The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
Taking this as read, either:
Researchers at the lab failed to spot something like this in the wild, in an area where they were looking for this. So, failed to raise the alarm appropriately with acceptable transparency.
or, Researcher work at the lab led to the collection of this from bats and some set of unknown situations led to it getting into the populace. So, caused the disaster they were trying to prevent/research.
Either way it's clear China reacted as-if this was the end of days. Which is understandable given the nature of the work going on inside the lab The fact that everyone involved seems to have thrown up barriers into a sensible discussion on this is unfortunate and renders most conversations mute such that we'll probably never know how bad it was.
Some scientists think otherwise, quite strongly in the opposite direction, it seems..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeW5sI-R1Qg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbbJaaMG7Bs
That jives with another source [1] that explained, amongst other things, that there's genetic evidence covid-19 evolved in animals with intact immune systems, not in a lab.
[0] https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/06/11/cggcgg-the-latest...
Attack their argument, not the location where they said the argument.
As layman, I am powerless to do so.
So I have to go by how much stake the proponents are putting in their argument. A testimony before government puts a lot more of their reputation and what not, at stake, than a blog post on a domain that one control, that has also has no real legal weight.
A person goes like "Here is what my scientist say!" and the others are like "No, you are wrong! Here is what my scientist say".
It is quite funny thing.
But in the link you posted
>https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/06/11/cggcgg-the-latest...
I often found that site to be less trustworthy because of a large part of the beginning of the article dedicated to Ad hominm attack. The most insulting is that they condemn admonim attackes, as and attemt to some kind of virtue signalling, and proceed to do it anyway. This can be consistently observed in articles of similar nature in that site.
Again, since I am not able to judge the article technically, I take this as an indication that the author is extremely biased and is trying to mislead readers.
The virologists describing things at the that level seem to have converged on similar set of possibilities, and the need for additional data to be certain of anything. It's my understanding that they've been saying "man-made impractical if not impossible, probably natural spillover which happens all the time, lab leak is not impossible, need more data" since last spring.
It could be that non-virologists argue about this more than virologists... lol
They had live animals in the lab.
Keep in mind that circumstantial evidence is also evidence: such as the earliest cases happening in a single-digit mile radius from one of the worlds few labs studying gain-of-function in coronaviruses, while bats are hibernating, a thousand miles from the nearest bat colony, and the extraordinary response and threats re calls for investigation from officials.
To me, that far outweighs the idea that some - NOT ALL - researchers have agreed that if there was editing done it was very smooth.
> Of 23 samples that came from Wuhan, only three were type A, the rest were type B, a version two mutations from A. But in other parts of China, Forster says, initially A was the predominant strain. For instance, of nine genome samples in Guangdong, some 600 miles south of Wuhan, five were A types. [0].
The above would imply that the markets in Wuhan were a super-spreader site for covid-19, but not the origin.
Coronaviruses in bats and jumping from bats to humans is incredibly common, with 3% of people they randomly tested in bat cave areas with bat coronavirus antibodies [1], which this source extrapolated to mean that 1-7 million people a year are infected by various bat viruses.
I agree with you that genetic evidence is the strongest evidence we have at this point.
> To me, that far outweighs the idea that some - NOT ALL - researchers have agreed that if there was editing done it was very smooth
Would be interesting if some lab tried to duplicate some of this theorized tricky editing, to prove it could be done.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
[1] https://www.vox.com/2020/4/23/21226484/wuhan-lab-coronavirus...
Highly tendentious claim...
>and it's not unusual for it to take many years to figure these things out.
Is that the case? Are you well-versed in this field? It is my understanding that previous epidemics of this sort in Asia in recent decades a host animal was identified in a matter of months. Are you privy to some valuable knowledge that is not widely dispersed in the literature? Because what you’re saying would seem to contradict it.
There's a lot of good sources saying otherwise, not just this article.
EDIT: My primary sources in this matter have been this reddit post from a virologist [0] (available as a 30+ page pdf), and the strongest (but not the only) genetic evidence he references points to covid originating 600 miles south of wuhan [1], which was also discussed in this writeup by another virologist [2] who also got into detail on the genetic evidence that we do have. Here's another article on how common it is for humans to be infected by bat viruses [3], here's the infectious disease expert from Biden's treansition team saying covid likely jumped from animals to humans [4]. The original article detailed how it took 15 years to find the origin of SARS, and China was secretive with that, too.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
[2] https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3
[3] https://www.vox.com/2020/4/23/21226484/wuhan-lab-coronavirus...
Infections from nature aren’t rare, unfortunately neither are infections from labs. In fact, if you compare the relative few places on earth where this type of viral and pathogen research occurs to all the places humans interact with the natural world, I.e. the whole world, you could say infections coming from labs are actually are far more common occurrence proportionally adjusted. There is even a paper trail of government officials expressing concern about lax safety measures at this particular lab. Well before the world heard of coronavirus.
If it is common for humans to be infected by bat viruses, I don’t see that as a point against the theory that one or more humans working at a lab that analyzes and manipulates bat viruses were infected with a bat virus that then led to a larger spread of the infection outside the lab.
> In this case, with the first known infections occurring in Wuhan
Do you have a source for that? I was seeing sources stating the opposite, based on genetic sequencing of collected samples, like this [0]:
> His research determined that A was the founding variant because it was the version most similar to the type of SARS-Cov-2 (the scientific name for the virus) discovered in bats. Many experts suspect that the virus migrated to humans from bats, probably via some other animal. But he also discovered that the A strain wasn't the predominant type in Wuhan.
> Of 23 samples that came from Wuhan, only three were type A, the rest were type B, a version two mutations from A. But in other parts of China, Forster says, initially A was the predominant strain. For instance, of nine genome samples in Guangdong, some 600 miles south of Wuhan, five were A types.
And this [1]:
> Upon further investigation, the first case detected from December 1st was found to have no connection to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Also, that patient was never linked to any future cases of COVID19. A third of the first 41 cases had no connection to the market, including 3 of the first 4 cases reported. Given this data, we have a new hypothesis: The first human cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection must have happened before December 2019 and likely did not originate at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
I'm not sure of your sources. I went back and re-read your original reply. You stated that "previous epidemics of this sort in Asia in recent decades a host animal was identified in a matter of months". Did you know that it took 15 years to identify the source of SARS, from 2002 until 2017? [2]
I don't know if any of that might change your thinking on this. I've paid the most attention to genetic evidence like the above. Ultimately I think that's what will lead to a definitive answer.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346413716_A_review_...
We know that lab leaks happen. Scary stuff. Even how many lab leaks there are here in the U.S. The paper you link to describes several lab leaks during a period of time while SARS was being widely studied.
Its quite a leap from knowing there are lab leaks to implying that covid, or any other virus, leaked from a lab. There's relevant genetic evidence indicating that the earliest covid-19 cases were 600 miles south of Wuhan [0]. Also it is estimated, based on antibody testing, that there are millions of people every year who get infected with various bat coronaviruses [1].
More/better evidence is needed to prove a lab leak, given that nature does things like this all the time.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
[1] https://www.vox.com/2020/4/23/21226484/wuhan-lab-coronavirus...
