The Next ‘Lab Leak’ | Hacker News Reader

The Next ‘Lab Leak’

nytimes.com

189 pointsjohncena33428 comments

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There are many variations of the "lab leak" theory for Covid-19. For example:

1. Was the sample found or engineered? Or found then engineered?

2. Was it a deliberate leak or accidental?

Here are some open questions that haven't been answered or examined (at least publicly) to a sufficient degree:

1. If Covid-19 jumped from an animal species to humans, possibly through another animal, then why hasn't it been found in the wild? For example, SARS was relatively quickly found in the wild. To date there's been no equivalent discovery of the lineage of human-transmissible Covid-19. An alternative theory, that Covid-19 spread to humans at a wet market, would strongly suggest that Covid-19 would be found in the wild;

2. The Chinese had a database of Covid strains that was taken offline in late 2019. To the best of my knowledge, no independent third-party has been able to examine the contents of this database and see if it relates to Covid-19;

3. Covid-19 seems to be related to bat coronavirus strains from hundreds of miles away. How was the jump made? Through what species? and

4. We don't really know who Patient Zero was.

None of this adds up to positive evidence of any variation of the "lab leak" theory but given that there is no alternative theory that holds up to serious scrutiny or doesn't have serious flaws or unanswered questions, it has to stay in the running.

My suspicion is the Chinese government doesn't know either but, more importantly, they don't want to know because absolutely no good can come from that becoming public. There is literally no upside. This applies on the individual level too. If you're a manager of a lab or even just a lab technician, do you really want to be held responsible, even just in the public eye, for "starting" Covid-19? God, no. That may well be bad for you, your family, the government and countless others.

So there's a concerted effort to not know.

And the WHO's response to all this has been utterly anemic from the early days of the pandemic where China's pronouncements were taken at face value to the late joint investigation with laughably narrow frames of reference.

CS people always underestimate the difficulty of this stuff. I used to be a genetic engineer: Even in the best of times doing real field science on the lineage analysis of sars-cov-2 would take many many years. In a time of acute political hostility it will take much longer.

You argue it's just political expediency not to look, when the truth is that it is brutally difficult work to "prove" any exact zoonotic sequence even if the political will is there in abundance. (It took a ~decade for sars-1, and the story's still a bit unclear with ebola.) The global scientific community does want to figure this out, but the lab-leak circus has made the job infinitely harder.

We do know of very close sarbecovirus relatives in Yunnan and Laos. Given the early epidemiological nexus of the wet markets there is every reason to believe this arose out of a reservoir in the fur or meat industry... but given the amount of animal culling that has occurred, it could be a real challenge to figure out the exact intermediate host, especially given the enormously broad mammalian host range of sars-cov-2 and the number of animal species commonly sold in those wet markets.

> Given the early epidemiological nexus of the wet markets there is every reason to believe this arose out of a reservoir in the fur or meat industry...

I can make the same argument for lab origin: "given the early epidemiological nexus of a government virology laboratory in the same city as the index cases, many of whom worked at the lab..."

The rest of your comment boils down to "science is hard and often ambiguous"...which it is, but is not an argument either way, and certainly not a reason to leap to one conclusion or the other.

BTW: the close relatives in Yunnan and Laos aren't actually that close. But it all depends on how you define "close", which just begs the original question. I wouldn't call the known relatives dispositive.

An epidemiological nexus is much smaller than an entire city and the details of the early cases matter. Aside from the contact-tracing, investigators were able to get positive PCR recovery of sars-cov-2 from -environmental samples- at the wet markets, indicating an incredible degree of contamination there. If the nexus were in fact WIV we'd expect a very different pattern of early cases (eg conference travel - a lot of researchers from WIV were at a Nipah conference in Singapore just before the outbreak!)

You could of course argue that the authorities just covered up any damning links, but the early outbreak was pretty chaotic and information wasn't well controlled... and in any case at that point we're not longer capable of arguing based on any evidence at all.

My point is simply that a lack of fully verified lineage analysis is completely unsurprising and not at all evidence in favor of conspiracy.

I used to engineer viruses... By natural standards the Laos samples are extremely close - the mosaicity of coronaviruses in these bats complicate matters - but likely within a decade of a common ancestor to sars-cov-2. Closer than any other sample that we know WIV were working with beforehand (again, people claim they were hiding what they were doing, except there was no reason whatsoever to do so before the pandemic).

Though "not close" for sure in the sense that even if they did have these strains, you would never evolve sars-cov-2 from them in a dish, there simply wouldn't be enough passages to do so. And that's sort of the point - the evolutionary "risk surface area" of zoonosis is many orders of magnitude larger than this nutty lab-leak idea, and we know that these coronaviruses jump all the time from close animal contacts, having caused two other epidemics in the last 20 years...

> Aside from the contact-tracing, investigators were able to get positive PCR recovery of sars-cov-2 from -environmental samples- at the wet markets, indicating an incredible degree of contamination there.

So? It's a market. People go there, in large numbers. Is it really surprising that you'd find traces of a widely circulating respiratory virus in a place where large numbers of people congregate?

> By natural standards the Laos samples are extremely close

RaTG13 is closer than the BANAL viruses, and we already knew about it. You have to look at specific genes and squint and make hand-wavy arguments about how SARS-CoV2 evolved from recombination of ~5 different viruses to make any sort of claim that this is strong evidence of natural evolution.

I'll give you this: the RBD of BANAL-20-52 is the closest match yet for the RBD of SARS-CoV2. Still no furin cleavage site, though.

https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-871965/v1/986c09c...

> the evolutionary "risk surface area" of zoonosis is many orders of magnitude larger than this nutty lab-leak idea

I love this. The evolutionary story is too complicated and improbable to imagine, but sure, the idea of making a few relatively simple additions to a known virus is "nutty". And hey...it's not like there was a lab in Wuhan writing grants about similar transformations or anything.

You have to be kidding. Look, I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but you're simply in love with a theory and dismissing all evidence to the contrary.

Thank you for bringing some perspective to the discussion, at the same time, I have no illusion that it is going to help to convince people that want to believe in the lab leak theory of anything else. Wanting to assign blame for all this is a very strong desire in many and the Chinese government through its acts and omissions has unfortunately made it a lot easier for people to continue to be deluded about this. Some of the arguments made are so incredibly weak that they shouldn't be made at all, and yet, they are supporting this whole house of cards of criminal intent gone wrong. It's a pretty sad statement as to the degree of understanding that people in general have about these matters, if they studied the subject (by reading textbooks, not watching youtube videos) we might be able to sidestep some of this.

Environmental samples from the wet market only show that infected humans were there. Given the centrality of markets in human social networks it seems very normal that an outbreak in the city would eventually focalize in the market. Without samples from animals in the market, the evidence for spillover happening there is extremely weak, and not even circumstantial, because it's indistinguishable from what we would expect given a spillover anywhere in Wuhan.

I'm uncertain why it does not seem to be discussed that maybe the leak was sabotage by a lab worker who got paid really well by a foreign service to take it from the lab and disperse it.

The problem with relying so heavily on argument from coincidences is that one then incurs the epistemic responsibility to seek out and explain alway other coincidences in the neighborhood putatively pointing to alternative explanations (a step people often forget, but is essential for the validity (insofar as one can speak of validity) of one's argument from coincidences). And such coincidences are always easy to find, since coincidences are cheap. (To take just one example, the pandemic happened shortly after the World Military Games, which US servicemen attended, at a time when the relations between the two countries were at their worst in recent times, and who came from a country one of whose household names novelists once publicly fantasized about all the world's nations coming together and use biological weapons to wipe out the entire population of China, based on none other than the desire to curb China's peaceful rise (cf. Unparalleled Invasion)) Do these "coincidences" need explaining away? Do they need to create a presumption in favor of the bioattack theory? If not, what is it about spatial proximity coincidence that gives it such power to confer that sort of presumption?

including the strain from the outbreak that the batwoman published in 2015 or so?

That one was supposedly the closest.

The technical difficulties don't really matter because that's not the actual problem. The problem is that even access to the data that's required has been denied. Independent audits have been denied.

Let me raise a counter-question.

Who was patient zero for COVID-19 in the United States, where did they travel from, and where did they travel to? When did the first case arrive in the country?

Why isn't access to this data available? Why would access to this data be denied? Why isn't the United States sharing this information with independent auditors? With its journalists? With the world?

Is there an ulterior motive to this secrecy?

If the US can't, or refuses to figure out who its patient zero was, why do you expect China to be more successful at this sort of endeavor?

Perhaps it's because figuring these sorts of things out is a little bit harder than one might think.

I think you're missing the point, the US does not have direct access to databases that could be related to these facts and yet suddenly took them offline.

I don't think anyone is underestimating the difficulty. Even if we had boots on the ground one day 1 we might not know more than we do now. But NOT having boots on the ground at all, is negligence. For a year it was verboten to discuss the possibility of a lab leak. It was deemed fake news... If it is so difficult, then how did they KNOW? The answer was, no one knew, but it was still forbidden to discuss it

That is the problem here.

The fact that lab leaks have occurred, and that ground zero appears to be near one of the only labs researching this... Well that is enough suspicion to investigate. But apparently that was crazy talk.

This.

This shit is hard. And expensive. And involves a hell of a lot of travel, which has been exceedingly difficult during this pandemic.

We're still fleshing out the animal hosts for MERS.

BANAL-52 is 96.8% identical to SARS-CoV-2. That is not particularly close. You need to get above 99% to even come close to zoonotic origin on this.

We also know that coronavirus samples from bats from Laos were shipped to WIV. Those samples have not been released. Hardly require decades to release that sort of data.

Thanks for your comment, I appreciate your willingness to share a contrarian perspective.

Question, how would a virus that spreads primarily indoors and rarely spreads outdoors accumulate enough viral load over enough hosts to spill over into humans? It seems like this would be difficult in an open-air wet market.

It wouldn't be hard, from a technical or scientific point of view, to give access to the labs' files to an independent commission of inquiry. That's what democracies do, but obviously not communist dictatorships. If there was a leak, it could be easily found, and if there wasn't, while the absence of evidence would not be definite proof, it would lower the plausibility for the hypothesis.

> It wouldn't be hard, from a technical or scientific point of view, to give access to the labs' files to an independent commission of inquiry.

And if those files are shared, and nothing is found, you'd just move the goalposts, and claim the data was doctored.

Supposing the lab was not at fault - what incentive is there for anyone to attract a bunch of media attention, and possibly lose face, in order to vindicate themselves in an inquiry that won't actually change anyone's mind?

> That's what democracies do, but obviously not communist dictatorships.

Democracies also hold inquiries over and over again until they get the political results they want. How many Benghazi commissions have we had, by now? [1] How many people changed their mind thanks to them? [2]

[1] Ten.

