Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt | Hacker News Reader

Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

telegraph.co.uk

687 pointssteelstraw785 comments

What really raises the most suspicion of the lab leak theory in my mind was how the Chinese government acted towards the rest of the scientific community...well before it was a theory at all. Not allowing foreign scientists in, destroying evidence, arresting journalists, etc. That just screams cover-up, even if there was none (in terms of a lab leak.)

Then Western scientists that rely on grants with Chinese ties, etc trying to cover the asses publicly, while privately saying it's possible...really doesn't inspire a lot of public confidence imo. There is a pretty big monetary incentive from the very people that we'd want to figure this out to say it didn't happen, even if it did.

It does feel like there hasn't been a proper airing of exactly what gain of function research has been going on (whether or not it led to this particular virus) and how governments have supported it. I suspect it's because, despite being a "hindsight is 2020" moment, a lot of people would be angry, and at a lot of public policy scientists involved in the response.

Plenty of people had the hindsight in 2020 that the lab leak theory was not only plausible but likely; it’s disingenuous to call this “hindsight is 20/20”.

I meant that gain for function research looks like a really bad idea right now, even if that wasn't the origin of covid, and some of the public policy experts making recommendations right now were people who had no problems with game of function research 3 years ago.

It was never a good idea, thats why it was officially rejected and performed in secret, and why Fauci keeps lying.

If they didn't know for sure back then, why did they actively deny the lab leak theories? Remember the Lancet letter [1]?

1. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

> Not allowing foreign scientists in, destroying evidence, arresting journalists, etc.

That is par for the course. The Chinese government would have acted this way regardless of if it was a lab leak, natural event, or space aliens.

That's probably true, but constant suspicious behavior shouldn't normalize behaving suspiciously.

If you're approaching this with a western democratic frame of mind, yes.

This is not suspicious behavior in China, as the GP said - it is standard operating procedure.

I don't expect it to be suspicious or odd _in China_. What I am saying is that internationally we should not just shrug it off as "aww, it just China, they're always so sneaky and secretive even when it's nothing!" We should treat the situation as if they are indeed hiding something important every time, because otherwise, constantly acting suspiciously about everything is an effective strategy for them conceal anything important.

Barring foreign scientists, arresting journalists, and destroying evidence is always suspicious, even if they always do it, and it should always make people from open and free societies curious of why they are doing it, not shrug it off because it's the norm.

It is being used as proof that they leaked it from a lab, when it is just how societies built like China behave. You can't infer anything from normal behavior.

It is similar to the way that Hussein's actions in blocking access to presidential palaces was considered to be highly suspicious and therefore proof that he was hiding his weapons program. Turns out he was just trying to save face domestically by standing up against the weapons inspectors over something that he considered symbolic and immaterial in order to not look like a total pushover (a desperate need of dictators). It had nothing to do with weapons programs at all.

Didn’t work out well for him.

And the search for WMD was also politically motivated, not based on any evidence afaik.

Yeah, holding strong to the logic that's like a mom concluding of her kindergartner "You're being evasive, this means definitely that you're hiding something" is ridiculous.

If the outbreak started in Colorado, and Russia wanted access to the CDC lab there, Americans (officials and public) would also be crying and screaming...

If Russia wanted access to a CDC lab, the Americans would be crying and screaming regardless of whether something happened there or not.

Exactly. Same thing in the China-not China relations.

Said hypothetical should include the disease originating around the lab, numerous conspicuous coverups and missing people, and a lack of transparent investigation. Should such a scenario happen, I think your argument becomes a bit of a strawman (i.e. that a segment of every nation's population would always cry foul in said scenario). I would expect more than just Russia would want access, and likewise that plenty of US citizens would protest as well.

Why is it a strawman? If malfeasance is occurring, they will not want Russia looking at their lab, if malfeasance is not occurring, they still do not want Russia looking at their lab. I'm just pointing out the obvious, ((!A -> B) and (A -> B)) -> B.

It’s also worth noting that you’re talking about the US allowing the country with whom they have the most adversarial relationship investigate their labs. In reality, we’re taking about international bodies doing the investigation. The fact that China has isolated themselves so badly that the best analogy for “anyone investigates China” is “Russia investigates the US” says plenty.

Firstly, we’re not talking about America right now. Even so, the US has its faults, but is vastly more transparent than the CCP. I would be shocked if the US arrested scientists and journalists to conceal the origins of a viral outbreak.

God damn debating with you people is useless sometimes.

My second paragraph is meant to show a possible other explanation why the Chinese didn't want foreigners snooping around their bio labs: in my belief the same evasiveness the Chinese has/had would apply to the USA if China wanted to visit and have unlimited access (for a thorough investigation) of American bio labs.

And I'm not talking about whether American journalists would be arrested. I'm just talking about the evasiveness about the labs.

You've been breaking the site guidelines so badly and so repeatedly that I've banned this account.

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29916895 for more.

> I would be shocked if the US arrested scientists and journalists to conceal the origins of a viral outbreak.

The US are actively prosecuting a journalist on phony charges because he helped expose their war crimes, among other things. The UK is of course actively complicit, which contributed in making his life a living hell.

Given that precedent, I wouldn't be shocked at all.

And you'll read an endless trove of comments posted on this site, including from myself, in support of Assange and his work, and condemnation of what the US is doing to him.

We shouldn't even be on this tangent, because the parent comment was nothing but "what about America!" and now we're veering into even more tangential territory with "well what about America with regards to some other topic!?" This isn't a Chuck Norris movie with a good guy and a bad guy.

My point was, I didn't see much difference to what the US has done to Wikileaks, and the hypothetical arrest by the US of journalists & scientists over leaking the top secret origins of an outbreak.

Now that I think of it I was likely incorrect. There's one big difference: I expect the US would first make sure they wouldn't look too bad doing it. That's almost certainly why some Swedish prosecutor happened to blow Assange's sexual affairs utterly out of proportion: kill the name before the guy.

So should we just pretend to think that it's suspicious even though it doesn't seem suspicious, or do we really need to soak our minds in the void until we actually believe that it is? How many IQ points do I need to lose before I am no longer normalizing totalitarianism?

Some of the details are unusual though especially the Wuhan Institute of Virology taking down it's previously public pathogen sequence database before the thing kicked off.

They took it down in mid September of 2019, a previously public database. They still refuse to share the data with anyone, which is weird since the database was public to begin with.