Nothing conclusive of that sort in that article.
>All I can say is it doesn't look to me as if Wuhan is the prime candidate, because A exists in other regions of China at that time at possibly a higher frequency."
More like, "some random person ran across a novel virus in the wild, a thousand miles from the nearest bat population, while they were hibernating; and this all just happened to be within a few miles of a laboratory with sketchy safety history that literally studies coronaviruses, and didn't let independent examiners in for a year, even then limiting their time and access severely."
If the argument is:
1) a lab was built in Wuhan that studied coronaviruses, then a global coronavirus pandemic originated in Wuhan
2) Therefore the lab caused the global pandemic
then it is a fallacious argument.[0]
> In a recent paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Forster reported he found three main strains of the virus that he labeled A, B and C.
> His research determined that A was the founding variant because it was the version most similar to the type of SARS-Cov-2 (the scientific name for the virus) discovered in bats. Many experts suspect that the virus migrated to humans from bats, probably via some other animal. But he also discovered that the A strain wasn't the predominant type in Wuhan.
> Of 23 samples that came from Wuhan, only three were type A, the rest were type B, a version two mutations from A. But in other parts of China, Forster says, initially A was the predominant strain. For instance, of nine genome samples in Guangdong, some 600 miles south of Wuhan, five were A types.
It doesn't seem fair to assume this originated in Wuhan. Instead the Wuhan markets may have been the first super-spreader site.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
I see you repeat this all around this thread. Can you show me where it says evidence is for emergence?
There's that word "emerged" (in reference to Wuhan) that you pointed out that I also used in my post. I was replying, with a supporting source, that this is not a certainty.
From the source I quoted earlier [0]:
> "I would be a bit careful about pinpointing a place (of origin), because we don't have many samples from the early phase," he says. "But it seems to me we shouldn't restrict ourselves to Wuhan when looking for the origin."
> Asked if his ongoing research should quash speculation that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab, Forster is circumspect. "It's not black and white. All I can say is it doesn't look to me as if Wuhan is the prime candidate, because A exists in other regions of China at that time at possibly a higher frequency."
I've repeated this because it seems to be a common misconception that the virus first appeared in Wuhan when in fact there is some evidence to the contrary.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
To be frank, that article is speculation, because they assume a certain variant to be the "founding variant" because of its similarity to existing/known virus. It looks like a bit of circular reasoning to me.
> Some people think it's relevant that a new coronavirus emerged next door to a lab working on new coronaviruses
There's no definitive proof of this, either!
Forster admits that his research is not definitive. The comparison of his A and B strains to the nearest known relative, the bat virus, as a founding variant may be wrong. I understand that the main objection is that there were probably intermediary hosts, and that evolutionary mutations and geography don't always line up.
So does that mean it's 50/50 at this point, he may be wrong, but he may be right?
It's enough for me to question Wuhan as the site of the first human infections. It might be. It might not. I think that's the general scientific consensus at this point. We don't know for certain yet, right? That was my point. Perhaps I could have stated it better.
I really don't understand what you are saying. Weren't all the first cases identified around Wuhan?
Just because some other variant was found to be dominant elsewhere a later point in time does not appear to suggest anything contradictory to me.
That's the thing, the early variants Forster identified could have migrated in either direction. Nobody is questioning the differences between his identified A and B variants, just the directionality. The expert consensus seems to be "too early to know for sure".
That's what I'm saying. Forster might be right, and this came from south of Wuhan. Even his critics say that he may not be right, they don't say he's wrong. We don't know for sure.
Can you appreciate the difference? You seem to be saying "this definitely started in Wuhan" when it appears that is not certain.
Unless it’s peer-reviewed and published, I’m not going to count it as evidence. As far as I can see, you’re citing one dude’s speculations. Unless somebody’s followed up on those speculations in the past year, I’m not sure there’s a case here.
> Some people think it's relevant that a new coronavirus emerged next door to a lab working on new coronaviruses
I don't know thing the above statement has been proven yet, and there are competing theories.
I wasn't trying to prove that the virus came from somewhere else, I was simply casting doubt on the statement that the virus came from Wuhan.
Because nobody knows for sure. Right?
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-find-covid-19-virus-was...
“The computer modelling found the virus’s ability to bind to the bat ACE2 protein was poor relative to its ability to bind human cells. This argues against the virus being transmitted directly from bats to humans. Hence, if the virus has a natural source, it could only have come to humans via an intermediary species which has yet to be found,”
I don't think that changes my point in bringing this up, that it is not a foregone conclusion that Wuhan was the location of the first human infections, that in fact there is some genetic evidence pointing in other directions.
> Asked if his ongoing research should quash speculation that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab, Forster is circumspect. "It's not black and white. All I can say is it doesn't look to me as if Wuhan is the prime candidate, because A exists in other regions of China at that time at possibly a higher frequency."
Full disclosure: I've be made aware of papers pointing out that Forster's methodologies may be unreliable, that the gap between bat and human viruses are too large to say definitively which varient of the human virus is older. But I don't think this materially changes the fact that his paper casts a good bit of doubt on Wuhan being the location of the first human infections, showing that there may be evidence to the contrary in his collected and sequenced genetic samples. He admits that himself in the same article:
> "I would be a bit careful about pinpointing a place (of origin), because we don't have many samples from the early phase," he says. "But it seems to me we shouldn't restrict ourselves to Wuhan when looking for the origin." [0]
The source you quote jives with what I have read in other places, that there are still missing pieces to this puzzle.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
At this point, this is not a complete black box, “novel virus.” There is a scientific understanding of the virus. There are known related viruses in the wild, just not anywhere near Wuhan. There are multi-pathway paper trails linking this class of viruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the people working there.
I don’t mean to be too harsh on you, the media environment around all this has been so bizarre, how various waves of suppression have ebbed and flowed. But if you’ve known where to look, are an independent thinker, not one who just repeats what the large media bullhorns are trumpeting, and can connect dots for yourself, there’s been discussion, discourse, evidence gathering of the very likely source of this virus since the beginning.
Not sure why you insist on being pedantic on word choice here. It obviously isn't a novel virus at this point; but it was in 2019 -- or whenever WIV would have found it.
I'd also bet dollars to donuts you have no experience in virology apart from participating in online forums. Which I don't think is any kind of point against you; but it makes it weird when you come out swinging with "you don’t have the faintest bit of background in what you are talking about."
> I don’t mean to be too harsh on you, the media environment around all this has been so bizarre, how various waves of suppression have ebbed and flowed. But if you’ve known where to look, are an independent thinker, not one who just repeats what the large media bullhorns are trumpeting, and can connect dots for yourself, there’s been discussion, discourse, evidence gathering of the very likely source of this virus since the beginning.
I laughed out loud at this. If this is satire it was really well done.
“Faintest bit of background” Meaning, your two competing hypotheses leave out pretty much everything that is known at this point, not an academic credential or such, just a basic reading on the known facts at this point.
“Natural origin” was the leading hypothesis from the start more than a year ago. At this point, there is no evidence for it, there is substantial evidence against it, and the pile of circumstantial evidence for the Wuhan lab being the source is a mile high.