[2] To a rough approximation, zero.

> And if those files are shared, and nothing is found, you'd just move the goalposts, and claim the data was doctored.

Really? That's what you're going for?

Would you be insulting me the same way if the suspicion was on, say, a private laboratory in the United States? Would you imply that I'm a conspiracy theorist nutjob if I were to demand an inquiry? Should we stop all trials because there's always some people who refuse to believe the verdict even it was reasonable when the trial was obviosly fair? How is this situation different?

It seems to me that you're the one who's exhibiting the same kind of denial and mental gymnastic as the average 911 or JFK truther.

I'm not a biologist, I'm an engineer with training in industrial safety and I've studied industrial accidents long before this happened. Industrial accidents happen. They happen less and are less deadly in industries where risk is taken seriously and where open access to information and public oversight is present. The debate on gain of function research that has been revealed to have happened before this pandemic, whether such research happened in Wuhan or not, shows to me that not only was risk not taken seriously enough by the virology community as whole, but that open debate and oversight was almost entirely absent.

The enormous set of circumstantial evidence combined with Occam's Razor pretty much rules out anything with the wet market. The world is well beyond that at this point.

None of your points disconfirm bullet point (2), which by itself is a political act.

It would be great to hear "this is why this thing didn't come from the lab: these are the strains under research, it doesn't match what was found. These are the security measures we have in place, here's all the audit data. WHO, please validate."

That would be helpful. Not this "yeah, we have this lab in the same area, why are you asking? It's fine. No you can't look, that's disrespectful."

This is fishy. Even if this pathogen specifically, didn't come from the lab, someone somewhere messed up(or is doing something messed up right now) and don't want people poking around.

China will not, if possible, willingly put itself in a position which admits any likelihood of losing face. If they couldn't rule out the possibility themselves and/or cover up completely that it was in fact a leak, they won't let anyone in - not because it happened, but because it might have.

That reasoning is so, so, so weak. 'This might embarrass us so you can't look' is _not_ a valid defense; anyone who says it is can be assumed to be complicit.

If it 'might' have happened, then there needs to be an investigation.

We're talking about millions dead worldwide, and tens of trillions in damages. Inequality has spiked and second-order deaths may well outnumber direct COVID-19 deaths already. And years on we haven't had an investigation into the single most likely source - that's insane, dangerous, divisive and inexcusable.

This is China we're talking about. Fear of losing face is a deeply rooted cultural thing. It isn't a valid defense... in the west.

Or they simply don't have data to prove conclusively it was not leaked, because it wasn't logged correctly.

And being a paranoid communist autocracy, they'll naturally take the "limit information" approach over "release everything and let external parties determine a verdict".

>If Covid-19 jumped from an animal species to humans, possibly through another animal, then why hasn't it been found in the wild? For example, SARS was relatively quickly found in the wild.

On the other hand, Ebola's animal reservoir remains uncertain. The implication of the question is that all animal reservoirs are easily and quickly discovered, but just because that's true for some examples doesn't mean its universally true, and doesn't mean that lack of a known animal reservoir is strong evidence against the existence of one.

> My suspicion is the Chinese government doesn't know either but, more importantly, they don't want to know because absolutely no good can come from that becoming public. There is literally no upside.

Sure, the airplane crashed and a lot of people died, but what good can come of the reason becoming public? There is literally no upside because that side got destroyed in the crash.

Or we can be rational and find out how we can prevent these disasters in the future.

Long story short; if lab leak happened CCP will never admit it and if US intelligence community has some information or evidence of the lab leak they will keep it classified for decades. I can't wait to read news papers in 2039 and find out the true origin of Covid-19 pandemic.

Or I would think if we did have that truth, more likely hodl until Xi does something aggressive and we need to rally public sentiment towards action.

Or it was a US lab and we will never release the records al la JFK.

> None of this adds up to positive evidence of any variation of the "lab leak" theory but given that there is no alternative theory that holds up to serious scrutiny or doesn't have serious flaws or unanswered questions, it has to stay in the running.

There is a very strong alternative theory that the virus evolved in human-animal interactions in fur farming. China is the biggest fur producer outside the EU, which results in very similar incentives to not properly investigate.

Denmark culled its whole mink population after human-mink transmission and the evolution of the cluster 5 variant [2].

[1] https://www.republik.ch/2021/06/05/herr-drosten-woher-kam-di... [German]

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_5

You have two #1's, and 2 #2's, so it's a bit hard to respond to any of those clearly.

I will first address the second #1, and note that your point is very hard to understand here. COVID-19 has been found in multiple places "in the wild." It's been found in racoon dogs, which were known to be sold at the Wuhan wet market. It even seems to be endemic in certain geographic areas of the U.S. deer population now, which makes me think this thing is never going away.

Regarding your point #3, I think 100s of miles for an animal reservoir of a closely related virus, where the animal is capable of flight, is not so far?

Regarding your point #4, I just don't get it. Yes, we don't know who patient zero is. Are you trying to imply that patient zero is being obfuscated by the government for some nefarious reason?

Regarding your first point #1, as a (former) protein engineer, I can assure you that viral engineering is just not a thing. It is not currently possible according to the brightest minds to just engineer a virus to have any particular infectious biological behavior in a host. Generally, we can engineer viruses to knockout core functions and thereby weaken them or render them non-replicative or non-infective. Sometimes we can engineer viruses to change their tropism (the cells they infect). But taking say a bat virus and combining with a different virus (SARS?), adding a few key mutations, and ending up with a weapon or something is just science fiction.

Could we use directed evolution? Maybe, but you can't just apply some sort of selective pressure in a cell culture that is applicable to actual human infectivity/morbidity/etc.

IMO The only "lab leak" hypothesis that makes any sense at all, was that someone just **ked up, the dice rolled horribly badly (like the worst outcome out of 10^64 possible outcomes), and it all went pear shaped. But it's a lot more likely an infected racoon dog at the wet market scratched or breathed on someone.

> IMO The only "lab leak" hypothesis that makes any sense at all, was that someone just *ked up, the dice rolled horribly badly (like the worst outcome out of 10^64 possible outcomes), and it all went pear shaped.

This is really not that unlikely. Probably someone designed something like 2^10-ish different recombinant grafts from related coronaviruses, with various design parameters, and the selective pressure was "oh it was actually infectious enough to infect the careless postdoc pulling the 100 hour workweek". Surely 1 out of 2^10 is likely to be more transmissible than the parent bat strain.

These days (aka 10 years ago) with molecular biology, 2^6 is not unreasonable to do by hand, by a well-trained undergrad intern, in three months. Oh and hey... out of 2^6 we discovered one GOF with higher normalized output than its parent. Citation (disclaimer, I supervised the intern, so it's possible I'm a three-sigma-above-median intern manager): https://bmcbiochem.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2...

> 1. If Covid-19 jumped from an animal species to humans, possibly through another animal, then why hasn't it been found in the wild? For example, SARS was relatively quickly found in the wild. To date there's been no equivalent discovery of the lineage of human-transmissible Covid-19. An alternative theory, that Covid-19 spread to humans at a wet market, would strongly suggest that Covid-19 would be found in the wild;

It took about 13 years to discover the source of SARS:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9

I lean towards the accidental lab escape theory, given the work the Wuhan lab was known to be doing, while only being a level 3 lab, and that the first cases originated in a nearby market, it feels like it satisfies Occams shaving implement.

As for why there were no previous wild outbreaks, that I can't answer,except that the people who found the origins of SARS in horseshoe bats in Yunnan didn't find the virus itself, but rather it's genetics spread across diverse strains of coronaviruses in one cave, with analysis showing the varying strains could mix. [1]

So, maybe Covid-19 is an amalgam of a novel coronavirus that was being studied, that had never reached the level of serious illness in the wild to be distinguishable from a common cold, and another coronavirus it met in Wuhan, whether in the lab or in the dense population, and became far more potent.

And of course, there's the allegations of gain of function work in the Wuhan lab.

I agree that we'll never know the truth, the CCP would never accept the loss of face of it was their researchers who accidentally unleashed it.

There was a giant fish that we managed to not know about for thousands of years until one washed up onto the feet of a marine biologist...

If it’s the coelacanth, they were known to local fishermen. They nicknamed them “king of the sea.”

Presumably the people who collect bat poop from caves are aware they're full of dangerous viruses..

So, a good book just came out last week by a MIT-Harvard Broad Institute genomics scientist that outlines all the lab leak vs zoonotic evidence (right up till the Pasteur Institute Laos study - whose underlying data wasn’t public in time for printing). Covers everything else we know so far - all about furin cleavage, the market-based arguments, and especially the ‘DEFUSE’ grant application document to DARPA.

It’s titled Viral and it’s written by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley (he was the author of ‘How Innovation Works’.)

What's the verdict?

1: such things can take time. Sometimes decades.

2: which proves what?

3: all coronavirus strains are related, that's why they have that common element in their name

4: we have some pretty good candidates though.

https://time.com/6121482/first-covid-19-case-wuhan-wet-marke...

https://wildlife.org/wild-deer-contract-coronavirus/

5. A wild strain would have spit out many new variants early on as it mutates to become accustomed to us.

>None of this adds up to positive evidence of any variation of the "lab leak" theory but given that there is no alternative theory that holds up to serious scrutiny or doesn't have serious flaws or unanswered questions, it has to stay in the running.

The virus derives from somewhere. If wild, we would have known it was wild. It's not wild anymore, that boat has moved on.

So where else? Now that we know it was a lab leak because of good old occams razor. We can look at the very quick response to label lab leak as a conspiracy theory. Who pushed that. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095418/

How did Trump of all people blame a lab leak in wuhan so quickly as well? Trump didn't know there was a lab there.

>My suspicion is the Chinese government doesn't know either but, more importantly, they don't want to know because absolutely no good can come from that becoming public. There is literally no upside.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...

A wuhan lab in china received money from the US government to do gain of function research on coronaviruses and they started using the variant that is 96% similar to covid only a few years before. The american politicians who at exactly the same time they started doing this work warned that safety at the wuhan lab was poor.

If it was a lab leak, why then is the person responsible for covid publishing about it like they didnt know. The exact person who is responsible.

That's because it's a leak. It's not intentional.

What do you mean by ‘found in the wild’? Covid has been found in wild deer populations and in various animals in zoos

They presumably mean an animal reservoir in China that predates the pandemic. Zoos are obviously a case of human to animal transmission, not animal to human.

That said, we don’t know where Ebola hangs out between outbreaks, and we’ve been trying for decades. It’s clearly hard.

i don't understand why the so-called "lab leak theory" of origin for sars-cov2 is treated as some sort of conspiracy theory. it is completely plausible, and things like this have happened in the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak), not due to malice but due to incompetence.

