Scientist finds early virus sequences that had been mysteriously deleted
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm not even talking about the truth of it. Instead the way the discussion has occurred and changed over time. In the earliest days it seemed implausible but possible, to suddenly fringe and impossible, then recently to something that _could_ occur.
At some point there was this weird, almost intentional, conflation of the idea the virus could have escaped in some way related to the labs in Wuhan with some sort of nationalist, uneducated caricature blaming the Chinese.
Worse still is the weird apologia, or cope, around the topic in these threads. People recognize the political reality, and it's easy to get distracted in threads tossing links around. But we still see weird arguments like:
- Oh there _was_ nothing wrong with it, but /most/ people were using it to be xenophobic or racist (QED).
- There was never anything really against the idea, but instead new evidence came out!
- Some flunky 'Bayesian' argument clearly proving one way or the other.
There's probably merit to each point above, but is that really satisfactory in light of how discourse was shaped? It actually feel likes gas-lighting. I don't track every comment, every article, and every casual conversation I have. But it has changed, the media has softened, the hostile atmosphere of the last four years is dissipating.
Before anyone starts screaming for sources - this is just some free-form thoughts on the subject. I'm a regular Joe. My contribution to this topic is hoping someone more qualified is able to look deeply enough into it. I'm also terminally online, and have read several hundred comments every day over this pandemic, and observed general trends.
its not a wonder why we cant have rational discussion when theres a constant reverberating noise of irrational conspiracy theories.
anyone who really considers the global propaganda should understand by now thst this is intentionsl. degrade scientific rationality, democracy and good governance by pumping FUD into any critical corner.
It’s 2021, we have the Internet and yet the masses were still as easily manipulated as the people in the 60’s who only had the TV and newspapers.
You listen them argue with polarized and surprisingly well defined opinions, like they're reciting some script they're supposed to follow to defend their faction of choice. You change social circle, like go from friends to family, to find the very same discussions with the same factions and the same detailed, almost scripted arguments.
Meanwhile you keep wondering why they even care, and why they're so passionate about it, it's like they're under some kind of spell which for some reason didn't work on you.
> It’s 2021, we have the Internet and yet the masses were still as easily manipulated as the people in the 60’s who only had the TV and newspapers
I really don't know why you're assuming that the average person is capable of doing sufficiently qualitative research with Google to be better than a epidemiologist at fighting a pandemic.
On the contrary, the internet makes it so that anyone can say anything they want. YouTube video saying the lizard people gave the virus? A epidemiologist-union.org website or a Facebook post claiming the same? How can you expect people without good web skill, without prior knowledge, without academic rigor to be able to filter out what is real and what is not?
The best advice is listen to the fucking experts, locally and globally, think about it, compare with reputable online sources. If in doubt, doubt, discuss, search more information. But don't go against official public health guidance unless there are many officially qualified experts confirming your doubts. And even that kind of rough advice is too hard to follow for a person barely capable of Office and Facebook.
The “experts” have been exposed lying, and carrying out their own political agendas many times throughout this pandemic. The appeal to authority is a logical fallacy in the first place, and “expert” credibility is (rightly) at an all time low. It’s now almost entirely evaluated politically, rather than on any criteria of trustworthiness.
I would suggest the best advice is to treat everything you hear/read with a healthy dose of skepticism, especially in regards to people who rely heavily on their credentials to deflect criticism.
This is the biggest problem that social media has brought us. Everyone is under scrutiny, afraid of the mob, afraid of losing their job. Too many experts go along with the dogma-de-jour. And then, like we're all idiots or something, they just "flip" and say the opposite, thinking we won't notice, because scrolling back 3 months on Twitter is hard.
Another problem is that politicians are just fundamentally bad at risk management. I’m sure we’ve all worked with those types of politicians at least once. They never want to try anything, because the risk it will fail is unacceptable, and the most important part of solving any problem is finding somebody else to blame. Politicians in public office are the worst at this. I used to live in a place where road deaths where a big cause for public concern, and I watched somebody get elected to office on the platform of reducing road deaths to 0. Now, anybody with any experience in risk management would know that attempting to reduce the likelihood of any risk to 0 is not only a bad idea, but is just simply impossible. The goal of risk management is to reduce the likelihood and impact of risks to an acceptable level, but a politician can’t stand in front of a news camera and say “an acceptable number of people died on our roads this year”.
I think even if you left the risk assessment portion of pandemic management entirely to the “experts”, it’s this deeply flawed style of politically managing these risks that has been biggest source of controversy. To start making risk management decisions on behalf of other people, it is necessary to curtail their liberty, and regardless of how medically unqualified the general population is, they can plainly see that a lot of the policy decisions around the pandemic have been very politically influenced.
That will depend on a per country basis. In the ones i followed there were no lies, only revisions in guidance based on better knowledge of the situation.
> The appeal to authority is a logical fallacy in the first place, and “expert” credibility is (rightly) at an all time low.
Yes, and that's how we got shit like Trump and Brexit, because people are "sick of experts" and decide to yolo it for the guy screaming the loudest. Guess what, that doesn't work, and you're much better off listening to experts, and evaluating what they're saying, rather than ignoring them and going with the village idiot. Experts can lie, be frauds, have conflicts of interest, etc. but their reputation and credibility are paramount. Which politicians or talk show hosts, because that's apparently who people take their pandemic guidance on, are credible?
> I would suggest the best advice is to treat everything you hear/read with a healthy dose of skepticism, especially in regards to people who rely heavily on their credentials to deflect criticism
And by having everyone doubt everything, you end up with people believing in Q shit in Germany. Skepticism is critical, but too much of it just creates chaos.
Money and PR have eroded away the societal trust into science. Tobacco is harmless. Sugar is healthy. Social science topped it off, when it declared that he who yells loudest, is always the one owning the truth, which is relative and just a display of power.
Little, big lies, that now have eaten their way into the core of the whole institution, from the point of view of the common men. No solutions for the big problems (energy/environment protection), but lots of small problems, while flooding the world with un-replicatable drivel. And getting demeaning and insulting does not repair the damage.
So instead I rely on various secondary and tertiary sources to help me make sense of the world, which opens up the possibility that my sources are wrong or even manipulative. But how would I ever know? I'm not an expert.
No you don't? Probably most countries have health ministries which lead the fight against the pandemic, usually via some proxy ( like head epidemiologist, or a person appointed specifically for that task). The guidance they and the WHO gave is the expert guidance, and at least the latter was given in a very digestible format for the general public.
Or consider the controversies over drugs used to fight COVID-19. People advocating their use were physicians -- that makes them experts relative to me. Then other physicians said no, they don't work and are dangerous. They are also experts. Who am I to believe?
This problem goes beyond the pandemic. Doctors of medicine use jargon derived from Greek and Latin both for historic reasons and with the purpose of creating an air of authority. But when someone comes along and usurps that language, it sounds to an uneducated ear like the real thing. That's how we end up with people drinking special water to alter blood pH to prevent cancer. Absurd? Maybe. But if you have letters after your name and I don't, how can I know?
And I do think the culture war is basically to blame here. The lab leak proponents dialed up their rhetoric to 11, early on, without evidence. And the agenda (it can't be described as a "hidden" agenda) includes anti-China posturing as well as a strong undercurrent of undermining the credibility of science and scientists.
I empathize with people in the science community wanting to push back, but Daszak probably crossed ethical lines by covertly organizing the Lancet letter and by not declaring conflicts of interest (he's revised his CoI disclosures, which might be taken as an admission of getting them wrong earlier). It's also legitimate to question whether the science community is too trusting of Chinese scientists.
I do strongly support a real investigation, and am cautiously optimistic we can come to understand the origins. But the actual science story is pretty boring ("we still don't know") compared with all the intrigue. And public discussion is basically worthless, 99% of what's said is trivially derived from "where do you get your propaganda."
I don't have answers to any of this, but appreciate you bringing it up in this way.
Does anyone thinks this is a wrong way to look at things? I haven’t read it, but if it’s just a hypothesis / fact finding document, there is no accusation.
Seems odd we have to tiptoe around this “or else” argument according to Koopmans.
The weight of that argument really went down (discredited it if you ask me) in light of the other accusations a former US president made before, during, and after his term. But he did highlight this effect really well:
> And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.
Just because there's no intention of accusing China doesn't mean China wouldn't take it as an accusation.
since US knows China may take it as an accusation, it feels there is no way to avoid accusing China therefore does it anyway. There are tons of interesting theories and stories around the endless chain of suspicion. I'd say Trump administration did a great job at destroying all mutual trust between the two. Now both sides have to take the worst intention of the other side for granted.
> However, the current study suggests that at least in one case, the trusting structures of science have been abused to obscure sequences relevant to the early spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan.
This is unambiguously an accusation that the Chinese authors acted nefariously.
It'll be mildly interesting to see Blooms reaction to the stated reason they were removed "[because] the sequence information had been updated, was being submitted to another database, and [the owners] wanted the data removed from SRA to avoid version control issues". Though at a guess he'll just not comment, since waiting for a reply from the NIH about why the data was deleted wasn't important enough to delay spreading his preprint.
https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1407445641609957380?s=...
