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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

> 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.

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

That one was supposedly the closest.

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.

The furin cleavage site looks suspiciously like a hallmark cut-and-paste operation that is exactly what I would do as a genetic engineer.

Really? I'd like to hear more about this. What exactly looks so "suspicious" that it can't be explained by typical recombination events that are known to occur naturally in RNA viral genomes?

The beta coronavirus class has a paucity of naturally occurring furin cleavage sites relative to the other coronavirus clades. I'm just saying that copying sequence from genomes a few species over is very common strategy for engineering projects.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/

Irony is that this paper is highly doctored to make it look (from the figures) like the opposite point, without outright lying, like they loaded the dendrogram of beta coronaviruses with a ton of sequences that are distinct but "basically from the same collection", to make the pie slice of betas with furin cleavage sites look much much bigger than it should be. Also, the betas are excerpted from the dendrogram of all coronaviruses...

Do you believe the DRASTIC leaked document?

https://drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/main-doc...

It's pretty complete, and exactly like what I would expect a DARPA/NIH grant to look like, having helped prepare one in my career (and one DOE grant). I can't imagine a group of nonexperts drafting this document - correctly - just to make up a conspiracy theory - I'm not a virologist but I am a molecular biologist and biochemist and skimming the leaked document all of the technobabble looks correct to my understanding of science.

umm. a paucity. So like, you admit that betacoronaviruses naturally do indeed sometimes have furin cleavage sites?

I have no opinion on DRASTIC.

> you admit that betacoronaviruses naturally do indeed sometimes have furin cleavage sites?

Never claimed otherwise. They are rare. The DRASTIC leak talks specifically about engineering cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses. (P. 11)

The trouble with the synthetic furin hypothesis and all this DRASTIC stuff on that grant, etc. is that all of this work would certainly be done in known viral vectors... you would never go messing around testing spike proteins in some totally random virus backbone whose in-vitro behavior hadn't been worked out before in your assay cell lines.

So, maybe I missed something, but none of the experimental designs I've seen in those grants would ever plausibly lead to the SARS-COV-2 sequence. Again, pre-pandemic there was no reason to be sneaky about this stuff if it were actually being done... I don't know why anyone would waste their time on some uncharacterized, completely markerless viral vector for these RBD and proteolysis tests.

Sigh... maybe if we -had- been doing those experiments earlier we would have discovered this new clade and been more ready for it. That grant looks spooky to some people precisely because it was so prophetic.

I don't think those grants would have led to the SARS-CoV-2 sequence either, because the base strain is different. BUT let's be real here. You don't ask for money and do the experiment. You do the experiment and then ask for continuation money. So it is a "generally accepted grantsmanship strategy" that WIV would have been working on viruses adjacent to that in the grant with the same techniques, and adjacent techniques that would lead to the natural next step. If that natural next step infected a postdoc that was careless that one time when he/she was pulling a 9-9-6 workweek... It's all so terrifyingly plausible to anyone who has been there on the front lines doing lab work.

You're really into stacking these hypotheticals. Why would anyone bother developing a pile of fiddly new vectors? cui bono? Vector development sucks, I've done it in simpler virus families. And why do it completely markerless? Remember that the other odd thing about this grant was that a lot of the genetic work was supposed to be done in the US. If it were already being done we'd probably have had those sequences in -our- databases!

My (recent) experience with viral development is that it can be done in radical multiplex. You don't make one vector at a time. You mix five together, let or encourage them to recombine, then use sequencing, screens and molecular assays to sort out the details of which of the trillions you create has your desired phenotype and why. If this group was thinking about adding a furin cleavage site, they could do so using a template homologous to the appropriate regions of diverse natural viruses, then use selection in cell culture or animal models to establish where it landed and what effects it had on infection.

It's highly unlikely that an established group would write a proposal that didn't describe their current research trajectory.

Although you have made a lot of arguments against it, I still don't know why it seems so unreasonable to you that SARS-CoV-2 might have laboratory origins. I think it's just that your prior expectations run against this. To me it's much easier to imagine than a natural spillover, given the modern urban circumstances and very unusual viral features and phenotype. Maybe my work experience is more aligned with this possibility than yours?

I specialized in high throughput synthetic biology and in applications adapting vectors and pathogenic proteins to subvert the human immune system (for immunooncology mostly). So I have all the background needed for supervillain thinking here :p Of course you can do multiplex markerless construction - but it’s a huge pain in the ass at these lengths and it still leaves open the question of what the point of such work would be.

I feel like I’m taking crazy beans - 20 years ago a satbecoronavirus from a wet market nearly started a global pandemic - hell my colleagues at the time were the ones that identified it as a coronavirus! We have epidemiological evidence this happened again. Absolutely nothing about this sequence is obviously synthetic or even unusual for coronaviruses. How is zoonosis not the null hypothesis?