Pretty much everyone involved stands to lose from it proving to be true that a lab leak occurred. China looks bad, the CDC/US looks bad, researchers look bad, EcoHealth Alliance looks bad[1], the lancelet looks bad.[2] Heck even politifact and factcheck.org reported the idea as debunked for the first year or so, and Facebook for around the same time took down content with that angle.[3] It would also likely result in a backlash against interest in GOF research in general.

The only group that stands to benefit are those who benefit by making those groups look bad, who will also unfortunately exaggerate their claims for greater effect.

[1]https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656

[2]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[3]https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-...

I was with you up to here:

>The only group that stands to benefit are those who benefit by making those groups look bad

I mean, collectively as humans we stand to benefit from knowing what happened so we can make more informed cost benefit decisions in the future about conducting risky research (if that's what happened).

There's going to be quite a bit more externalizing risk while "privatizing" (even if it's nation states) gains in the future with bio-engineering, so these conversations should be had.

I want to disagree with you and say it doesn’t matter, but you’re definitely right hiding bad situations is in the playbook of the authoritarian and should have no place in our society.

> I mean, collectively as humans we stand to benefit from knowing what happened so we can make more informed cost benefit decisions in the future about conducting risky research (if that's what happened).

You're not wrong, but I think what you're missing is that the risky research was funded (in part) by the us federal government, and no one voted for that in the first place. So even if we were all enlightened, what could we change? So many people still don't even know that there was a lab studying coronaviruses in wuhan.

Transparency is the most important tool in becoming a better society.

I definitely agree that there's good reason to know what actually happened, if for nothing else for the sake of long term trust in institutions. Instead of group, something more like organizations and institutions with the ability to investigate and hold people accountable would probably be more accurate.

That's such a diffuse benefit that you'd need to compare it to other things that benefit literally everyone alive - for example, the environment which sustains our existence - to determine how effective a motivator that is.

It's not looking great.

I really don't think so. Knowing what actually happened makes no difference. What is important is knowing what problems exist and what can possibly happen as a consequence of them.

This is a spot on description. It's also the sad truth of why our institutions are decaying.

They have become heavily biased towards self-preservation over function.

The real question is why self-preservation cannot best be obtained through functioning.

What looks bad is having millions of people die and not learning how to prevent it in future. This should be a blameless post-mortem. Shit went wrong, this is how we fix it. Truth and reconciliation, not hide-behind-feels. The people who want to apportion blame grow stronger from all this cat and mouse.

Not easy to achieve though.

If one or more parties are "responsible" then public sentiment (amplified by social media) will bring the pitchforks.

That translates to political support and basically guarantees the election or increased support for certain types of politicians and response, which in turn will impact diplomacy.

It would take some supreme social engineering to get society at large to accept the idea of a blameless post mortem. It's really not part of the broader cultural lexicon. Even companies struggle and they are much smaller and simpler systems.

Responsibility and liability are intrinsically linked in the public mind.

Governments likely have it in form of top-secret intelligence reports for top decision makers.

>It would also likely result in a backlash against interest in GOF research in general.

If general GOF research caused this pandemic, then maybe there should be a backlash against it. Lot's of science doesn't happen because it's too dangerous to human lives, even if the theoretical benefits outweigh the costs.

The other problem is the damage they have done to the institutions and the publics trust. Even if it's a natural event they all have to go. Who can trust them to tell the truth the next time. They have burned those bridges.

> The only group that stands to benefit are those who benefit by making those groups look bad, who will also unfortunately exaggerate their claims for greater effect.

Does this also hold for Root Cause Analysis?

Assuming there was a lab leak, the root cause to me would seem to be organizations overestimating the benefit from GOF research compared to the risks. Why that happened is a bit harder to answer. A couple potential explanations are a leak was actually a one in a million chance (this seems unlikely given past issues)[1], there is some extreme benefit we just haven't seen yet (also seems somewhat unlikely) or organizations are likely to accept risks if it means everyone gets to keep their jobs and grants keep coming in.

How to fix that problem is difficult, as gain of function research is complicated and obscure enough to be off the radar of most people until something goes wrong, so questioning scientific orthodoxy is somewhat impossible for the average person. I'm not sure what can be done about it, other than those with respectable credentials advocating for transparency and and regular people maintaining a healthy sense of curiosity.

[1]https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=837679

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Or so logic would suggest, but observation suggest otherwise, at least for ~mainstream/normal people.

If nobody can benefit from truth being public - there is no truth.

The only group that benefits are those who want to know the truth, and that is dangerous cause the truth will make the liars look bad? I mean, no offense but that sounds like something a sociopath would say.

I wouldn't say the truth itself is dangerous, but it is dangerous to the organizations involved. Those who benefit from the truth such as you or I do not have the ability to uncover it, and the institutions that could have the ability to do so don't benefit from doing so. There's no impartial oversight group outside of regular citizens, who unfortunately lack the ability to hold their institutions to account for a variety of reasons. The (potential) truth is dangerous to the parties involved, so they have an incentive not to investigate or ignore the possibility. They might even give some not completely self serving explanations/rationalizations if asked, such as keeping the peace or not causing a panic.

If for example there was a leak, and it was purely the fault of one country, I would imagine there would be vigorous finger pointing.

Politifact and factcheck get plenty of things wrong so I wouldn't say "heck even" to that. These websites are a joke.

I agree they leave a lot to be desired, but they're both at least perceived as somewhat reliable and trustworthy - factcheck is used by Facebook for example. I'm sure lots of people have pointed to those sites as proof, unfortunately.

A couple reasons, from the perspective of an infectious disease epidemiologist who isn't particularly a fan of Gain of Function studies:

1) "The lab leak theory" is actually a collection of theories, from the fairly reasonable possibility of an accidental release as part of a lab accident down to a engineered Chinese bioweapon. What any individual means by "lab leak" tends to be whatever is serving their political purposes as the time, and they borrow evidence from each other in a way that's really flawed, etc.

2) There's a lot of personal attacks built into the evidence - whether or not Ralph Baric is a likable guy, for example, fed into a lot of whether or not his lab was "involved".

3) A lot of the advocates for the lab leak hypothesis don't come from epidemiology/public health/virology, but from the intelligence community, the tech world, etc. who tended to reach for "Oh, it's obviously this..." and who reacted poorly to the idea that it might not be that simple and straightforward. Both sides of that exchange burned a lot of good will with each other early on enough that the engagement has, I think, spiraled somewhere not particularly productive.

4) It got coopted by crackpots and conspiracy theorists, as well as those interested in abdicating their own role in the pandemic.

5) The biggest reason, in my mind, is that it is a "fast" solution that gets a lot of press, and for which the alternative explanation - the one that has been true for the last two coronavirus outbreaks - is something that will take the better part of decades to resolve, if it ever does. It's also by and large not relevant for the current state of the pandemic. That creates the sense that there's a whole mountain of evidence behind it, when in reality it's a theory that is going to be rather difficult and expensive to falsify, one way or the other.

The people smart enough to conduct investigations into this know that the only outcomes will be harsher restrictions on lab research stateside without much consequences for China, and thus they are unmotivated.

This is the unfortunate truth on the psychological side. There is simply no motivation to push the lab leak theory for those scientists involved. Not for the chinese because that would be their death sentence and not for the outside world because funding and restrictions will get a lot harsher. On the other side everyone can live with the other theories because they imply more research funding and no one has to die for political reasons.

> Not for the chinese because that would be their death sentence

I don't believe it would affect "the Chinese" at all, other than spending time to ladle out a new dose of conditioning for their own public.

Well, but we certainly need to do something about this. SARS-CoV-2 is relatively mild compared to other potential lab leaks.

It has nothing to do with taking an anti China stance, as this has happened elsewhere.

It would also be advisable to investigate the early stages of the pandemic as clearly many parties were deliberately hiding information. This led to avoidable casualties and, ultimately, the whole pandemic might have been possible to contain.

>"It has nothing to do with taking an anti China stance, as this has happened elsewhere."

This is a classic collective action problem, not some nationalistic thing (though some will believe or pretend it is). Each specific lab wants relatively lax rules and no consequences for failures, but everyone else needs higher standards.

We should have leashed very short both politicians and virologists after this disaster, but the blame game has been shifted very skillfully at every point, from anybody worrying about a pandemic, to anybody not worrying about it, to your neighbor who wears the mask wrong, to three guys in the middle of desert who didn't take the vaccine, while nobody with power ever answers about anything.

As an example, notice how much scrutiny Aaron Rodgers or Joe Rogan received, compared with the fact that we've kept the US/Canadian border closed to car traffic while allowing flights in. What seems like an incoherent policy that affects millions gets next to zero attention. But what Joe Rogan does to his own body, now that we should all get the details and a full explanation about.

Marburg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Marburg_virus_outbreak_in...) is another notable lab leak.

Might be a better match in some ways as it was a previously unknown pathogen, from a previously unknown family of viruses, isolated only after several lab workers got sick.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/

“ The World Health Organization has confirmed that breaches of safety procedures on at least two occasions at one of Beijing's top virology laboratories were the probable cause of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) there last month, which infected nine people, one of whom died.”

It even happened with a coronavirus in China before!

Because there is a whole contingent of people who take the argument in bad faith for xenophobic reasons and there is not a lot of solid evidence in this case to argue in good faith beyond "theoretically possible."

Whether unsavory people believe in something has zero bearing on whether it's true.

Unfortunately, the unsavory people don't live in a vacuum separate from us. If it ends up being true, then it's true, and whomever is President at the time will do what they can do. If it ends up being false, however, the people (generally Asian Americans) who have been maimed, or killed by those unsavory people in the meanwhile don't get an undo. Continued discussion with no new real evidence, like the situation with Hillary Clinton's emails, is propaganda, pure and simple.

That's sort of covered by the second half, though

>and there is not a lot of solid evidence in this case to argue in good faith beyond "theoretically possible."

Also, bad faith arguments tend to be posited on the fact that they are incorrect. Otherwise they would just be arguments.

It bears on the signal-to-noise ratio.

And hiding something because it's believed by bad people is going to make those bad people look like heroes when they turn out to have been right in this particular instance.

If the goal is to make racists look good, that's a great plan.

Personally I rate the plausibility of a lab leak at over 90%. Quick back of the envelope: there is one such lab in China, where there are about 100 cities with over 1 million inhabitants. The probability that a pandemic randomly appeared in any one of them is therefore 1%, or put another way, there is a 99% probability that it appeared in Wuhan because of a link to the lab. There has been no new information in the past two years to change that assessment.

90% of what?

I don't know how to think about this article https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-r...

