
"Covid-19 variant wreaking havoc and causing severe hospitalisations and has killed 3.5M people came from #{COUNTRY_A}"
The same carefully worded statement like yours for the variant one can also be used for the first outbreak country's name. It is the usage that is the issue not the term itself. My point still is, if someone saw downfalls of using the country name in one situation, they should have seen it in the other as well. At least WHO did, that's why they came up with the new names.
the origin of the pandemic was made a central point of contention by trump. it appeared very important to him, based on his own language, that we identify china as the place where the virus first infected people, and for a while, as the place where authorities had failed to control its spread.
while i see downfalls in terms like "the india variant", they seem small because they generally do not have connotations of blame. by contrast "the chinus virus" term was entirely about blame (and also about deflection from the failure to manage the pandemic effectively).
Better descriptors could be: "Covid-19 ... wreaking havoc... came from laboratory with poor hygiene practices and safety measures."
"Child was murdered by insane person."
These titles stick to the point rather than trying to bias public opinion, and associate the bad thing with what the actual underlying cause was.
Why do you think the latter is more "to the point" than the former?
It's the WAY Trump et al said it + their political motivations & bias. Context is very important.
"ChiNe A", almost the verbal version of slanting your eyes with your fingers.
And the more obvious 'kung flu.'
For what it's worth I've read that there has been attempts to reframe virus names from using state names as to not cast blame (though 'blame' is muddled in this case if it was leaked or worse GOF->leak).
"Spanish Flu" for instance likely didn't even originate in Spain
Fair point on the media, since variants do have actual scientific names. But I don't think the context there is the same. But they should be using consistent scientific names imho we knew H1N1 we can do that again.
Why is this amusing? In N.A. there is currently (and pre-dating Covid-19) substantive differences in xenophobic response to China/Russia vs. the other countries mentioned. The former are the go to political boogiemen whereas the latter are either allies or patronizingly viewed.
> "The pandemic is conventionally marked as having begun on 4 March 1918 with the recording of the case of Albert Gitchell, an army cook at Camp Funston in Kansas, United States"
I'm surprised you didn't get this memo by now, but Spain gained that ignominy only by being the sole country to not apply censorship regarding the topic at the time ("Land of the Free" included).
It's utter nonsensical bullshit like this that made us collectively move away from naming diseases after countries.
It was practice. Past tense. The WHO changed that practice in 2015 [1]. In fact they explicitly list Spanish Flu as an example of why that practice was flawed.
"Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations (e.g. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish Flu, Rift Valley fever), people’s names (e.g. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Chagas disease), species of animal or food (e.g. swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox), cultural, population, industry or occupational references (e.g. legionnaires), and terms that incite undue fear (e.g. unknown, fatal, epidemic)."
[1]: https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-pra...
Media, governments, and scientists should take a stronger stand now, or they will not protect amateurs against the full wrath of more unsavory elements of hostile state actors.
How? I barely have enough time to do my day job. You think I have the time or expertise to research the origins of a virus?
Where does it end? Do I grow my own food? Make my own clothes? Build my own car after mining ore, smelting it and doing a million other things?
Trust the experts if you've no time for more, but this is the likely result.
Put time into your own research, and maybe you won't be caught off guard.
Why? What guarantees are there that I'll do a better job of research than the experts?
The "experts" rarely have a unanimous consensus on anything. If you actually listen to all of the experts, you'll hear all of the possibilities. But that still won't tell you who's right and who isn't.
On a question like "lab leak or meat market?" the answer isn't of importance to me, or any other average person. It's important for the experts to know the truth, in order to be able to prevent it next time. But other than that, finding someone (or several someones) to pin it on isn't going to give everyone the past 15 months of their lives back.
Why are you assuming my beliefs on this topic were set in stone previously?
As we all know, media often gets thing wrong, as nobody are arbiters of Truth. So one reads it like that.
When president turned traitor, that was more damaging than this virus itself.
I'm not going to ban you because it doesn't seem like this happened before, but we ban accounts that do this kind of thing, so please don't do it again.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. There's far too much content here for us to read it all, or even see it all. People can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
When you're not the product, you'll get more truth.
(The most important takeaway is to ignore Twitter - not "social media", but specifically Twitter).
At some point, you have to trust someone or some institution or organization or system.
My point is that maybe you shouldn't stick your oar in in that case. The polarisation was exacerbated by a lot of non-experts who not just trusted the WHO (reasonable in itself) but felt the need to pile on anyone who was questioning them.