> You do the experiment and then ask for continuation money.

Public research labs aren't made of money, and generally don't run ambitious experiments and then pray for funding to drop from the sky on them.

No, you use money/resources from a previous grant to do exploratory work on the next grant while you are writing it. Sometimes you double-dip, so you write up a grant for one place, change parameters and personell slightly for another, etc. Have you ever actually worked in a research lab?

Nobody seriously believes that COVID-19 could have been produced via exploratory work.

I wouldn't believe it if you told me COVID-19 was produced via carefully planned work. IMO, COVID-19 could only have been produced via exploratory work.

Look, fact of the matter is, I have consumed ~2M USD of resources on a seven year PhD that did not have grant money attached to it. Despite my important results, my grad school PI did not pursue further work in the direction I piloted. And as a postdoc I've steered DOE funded bioengineering project away from a strategy I knew would be unfruitful towards results that garnered three papers in as many years, but were very much not "in the proposed work of the grant" (though very much in the spirit of it). Ultimately we rewrote the grant to reflect the effect magnification I got and we were rejected for renewal, haha. Moreover, at the end, we did the experiment we were actually funded for, and found no effect.

Grants and science writ large are not the ideal spherical cow you think it to be.

Per the CCDC 33 of 585 environmental samples taken early Jan. were positive, and 31 of those were concentrated near the live-animal region of the Huanan market. Environmental PCRs aren't magic, they have a finite level-of-detection, RNA viruses don't survive very long in the wild...

There's no handwaving and I'm not positing a particular evolutionary history - the sarbecoronaviruses are clearly understudied and we don't have a good survey of what's out there, we just know about a few close relatives. These are known to be highly mosaic viruses!

"few relatively simple additions to a known virus" Which additions and which known virus? There are a huge number of random mutations between the above mentioned strains and SARS-COV-2, there's no plausible story for lab manipulation here from those strains. ...have you ever worked with viruses before?

There are billions of animals in the chinese markets, each a test tube... this is the cauldron of evolution, not a few dinky petri dishes in one lab, man.

I'm in love with parsimony, and the history of human disease is the history of zoonosis. If extraordinary claims are going to be made, the burden is on those with the radical new theory to offer up a shred of molecular or epidemiological evidence, not just stories about conspiracies.

Recent work re-evaluating timelines has only -strengthened- the case for Huanan market and a possible link to a racoon-dog intermediate. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454

The trouble with that piece, is that it is contradicted by this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/comments/es21aq/wuhan_pne...

(Chinese original has been deleted, but I remember seeing it at the time and running it through google, scroll down for English translation in the comments)

which reports a case with symptoms starting 24th December, and reports of the hospitals in Wuhan already having multiple cases. Patient didn't visit the market, but did work near.

With what we now know of disease progression, and infectiousness, this pushes the initial date back at least a month, probably two or more.

...but that report doesn't contradict anything. The current earliest known case is a Huanan market seafood vendor who contracted the disease on Dec -11-. Dec 24 is way late in the existing epidemiological timeline. (And no one is saying the above is the provable first case, just the first recorded case.)

No, you're wrong. The earliest cases were at least in November, and quite probably earlier.

The earliest case identified in the market was on December 11. There's simply no way that was the first actual case.

https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/14621732432474071...

If you want to argue like that there's also this publication from Italy claiming that the first antibodies were detected in September 2019.

The comment above says I would just do X, and bringing up RaTG13 and BANAL-52 as an argument as if it's all trivial. They share 96.2% and 96.9% similarity with sars-cov-2. There are seemingly unrelated animals sharing that much. The linked study also doesn't mention any of that.

I'm not going to argue one way or the other, but I'm starting to get really annoyed at people posting random studies they half understand to argue one way or the other. Covid-19 discussions hackernews(or reddit for that matter) are like the Joe Rogan of nerds. It's ridiculous, people here should know or act better.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33176598/

One strain of BANAL (52) has a high DNA sequence similarity to SARS-CoV2. Nonetheless, RaTG13 is closer overall (as you can see in the phylogenetic analysis in the paper I posted), and there are enough differences that you have to make complex assumptions about how multiple viruses crossed over evolutionary time. Possible? Yes. Parsimonious? Not necessarily.

Also, nobody reasonable is arguing that BANAL-52 is not evolutionarily related to SARS-CoV2. Of course it is. But that could be true even if it were a precursor of some virus that was later engineered in a lab.

To fully convince me of a natural origin hypothesis, you'd have to find a virus in an animal reservoir that had a highly similar RBD with a furin cleavage site -- or something within a few point mutations of a furin cleavage site. Also, a high degree of homology across the remainder of the genome.

