Is this proof of lab leak lies? | Hacker News Reader

Is this proof of lab leak lies?

unherd.com

89 pointsllimos142 comments

There may be proof in there that somebody lied about something related to the lab leak. In this case, of course funding is a trail of breadcrumbs, and even if there were no relation, a coverup would be likely. Because it makes the funders look bad at least.

Real proof that COVID-19 originated in one of the Wuhan labs will probably never be found, there was time enough for a coverup of those facts.

But in any case, whether lab leak or not, a few things have become crystal clear imho: Research must really strongly improve its safety around possibly infectious materials. Even researchers working with the stuff consider a lab leak a real possibility. BSL-1 is practically a clean kitchen and BSL-2 is any common hospital before the current Corona measures. Even BSL-3 and -4 facilities are located in habitated urban areas. Researchers freely enter and leave without quarantine, have contact with an unsuspecting population, go to normal hospitals, infect other patients there. Viruses are much much more dangerous than radioactive or chemical materials. A tiny radiation or chemical leak will have tiny consequences. A tiny virus leak can still infect all of humanity.

Also, I'm not qualified enough to comment on whether gain-of-function research is necessary and useful. But I would strongly suggest that given the possible consequences, together with the aforementioned woefully inadequate safety measures, it should be reevaluated. And confined to lonely islands at the end of the world with monthly airdropped supplies, entering or leaving only once a year after destruction of all samples and two months quarantine.

> Also, I'm not qualified enough to comment on whether gain-of-function research is necessary and useful. But I would strongly suggest that given the possible consequences, together with the aforementioned woefully inadequate safety measures, it should be reevaluated.

But people have been saying that for at least a decade. There was a moratorium in the USA for a couple of years. The EU produced a lot of guidance. It was viewed as enough and it might have been in a world where international actors are reasonable, transparent and act in good faith. The issue is that COVID have definitely proved that it is not the world we currently live in and some actors are part of the international community in names only.

In that case, diplomatic pressure and travel and trade restrictions would be necessary. One would have to treat the whole irresponsible country harboring an unsafe lab just like that unsafe lab.

I think this is also the real problem around Fauci's financing deception: He knowingly financed unsafe research in China, which not just gave them money but also the implicit acknowledgement that they are doing it right.

1. can you define "unsafe lab"?

2. is so, and if such a lab is found in the USA, do you really see a future where Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Mexico, and Brasil stop buying Microsoft products and Apple toys?

Come now, let's be serious.

1. An unsafe lab is one, where pathogens can possibly get out with a non-negligible probability. And where those pathogens are infectious and deadly enough to be of concern.

2. Microsoft products don't carry biological viruses, because most of them are software. Microsoft hardware comes out of China I'd guess. Apple also doesn't produce most hardware in the US. Besides, computer hardware can be sterilized. Biological matter, like food and drink are more of a concern. And there is already a lot of regulation around those, e.g. you cannot get imported German sausage or French cheese in the US, and you cannot get US chicken in the EU for those reasons. You also cannot travel anywhere from an Ebola-affected region for example.

I am very serious. But I'm really not sure what you are getting at.

Thanks for answering. Let's address point 1), now that we have a definition:

1. Unsafe labs:

a) Since 1903, the vast majority of known bio-lab incidents have been in the USA and then the next largest group is their western allies;[1] so any solution must address this, no?

b) this 2105 USA Today article describes just 10 recent bio-lab incidents, including this gem:

"In November 2013, a University of Wisconsin researcher in an ABSL-3 punctured skin with a needle loaded with H5N1 avian influenza. The researcher was quarantined for seven days in an empty home."

or this:

"Between April 2013 and September 2014, eight individual mouse escapes were reported at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill."

or this:

"Centers for Disease Control and Prevention inspectors and University of Michigan officials found materials labeled as Brucella, a select agent, outside the BSL-3 containment area in April 2012."

And as a finale [3]:

"Scientists inadvertently switched samples designated for live Ebola virus studies with samples intended for studies with inactivated material. As a result, the samples with viable Ebola virus, instead of the samples with inactivated Ebola virus, were transferred out of a BSL-4 laboratory to a laboratory with a lower safety level for additional analysis."

There are (literally) hundreds more examples.

So having established that unsafe labs abound in the USA (per your definition), let's move to point 2 in your suggestion: "diplomatic pressure and travel and trade restrictions "

What possible restrictions of any kind do you possibly see any ally of the USA enforcing in any future "world-wide, no-execptions-to-the-rule agreement" scenario, given that they already tolerate all this incompetence?

And that's just the Western allies. Do you see any third-world, dollar-dependent, tourist economy placing any restrictions on American tourists because a rate escaped from a lab?

So, for the sake of brevity, did you really mean: "the USA and its allies must put diplomatic, travel, and trade restrictions on China?"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/05/29/some-recent-u...

[3] [https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/human-error-in-high-bioconta...

Well, obviously China is suspected of having let Covid-19 escape, so of course this is first and foremost about restrictions that affect China..

What are you getting at?

Also, of course there are accidents in any lab, most of them just reportable incidents. Why are there almost no reportable incidents from Chinese labs? Usually because either they are not using those labs (unlikely) or because they don't do incident analysis and reporting. That the list contains almost no incidents from China means quite the opposite of what you are suggesting: It means that China regularly covers up even very small mishaps such as a mislabeled sample of something relatively harmless. Just stuff that cannot be covered up will be reported (such as the few thousand people infected with Brucella somewhere...)

Does that mean that all other labs are safe? Certainly not, and I'd suggest you read my other comments about improving safety. But quarantining a researcher after a needle puncture is the right thing to do. Recognizing and reporting the escape of lab animals is a sign of there being at least some amount of oversight. China quite obviously doesn't have that, because noone in their right mind will believe that a lab never has a reportable incident.

So yes, I'd suggest starting at the most unsafe labs, where quite probably Covid-19 originated, and improving those, e.g. by closing them. And rebuilding them somewhere safer, to a far higher standard. Same for the rest of the world's labs, of course, but priority is on those having started global pandemics in the past...

It’s just whataboutism. The person you’re responding to has a long post history defending China and shitting on the US.

Also the research mentioned in the article was commissioned and funded by the US, and covered up by US bodies until they were forced by a court to release documents. Any action against dangerous research needs to be global really.

>So having established that unsafe labs abound in the USA (per your definition), let's move to point 2 in your suggestion: "diplomatic pressure and travel and trade restrictions "

There's a key difference going on there, and you're sort of making the poster's point. The United States is genuinely transparent about as evidenced by your ability to actually find write-ups, and that processes are sufficiently audited to improve on process with. China hasn't done that and has actively stonewalled international cooperation by destroying or otherwise covering up any information vital to characterizing the nature of the early days of the pandemic.

So you're creating a false dilemma. Yes. Unsafe labs happen. How seriously is the issue taken, and with what level of transparency and scrutiny and preventive due diligence are these inherently unsafe ventures undertaken with?

That's more what I think the poster is getting at. Not a simple binary yes/no unsafe labs, but track record of safely and transparently handling lab escapes.

I upvoted you for this reply. There is definitely some quantitative difference between how the US handles its laboratories which was absent from my comment.

Thank you, your phrasing is far better and clearer than mine.

> Researchers freely enter and leave without quarantine, have contact with an unsuspecting population, go to normal hospitals, infect other patients there.

Just to be clear, which/what labs are you referring to here ?

All of them. Even a BSL-4 lab is just a day job. In the evening, you get out of the lab area through the airlock, take off the suit, shower and go home to your family. After shopping and a quick beer of course. Followed by going to the movies.