There is something distinctly missing from education even through undergraduate degrees: gathering, evaluating, and criticizing conflicting high quality research.
I took a philosophy class in the spring and one of the most striking things about it wasn't the material but the other students (most of whom a decade or more my junior) reactions to the material. A few of them were openly upset at the disagreement and inconsistency of philosophical opinion on every topic discussed; I didn't really understand it at first but then... What seems to have happened is basically for their entire education up to their senior years in undergrad, these people had only really ever been taught the Truth as though everything presented to them were solid facts and as a corollary, in general things should just be known and true or not.
There is a really big gap there. Sure, there are plenty of things which are quite certain, but people need to be driven to realize the truth doesn't just pop out one day, it is arrived at through a long process of disagreement and development and there are few ideas out there which weren't in their time quite controversial, and there is plenty still which is being presented as True which really has quite a bit of room for doubt.
Right, it's Trump's fault that the media and political opposition acted like children in opposing every word that came out of his mouth.
Apply that logic to your favorite left-leaning politician:
"The fact that Obama was always a natural born citizen would have been accepted by some Conservatives who thought he was born in Kenya, but the fact that Obama denied the claims that he was foreign-born made things worse."
When you're wrong, you're wrong. Try to own up to it without blaming the people who were actually right.
There was never a need to rely on Trump. This was a pandemic. Basic journalistic curiosity and integrity should have meant that our "free" press should have been all over figuring out how COVID-19 came to be. Instead, they played politics with information that they could have easily looked into.
In 2020?!? By then, "acting like children" would have been not to doubt every single word from Über-liar Trump.
The lab leak theory is popular because of politics and ignoring the down sides of potential error. The lab leak theory posits that natural disasters such as have happened throughout history no longer happen because all events are shaped by the hands of man. The lab leak theory is based on the idea that establishing guilt brings justice. The lab leak theory is based on a generalized loathing of China. The lab leak theory ignores the history of ongoing transfers of animal viruses to man in favor of the view that it is different this time. Garbage in results in garbage out and the lab leak theory assumes that an incorrect idea will result in correct political action.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy here is that people are appealing to ideas about justice by saying this was a forbidden struggle that is a big fight, yet ignoring the most important realities of justice. If you really want justice then you need a coherent statement of the offense, there should be a fair hearing with representatives of all sides, there should be impartial review whether that be trained judges or a selected jury of peers or whatever else, and so on. We know what justice looks like and any serious introspection will show that this shrill advocacy of the lab leak theory is just more social media garbage like q anon and the rest. If you want justice then you will have to submit to the kind of impartiality that brings justice, but that isn't what we are talking about here.
I'd add that, while China is ready to help and take part in the global fight against the covid, a finger-pointing shaming war against them would probably (as it already did several times) trigger the very Asian reaction of counter-fighting to not lose face, and stopping any constructive cooperation.
This is laid out clearly in Wade's article below, and saying it's political is not based on data or science.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
Note the grant specifying the research here, with the chief author of the Lancet letter as recipient.
https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
It was ridiculed because a Republican Senator popularized it, not because of evidence.
The way you know it had nothing to do with the evidence or lack thereof is that people who respond based on evidence don't usually respond with ridicule, and people who respond based on tribal affiliation usually do.
There were definitely some people saying "this is possible, but on balance unlikely given what we know today", but for the most part words like "crackpot" and "incompetent" and even "racist" were used instead. That's not what arguing from a place of facts sounds like.
Cool. Since China is the source of this virus, can they take the lead here? I'll wait.
And what exactly is China expected to do in any case? Apologize? Pay in the way fining Germany for WWI led to WWII?
You are full of moral rage, yet still have essentially zero scientific support. Are you sure that is okay?
China, and every other country, should move such labs away from major population centers.
From the article:
> Then, in February, a research paper coauthored by two Chinese scientists, based at separate Wuhan universities, appeared online as a preprint. It tackled a fundamental question: How did a novel bat coronavirus get to a major metropolis of 11 million people in central China, in the dead of winter when most bats were hibernating, and turn a market where bats weren’t sold into the epicenter of an outbreak?
> The paper offered an answer: “We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus.” The first was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which sat just 280 meters from the Huanan market and had been known to collect hundreds of bat samples. The second, the researchers wrote, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
> The paper came to a staggeringly blunt conclusion about COVID-19: “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.... Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.”