There's a case to be made that "China acted as-if this was the end of days," and western media went along with the narrative. For example, people were not falling dead in the streets from cases of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan China. Those were staged.
Example of the Propaganda in the UK: "CORONAVIRUS IS CAUSING PEOPLE TO DROP TO THE FLOOR IN THE STREET" (subtitle on video, article published January 24 2020), https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/infected-people-see...
I think it likely that SARS-CoV-2 was spreading much earlier than the official narrative allows. Competitors in the Wuhan Military Olympics seem to have caught #EarlyCovid (COVID-19 before it had a name):
"Congress is investigating whether the 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan was a covid-19 superspreader event" - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/23/congress-...
"During the two-week event, however, many of the international athletes noticed that something was amiss in the city of Wuhan. Some later described it as a “ghost town.” As the covid-19 pandemic took hold worldwide in early 2020, athletes from several countries — including France, Germany, Italy and Luxembourg — claimed publicly they had contracted what they believed to be covid-19 at the games in Wuhan, based on their symptoms and how their illnesses spread to their loved ones." (emphasis added)
Australia probably had #EarlyCovid: https://twitter.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1407130748373504002
cui bono - "who stands, or stood, to gain (from a crime, and so might have been responsible for it)?"
While China is certainly a beneficiary of their theatrics, why do the power structures in the rest of the world go along with the con job?
I got the blood test for SARS-CoV-2 immunity last week. If it's positive I would take this as confirming that I did actually have #EarlyCovid (COVID-19 before the lab test was available). I remember an odd headache in the December 2019/January 2020 period. This won't prove I had #EarlyCovid, but it's DATA AND SCIENCE to back up my inconsequential mussing about the Long Con [0] of our era.
@MichaelPSenger stands on his little twitter platform trying to point out the Long Covid Con. For example: https://twitter.com/MichaelPSenger/status/134832483816790835...
There's a lot of servings of crow [1] to go around, but no one in power will call out those most deserving.
When collecting samples from the wild they aren't collecting viable virus, they're collecting samples which have mRNA in them. Those samples just won't infect anyone at all.
While collecting the samples they're of course exposed to the environment and could have gotten sick, but they have dramatically less exposure to the environment that the workers who collect bat guano for fertilizer in China, or the people who clean the cages in the wet markets. It would be highly unlikely that one of them was naturally patient zero when there's a million times more human exposure going on in China. And hopefully they were wearing respirators in the caves and mines since they know the risks.
When it comes to the live virus the problem is that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't look like any other known virus. The difference between it and RaTG13 is still 4% which is like the difference between us and gorillas. It is a few decades of viral evolution and serial passage through many millions of hosts away. So for a lab that was all about finding new sequences and publishing them they would have had to keep this new viral backbone perfectly secret, they would have had to keep this new ACE2-infecting spike protein perfectly secret. Then there would have had to be some novel lab accident since SARS-CoV-2 requires aerosolized particles to be breathed in, you don't get it off surface transmission so the petri dish binding studies don't produce an environment where a lab accident is very possible.
None of this is right. RNA (of which mRNA is just a subtype) is extremely unstable and degrades almost immediately unless carefully protected, which is why viruses need a capsid and why mRNA vaccines need cold chains. You can't just touch some animal and collect raw RNA. Also the only type of thing a virologist could recover from a bat of any interest to them is viable virus because their whole goal is to study actual viruses.
"Then there would have had to be some novel lab accident since SARS-CoV-2 requires aerosolized particles to be breathed in"
There's nothing unexpected about that. These supposedly novel lab accidents happen all the time. Viruses constantly escape from labs. SARS1 has escaped in China many times, and the last foot-and-mouth outbreak in the UK came from a lab that had captured samples from the previous outbreak and kept them replicating.
"petri dish binding studies don't produce an environment where a lab accident is very possible"
Virologists don't only try to grow viruses in petri dishes. Look up serial passage. Animals are frequently used for that purpose. The WIV has been found to have been developing and buying bat cages. It's not really disputed that they were infecting live animals with viruses.
And many samples ARE degraded and only partial reads can be recovered.
> “These samples are not like huge vials of blood,” Rasmussen said. “It’s not like a big Erlenmeyer flask of green liquid.” Researchers would have to grow the virus in cells in order to stand a real chance of infecting people, she added, and it’s difficult to grow viruses from these swabbed samples even if you try to. There’s not much virus in them, and what you get tends to be contaminated with virus-killing detritus. “Technically it’s very challenging to directly isolate virus from field samples from wild animals. So that makes it unlikely that just handling those samples would result in some kind of infection.” Finally, Rasmussen added, the chemical solution that’s used to stabilize the viral RNA for sequencing is a very potent disinfectant its own right.
(from the title article)
PCR amplification means that you can find the needle in the haystack and find enough RNA to construct aa genome out of it. A lot of the time you only get partial reads or don't get the whole genome. There isn't enough viable virus there in order to infect anyone.
"Researchers would have to grow the virus in cells in order to stand a real chance of infecting people"
They were filing patents on designs for bat cages. Videos from inside the WIV before COVID showed live bats. They were doing far more than growing virus in cells, they were growing them in live animals, as virologists typically do.
"PCR amplification means that you can find the needle in the haystack and find enough RNA to construct aa genome out of it"
This would be relevant if virologists were mere lab technicians running PCR tests, but they aren't.
Since viruses can multiply so quickly, when grown in large numbers of lab mice they can mutate relatively quickly into something with a "desirable" trait.
In fact if as you say the virus has passed through millions of wild hosts on its way to being perfectly adapted to infecting human lungs, why has no one found even one of those millions of hosts?
> We confirm that a direct proximal ancestor to SARS-CoV-2 is yet to be sampled, since the closest relative shared a common ancestor with SARS-CoV-2 approximately 40 years ago
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.22.427830v3
And do you have any idea how many animals there are in China? There's 1.4 billion people to start with. There's 100 to 100,000 more vertebrates than people in the world. Take even 50,000 samples and you're still barely scraping the surface.
I wonder what the judicial system would have to say if a murder was committed in my house, and there was evidence that I destroyed the evidence. Also, I don't have an alibi, and have multiple prior felonies. Would that be enough to put me in jail again?
Which is to say, not much. But we have no evidence for the natural origin story, and it's a somewhat strange coincidence that the initial outbreak was near a lab studying these very same kinds of viruses. Granted you might put such a lab in places where there are lots of bat viruses to be found, but that's still a much, much larger area than the city of Wuhan. The closest known wild virus came from a source 800 miles away. Draw a circle over a map of China including both Wuhan and that bat cave and you can see that quite clearly.
Combine that with the fact that Sars cov1 escaped labs in China to infect researchers not once, but at least twice, and the Bayesian calculation swings heavily to the lab leak hypothesis.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
"There are several serious flaws with their findings and interpretation." [1]
"The authors’ misinterpretation of MJNs fosters misconceptions, inaccuracies, and misrepresentations of fundamental phylogenetic principles."[2]
Do you think that these conflict with the statement Forster made that "I would be a bit careful about pinpointing a place (of origin), because we don't have many samples from the early phase," he says. "But it seems to me we shouldn't restrict ourselves to Wuhan when looking for the origin." [0]. They did have a variety of samples, enough to throw doubt on where the origin was, right?