It looks bad

Well, there's not much evidence for it. And, honestly, there's arguably an aspect of wishful thinking to it. "This was the result of a leak" is much less scary than "this just showed up", because in the leak scenario, the next one probably _could_ be stopped through better procedures, whereas the entirely natural scenario... well, there are some precautions that can be taken, but good luck preventing exiting new viruses from showing up from time to time.

Closest known relatives of virus behind COVID-19 found in Laos

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2

The NIAID claimed that it didn't fund research into BANAL-52 and similar. "the closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 . . . were not studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant"

https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/coronavirus-ba...

However, that was recently revealed to be extremely unlikely, since bat coronavirus samples were in fact collected from Laos, where BANAL-52 was located. Even more suspiciously, the Laos genetic samples disappeared from the WIV database in late 2019.

https://wap.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/wu...

So what's the harm in accepting it was a lab leak? You might end up with better procedures?

That depends on what you decide to do about it.

1) I've seen people call for a ban on research at all on BSL-3+ pathogens.

2) If you "accept that it was a lab leak" you are implicitly accepting that it was not a natural event - which is going to cause you to focus more on long-tailed, low-probability events like lab leaks, and less on zoonotic transmission events.

Which if you're wrong would be a serious problem.

Better for whom? Certainly not for the labs. It's far better for the labs to draw their own conclusions from the leak, privately, at their own pace. Also, there's a significant financial disincentive: funding for gain of function research will be severely impacted by recognizing the lab leak as the most plausible explanation.

> ...good luck preventing exiting new viruses from showing up from time to time.

But even with a "natural origin," there are things that could be done. I've heard it said that the real Chinese cover-up in that scenario is the widespread trading of wild animals (with one wild animal vendor even travelling from Wuhan to other markets which China had insisted only sold frozen food and kitchenware).

https://news.yahoo.com/virologist-suggests-coronavirus-origi...

You still have the same problem in the end: a "lack of transparency" (if not downright dishonesty) from the Chinese government. And also, an obvious avenue for reforming the dangers that helped spread the 2020 pandemic -- which is not being explored because of difficulties in even establishing the facts of the initial outbreak.

I honestly don't know why this idea -- this possibility, this scenario -- isn't getting equal consideration.

> there's not much evidence for it

The fact that the first(?) major outbreak was in a city with a major virus research lab that researches coronaviruses is pretty strong circumstantial evidence. China's "nothing to see here" handling of it was also suspicious.

NYT treating it like a conspiracy theory is consistent with their editorial deference to official government narratives.

NYT and others were reluctant to talk about the lab leak theory because Trump put them in an impossible position by constantly stirring up racial tensions regarding COVID. His actions led to real violence against Asian Americans and promoting the lab leak would have furthered it.

We could have easily been able to have an open conversation about the lab leak possibility if we had proper leadership at the time.

The first thing Bush did after 9/11 was go on TV and essentially say to everyone: “hey, don’t be racist towards Muslim Americans because of this attack; they are fellow Americans and have nothing to do with this” and it was largely effective.

(Not that I'm praising Bush as a president, but this specific act was an instance of good leadership)

Also the emails saying things like "this could do to virology what chernobyl did to nuclear science".

They know their cushy careers and research grants are gone if they normalize the lab leak.

> They know their cushy careers and research grants are gone if they normalize the lab leak.

These sorts of comments on HN are always fascinating to me.

Scientific researchers make $20K/yr for 6 years of their 20s, often working 60 hour - 80 hour weeks. If they are successful, around the age of 30 they will then make between $40K and $60K in a temporary, term-limited position (post-doc). This might repeat several times -- each more stressful than the last -- until they land a permanent job. Still working like dogs the whole time, btw. That final permanent job, which very few will ever actually get, probably pays between $60K and $100K. A very lucky few among the lucky few might make up to $200K by the time they turn 40, but most will never surpass $150K in their lives.

My undergrad mentees all make $160K+ as 22 year olds, often get to $300K pretty quickly, and will max out in the >$500K range some time in their 30s.

Software folks accusing life scientists of getting fat off of research grant money is really something else.

I've often found that when people take a "follow the money, man" position on an argument, they are not in fact following the money. e.g., the arguments I used to see against anthropogenic global warming based on essentially the same idea you're pushing back on -- that it was a fraud perpetrated by climate scientists so they'd keep raking in the donations and grants. When I inquired as to why "follow the money" wouldn't in fact suggest far greater skepticism of oil companies in the debate, I never got much of a response.

This.

In the lab where I did my postdoc, the folks who went on to work for Amazon, Rackspace and Facebook are doing way better than those of us who went to work for universities, the CDC, etc. monetarily.

I have, what is for an academic a great job, and it pales in comparison to what I could make if I retooled for industry.

Your analysis should start with the people who got the final permanent job, as those are the ones whose careers are at risk. And your comparison of a "cushy career" should be compared to the median American, who earns $36K, not the extreme outliers you mentor. $60K to $100K for high-status intellectual work is something most people would cling onto.

People in academia are smart enough, they made that choice voluntarily and nobody held a gun to their head.

It's a voluntary trade-off for lower pay to work in the field you want.

There is a difference between churning out code you really hate for 500k/yr, and doing what you are interested in for 80/10/150k. The vast majority people in software aren't aching to reinvent the wheel, but in a new js framework every year, they just do it for the money.

Research grant money is still money, even if the academics decide to take a trade-off others don't.

How would you like to NEVER receive grant money again? Gonna bite the hand that feeds you?

Fauci is the highest-paid US government employee. That's even ignoring the fact that he will make tens of millions of dollars after he ceases to be a government employee. The previous head of the FDA, Gottlieb is with Pfizer already. The guy who replaced him, Stephen Hahn, is with Moderna now. I find it bizzarre how people instantly forgot how profoundly evil US Big Pharma was considered even a couple of years ago. These people will let diabetics die for a buck, and yet I'm now supposed to treat them as the second coming of Jesus, and pretend they can do no wrong.

And I can guarantee you Daszak and a bunch of other hangers on make a lot more than "20K". In fact 20K might not be enough to get him out of bed in the morning.

> ...the so-called "lab leak theory" of origin for sars-cov2

That isn't what this article is about.

I thought the article actually did a real public service by moving the discussion beyond whether Covid did or didn't emerge from the Wuhan market. Because either way, it's much much more important to say, "how could we, in the future, prevent the scenario of a lab leak from happening."

It keeps the discussion focused on what's important.

I think part of the push back from the lab leak theory is that it's often accompanied by lab created and leaked. I'm far from an expert, but from what I understand, there are 0 signs it was lab created. Now isolated from the wild in a lab and then leaked is still considered possible, but they just don't know.

It is trope-y enough to lend some suspicion. That is most conspiracy theories are about some sort of "reassuring" narrative that it takes evil people who you already expect to create big problems. As opposed to the world being a chaotic uncontrolled and uncontrollable place. That isn't hard disproof of course but it is a resemblance to other conspiracy theories.

The lab leak theor(y/ies) (is a/ are) "the hoofprints may have come from zebras" sort of situation - possible but not the most likely in absense of other evidence.

You're near a watering hole in southern Africa.

It never really was. Reasonable conversations were being had, just not on polarized platforms. People's knee-jerk reactions to downvoting and "cancelling" every thing that mentioned it, in good faith or bad, last year was a direct response to the powers-that-were choosing the "China did it (maybe on purpose)" narrative to misdirect peoples anger and frustration.

If those same people would have said things like "obviously, it's _possible_ it was leaked from a lab, we're going to work on finding that out and let you know what we find as we do. In the mean time, here's what we're going to do about the immediate problems we're facing..." and ended it there, there wouldn't have been any backlash. That's what going on now, and that's why this post (good or bad, I can't say, I can't access it) wasn't flagged into oblivion the second it hit the front page.

When one slightly orange tinted guy can effectively ban discussion of any topic on all platforms by vaguely mentioning it, the problem is not that guy, it is everybody else.

> It never really was. Reasonable conversations were being had, just not on polarized platforms

Does "polarized platforms" include the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Lancet?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-media-cal...

I think to some extent our media has developed an attitude towards inconvenient ideas that they are conspiracies. They can't discuss stuff like that without emphasizing how totally not true they are. I am not saying it is or isn't true but that the media will tend to suggest inconvenient stuff is not true.

Malice is also completely plausible. Biowarfare is like chemical and nuclear warfare, it's not new, it has been used before, and it probably will be used again.

Hanlon's Razor says, never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

In this case, the malice explanation demands stupidity because it was released in their own city. Not sure what Hanlon would say about that.

Not to mention the stupidity of developing what would surely be the least useful bioweapon in history (most people of fighting age get mild and brief symptoms or no symptoms, but it's infectious enough to get back to your own population and kill similar proportions of your own vulnerable before you figure out how to deal with it)

Hanlon's Razor is only applicable to individuals IMO.

The topic was what is plausible.

> In this case, the malice explanation demands stupidity because it was released in their own city.

Lenin said that "if for the sake of Communism it is necessary for us to destroy 9/10ths of the people, we must not hesitate". Tito killed 1% of his country's population. Stalin killed or starved 20 million. Mao killed or starved 60 million. Pol Pot killed or starved 25% of his country's population.

I don't understand why lab leak isn't, like, the first or most important investigative line. It's just a matter of asking and checking - thoroughly - every person and every machine involved with the lab in that timeframe. After all, "the disease is the same name as the lab!" [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8

iirc it is because it heavily implicates both Peter Daszak, who was the head of the UN investigation of the Lab Leak theory, who orchestrated the Lancet letter denouncing the Lab Leak theory, who has now been shown to have conducted gain of function research on bat coronaviruses at the WIV, and Fauci who provided funding for this through Daszak's EcoHeath Alliance and NHAID after there was some sort of restriction on that kind of research stateside. On top of that China is completely uncooperative with the effort and wouldn't provide any evidence to implicate themselves.

Presumably people are being more careful now. Would like to see some sort of news or legislation about this but I’m sure it’s unlikely.

And what kind of legislation would tickle your fancy? Intentional release is already legislated against. How do you legislate the prevention of accidents? Are you specifically talking about disclosure? I can get on board with that, but I'd be shocked if there's not already legislation around that.

Now, the crux, whatever legislation you come up with, how does that apply to a foreign country?

Well for starters, the reason a lot of this research was pushed to China was congress had grown tired of finding ways to punish the CDC for lab leaks and mistakes here in the US. It was only recently that the CDC had been allowed to restart a lot of its more dangerous research. So how about the US stop funding dangerous research regardless of where it is at?

Either the lab leak was true and this was a self-inflicted wound, or it was highly suspicious and uselessly dangerous research, as it didn't help us stop the pandemic.

I know basically nothing about foreign policy at all, but just in the "tombert thought experiment" land I'm going to give my "asshole opinion" [1].