We probably couldn't realistically conduct research under conditions where you had to live in confinement for the duration of research with weeks long cooling off periods between visits to the real world. You simply wouldn't be able to find personnel to sweep the floors let alone bright motivated researchers.

There is a long waiting list for research at the south pole. Also, if that research is important enough, it can be sufficiently high-paid, so that people willing to do it can be found. If there isn't enough money for that, that research is obviously not important enough. If it isn't important enough to spend that money on, it also isn't important enough to justify the risk to society.

Interestingly enough, some decades ago there was an outbreak of common cold virus at a British Antarctic research base. The catch: at the time of the outbreak the researchers had been isolated there for months, with no contact with the outside world. It was investigated and no origin for the infection could be found. No new supply crates had been opened, for example.

Quite what this implies for COVID is unclear, because the field of epidemiology seems to have forgotten about this incident and never investigated deeply. It's worth noting though that there have been repeated cases of outbreaks in New Zealand that couldn't be traced back to any contact with anyone who had crossed the border. Personally I suspect that SARS-CoV-2 can be carried by the wind and maybe in the upper atmosphere - that has certainly been asserted for different viruses in the past - but that's heresy at the moment because it would provide a theoretical reason why lockdowns and mask mandates don't seem to have any effect.

Anyway, not really directly related to your point, but the mention of isolated research bases reminded me of it.

It seems vastly more likely that the virus lied dormant upon supplies that were kept cold and was by happenstance later carried back into the warm than to imagine it carried across thousands of miles in the upper atmosphere.

Even if it were possible for someone to infect you from thousands of miles away with no intermediary save the wind it wouldn't be likely nor would it change the average dynamic where masks and lockdowns decrease spread in far more normal scenarios.

A lot of arguments against public health measures seem to bear a strong resemblance to yours. It is formulated like bullet proof vests don't stop hellfire missiles ergo we should stop wasting our time and money making swat team members deal with the sweat and discomfort of wearing vests!

It's only tolerable as an argument between people who have already decided that such protective measures are bad. Had the same sort of argument been made on a topic which they found controversial their reason should immediately have suggested 7 different counter arguments.

It seems like dubious reasoning to imagine that individuals spending 90% of their time in their homes and going out to the grocery store once a week wearing masks or not at all with curbside should spread disease just as much as when people mix normally.

The investigators did look at the fomite/supplies idea but couldn't find any records or recollections of new supplies being opened.

"Even if it were possible for someone to infect you from thousands of miles away with no intermediary save the wind it wouldn't be likely"

Isn't this just an assumption based on your pre-existing intuitions? How do you know?

"nor would it change the average dynamic where masks and lockdowns decrease spread in far more normal scenarios."

Lockdowns and masks don't decrease the spread. That's the point, that's why alternative explanations are necessary. Go look at case graphs for regions where you aren't familiar with the local laws, and try to draw a line on the graph where mask mandates/lockdowns were brought in or removed. You can't do it, I've tried. The graphs are always basically smooth and organic looking except for measurement artifacts. If these tactics worked there should be sharp, clearly artificial jumps and drops in case numbers 3 days after a mask mandate / lockdown is brought in or cancelled but that never happens. In fact in the UK, their "freedom day" where mandates were cancelled was followed three days later by a sharp DROP in cases. That's the exact opposite of what you'd expect. It doesn't mean anything though, it's just a funny coincidence, as becomes clear when you look at a wider span of data.

Now you're claiming that viral spread on the wind is incredibly unlikely. Epidemiologists do not agree. They agree for SARS-CoV-2 but for other epidemics in the past this idea has been taken very seriously and is the subject of entire research papers. Even Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London, Mr Lockdown himself, based his models for foot-and-mouth disease on the assumption of long range windborne transmission. Ferguson has never claimed those models and understandings were wrong, in fact after the event he claimed victory (the tactic that time was mass killings of farm animals). Somewhere between 2000 and 2020 his team lost interest in windborne transmission without ever explaining why. It's not for microbiological reasons. No epidemiological predictions have any link to microbiology.

You're claiming motivated reasoning by me, but that isn't true. At the beginning I thought lockdowns and masks would work too. I was very surprised when they very clearly had zero effect on case curves, and very angry when lots of people decided to simply ignore that fact for what looked like ideological reasons (like loyalty to the academic "expert" classes). I know about these cases where airborne transmission was taken seriously exactly because after the 6ft droplet model failed to generate useful predictions I went digging to try and figure out why.

We know it wasn't engineered and wasn't due to gain of function. SARS-CoV-2, RatG13 and RmYN02 evolved from a common ancestor decades ago:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33500788/

If SARS-CoV-2 was a spike spliced onto a backbone it wouldn't look like they evolved from each other (similar to a photoshopped picture with different shadows and noise).

It also didn't arise from serial passage since the distance is large enough that the 1,000 base pair difference would take passage through many, many millions of animals, not something that could be accomplished in a lab. 30-50 years of evolution is an awful lot of serial passage, and only nature can accomplish that large of a serial passage experiment.

It is also very unlikely that the lab found SARS-CoV-2 or the immediate ancestor and cultured the live virus without publishing the sequence. They did culture WIV-1 and used the WIV-1 backbone, but they also published the sequence years before they did that and did it all in the open. That's the reason why people know about that. Before the pandemic there would be no reason to keep a SARS-CoV-2 sequence secret, and they earned their living by sequencing sarbecoviruses and publishing them. And still its unclear how a lab leak would happen with this virus, since you need to both culture the live virus and somehow aerosolize it and snort it in -- as we've learned it doesn't transmit by surfaces and restaurants doing deep cleaning after COVID issues are just engaging in sanitation theater.

The actual bioreactors where it formed are all sitting right out in the open. All the bat caves across China, all the factory farms which have tightly packed intermediate animal hosts. All the humans interacting with those animals through factory farming or collecting bat guano for fertilizer. All the mixing that occurs by those animals being transported across china. There's a million times more serial passage and animal-animal or animal-human contact happening right out in the open.

Not true. We know it didn't come from any viruses that have been published but the Chinese have been pretty diligent at taking down databases and hiding information and there are almost certainly many viruses they have that we don't have the details of that they could have used.

I have to say the data hiding is pretty suspicious. If it was a natural virus it would be useful to have a look at WIVs extensive research on bat coronaviruses and have a look at the other nine they took from the Mojang mine along with RaTg13. If they have nothing to hide why hide that stuff as soon as we have a pandemic that it would be relevant for?

Well lets be clear then that there is zero published evidence and all that remains is a perfectly executed cover up (which is both unprovable and unfalsifiable).

I'd say a fairly shoddy cover up. These things are not unknowable - someone could leak the database. Someone could find the natural source if it came from nature and so on.

While they have taken down the WIV database there is quite a lot of information in other papers and PhD thesis that came out before the outbreak and so were not censored. For example this stuff https://mobile.twitter.com/ydeigin/status/142816212306298881...

That's a preprint by two "independent researchers" that they apparently had to submit to the physics arxiv because medrxiv wouldn't take it, which is discussing pangolin sequences done by a lab in Guangdong. I don't know why you think that has any relevance to the WIV database.

And until someone actually leaks some information, you still have zero information. You believe on faith that it must exist. There's no point in arguing with you about it. At least its obvious now that the lab leak hypothesis is starting to resemble a religious belief.