It is really weird how HN talks about this in comparison to similar topics. For example, this is the exact same logic that leads people to believe that encrypting data or using Tor is evidence of someone trying to hide criminal behavior. Almost everyone here would object to that type of thinking, but when it comes to China it suddenly becomes "Why would they object to transparency unless they had something to hide?".

Yes. Countries and people are two different thing and the expected and acceptable behaviours are different too.

If you write an officially sounding letter to your neighbour demanding to know how they come to choose the paint to repaint their bikeshed you are a weirdo and they are in their right to ignore you.

If you write the same letter to a city official about a public bikeshed you are sending a freedom of information request and they are expected to respond promptly and accurately.

yeah, but what if you send the letter to an official of another country?

countries and people are different things; countries are generally much more secretive than people.

You missed GP's point, which apparently was equating personal privacy with China's national security. I didn't think twice about China's lack of transparency. It's normal and expected behavior from China, so I would never suspect it to mean they were hiding something that was actually salient to the global pandemic... they're just hiding everything, but all it amounts to is hiding whatever corruption comes with government. IOW what they're usually hiding is often well known and is nothing interesting. Suspicion of things being hidden, wild speculation on it and tenuously attaching it somehow to common strife seems to be a conservative theme.

What always interests me is:

1) How many pandemics have there been? 2) How many lab leaks have there been? 3) How many lab leaks have caused outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics? 4) What is the cause of every other pandemic?

The answers lead me to believe a lab leak of virulent COVID, if it occurred, and let's assume it did, is only a coincidence, and the hidden cause of this pandemic is, while somehow the most unsuspected in light of the assumed lab leak, was the same cause as every other pandemic, ever.

I think the article just shows that experts are human and subject to human bias, and as such, like everyone else that similarly succumbed to bias, foolish for considering or believing in something with literally millions, tens of millions, or hundreds of millions to one odds against (lab leaks happen occasionally, there have probably been hundreds to thousands of lab leaks in 100 years, but over eons there have been millions of pandemics, and in recorded history, there have been enough of them to see a clear pattern: viruses jump species, people living and working in close proximity to animals are infected, the infection spreads).

So just ignore it?

Wildfires occur naturally in a similar fashion. We still try to diagnose their causes and use that information to punish arson or otherwise come up with better strategies to prevent them.

I'm not sure what you're referring to, re: ignore, but I don't think your analogy is remotely apt. I think you're saying a little fire is like a little virus, and a big fire like a pandemic. But anyone can light a fire, even animals cause wildfires, and thanks to lightning and fuel, fire doesn't need anyone to cause it. No one, I think, can "light" a little virus that could then spread like wildfire across the globe. Maybe a state actor, but not some individual and not accidentally. But this is mixing the two conspiracies, ordinary lab leak vs. engineered virus intentionally released. I just don't think China is up to it. I still return to the fact that lots of nasty things have escaped labs and the worst result was a very minor outbreak. Though genetics and microbiology has made incredible advances, it is all, all of it, on Nature's back. I think in a contest between Nature and any group of the smartest most knowledgable scientists with global resources to create the deadliest virus imaginable, Nature wins every single time, forever. And if COVID-19 was engineered for this, it sucks, it's an absurd and annoying failure. I think the reason why the source for COVID-19 can not be found is that it was fully consumed by one or more of the first 50 infected Wuhan residents that purchased it at the wet market and fully digested it before anyone had a hint of symptoms.

Governments do not have an inherent right to privacy.

Yes, we hold states to a higher standard than individuals.

No kidding: the best (and only?) argument against the lab leak theory is that the communist dictatorship is just acting like a dictatorship.

No, it's that it happened right next to a centre doing Gain Of Function research on coronaviruses.

If you prefer to close your eyes and keep blaming a bat in the nearby Wuhan fish market, you're free to do so.

Although they were hesitant at first, the Chinese government handled the SARS-1 outbreak differently.

The similarities vastly outweigh the differences. The biggest difference between SARS-CoV and COVID-19 is that the latter takes a bit longer before you get ill but you are already contagious. Other than that it's mostly the same old story. Note that if not for SARS-CoV this would have been a lot more serious because that served as a dress rehearsal and put a lot of mechanisms in place as well as suggested screening for Coronaviruses in cases like these.

Another major difference between SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 is that SARS-CoV-1 took time to gain new adaptions to effectively spread between humans. These mutations that SARS-CoV-1 went through allowed researchers to find the intermediate animal host within months.

With SARS-CoV-2 there was no known mutation phase where the virus rapidly gained mutations to more efficiently transmit between humans. SARS-COV2 came out the gate perfectly adapted and did not start mutating extensively until many months after it spread globally. These lack of adaptations are also the reason why it's so hard to trace back to the original intermediate host species.

> SARS-COV2 came out the gate perfectly adapted

We actually do not know this for sure. There is a chance that the reservoir is one step removed and that another host in between amplified the virus to the point where it could make the jump.

Ebola also has this property, but it is just a bit too lethal to spread far (fortunately). An Ebola with a slightly longer asymptomatic incubation time (while already shedding) would be far worse then the current versions.

With Ebola each and every outbreak starts with an interspecies jump, usually bushmeat. The idea that these jumps are extremely rare is in principle incorrect, but it looks like that because pandemics are rare. But those are just the runaway successes (from the viral point of view).

The comment was about the way the Chinese government (mis)handled the information sharing, etc., and hence about the possibility of a lab leak, not about the actual disease, which (IMO) is even different, as covid-19 is much, much more contagious. And if the lab leak hypothesis is true, then the first outbreak didn't serve "as a dress rehearsal", but rather as the inspiration for the current one.

> Not allowing foreign scientists in, destroying evidence, arresting journalists, etc.

The Chinese government does all these things because it is routinely covering up illegal behavior. The fact that they followed standard operating procedure means they were probably simply continuing with the standard operating procedure of tacitly allowing illegal behavior. Illegal behavior in the context of a lab enhancing viruses is likely to result in a lab leak of a very dangerous virus.

Thing is, that's what authoritarian organizations seem to do reflexively, whether it's smart or not. Maybe because they have trouble getting reliable information themselves - is a coverup needed, or does it look like no coverup is needed because your subordinates have already covered up to cover their own behinds?

> What really raises the most suspicion of the lab leak theory in my mind was how the Chinese government acted towards the rest of the scientific community.

That is nothing special for the Chinese government, they would have acted that way regardless. They are extremely adept at creating Streisand effects.