I brought this up just to point out that it is not a foregone conclusion that Wuhan was the location of the first covid-19 cases in humans. Do you think that is an incorrect statement?
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
Personally I'm suspecting an accidental leak of non-engineered (eg, naturally occurring) virus is the most likely cause, if only due to the actions of the CCP. That said, I'm an engineer and have no training in virology or infectious disease studies, so my opinion is basically worthless.
It seems like an interesting leap to assume the lab leak is the most likely cause, when there is so much precedent for natural spillover, even antibody sampling which seem to indicate that millions of people per year may be catching various coronaviruses from bats [1], let alone other mammals like civits, pangolins, etc.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/weekinreview/china-discov...
[1] https://www.vox.com/2020/4/23/21226484/wuhan-lab-coronavirus...
I'm about 80/20 on a lab leak.
https://news.yahoo.com/news/evidence-mounts-wuhan-lab-studie...
That, plus the fact that a novel bat coronavirus originated blocks away from a facility...that studied novel bat coronaviruses.
How much of a coincidence is even possible?
You can't judge them like a Western Democracy with a free press and think that they'd just "come clean".
The government (and party) only acting in their self interest means they'd share and push any explanation that wasn't nefarious. No they don't have to do anything, but an innocent explanation is something they'd benefit from by disclosing.
You're applying the logic of a democracy with a free press, which assumes people will talk about it. You also probably think that China worries about what you think and that they would care to address your concerns, when the 1.4 Billion Chinese citizens is of much greater concerns to them.
This is the same delusion that Western intelligence agencies like the CIA had with Saddam Hussein. Everyone expected that his putting up a fight against the weapons inspectors was a very clear sign that he had something to hide. If he had nothing to hide why not let them in. After the fact we found out he didn't actually have a functioning weapons program. His failure to be open to the weapons inspectors seems deeply weird and irrational from the perspective of a Western Democracy. But he was running a strong-arm totalitarian state. He needed to stand up to the US and the rest of the world for domestic political points.
China doesn't care what you think or what the US thinks. China cares what 1.4 billion Chinese think. China can better control what they think by flat-out suppression of information, because they've built those systems of control.
How widely accepted is the notion that Ebola is a bat virus? The last I heard (which was a while ago) the leading theory was a simian reservoir.
> What we’re left with is this: If the WIV had a secret strain (or strains) at least 99 percent similar to Covid-19, it got that raw material from the wild. That would mean there’s at least one wild virus that’s at least 99 percent similar to Covid-19 somewhere in nature, where humans had contact with it at least once. So far, it hasn’t been found, but it’s got to be out there, whether Covid is 100 percent natural or human-tweaked. So, given that Covid (or its direct ancestor) must exist in nature, it’s more likely that it got out naturally (like SARS and MERS) than that it took an undetectable detour through a secure biolab.
Is this really true? Everyone acknowledges that WIV researchers (quite openly and properly) sought out new coronavirus strains, including expeditions into remote mountains etc. to look for bat caves and take samples from bats that would probably never have otherwise had contact with humans. Everyone acknowledges that WIV cultured cells from its samples and worked closely with them under what were, at least in retrospect, inadequate (BSL-2) safety precautions. For a virus that we're all agreed must originate with a bat in a remote cave somewhere to get to a human, yes this is a more complex route than one lost bat biting a farmer or something. But I'm not sure it's really so much less plausible that humans who deliberately collected, studied, and worked closely with this virus for many man-hours might have slipped up once.
(We will probably never know for sure what happened - another thing that everyone acknowledges is that the PRC government destroyed a lot of potentially relevant evidence. On balance I think a purely natural origin is probably most likely, but I do think that the people who dogmatically shouted down any lab leak theory come off a lot worse than those who kept, and keep, an open mind)
On the route into humans, I'm no expert but as I understand it while these viruses are found in bats the most likely route to humans is via another mammal intermediate such as a pangolin or cat. The reasons for this seems to be that bats are just too small and the virus load too thin to pose a threat to humans. So bat to human is very unlikely, but bat to cat is more plausible, and then cat (etc) to human also more plausible. I've no way to validate if that's accurate.
It really is all numbers games though. All we can say is what is more or less likely, and I think that's all the article is trying to explain.
Some bat species, e.g. flying foxes are not really small and can weigh about 1 kg. Also bats are very strange that they can tolerate high virus loads without getting ill. There is a report that one of the Chinese researcher got infected while collecting samples.
But what evidence is there that this was the case, that they just had normal flu like symptoms, and it was not more serious? What information at all do we have about their cases, and how trustworthy is this information, and why does this have to come out through leaked intelligence reports if China is so sure they have nothing to hide?
We don't know, but there is no burden of proof on one side--even if you would like it to be the side you are not on.
There's no evidence they were even sick
Nobody knows which workers they are or who their names are
The article in the WSJ that really ignited the story about the "three researchers at WIV" is the same guy that in 2002 co-authored the piece in the NYT with Judith Curry about Saddam Hussein's nuclear WMD program.
In 1995 Laurie Garrett warned about how the world could be brought to its knees by another airborne flu-like illness in "The Coming Plague".[1]
The first SARS and avian flu and swine flu, and CJD and mad cow disease were just more warnings that humans were continuing to play russian roulette with the way they were living with an using animals. Virologists knew this and warned about this, but the rest of the world chose to ignore them.
As things return to "normal" for the parts of the world lucky enough to get vaccinated it's likely that we're going to return to sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that this could never happen again, especially if we believe SARS 2 was created by humans instead of being just another natural disease... with probably a bunch more waiting in the wings.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balan...
Here's the thing: if we knew the answer definitively to the lab-leak question, how would it change the pandemic response? The things we need to do to combat the virus remain the same.
If you're fighting a shooting war and you have an explosion in a munitions factory, you don't necessarily decide to stop making munitions, or perhaps even that type of munition because it's too dangerous. You make a judgement that balances the risks.
What an apt analogy!
In scientific research particularly, not having seen results yet doesn't mean we should abandon the research. If gain-of-function research is supposed to help us gain a better understanding of viruses and we're likely to see more pandemic-worthy viruses like SARS and SARS-CoV-2 arise naturally, I think any ban should be considered very carefully.
Virologists competing with each other on who can produce the most infectious virus does not make us safer. Pursing research to prove that small pox can indeed mutate to be infectious via airborne aerosols is reckless, it creates a super charged version of a virus that never evolved naturally despite being a common disease for millennia.
How do we live with and use bats that makes viruses crossing over more likely, though?
No matter how hard you yell it, correlation is not causation (and even when there is causation, the direction of the causation isn't always obvious).
> Of 23 samples that came from Wuhan, only three were type A, the rest were type B, a version two mutations from A. But in other parts of China, Forster says, initially A was the predominant strain. For instance, of nine genome samples in Guangdong, some 600 miles south of Wuhan, five were A types.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/marburg/index.html
(Marburg virus is a variant of Ebola)
https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/researching-eb...