This really doesn't really feel like it tells the whole story. A central claim in the article quotes Rand Paul's exchange with Anthony Fauci, but read this quote from The Intercept:

'That video was edited by Paul’s staff so that it ends before Fauci responded to the senator’s harangue by saying, "I totally resent the lie that you are now propagating, senator, because if you look at the viruses that were used in the experiments... it is molecularly impossible... to result in SARS-CoV-2."'

https://theintercept.com/2021/07/27/covid-anthony-fauci-rand...

> "it is molecularly impossible... to result in SARS-CoV-2."

That's sound ominous, but I am curious, how could it be "molecularly" impossible?

My understanding is that as there are several other Sarbecovirus (including SARS-COV-1), what could in principle ("molecularly") forbid one of them to mutate to SARS-COV-2?

Yet I am not a scientist.

Thanks!

There was an episode the TWiV podcast a few months ago where they discussed the biology-based evidence for why SARS-COV-2 wasn't made in a lab. I think it was this one: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-762/ One nice thing about the podcast is that because they're scientists by personality they tend to focus far more on the biology of it, which I really appreciate. I listened to it at the time, but I don't remember what they said, to be perfectly honest.

As a biologist (sorry for the appeal to authority, but it matches the tone of this thread), the evidence against a natural origin appears absolutely staggering.

You have a viral clade that completely descends from a single introduction event inside a major city. The virus does not undergo a period of host adaptation, but instead infects many millions over nearly a year before phenotypic changes are observed. This is simply fantastic. I know of no case where a virus jumped species without a period of adaptation to the new host. The fact that the entire clade has a root in October 2019 (and we can see this even because the first viruses sequenced differed by only one or two mutations from their common ancestor) indicates that there was not slow community spread before the initiation of the pandemic period. There is no weaker progenitor virus.

Considering as well the focus of research labs within the exact city where the pandemic arose makes any argument against the laboratory origin of the virus seem extremely weak. How does a serious and non-conflicted scientist explain all of these ultra-improbable coincidences?

> sorry for the appeal to authority

You don't need to apologize for your knowledge and experience. We are not engaged in a roman-style rhetoric class where the mandate is to build all arguments upon a set of rules we never agreed to.

The wikipedia list of common logical fallacies is not a guideline to rational discourse in the 21st century.

As far as I'm concerned, apologizing for the appeal to authority signalled that he was open to being criticized and challenged by layman, rather than choosing to belittle those who disagree with him without having his knowledge and experience.

In short, he demonstrated that he wasn't an "elitist".

An appeal to authority is only inherently invalid insofar as the authority claimed is irrelevant authority or used to paper over weaknesses in the actual argument. Forums not entirely overrun with imaginary internet doctors and cranks can probably start with the polite presumption that you are actually a biologist and proceed with reasonable discussion from there without further ado.

I agree with you for the begining, but this part:

> The fact that the entire clade has a root in October 2019 (and we can see this even because the first viruses sequenced differed by only one or two mutations from their common ancestor) indicates that there was not slow community spread before the initiation of the pandemic period. There is no weaker progenitor virus.

is hard for me to understand.

Rural China in not rural USA. At all. I've hiked for a month in the Appalachian, another one in the Sierras, and spent two month in rural China. Rural china is as i used to imagine rural Africa.

Rural china have two particularities: young, probably younger than you imagine. You have villages with a median age of 15, with no middle-aged inhabitants. And enclaved. You have villages where you have to use a jeep (that the village do not own) to get to.

Is it possible, in you opinion, to have an early SRAS-Cov2 infecting a village, festing on the people for weeks or even months, then a parent coming back for his yearly vacations, getting infected, then going back to work in Wuhan?

I'm not a biologist, so i don't understand how viruses works, but i _know_ rural China (and rural europe, and rural USA.)

HIV is believed to have first infected humans in the 1920s where it traveled up the Congo before arriving in Kinshasa. From there it radiated across Africa carried by truckers. Like you say, I haven't seen evidence to rule out rural circulation before arriving in Wuhan. Granted, I don't think this is the most likely series of events, but the GoF lab leak hypothesis is lacking support.

The documents that the article is based on demonstrate the lab was doing GoF experiments to infect humanized mice with chimeras based on bat coronaviruses and got a grant to do further such research starting in 2019. And lo - we get a break out of something looking like a bat based chimera that infects human cells in 2019. Bit of a coincidence there.

This process would leave traces that we would have detected by now. If this happened, we should see viruses that sit outside the Wuhan-rooted SARS-CoV-2 clade but are otherwise the same. The rate that this happens would be low, but it would have been observed. I would expect that the epidemic required to spread from rural to urban regions would be large enough to throw off daughter strains that would have been circulating after the main outbreak was discovered. These would have been detected by the mobilization to find the origins and scope of the pandemic. Of course we can make stories about a perfect chain of transmission leading from a bat cave in southwest China to a major population center, where each step never resulted in obvious illness or community spread. I also enjoy science fiction. Some things make for nice stories but involve staggeringly improbable series of coincidences. And if the same virus (remember: thanks to it's error correcting mechanisms it doesn't change very fast) were let loose in another community, why would it not take up residence there? We would have to explain why people in Wuhan and the rest of the world were so much more susceptible to a virus that was completely wiped out along it's entire chain of transmission from probable animal host to human.

>> Of course we can make stories about a perfect chain of transmission leading from a bat cave in southwest China to a major population center, where each step never resulted in obvious illness or community spread. I also enjoy science fiction.

Yes, the part "where each step never resulted in obvious illness or community spread" is where i don't understand. I think i insisted on it enough, but it bears repetition: rural china is _young_ and _enclaved_. I've seen villages with 70 children, 10 adults total. Granted, the adults are "old" (i understand they are between 40 and 60, the life expectancy is not that high). You also have phantom villages. If you ever read Lord of the Flies, you can imagine how a village get abandonned and trashed.

How it works: people get kids early, did not declare them, go to work in the city and let the kids for the remaining farmers (often village chiefs and to ones speaking Mandarin, all the other speak in local dialects) and sometime grandparent. Few of the young adults stay (women that were "shamed" into staying from what i understood, the guide was not very proud and did not expand on this). Most of them come back either once or twice a year, sometime more if they work closer, but not more than once a month. Couples sometime come back to drop a kid or two in the village before going to work again.

> And if the same virus (remember: thanks to it's error correcting mechanisms it doesn't change very fast) were let loose in another community, why would it not take up residence there?

And if he did take residence, how would we know? If a 100-person village was infected, they would be immune by now. If only one external (or even ten, most asymptomatics don't transmit the virus if i understand that well) was infected and transmitted the virus directly in Wuhan, would it be possible?

One more fact: some parts of rural china are way less connected than western Africa. I did not visit Africa yet (my next month-long hike was supposed to be in Ethiopia, stopped for obvious reasons), but the preparation are less stringent, and the path easy to plot. I guess western Africa, with less mountains/hills, would be even more connected.

You see, i agree that a chimera might have escaped, is a possibility that i find more likely (let's say 45 to 80%, depending on the day). But as long as proponents of this theory dismiss the other theories as "science fiction" _when they view rural China as rural Europe_, i will have a bad time getting onboard the theory.

I'm not skeptic of everything, but still, the 2000's outbreak of BDBV or all those novel-ebola where we never find the index case nor the origin village, why couldn't they have been lab outbreak too? There is research in the area, they have to keep Chimeras for some of the EV because else they can't keep those new versions alive long enough, i'm pretty sure there is less security (i imagine, i don't know Africa very well). Were those ebola viruses with no index case lab outbreaks too? Why didn't we talk about it ever?

