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Comment by tmp404 | Hacker News Reader

While this article is quite illuminating on the political side of the lab leak theory, on the evidence side it's mostly a rehash of some long-standing speculations.

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.

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I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse towards assuming that the lab leak theory must be true. It's not so much the theory itself that's surprising. Lab leak remains plausible but less probable then natural origins.

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.

So you’re saying because there’s no new evidence the new furor is not worth it? It was clear for some of us from the beginning that the evidence is damning enough from the beginning.

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.

What makes you think it's less probable than natural origins? The wet market has probably been there for 1,000 years and this hasn't happened. Compared to the virus appearing in one of 3 labs in the world that would be studying it.

Well, we know for a fact that a >96% similar virus was found to infect the miners naturally in 2006… how hard is it to imagine a few more tweaks since then?

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?

No, there is no public evidence that the miners were infected by the virus. The common story is the WIV sent people there to check if it was a virus. From there it diverges to the WIV saying "turns out it was a fungus" and then an obscure masters thesis about the cases that just assumes it was a virus.

The Wuhan wet market episode, in retrospect, was almost certainly a superspreading event rather than a patient zero situation. The virus's effects are so variable from person to person (lots of asymptomatic carriers, people who just get a little cold, symptoms undistinguishable from the flu) that it was almost certainly already circulating in Wuhan unnoticed, until it became big enough to be hard not to notice.

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.

Maybe the Biden administration has concluded that it's possible there may have been a lab leak. It would be damaging to them if they did nothing and ended up unable to conclusively prove there was no lab leak, because Trump has been banging on that drum for a long time now.

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.

And when I say "find the truth", I'm not taking a stance on what that is. I personally don't rate the lab leak theory very highly, but then I don't know enough to say one way or the other.

Natural origin and lab leak are in no way exclusive. The lab was collecting viruses and creating new ones - either one could have leaked.

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.

There are two possibilities for lab leak:

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.

Re 2.

The wet market was likely the first superspreader event but the patient zero (from what we know today) had no connection to it.

Why is a lab leak a likely scenario? You say that with no evidence to back up the claim. I say a lab leak is highly unlikely.

Consider the priors. There's one lab of that type doing that kind of work in China. What is the likelihood that an epidemic emerging in China next to that one lab while not being from the lab?

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.

>Consider the priors.

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.

But SARS has leaked from these labs before. Obviously we already knew about SARS-CoV-1 when it leaked, but this could be one of those situations where the virus leaked from the lab as its first exposure to humans.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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".

There was censorship in the form of calling the hypothesis of a lab leak (distinct from the hypothesis of an engineered virus) a debunked conspiracy theory. The fact that the theory is considered acceptable again is what people are claiming vindication for, and rightly so.

Someone telling you that your theory is wrong isn't censorship dude.

Saying that a theory is wrong is different from saying it's a conspiracy theory.

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.

People can be censored but wrong, however, that doesn't mean the censorship policy was good. Censorship distorts your information market and makes getting to the truth harder. Sure, only the general public might be being censored but that makes said public (and the news media) associate taking the censored hypothesis seriously with craziness and evil. Which makes it substantially harder for university scientists (and to an extent, government ones) to research (this can take the form of cancellations, like Steve Hsu, lack of funding or just reputational damage)

The furor about the lab leak theory isn't solely due to the 3 hospitalized workers, but also due to a well-sourced article [0] written by a editor of the Science section of the New York Times (as well as for Science and Nature), Nicholas Wade. Those two broke on the same day. Papers hadn't been covering the theory in depth since last summer.

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...

But isn't it true that furin cleavage adaptation is also found naturally in other betacoronaviruses?

It would seem to me that shows it's not the "smoking gun" many people believe it to be.

You're misreading the context. The furor comes from the fact that the lab leak hypothesis (distinct from the engineered virus hypothesis) was dismissed by fact checkers as a debunked conspiracy theory for a year based on nothing but assurances from the few scientists they interviewed.

This is just one example I could find quickly, but there are many more... https://twitter.com/JoePCunningham/status/139718591836522496...

The fact checkers were definitely too eager to mark this as debunked, but it still lacks real evidence. No fact checker would mark this theory as true even now.

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.

So are we to believe that, out of 200 million square miles on this planet, this novel bat-related coronavirus just naturally emerged within 8 miles of a facility that specializes in novel bat related coronaviruses?

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.

> So are we to believe that, out of 200 million square miles on this planet, this novel bat-related coronavirus just naturally emerged within 8 miles of a facility that specializes in novel bat related coronaviruses?

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?

We’ve been searching for intermediate animal species for 15 months and none have been found (SARS and MERS were found quickly), SARS-Cov-2 is actually quite bad at infecting bats, and the key thing: arginine-based (i.e DNA amino acid, not RNA) furin cleavage site on the spike protein (widely regarded in the GoF research as a great way to increase human infectivity).

To say nothing of the incredible coincidence of the WIV.

>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?

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".