Where else would you research ebola?
Indirectly via animals like minks/civits being farmed. The bats can occasionally infect those animals, when those zoonotic jumps happen there's then a large bioractor of animals in close contact, resulting in a "serial gain of function" experiment to produce a virus which is adapted to those animals and can spread.
Every factory farm is a stochastic virus research laboratory that isn't even BSL-1 trained.
1. Build vaccine manufacturing capabilities. These are as important as other aspects of physical armed force defense. Every country should try to have their own facility given how vaccine supplies are being weaponised by certain powers.
2. Build up hospital capacity and make healthcare affordable. Train more doctors and nurses. In particular nurses are very important and generally require less training, so I would focus on building up a reserve of nurses. Pandemics will only get worse with our aging population. Our beds:human ratio is terrible even in the most advanced countries.
3. Invest in R&D towards breakthrough technologies in testing. There are currently tests like Breathonix's breathe based test that can detect a covid infection in 2 minutes with pretty decent sensitivity.
4. Build a medical reserves corps. This would be a group of citizens who voluntarily are trained in basic first aid.
5. Build more oxygen plants/equip hospitals and ambulances with oxygen concentrators.
6. Conduct drills like the Army does that simulate such an emergency. Practice emergency buying. Keep your medical corps on their toes.
7. Make sure every god damn citizen has a bank account so you can transfer emergency funds into the account in the event of a major economic disruption.
8. Estimate the financial impact and provide backup options for people who work in the service industry. If you were an air hostess for instance, you would have some basic training in medical emergency handling. In the event of a pandemic, your income source will be hurt. However, the government would definitely be scrambling for nurses and contact tracers. These are jobs that could be taken up temporarily during the duration of the pandemic.
9. Work on technolgies and training for deployment of field hospitals.
None of these actions should change irregardless of whether the vaccine is a lab leak or not a lab leak.
I live in Singapore where due to our size and wealth we have been able to manage the pandemic, arguably better than most countries. Its not only the fact that Singapore enforces legislation that helped us. There are many instances where legislation has been broken, and not all cases will be prosecuted. But one thing that worked well is the government treated us well. The moment they announced a "circuit breaker" (not lockdown cause that sounds scary) the government accompanied that with multiple payouts through the year to ensure people have basic sustenance. Further, the prime minister thanked us for complying with orders rather than picking on the few that did not comply with orders. Also we lived though SARS, and every now and then get scares from the Avian Flu so pandemic response is something we have lready been conditioned bu.
For conspiratorial thinking have a look at godlikeproductions.com
countless threads about virus fake, virus harmless, masks don't work, vaccines kill. I am confident that godlikeproductions.com has killed far more people via covid than gab or parler did through "insurrection" or racism. And yet cloudflare continues to provide services to godlikeproductions.com It is almost as if they don't care as long as those dying are not san francisco elites.
Japan honestly has done a terrible job managing the epidemic if compared with the rest of East Asia. It cannot be clubbed with China. In China we do not actually know the amount of compliance as that data is not available to us. I know of at least one protest held in Wuhan during the lockdown. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-10/wuhan-ren...
Even the places that were heralded as amazing are starting to fall. I see Vietnam is on a rise now. Thailand? Who is left?
Freedom is costly. A lot of people died, and I mean, really, "A LOT", and I am talking people at the prime of their lives, for freedoms that we enjoy all over the world.
"muh freedom" indeed.
Edit: ok, you're an arrogant yank, which explains it. Whatever you read about the mystical EU on reddit is 9 times out of 10 total bs.
As for the pandemic not being that bad, we did get lucky in a couple ways: it was possible to rapidly develop many vaccines, and the mortality rate was relatively low. Covid, disturbingly, was sort of the least bad version of a global pandemic, at least compared to the alternative scenarios outlined in warnings (e.g., [0]) over the past several decades.
It's like when some out-of-control company creates a superfund site through gross negligence of industrial byproduct handling and then goes "idk cancer gonna cancer. you can't link that to us!".
After many early cases of tick-borne Lyme disease were first identified around Long Island Sound, it was deemed too much of a coincidence that the U.S. military’s Plum Island animal research lab sat on an island in the sound itself.
When SARS emerged in 2003, so did fears of the severe acute respiratory syndrome’s unnatural origin. “It’s a very unusual outbreak,” bioweapons expert Ken Alibek told the New York Times at the time. “It’s hard to say whether it’s deliberate or natural.” One Russian scientist posited that “the propagation of the atypical pneumonia may well be caused by a leak of a combat virus grown in Asian bacteriological weapons labs.”
And in recent years, efforts to eradicate Ebola have been hobbled by attacks on health care workers motivated, at least in part, by a belief that the virus is man-made.”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab-leak-theory-doesnt-...
This literally happens every goddamn time. Natural explanation is simpler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor
Razor's aren't scientifically rigorous theorems. Feel free to use them but don't argue by them in a public forum, it's disingenuous to truth.
NO it doesn't. Just because some theories LATER turned out to be wrong does not mean that we automatically dismissing this or that theory. It really doesn't matter if the "lab leak theory" is later on definitively discredited. To me thats not the point. The point is whether or not there was any justification for not only ignoring but actively removing it from discourse urgently as was done at a time when no one knew anything for certain.
Any scientist worth his/her salt shouldn't dismiss any theory outright without having hard data to back it up.
- There's strong evidence that it's not bioengineered; scientists used very strong and convincing language here.
- There was initially hope of finding the zoonotic reservoir; scientists used couched language here to subtly detangle a natural virus vs. a natural virus that had adapted to passage in cell culture in a lab, and had priors assuming a zoonotic source would be found.
Guess which language journalists glommed onto.
It makes sense they are so against the idea, no one wants to be associated with/partially responsible for the death of 4 million + people worldwide, nor do they want to have their careers ruined.
The other thing is that this case seems different? It's not some vague accusation based on some xenophobic idea of "The Other" or a geopolitical adversary, or a threatening location -- for instance, a US military rival, or a military base -- but rather a large lab specifically focused on experimental virology research. Even more specifically, it's a lab that has been involved in genetically manipulating closely related viruses to be more virulent. There's been suspicious coverup activity by multiple parties, which in itself is not evidence, but I think raises some "worthy of investigation" rationale, and also has been a serious ethical problem in itself regardless of the actual SARS-CoV-2 origin.
I guess in short, yes, there's always conspiracy theories. But this time is different. I don't really see this situation as comparable to other situations, because the evidence justifying serious consideration is so specific.
Personally, I think the train has left the station on ever figuring out what really was the source. This delay in itself seems suspicious to me but I don't know that I'll ever really feel confident about any particular explanation.
As for "simpler", I think that depends on your subjective opinion. I personally think that the perspective that the "natural explanation" is simpler is naive, and underestimates human behavior, especially in our time.
Take Ebola: is it really irrational for non-white, non-Euroamericans to be suspicious of health care workers given, for instance, what happened at Tuskegee and in the search for Osama Bin Laden? There's a reasonable argument that it is irrational, but also a reasonable argument it's not irrational. Turn it around. What's simpler?