-----------

> Now, the crux, whatever legislation you come up with, how does that apply to a foreign country?

Conceivably couldn't we do some kind of trade agreement/embargo on countries that don't follow a minimum level of disclosure/safety protocol? E.g. if country A is shown to have covered up a massive lab leak, we impose some kind of tariff on them for N days.

Obviously there are no easy solutions to problems like this, but I think that would be the place I start, because obviously US law doesn't really apply to places outside of the US; the only thing we could do (at least the only thing that I could think of) that's even close to punitive enforcement would be to apply leverage.

[1] "Opinions are like assholes; everyone's got one and most of them stink"

> And what kind of legislation would tickle your fancy? Intentional release is already legislated against. How do you legislate the prevention of accidents?

That's a ridiculous line of reasoning: legislation helps mitigate accidents all the time.

Pilots don't want their bird to fall out of the sky, and yet legislation around pilot training, practices and certification limited the number of accidents.

> Presumably people are being more careful now

Probably so, but just like hollywood and guns.

It's plausible, sure, but it'll never be proven, especially at this distance.

Also the U.S. Army lost control of some anthrax in 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks

that whole saga was so fascinating. the culprit ended up (likely) being one of the scientists involved, with the motive of justifying funding into anthrax research. because of the incredibly low mutation rate of anthrax, they couldn't identify the strain by DNA testing.

they had to do new science to fingerprint strains based on the quantities of different populations in the samples vs. the bottles - an investigation the culprit himself was involved in. as they uncovered the flask responsible and the very limited number of people who could get their hands on it, the attacker killed himself.

The pushback on the lab leak theory happens because proponents of the lab leak theory are pushing that theory in bad faith. If there's a lab leak, then they can excuse mis-handling of the USA COVID response.

What about the mishandling that occurred elsewhere in the world? Trump was only president of America.

What about it? The excuse-seekers aren't looking to wave away Sweden's mishandling, for example.

Sorry to grand-stand a bit, but I think the narrative is missing the point of the 'lab leak theory'.

The 'lab leak' is actually a bit of a misnomer. What they really mean is that it was created/modified/bred intentionally, versus just being discovered in some bat cave or whatever.

It's not the leaking per se that is what worries people--it's the idea that this has a human-created origin. It's an experiment or weapon which was accidentally leaked to the world.

Not only it is plausible, it's very very likely. What are the odds that a lab that works on gain of function of Corona viruses is the exact place where the epidemic started?

The "exact place" the epidemic was discovered is in Wuhan, which is also where the lab is. That's a correlation, and clearly worth investigating, but it's not in and of itself proof.

I was originally dismissive of the "lab leak hypothesis", in no small part because of how quickly it got caught up in politics. I'm less so now, but I do think it's important to remember that when we ask "how likely is it that a novel coronavirus epidemic would start in a city that also has a laboratory working with novel coronaviruses and it just be a coincidence," the answer may be "not very" if the city with the laboratory is the size of, say, Frederick, Maryland (78,000), but "maybe more than you think" if it's the size of New York City (8.8M).

The lab leak idea bears further investigation, but "authorities have been too dismissive of that" shouldn't lead us to assume "well, it was obviously a lab leak."

Also: how many laboratories working with novel coronaviruses are there in the world? How concentrated are they?

I don’t know the answer, but it could well be that a significant fraction of the population of China (or the USA) lives in a city with such a lab, making it not too unlikely that the first patient will be found in such a city.

One note:

"Where the epidemic was first detected" and "Where the epidemic started" are not the same thing.

Especially given the relative prevalence of mild disease in COVID-19 cases.

Everyone I've seen discussing it treats it as possible. The "conspiracy theory" part comes in when people claim or speak as if it's proven when it absolutely is not. There is no smoking gun evidence for it, but it can't be ruled out either.

That in itself is kind of scary though. It means a lab leak could happen silently and we may never correctly attribute it.

Add to this how fabricated the "wet-market" theory just feels. Perhaps it may be a viable theory, but it smells like such BS, the kind of bad-but-effective theory you know you could get away with thanks to classic "ooh weird foreigner food racism." No one's going to stop to ask, uh, why NOW?

Doesn't seem fabricated to me. Zoonotic disease transmission is the norm. Add population growth, rampant development encroaching on habitats, stresses and migrations due to climate disaster, and the "why now?" seems pretty obvious.

There are some thoughts you just aren’t allowed to think, lest you be labeled a trump-supporting nazi racist.

Because it's almost inherently conspiracy fodder, true or not.

It tickles the part of human psychology that looks for threat agents, rather than just threats.

Lots of us here on the more analytical side might have trouble understanding that fully, especially if we relate to Fauci's early 2020 statements which more or less amount to "it doesn't really matter which plausible origin turns out to be the case, either way the task in front of us is to figure out how to mitigate the damage and address the virus."

It could have been a lab leak. It could have been (and now looks more likely to have been [0][1]) natural spillover from increasing contact with zoonotic reservoirs. What's the difference?

The answer to that question on a practical level is re-thinking safety protocols for related research (and perhaps a conversation about the risks of conducting viral research vs the risks of viral ignorance).

On a less practical level, though, the answer is that it prompts inhabiting a narrative where they key issue is human threat agents.

The irony is that many of the people who choose that as the most important thing to pay attention seem slower to consider how human threat agents might use that narrative.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/11/18/coronavirus... [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/why-many-scientists-...

Imagine if a policeman was saying the same thing about a crime; why investigate, finding the culprit is only conspiracy fodder, let's only take care of the victims.

Not investigating, and hiding the truth is what gives room for conspiracies to grow.

Also how can we better understand and prevent pandemics whithout understanding where they come from. Wasn't the coronavirus research lab founded on that premise?

I don't find the parallel good. Trying to invent a better one, I thought I'd say the coronavirus situation is IMO more like a question of whether, say, some particular volcano's explosion was natural, or human-induced.

As such, one can either focus on generally being more prepared against volcano explosions, or focus on trying to find a person among volcano researchers and tourists who may have done something to tickle the volcano to explode.

I mean, it's sure also not a perfect analogy; but how I see it, focusing on preparedness and handling of a situation that does happen naturally from time to time for sure, sounds to me like a sensible choice to focus effort into. With that said, totally, if there's some possibility it might have been human-induced, it makes sense to try and track and prevent it in the future; thing is, me personally, and I would risk theorizing that also many other people, am strongly afraid of such approach too quickly and too easily turning into a witch-hunt, anti-XYZ propaganda, and stirring hate by unscrupulous people - with scapegoating seemingly socially much easier to turn towards, than tiresome and "boring" epidemologic preparedness and discipline.

> Because it's almost inherently conspiracy fodder, true or not.

No it's not! Reasonably minded persons consider this entirely plausible.

The way the conversation is being actively steered away from this topic is concerning.

> It could have been a lab leak. It could have been (and now looks more likely to have been [0][1]) natural spillover from increasing contact with zoonotic reservoirs. What's the difference?

There's a huge difference. Each scenario has different lessons to learn, culpability, etc.

> No it's not! Reasonably minded persons consider this entirely plausible.

I didn't say it was implausible. In fact, I have at least one sentence in my comment that acknowledges it is plausible to entertain. It doesn't appear to be plausible as a conclusion (see the two articles I linked, which do include sources who initially wanted to explore the lab leak theory), but it was plausible enough as a hypothesis.

What I said is that even if it is the truth, it evokes conspiracy-oriented thinking in a specific way, and elaborated on the dynamic.

> Each scenario has different lessons to learn, culpability, etc.

"Culpability" -- thank you for reinforcing my point about human threat agents. And also regarding "lessons to learn", or as I put it, managing risks in viral research vs the risks of not doing viral research... which of course is a conversation that goes on anyway.

>There's a huge difference. Each scenario has different lessons to learn, culpability, etc.

Perspective matters. Yes, learning to not have it happen again is an ideal thing. However, from Fauci's point of view at the time and his role, the how/why absolutely didn't matter as he stated.

>i don't understand why the so-called "lab leak theory" of origin for sars-cov2 is treated as some sort of conspiracy theory. it is completely plausible, and things like this have happened in the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak), not due to malice but due to incompetence.

It's remarkable how quickly they settled on bats and everything but this was misinformation that would get you banned from various american tech companies.

It's also remarkable how quickly they moved to shutdown many discussions. The lab leak only months earlier from Canada where a chinese national shipped viruses to wuhan. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/chinese-researcher-e...

There's no evidence of coronavirus being involved at all with the canadian lady, but they sure did call it conspiracy theory and shutdown talks quick.

Throw this in context of a pissing match with China and Canada. https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/26/china/meng-wanzhou-china-arri... and China in return arresting and putting Canada diplomats on death row.

I think lots of answers came along from fauci's emails. All of these are not coincidences and China is probably not the source of covid. Hence why there was such a quick reaction to blame china.

Blame Canada!

> where a chinese national shipped viruses to wuhan

No where in the linked article does it say that Dr. Xiangguo Qiu shipped viruses to Wuhan.

NMLs lips have been sealed and there was never a reason given why they were dismissed. Going as far as saying that they were shipping viruses to wuhan is baseless speculation.

A more recent article from CBC had more up to date details than the article you linked: https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6090188

>No where in the linked article does it say that Dr. Xiangguo Qiu shipped viruses to Wuhan.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/canadian-scientist-s...

>All of this has led to conspiracy theories linking the novel coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, Canada's microbiology lab, and the lab in Wuhan.

There's no evidence that coronavirus was involved with this lady.

>NMLs lips have been sealed and there was never a reason given why they were dismissed. Going as far as saying that they were shipping viruses to wuhan is baseless speculation.

Like, Wuhan is certainly involved. It's possible coronavirus was already at wuhan and they used these canadian viruses for the 'gain of function' stuff. Oh it's much better than that. Those government officials have outright defied orders requiring them to disclose this information. Even better, we all know how strong unions and such are. They came out originally fighting for this lady and then suddenly they stopped altogether. No fight at all.

And where did this lady go? She has been missing...

Even better? Early on in covid Indian universities looked at the covid make up and found that it wasn't a natural virus. A natural virus would have been spitting out many new variants early on. They made some predictions about where those gain of function points would have been from. But then the censors came along and shut them down.

Because it was useful politically for the media to treat it that way. They had one goal and this was something that needed to be done to achieve that goal.

Yeah… all hypotheses are “completely plausible” until they’re not.

Plausibility is a starting point, not an answer.

no, the set of all hypotheses taken together form a distribution (determined by the prior probability). For example, if you proposed that space aliens delivered COVID to us, I would say that is lower probability than any lab leak because we have zero evidence for space aliens, and it's certainly not required to explain anything about COVID that we've observed.

Entirely pedantic and missing my point.