Well hey now, I think people are too quick to call gas light these days, such that the term is losing some of its meaning, seriousness, or utility. The people you're talking to (at least in this thread) are stating their own beliefs with their own evidence. No one (that I can see) has directly attacked your self confidence (unless you're extremely sensitive) or attempted to convince you that you're in a different reality to exert control over your personal self expression, esteem, or confidence. Gas lighting implies direct personal attacks and what I see here is thoughtful interesting, but serious debate. I would say that you saying you're being gas lit here is strong indication you truly do not understand what that term is.

If the math were that easy, we wouldn't be discussing it.

The first SARS outbreak happened in Guangzhou which has a BSL-3 lab, yet all evidence points to zoonotic transfer.

And in this case, there's basically zero evidence of zoonotic transfer aside from "China said so." So it's different.

Not disagreeing with you, only giving a counter-example to parent's simple math argument.

> but it still lacks real evidence

Well any evidence is probably long gone and cleaned up and swept under the rug now.

Twitter makes very poor references for fact checks

It’s how imperialist propaganda works. When material interests shift, suddenly and with one voice all “independent” western media pushes the same unsourced narrative.

If you remember the lead-up to the Iraq was, it was the same surreal experience.

> I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse

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 have a furin cleavage site using arginine?

Which other coronaviruses even have arginine in their proteome?

Why would coronaviruses not have arginine?

Sorry, I was being hasty (replying in too many locations to produce a good and thoughtful response -- instead I produced a factually incorrect one)

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.

It's like everyone has forgotten or never even knew the context of the original strong pushback. It wasn't against the possibility of a lab leak, it was against the rhetoric (lies) coming out of our own Whitehouse trying shift blame to China. Lies that were dangerously feeding anti-asian sentiment in the USA.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

Oh please. Your one article doesn't change the fact that even mentioning the lab leak theory got you labeled a right-wing conspiracy nut and in some cases banned from social media.

No, folks who claimed the virus was bio-engineered were thought to be nuts. Those who claimed it came from the lab were asked to provide evidence.

You didn't read the article. Any medical professional who seriously considered the lab leak was ostracized.

I can't believe you're putting me in a position to have to even slightly defend Trump. You are giving Trump supporting whack jobs credibility when you give deference to this sort of revisionism.

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.

Fuller video of what lead of to those questions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3BRQ7scbqc . Trump was already starting to spread the FUD about the virus situation being China's "fault" and strongly insinuating it was somehow malicious.

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.

Great, I don't have to do any Trump apologetics now. But while you were busy adjudicating what Trump did or didn't say, you forgot about what CNN was doing in its article - the most important part (and CNN isn't the only one who did this). They created an association of the WIV lab leak theory with Trump, suggested he was in disagreement with the intelligence community, and wrapped that up with denials of the lab leak theory.

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.

Well look, I didn't bring up Trump. I just said the WH because there were a lot of people within the admin and in their circles who were trying to offer up China as the "enemy" in the COVID situation with a bunch of BS supposedly backed by secret evidence that has yet to be seen in order to deflect blame for the situation in the USA away from.. Areas they didn't want the blame to fall. Probably related to the 2020 run-up.

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

> 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.

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

I think in articles like this there are verifiable claims about facts, and reasonable speculations that have mostly been circling for a while now. These are of course worth considering.

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.

Thanks for that context. I had thought the hospital care was more significant as flu hospitalization is rare in working age people.

But medical visits are common so that is quite different.

What’s really missing in the analysis is the base rate of WIV workers visiting the hospital with cold symptoms. I’ve heard plausible explanations for why it might be pedestrian or why it might be exceptional, but it’s all meaningless without the base rate.

> First, most common symptoms of COVID are indistinguishable from common cold.

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).

Also, mid winter/flu season

I believe you are correct based on my research and having had COVID.

Doesn't take really detract from the points though.

It would be interesting to know how many scientists there are and how often they are admitted to the hospital. Then you could say how likely or unlikely the event was. Obviously there would be other factors like season, etc. But maybe this is a big outlier. We can't say without more numbers.

I’ve also been curious what hospital these scientists went to. You would think that they might have some sort of self contained medical unit for when any researchers at these types of facilities get sick. Just to make absolutely sure they aren’t sick with something particularly dangerous that they picked up at work.

I used to work in and around BSL 2 and 3 labs. A leak was highly unlikely. I was way more concerned about catching something where the animals were kept.

Maybe you didn't read the full article? There's a lot more supportive of the lab leak theory than the three researchers getting sick.

Do you know anyone who's gone to hospital for a common cold? I never have nor can I recall anyone I know or anyone I've heard of. I'll give you that flu is a possibility.

My recurring shower thought at the moment is that there will eventually be strong evidence of a natural origin and this whole debacle will be rubbed in the faces of people who dared challenge the medical/media industrial complex and its infinite wisdom. Let's be clear: there's no strong evidence either way.

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.

The fact the most ancestral strains of active Covid-19 virus we know of are from outside Guandong, some hundreds of kilometers away from Wuhan, is pretty strong evidence the epidemic didn't originate from the WIV though?

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