And now in mid-2021, one of the few things that we know for sure is that some of the key scientists in the "It must be natural" camp have ties with the WIV and thus a strong conflict of interest that they did not disclose.
And then of course, there is the fact that China is blocking all research. Is that only China being China?
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/under-fire-lancet-...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
More info on the same topic: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
> "... it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins."
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory...
It never occurred to these people that claiming the virus came from bats because they eat bats there is the more "xenophobic" thing and not the possible lab leak caused due to poor handling.
The next time someone asks us to trust the science, our response should be "okay, but can I trust the scientists?" And if they can be so easily manipulated based on politics, what else are they and the dissenters being silenced on?
Originally, trust in scientists was not required. Because anyone could have repeated the experiment and should see results consistent with what the scientists were saying.
This is where the credibility of science come from and it made people's trust in science grow to a kind of blind faith. But then some point, experiments became too large to be attempted by anyone. This along with entities like "consensus" and "reputation", that can reject any conflicting results, enabled entities that control all of these to have a veto power on scientific truth.
This is our current situation. And I am not sure people recognise the true danger of this situation. This is the kind of power that in holy men held in ancient times, where you could make people to do mass murders and other atrocities in the name of god. So I think it is very dangerous. It might not be that bad as of now, but we are in that path.
One solution to this problem is to recognise and reduce the trust in "science" that is a result such collaboration.
May be we can do it by using a measure of how easily verifiable a result is. For example, if something is verifiable by anyone in this planet, it should have a measure of 1. And if it is only verifiable by a single entity, then it should have a measure of zero. If it is verifiable by a few entities, then it should be somewhere between.
1. Being able to replicate a study is necessary but not sufficient for the conclusions to be correct. Scientists pump out a lot of studies that are just doing stats on public data sets. These should be easily replicable, but the conclusions may still be nonsensical if the analysis isn't done right (and a lot aren't done right), or if the scientific work itself contains fraud or logic errors (and a lot do).
2. There are no incentives for scientists to make their work replicable. Their salary does not depend on it. Their salary isn't going to depend on it, because the scientific institutions are all basically dependent on funding by governments or rich benefactors who aren't paying attention - funding "science" is not a means to an end but the end in and of itself for these groups, and thus they aren't particularly motivated to double check the quality of what gets released.
Consider the above problem: scientists were deceiving people because they thought helping Trump is the same thing as helping "racists". Scott Alexander did a very thorough analysis of this where he pointed out that Trump is not, in fact, racist and a lot of the claims that his followers are don't make any sense [1]. If self-proclaimed scientists can't do even basic sanity checks on their own beliefs like that, you can imagine how much they struggle with more complicated claims.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wo...
May be I didn't make myself clear. I only meant to include actual experiments, in the context. So it will only involve procedures that include collecting raw data from nature.
Mostly agree with the rest of your comment.
Consider that the normal 'street' definition of people doing experiments on nature would mean the following fields aren't scientific:
1. Computer science
2. Economics
3. Climatology
I'd personally be fine with all three being considered un-scientific or even defunded, even though I quite enjoy reading computer science papers. It's more of an engineering discipline in my view and the attempts to make it seem scientific mostly just obfuscate things.
And most people would be fine with economics not being a science.
The live wire is of course climatology. These people don't do experiments, they just compile data and analyze it. Good luck convincing people that climatology isn't a science, even though you may be in the right about it!
Translation: "please shut up about this, it doesn't matter now and we need to get China calmed down, and this talk is making them defensive and therefore uncooperative." The rest of the article is mostly just FUD to try to provide a plausible excuse for ignoring the obvious fact that China is covering up, so that raises the possibility that there is a mistake for them to cover up.
I would prefer the truth to be brought out. But, I have to admit, it may be that the "let's just pretend we don't realize they screwed up" policy is in fact the wiser one.
- Chinese nationalists (although they rarely author publications outside of China) - people who expressed strong opinion on this matter a year ago (based on the information they had then), and now don't like to admit they were wrong even in the face of new evidence. - people who think the lab origin hypothesis is an example of anti-Chinese racism, and therefore take the opposite the side to fight racism.
On the other hand, I would argue that even more people who write on this topic outside of China are biased in favor of the lab origin hypothesis. This is because many groups of people would (consciously or subconsciously) like to use this opportunity to blame the Beijing government for this huge disaster. Examples:
- those who dislike the communist ideology (e.g., those whose loved ones died to wars with the communists, or those who just dislike authoritarianism on general principles) - those of China's neighbors who dislike the Beijing government's aggressive policy towards them (India, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam) - those who dislike the Chinese in general, for racist reasons - Americans who don't want to see China surpass the US in global power
These biases are present even among journalists and scientists, since many of them cannot (or don't even bother trying to) separate their feelings as regular people from their role as unbiased reporters or researchers.
Overall, this means it's very hard to take seriously anything written on this topic. Perhaps I would tend to trust:
- An expert who has been consistently friendly to Bejing but argues in favor of the lab origin hypothesis; or - An expert who has been consistently unfriendly to Beijing but argues in favor the natural origin hypothesis.
One of the rare examples of such people is Jeffrey Sachs, who chairs the Lancet Covid-19 origins commission. He has been at least somewhat friendly to Beijing (well as friendly as you can be in the West without committing a professional suicide). And yet, he says that there's at least enough evidence that both hypotheses are worth pursuing (that is, that it's not 100% obvious that it was a natural origin). Unfortunately, he's not an expert on this topic (he's an economist). Still, I would follow his comments with interest. https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/finding-the-origin...
"Please shut up about zoonotic origins, we don't want to have to worry about factory farming of animals, and for fucks sake could you imagine a world where we had to admit the goddamn VEGANS were right? That certainly can't ever happen. They're already insufferable assholes, could you imagine?"
(p.s. be very, very angry at China so you don't think about the US policy response that wound up with half a million Americans dead -- once you pin fault on someone that allows everyone later to neatly escape any guilt)
> Of 23 samples that came from Wuhan, only three were type A, the rest were type B, a version two mutations from A. But in other parts of China, Forster says, initially A was the predominant strain. For instance, of nine genome samples in Guangdong, some 600 miles south of Wuhan, five were A types.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
I don't think it's beyond reason to think, in a country where officials routinely fudge numbers to avoid jail time, that someone covered their ass for too long and now it's the entire CCP's problem. This article looks like it's just running cover because, idk, GOP evil I guess.
> His stern ethos of self-help and bootstrapping has made him a darling of the so-called intellectual dark web, and a gateway drug for countless budding right-wingers who have stumbled upon one of his lectures on YouTube. (https://newrepublic.com/article/156829/happened-jordan-peter...)
It seems too much of a coincidence that another member of "the so-called intellectual dark web" is perhaps the most recognizable proponent of the Lab Leak Theory. She also writes for The Nation, which is unapologetically leaning pretty hard to the left.
In other words, I question both her motives and authority.
What about the undeniable fact that China (the government) is blocking all international research into the origin of Covid.
Is that only China being China?