[flagged]

I'm pretty sure there was a conspiracy. Not a conspiracy to create a pandemic, but a conspiracy to hide an accident due to incompetence. Not all conspiracies are myths, just consider Watergate: there was a conspiracy to hide Nixon's shenanigans. The only difference is that one happened in a dictatorship while the other happened in a democracy with a free press.

Oh I agree, at a bare minimum there's nothing even remotely wacky about the lab leak theory. I'm just explaining why half the country has counterintuitively decided to brand it as lunatic fringe conspiracy rather than it being self-evidently plausible if not likely.

Well I'm guessing that because of your political ideals you're committed to the wrong position that masks are ineffective so studies like this won't convince you, https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-068302

No, it's my commitment to objective analysis and not bizarre herd behavior combined with religious/cult undertones that led me to this conclusion.

I always love when someone posts like one single "study" that almost always doesn't even qualify as amateur hour (eg data mining) and thinks it's some sort of mic drop, as if there aren't 25 disconfirming studies or data points for every one thing saying masks have even a faint amount of efficacy.

it's too bad this was downvoted because it's probably the best explanation.

I'm not totally sure about 3, my guess is that we have collected far more useful intelligence that our agencies have released, but nothing sufficient to make a geopolitical claim about China, and the cost of being wrong with such an accusation is huge.

Because people get polarized and are incapable of nuance.

It's important to remember what some of the lab leak theories have said:

- that it is a engineered bioweapon

- that it is genetically altered to contain parts of HIV

- that it was intentionally released during the 2019 military games

Once in a camp it is difficult to accept nuance.

We can’t talk about the lab leak theory for the same reason a third of the country refuses to get vaccinated: it became a politicized issue somewhere along the way, at which point people’s brains turn off and their emotions and tribalism take over.

Most of the people pushing the lab leak hypothesis have the specific goal of fomenting anti China sentiment. Trump ignored covid despite the extensive advice of experts and then tried to distract from his failure by trying to foment war with China. This argument is an extension of that.

Probably more so trying to distract from the fact he’s over $200m in debt to the CCP. Wouldn’t want anybody looking too deeply into that.

What Trump believes or uses for his political gain does not magically become incorrect by virtue of being believed or used by Trump. I don't think you're trying to suggest anything as silly as that, but still worth explicitly pointing out.

Trumpian tempests should remain in a teapot of their own, and lab leak theory should be discussed on its own merit. Xenophobia innuendos and "but Trump" dog whistles are unhelpful in sussing out the truth.

> What Trump believes or uses for his political gain does not magically become incorrect by virtue of being believed or used by Trump.

OTOH, I will tell you that I definitely look at what my daughter says with a far more critical eye than I do what my son says, because my daughter has a track record of lying and my son does not.

Because it's completely untestable and short of someone "admitting" it we will never know for sure.

So whether you believe it or not depends entirely on you're prejudices. I'm prejudiced not to but others may feed differently.

And it makes absolutely no difference at all. You still need a vaccine, you still need lockdowns and quarantines and to manage your healthcare. And we should all be taking action on China whether it's incompetence (around food hygiene) or incompetence (around bio hazard management).

This is why I hate the whole Lab Leak thing. It's people "straining out a knat and swallowing a camel". It's a distraction and it unnecessarily complicates messaging and discussion that can be pretty vital.

It absolutely makes a difference, because we need to stop this from happening again. We can't just accept that labs are going to continue to release dangerous viruses and then just deal with the effects every time.

The issue here is China. My evidence for this is that this keeps happening in China (SARS etc).

So if it's lab leak, the problem isn't the US or Russia or Butan doing lab work. It's China doing lab work insecurely.

And if it's a food hygiene thing, it's not a world food hygiene thing, it's a Chinese food hygiene thing.

So the action here is to sanction the fuck out of China. And that is true whether it's lab leaked or zoonotic or any other unimaginable source.

> Because it's completely untestable and short of someone "admitting" it we will never know for sure.

What a weird assertion.

It would be perfectly testable in any democratic country. Set up an independent commission, give access to the lab's complete files, perform a lot of tests on samples held there. That's exactly what would happen. Opposition parties would be demonstrating non stop demanding answers.

Instead this is China, a communist dictatorship with, on top of that, a strong culture of never losing face. It's only untestable because of that, not for epistemological reasons.

So it's testable, but only if we overthrow the CCP, make China a functional democracy, change Chinese culture to encourage openness, seize the records before they destroy them (which them might already have) and if we can't find those records or they say nothing incriminating, we accept tthat they're innocent because abcence of evidence is evidence of abcense?

Sounds untestable to me...

Nobody associates it with a conspiracy theory just because it gets mentioned. That happens because the people most aggressively pushing it online often make that association themselves. In between demands for expensive new investigations, they often veer off into talk of Dasczak is part of a vast gain-of-function underground and Fauci is helping them cover it up, and Big Pharma is pushing vaccines because they can't make a profit from ivermectin, and something something about discouraging masks at the start of the pandemic, and mask/vaccine mandates are somehow part of a plot to destroy America, and so on ad nauseam. Seen plenty of it right here. Such people might be a small minority of the people who think we should look more closely at virus research standards, but they're an incredibly visible minority and their stridency causes the whole issue to be framed in conspiracy-theory terms.

What? Unless I'm mistaken, There is no GOF underground with Dasczak, it's very above ground (to be clear, the NIH didn't fund GOF on SARS-Cov2, just on... adjacent viruses). Don't know if Fauci is covering it up, but he certainly hasn't stepped forward to condemn Dasczak, even though the NIH already has condemned EcoHealthAllicance.

It's also kind of insane that Dasczak was a lead signatory to the "this is not a lab leak" opinion piece without disclosing a MAJOR conflict of interest. He should have stayed out of it.

If you don't think a lot of people died early on in the US because the Surgeon General went on TV and said masks were basically useless for the average person, with every talk/news show running pieces about how you'd just touch a doorknob then your eye, and thus are more likely to get infected by wearing a mask, then you either can't remember what happened or are ideologically driven.

But that's totally irrelevant to where the virus came from, unless you're arguing that there's a massive global conspiracy.

If I had to guess, it's something along these lines (again I'm just guessing, these are general social sentiments that I observed over the past 2 years):

1. Trump mismanaged the pandemic, this resulted in cognitive dissonance amongst his supporters. (they like him but their brain doesn't like the feeling that it was wrong)

2. A 'convenient' explanation to avoid this dissonance is COVID is a Chinese bio-weapon. They (big bad China) released COVID to make Trump look bad and to kill Americans.

3. Liberals, seeing through this, push back on this generally unsubstantiated claim (at the time and potentially even now) that COVID is a bio-weapon. In the eyes of most, Liberals have taken the side of 'COVID is a natural random mutation, not a lab leak'.

4. Now whether or not it's a lab leak or natural is a political game, where your team wins depending on where the facts finally lie (or if you can manufacture enough support for your 'side').

5. See: Rand Paul v Fauci in various senate hearings about gain-of-function research and funding for a Wuhan lab & generally liberals trying not to talk about it because it would be another example of them 'lying' in the eyes of conservatives (think 'masks don't help' but alllll over again).

This seems like a pretty good take to me. As an American who cares a lot about having compelling reasons for my beliefs and opinions, it's so fucking exhausting.

Lately, I've been getting more comfortable with just saying "I don't know" for the latest controversial topic. It's not great for making small talk though.

Spot on. Nearly everything these days gets shoehorned into the insane US culture war, including the origins of Covid.

I don't buy this, obviously not an unbiased sample, but most individual liberals I know are on board with it being a lab leak. Can't necessarily say that about 'liberal leadership class' in the US, though.

For the same reason we were influenced to used COVID-19 as a name rather the presumed geographical place of origin as is traditionally done.

There are lots of “traditionally done” things that turn out not to be great. There are some good examples of the issues with naming viruses geographically in this article.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/28/us/disease-outbreaks-coronavi...

Your article says absolutely nothing about the geographical naming causing the prejudice against minorities and it doesn't make sense that the place of origin, which is of public notoriety, would either be forgotten or is the cause of the prejudice anyway.

By cherry-picking that particular lab leak, you're making it look like this only happens in 'other' countries. Plenty of lab leaks have happened right here in the US.

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

Has a virus ever leaked from a lab whose existence (or ability to transmit along humans) had not previously been known? Surely the vast majority of new human-infecting viruses have been novel mutations that happened naturally.

If the lab leak was real, covering it up to the extent they did requires a literal conspiracy (not to mention hypothetical function gain research). In the absence of concrete evidence, it is quite literally a conspiracy theory.

Hypothetical function gain research?

You mean the literal proposal to put furin cleavage sites on coronavirus collected in the wild, filed for a grant in 2018, which was rejected for being too dangerous. Also, SARS-Cov-2 is the only beta coronavirus with a furin cleavage site. And if you have ever been anywhere near academic grant process, you'll know that you use a previous grant to do the next grant work, as preliminary results.

So tell me it is just a coincidence that just after writing this grant proposal in 2018 to take coronavirus in the wild and putting furin cleavage sites on them, the first beta coronavirus with a furin cleavage site turns up in the same place right next to the lab, right after they moved their sister BSL-2 lab.

Furin cleavage sites aren't as exclusive as you are making them out to be. It has already been established that such sites occur in other corona viruses.

https://virological.org/t/tackling-rumors-of-a-suspicious-or...

I'm under the impression that the viral precursor they were expecting to find in animal populations has not been found (and that if it were a natural occurrence it would have been found) and that at least one researcher at the Wuhan lab had previously proposed gain of function research like this before. I'm sure stranger coincidences have happened but with that in mind I think its fair to elevate a lab leak theory from 'premature/purely political in intent' to 'reasonable'.

There is no evidence of animal host transmission either. Does it make it literally a conspiracy theory too?

Do you believe animals literally conspired to transmit to humans?

I believe what you're describing is rather "the coordinated malevolent animal transmission theory".

The Soviets successfully covered up a lab leak for multiple decades even after independent investigations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak

There is nothing wrong with literally conspiracy theories when literal conspiracies are likely.

Watergate was an actual conspiracy, that consisted in trying to hide Nixon's shenanigans. Real conspiracies exist. Most of the time if not always, their aim is to hide something inconvenient, not to produce some dramatic evil result. The very plausible conspiracy here is that the Chinese government and some foreign individuals are trying to hide an accident. An entirely implausible conspiracy would be that the virus was deliberately leaked, which makes no sense however you slice it, based on both motive and technical aspects.

It is Hacker News trope really, more and more evidence mounts that it was indeed - a lab leak, there has been lengthy research reports from journalists on this matter, but Hacker News remains in doubt. Which is strange, one kind of expects Hackers to weight everything and see if theory withholds scrutiny.