I think the Chinese government would have reacted like this even if it didn't know what they were dealing with, which still is the most likely explanation.

I think the general information control we saw around Covid far more concerning.

China arrests and disappears people for making minor off handed comments about the CCP, the way they handled it really doesn't prove anything other than they were attempting to silence -everyone- involved so they had complete control of how information flows, just like they do on every other issue that has international attention.

If this comment thread is the way the self proclaimed smartest forum on the web deals with articles like this then we're doomed.

This article contributes zero actual evidence, is littered with out of context quotes (including of all places the title), doesn't appear to understand the science or the probabilities involved and finally is clearly written with an agenda.

It shouldn't have been posted to HN in the first place, it just serves to divide, not to find fact. If there is an article that deals with the actual evidence available in a neutral manner it would be nice to read, but opinion-masquerading-as-fact is not.

I’m with you. 300+ comments as of this writing and most of the top ones are shitting on scientists and science in general…

And it's in the Telegraph

The telegraph is a mix of fox news and the daily mail, but with plummy vowels [0]

[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/plummy

What would that evidence look like?

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform have a press release with more detail[1], which the Telegraph mentions - it's how I found it - and you can download a pdf which contains the partially redacted emails. It doesn't seem to me that the Telegraph has misled anyone regarding this news at all. Perhaps you could read it and be more precise as to where you think they're providing slant, or even lies, if that's what you think.

[1] https://republicans-oversight.house.gov/release/comer-jordan...

Evidence that would convince an independent panel of people trained in the field that it confirms a lab leak. Given the odds against that evidence would likely have to be fairly hard.

Evidence does not need to be able to convince on its own, you seem to be picking an arbitrarily high bar that would dismiss all evidence until such time as it would confirm a leak. That's not even the bar used in law to begin a prosecution, when they know that reasonable doubt will need to be overcome.

Regardless, this is evidence of a conspiracy of silence, not evidence that there was a lab leak. The two should not be mixed up nor conflated.

There is no evidence of anything remotely like "a conspiracy of silence". The Telegraph article quotes parts of emails between people discussing the possibility of a lab leak and the possible outcomes of a public discussion of the possibility of a lab leak. At no point is anyone saying "we must keep this under wrap" or something along those lines. You have to squint very hard to find an insinuation that the discussion of a lab origin has to be silenced.

As indeed it was not. The few people who thought a lab leak was likely have been very public about their opinion and nobody has attempted to stop them. We've all heard the one about the furin cleavage cite (even if about 0.005% of those who repeat it know what the hell a furin cleavage cite is). Hence why the internet bursts at the seams with discussions about lab leaks and conspiracies to cover them up.

It’s amusing too because many highly trained people were perplexed about the FCS — until last year when we discovered that those mutations actually do happen spontaneously in nature, in Coronaviruses and are stable:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...

People forget that we're looking at the "plane that landed" from the famous WWII picture. A bunch of low probability things had to happen for SarsCOV2 to emerge naturally -- but given a long enough timeline and trillions of viral replications, sometimes it will.

> At no point is anyone saying "we must keep this under wrap" or something along those lines.

Francis Collins, (at the time) director of the National Institutes of Health wrote:

> Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy

put down is strange language, but Collins has used similar in an email that also ended up in Dr Fauci's inbox:

> The proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention

> There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises

take down, eh? And in the Washington Post[1]:

> This is a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous.

The fringe epidemiologists not doing mainstream science but dangerous things are:

Martin Kulldorff, PhD, a biostatistician, epidemiologist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School[2][3]

Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He directs Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging[4][5]

Sunetra Gupta, infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford[6][7]

The language doesn't match the claims, his or yours.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/covid-herd-immunity/20...

[2] https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/m...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kulldorff

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya

[5] https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunetra_Gupta

[7] https://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-sunetra-gupta

That is not how science works. There is no authoritative panel of experts. There are scientists all over the world working on different problems. Some of them state they are careful because what they believe to be true could have political consequences. These ideas got suppressed. It is not much more complicated than that.

Science has been shut down for political reasons. Your "panel" would just make sure that exactly that would happen.

> Dr Collins, the former director of the US National Institutes of Health, warned it could damage “international harmony”

The position is understandable, is it not? But it still doesn't have to do with science.

The article is not about whether there was a lab leak, but whether scientists believed a lab leak was a possibility and chose to deny that belief for non-scientific political reasons. The article makes no claim at all about whether there was a lab leak, which would indeed require the level of evidence you suggest.

This is incorrect. The article is asserting that a group of important scientists (arguably) advocated for the public rejection of an important hypothesis not on the basis of evidence. Evidence proving or disproving a lab leak would be irrelevant to the article's claim.

I was a genetic engineer for two decades:

- Clear signs of molecular manipulation in the sars-cov-2 sequence. There are none. Almost all of the alleged manipulations would have left unmistakeable, damning evidence in a recognizable vector. The only remotely interesting thing at all in the sequence is the furin site, but plenty of coronaviruses have those, and it just likely indicates selection/propagation in a secondary host species... exactly like the ones that caused SARS-1 and MERS.

- Failing that, even a scrap of evidence that anyone was even culturing (not just sequencing) this new sub-clade. You're not going to catch a respiratory virus by accident from a sterile rna-stabilized swab or a database entry. Compared to the vast, unregulated wild-meat industry in China this is such an unlikely vector.

- Any epidemiological connections to WIV? There aren't any, just the original fact that the outbreak happened in Wuhan (...across the river, in an animal market with known coronavirus hosts species.) All of the index cases are associated w. the market - not WIV. There were a number of western scientists interacting w. WIV researchers in Nov/Dec at the start of the outbreak and no independent reports of any sickness or anything out of the ordinary.

There's no evidence for a lab-leak. Increasingly febrile accusations of conspiracy and speculative just-so stories aren't evidence. Someone like me would be easily, readily convinced by some hard facts... but none have been presented. As a biologist that's what I and many of my colleagues find frustrating about this... it just seems like people emotionally crave a human agency to blame. I used to think René Girard was silly... but maybe he was right about humanity and scapegoats.

This isn't just a random scapegoat. It just happens that the company (Ecohealth Alliance) proposed the gain-of-function research on the virus to DARPA, which was subsequently rejected as being too risky. NIH later funded similar research to the same company for its work in Wuhan during 2020.