"Fortunately, Sequence Read Archive has rigorous data tracking enabling them to determine when data deleted & stated justification by authors. In fact, @NIHDirector @NCBI have already determined this & generously shared info w me, but will let them share more widely."
> Minimally, it should be immediately possible for the NIH to determine the date and purported reason for deletion of the data set analyzed here
and then he goes on to say the thing about the trust of the NIH being abused.
The tweets and the preprint are from the same day, so it appears he indeed mostly just ignores the fact there is a know and plausible reason for the data being taken down.
No. The media reporting on those proponents' theories dialed it to 11 to get clickbait titles for their articles.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
"Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone"
One of the authors of this paper is mentioned in the article, he's walked back his stance a bit.
There appears to have been several years when the then-president of the US frequently made statements which were "dialled up to 11".
Much of the media covering this period dialled their coverage, responses and rebuttals up to 11.
Once that behaviour gets entrenched, doesn't it reach a point where it's almost impossible to have a normal exchange?
The lab leak people did have evidence: the fact that the virus emerged right next to a lab doing experiments on coronaviruses. The people claiming it couldn't have escaped from the lab were the ones without any evidence. Their claims were basically "it wasn't from the lab trust us we're scientists".
The "anti China posturing" you say existed could also be described in other ways but if someone believes China allowed a deadly virus to escape from a lab and then covered it up, it's hard for that position to not be anti China in some way.
As for "a strong undercurrent of undermining scientists", as you admit, it turned out later that they had been dishonest so the people trying to undermine them were in fact doing the right thing.
It feels like you're trying to retroactively justify a dismissal of these claims by arguing that because their conclusions didn't fit with your notion of what good people think you were right to dismiss it. But that's not how argumentation is meant to work.
You are way way underselling it. There's a ton of stuff we knew a year ago that were called conspiracy theories until a month or so ago, until suddenly the media is pretending they're both credible and were only just discovered.
haha this is true of most topics.
and the establishment is very easy to manipulate with the R word
There is a great book by Kissinger about China that explains a way of thinking Chinese rulers have. That was stroked me most was a chapter about early conflict between US and China (in Mao times). US were trying to frighten Chinese rulers with nuclear weapon, but Chinese answer was that even if US strike them that way and kill 300 million people, there is still 700 millions alive.
If you look on Covid from that perspective, the mess in some lab in Wuhan sounds very plausible. For Europe/US it is a big problem, for China it is a big opportunity.
In Europe/US there is a lot of regulation concerning research (ethical, security) that just don't exist in China. We don't know what they do in terms of genetic modifications, cloning, bacteriology, etc. The fun fact is that western companies are eagerly investing in such research in China as they are cheaper and they don't need to care about boring stuff like ethics.
We should be scared.
BTW. I don't believe that story - Kissinger was a lot of things but he and Nixon were not in the 50 Hitlers league.
Something else: should we be more scared of countries with a confirmed history of genocide and using weapons of mass destruction against cities, or China.
To be fair, China is also doing their own genocide against the Uyghurs.
That is just how it is done in that corner of the world. Fight for your Motherland until the last man standing, and individual lives have no value. USSR lost 30M in WWII so that remaining 170M saw the Victory Day. Stalingrad was basically a meat grinder.
Smaller Eastern European countries had even more appalling losses, not because of their disregard for human life, but because of their enemies' appetite for murder.
Stalingrad was a worthwhile strategic objective, if I'm not mistaken. Keeping the Wehrmacht engaged also gave the Soviets an opportunity to stage the massive pincer that broke the Wehrmacht's back and damn near knocked its allies out of the war
An American is on a steamship with a Chinese steward. The news reports the Japanese had lost 25 soldiers that day and the Chinese 250. The next day it's worse, the Japanese lost 35 men and the Chinese 500. On the third day, the numbers are 50 Japanese and 2000 Chinese troops. All the while, the Chinese steward simply smiles. Finally, the American asks him how he can be so happy, given the news. The Chinese gentleman simply says "Pretty soon, no more Japanese".
All the while this was happening, among the fire, the chaos of people fighting fire, people rushing away from the fire, or saving their belongings, there was a mob trying to lynch the presumed perpetrators. First it was the French and the Dutch immigrants, but throughout the saga, Poles, Jews, Catholics and other "aliens" were pursued. The presumed perpetrators changed without much rhyme or reason, merely according to whichever rumour was currently peaking, as the mob, and the fire, continued their steady march. All while the city was ablaze.
Interestingly enough, the cause of the fire is now known, and really should have been known at the time: it started from a small-ish fire at a bakery on Pudding Lane - a street that still exists, since central London was rebuilt on much the same street layout. It started small, but due to indecision wasn't tackled properly, grew a little, then grew a lot, then turned into an all-devouring beast that could not be stopped.
Some things don't really change.
The Chinese have largely themselves to blame for the current suspicions against them. If they had been transparent from the start, the speculations would have been far fewer.
As an aside, I’m not taking a side in “blame” on China. I’m really only talking about the public opinion side of things. The cause of the fire was found through an investigation, and had nothing to do with the mob “crowdsourced” sleuthing. And the mob kept changing its mind as to who is to blame.
Sounds to me a lot like NYTimes saying one time “of course it’s not China you bigoted racist” to “ooh questions are being asked and it’s suspicious we don’t have answers” without any real change in available evidence.
Like the leading idea is that it occurred naturally, and there's heavy emphasis on it starting in that wet market. More than enough ammo already for the mob to hate on Chinese people, and sadly that's what happened and has been happening.
Suppressing inquiry into a possible source of the pandemic seems more like political shenanigans than some vague effort to save the population from harm.
There is a really interesting dynamic in political debate. I'm going to pick on Ivermectin as a COVID treatment, for example. There is official guidance on Ivermectin [0] that says "So, currently there is no clear information that confirms whether ivermectin works as a COVID-19 treatment."
So what is interesting is that there are then a large number of largely faceless/anonymous opinions that Ivermectin is obviously totally proven/totally disproven as a COVID treatment. Anyone discussing the evidence either way runs the risk of being censored.
But when the official position is taken, all the faceless opinions on the wrong side will vanish. If something like Ivermectin proved to be workable then anyone advocating for it will find this weird situation where they were right but no-one official ever argued with them and it is sorta mysterious where the pushback came from.
Ditto the reverse, where if it is disproven as a treatment then there will be a weird situation where it was only ever a tiny fringe of people who cared. This effect is very frustrating in political debates, but does in a sense incentivise people to be clear in their positions. Debating anonymous opinions doesn't actually help and is a trap a lot of people fall in to.
Modern censorship has the protocol of calling names to ideas or opinions that they don't like, prior to "cancelling" them, like calling homophobic the people that disagree in their opinions about homosexuality with what mainstream media says the opinion should be.
The theory of lab escape was very obvious from the start for experts in the field. I talked with laboratories chiefs after the pandemic and every single of them told me it was the main hypothesis. But none of them went public about it at first because simply the West needed China in order to fight the pandemic.
The fact is that China did wrong here, but there is hypocrisy in the Western world. The West put taxes into CO2 so energy prices go through the roof but China does not pay taxes so it has a big competitive advantage over the West. The West buy products made in China because they are cheaper(because they don't have taxes on CO2 or pollution regulation[regulation exist but nobody complies with it in practice] or protection against verbatim copying products).
Lab research is controlled in the West with very stringent set of regulations, so the West subcontracts China research because it is way cheaper and the safety measures are a joke, not in my backyard.
The US financed (outsourced) the lab research done in Wuhan. Bill Gates and so many others did too. While the West is arguing about ethics, China is doing experiments with human embryos because in China there is no such a thing as ethics. So Western companies put money in Chinese laboratories to do what they are forbidden to do in their native countries.
- While the disease was spreading it probably made more sense to focus on dealing with the disease. Focusing on blame would probably take away from the efforts and clear message needed to combat the actual problem. As an example, see how any information about people hurt by the vaccine actually caused more problems. There is probably orders of magnitude more people dead or going to die because of reluctance to take the vaccine that would ever be hurt by the vaccine itself.
- There is probably intentional and unintentional misinformation war happening in social media that for me or you is difficult to quantize or understand effect of. I find it likely there are state actors trying to influence public opinion on various matters or at least make various points moot. Add to this misinformation from various (I will call them amateur) groups that spread it based on rumor or feelings or pure conjecture without any facts to back it up. Then there are people who are responding to this misinformation, without having any facts themselves.
All of this is going to make it difficult to understand where these shifts come from but not difficult to understand why they are happening.
We have to find some way to subtract the political infighting from the public health motive to find the origins of this virus outbreak.
I guess it was a risky move, hoping that evidence wouldn't popup (or come out late enough to make sanctions worth (b|tr)illions improbable).
Yet, the most significative thing about this story is that a move was made.
Probably the biggest case of foreign propaganda we've seen until now.
Wait but less flippantly phrased this was exactly the problem earlier on.