Luc Montagnierd joint recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus HIV has argued the virus was created in a lab.

"French Nobel prize winner: ‘Covid-19 was made in lab’"

https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Disputed-French-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier

Again, just another appeal to authority, to be analyzed further. I find curious his personal Wikipedia page still characterizes the controversy has him being accused of spreading a conspiracy theory, while today, its looking as one of the most likely causes.

luc montagnier has a long list of insane public claims for the past decades (things about "water memory" comes to my mind , but there are others).

He lost credit a long time ago, way before covid, so i would be really cautious about citing anything he has to say about the virus.

After further research...I am inclined to agree with you. I just found he also claimed 5G was helping spread Covid.

This phenomenon keep happening with old Nobel laureates. Linus Pauling for instance...

For any public binary question with weak information, you'll find crazy people arguing both sides.

> The fact that the entire clade has a root in October 2019... indicates that there was not slow community spread before the initiation of the pandemic period. There is no weaker progenitor virus.

SARS-CoV-2 has an error checking polymerase and a relatively slow molecular clock. Just because observed sequences have little divergence from our first observation does not imply that we actually observed the species jump.

The preadaptation argument doesn't hold much water. SARS and MERS were deadly and high transmissible.

That said, let's suppose we did observe cases shortly after it initially infected humans. Shi's lab regularly went caving in search of coronaviruses in bats. These expeditions have previously been described as reckless. The possibility that a lab worker became accidentally infected in a cave shouldn't be counted out by anyone advancing GoF origin claims.

The distinction between "lab workers got infected whilst physically at a lab" and "lab workers got infected whilst doing remote work intended to benefit the lab" seems quite small.

There's a huge gulf between getting sick attempting to make a virus more virulent and getting sick while gathering natural samples in the field.

Both involve research that was specifically intended to reduce risk of pandemics. If either is true, our response here should be to conduct this research with extreme care or even stop doing it.

If the lab origin hypothesis is not true, we should actually do more of exactly this kind of work. That's why it's important to understand and come to consensus about it. It's not just a curiosity or a chance to point the finger at countries and politics we don't like. The prescription for how we should behave is completely different depending on what we think happened.

The slow mutation rate helps us date the "spillover". But it isn't relevant to my argument. If we saw one, two, and three mutations per strain in late December, it means their common ancestor couldn't have been more than a few months prior. If we saw tens, or different clades with specific geographic distribution patterns, then we might look at those to understand where the introduction to humans was. My point is that this introduction probably happened in Wuhan itself, or there would have had to be a complex and highly improbable series of transmissions from a host animal (presumably a bat 1000km away from Wuhan) which spawned no daughter strains. And thanks to the high fidelity replication process of the virus, these strains would be exactly the same in phenotype as the one that showed up in Wuhan. Why did we miss them?

SARS-CoV-1 underwent clear adaptation in humans that was observed through sequencing. In observation, the mutation pattern over time wasn't initially driven by a stable molecular clock. There were easily-discoverable mutations which yielded phenotypic gain. The virus is high fidelity, but there is enough of it that it's exploring a wide range of possible options at every infection. For a virus close to optimum, very few of these will yield a benefit, and so we see mutations that are mostly synonymous that occur at a clock like rate. Sound familiar?

Origin of Life is full of ultra-improbable coincidences. How do scientists in that field explain it?

"There is no weaker progenitor virus."

I've never heard a scientist dealing with any level of Complexity declare a negative fact before. Having not discovered a weaker progenitor doesn't preclude its existence. This type of statement ignores all comparisons made to the bat coronaviruses that have very much been part of the discussion.

I read some of your other replies and agree with some, and can at least see the point of a lot of them. But the grander wide-brush statements weaken those points.

The lab was working with chimeras instead of the virus in part because they were unable to consistently culture the virus. Neither nature nor humans make a viable viruses out of chimeras.

One of the chimeras (in the research the article is based on) reproduced up to 10,000x better than the virus it was based on and caused the mice to lose weight through illness. Sounds viable to me.

Rand Paul did not actually say that Fauci's gain of function research led to COVID19 but he didn't really need to. We cannot trust Fauci.

Doesn't it seems like too much of a coincidence that:

- Fauci has been director of NIH since 1984. [EDIT]. Director of NIAID (the branch of NIH which is in charge of infection diseases)

- Fauci initially denied NIH funding coronavirus gain of function research in Wuhan labs.

- It was discovered that NIH did in fact fund coronavirus gain of function research in Wuhan labs.

- Of all the cities in the world, Wuhan happens to be where COVID19 originated.

- Fauci was put in charge of the COVID19 response in the US (why not someone from the CDC? The CDC is the agency responsible for disease control and prevention, not the NIH... Why did Fauci end up getting this role when it's clearly outside of his normal duties and clearly a conflict of interest?)

Put together, it seems extremely far-fetched that these facts are merely coincidental. They paint a very clear narrative with means and motives; doesn't leave much to the imagination.

> Rand Paul did not actually say that Fauci's gain of function research led to COVID19 but he didn't really need to.

This is true. He strongly implied it did.

Fauci continued to deny the funding went to GoF research even in that heated exchange, so he wasn't changing his position. Paul said it did, Fauci said it didn't. What Fauci didn't say was that GoF research wasn't happening there. It undoubtedly was.

I'm assuming the coincidence with 1984 is ... the book?

>> I'm assuming the coincidence with 1984 is ... the book?

Haha, nice catch; I didn't even see that one. I only mentioned that date to point out that he's been a director for several decades so the NIH didn't fund this research under a different director; it was Fauci himself in charge. I think the date 1984 is much more likely to be a coincidence; I just don't see how that date fits into the motive. I don't think people like Fauci and his friends care much about symbolism; aside from symbols and numbers displayed in their personal bank accounts and on their trading platforms.

The nail in the coffin for me is the clear motive that Fauci had in being appointed to handle the COVID19 response in the US. Combined with the fact that the US government actually funded this research and that Fauci then lied about it and later tried to fudge definitions in an effort to gaslight everyone into thinking that he did not lie when he clearly did... Rand Paul's arguments were delivered with almost Mathematical precision. Not to mention Fauci's earlier lies about masks not providing any protection against COVID19. There's a point when you just have to draw the line, enough lies, this guy is a liar and a manipulator. How many more times does he have to be caught red-handed for us to accept this?

Fauci leads NIAID, focused on infectious disease research. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/cdc-fda-n...

Fauci was not put in charge of the response in the U.S. Rather, Mike Pence was, with Deborah Birx as task force chair. And of course Robert Redfield, the CDC director, was indeed on the task force.

You're confusing who had the best communication and stage presence with who was in charge. Redfield was not a good public communicator, and Fauci was, so Fauci got more screen time.

I don't understand the need to split hairs when it actually reinforces my conclusion but thanks anyway for pointing it out. Isn't it even more surprising that he would step outside of his role to throw himself into the limelight when it's not even his job? Seems like he was desperate to control the narrative.

That's the thing about Fauci; every time a point is made in his defense, it only seems to implicate him further.

No, that's the thing about conspiracy theorists: every time a factual claim they made is demonstrably wrong, they claim it "reinforces their conclusion."

I didn't deny your argument, I accepted it. I merely pointed out that your argument lead to the same conclusion as my argument except that it provided even more certainty.

On the other hand, this comment is an ad hominem attack trying to categorize me as an irrational conspiracy theorist in the hope that readers would dismiss the logic in my comments.