I'm far from a conspiracy theorist. But, what are the chances of this being coincidental? The "from the wild" theory doesn't have any evidence either but requires more assumptions. Occam's razor.

Jesus Christ, son of Mary, please don't bring Occam's razor in yet another internet discussion that tramples all over it. There is no reason to assume a lab leak when every disease we know that affects humans is _not_ the result of a lab leak. A natural origin is the most likely explanation and we don't need any other explanation unless there is strong evidence that something different happened, which we absolutely don't.

In fact the "lab leak theory" is exactly anti-science. In the most backwards fashion it starts not with an observation that must be explained with a hypothesis, but with a hypothesis -that the virus escaped from a lab- that is not supported by any observation. Its proponents then try to find evidence to justify their hypothesis. They don't find any, but they keep looking anyway because they are convinced it is true even in the complete absence of evidence. Then they accuse everyone else of hiding the evidence. "A-ha! That's why we can't prove this hypothesis we know is true! Because the evidence has been hidden from us!". This is the pattern of quackery, not science and not scientific hypothesis-making and verification.

Scientists must do a better job of explaining how natural origin is the likely explanation, then. Otherwise, a lot of smart and educated people are going to put the wrong dots together.

The natural origin is the default explanation and nobody needs to have an IQ of 130 and a degree in biology to figure that out. It suffices to know that diseases are a natural thing. Most people who have gone to school will know that already.

It really hurts me that you believe "smart and educated people" believe that nonsense. Everytime anyone with any relevant education has commented on HN it's to say that "lab leak" is rubbish. And let me not get started on how people on HN think they're smart because they're on HN where people think they're smart.

Why is that a default explanation when you have no natural carrier habitats at the ground zero, but you do have a virology lab there?

There's no "when". A natural origin is the default explanation. To look for a different explanation you need to have a reason to look for a different explanation.

The existence of a virology lab in the state where the pandemic began is no such reason. Rather, it is a post-facto attempt at making observations supporting an a-priori hypothesis.

Not just "in the state" but in minutes distance from first cases. Plenty of reason to look into, it's not like every urban centre has virology labs studying the titular disease.

The first cases were found in a wet market. The lab is miles away from it:

The first known human infections from SARS‑CoV‑2 were discovered in Wuhan, China.[37] Because many of the early infectees were workers at the Huanan Seafood Market,[50][51] it was originally suggested that the virus might have originated from bats or pangolins sold at the market.[30][33] It was later determined that no bats or pangolins were sold at the market.[52] Bats are not commonly eaten in Central China.[53] The Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control are located within miles of the original focal point of the pandemic, Wuhan's Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and this has been used to argue in support of the lab leak theory. However, another explanation for this is a tendency to build virology labs in proximity to outbreak areas.[54]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory#Wuhan...

What's more, the proximity of the first detected cases to anything is a red herring. We don't know where the first transmission happened. We only know where the first cases were detected. For all we know the virus started in Alaska.

Finally the location of the lab was only noticed after people started talking of a lab leak. Some people said "lab leak", some other people said "OMG there's a lab close by!".

Yes, "miles away" is within minutes drive: many lab workers quite likely have a commute longer than that.

> For all we know the virus started in Alaska.

I think we know where the virus have started at this point with reasonable confidence, and it wasn't Alaska. Can't help but notice tho that U.S. origin of virus was a popular CCP media propaganda point last year.

>> Can't help but notice tho that U.S. origin of virus was a popular CCP media propaganda point last year.

What am I supposed to make of that, now?

Do you really think that most people will buy that given that we haven't had a similar pandemic in 100 years?

Also, if you're going to appeal to authority, please link to the HN comments that explain how "lab leak" explanations are rubbish. I'm more than happy to read them. In my opinion, we don't have nearly enough information to make such a decision, one way or the other.

>> Do you really think that most people will buy that given that we haven't had a similar pandemic in 100 years?

Sure we have. Off the top of my head: AIDS, Ebola, CJD, SARS and MERS and H1N1. In fact people thought that AIDS was a US bioweapon that got loose. Or something. Pandemics make people believe all sorts of weird things.

>> Also, if you're going to appeal to authority, please link to the HN comments that explain how "lab leak" explanations are rubbish. I'm more than happy to read them.

See OP, for instance.

The OP barely provided any information. Mainly they claimed authority on the issue and ruled it closed.

It's also interesting how you continue to imply that I'm uneducated, dumb, etc. That's a great way to shut down a dialogue.

Where did I imply you're uneducated or dumb?

The last major coronavirus pandemic probably started about 133 years ago.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

Since then both SARS-CoV and MERS jumped from animals to humans. They caused smaller outbreaks rather than worldwide pandemics. There was no suspicion of a lab leak origin for those viruses.

"People whose whole job it is to study bat-based coronaviruses managed to cause a variant which escaped."

"A virus whose whole job it is to mutate and infect mutated and infected people."

I think most reasonably sensible people would consider these to be fairly equal in terms of unlikeliness or simplicity. So yes, Occam's razor does not apply, but not because of your particular bias against one of the options.

> that is not supported by any observation

It's supported by at least 3 observations, which is that a leading virology lab known to manipulate bat-based coronaviruses was less than 30mins drive from the potential wet market source, and that China has a history of covering up controversial facts, and that China did at least their usual amount of hindrance for investigators.

I have absolutely no preference for one theory over the other. Or neither. I have no special evidence, and speculation at this point seems pretty pointless.

And unless you do, telling people they're stupid because of their preference is only going to cement their belief in a coverup. So maybe we should quit screaming at people and just say "you do you".

(Just to clarify: Feel free to work against sinophobia... that's perfectly valid. But again, dismissing critical thought on a topic out of hand does nothing but hand the Sinophobes an own-goal)

>> I have absolutely no preference for one theory over the other. Or neither. I have no special evidence, and speculation at this point seems pretty pointless.

That's a false objectivity. We have very strong prior knowledge that diseases arise naturally, without the need for human intervention. To assume there was human intervention requires accordingly strong evidence, at least as strong as the stength of the prior knowledge.

This is where Occam's razor comes in. We do not need to imagine lab leaks, when a natural origin suffices to explain the pandemic.

Also, the "3 observations" you list are observations used to justify the hypothesis that a lab like happened, not observations that caused the hypothesis to be proposed in the first place. First people assumed there was a lab leak, then they went out to find reasons to support a lab leak. That's putting the cart before the horses. Solid reasoning needs observations to precede a hypothesis, not the other way around.