People who wanted to absolve our own abject failure to prepare or deal with the virus started acting like the lab leak theory was a proven fact and thus since it was all chinas fault we could stop quarantining and if only we frothed with nationalistic sanctimony our lives would return to normal.
The problem was three fold. 1) the leak was an especially unproven theory back then with very little evidence either way, i.e just pure speculation. 2) the way it was used to absolve ourselves of being ill prepared, even if it wasn’t speculation there is no excuse for our preparedness 3) it was used for racist propaganda and we don’t need to sound like America is moving to Japanese internment camps 2.0, China edition. It’s not helpful and just gives the CCP propaganda fodder that harms our actual efforts resolving our justified grievances against the Chinese government.
I doubt anyone has argued that the CCP deliberately spread COVID19 to the world because it is Chinese. Taiwan and Hong Kong are also Chinese, and would be primary targets of such an attack. Who dislikes the Taiwanese?
The presumptive reason for an aggressive "unprovoked" WMD use would be because China is a Communist dictatorship. Those have an aggressive track record, to put it mildly.
I say "unprovoked" in quotes because CCP media will gladly list many provocations, and aren't they the ones whose opinion counts when inquiring as to motive?
If there's something Chinese about this, it might be the unconventional warfare aspect, from the culture that gave us Sun Tzu.
Maybe the real racists are those who assume that Chinese Communists would not attack a stronger opponent in an indirect and clandestine manner. Isn't that projecting one's value system onto another?
Since WWII, the USA has strong-armed the world into accepting the USD as reserve currency, permitting the US oligarchy to "tax" them by creating new USD ex nihilo via financial wizardry. Armed robbery, even when state-sponsored, often inspires armed resistance. Don't go crying, "He hit me for no reason!" when you're holding his lunch money.
Apparently you can't say this, since I always get downvoted when I do. I have yet to hear an answer.
https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1407445604029009923
This technical bit is interesting - although the data had been 'deleted' from the Sequence Read Archive* web app by the original submitter, this tweet explains that they were able to recover the data via storage.googleapis.com:
https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1407445615248691201
I discovered that even though the files were deleted from archive itself, they could be recovered from the Google Cloud at links like https://storage.googleapis.com/nih-sequence-read-archive/run... (5/n) ...
So technical question for HNers - what lives at storage.googleapis.com usually? Was that like a cloud mirror or was it more like the 'delete' function in the web app was only removing things from the index but leaving the deleted stuff accessible?
* Sequence Read Archive seems to live at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra
"delete" deleted the reference to these objects but the objects were kept around. (This is a not-so-bad practice, if you're hacked and somebody tries to wipe everything, or some bug or fat finger deletes everything, you've deleted references to data not actual data)
In case this is why this comment was downvoted, it's worth remembering that others have been charged with CFAA violation for basically the same thing.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/french-journalis...
Though I'm happy to have the information available in this particular case, I can't really say this is different in terms of either the letter or spirit of the law.
So: when should we expect to hear this guy being charged with CFAA violation? I'm not holding my breath, and I hope he doesn't, but what he did seems as clear a violation of the law as the two examples listed here.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2013/03/att-hacker-gets-3-years/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598222
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.18.449051v1
Unless this is a new instance of mysterious sequence deletion.
“These SARS-CoV-2 sequences were submitted for posting in SRA in March 2020 and subsequently requested to be withdrawn by the submitting investigator in June 2020. The requestor indicated the sequence information had been updated, was being submitted to another database, and wanted the data removed from SRA to avoid version control issues"
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/coronavirus-origin-nih...
The source paper (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.18.449051v1) or Twitter thread (https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1407445604029009923) are probably better sources than the New York Times article based on them.
In computer security, if obscure researcher Bob discovers that a few instructions can theoretically be used to steal Joe's passwords at the random location in memory where they are by burning the CPU using some webassembly, we make a huge deal of it. We slow down all CPUs in the world overnight to cope with that thus-far _theoretical_ attack, threaten the CPU designer with class action lawsuits, and hail Bob as a hero.
With this virus, we are doing the opposite: we are distributing the patch (vaccine) at glacial speeds (while our economies burn). No "hardware hardening" is being discussed and we are not bringing a class-action lawsuit against God for all His vulnerabilities. All we are saying is "This is your fault Bob, we are going after you!"
Be fair - the vaccine development and distribution program is by far the fastest in history and has wildly exceeded even the most optimistic predictions at the beginning of the pandemic.
Also, consider how long it took Amazon to build a global distribution system for things like books and cheap gifts. 10 years? Maybe more...
Now "hardware hardening" - what would that be in your analogy?
Maybe so, but what would happen if bad actors had the capability to create viruses easily? My understanding is that the tech for it is already around the corner, if not currently available. Are we just going to trust that bad actors won't have the motivation to use them? Returning to my compsec analogy above, Bob and the rest of the compsec good guys don't care about any possible motivations, just that it is possible. For the record, I'm not 100% for that approach, but it seems to be the way things work.
> Now "hardware hardening" - what would that be in your analogy?
We have an immune system that--for the most part--works. It does cause terrible diseases in most people[^1] , and there is a bunch of things that it's not very good at, specially for old folk. Maybe it, and the rest of the system, needs some "technical love"? Honestly, we are technologically far from being able to completely fix it, but I would be happy if we had the same heated and open discussions about that backlog --and what can be done with it--the same way we have about practically anything else.
[^1]: https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/autoimmune-diseases
DNA databases are known to have a small percentage of corrupt data, specially early data. There is not anything strange in modifying or deleting an item in a database. Database managers do it all the time when finding an error.
Maybe those sequences were duplicated. Maybe they were wrongly translated but nobody noticed it until the covid suddenly became very popular. Maybe the publication that provided this data were bad science and retracted later. Fixing a bunch of mistakes in taxonomy that sleep for years until a specialist came and reviewed the old material is not uncommon in biology.
I was under the impression it was a natural sequence, I read about it way back in the beginning:
https://www.labmate-online.com/news/laboratory-products/3/br...
They found that the spike protein, a receptor-binding domain (RBD) that hooks onto host cells, had evolved to target ACE2, an enzyme founded on the outer surface of human cells that helps to regulate blood pressure. The team say the COVID-19 spike protein is so efficient at binding to human cells that it could only be a result of natural selection, not artificial engineering. Another tell-tale sign of natural origins is the molecular structure of COVID-19, which is substantially different from other known viruses. Rather than mimicking other viruses known to cause severe illness in humans, COVID-19 more closely resembles strains of coronavirus found in bats and pangolins.
"These two features of the virus, the mutations in the RBD portion of the spike protein and its distinct backbone, rules out laboratory manipulation as a potential origin for SARS-CoV-2" says Andersen.
Also it seems tuned to infect Mustelidae - like the Mink in Belgium and Holland, and Ferret Badgers. The thing about that is that why would that be if you were passaging it through mice? Mustelidae are going to be a pretty difficult lab target in comparison to mice (they bite, they're big, they take a season to mature). The fact that Ferret Badgers were sold for meat in the Wuhan market is pretty interesting in this context (although none of the animals tested had Cov19).
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
> In 2011, a tall, confident Dutch scientist, Ron Fouchier, using grant money from Fauci’s group at NIH, created a mutant form of highly pathogenic avian influenza, H5N1, and passaged it ten times through ferrets in order to prove that he could “force” (his word) this potentially fatal disease to infect mammals, including humans, “via aerosols or respiratory droplets.”
https://www.salon.com/2020/11/29/covid-19-mutations-spread-m...
> Because ferrets are the animals most like humans in terms of how their immune systems respond to influenza, scientists have experimented with them to make existing viruses more deadly, a biowarfare concept known as "gain of function" research.
> A second statement that had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.
> [...] True, some older methods of cutting and pasting viral genomes retain tell-tale signs of manipulation. But newer methods, called “no-see-um” or “seamless” approaches, leave no defining marks. Nor do other methods for manipulating viruses such as serial passage, the repeated transfer of viruses from one culture of cells to another. If a virus has been manipulated, whether with a seamless method or by serial passage, there is no way of knowing that this is the case. Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something they could not know.
> [...] The two reasons the authors give for supposing manipulation to be improbable are decidedly inconclusive.
> First, they say that the spike protein of SARS2 binds very well to its target, the human ACE2 receptor, but does so in a different way from that which physical calculations suggest would be the best fit. Therefore the virus must have arisen by natural selection, not manipulation.
> If this argument seems hard to grasp, it’s because it’s so strained. The authors’ basic assumption, not spelt out, is that anyone trying to make a bat virus bind to human cells could do so in only one way. First they would calculate the strongest possible fit between the human ACE2 receptor and the spike protein with which the virus latches onto it. They would then design the spike protein accordingly (by selecting the right string of amino acid units that compose it). Since the SARS2 spike protein is not of this calculated best design, the Andersen paper says, therefore it can’t have been manipulated.
> But this ignores the way that virologists do in fact get spike proteins to bind to chosen targets, which is not by calculation but by splicing in spike protein genes from other viruses or by serial passage. With serial passage, each time the virus’s progeny are transferred to new cell cultures or animals, the more successful are selected until one emerges that makes a really tight bind to human cells. Natural selection has done all the heavy lifting. The Andersen paper’s speculation about designing a viral spike protein through calculation has no bearing on whether or not the virus was manipulated by one of the other two methods.