Yes, that is precisely the hallmark I was pointing out: when you were right, that proved your conclusion. But when you were wrong, that provided even more certainty.

That "logic" is irrational.

You just made a bad argument. You focused on a flaw in my argument to try to discredit me as an expert (which I'm not and never claimed to be, I welcome the correction) but in doing so you made my argument stronger.

I can't believe I have to spell it out TBH.

The fact is that Fauci had managed to put himself in a position to control the narrative and also the COVID19 response at a national level. Whether he did it by securing an official position or he simply jumped into the limelight on his own initiative is completely immaterial to my argument. The conclusion is the same; it is very suspicious when someone who is secretly associated with a problem wants to control the narrative around the problem once that problem becomes of public interest.

> "They paint a very clear narrative with means and motives"

Only with the help of motivated reasoning. Any singular focus on Fauci is a distraction mostly motivated by political biases and/or the desire to direct frustrations at a public figure. Unless you have some specific and quantifiable actions to take as a result of this "very clear narrative" then this reasoning is just adding to the noise.

> Fauci has been director of NIH since 1984.

No, Fauci has never held that position.

Fauci has been director of NIAID since 1984, which is one of the institutes of NIH.

> Fauci was put in charge of the COVID19 response in the US

No, under Trump he was a task force member, but the TF coordinator was Deborah Birx. Fauci was one of the more visible spokespeople, but not even approximately in charge.

Under Biden he also got the Chief Medical Adviser to the President title, but on COVID—while.even a more prominent spokesperson than previously—he is a member of the new task force, but Jeffrey Zients is the coordinator.

>> No, Fauci has never held that position.

My bad, I was mislead there. Doesn't change the conclusion of my analysis though. If anything, it strengthens it.

So he was director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (a branch of NIH). Coronaviruses are infectious diseases. It seems practically certain that he would have been directly involved. Of the 27 sub-agencies of the NIH, NIAID is the one which matches the category for 'coronavirus gain of function research' most closely.

The list is:

National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Eye Institute (NEI), National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), National Institute on Aging (NIA), National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin, Diseases (NIAMSD), National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD[69]), National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDOCD), National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDKD), National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHHD), National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR), National Library of Medicine (NLM), Center for Information Technology (CIT), Center for Scientific Review (CSR), Fogarty International Center (FIC), National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), NIH Clinical Center (NIH CC)

Within which of the above 27 categories does a 'highly infectious disease with immune-system-evading characteristics' such as COVID19 fit into? The fact that NIAID also deals with allergies (whose treatments typically involve regulating the immune system) is too much...

What you're saying makes foul play even more likely. This virus has got Fauci's signature in it and his face is on the packaging.

Not saying he is guilty, but he should be investigated.

You are leaving out the other errors in the basis for your initial conspiracy theory, notably your false claim that Fauci was put in charge of Coronavirus response; as noted in my earlier response, no, he wasn't, he was made a member of both Trump’s and Biden’s COVID task forcez, but neither the formal head (the VP in Trump's case, the President in Biden’s) nor the lead member once elected officials are excluded (in both cases, titled “coordinator”, Deborah Birx for Trump and Jeffrey Zients for Biden.)

You also draw your inference of foul play from the claim that Fauci’s role as “director of NIH” has some nexus to gain of function research but, unlike the CDC, nothing to do with preventing the spread of disease, making his (nonexistent) appointment as head of COVID response suspicious. When informed that he was not head of NIH but of NIAID and never appointed as head of COVID response, you apparently double down on that, because NIAID has a closer nexus to gain of function research. But, NIAIDs nexus to gain of function research is precisely that “conducts and supports basic and applied research to better understand, treat, and ultimately prevent infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases”.

Theret nothing suspicious about the head of NIAID being appointed to a committee planning response to an infectious disease. It would, indeed, be suspicious if the head of NIAID was excluded from such a committee.

I also forgot some other critical points:

- Several top scientists stepped forward in the early days and claimed that the virus showed signs of being man-made (and they were censored and called conspiracy theorists).

- Some countries have been telling their citizens since the beginning that the virus was likely man-made (this was the official narrative in Russia since the beginning).

- Fauci initially denied the possibility that COVID19 could be man made and said that the 'lab leak theory' was a conspiracy theory.

- Later, Fauci conceded that the lab-leak hypothesis could not be dismissed. Evidence for this has been mounting and the media has done everything it can to avoid discussing this topic.

> Several top scientists stepped forward in the early days and claimed that the virus showed signs of being man-made

So, if you're talking about the early days: One of them was in my country, and claimed that CRISPR was used on SRAS-Cov2, probably as a biological weapon. This was the human-made theory in the early days. Two day after his delcaration, the virus sequence was available for everyone on the internet, and he deleted his tweet the day after that.

Then the narrative was about a chimera that escaped the lab (which is way more likely). People conflated the two theories

I'm sorry if people who claimed that were called conspiracy theorist, but the CRISPR theory was junky since the beginning (Since the ACE2 is not the optimal key to bind to a human host. Also you need human test subject to make this kind of experiments, i know the oversight is not the best, but this would have leaked if there was human test in Wuhan). And it was not a conspiracy theory, it was honestly just dumb as f*ck, i don't think anybody here bought it.

Now, a lab-escaped Chimera is a good theory, but since the first theory was so jank, some people thought it was just a rehash, and took it with skepticism, especially since the same network/people share this new theory. I'm still not convinced: fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice... But i won't call anyone a conspiracy theorist over this.

Whether or not NIH funding created SARS-CoV-2 is immaterial to Rand Paul's central point, which was that the NIH illegally funded gain-of-function research.

Whatever the truth of the matter is, what I was getting at was the tone of the article, which seems happy with innuendo and partisan talking points. I have an open mind on whether or not it was a lab leak, but not being an epidemiologist I'm left with trying to gauge the tone as a proxy for whether to trust the author, and this article doesn't pass the smell test for me.

Though it's possible Fauci may not have known.

I fear the opportunity to truly get to the bottom of it has passed. Judging by the actions of the Chinese government in stomping all over foreign investigations inside China, if it was a lab leak the evidence has long since been destroyed. In the Western world the lab leak hypothesis is largely a distraction, because it's easier to focus on blame than it is to put the work into controlling the pandemic.

For those of us who have lost loved ones. Who have lost their business. Who weren’t allowed to see their dying father in the ICU because of COVID restrictions. For the 3M “lost children” who never logged on once for school last year. For the future generations who will have to reckon with the economic disaster we may be kicking down the road. For all of those people and more, we deserve to know the truth. That’s the very least we are owed.

Why? Will the truth mitigate the prevent or prevent a future one? What matters is the possibility of a leak, not if one happened.

The origin leak is nothing compared to the repeated failures hat happened after and are still happening.

The leak is one thing, if true. The cover-up (if there was a leak) during a critical window of possible containment is another thing. But we will likely never get the truth.

The truth matters a great deal to anyone who has suffered and lost. It’s not unique to the pandemic. The parent who has lost a child. The spouse who has been cheated on. The employee who has been unjustly fired. They want the truth. The not knowing makes it almost unbearable.

But the comment you’re responding to said it’s unknowable, not that it shouldn’t be known. It’s not an argument of merit but of practicality. I’d also add that it’s irrelevant. Let’s hypothesize that we find out tomorrow irrefutable evidence for this theory. What does it change? Are we going to start WWIII over it? I’d hope not. Maybe ‘the powers that be’ came to the same conclusion early on and tried to stem the public outcry, and maybe that’s ok. If you say that the value of finding out it was a lab leak would lead to stricter controls or dissuade similar research, I’d say that that has already happened. So I agree with OP in that it’s a distraction at this point and we should put all effort and mental energy into dealing with the pandemic rather than finding someone to blame.