This is all utter horse manure.

> We have very strong prior knowledge that diseases arise naturally

Correct. We also have very strong prior knowledge that existing diseases can be manipulated and produced by means of unnatural selection.

We also have strong prior knowledge that this particular lab have done a fair amount of that. With coronaviruses. With bats. 5 minutes with wikipedia would tell you that.

It's a bit like saying "We have very strong prior knowledge that coins can land heads-up, so this coin could never be showing tails".

> not observations that caused the hypothesis to be proposed in the first place

Please cite your sources. Otherwise, you're just showing bias against the people proposing the theory in the first place.

And let's be fair, conspiracy theorists are more often wrong than right, so I understand your distrust of them.

But also let's be fair:

- if it was true that Covid-19 originated in that lab, I don't think anyone is saying "oh no, China would never cover something like this up"

- the geographical coincidence is a compelling coincidence.

> Solid reasoning needs observations to precede a hypothesis, not the other way around.

This is dodgy ground, and shows a serious misunderstanding of the applicability - and even the process - of the scientific method. Observations like "viruses rarely jump between species like this" and "virology labs can produce viruses" are valid outcomes of pre-hypothesis research. Tests such as "If the WHO try to investigate, the Chinese government will attempt to restrict investigators" might be problematic (write it up in your analysis!), but are nonetheless valid. There are very few easily measured predictions in this.

If you want to go scientific method on this, by all means share your hypotheses and tests. "Lots of clever people have said this" or "I trust this source more than that source" is not a valid test when the waters are so muddied.

So no, this is not false objectivity at all. This is your opinion masquerading as fact. In all the data gathering I've done, I've seen nothing to compel me to take one opinion over another. If you want to actually try, using real arguments, please feel free.

>> This is all utter horse manure.

That's great to know. Thank you for your kind and dignified contribution.

Any time.

I will point out though, I would rather be undignified and call out bad arguments, than saying it takes a "certain type of person" to show bad arguments.

Prove me wrong. Show me the arguments that actually do make sense. I'd love to have a good reason not to sit on the fence, these spikes ain't doing my piles any good.

But quite frankly, my dignity doesn't care.

One of the more amusing versions of, "I may be mistaken on some points and need to reconsider" that I've read in a while...

A scientist parks her car under a tree, everyday. Occasionally, branches fall off and scratch her car. Today, she goes outside and sees that her window is smashed. She looks around to find the branch that smashed her window but can't find it. She notices some kids playing baseball nearby. They look guilty. However, scientist rules that the window was broken by a branch because strong prior knowledge.

>> However, scientist rules that the window was broken by a branch because strong prior knowledge.

Prior knowledge doesn't stop you from forming new hypotheses, otherwise we wouldn't be going anywhere. The way it works is, you make an observation, you form a hypothesis to explain the observations based on prior knowledge and then you test your hypothesis with new observations. Ideally you look for observations that allow you to refute your hypothesis (because refutation is more secure than positive proof). If you can't find evidence to refute your hypothesis, you adopt it, provisionally, until such time as you have sufficient evidence to support it with good certainty, or until you have found evidence against it.

In your example, the initial observation is the broken window. The prior knowledge is that branches keep falling off and scratching the car. The hypothesis is that a branch fell and broke the car window. The second observation that tests the hypothesis is that there is no fallen branch around the car. This observation refutes the hypothesis. Then the scientist is free to go looking for additional observations and form a new hypothesis: the kids playing baseball nearby are the new observation. The next hypothesis is that they broke the window.

This process actually works very well in most situations where we have uncertainty and need an explanation, be it in the sciences or everyday world. I think you assume it's just some idealised version of "science" in the broad, but it's actually the most solid form of empirical reasoning we know of.

If an offender removes key elements from your observation (or in the example adding a branch beside the scientists car) you will not even consider to form a new hypothesis? That's quite convenient for those kids.

> But, what are the chances of this being coincidental?

Enormous. The odds are heavily on the side of this being a coincidence.

What are the odds of, if this was a leak, the leak coming from that single research line? It's basically 1 divided by the number of experiments running on the lab. And that's assuming it was a leak, if you estimate the odds of it being a leak, you will at a minimum halve that number.

Why would there be a ban on this type of research, in the US, since 2014?

https://osp.od.nih.gov/biotechnology/gain-of-function-resear...

> 1 divided by the number of experiments running on the lab

That would only make sense if you knew there was a leak but didn't know which virus was leaked.

Since we already have the knowledge of what virus (supposedly) leaked, the odds are (1/number of labs experimenting with that virus).

Yes, but isn't that lab the place to go for researching coronavirus? Dividing the odds through all experiments may underestimate it, but it's not very far.

> Any epidemiological connections to WIV? There aren't any

I am neither a geneticist nor an epidemiologist, however my understanding is that as further tracing of early cases has occurred that the earliest cases identified were employees of the WIV and predate the case cluster that started in the wet market. This was one of the strongest pieces of information that swayed me towards believing a lab leak was likely, and that it was most likely accidental rather than purposeful.

That’s not true — again showing the problems with headlines like these.. (drive by viewers integrate the headline into their understanding even though the actual article is very light on information).

Nearly every early case — before there could have been “pressure” to hide the origins was connected to the market:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454

This alone doesn’t disprove a lab leak of course, but it tilts the odds dramatically compared to the alternate scenario where WIV employees were among the first infected.

If you were a genetics engineer, then I am an astronaut, not a computer scientist, studying computational epidemiology. Detecting bioengineering is near impossible for a virus. To make these claims is dangerous. The developer of the engineered organism doesn't leave their name on it.

I don't necessarily agree with the lab leak hypothesis but your arguments have some flaws.

Hypothetically a lab worker could have been infected by careless handling of a lab animal rather than a swab. As I'm sure you're aware, viruses can be passaged through transgenic animals as part of gain-of-function research.

There is no reliable evidence that the bat or pangolin species suspected to be the source of zoonotic transmission were sold at the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. They are not usual foods in the local cuisine.

All it would take is a bat taking a dump on a pigsty and then the unlucky pig that now happens to be infected being taken to the market. Which is the most likely backstory of several other bat-to-intermediary-to-human viral jumps. And if you're unlucky the intermediary species doesn't just carry the virus but serves as an amplifier. Hendra for instance.

Fecal-oral transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is suspected to be possible, but I don't think it has ever been definitively established.