> The authors’ second argument against manipulation is even more contrived. Although most living things use DNA as their hereditary material, a number of viruses use RNA, DNA’s close chemical cousin. But RNA is difficult to manipulate, so researchers working on coronaviruses, which are RNA-based, will first convert the RNA genome to DNA. They manipulate the DNA version, whether by adding or altering genes, and then arrange for the manipulated DNA genome to be converted back into infectious RNA.
> Only a certain number of these DNA backbones have been described in the scientific literature. Anyone manipulating the SARS2 virus “would probably” have used one of these known backbones, the Andersen group writes, and since SARS2 is not derived from any of them, therefore it was not manipulated. But the argument is conspicuously inconclusive. DNA backbones are quite easy to make, so it’s obviously possible that SARS2 was manipulated using an unpublished DNA backbone.
> And that’s it. These are the two arguments made by the Andersen group in support of their declaration that the SARS2 virus was clearly not manipulated. And this conclusion, grounded in nothing but two inconclusive speculations, convinced the world’s press that SARS2 could not have escaped from a lab.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
[2] https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
"Letter
A Letter reports an important novel research result, but is less substantial than an Article. Letters typically occupy four printed journal pages. This format begins with an introductory paragraph (not abstract) of 150 words maximum, summarizing the background, rationale, main results and implications. This paragraph should be referenced, as in Nature style, and should be considered part of the main text, so that any subsequent introductory material avoids too much repetition of the introductory paragraph. The text is limited to 2000 words, excluding the introductory paragraph, Methods, references and figure legends. As a guideline, Letters allow up to 30 references. Letters should have no more than 3–5 display items (figures and/or tables). A Methods section is published online-only, immediately following the main text and figures. It should be written in such detail that experiments can be reproduced by others.
Letters include received/accepted dates and may be accompanied by supplementary information. Letters are peer reviewed."
https://www.nature.com/nmat/about/content
It doesn't take long to discover the above - so why did Wade fail to do the work to check what it was he was attacking?
2) "Since the SARS2 spike protein is not of this calculated best design, the Andersen paper says, therefore it can’t have been manipulated." What I read was that the SARS2 protein doesn't work in theory, because the theory is wrong (a bad approximation that is subject to intensive research world wide - protein dynamics are a big step beyond the art of protein structure prediction as I understand it.) It would be irrational for a team to attempt to build a SARS2 binding protein - essentially they would be shooting into the dark. The space of random search for this kind of structure isn't just huge - it's incomprehensible, consequently the chance of coming upon the SARS2 protein by chance is vanishingly small. If Chinese scientists did have the capability to do dynamic bindings calculations that would have found the SARS2 spike I would think that they would be employing them for a number of decisive military innovations - as well as staggering commercial gain. We know that the Russians capabilities to do hypersonic flow calculations because we see this in their torpedoes and ICBM's.... we would see similar evidence in China for this. We don't.
3) "With serial passage, each time the virus’s progeny are transferred to new cell cultures or animals" but this is addressed Anderson et-al; in an entire section of their article : "The acquisition of both the polybasic cleavage site and predicted O-linked glycans also argues against culture-based scenarios. New polybasic cleavage sites have been observed only after prolonged passage of low-pathogenicity avian influenza virus in vitro or in vivo17. Furthermore, a hypothetical generation of SARS-CoV-2 by cell culture or animal passage would have required prior isolation of a progenitor virus with very high genetic similarity, which has not been described. Subsequent generation of a polybasic cleavage site would have then required repeated passage in cell culture or animals with ACE2 receptors similar to those of humans, but such work has also not previously been described. Finally, the generation of the predicted O-linked glycans is also unlikely to have occurred due to cell-culture passage, as such features suggest the involvement of an immune system18."
Now - I count three arguments in that section of the article alone. Two of them are flatly ignored by Wade. It's almost as if he hasn't actually read Andersen's work.
> The Correspondence section provides a forum for comment on issues relevant to the journal’s community. This format may not be used for presentation of research data or analysis. A Correspondence should not exceed more than two printed pages and can range from 300-800 words; it is limited to one display item and up to 10 references. Article titles are omitted from the reference list. Correspondence may be peer-reviewed at the editors’ discretion.
Given that, I don’t think Wade’s characterization is dishonest.
It’s funny that you’re accusing Wade of not reading Andersen et al’s work, because it reads like you didn’t read his work - or even the excerpt that I posted!
For instance, take this notion that SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein doesn’t “make sense” or that “the theory is wrong” and can’t explain it. First of all, that’s not what Andersen et al actually says at any point. It really does just say:
> [while] SARS-CoV-2 may bind human ACE2 with high affinity, computational analyses predict that the interaction is not ideal and that the RBD sequence is different from those shown in SARS-CoV to be optimal for receptor binding. Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise
That is to say, accusing Wade of not reading the work he’s criticizing because he doesn’t address an argument made elsewhere (where?) is unfair at best.
That said, even if Andersen et al were saying what you’re saying they did, Wade clearly accounts for this in the very excerpt I posted: he claims that GoF researchers simply don’t design proteins like this. Serial passage as a mechanism in particular doesn’t seem to require some fantasy of Chinese scientists expertly constructing some bizarro inexplicably dangerous spike protein by hand.
I can’t defend Wade’s failure to connect these dots himself, but all of the other claims in the letter are similarly addressed explicitly or implicitly. Humanized mice, discussed in the article, have immune systems; if serial passage were conducted in them it wouldn’t be surprising if it looks like an immune system were indeed involved. And on the flip side, the polybasic furin cleavage site, which Andersen et al claim as evidence that the virus must be natural is actually one of the most damning pieces of evidence for manual manipulation: it’s well understood that this could make a virus more easily infect humans, that scientists know how to artificially add them, and its particular construction in SARS-CoV-2 (as discussed by Wade in great detail) looks very artificial.
Putting that together: WIV scientists deliberately adding the furin cleavage site to some bat coronavirus, possibly (though not necessarily!) RaTG13, to help it jump species and then conducting serial passage in humanized mice is a straightforward and plausible origin story for SARS-CoV-2, in line with the sort of work we know WIV was doing, that accounts for Andersen et al’s concerns completely.
A hypothesis which addresses both questions is that the virus evolved in humanized mice. That would also explain why it doesn't look genetically engineered; it wasn't, the mice were.
A reminder: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/26/1021263/bat-covi...
It took less than a year from outbreak to publication:
Yes, if this were a narrow academic research project looking into the origin that was left de-politicized until there was an outcome that would be great. Unfortunately this whole thing was born political and China hasn't done itself any favors by always being so hush hush.
1. Because Trump called for an investigation into the Lab Leak Theory. Since Trump is bad, everything he says and does is always bad. This meant that everyone who was anti-Trump said that the lab leak theory was 100% false, definitely a consipracy theory and hence.... bad.
2. Because the Chinese government have used the modern political environment to deflect all critism as racism. Because people often shorten "Chinese Government" to "China" in news (much like the US), they take it that attacks against "China" aren't really attacks against the country but instead racist attacks against the people. Since racism is bad, criticism of China is racism, and investigating the Lab Leak leak is criticism of China - it stans to reason that the Lab Leak theory is racism, and hence.... bad.
Government, politics, and politicians are among those things that should be very boring. The mark of a good political leader is that you don't have to think about politics very much during their tenure. Interesting government was a major cause of death in the early 20th century.
Another poster in another thread once said that during the Bush and Obama years, safeguards against misleading the US public with counterintelligence ops were removed. I feel like that must have something to do with the explosive growth of the partisan-bullshit-drama-news business. The obvious factors in changing news media are the internet and social media, but I don't think that fully explains the widening divide and eager abandonment of objective reality.
It is a poor vehicle for a narrative. Thus, it is weaponized by contorting it into half-truths that serve the important purpose of affirming pre-existing values.
The past year has made it extraordinarily clear that the epistemology of science is far too demanding for most people. And that’s okay; it just usually isn’t so starkly obvious.
Dreyfus affair was the highlight of that phoenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair
Unfortunately, same thing is happening with YouTube bloggers right now: I checked economists of 3 different kinds, and all of them would mostly pick the other's argument, exaggerate it to absurdity, then blame the opponent being socialist/social darwinist/nazi/anarchist/etc.
Most of audience enjoys simple confirmation of their views, and accepts whatever is put in its favor: pure theorizing, demagogic questions, anectdotal evidence and cherry-picked data. Many reject any evidence that puts their worldview under stress -- I personally had this moment with friends, who'd just claim "this is not important, X is always Y, and Y > Z."
Is it? (the answer is no).
Because the other place that we actually do need to invest enormous resources in researching for viral origins is the wilds of China. Because if it's not a lab leak, then there's a carrier species out there as a reservoir and a series of transmission and exposure behaviors which made it's emergence more likely, and we really need to identify those as well as any potential future viruses which may emerge from the same reservoirs - as was predicted would happen after SARS (and then did, hence COVID-19).