> I’d also add that it’s irrelevant. Let’s hypothesize that we find out tomorrow irrefutable evidence for this theory. What does it change?

Demanding reparations from China for their WMD program going out of control would be a good start.

Then criminal cases against everyone involved in the West who approved something so boneheadedly evil and pointless.

Research on viruses happens a lot of places, it doesn't mean it's being weaponized.

do you think that live virus research including gain-of-function serves no purpose whatsoever other than for WMD's? It's just "evil and pointless"?

That's a good way to start WWIII.

WWII started like that. To make things simple, countries who lost WWI were destabilized and reparations were a big reason. It promoted the raise of nationalist, revengeful leaders like Hitler and Mussolini. You know the rest.

They carefully avoided making the same mistake after WWII.

Avoiding confrontation with evil will only allow evil to prevail.

The only reason the US hasn’t gotten after china is because of the economic/supply chain ties and the implication of the US gov itself.

This is an oversimplification to the point of being just untrue.

There is a fundamental difference between developing a biological weapon and a leak of a pathogen being analyzed as part of research program. There is absolutely as far as I know no reason to believe that covid is a biological weapon. Such a virus in fact would be an awful weapon. It acts very slowly relative to any evolving conflict with someone who has ample access to weapons that act of minutes and hours vs months and years. It is near impossible to broadly vaccinate your own population without telegraphing your intent to act and probably leaking your vaccine and may mutate beyond your ability to control it and damage your own population.

It is like being in an armed standoff in a building full of soldiers from each side and "attacking" the enemy by setting fire to the building you are all in.

A virus is a weapon of terror not war. It is unfit for purpose.

There is no reason to suppose that, if Sars-Cov2 originated at WIV that it was NOT part of a bioweapons program simply considering the tight integration of the PLA with all forms of research deemed of national interest in China. It's certainly not evidence AGAINST there being a bioweapons angle to Sars-Cov2 (if it emerged from WIV) that the PLA is involved (as it has been documented it is)[0][1].

[0] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/feb/16/chinese-maj...

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02523-x

I don’t want to argue it is a weapon, but just playing devils advocate here … the pandemic has been far more destabilizing to democracies in the west than autocracies. Unilateral, heavy-handed action is effective at combating pandemics. And it’s not inconceivable that some bigwigs in Beijing could see some population culling, especially in the more rural regions, as not a terrible thing. And it’s good cover to argue that it wasn’t an intentional weapon if it affects your own population too. I don’t believe it was an intentional release of a weapon, but if it were it wouldn’t be as self-sabotaging as it may first seem is all.

The takeaway in any event is it could have come from a lab. That should be enough to trigger some action around biosecurity.

There is no reason to think this won't happen again in our lifetimes. We have this amazing global logistic network that can apparently ferry a virus all over the world in about 3 months. Lab safety has to be beyond question.

I imagine we'll see some monumental changes in Chinese lab safety after this, independent of whether or not they believe it came from a lab.

> I imagine we'll see some monumental changes in Chinese lab safety after this, independent of whether or not they believe it came from a lab.

No, we won't. That would be the party admitting it was wrong before, which can never happen outside of a coup.

The party are many things, many of them bad. But they do not like global pandemics. And I expect many of them are quite elderly (eg, Xi Jingping is 68) and feel personally threatened by exotic new diseases.

I reckon they'll act.

I would argue that there is a huge difference regarding the improvements in safety measures, depending on whether there is the suspicion or the proof of a lab leak.

With just the suspicion of a lab leak, there will always be half-measures because of researchers arguing that you are needlessly tying their hands. And there will always be people who believe them, either because they trust those researchers or because they don't want to spend any more money on safety measures.

With proof of a lab leak, nobody would listen to researchers' complaints about those strict safety measures anymore. And having seen the huge cost to society, the evaluation of cost and benefits of that research and its safety will be seen in a totally different light.

Also, having someone to blame would imho rally sceptics and deniers behind a common narrative. There would be a common external threat and a common enemy to fight, meaning that the means of that fight like travel restrictions and vaccinations would be more readily accepted.

I see you’re first point, that’s probably accurate. But I think on the second point the common enemy to fight would quickly become the entire country of China (in the eyes of many in the US at least), and there would be massive public pressure for war, or antagonism of some kind (economic, political, social) that could escalate to war. And that has the potential to be much more devastating than the pandemic. So I think the first point you make about the merits of increased scrutiny have to be balanced against the dangers of potential war.

We are already at 4 Million fatalities from Corona, with a probably significant unknown number of deaths in third-world countries without proper diagnostics and healthcare. Vaccinations are still going too slow and will take another 5 years to even possibly cover all humans. Within that timeframe, it is quite possible to approach WW2 levels of fatalities (around 80 mio.). Secondary damage due to hospitals being overwhelmed, imploding economies and hunger will come on top and are still not easy to estimate.

It would be appaling and immoral to let something of this magnitude go unanswered. If someone is responsible, they need to feel the consequences. Because the consequences of not reacting to something like this, and it getting out later, are far more serious and devastating: That would in one stroke wipe out all legitimacy of involved governments, leading to revolutions all over the west (and quite possibly the rest of the world).

4 million with COVID, not because of. China would certainly point out that all COVID fatality data is confounded, e.g. the average age of death being above the average life expectancy in some areas. Given how a COVID death is defined, an entirely inert virus engineered to be spreadable but otherwise completely harmless would still be considered to have racked up a lot of deaths.

They would also argue that they aren't responsible for western policy responses, even if those responses were inspired by theirs. Things like hunger are a side effect of lockdowns and supply chain disruptions, not directly the virus.

The true number of deaths genuinely caused by COVID that wouldn't otherwise have happened is unknown and probably always will be. It's probably in the same general area as the 4 million figure, it wouldn't be 50% or anything, but really for a virus that so heavily affects the old and co-morbid you'd need to be calculating in terms of life years lost rather than concrete "deaths". It's the latter style of counting that has led to this mass confusion in the first place.

The graphs for excess mortality track the deaths attributed to Covid quite well in most of the world. There's just no chance that it's some kind of an measurement artifact.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

The main exception are totalitarian states like Russia or China, where the numbers were either entirely suppressed or fabricated.

What is "it" in that sentence? COVID deaths exceed excess deaths in quite a few countries, which doesn't make sense, especially given that lockdown measures create deaths through restricted healthcare access - look at graphs of hospital admissions right at the start or the now massive backlogs.

The Economist tables show this. Britain reports 10,000 more COVID deaths than excess deaths, and the over-count is surely much higher than that given that the healthcare system now has huge backlogs with people dying on waiting lists for non-COVID related diseases. Denmark also reports far more COVID deaths than excess deaths. Some of those are created by policy, and the proportion will only increase over time given the vaccines + generally screwed up health system.

Then there's the question of how excess is calculated. It's excess vs a model. What matters here is not really what's true but what China can argue is true. Modelling is discredited in the west now, in the unlikely event they cared to respond at all, they would certainly argue that any calculations of damages were based on motivated reasoning and bad modelling (and then present their own bad modelling in response).

"It" refers to what you wrote, i.e. "Given how a COVID death is defined, an entirely inert virus engineered to be spreadable but otherwise completely harmless would still be considered to have racked up a lot of deaths."