>There's no evidence for a lab-leak.

I tend to agree and the "intentional CCP release" theory also seems flawed.

If intentional, would China shoot itself in the foot by releasing a deadly virus in its OWN major cities and infect potentially millions/billions? There is a Chinatown in every major city in the world and it would be trivially easy to release in any one but they chose to attack their own city of Wuhan during the world military games "to own the West"? Seems silly.

Or would the US and its allies release a virus it knowingly funded the creation of, a few miles from a primary lab in a country they constantly call their 'greatest adversary & threat'?

One of these seems more likely than the other to an objective observer since this isn't the first time the US and its allies have engaged in chemical & bio-warfare against the Chinese population.

The foreign aircraft carriers and war ships surrounding the Chinese coast are perhaps yet another clue...

> Any epidemiological connections to WIV? There aren't any, just the original fact that the outbreak happened in Wuhan

other than multiple published papers and NIH reluctantly admitting WIV did THOSE EXACT genetic modifications https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-r...

Redacted emails without any associated email thread for context with cherry-picked quotes published by two Republican Senators who have consistently spread Covid-19 misinformation.

Not heavily redacted, there's certainly enough to be able to follow the thread - are you suggesting that the following quote could be given context that would change its meaning?

> ... Given the evidence presented and the discussions around it, I would conclude that a follow-up discussion on the possible origin of 2019-nCoV would be of much interest. However, I doubt if it needs to be done on very short term, given the importance of other activities of the scientific community, WHO and other stakeholders at present. It is my opinion that a non-natural origin of 2019-nCoV is highly unlikely at present. Any conspiracy theory can be approached with factual information.

> ... An accusation that nCoV-2019 might have been engineered and released into the environment by humans (accidental or intentional) would need to be supported by strong data, beyond a reasonable doubt. It is good that this possibility was discussed in detail with a team of experts.

> However, further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.

The draft United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, S.1260 which passed the Senate 68-32, has verbiage on the lab leak too - it requires a report from the Director of the National Intelligence to Congress within 180 days which provides:

> (1) an assessment of the most likely source or origin of the SARS–CoV–2 virus, including a detailed review of all information the United States possesses that it has identified as potentially relevant to the source or origin of the SARS–CoV–2 virus, including zoonotic transmission and spillover, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), or other sources of origin, transmission, or spillover, based on the information the United States Government has to date;

> (5) an account of efforts by the PRC to cooperate with, impede, or obstruct any inquiry or investigation to determine the source and transmission of SARS–CoV–2 virus, including into a possible lab leak, or to create or spread misinformation or disinformation regarding the source and transmission of SARS–CoV–2 virus by the PRC or CCP, including by national and local governmental and health entities; [1]

I look forward to seeing the report.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/126...

https://republicans-oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2...

Page 8.

You don't seem to understand the material you are linking to at all. That's fine by me but this does not constitute evidence in the scientific sense of the word and that's what I am getting at.

Yes, more context is needed.

Here's what it says on page 8, and on page 7, listing the email from Ron Foucher:

... Given the evidence presented and the discussions around it, I would conclude that a follow-up discussion on the possible origin of 2019-nCoV would be of much interest. However, I doubt if it needs to be done on very short term, given the importance of other

activities of the scientific community, WHO and other stakeholders at present. It is my opinion that a non-natural origin of 2019-nCoV is highly unlikely at present. Any conspiracy theory can be approached with factual information. ... An accusation that nCoV-2019 might have been engineered and released into the environment by humans (accidental or intentional) would need to be supported by strong data, beyond a reasonable doubt. It is good that this possibility was discussed in detail with a team of experts. However, further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.

The Telegraph cited only the last sentence ("However, further debate...") and left out the preceding text where Ron Foucher staes his opinion that a non-natural origin is "highly unlikely". This is a clear attempt to take a quote out of context to make it look like it says something completely different than what was actually said.

Further, this is from page 3, listing the email from Francis Collins:

Though the arguments from Ron Fouchier and Christian Drosten are presented with more forcefulness than necessary, I am coming around to the view that a natural origin is more likely. But I share your view that a swift convening of experts in a confidence inspiring framework (WHO seems really the only option) is needed, or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony...

Which is clearly calling for open, public debate, rather than keeping quiet.

Evidence? The hypothesis of the article is that certain scientists did believe a lab leak was likely, but hid their views. The article provides ample evidence for this.

If you also want it to conclusively prove the lab leak hypothesis in the same breath then I'd say your expectations are too high. Better publications have tackled the subject anyway: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...

Then the title of the article is highly misleading. Using "Scientists" instead of "Some scientists" implies that the great majority of the scientists believed in this hypothesis, and there is no evidence for that.

And you would make the same criticism against articles that denied it could have had a lab origin? At some point people don't believe you anymore.

I don't have a strong opinion about what happened, it may or may not be a lab leak. It's still ongoing and I feel it will be a very long and sterile debate with few scientific facts to prove anything.

Granted, if the title of the article was "Scientists believed that Covid had natural origins...", this article wouldn't attract my attention as much, because I already believe that to be the popular opinion. But if, in this hypothetical title, "Scientists" only represented a minority of scientists, it would still be a very misleading title.

Did you notice though that the lab leak in mainstream media was stated as being conclusively not a lab leak - not even potentially? That's what I saw, only relatively recently did the tune change.

Oddly enough the mainstream media I saw stated that it was conclusively a lab leak, orchestrated by the democrats, in conjunction with soros, gates, leftists, globalist and the CCP. There was zero potential that it could be anything else at all, or that even one of the supposed conspiring parties was not involved.

The point is that scientists felt compelled to hide their views for one hypothesis.

Yes, some scientists did and they didn't want speculation and suppressed the fact with political means. There were other scientists that did entertain the thought publicly and they were branded as being anti-science. Just for entertaining the thought, not for saying the had any conclusive evidence.

If an article is headlined "Firefighters rescue cat from tree"

Is your assumption that all firefighters were involved in the rescue?

It’s not reasonable to assume all firefighters were involved in a cat rescue.

But if one says “Firefighters think cats are cute”, it certainly appears that it implies most firefighters share this opinion.

I do agree with you we should require specificity as a pillar to integrity but it seems like a long way to there.

Also, the scientists with the most power were the ones doing the misleading. For whatever reason, the power structure has been such that the scientists willing to mislead are elevated to positions where they are given the opportunity to mislead the most people, and not challenged by other scientists^1 like you would expect in a community dependent on debate to find the truth.