Lab-leak proponents are basically UFO-believers at this point: constantly claiming we need more research into the lab leak, and dismissing any alternative explanations (hence why we're up to "China did secret, undetectable gain of function research at the Wuhan lab")
I can think of two reasonable reasons why someone wouldn't want to investigate the matter:
1. It would be embarrassing for China.
2. It may be hard to properly communicate or convince people of the difference between an accidental lab leak vs. an intentional lab leak which could add fuel to a fire of jingoism/nationalism in other countries.
Again, I'm trying hard not to make a judgement here. Hopefully I did a decent job.
There’s also a #3, that is that I’m irritated that people are becoming experts on virology after reading a Wikipedia article (or worse) and deciding to “look into” this, then declaring things to be damning evidence based on an extremely limited understanding of the subject matter.
3. Experts who conduct or fund virology research don't want it to be true, because it would inevitably cause a massive clampdown on what research is allowed and how it is conducted. It would also cause lasting damage to the field's reputation and prestige. Eg. imagine being a nuclear researcher in the aftermath of Chernobyl.
4. People who have significant personal or business ties with China are concerned that a finding of culpability will result in escalating tariffs and other sanctions, damaging China's economy and potentially causing collateral damage for those who do business with Chinese firms.
Whether or not Covid came from a lab, it's at least plausible that it did, and a virus just as bad could get accidentally released in the future. So our options are:
- Continue gain of function research, and risk killing literally millions of people
- Stop gain of function research, and lose any knowledge we would gain from it.
Honestly, I don't know the first thing about gain of function research, but that's one hell of a risk we're taking with it. Can we maybe not try to make the viruses deadlier?
WIV did collaborate with UNC Chapel Hill to do GOF research in America, in mice using a SARS-CoV-1 backbone.
The US government send funds to WIV to study SADS-CoV in pigs.
Circular logic is invoked to "prove" that those funds led to secret GoF research which has never been published or talked about on the basis that the pandemic arising in Wuhan is too much of a coincidence (and coincidences logically can never happen).
And if you disagree with that, do you have details of the experiments and how they were seeking to enhance existing viruses which goes beyond just speculation and circular logic?
> But in an email to the paper, Shi said her experiments differed from gain-of-function experiments since they did not seek to make a virus more dangerous. Instead they were trying to understand how the virus might jump across species.
They have already been caught lying about not having any bats in the lab and so far they haven't been acting like someone who's innocent.
It doesn't claim either that they had bats in the lab.
https://twitter.com/r_h_ebright/status/1405239078698815489?s...
> The Wuhan lab constructed novel chimeric viruses that combined spike genes from new bat SARS-related coronaviruses with the genomic backbone of another bat SARS-related coronavirus.
> These were viruses that were novel, not viruses that were present in nature.
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
And your citation is to:
> Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus
Yes. There is a massive amount that we still don't know about the genoomic diversity of sarbecoviruses in bats in and around China. This is the kind of study that we need a whole lot more of. No idea what your point is.
2) You only read the title of the article I linked that was in sub-tweets. See the following tweet:
https://mobile.twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/14052391926286...
> The construction of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses able to infect human cells and lab animals at WIV (1) was published with acknowledgment to NIH grant AI110964 (https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...) and (2) was reported to NIH under NIH grant AI110964 (https://reporter.nih.gov/search/0dVX_GElSEGDOsNMZq7qaQ/proje...)
So, yes, gain of function research was happening at WIV.
You can debate if that's a good idea or not, but SARS-CoV-2 is way too distant from WIV1/SARS-CoV-1 to arise from any lab experiment with chimeric viruses. And its also too far away from RaTG13, which still needs decades of evolution to turn into SARS-CoV-2.
> The work met--unequivocally--the definition of gain-of-function research of concern under the 2014 Pause.
> The work met--unequivocally--the definition of potential pandemic pathogen enhancement under the 2017 HHS Potential Pandemic Pathogen Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework.
I feel that people are over-simplifying this issue greatly on both sides in this thread. Basically, it seems like the definition of GoF is not totally agreed upon even by top scientists. A lot hinges on intent/expectations, but of course scientists can't perfectly predict what will happen with these experiments.
It seems like the research referenced was not "GoF" research in the sense that it wasn't intended or predicted to cause GoF. But at the same time, going back to even 2015, there was criticism that this research was risky, even if it technically was not GoF research.
Some scientists also seem to think we should be doing more GoF research to learn more before the next pandemic.
These are the links I read, both of which I thought were pretty even-handed. For the record, I often think fact checking sites present totally biased nonsense, but in this case it seemed okay.
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/05/the-wuhan-lab-and-the-gain...
Thread from an MIT researcher quoted in the article:
So they were creating chimeras from a spike they found that was similar to the pangolin spike but has never been published. And they were combining that with a backbone that they found that was RaTG13-like but similarly has never been published. Even though their prior targets have been SARS-CoV-1 and WIV1 backbones, and they skipped over RaTG13, which would have been of more interest to study because of its association with the miners, to select an RaTG13-like backone of an unpublished virus. And then presumably they did all this in HELA cell lines expressing human ACE2 and did serial passage / gain of function so it became well adapted.
Then even if you have all this happen, you somehow need to get that virus up someone's nose. Because petri dishes don't cough. And we know that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't spread pretty much at all from surfaces. And you need to get a sufficient infectious dose. So someone had a party in the lab and decided to chop up a dish of proto-SARS-CoV-2 cultures and rail a line of it like it was coke or something.
Or, nature does chimeric (recombination) gain of function experiments all the time, and every confined animal farm in China is a bioreactor in a lab doing stochastic serial passage experiments with "lab workers" who have never even heard of biosafety levels.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.22.427830v3
https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00709-1.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/science/covid-lab-leak-fa...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/world/asia/china-covid-wu...
At least everyone seems to have stopped yapping about furin cleavage sites this time.
> There's no indication WIV was doing any gain of function research.
> The work met--unequivocally--the definition of gain-of-function research of concern under the 2014 Pause.
That being said, there are a lot of confounding issues. Mostly political in nature.
First, the vast majority of people who insisted on the lab leak theory did it to deflect blame and target China as a scapegoat. And many trotted out terrible and conspiratorial reasonings for why the accidental lab leak theory was the "truth," many going to the point of it being an intentional leak and that it was designed in the lab by humans. Not to mention using these claims to suck up attention away from other things like actually handling the pandemic. And to pile on politically a China=bad narrative. So by association there's been a severe reluctance to add more ammo to this group's claims.
Secondly, history and the nature of the spread put the chances more on the side of a zoological vector given the information we have now. Obviously this isn't 100% proven yet, but so far most are hedging on historical priors. Especially considering the conditions of farming and the fur industry that exists in China. So the majority of the community side against the lab leak as the most likely option.
Of course, many scientists still leave open the option that it was a lab leak. We don't have enough information to completely be sure. And there's some odd circumstantial evidence that may point to a lab leak somehow. Including that China hasn't been the most forthcoming.
Still, it's very much a minority opinion in the field at this time and many people insisting it "must be investigated" seem to be doing it for political reasons as cover for other purposes.
Here's from Forbes an opinion piece about the current evidence we have so far about the origins and possible explanations. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/06/11/ask-...
I don't see how that works. The US funded some of the research in Wuhan and it was done in collaboration with US scientists. If the lab leak hypothesis is true both the USA and China could share the blame.
The original form was almost purely China=bad. Then it has morphed to include some of the US scientists as more information came out.
But specifically most (in the conspiracy group) are trying to tie it specifically to Dr Fauci who became a lightning rod for controversy and political attacks during the pandemic as he became the face of the government's response. Thus it's not all US scientists. Just the ones some don't like politically and who are "in bed with China."
And furthermore, sure the US may have funded some of it, but at the end of the day China is the one who goofed.
Of course, I'm speculating a lot and there are a lot of variations that I've seen for support for the lab leak theory. Just trying to summarize some of the hotter takes I've seen.
I don’t see anything political here. If Fauci and Daszak had come out against dangerous experiments at low biosafety levels we wouldn’t be talking about them.
Sometimes it's in the US, sometimes, it's somewhere else. The goofing is guaranteed, unless you pay somebody to goof on your behalf
I don't think this describes a lot of people. On the contrary, this seems to be an assumption by people who seem to not want to discover the nature/cause of the virus. It's possible to want to "handle" the virus properly at home while also wanting to know what caused it, and that always seemed to me the predominant attitude among those who were open to the lab-leak idea.
If China did have a lab that leaked the virus, they _are_ to blame. To say that we shouldn't hold their feet to the fire if this is the case, well, that's a fine political opinion you can have. It may or may not be prudent.
The essence of the argument why we shouldn't discuss the lab leak hypothesis is "people's feelings". In other words, feelings are more important than what is true.
Truth should be the highest priority, damn whoever's political interests it will help. It is so sad that thinking of truth as too dangerous is part of today's milieu.
And you pretty much can't disprove lab leak idea at this point because there can't exist any sufficient evidence against it to convince people who believe in it.