It's not like there's a paper trail. The best you can say is that the virus looked very similar between species, so a natural jump is plausible.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
This is such an odd way to discuss an issue of finding the truth. This first paragraph of the article seems to intentionally try to create a sense of sympathy for the Chinese scientists against whom “unsubstantiated allegations” were being leveled. Of course we should all feel bad for well-intentioned people being thrown into the controversy of the pandemic origins, but this is not about shielding people from difficult circumstances—this is about finding truth so that we can minimize the risk that this ever happens again.
My goodness, that statement from the essay is missing critical context. The lab hasn't been independently audited because the CCP refused permission for any independent inspections.
And yes, you are allowed to take into account their refusal to allow inspections when making a judgement on whether the CCP is covering up a lab-leak.
But at the same time I have to wonder how much it matters? It's the difference between telling some researchers to double-check their containment procedures vs. not? I think it's extremely unlikely that this was an intentional attack from CCP on their own people. It wasn't a Uyghur town as far as I know, and even so containment was nearly impossible so it's a dumb idea anyway.
So the only two plausible theories is it was either a natural source or an unintentional lab leak. At the end of the day it doesn't matter that much which one was true, the response is about the same. Maybe on the extreme end the lab could be shut down and its work moved elsewhere. People are wasting an enormous amount of energy arguing over this.
The author presents the mutation history as an argument against a 'benevolent gain-of-function experiment.' But the key word there is 'benevolent.' And it is there on purpose. Let me formalize this: Set(gain-of-function experiments) - Set(benevolent gain-of-function experiments) => Set(non-benevolent gain-of-function experiments).
So if it was a lab leak from a gain-of-function experiment, it is, according to Rasmussen, a lab leak from a biowarfare gain-of-function experiment.
In that sense, I hope that it was a lab leak. It will be better for us humans.
It wasn't uniquely adapted to humans in the beginning. Humans are just more connected species than for example panthers.
As it grew to pandemic levels it spawned mutations slightly more adapted to humans.
Seems wrong.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92388-5#Abs1
>Conspicuously, we found that the binding of the SARS-CoV-2 S protein was higher for human ACE2 than any other species we tested, with the ACE2 binding energy order, from highest to lowest, being human > pangolin > dog > monkey > hamster > ferret > cat > tiger > bat > civet > horse > cow > snake > mouse.
>>These findings show that the earliest known SARS-CoV-2 isolates were surprisingly well adapted to bind strongly to human ACE2, helping explain its efficient human to human respiratory transmission.
There's really no wonder that virus that spreads through human population is slightly better adjusted to humans than animal species its ancestor was infecting.
It's the case of water in the puddle surprised how well the puddle shape fits the water shape.
What I'm saying is that this virus is sufficiently general that it can infect multiple species with high efficiency and if hamsters were more densly connected than humans it could have been a hamster pandemic before it would become human pandemic.
This virus fits us well but not uniquely well.
This does not make sense to me, because I think the COVID virus was pretty stable for a long time (being an RNA virus and all that, I don't know). So the idea is that it was optimally adapted during the time of the jump to humans (of course it could have got the perfect mutation right at the time of the jump, but the chances of that happening is astronomically small), and the optimal human transmission was not acquired later when it started circulating in humans.
So the only way to have this happened is if it was optimized in a GoF research in a lab.
It easily infects species other than humans.
It's stable but not that stable. The variant that spread out of China was already different than the variant that initially caused trouble in China. Since then we got few new variants and that's only counting the ones that spread enough for us to notice.
There are no perfect things in biology. All things are just good enough. This virus was just good enough at spreading between people that given our connectivity it spread pandemically.
If the virus was was somehow uniquely well adapted to humans (which it isn't) it would be still more probable that its ancestor was just an unknown human coronavirus (other than 4 that cause some common colds) that we haven't discovered yet, because it spread completely asympthomatically. And the mutation it acquired made it slightly lethal not more infectious.
I don't think that happened because then why would pangolins be better suited for it than dogs, although dogs and cats being high on the list is quite curious.
And I'd be careful about reasoning that if I can't imagine any other way something could happen then it must have happened exactly the way I think it happened. It's good to be aware that no matter who I am and what I know, my ignorance always exceeds my knowledge and imagination.
To be frank, no one said so.
>And I'd be careful about reasoning that if I can't imagine any other way something could happen then it must have happened exactly the way I think it happened
No one is doing that either. Just that the chance of alternative is astronomically small..
There's nothing unexpected about Covid being infective because spread in humans is why we took note of it and are currently discussing it. That is, we're discussing P(human infectiousness | human epidemic). If we _randomly selected_ a virus from amongst _all_ viruses, then yes, P(human infectiousness) would be expected to be low, but we're not doing that. The former is plain selection bias (by which I mean the technical error; I'm not accusing you of bias).
We need to know so we don’t do it again.
I’m not concerned about whether the car driver was drunk, I’m more concerned about how the paramedics responded to the crash.
Things have changed since Ebola 50 years ago and Sars1 20 years ago. For one thing, millions of dollars have been invested in gain-of-function research. There are many more labs, many times more investigators and projects running. These scientists are working to create the characteristics in viruses that make them more deadly and more infectious.
Also, today powerful new bio-engineering tools are available, in the past 10 years especially. Today the situation is different, since there are now new pathways for a deadly virus to come into being.
I don't think anyone can argue that the number of dangerous viruses being studied in laboratories around the world is the same now as it was 20 years ago.
If you want to argue against a lab-leak today, you really need to argue that the BSL-rated laboratories are perfectly leak-proof.
Why has the lab not been independently audited? If I was going to make a case against someone making an error, saying "well, that group said they didn't make an error" seems like a bad argument.
> The first human case of Covid could have been infected hundreds of miles away, perhaps closer to the horseshoe bat caves of southern China.
Have we found such a person?
> You can get on the fast train in Wuhan and be in Guandong Province, the home of the original SARS outbreak, in under four hours.
If someone had been in Guandong, and taken a train to Wuhan, it seems to me that the early cases would not have been so concentrated in Wuhan, for two reasons: 1) if Wuhan is really all that accessible by different means of transportation, you'd expect people would just as easily take it from Wuhan to other places, and 2) presumably, the fast train doesn't just stop in Wuhan (Google says it's 1000 km away), meaning an infected person on the train could easily have infected someone else on the train who got off in between. Honest question: is that not how the spread of disease would work?
> There is no evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or anyone else, ever had any strain that similar to Covid-19.
Again, that's what we're trying to figure out. You can't take the thing we're trying to figure out as evidence one way or the other, that's Begging the Question (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question)
> Given that Covid (or its direct ancestor) must exist in nature, it’s more likely that it got out naturally (like SARS and MERS) than that it took an undetectable detour through a secure biolab.
I don't understand this jump. Most people I've read arguing that the lab leak theory is possible agree that there must be some base virus in nature. The question is, what is the more likely path from that natural virus to the COVID outbreak, through a lab or through some other animal (or animals)? I understand the argument that we didn't find the transmission chain for SARS or MERS or Ebola for years, but why does asserting it started in nature lead to the conclusion it therefore had a natural path? This again seems like the author is trying to prove a conclusion using the conclusion.