That theory is obviously not compatible with the excess mortality graphs moving in lockstep with the Covid death graphs. If the virus has no correlation with deaths and it is all a mis-attribution, why would the pattern of deaths match so well with the pattern of excess mortality?

Excess mortality being a model rather than ground truth is irrelevant too. It still doesn't explain the correlation.

Ah. I didn't mean that SARS-CoV-2 is literally an inert virus. Clearly it's not at all, it's a virus that has caused quite a bit of death, and indeed, the mortality graphs are the best evidence of that.

The claim about an inert virus was an extreme example to make the point clearer. Imagine such a virus did exist (which it doesn't). Then by the methodology used to compute COVID deaths, there would still be a large number of deaths attributed to the virus even as excess deaths didn't move at all, even though that should be a statistical impossibility.

The question is therefore not "is SARS-CoV-2 entirely inert", obviously that would be ridiculous. The question is "to what extent are the reported numbers confounded by age and co-morbidity effects". The Economist is arguing that excess death figures show the confounding doesn't exist or must be so small it hardly matters. I'm arguing that by their own data (which seems to be continuously updated even long after the article is published?) there are countries where either the numbers are over-counted in this way, or the mortality models are seriously wrong, because COVID deaths > excess deaths.

There are non-kinetic forms of warfare that may very well be appropriate if indeed this was a lab leak and cover-up. If it is proven tomorrow to be the case that the virus emerged from WIV, do you think it's appropriate to just let it go? Even if it was pure negligence the cover-up itself and the hiding of the epidemic before it became pandemic could be considered an act of war by countries affected.

I agree it could be considered an act of war, which is why cooler heads on all sides may have decided to downplay, distract, and deny that that’s what happened. War between China and the rest of the world (which we all know means the US as far as war goes) would be devastating for humanity.

There are non-kinetic forms of warfare [0]. At least, the PLA believes there are. These are tactics to win without physically fighting. Many believe China is already engaged in non-kinetic war with the U.S. (economic and information).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_warfares

Wuhan is a large city with a big foreign presence. The US, the UK, South Korea, and France have consulates generals or consulates there. That places severe limits on just how effectively an epidemic in Wuhan can be covered up.

Not if the major players on both sides are invested in the cover-up. Are you arguing the CCP is not very effective at cover-ups? That would be reassuring if true.

> Let’s hypothesize that we find out tomorrow irrefutable evidence for this theory. What does it change?

The most likely outcome would not be greater transparency or control over how such research is conducted. More likely it will move into the shadows, in military labs whose very existence is shrouded in secrecy. That's not just speculation, either. It already happened with biowarfare in the USSR and USA and probably elsewhere during most of my lifetime. Do people not remember these issues being discussed in the context of destroying the last smallpox samples? Or the anthrax scare(s)? Or the Reston "Hot Zone" incident(s)?

I'd expect that a lot of countries would not want to look too deeply into blaming someone because once you've blamed someone the topic of damages come up.

Damages are usually based on some notion of reasonable behavior on the part of the damaged party. If the damaged party behaves unreasonably and that increases the damages they suffer the negligent party usually does not have to pay the extra damages.

I think a lot of countries look at this, realize that at best they can make the case that China is responsible for 5-15% of their damages, realize that their political opponents will spin that as the current government being responsible for 85-95% of their loss, and decide it is better to just move on.

Yellow card: appeal to emotion. GP was clearly talking about practicality and practical effects of obsessing over lab-leak theories, not the moral or general desirability of knowing the truth. We can work toward better lab safety and oversight of dangerous research and responses to outbreaks without fueling nationalist/racist paranoia. In fact people are also doing so, while others use lab leaks as a pretext for driving division they sought anyway.

Is the pandemic not controlled?

There are no restrictions in the UK.

The stadiums are full and tens of thousands went mad over a football player just this last weekend.

156 people died of covid in the UK yesterday. Per capita that's more than in the USA.

I heard Ronaldo played a blinder.

> 156 people died of covid in the UK yesterday.

This may be highly inflated.

As far as I understand it, and implied by e.g. [1], UK COVID daily death cases are "if you had a positive result in the last 28 days and you die". So it includes, for example, heart attacks, strokes, and being run over by a bus.

[1] https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths

Even going by the "covid on death certificate" number, it's 109 a day. Adjusted for population it's almost as bad as the science-denying shitshow that is half the US right now. Compare that to countries who actually have it under control like Australia and Taiwan, who had eight and zero deaths yesterday.

Hard to catch Covid when you can't leave your house without a visit from the goon squad.

Yeah, I'm not trying to diminish the situation; it's appalling.

I'm just pointing out that relying on figures with unknown (or in this case, frankly ridiculous) methodologies to make comparisons to other countries (which will have different methodologies again) muddies the water at best.

Quite right, and that wasn't my goal anyway. I was just making the point that lifting mask restrictions and having large social gatherings does not mean we have the pandemic under control.

It's unnerving how everything is open at my city as well - except public universities. Some teachers have taken education for recording all their classes and pressing "Send" at the comfort of their home, I guess.

Ask yourself a simple question: if something fell from the sky and exploded in Orlando Florida killing hundreds of thousands and irradiating the area which would be more likely?

That an undetected new type of asteroid carrying heavily enriched uranium crashed within 50 miles of Cape Canaveral, or that a nuclear rocket was tested and went out of control?

We need to hold funding bodies and scientists accountable for immoral research whose only purpose is weapons of mass destruction.

The problem is their own institutions incentivize it. Their world is one where you need to be cited for credibility and therefore funding. You do this by making yourself and your work important. If your area of research is epidemiology and there’s not much to worry about then you need to find something worth investing in from the political class and their appointed admins. So you conduct gain of function research, etc to create enough concern that you get further funding and then somewhere in this process a mistake happens and here we are.

It’s not a conspiracy or anything tin foil hat related. It’s just pure incentives. No one makes a name for themselves or gets the funding they need to continue to exist because they said “there’s not much to worry about”. You need to convince your benefactors that your research is relevant and should be prioritized.

> We need to hold … scientists accountable

Precisely how do you suggest that the seven thousand odd million people outside the USA hold the USA accountable for what their scientists get to do in Fort Bragg?

The USA, China, and Russia are going to do exactly as they please. You need to make your peace with this.

The same way we stopped nuclear testing.

You could accurately scare-quote any word in that sentence.

This is a bad analogy a novel respiratory virus is hardly an unlikely turn of events.

This is not the point of the document dump. The document dump shows that Fauci funded GoF research in Wuhan, and that people involved in the funding pipeline were involved in covering that up. These were the same people who advised the big tech cos to cancel any information about a lab leak.

Love the down votes for merely restating what the FOIA'd docs say. All you have to do is read them. It's not that hard.

Often wondering about the down-votes on HN. Pretty cowardly to down-vote statements of fact without comment.

Maybe we won't get all the details but there is a steady drip of information coming out at the moment including the funding documents referenced in the article. I think the odds of getting data is helped by the US Chinese cooperation. I think the odds are good that US scientists have some of the hidden details that they could be forced to divulge through legal action.

So, posting these assertions over and over again makes them true?

Let's start at the core as stated in the first paragraph:

> ... the central issue of whether it began with natural spillover from animals or some kind of laboratory incident.

How exactly is this a central issue? We know that similar viruses appear at a significant rate. How we respond to such inevitable new viruses is going to be the same no matter where they came from. What this is doing is superimposing ideas about storytelling and morality on a situation we have little actual information about. If anything the genesis of SARS-CoV2 is nearly irrelevant.