Even if you just personally let them inside the lab and gave them access to all documents the only thing they would find would be next suspicious clues regardless of what would actually happened. And even if there was very little they managed to find suspicious they'd say it's because evidence was removed and they are being lied to.
The truth became unknowable due to feelings.
You'll be always left with nothing more than accusations that can't be disproven (or proven).
The only thing that might put this thing to rest is further research on coronaviruses in animals and humans especially the ones that spread asympthomatically which are way harder to even find. And maybe some day we'll discover some ancestor of covid somewhere.
But it still won't put the lab leak hypothesis to rest if it's found in bats. Only if ancestor of covid is actually human coronavirus (other then the ones we discovered so far because they cause symptoms of common cold) and is detected in historical tissue samples from humans from before 2019 then maybe most people will rule out lab leak.
Meanwhile get ready for decades of blaming China for the pandemic.
People will believe feelings if they can't figure out the truth, sure, but that doesn't mean we have to tolerate fantasy over fact, and we shouldn't allow those people to make policy decisions. I mean, clearly we HAVE, but we shouldn't.
There should absolutely be as deep as possible an investigation into the origins of the virus, but it needs to be dispassionate in all directions.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-officials-raised-alarms-a...
Btw, comparing a restaurant worker being sloppy and a supposedly BSL-4 lab functioning at the level of BSL-2 lab is not a good look.
Also, China's govt. has much much more control over a govt. lab than US has over a restaurant in California.
The analogy fails.
Deciding not to is the same in both cases
No, it doesn't.
> Its got a huge military and could nuke the place if it wanted to
By this logic, the US govt. has control over every corner of earth.
Also, was the US govt. running the place and ignoring safety warnings?
Was the restaurant possible responsible for a global pandemic?
The analogy is stupid and not worth discussing more.
All I am getting from this is that people think a restaurant I n US has the same level of responsibility as the lab in Wuhan.
> The Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences is a research institute on virology administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which reports to the State Council of the People's Republic of China.
It would be reasonable by most people's definitions to blame whoever has oversight over a virology lab that leaked a virus. In this (alleged) case, that's the Chinese government.
Is this part of the misdirection? Both sides do not want to know. Or let's say powerful interests on both sides.
If that worker causes a global pandemic the U.S. government covers up, yes.
The cover up by is the problem
The restaurant worker slipping up is bad luck if they happen to be first to contact a virus. The government that runs labs know there is 100% chance there are dangerous viruses there and have a responsibility to enforce the safeguards.
Once it's outside, sure, there's a duty to report, but other governments have a responsibility to their own populace to keep them healthy.
The US, for instance, should have more than enough spies in China to know everything china knows anyways, and took the chinese line that the virus didn't exist, or wasn't a problem up until Joe Biden got elected
As for the "until Joe Biden" bit, er ... no. Trump was kicked out in large part due to his incompetent handling of the virus in the US (he thought it was an orchestrated attack by his political opponents, given that they turned everything into such an attack).
The virus was a problem long before Biden won. Not that he is more competently handling it (he isn't), but the news media can now largely let go of their Trump derangement to start focusing on important things again. So it shows up more.
[1] https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/905779/CIA-China-Jerry-...
I think you’re misunderstanding the bit you are quoting.
Of course China is to blame if they had a lab leak.
The comment is instead making the point that most of those who are blaming China are not doing it motivated from a reasonable belief that there was a lab leak. Rather they are motivated by the opportunity to use China as a political tool to avoid blame for their own failures in dealing with the pandemic.
After 9/11 there was a failure in airplane protocol to not have bolted pilot doors and to not aggressively fight hijackers. I wouldn't say investigating Saudi Arabia should have been avoided - even if there had been voices at the TSA who wanted to distract from their own failures.
If you let a country intentionally kills hundreds of thousands of people and enact no penalty they will only escalate.
Still - I'd say the chance it was intentional to be less than 1/1000. Chance it was by accident - and that they covered it up - to be fairly high.
The question is if this was an intentional lab leak as is being suggested, I’m curious to know what people expect to happen.
As you pointed out this has killed millions of people, seems like people are angling for a war.
That outcome is why the accusation that this is intentional is a very very serious accusation and not one that should be tossed around by a bunch of half cocked internet sleuths (not saying you are one, just in general).
If it was intentional, then they're incompetent. I don't believe they're incompetent.
Not, “was it a lab leak?”
Rather: if proven it was a lab leak, what would the remediation be?
Would it be a) for tightening of biosecurity controls, b) toughening of wild animal trade, or c) war with China.
We will get a) and b) without knowing where it came from; as prudent steps to prevent this from happening again; they are already happening.
Perhaps we can avoid c) if we never “really know”.
That would be nice.
This is not a strong argument.
Regardless of all these wild pontifications, those who have run interference on the truth need to suffer the reputational consequences.
Having a immediate target that is clearly to blame and already an “enemy” isn't going to just result in a ideological slap on the wrist.
What consequences do you think there should be?
Pay for the damage to the US economy? To the world? Apologise and it’s fine?
What do think “holding them to account for what happened” actually means?
This isn’t some scientific journal where you lose magical reputation points.
There's already literally a response two comments down saying you would need to force change to the CCP. How do you imagine that's going to happen? Ask nicely? Sanctions? Well, that's worked just great so far.
Let's see, oh I can think of another way of forcing change... what could it be?
I'm not pretending this isn't a political clusterfuck. But I'd rather deal with a political clusterfuck than a bioweapon clusterfuck. And if they aren't developing bioweapons then great! If they are developing bioweapons then that feels like something that's better to know sooner rather than later. And if there wasn't a lab leak then even better! Now the world knows that it really was just a bizarre phenomenon. If there was a lab leak then they simply made a mistake, they can rectify that mistake moving forward, and the world moves on. If the world doesn't move on - what are they going to do? You think the US (or any country) will go to war (as in send in troops in huge numbers with the understanding most of them will likely die) with China because of an accidental lab leak? I don't.
It seems to me the dumbest possible thing to do is not investigate. I don't believe advocating for ignorance is ever a viable strategy.
We still haven’t gone to war with them, and we’re in a better position to do that as well.
Declaring war on China even if this was a lab leak, hell even if it was on purpose (Difficult to believe, but let’s go there) isn’t a workable or appropriate solution. Certainly not going to happen in the short term, blame it on globalism, but the global implications are bigger than ever and don’t make it practical.
Or I suppose some people just weren't alive to witness the changes! It was a long time ago, bizarrely enough. It feels recent. Perhaps in part because it's still so relevant.
Did something in my comment sound like I didn’t favor investigating? That was not my intention. The origin including lab leak should be investigated.
* Waiting a week after patient 1 to close the borders
* Intentional efforts to suppress testing
* "Covid won't happen here because we closed the borders" (a month into exponential covid case growth in the US)
* "...but if it does, it's barely worse than the flu"
* "...but even if it is, hydroxychloroquine is a miracle cure."
* "...but even if it isn't, we shouldn't lock down because it won't stop the spread"
* "...and even if we do, a silent first wave means we're all immune now that the first wave is slightly trending downwards and we should do a full reopen"
* Anti-mask
* Anti-vax
and more. Those fights had actual public health impact. "Whodunnit" had 0x the public health importance and 10x the flamewar potential, which is saying something, because we had plenty of flamewars as it was. Steering the conversation away from lab-leak steered the conversation towards things that mattered.
I think politicizing rational inquiry, especially when China did a lot to help the virus leave its borders, was equivalent to trying to deflect, and just added more obfuscation to a meaningful dialogue about what we should do and what we should learn.
In 2020 the questions people wanted answers to were "what was the government doing" and "when was relief coming" and "we need masks and ventilators are you going to distribute them". The only people who seemed to think the answer to all those questions was "well firstly we need to consider if this is China's fault..." was the White House.
I genuinely worry about all the people that believed it was a conspiracy theory, and still think they are on team science. They aren't.
It keeps being asked for the same reason that 9/11 truthers came into existence: because the idea that bad things can happen randomly to good people is a more scary idea then the one that bad things happen because someone planned for them to.
"It escaped from a lab" is an appealing idea because the very next conclusion will be "there should be no more virus labs!". Zoological origins, like SARS, or Swine Flu before it, offers no solutions - it's an ongoing problem.
It's like being in the middle of a house fire, looking for a way past the burning hallway to the door, and then someone else in there with you arguing "Don't worry about how to get out. What's really important is who started the fire!"
This seems like a distinction without a difference since both coasts got the virus ultimately from the same country.
Eg, close border until effective screening is in place
Worked very well for Taiwan, Australia.
For example, border closures. Putting aside the fact that at the time the entire mainstream establishment insisted that imposing them at all was dangerous, counter-productive xenophobia, the US had the only remotely sensible early border closures in the Western world - and that was an infinitely bigger problem than whether Trump should've imposed it a week earlier. In particular, Italy massively dropped the ball and ended up with a huge outbreak spreading infections to the US and the rest of Europe whilst somehow reporting zero cases. (Even US testing wasn't that broken!) There is approximately zero chance that the US could've banned travel from them in time to stop this - there was absolutely no justification for this at the time, given they were reporting zero cases unlike the USA.