> The fact that China is being secretive about Covid-19 isn’t evidence for any particular theory.
When SARS came out, I don't remember the Chinese government blaming Italian frozen food or athletes at an international athletics competition for SARS. I don't remember them promising people that it's not transmittable between humans, or that it's not a big deal. I think simply saying "China is being secretive" is not looking at the whole picture.
> All theories of the origins of Covid-19 should be investigated, including lab origin theories. We should go wherever the science takes us.
This seems right to me. We can't make bricks without clay though.
There's genetic evidence that the origin was 600 miles south of Wuhan [0]:
> His research determined that A was the founding variant because it was the version most similar to the type of SARS-Cov-2 (the scientific name for the virus) discovered in bats. Many experts suspect that the virus migrated to humans from bats, probably via some other animal. But he also discovered that the A strain wasn't the predominant type in Wuhan.
> Of 23 samples that came from Wuhan, only three were type A, the rest were type B, a version two mutations from A. But in other parts of China, Forster says, initially A was the predominant strain. For instance, of nine genome samples in Guangdong, some 600 miles south of Wuhan, five were A types.
And this [1]:
> Upon further investigation, the first case detected from December 1st was found to have no connection to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Also, that patient was never linked to any future cases of COVID19. A third of the first 41 cases had no connection to the market, including 3 of the first 4 cases reported. Given this data, we have a new hypothesis: The first human cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection must have happened before December 2019 and likely did not originate at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
Well, remember back in February 2019 when China said Covid was basically over and capped their infection count at about 60k? While every other country reported the truth in the millions, they just said ‘no, it stopped at 60k (as of today less than 100k still)’.
They are liars, that’s why there’s no independent investigation. China believes it deserves automatic respect and the rest of the world should take it’s word for it. They do not accept that many countries work hard to earn a modest reputation of integrity.
> Last spring, the media accurately reported the scientific consensus that Covid (also known as SARS CoV-2) is a natural virus [...]
To be pedantic: No, lady, Covid is the disease, and the virus is SARS-CoV-2. Like AIDS and HIV (disease and virus respectively).
It's a little thing, but accuracy in journalism is still important (or is it just me?).
1. There wasn't a consensus, some scientists disagreed
2. A natural virus can leak from a lab
Also, a reminder that biosecurity incidents are common, there were about 17 in the last decade [0]. Just (natural) SARS-CoV-1 leaked from the lab 4 times [1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
Consensus means "general agreement", it doesn't mean unanimous.
"Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas entertained a particularly fringe version of this last variation, speculating that China might even have attacked Wuhan with a biological weapon"
She actually provides a link here, which goes to a Twitter thread [1] where Cotton starts out by saying the exact opposite:
"@paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus: 1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market). 2. Good science, bad safety (eg, they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred). 3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach). 4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in). Again, none of these are “theories” and certainly not “conspiracy theories.” They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence, if the Chinese Communist Party would provide it."
In other words, merely enumerating every hypothesis that had been proposed by anyone got turned into "Republican thinks China might have attacked its own city". That is a blatant mis-representation of his position and shows the journalist is willing to manipulate her reader. Moreover this was in February 2020, long before the recent evidence of a lab leak became available, and thus Cotton's openness to the lab leak theory looks rather prescient in hindsight.
[1] https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202139232292866
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
I do think the Chinese were studying this virus in the lab, not engineering it, but studying it. I do think it was the result of a lab accident, a technician tried to cover up an accident/carelessness in order to avoid getting punished or fired, normal human behavior.
HOW DID THE CHINESE KNOW THEY HAD A NEW VIRUS WHEN THEY ONLY HAD A HANDFUL OF CASES????????
Covid-19 presents like the flu, without a test you don't can't know if it's the flu or Covid-19, but the Chinese knew they had a new virus in late Nov, early Dec when there were only a handful of cases. HOW DID THEY KNOW???
The only way to tell if you've got something new is because: a) unique symptoms b) a statistically significant increase in cases c) a statistically significant number of deaths
In the early day of Covid-19 you had none of these present, with only a handful of cases NOBODY WOULD HAVE SUSPECTED ANYTHING WAS AMISS.
I can see it now, "Hey, I'm thinking that we have these flu cases, in flu season, and there isn't anything remarkable about the cases but I think they are the result of a new virus, so we should raise a red flag and swing the government into action." Highly unlikely.
There is one other way that you know you've got something new: d) you know something that no one else knows, like there was a lab accident.
How did the Chinese know they had something new, when they had no evidence or indication that something new was circulating?
This is the only question that needs to be answered. Nothing else. If there isn't a reasonable and logical answer to how the Chinese knew they had a new virus with only a few cases that looked just like the flu, and no other information, then it stands to reason they knew something else.
What I think happened.
A lab tech had an accident or was careless, and exposed themselves to the virus they were studying in the lab. The tech didn't report the incident because they didn't want to be punished or fired. The tech incorrectly assumed that everything was fine, but then got sick. Then when some other lab workers got sick, the safety people at the lab got involved and they learned what really happened, and they pushed the panic button, quietly. The rest is history.
IMHO, this discussion about the lab is a distraction from the real discussion we should be having. The one about suppressing discussion between doctors who are merely reporting on what they're seeing and delaying the worldwide response as a result.
Even today the CCPs official numbers on COVID infections in China are extremely unlikely. They claim to have had fewer cases than even New Zealand. Clearly there is political influence being exerted over the official figures.
Looking at the article, it also uses weak arguments to support its thesis: "She first takes aim at the popular version of the lab leak theory that posits that Covid was taken from nature and escaped in its wild form. The problem with that scenario, she told me, is that a swab from a bat contains very little infectious virus. Each bat weighs less than half an ounce, and each sample is basically a Q-tip swiped briefly over a bat’s mouth or anus. These samples are stored in vials in the freezer; they’re not likely to spill or leak, the way disaster movies have primed us to suppose."
The real-world counter-argument to this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marburg_virus
Lab leaks do happen, and all researchers in those labs do have an interest to play down the danger and cover things up to continue working.
It's not like ebola where single micro droplet is enough.
We know that they were doing gain of function research, but that only works with live viruses. So they must have some method to cultivate the virus. When they can do that small size of the initial sample is no longer relevant.
There are a lot of coincidences that make a lab leak a real possibility. It is possible those are all coincidences and the virus is of natural origin, but it is also possible that those are not coincidences and the virus originates from a lab leak.
Most likely we will never know since virus origin investigations are difficult to begin with, and China has no motivation to fairly cooperate in this investigation. It also is not actually important, since it is extremely unlikely the virus was intentionally released.
For political reasons it is better to go with the natural origin story and avoid stirring things up - there is no gain to be had from pressing the issue.
You say this as if you know that they're purposefully not being careful or something.
I have no time whatsoever for the nutters who say the lab leak is definitely correct or has been proven. Likewise I have no time for people who say the lab leak was not possible and should not be considered. In both cases there's a big chunk of motivated reasoning, and quite possibly wilful ignorance going on IMHO.
It was created because people thought it was weird that a novel bat coronavirus originated blocks away from a research facility specializing in novel bat coronaviruses.