And it's not as if this is leading to a substantial change in the community. If we're being honest, scientists with positions of power are just as likely to mislead us in the future when they believe the truth might be harmful to their funding.

1 in a substantial way

That's one of the tough parts about headline interpretations because you're right. I think editors use it as a sort of con knowing it can leave them with a way out. Here's an NPR headline using the same term that could be seen as just as misleading:

"Scientists Debunk Lab Accident Theory Of Pandemic Emergence" April 22, 2020 4:08 PM ET https://www.npr.org/2020/04/22/841925672/scientists-debunk-l...

Agreed - both should say "Some scientists".

I think if you qualify every bit of a statement, it comes off as verbose, which mollifies the impact. If you have half a brain, you should know that it means "some scientists" not "all scientists". I suppose it's normal to read absolutes into things you know nothing about or are unwilling to invest thought into. Then the ambiguity leads to lots of pointless quibbles.

Just like when CNN, WaPo, etc post “The GOP…” or “Republicans…”

I too would like to see some evidence for the hypothesis that hn is "the smartest forum on the web".

Between public “popular” forums, it very well might be. What alternatives are there? I don’t know any big subreddit that has as smart people. Lesswrong has more intelligent people (probably), but it’s a much narrower, more technical forum.

I’ve noticed for a long time now that the HN community has very little humility. There’s a ton of arrogance in these comment sections.

I don't believe this article but I give it more lenience at this point since this is what I see with articles of other publications.

I do think it still holds valuable information though and that the subject that it criticizes in in dire need of more criticism. And I don't mean the lab or China of course.

Let us not pretend these topics are discussed with only the scientific quality in mind.

In this particular case, the evidence would simply be the existence of the emails from scientists expressing their opinion, which are very different from public utterance. Strictly speaking, the article is about politicisation of scientists, rather than what really happened in Wuhan.

But I take your point, the Telegraph is bilge. But then, so are all British broadsheets.

It's naive to think that HN is necessarily better than an arbitrary Subreddit in terms of quality of conversations and depth of discussions, especially on non-tech related material. I don't know why one might think it's better/worse than a Twitter thread or Facebook post when it comes to controversial topics. You can find smart and dumb people here. Also, going against the narrative of the comment section may have negative consequences even here.

My personal preference is to treat HN as any other popular social media and be vigilant about what I read here.

P.S. I am not talking about this particular post. Just an opinion about the discussions on HN since you mentioned.

Edit: typo fix

There was a point in time (10 to 15 years ago) in which HN was actually a good forum to check out, you could learn a lot from the discussions here.

But then it grew massively. Nowadays, it is no better than classic Facebook comments or r/technology on Reddit.

I think the strict moderation helps a lot here. Just as it does on some of the better subreddits and forums.

As for non-expertise; I have tried to explain several basic biostatistics concepts on here in relation to COVID threads. Generally this was because of an understandable fallacy or mistake being made. When the mistake was genuine the response to my comments is usually good. When there is an agenda the response is usual hostile or asinine. Anyway, it’s much nicer to argue with a bunch of people who value argument on HN than it is to try the same thing on r/news.

> It's naive to think that HN is necessarily better than an arbitrary Subreddit in terms of quality of conversations and depth of discussions, especially on non-tech related material.

HN is much better than an arbitrary subreddit in terms of quality of conversations. Dissenting opinions are very rarely censored on HN, but dissent on subreddits is typically quelled. Subreddits are mostly echo chambers for people who want to loudly agree with each other while arguing against strawmen.

Maybe it depends on the topic.

In the 3 years I've been reading HN I've observed a pretty steady increase in similarity to tech focused subreddits. Sometimes things are effectively "cross posted" on either site.

There's nothing stopping anyone on reddit from posting on HN and vice versa. I am a random example of someone who discovered reddit before HN, but was drawn to HN for what I also perceived to be better "quality of conversations".

> There's nothing stopping anyone on reddit from posting on HN and vice versa.

Yes there is. About 1/3 of my comments on Reddit have been censored for being against the "official truth" of the subreddit.

> This article contributes zero actual evidence

What evidence has China given to show that the virus jumped from animals?

Why is such evidence needed? The vast majority of diseases we know have not come from a lab leak. Why should this one in particular be assumed to be different?

The other most famous outbreak with wet market specified as culprit (Sverdlovsk 1979 anthrax) was in fact a lab leak.

Nine out of ten times an article is just the excuse to start a conversation about any given subject. Speaking for myself, at least half of the times I don't even bother reading the article and jump directly to the comment section because I care what hners have to say.

I know something about probabilities. What is more likely, a virus occurs naturally blocks away from a Virology Institute that researches the very type of virus we're dealing with, or the virus was released from that Institute, either intentionally or unintentionally?

I think people are divided. There are those that are vaccinated, like me, and those that are not. I, for one, am done getting the vaccine. I've been jabbed 3 times, and if they can't make a vaccine that works, like they promised, then I would rather develop natural immunity, no matter what the science tells me. Science also tells me that the pesticides they spray on produce in the store are safe. I also avoid that produce as well.

Make sure you tell everybody that sites Virology institutes to put them as far away from areas where the scientists would like to work as possible.

Dont forget to tell people "research" amounted to engineering human transmittable viruses https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...

>The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses.

Imagine another headline then.

How about that (hypothetical):

Galileo Galilei believed the earth wasnt flat - but feared debate could hurt ‘international churchly harmony’

I think you are missing the context. It's not that it proves or disproves the lab leak hypothesis. It's that it shows the scientific authorities were deliberately misleading the public by saying it's a crazy conspiracy theory while in private believing it quite likely.

And as to why that matters rather than "It shouldn't have been posted to HN" type suppression - we have millions dead in this outbreak and "At least 59 maximum biosafety level 4 labs (BSL-4) are planned, under construction or in operation across the world" https://www.ft.com/content/a0badd5d-4d88-4a3b-b019-61c6d8275... If labs are the cause we should take steps to try to avoid the next pandemic.

> while in private believing it quite likely

That's not what they said or believed. That's exactly why I have a problem with this whole exercise, it seems to me to be mostly a game of jump-to-conclusions.