Then the American media pointed to the fact that Italy had banned direct flights from China (much too late) as proof travel bans didn't work. Of course it didn't - Italy has borderless travel with the rest of the EU, everyone could just fly in to a different airport, it's the equivalent of Texas or California banning direct flights in a futile attempt to keep the virus out. The US took the more sensible approach of restricting based on where people had travelled recently, regardless of where they were travelling from - pretty much everyone else now seems to have copied this approach.
The media also seems to have misled everyone about what went wrong with Covid testing in the US. As far as I can tell, the USA had the earliest, most aggressive attempted rollout of testing out of all the countries in the West at least, maybe in the world. There certainly wasn't any lack of enthusiasm for it from the top-level, politically appointed levels of the government. The problem was the non-partisan career parts of the CDC screwed up, first by contaminating the testing reagents and then covering it up and letting them ship out to labs anyway, causing confusion and delays as the labs couldn't work out why they failed quality checks.
Closing the borders before patient 1 or almost immediately after patient 1 (plus aggressive contact tracing) would have been good public health policy. Closing the borders after a week of exponential growth and lack of aggressive contact tracing was hopeless. Good for appearances only -- and the good appearances came largely from xenophobia because the public health cat was well out of the bag by that point. See the difference?
I'm sure you can find plenty of bad liberal media takes on the issue, but that's completely beside the point as they were not in charge of anything. The bad (xenophobic) conservative takes didn't just come from the media, though, they also came from the president. Repeatedly and persistently.
> As far as I can tell, the USA had the earliest, most aggressive attempted rollout of testing out of all the countries in the West at least, maybe in the world. There certainly wasn't any lack of enthusiasm for it from the top-level
Just one tiny little problem with that narrative: Trump said the quiet parts out loud, multiple times, confirming what would otherwise have "just" been rumors and leaks. He didn't just fight and stall the testing, he publicly bragged about it later.
"When you do testing to that extent you're going to find more people, you're going to find cases. So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.' They test and they test. We got tests for people who don't know what's going on."
Now, of course Taiwan had a lot of success until recently and they did ban travel from China earlier than anyone else - but again, the role of this was almost entirely omitted from the early US news coverage because it didn't fit into the anti-Trump narrative. Their success was attributed to their Covid testing and tied into to the story that this was something Trump screwed up due to his focus on border closures and travel bans. (Meanwhile in the real world, their Covid testing basically collapsed the moment the disease got a foothold - in May 2021 when this had become a mass-produced commodity.) They also didn't have the level of travel from Italy that the US and other worse-affected countries did...
* we only have to lockdown for two weeks to flatten the curve
* ok, two more weeks and then we can reopen
* well, we can't reopen, but we'll have vaccines soon so we'll be able to reopen
* ok, we vaccinated 70% of people so we can reopen now
* Vaccines work!
* Well, they don't work in that country because those are the worse vaccines
* Israel and UK having another surge? Oh it's only amongst unvaccinated people
* Uh oh, Delta Plus is coming, better stay home!
They were still hugely protective against severe disease. So they work.
Who cares who did it, naturally it will be more evidence that communist dictatorships aren’t the best way to run things, but they’re never going to share the truth if that means a flogging.
This is the post truth world.
And in the post truth world, the 6 inch chimp brain under assault of an info tsunami it has no capacity to fully grok, has only one choice - to escape reality, deny responsibility, judge, blame and demand that an imaginary entities descend from the heavens to clean up the mess.
Guess what chimp troupe? It's not going to happen. Now get back to work.
Let's fight with our greatest might to make this a post-post-truth world.
Those responses are way more interesting, too. Taking another 20% chance off of a lab leak happening again doesn't fix that the US government will pretend a virus doesn't exist while it's killing people
This was the ideal for the Enlightenment, because the truth is good and from God. However we now live in the postmodern philosophy were truth is merely a political instrument and has no longer a holy status
How does not investigating help with those theories? There is a lab in Wuhan, they were working with coronaviruses, the infections seems to have started there, so logically someone points a finger... and the answer is "we won't investigate, because people are pointing fingers!"?
No negative investigation result is acceptable to the public IMHO.
Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence to support that the virus was in fact "designed in the lab by humans" so not sure why you're lumping that in with "conspiratorial reasoning".
Meanwhile, there was what looks like an actual conspiracy by prominent scientists led by Peter Daszak to mislead the public about the possible origins of the virus. These scientists intentionally, collectively, misled the public and hid their obvious conflicts of interests. Wouldn't that qualify as a conspiracy?
History and the nature of the spread did not support a zoological origin of the virus. The likelihood of zoological vectors is an over-stated fever dream of gain-of-function grant seekers. If anything, the fact that ground zero for the virus was on the doorstep of the Wuhan Institute of Virology where the research specialty is bat coronaviruses suggests the null hypothesis is lab-leak. Zoonotic spread was a hypothesis that favored the actors likely responsible for the accident.
The evidence that the virus escaped a lab is not merely circumstantial and certainly not merely that China is, er, not forthcoming. The principal evidence is in the structure of the virus itself. There are details of the virus spike protein that appear likely to have been created in a lab using a bat coronavirus as a base.
The "debate" has been highly politicized, all right. But the politics has been mostly on the side pushing for a natural origin. Would it suprise you if CCP propagandists were involved in promoting the theory that points the blame anywhere but at the government of China, perhaps pushing the narrative that anyone who says otherwise is, wait for it, racist? Given how punishing the Chinese government can be to those who are perceived to oppose Chinese interests, and the many conflicts of interest vis a vis China and the Chinese market that exist in our government and science research industry, is it surprising that the narrative pushed by corporate media would relentlessly promote zoonotic and demote lab-leak?
Assuming the virus did, in fact, come from a lab -- one that had been cited for lacking sufficient safety protocols and training for the research conducted there -- it's certainly reasonable to want to investigate and ensure it doesn't happen again. Who would that be "deflecting blame" from? And "scapegoat" implies that China wasn't to blame. If the virus originated from a government lab in Wuhan, then they are to blame.
An opinion piece in Forbes by an astrophysicist on evolutionary microbiology is worth not much in my book. Despite looking really hard, we haven't found the missing link in nature that would support an evolutionary explanation for the odd protein sequences. Gain-of-function is the simpler explanation. Meanwhile, the CCP is apparently engaged in a cover-up now, putting out agitprop about bat-bites and other smokescreens. Why would they do that, do you think?
I'm not even going to go into all the circumstantial evidence that connects our major GoF researchers and money to the Wuhan lab. That would take another long post.
It also doesn't help that China's current leadership is extremely allergic to anything that implicates China at all, so their actions are largely compatible with what you'd see in a coverup.
They are probably as interested as Chinese government in downplaying the role of this lab in the Covid outbreak.
But from a populist perspective, it's really scary. Crime is up across the board 33% in the US due to various factors, populist anger is real and that's just 'regular covid stuff'. On the margins of the bell curve, people do really crazy things. Anti-Asian acts, ranging from a few simple harmful words on the street, to full on assault, have measurably increased this year. So you can see some of the impact of populism right in the numbers. With 600 000 dead Americans and 240 Million guns ... it's pretty scary to think of what might happen.
Geopolitically, it's a 'monster' thing, on the order of 9/11, invasion of a country etc.. Accident or not, if China 'caused' a massive worldwide decline and millions of deaths ... it's hard to imagine what the fallout would be.
If there were inexorable, clean, hard evidence ... then I can see 25% of the population demanding blood, i.e. 'war' as within the scope of retribution.
So the 'truth', the 'nuances', 'public communications' and 'goestrategic implictions' all form different aspects to thi answer.
There's around 8 billion people on Earth. Most of the wealth on Earth is controlled by a small number of those people. What stops the other people from taking it from them? Answer: The illusion of power and control, via use of that wealth.
Historically, the best way to control people is to divide them...over and over. That's what we're seeing nowadays: via use of the mass media. You'll rarely see a major news story nowadays that doesn't pit large groups of humans against one another. Currently, the best "division" strategy is for them to use the media to promote left-wing thought.
Since a lab-leak doesn't align with the political aspect of Covid, they're doing everything they can to squash any discussion of it. Admitting they were wrong, or having discussion around the possibility of them being wrong, would bring the possibility of people waking the fuck up to the level of bullshit they're being fed.
It now beats the #2, "Covid isn't real but it was created by the Chinese government".
Wake up, Sheeple!
And if you lived in the 15th century you'd probably be the guy ridiculing anyone who said the Earth might not be flat. How dare those crazy people!
same way it matters if police coerce a suspect to "confess".
tainting an inquisition that started with no factual observations is what has happened.
Were one to entertain the possibility that a lab facility in China was the source of infection leading to a global pandemic then isolationists and nationalists and other persona non grata might imagine they've received some validation of their policies. Naturally this is intolerable. So intolerable, in fact, that you are obligated to employ however much cognitive dissonance you find necessary such that any suggestion of a lab leak becomes unthinkable. Obviously anyone that fails to do so is exhibiting faulty and dangerous thinking.