I'm fine with people posting random studies that I can read and form my own opinion on. This isn't ridiculous. This is the process of science.

I’m actually not fine with people posting random studies and then also making random claims from undereducated interpretation. That’s not the process of science, mostly because in the process of science you’re expected to be educated first before you can enter a discussion, otherwise you’re not discussing heavily niche subjects with peers you’re just introducing noise and that drowns out the actually useful educated niche. As a layman that is trying to find what the actual, educated in virus research and virus forensics folks are discussing and saying, this sort of undereducated claim is more noise for me to try and sift. It’s very annoying and a waste of my time.

"Chinese original has been deleted"

Wait that never happens...

> Per the CCDC 33 of 585 environmental samples taken early Jan. were positive,

The first cases were at least in November, and quite probably earlier. The virus was in circulation in Northern Italy by December. We know this from multiple lines of evidence.

https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/14621732432474071...

Are you seriously posting a link to a one-off phylogenetic molecular clock estimate as experimental evidence of italian priority? The other Italian claims of priority are highly disputed by basically everyone - but have I missed anything - are there any actual sequenced, dated samples from Italy in December? That's the standard of evidence here, not some crappy antigen test or unsequenced amplification hit. No one believes the Dec 11 case to be "the first", just the first well attested case.

No. I'm seriously posting a paper by the director of the University College of London Genetics Institute.

The same twitter thread (again, same person: director of UCL UGI) shows a Lancet article placing the first documented hospitalization on December 1, and a different source documenting a case in China in mid-November:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...

So yes, there are multiple lines of evidence. This isn't even remotely controversial. You're arguing that the sky is red, and your only counter-argument to the evidence otherwise is incredulity.

> are there any actual sequenced, dated samples from Italy in December? That's the standard of evidence here, not some crappy antigen test or unsequenced amplification hit.

I mean, you're inventing "standards of evidence" here, but as long as you're asking: yes. Dated, PCR-confirmed wastewater samples in Italy were purified by gel electrophoresis and sequenced.

https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/13280584020529684...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.25.20140061v...

I'm not a huge fan of "appeal to authority", but I'm curious what your credentials and experience in this area are?

The person you are arguing with claims to have direct experience working with viruses in a lab setting.

Is this another of HN's all too frequent, "computer science major arguing with expert in field completely unrelated to computer science"?

Reasoning doesn't require credentials, please let's keep it that way.

One of the parties did an appeal to authority as a way to _prove_ they entered _relevant_ evidence.

This is obviously entirely misguided, and if you start making such basic logical mistakes it is expedient to inquire about the posters background to know if they've reached the limit to their ability to create reasoned arguments.

There are nuances, but at it's core either it was valid for them to make that appeal and it is valid for us to request their credentials (which is essentially an appeal to authority--"who has the better credentials?"), or it was not valid for them to make that appeal and it is not valid for us to request their credentials. I lean towards the latter view.

Logical mistakes don't weaken a person's entire argument (we don't want to just see who's "winning"), or even weaken the line of reasoning they were invoked to support -- they just fail to provide evidence.

One of the parties called into question the validity of a paper the other party posted, and the other party rebutted by implying that as the director of an established institution, the paper's author has something to lose. I find that argument weak, but the initial questioning of validity also provided no evidence or made any strong arguments as to why the paper was not valid.

Appeals to authority are useful not as logical arguments but as a way to avoid wasting time on drivel, and I don't believe that to be the case here.

No one is arguing that the earliest known case on Dec 11 is when sars-cov-2 "began". We know it must be older than that. More recent reviews of chinese epidemiology don't mention the hubei patient, the Dec 11 case seems to be consensus earliest verified case.

And yes, for a data point of this importance a random environmental sewage PCR handled over half a year later is of dubious provenance. If you've never done a ton of environmental PCR work you'd be amazed how easy it is to contaminate everything, but whatever. Given how contagious sars-cov-2 is, if it really were present in Italy in early December... we'd probably have more definitive proof of it's presence much earlier than Jan 31.

Ok, fine. We're agreed then: the virus was obviously circulating widely by December, which means in all likelihood, it could have been found in pubic places in Wuhan China. Like, say...a public market.

I'm not saying it had to happen that way, just that finding shreds of viral RNA in a market, in December, in Wuhan, is in no way dispositive evidence of the market being the origin of the virus -- any more than finding flu virus in the ball pit at a McDonalds means that the flu came from Ronald McDonald.

> And yes, for a data point of this importance a random environmental sewage PCR handled over half a year later is of dubious provenance. If you've never done a ton of environmental PCR work you'd be amazed how easy it is to contaminate everything, but whatever.

"They could have made a mistake, so I'm going to ignore all evidence which disagrees with my prior beliefs."