Same thing happens with that ultrasound attack against US diplomates in Cuba, Hacker news users claim it was just grasshopers while more and more evidence mounts it was a Russian attack.

> more and more evidence mounts that it was indeed - a lab leak

Perhaps you mean "less and less evidence"?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/11/18/coronavirus...

https://www.science.org/content/article/why-many-scientists-...

No I mean more and more evidence:

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/16/politics/biden-intel-revi...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-lab-leak-theo...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/25/timeline-...

>i don't understand why the so-called "lab leak theory" of origin for sars-cov2 is treated as some sort of conspiracy theory.

Because wildlife->human is a lot more plausible than that. Consider for instance a novel mutation that arises from [0], transmitted to humans and is coincidentally discovered near a lab that was researching this disease. Would that also be considered a 'lab leak'?

https://www.wbur.org/npr/1054224204/how-sars-cov-2-in-americ...

Lab leak doesn't mean modified virus, and yeah those types of bats don't exist anywhere near Wuhan except inside that lab.

If such labs and research are dangerous, shouldn't we, you know, be more careful in working with them, especially in a country which is notorious for hiding data, cutting various corners and preferring good looking lies to the ugly truth, and being in control to doing the right thing?

And shouldn't we ensure that people who work with such labs when and if it is necessary to do so are fully, 100% transparent and subject to public oversight? And if they, say, lie to the public and/or use weasel phrasing to hide their actions and mislead the overseers and the public about what kind of research is conducted in the dangerous labs and how it is financed and supported - shouldn't there be some consequences to it? I mean, beyond ones for lying to the Congress, which has become so routine now nobody even bats an eye at it?

I think we have to accept at this point that pandora's box has been opened with our ability to now directly synthesize genetic material and modify organisms. It wont be long before anarchic hackers can start doing this just to troll the world. There's sort of a parallel with computing, where viruses were never really a problem until everyone had access to the technology. I can see a future where we all need to get regular "security upgrades" installed to our immune systems in the form of an mRNA cocktail tailored to the latest bio threats that have been released.

>I can see a future where we all need to get regular "security upgrades" installed to our immune systems in the form of an mRNA cocktail tailored to the latest bio threats that have been released.

I think it's inevitable, along with a medical infrastructure that tailors therapies to individual genome. The world is going to become a very dangerous place to the portion of our population that can't afford the latest updates.

if the FDA switches to approving drug development/manufacturing processes, rather than the final products themselves, mRNA vaccines could be made on-demand, quickly enough to do this.

for instance, CAR-T immunotherapy is such a process. no patient's dose is the same, since it involves removing T-lymphocytes from the patient, genetically modifying them in a bespoke way, and putting them back in. if the process itself weren't approved, you'd need to run clinical trials on every individual dose.

pipeline approvals are probably at least a decade away, though it'd be very smart if the government would get it all ready in case we need it.

As an added bonus, if you're having a slow quarter or two, you can arrange for new demand for your products to suddenly spring up in some random corner of the world.

yes honestly I'm surprised that so much attention is devoted to lab leaks and state actors who at least have a self-preservation instinct compared to explicit bioterrorism by groups with an ideological death wish.

Not sure we're super far away from the moment where these technologies become cheap and simple enough to cause mayhem. Ever since the sarin gas attack in tokyo in the 90s I've honestly wondered how this isn't already a much bigger issue.

I think it's because it's vanishingly rare that someone actually wants to see the world burn to the extent that they're willing to spend years of personal effort to that end to enact a plan that will kill them and everyone they know and love.

If it ever becomes possible to achieve personal or political gain through the development of bioweapons I suspect we are in extremely deep trouble.

>I think it's because it's vanishingly rare that someone actually wants to see the world burn to the extent that they're willing to spend years of personal effort to that end to enact a plan that will kill them and everyone they know and love.

The point is that's what has kept us safe so far. But when the complexity of bioterrorism gets to the level of script kiddies, there's plenty of people that are intelligent enough and driven to do it with nothing to lose. The difference with nuclear or chemical attacks is that those both require massive industrial capacity and complex delivery mechanisms. Think of the mayhem when a single hacker can modify a flu virus to infect the entire world.

It's easy in the US, just get an AR-15 and cause mayhem in a mall with little to no training.

if you invent the pathogen along with its vaccine, you can vaccinate yourself and the group you care about, while killing off the undesirables. you could also make genocidal weapons by designing a virus that recognizes a certain genetic sequence and inserts itself only there (or the converse, use that as a safety by inserting a gene for an inhibitory protein.)

monstrous things are achievable with a bit of engineering.

As a note, please do not try this at home. There would be a large amount of selective pressure for the virus to change the genetic sequence it recognizes / is inhibited by, and suddenly you've got a virus that can infect the "wrong" people. Likewise a vaccine puts significant selective pressure towards immune escape.

(!) In fact, don't try this anywhere! Genocidal bioweapons are bad news.

The worst (best?) possible odds of someone landing in the middle of the "socially isolated/sociopath + suicidal" and "smart enough to use newly simplified genetic technology" venn diagram is 1 in 8 billion-ish. I'd put money on there being more than that if I thought I would survive to collect.

I was (pleasantly!) surprised that nobody from ISIS traveled to Africa during the Ebola epidemic to infect themself, then flew back to NYC to hang out in Times Square. Doesn't require much brains, just the willingness to commit suicide and the motivation to kill a bunch of people, both of which ISIS had in spades.

People blinded by hate tend to not be the most creative thinkers. The either/or right/wrong mindset does not lend itself to creativity.

so ud be walking on your footbridge to work and your eyes start to roll. nothing to fear. you are just being updated :)

we don't have to crazy and make them Over-the-air updates. unless, the udpates are only going to be applied in sleep mode.

This article briefly mentions SARS-CoV-2, but at length it discusses Ebola and others quite a bit more. This article isn't about what happened with COVID-19, but about whether we should have BL4 labs at all.

In my opinion, we absolutely should. Awful diseases like Ebola are effective at what they do, so they're great places to learn about molecular biology and genetics. It seems feasible that we can manage the risk well enough to get a net expected benefit.

Biologists are able to generate highly specialized viruses for research for decades now, i m sure it was possible before covid. I think going forward you should be afraid of nature. We have evolved global transportation / shipping / tourism beyond the carrying capacity of modern epidemiology / bacteriology to keep up with spreading pathogens. SarsCov2 might be just one of many , since human population has not peaked in numbers yet.

The only thing I am afraid of is ideas being disregarded because they don't help you politically.

Reality is what reality is. Whether this was leaked by a lab in China or not should not depend on which side of the election we are on. Ivermectine is not effective or not based on which side of the political spectrum you are on.

And if it doesn't work, that doesn't mean we make fun of those who believe it does, it means we try something else. It took thousand of failed attempts to find the one bacteria that could effectively attack TB.

If you want to reject reality and substitute your own, I won't stop you. Don't force it upon me.

This comment section is, at best, 99% speculation by internet detectives and conspiracy theorists.

How many level 4 biosafety labs exist in the world where this type of dangerous research is carried out? 15. How many are in China? 2, one of which is in Wuhan the epicenter of the origination of the virus. Lab leak theory should have been the default root cause until proven otherwise by independent researchers (which China won't allow in).

The coronavirus lab is in Wuhan because it's a big city in a region where historically a lot of coronoviruses originate, so it makes sense that they'd be researching them there.

That's not true though, the lab is in Wuhan due to it's proximity to major universities. The SARS like coronaviruses that they studied are in provinces in the south such as Yunnan, Guangdong, and bordering countries like Laos. That's why researchers from the lab always went on field sampling missions to Yunnan and Laos.

The reason the lab is Wuhan has nothing to do with where these viruses originate, it's there for the same reason there is a BSL4 lab in NYC.

How many pandemics, out of all the pandemics that have ever happened throughout history, have been due to a lab leak? Wouldn’t the default assumption be the one that had been the cause most of the time?

Yes the factors you raise the likelihood of a lab leak theory, or they could just be circumstantial. Without more, the fact that pandemics throughout history have a natural origin weighs heavily in favor of our current pandemic having a natural origin.

Most pandemics throughout history started when there were no labs at all, so they can be ignored in this calculation.

Why? You’d need to know the independent probability of a natural origin pandemic to compute this. Surely to figure this out you would need to look at history to make this calculation. How else would you estimate that value?

What, why was the black plague not developed in the genetic engineering labs by Genghis Khan.. Maybe because the labs did not exist?

How you can compare the history of humanity to the last ten years, the time when we really have started such experiments, is beyond understanding.

Well then restrict the analysis to modern time when labs have existed. How many pandemics since labs have existed have been the result of leaks before Covid? If the answer is that more pandemics have been the result of lab leaks as opposed to natural causes, then I would lean toward lab leak being the default assumption for Covid. But if some overwhelming fraction of the pandemics in modern times were due to natural causes, I would have to choose natural causes to be the default assumption. The proximity to a lab is interesting, but to understand how to weigh that factor it might be useful to know how close labs were to the epicenters of other pandemics that had turned out to have a natural cause. Mere proximity of one thing to the source of an event is an interesting clue, but it can't tell us much on its own. This could have been a coincidence or it could have been causal. To me, it certainly wouldn't weigh heavily in the face of overwhelming evidence that pandemics are natural events that occur from time to time.

It's like trying to blame an earthquake on a dance party that happened in proximity to the fault line. Okay, maybe, but are dance parties known to cause earthquakes? Do earth quakes happen absent dance parties? Can a dance party theoretically cause an earthquake? I'm not sure, maybe if it were vigorous enough. But if all you've got proximity and a narrative about how it could have happened, without any other proof, then I'm going to default with what I know about pandemics -- they just happen, and so did Covid. I also don't have any proof and just a narrative, but I am reassured by examples of naturally occurring pandemics in the past, and a dearth of lab-leak caused pandemics. I don't see any reason it couldn't be a lab leak, and could easily be convinced with hard evidence. But again, this thread was about default assumptions absent evidence.

It isn't just proximity though.

It is also about doing dangerous research in imperfect conditions with no oversight, shady behavior like moving the dataset offline, hiding the testing status of kab members, or how the sister lab changed locations to move right next door to the wet market in fall.

It is also about how sars-cov-2 is unique in being the only beta coronavirus with a furin cleavage site, which allows it to be more infectious. It is also a coincidence to that in 2018 Wuhan was part of a failed grant to collect coronavirus in the wild and put furin cleavage sites on them. Failed grant sure, but everyone who works in academia knows that you start working on a grant for preliminary results even before it is filed. And who knows, maybe China funded this dangerous research.

The only problem in all this is how lab-leak was declared to be a settled conspiracy last year. And the only reason was because an orange idiot vouched for it.