All of this is self evident when you understand the correct prioritization of concerns. While discovering the true genesis of some great failure and correctly ascribing fault may have value, the risk of validating ones ideological opponents -- vanishing few and impotent as they may be -- has many times more import.
I'm surprised that people had forgotten this already. You don't hear much about a "democratic hoax" or a "bioweapon" nowadays, but those words were a part of the conversation a year ago.
Note that the phrase "politically motivated people" was substituted for the original term "whack jobs", which I think is more appropriate; however, your asked me to use "non charged terms", so I did my best.
At worse... virology would receive an indelible stain of epochal vitriol.
If it was a coverup it was a rather poor one. It’s hard for me to think this was nefarious, unless the intention was just to delay (in a plausibly deniable manner).
If I hear a surprising claim from a pathological liar, I'm also less likely to believe it, not more!
My bet is that even in China (which is not monolithic) different stakeholders are not so sure and there's major CYA between the scientists, the local managers, the Beijing-based leadership, senior leadership at all levels. Nothing good can come for any of these people if they allow the investigation to proceed smoothly. What if it's discovered that some totally unrelated incident happened years ago or that somebody was embezzling or did shady land deals with Wuhan lab accounts? The truth only helps people who are not involved. Everybody involved is best served by keeping their mouth shut and blocking any investigation.
Here is a report titled "Understanding china's political system"
Local officials are highly corrupt and also are terrified something they are responsible for will come to the attention of the central leadership in a bad way. Thus they will bodge things for personal gain against the policies of the central leadership, and will try to ensure the central leadership don’t hear about things they very much want to hear about.
This is a terribly high risk strategy, but it’s the only one that actually works. That’s the problem with corrupt bureaucracies.
Of course once central leadership is aware of a situation they can mobilise vast resources and have absolute power to impose whatever strategy they choose. Anything or anyone in the way gets flattened. This is now happening in Hong Kong.
> The CCP had an incredibly tight control over the entire country.
And your comment below really disagree with one another?
> Of course once central leadership is aware of a situation they can mobilise vast resources and have absolute power to impose whatever strategy they choose. Anything or anyone in the way gets flattened.
I'm totally ignorant on this matter but to my reading there seems to be more in common between your two viewpoints than not.
And yet somehow even the most ill-informed Americans hear all about things the CCP doesn't want anyone to hear about. Doesn't sound like very tight control.
Which doesn't really square up with the extensive border smuggling operations into and out of China, the defusion of illegal portable media players and thumbdrives carrying outside news, or the methamphetamine epidemic they're suffering.
In the zoological scenario, they wouldn't have any idea where it came from and might suspect it could be a lab leek simply based on the origin. It's very likely they would engage in cover-up behaviour anyway, just out of caution.
And then there are other reasons why they might decide to cover things up.
Ironically, a Chinese cover-up is absolutely useless evidence towards a lab leak hypothesis.
It's estimated that dozens of viruses jump to humans every year, it's just unlikely that they survive long enough to mutate to adapt to the human body.
And pretty much the moment it was developed, a new coronavirus in the midst of jumping species was found in hospitalized patients with pnuemonia-like symptoms [1].
Basically once they went looking, in 2% of the sample group they found people who were infected with a canine coronavirus, but who did not seem to be able to infect other people with it.
The likely scenario is that viruses are jumping species all the time, but rarely succeed in causing illness we don't simply write off as "a bout of pneuomonia from a seasonal something" due to lack of severity or lack of ability to spread human to human.
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/05/another-...
The only reason we know is that this is pre Xi China.
https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/ncov/release_genome https://db.cngb.org/
More Chinese institutes are encouraging their scientists to deposit human bio-sample data to their own servers. Some grants even require them to do so.
https://youtu.be/q5SRrsr-Iug?t=1843
He's been the canary in the coal mine on numerous issues surrounding COVID.
edit: listen from 30:43, also from 25:11: https://youtu.be/q5SRrsr-Iug?t=1511
He's also been the carbon monoxide in the coal mine, steering people away from vaccines
https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/feature/everythin...
It gives a lot of data on chances of symptoms and illness at various periods after the first and second doses from various studies, however the bottom line is that long term the national level studies show that:
“The vaccine also provided 97.2% protection against hospitalisation overall and 97.5% protection against severe and critical hospitalisation.”
These are outstanding results, among the best of any vaccine ever developed, and from studies of large a large and diverse population.
It was 100% effective is a study of 2,000 12-15 year olds. This is important because in countries like Brazil where the death rate is incredibly high, even the small fraction of victims that are children adds up to many hundreds, or even thousands of deaths.
The Shingrix vaccine is recommended for everyone over 50. It's a two-dose regimen to prevent shingles. If you've ever known anyone who has shingles, you'll rush to get those shots as soon as your doctor recommends it.
Guess what? The side effects can be rough. I know from personal experience: the second dose knocked me down for at least 24 hours. I felt awful and pretty much did nothing but sleep. By the evening of the next day, I was fine.
I also got my Pfizer vaccine shots around the same time, and had nothing worse than a sore arm. Even if someone had told me there was a 100% chance I'd have the same side effects from the COVID-19 vax as I did from Shingrix, I still wouldn't have hesitated. A day or two of feeling terrible versus the known dangers of COVID-19 is an easy choice.
Don't overplay the "major downside" bit.
Which COVID-19 vaccine did you get, and what side effects did you have, if any?
Honestly, I'm seriously starting to doubt whether it's even remotely feasible to achieve herd immunity with the current vaccines - the Delta variant is looking really worrying on that front.
The Delta variant is more contagious, but has not demonstrated vaccine escape behavior against Pfizer and Moderna [1], and although efficacy was shown to be reduced by mutations in trials, both vaccines still successfully result in complete neutralization in of the virus by antibodies in test titres (in brief: you vaccinate people, then draw their blood and expose the antibodies to virus in vitro and see whether neutralization is effective - it was).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/15/the-covid-delt...
The more people that are vaccinated, the shakier his argument becomes.
Covid19 has very real, well documented risks. The common vaccines have very low known risks by comparison. The space for unknown risks shrinks by the day.
That's the danger inherit with being a contrarian. Mostly you end up being wrong. It's a very important role though, to challenge accepted beliefs and create a dialog around them.
1. Not allowing dissenting opinions in the scientific community along with silencing any criticism from both media and big tech. If we are silencing dissenting view points, then are we really getting the truth?
2. Pushing it on pregnant women, kids and healthy youngsters where the risk vs reward isn't in favour.
3. Pushing it on people who have already recovered from COVID. There's no reason for this.
I was hoping that after what's happened in the last 1.5 year (and even past centuries), we would have learnt our lessons on how bad censorship is. But people don't learn their lessons. Bret correctly called it "intellectual authoritarianism".
His YouTube channel's already got strikes and videos taken down and demonetized. He's moving his podcast over to Odysee because of this. His ArticlesOfUnity twitter account (unrelated to COVID) was banned too.
I don't see a problem with the latter. It is almost always the latter.
That tells me nothing will change your mind as it indicates that you still think social media censorship is anywhere remotely fair.
He's completely right about 1 and 3.
This is new. We don't know why the sequence was deleted; the submitter cited "version control" reasons (data was being submitted somewhere else) but then deleted both known copies.
"It turns out that mention of the sequencing project in question (PRJNA612766) also disappeared from China National GeneBank (CNGB) shortly after it was removed from the NIH Sequence Read Archive. (2/n)"
https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1407542296497688580?s=...
literally nothing in this article or in the sequences is indication of a lab leak.
it isn't even particularly clear there is any cover up here, particularly since an article on the sequences was published.
if there's any deliberate suppression it would seem to be to hide the fact that scientists were studying the virus sooner than previously admitted and that they should have raised the alarm earlier.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-bret-weinste...
> I have titled follow the science except when we want you to follow us and we're just going to pretend it's because we're talking science. One of the many executive orders that Biden has introduce President Biden on January 21st requires masks in national parks. [...] News reports on this tend to say masks required inside and outside when in crowded areas like overlooks, which you know, that that would sound reasonable. That sounds like, yes a hundred percent when you're indoors with strangers you should be wearing masks at this point Correct and you know in a really crowded place on overlooks ah okay sure but the actual EO [says...] [{reading of section 1 second paragraph only}] Thank you Zach. So that doesn't actually specify that you're not required to wear a mask if you're away from people outside. And that worries me because everyone who spends any time outside now and you all should be. Especially if you should be in whatever form...
[1] - https://youtu.be/wndotTtBTZQ?t=2799 [2] - https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...
Amazing how the NYT is gripping onto this "bat origin" conspiracy theory for dear life. They present this as fact, then casually mention the actual cause is being investigated.
You'd expect the primary focus of this story to be the fact that virus sequences were "mysteriously deleted"...but instead it focuses on pressing a deceptive dialog that aligns with NYT political agenda. Shows you the current state of the media. Cancel your subscriptions.
I guess we'll have to rely on those crazy Q-anon people to actually investigate why these went missing in the first place.