Millions of old people in dense cities turn out to be a fantastically sensitive instrument for detecting the presence of sars-cov-2 in a population. You’d have to explain nearly two months of cryptic transmission that left no hospital reports or verifiable samples…

You do realize these papers pointing to an international nov-dec timeline only -weaken- any link to WIV at all, and have in fact been heavily leaned upon by Chinese conspiracy theorists as evidence this disease has -western- origins?

> You do realize these papers pointing to an international nov-dec timeline only -weaken- any link to WIV at all, and have in fact been heavily leaned upon by Chinese conspiracy theorists as evidence this disease has -western- origins?

Chairman Pooh? Is that you?

The CCP can fuck right off with this idiocy. Seriously. Nobody with half a brain is falling for it.

You don't get to suppress information and/or not look for it in the first place, then claim that the lack of information is indicative of something.

Then why did the Chinese shut down access to the covid database for instance if there is nothing there? Edit : You can downvote this, but that doesn’t answer this question that I am seriously curious about?

The same reason they surpressed all evidence of widespread wildlife trade in the city in 2019 and lied to the WHO about it?

> If extraordinary claims are going to be made ...

I don't think any claim here is extraordinary, and none with very good evidence.

So pursuit of parsimony doesn't help much.

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.

> 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.

Nobody so far in the thread has said anything about "criminal intent". That's just you, interjecting your pre-existing biases into the discussion.

It's entirely possible that a laboratory was doing completely legal experiments with no malicious intent, and an accident happened. In fact, it's so possible, that reasonable people who understand the evidence have concluded that we're unlikely to ever know the truth.

That's where I sit on the matter.

> 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.

Maybe you should look at my profile.

Thanks - I don't expect to change anyone's mind. I just don't want to give into the cynicism that evidential reasoning is pointless. I don't want to tell anyone what to think... but given that I have the professional background, I feel some moral duty to at least try to outline why most biologists assign low probability to a lab-leak.

I think one big missing element for the reasoning behind all this is that people seem to intuitively assign the wrong prior to the chances of a zoonotic event, they miss that fully 2/3rds or so of our pathogens are zoonotic in origin, and that's only the ones that we can trace back, the remainder is either an open question or settled to have originated in our species or passed on as part of our heritage prior to humanity budding off from our ancestors.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Actually the US and the wider world has had access to this sort of stuff because peer review means sharing knowledge.

https://thevirginiastar.com/2021/06/07/american-higher-educa...

Covid is a fart in a room and China was first smeller so first stinker.

Waste water samples from other countries show it was around months before China went official so were those other country's just keeping quiet?

Besides, its not like you can stamp Made in China, Made in US on viruses so Covid is resigned to the conspiracy theory books, and even if someone came forward to own up that it was some state biological weapon, the country in question can just play the mental health card on the whistle-blower. Very few people can afford to step out of line because it would put their family at risk and even if they could afford, there is always the getting knocked over by a bus risk.

So many ways Covid can be plausibly spun, its probably just best to keep abreast of the news, reduce risks where possible and get on with life so you don't have any regrets or at least have lived life as fully as humanly possible however that might be.

Perhaps such a stamp should be required for gain of function research to continue? (preferably somewhere in Antarctica)

FYI, the wastewater story you refer to was clearly nonsense and has not withstood any serious scrutiny. But, I agree with your larger point.

Other countries weren't the first one with crematorium running 24/7 with staff breaking down on social media. Also other countries did not censor the event then detained a doctor who just posted a warning txt to his colleagues in private chat. Let's not even go into the whole deny WHO visitations years after.

I especially like the kicker, alpha variant isn't even the one found in Wuhan. Good job on whoever made that happen.

You dont have much experience of national health care systems do you?

China is a developing country it doesnt have the established early warning systems in place that developed countries have for monitoring potential health risks and they dont have the contingencies or over engineering in place that other countries have.

Simple example for you to understand, take the new VW Golf R, officially its 320hp and 420nm 1550kg, power to weight ratio is worse than the Seat Cupra Leon R at 300hp and 400nm 1392kg, yet why is it performing better than the Seat. You can watch the mystery here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycKWQBCpwMg but let me tell you, sandbagging technology, ability, performance, what ever you want to call it is a valid technique, I believe its even mentioned by this Chinese philosopher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War

So are we "watching" a magic trick of sorts and if so who is the magician in this case? Is it Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics?

I find many GP's to be "useful idiots", they know what they have been taught, I love pushing them towards jihard aka cognitive dissonance when I have to interact with them but if you are clever enough, you could create a system which could even keep them in the dark. Try to think how clever terrorists might work, so take a look at the security services around the world like the CIA for example. Look at the things they have done in the past! Shocking! Shocking I Say!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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