Key part: "Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places" Isn't this common sense? I feel that those claiming there is nothing that could be done with information pointing to a lab leak, as you seem to be doing, are being incredibly disingenuous. If the virus escaped from a lab, strengthening lab regulations is the obvious response that you seem to be pretending doesn't exist.
re limits - I got banned from the covid19 reddit for mentioning it and was unable to write about in on Wikipedia, this in Feb 2020, pre Trump
re evidence - there were no bats anywhere near Wuhan and Daszak's gain of function funding and interview were public before the breakout but unmentionable
How is the above that the nearest viruses to the breakout were in a lab politics?
And while people like me being unable to write on Wikipedia etc may seem silly bear in mind 10m people died from this thing and several of those million may not have done if the data was not censored.
Trump was the boy.
Everybody knows how that story ended, but as a reminder:
"This tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his flock. When a wolf actually does appear, the villagers do not believe the boy's cries for help, and the flock is destroyed. The moral of the story is that liars will not be rewarded; even if they tell the truth, no one believes them. "
There's a cost to lying. Sometimes it's your own flock. Sometime's its everybody's flock. Maybe Trump was right, maybe he wasn't. The boy was right about the wolf, eventually, too. The moral remains the same.
How long was it between the writing of the Pentagon papers and their release? How long did the Catholic sex abuse situation take to be fully reported?
It's been a bit more than a year since the virus turned into a global pandemic. I'm willing to grant journalists a bit more leeway in the timeline for serious investigative journalism, particularly when the central locate is a somewhat secretive Chinese lab in an area that was completely locked down for months as the pandemic started.
You gotta remember they had time to "debunk" this theory. So apparently they had time to do something, except critical thinking.
This is in fact how the media has always behaved. It did this about more or less every major event in US history. Only when the tide has turned sufficiently within the culture as a whole does the media as a whole manage to embrace non-status-quo positions. There are always outliers, visible/audible from the start, who tell contrary stories, just as there have been for COVID19.
> "After the interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”"
There were many people in bioscience, virology, etc. who said it was possible and should not be discounted, but those people were hounded and shut up.
Twitter and FB had policies against it and even now, today Twitter suspended the account for the Fauci email leaker(s). So much for open discussion.
Several media organizations (washington post, buzzfeed) submitted FOIA requests for the emails, and as per federal law, they were released. No leak, normal federal government policy process, driven by mainstream-y media outlets AFAICT.
Twitter has not banned discussion of the theory. Here's a thread from May 27th (Nate Silver) discussing it in some detail:
https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1397869883585708034
Here's Ryan Delk from May 23rd saying it even more clearly:
https://twitter.com/delk/status/1396583148524212226
They did have policies related to the lab leak theory, but it seems like a mischaracterization to say that the banned discussion of it.
The only person I can find who has lost their account over related matters is a NY Times reporter who closed her own account after making some fairly dumb remarks about the theory.
The goal posts will move on this, I guarantee it. Suddenly institutional media will claim they've been working on this story the entire time, and all of their pronouncements cajoling people into not thinking about this explanation will be completely memory-holed. I'm not being hostile to you, I'm expressing frustration here because this really does call into question nearly all of the reporting on the broader Pandemic response when we're just fully admitting here that they did this "because Trump". What other stories did they fuck up on "because Trump"?
Go back and look at the reporting on every major environmental disaster of the last 70 years, from DDT to oil tanker spills to lead in gasoline to anthropogenic climate change: same pattern. Trump had nothing do with any of them either.
Hint: the media is pro-status quo. On every story, there are a few outliers who provide contrarian accounts, while the majority take a don't rock the boat (much) approach. Eventually, evidence accumulates, the culture shifts, the media changes direction.
It's not, for once, about Trump.
Whom is that a lesson for?
If I had to pick a "moral" of that fable, it's to never let your guard down, no matter what.
Sure, you can make the case for always ignoring past lies, and always evaluating every claim based on current evidence. The reason the story exists is to try to illustrate how most humans actually behave, despite there being a preferable response.
In addition, the evidence for the lab leak theory wasn't strong back when Trump became the mouthpiece for it. There wasn't much of a reason, even if you evaluated the current evidence for what could be another one of his thousands of documented lies, to take it particularly seriously.
That situation might be changing now, and we are seeing that in the media and culture right now, as we respond to new evidence, or more specifically, lack of other expected evidence.
Trump seems to occupy a super position in the brains of media types in this country. He is a idiotic buffoon who no one should take seriously and yet he somehow magically and constantly influences behavior that is directly related to their job.