Maybe reverse it. What is the likelihood, given that a pandemic has arisen, that it will arise in a city where a lab leak is a possible origin (having the laboratories and the research going on)? I'm going to guess that it is very unlikely.

It is indeed unlikely, because it's much easier to detect an outbreak in a controlled setting like a lab before it infects a critical mass of the population. Indeed, lab leaks have happened before and were contained before it reached more than a handful of people.

Much more likely that covid was rip-roaring uncontrolled through the Wuhan population well before the first official diagnosis, so it was already unstoppable. The real conspiracy is that China massively fucked up its handling of the outbreak because their government is generally incompetent and they don't want people prying too hard into any of it because it would be highly damaging to its world image for everyone to know just how incompetent they are. The labs have proven to be much better at this than some unelected cabal of autocratic government bureaucrats.

> How many are in China?

Virus know nothing about countries. Check all 15 labs.

It has been now almost 2 years and still no closure or definitive explanation about where Covid came from? It would seem as if nothing changed . You have all these investigators ,scientists, and reporters but no progress it seems.

It took 15 years to find the animal reservoir for the original SARS virus: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9

TBH this is not a scientifically very interesting question. It's quite likely that if one wanted to make this virus they could have. It doesnt appear to be the pinnacle of bioengineering so scientists are not curious to find out how they did it, if they did. And lab standards are already stringent, so leaks will keep happening. I don't believe the virus was leaked, not because it couldn't have but because it's equally probable that it's natural. And i 'd hate to see even slower progress in biology because of new safety standards that limit the number of people who can work in a wet lab.

It's a politically interesting question though.

> And lab standards are already stringent, so leaks will keep happening. I don't believe the virus was leaked, not because it couldn't have but because it's equally probable that it's natural.

So you're not interested in knowing whether it was a leak, or if it was, whether it was accidental, and you're not at all interested in making bio labs more secure (which one might be, if one knew it was a lab leak!)?!

So... no need to improve, just let it keep happening?

And you don't think there's any interest in the science behind making a custom virus, or spreading it?

OK, fine, you're not interested. Ah, but:

> so scientists are not curious to find out how they did it, if they did

All scientists? Most? A significant number of them?

Are you saying no one should be curious about this, or just that you aren't?

> It's a politically interesting question though.

Ah, so do investigate? I can't tell what you meant.

Some people don't believe the 'Lab Leak' explanation. They believe the 'Wet-market' explanation.

Well, wet markets are open. Wet markets are weapons of mass destruction.

In April 2021, the World Health Organization called for a total ban on the sale of live animals in food markets in order to prevent future pandemics.

Hasn't happened.

Given the ongoing damage caused by COVID-19, lives lost, economic, mental health, educational, is this OK?

I am going to make an extreme suggestion. Given the risks, I don't know what else is feasible: As long as wet-markets are open there needs to be mandatory quarantine of any traveler from China, or traveler from a country that doesn't enforce mandatory quarantines on travelers from China.

I can't find the exact link, but 80000 hours has written about lab safety as a possible high-impact career area.

https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/toby-ord-the-precipi... https://80000hours.org/preventing-catastrophic-pandemics/

The lab leak theory is taboo because it helps Trump style populism, which elites in China, EU and USA oppose.

The lab leak theory also attracts nut job conspiracy theorists because it helps Trump style populism.

We might never know what happened, but after two years my money is what a brilliant Chinese colleague (graduated from the top university in China said) told me (before we took COVID seriously)

“The bio lab is two miles from the wet market. I’ve worked with Chinese scientists. I’ve worked with US scientists. The safety culture in China is terrible.

Its a lab leak”

To anyone who thinks thats racist, its not so I don't care. Culture is not race - Ill never forget an Eastern European friend who disabled one of the gas alarms in his lab because they annoyed him when they went off. His excuse: “we didn't have working fume hoods at home”. His PI, from the same country, shrugged the whole thing off with a laugh.

Pedantry:

COVID or Covid?

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/brand-style-guide/writing/grammar...

https://ginsengenglish.com/blog/covid

My first thought is why do they seem to locate infectious disease labs in highly populated urban areas?

I keep seeing more hints of smallpox like media companies are priming the public. It’s really eerie after I noticed it.

Can we have some posts about computers now? (Yeah, yeah, be the change you want to see in the world)

"might not have come out of a medical research lab"

uh huh

might have come out of a bio-weapons research lab

I want to take the contrarian take to most people in this thread.

Sure, lab leak could be true and with all the available evidence, could very well be true but the confirmation of of it being true may have more far reaching domestic and geopolitical ramifications that may do more harm than good.

It seems like there's some game theory going on within the political sphere of many western governments in that increasing anti-China sentiment by confirming lab leak could further put us down the path to an eventual confrontation (read: war) with China, in which we lose a lot more.

The only thing we gain by admitting to lab leak is the truth but is the truth (that we've pretty much deduced at this point) worth worsening relations not only politically but gives anti-Chinese factions in the west more evidence as a prelude to war?

Yes. It’s pretty caustic to build a society on noble lies like you are proposing.

>The only thing we gain by admitting to lab leak is the truth but is the truth (that we've pretty much deduced at this point) worth worsening relations not only politically but gives anti-Chinese factions in the west more evidence as a prelude to war?

IMO yes, not because it might give anti-China warhawks a casus belli, but in spite of that.

Since the start of this whole ordeal, instead of taking a step back and do some serious introspection about the risks of their research conduct, these misguided virologists and their institutions have doubled down on GoF research. And if that was indeed the ultimate cause triggering the cascade of events leading to the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, which I personally think is the most probable scenario given all the circumstantial and genetic evidence we have, then it is absolutely worth it to prevent another lab leak. The next one might not be as mild as this one.

I wonder which would realistically be worse... full blown war with China or a real, Black Plague/Spanish Flu (I know, not Spanish) level pandemic? Not disagreeing with you, genuinely just interested in the thought experiment. I guess maybe there's a line after which the level of "bad" is kind of irrelevant anyways.

I do not know, isn't it already perceived that lab-leak or not - Covid is China's fuckup?

From my perspective China did an amazing job at handling COVID, it is other countries that fucked up by not taking it seriously - not doing quarantining properly, waiting until domestic spread was out of control to take half-hearted and unenforced measures to slow the spread. In comparison China took quarantining and contact tracing very seriously and was effective at stopping their domestic spread early in the pandemic.

You could blame China for most hypotheses for Covid’s origins: lab-leak from gain of function research, unsanitary wet markets, or not following proper cleanliness procedures for field research. But I think those things (besides lab leaks) could have happened in literally any developing country, and most probably would have done even worse at containing it than China.

What I don’t think you can blame China for is the virus escaping their country. They would be (rightly) be under a ton of fire from the international community if they had not allowed non-citizens to leave their country at the start of the pandemic.

>lab-leak or not - Covid is China's fuckup?

If lab leak is confirmed, depending on how deep you want to root out those who are responsible, then much of the virology community from US and those who fund them are equally to blame, if not more. There is no "Chinese Science" or any country-specific brand of science in the world nowadays, there is just Science. And in both methodologies/techniques and funding, much Science leads back to the US.

Wasn't the lab in question an internationally funded operation, with many western countries, including the US involved?

We are already in a war with China. Modern warfare is fought with propaganda, economics, and infiltration of institutions. The Chinese call it "Unrestricted Warfare". The fact that most people don't know any of this means we could very well be losing this war.

I would not call it a war. It is a struggle for dominance. The lack of war-like actions makes it not a war.

Millions people died from COVID. It’s true origins is one of the most important question we must answer, however uncomfortable the truth may be. And yes, if there are those responsible, they should face consequences.

Why is it one of the most important questions we must answer?

Nobody took responsibility for the first one nor seem interested in investigating it, but I should worry about the next one?

The news have abused my "you should be afraid" notification too many times for me to take this to heart.

What kind of sick editors get off on a headline that starts with "You Should Be Afraid" anyways? There are far more constructive phrasings, but no, they shamelessly want the fearful clickbait.

We've taken out the baity bit, as the site guidelines ask.

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The new / current title "The Next ‘Lab Leak’" is even more misleading and baity, as it suggests a lab leak just happened or is imminent.

It doesn't suggest that, because the phrase is in quotes.

When mainstream news starts putting 'The Next' without a question mark in headlines it certainly gives conspiracy theories some credibility.

Regardless of covid's source. Are we ready for something that is truly bad? It sure is a good thing that covid turned out to not be anywhere near as deadly as the spanish flu as they touted it to be.

Here's an article from April 1st 2020.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dems-media-change-tune-trum...

Trump put in travel restrictions for china in february of 2020 and was called xenophobic and fear mongering over what wasn't yet a pandemic. Sorry but the democrats went on the offensive attacking trump for doing what everyone did.

Flipside, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/obama-team-left-pandemic...

Trump had a pandemic playbook on how to react to a pandemic and didn't use it? Is it possible because of the political attacks on him?

It's pretty obvious that politics got in the way bigtime. I have no expectations this will be different next time.

Then we had clearly political decisions made all throughout. By May 2020 we had the data in that people like Dr. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College said covid is the equivalent of the Spanish Flu of 1918.That was wrong and we still reacted like it was indeed still dangerous. When in reality it was less dangerous than the normal flu season(largely due young children being unharmed).

The number of political abuses is so high that society right now would not accept another pandemic. That they are almost certainly full of shit at this point.

How the lab leak is not considered a fact already? Have everyone forgot about this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28644428 ?

The leaked grant plus Peter Daszak Wikipedia page screams “guilty”

I'm not so worried about humans maliciously trying to destroy the world. There are few who would do so intentionally.

Far more worrying is when people do what is easiest for them, regardless of the cost to their neighbour.

A mask collects particles, including the COVID-19 virus. Please can we work together to pick up the masks from the street?

Worms will eat the masks. Bats will eat the worms. And the bats will give COVID back to us.

We're not responsible for world-scale Epic issues: plastic in the ocean, climate change, pandemics. We are fully responsible for the Issues we see. Please, let's clean the streets while we cycle/walk dogs/skateboard and the butterfly effect will help to fix the bigger problems too :)

I haven't seen any science on this, but I'd guess there is about a 0% chance of human->mask->worm->bat covid transmission. Do you have any basis for this fear? Obviously mask pollution is a bit of a problem, but not so much for risk of covid contamination.

Don't worry about worms, it's already in deer and I would assume a large number of other non-human animal populations already. It's obviously still in bats as well, SARS-CoV-3 is inevitable unless there's some sort of mass killing of bats, but it might not end up being very bad or transmissible.

Bats are extremely far down the list of things we have to worry about, when we continue to have millions of infected people who proudly and angrily spew virus-infested air particles uncontrolled into their communities because they think they know better.

People taking shortcuts is the root of so many problems.

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