Then it asserts that gain of function experiments were going on because chimeras were created. That is a basic misunderstanding of the subject matter. Chimeras are created when gain of function research is simply too complex or has failed outright, both of which appear to be the case here. Few think that SARS-CoV2 started with an experimental chimera because chimeras don't work that way and there is no evidence of chimeric origins in SARS-CoV2.

> ... three people who fell sick at a BSL 3 lab within a week of each other.

This is ridiculous. It is well established from satellite data that there was an explosion of activity at Wuhan hospitals starting in August. Researchers at the Wuhan facility got sick because everyone in Wuhan was getting sick at that time and had been for at least a month.

When you have to engage in that kind of evidence hiding and drama building to make an assertion there is likely to be a problem in the reasoning. This is a really good example of how the power of storytelling tends to overwhelm even obvious truths.

> ... these are small steps forward in the search for the pandemic origins.

No, these are motivated lies which are incrementally burying the truth. If we are to know the origins of the virus it will probably be through ongoing analysis of gene sequencing data as usual, and whether we find the origins or not we need to be ready for the next new virus because what we can say with absolute certainty is that there will be more deadly viruses and we need to take that seriously no matter where they might come from or what stories we might like to tell about them.

I won't repeat myself, but above I assert that there are some critically unusual things about this virus that make it look extremely different from the viruses that "happen all the time." We gain this information not from inside documents or statements that can be dismissed as lies, but from the highly observable viral phylogeny and phenotypic evolution. These are highly unusual in the scope of natural viral spillover events, and any serious attempt to ground the virus in a natural introduction must develop a theory that explains them. What's your plausible story?

You are correct but so many people have been brainwashed and will refuse to accept that what they were told is a lie. Their very identity is at stake and will not abandon their position.

> Their very identity is at stake and will not abandon their position.

This is actually much more likely among contrarians and critics than the general populace. People who are insecure about their identities seek out opportunities to stand out, not blend in.

> I assert that there are some critically unusual things about this virus that make it look extremely different from the viruses that "happen all the time."

What are these critically unusual things?

Yes, there are differences that seem unlikely to arise as part of natural evolution. There are also differences that seem unlikely to arise as part of a lab experiment (i.e. things that are well beyond our known or predictable ability). Some kind of unlikely event still managed to happen. Treating the statistical improbability as evidence for only one conclusion is suspect.

You're one of the first people I've seen defending these points. Do you have any well sources articles that back up any of the points you are making?

"the central issue" is a bit in the eye of the beholder. Some people are interested in how this all happened.

I'll give you the "three people who fell sick" doesn't prove much. The release of the funding documents is a small step towards figuring what went on.

> “There is a possibility it was influenza,” he said. “But I’m very doubtful that three people in highly protected circumstances in a level three laboratory working on coronaviruses would all get sick with influenza that put them in a hospital or in severe conditions all in the same week, and it didn’t have anything with the coronavirus. That’s highly hard to believe. From that point forward, it certainly seemed to have started to spread within their community.”

People working in highly protected circumstances in a level 3 laboratory still have plenty of opportunity to pass influenza to each other.

First, it is level 4 where the workers wear the full body suits. At level 3 the concern is more just with keeping whatever they are working on from getting out, not with keeping the workers from bringing stuff in.

Second, even virus researchers like to socialize and so do things like have lunch together. As far as I know a biology lab lunchroom is pretty much the same as any other office lunchroom as far as biosafety goes.

The 3 lab workers probably weren't the original source as it was in November and the outbreak probably started before then. I think I saw a report that they had the ground glass like lung x-rays characteristic of covid but may have caught it like everyone else rather than from lab work.

It's still early. We will end up finding the truth.

The World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 30 January 2020 and a pandemic on 11 March 2020. We are getting into the last quarter of 2021. I think we will end up knowing the truth for 3 reasons:

- The more time passes without finding evidence of the original animal host, in China or any other country, the more likely the lab theory becomes.

- Lovers quarrel, people betray people, and persons who can't talk at the moment, after a few years, decide they have more to gain by talking.

- It is now known, and this has not been denied, that US Funded non profits were doing gain-of-function research in Wuhan:

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/09/covid-origins-gain-of-fu...

That article doesn’t at all prove that the US was supporting gain-of-function research. At best it proves that gain-of-function research is not well defined and epidemiological researchers themselves disagree on what it means. The grants themselves deny access to funds for gain-of-function and provide a framework for judging what that is.

>"...At best it proves that gain-of-function research is not well defined and epidemiological researchers themselves disagree on what it means..."

If its not so well defined, the categorical denials from US officials, saying it was not happening, become then even more interesting.

The case from the article is a bit stronger I would say:

"Scientists working under a 2014 NIH grant to the EcoHealth Alliance to study bat coronaviruses combined the genetic material from a “parent” coronavirus known as WIV1 with other viruses. They twice submitted summaries of their work that showed that, when in the lungs of genetically engineered mice, three altered bat coronaviruses at times reproduced far more quickly than the original virus on which they were based. The altered viruses were also somewhat more pathogenic, with one causing the mice to lose significant weight. The researchers reported, “These results demonstrate varying pathogenicity of SARSr-CoVs with different spike proteins in humanized mice.”

But the terms of the grant clearly stipulated that the funding could not be used for gain-of-function experiments. The grant conditions also required the researchers to immediately report potentially dangerous results and stop their experiments pending further NIH review. According to both the EcoHealth Alliance and NIH, the results were reported to the agency, but NIH determined that rules designed to restrict gain-of-function research did not apply.

The Intercept consulted 11 scientists who are virologists or work in adjacent fields and hold a range of views on both the ethics of gain-of-function research and the Covid-19 origins search. Seven said that the work appears to meet NIH’s criteria for gain-of-function research."

The evidence for NIAID complicity at the highest levels in funding illegal research is already public record. The evidence for repeated lies from top health officials is already public record. The attempt to silence and shame those who pointed to lab leak by the very people most invested in the research program is already public record. I could go on. None of this has been sufficient to raise the public wrath.

I'm not holding my breath for the future 'tell-alls'. There are too many incentives and disincentives for the major players.

And the current info is only known, because the Intercept had to sue for a FOIA request:

https://theintercept.com/document/2021/09/09/the-intercept-v...

Talk about a gigantic conflict of interest...

"According to press reports, Dr. Daszak is the sole U.S. scientist on the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the virus. The panel’s investigatory efforts have come under increasing scrutiny due to China’s limited cooperation with the investigation and, importantly, conflicts of interest of many of the investigators, including Dr. Daszak.

Media reports indicate that Dr. Daszak has deep, longstanding ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a Chinese research facility central to questions about the origin of the pandemic"

It's a bit of a minority interest and quite hard to follow - I've been wasting time following some of the goings on but don't know anyone else personally who is. Even so the few people who are following can raise a bit of a stink.

At the very least, it’s proof that Fauci lied to Congress that the NIH had been funding the gain of function research. Regardless of if the virus leaked from the lab or not, Fauci needs to go.

I'm not sure the article does a very good job of explaining what 'gain of function" was done. This twitter thread from Richard Ebright is maybe better https://mobile.twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/14362036241247...

Most of these facts have been out for awhile now but have been effectively suppressed by mainstream propaganda control.

Seems eminently plausible. Keeping an eye on this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

For crying out loud. Inductive reasoning. GTFO

> ... these documents include the original proposals along with project updates, so significantly flesh out what we knew. They highlight how US funding bodies outsourced risky gain-of-function research to China, even over a three-year period between 2014 and 2017 when it was banned in their own nation

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