Well "accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40." sounds like Mike Farzan thought it quite likely. And

>Before I left the office for the ball, I aligned nCoV with the 96% bat CoV sequenced at WIV. Except for the RBD the S proteins are essentially identical at the amino acid level – well all but the perfect insertion of 12 nucleotides that adds the furin site. S2 is over its whole length essentially identical. I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function – that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level – its stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted. Another scenario is that the progenitor of nCoV was a bat virus with the perfect furin cleavage site generated over evolutionary times. In this scenario RaTG13 the WIV virus was generated by a perfect deletion of 12 nucleotides while essentially not changing any other S2 amino acid. Even more implausible IMO.

from Bob Garry sounds like he also thought it quite likely. Source https://republicans-oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2...

Meanwhile, we have hard proof that this does occur in nature.

So this part of the discussion is no longer relevant from an evidence of view, the 'even more implausible' part turned out to be true.

This - again - illustrates why I think this whole thread is a large pile of rubbish. If you are arguing with old information for an implausible viewpoint why are you arguing at all?

I'm arguing mostly that scientists should be open with the relevant data. I don't see what should be controversial about that. It's like there's an air crash and the authorities say we must not investigate and keep all documents confidential in case it upsets the plane manufacturer. It's not a good idea to do that.

Specifically EcoHealth Alliance who were the main US funders of WIV and main enthusiasts for gain of function research on bat viruses should publish their emails and data. They are a US government funded non profit and have no business obstructing all inquiries really.

I mean even if you are convinced the origin is natural and not involving a lab then why not be enthusiastic for data about lab research to be open so you can rule that out?

Imagine for a moment that everything is reversed and read 'USA' for 'China' and 'China' for 'USA'. Now what do you think are the chances that an American research facility will open its books to the world after a political war of words all but blaming the USA for a pandemic? Because - in my opinion rightly - such a mission is bound to generate a lot of data that will then be mis-interpreted by people with an agenda seeing proof in everything that they were right all along, no matter what the scientists say.

Yeah which is why I think the US should start by going after the US institutions involved.

This is The Telegraph, a conservative UK paper that published such Covid-19 misinformation as the common cold conveying immunity against Covid-19 and the lockdowns were dumb and herd immunity was the way. Being devoid of fact is a feature not a bug. Fluff pieces like this from biased news sources known for spreading misinformation have no place on Hacker News.

I think I found the article you are referring to. [1] I don't think that's a good example of misinformation. Here's a recent report by Reuters on the same topic. [2]

I agree that The Telegraph is not the most reliable source of the news [3], but that doesn't make anything they report on automatically false.

[1]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...

[2]: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

[3]: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-telegraph/

Hmmm I think someone else is also extrapolating one data point to an entire community as well based on less than probably 0.1% of the participants of HN...

There are 100's of comments here like that, and on balance it's a dumpster fire.

> But a leading scientist told Sir Jeremy that “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular”. Dr Collins, the former director of the US National Institutes of Health, warned it could damage “international harmony”.

COVID-19: the time where Scientists pretended to be politicians and politicians pretended to be Scientists.

Also if their intention was to not hurt China, we now see one of the largest decentralisation efforts away from Chinese manufacturing we have seen in quite some time. Any future outsourced research to China will be under extreme scrutiny.

> Later emails showed that by February 4, Sir Jeremy had revised his estimate of a laboratory leak to 50:50, while Professor Eddie Holmes, of the University of Sydney, gave a 60:40 estimate in favour of an accidental release.

When you consider how the CCP and all staff involved have behaved, the odds appear higher. You have a major opportunity to show openness and lack of wrongdoing - and yet choose to act closed and actively prevent investigations.

> An email from Dr Ron Fouchier to Sir Jeremy said: “Further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”

Unnecessary harm? If it was as a result of a lab leak, it would be completely necessary harm. For all we know, COVID-X is just around the corner. Bare in mind many labs around the world have been processing COVID samples and performing experiments on it in order to figure out how it may mutate.

> For all we know, COVID-X is just around the corner.

Not necessarily Coronavirus based, but the next jump from one species to another of some pathogen (viral, bacterial) is pretty much a certainty. And with the amount of habitat destruction and bushmeat/wetmarkets we are increasing the odds of it happening soon considerably. The last three decades have seen an ever increasing number of such events each of which has the potential to trigger a pandemic like this one, a milder one or one that is much worse.

Talking about COVID-X EcoHealth Alliance who were enthusing about Covid gain of function research also wanted to much around with MERS, a virus that kills 30% of humans rather than the namby pamby Covid with its mediocre 1%. Another reason why I feel this stuff should be investigated properly https://mobile.twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/143200746439279411...

> COVID-19: the time where Scientists pretended to be politicians and politicians pretended to be Scientists.

It's naive to think this is not systemic to academia. Science was corrupted by politics a long time ago on more than one level.

It’s hard to believe how bad this is. Not the lab leak theory itself, but the fact that scientists found it plausible that a scientific mistake released an epidemic which killed 20m people – and decided they should cover this up because “talking about it might harm science“. This is truly scandalous, and I don’t see how those people can remain in their post.

Let's not forget the media's role in selectively amplifying and smearing scientists.

Or government's role setting the agenda (and bungling the response horrifically while putting all the blame on political opposition and the unvaccinated).

Or FB and Twitter's role in deleting millions of posts re the mere possibility of a lab leak.

Or various health organization's roles watching all this and saying nothing.

... Looking at all this - is it time to reexamine some other major incidents in the last 20.75 years?

I find that behaviour more dangerous than any other anti-science or anti-vax movements. That behaviour degrades the public trust in institutions, in science and in scientists. It will breed even more anti-science and anti-vax people for years to come.

Conspiracy theory at its best. Self-amplifying narrative. Congratulation.

Can we stop with the anti-vax crap?

I haven't met a single person who is hesitant of traditional vaccines.

The anti-vaxxer crowd is still as small as it once was, loonies in Oregon and other places that cause an occasional Measles outbreak.

Being hesitant of unknown longterm effects of mRNA vaccines is reasonable and is not "anti-science" or "anti-vax".

But yes, lying about what you think caused millions of deaths because you're scared of the support the CCP has is pretty high up there on the fucked up meter.

Maybe Facebook and Twitter will let us talk about it now.

I have seen (IRL) people who were not “anti-vax” previously, but don’t want a Covid vaccine (mRNA or not).

...but who is to blame here? Are the scientists who were in fear of harassment, intimidation, and career destruction to blame? ...or is it the institutions that facilitate that sort of punishment.

I would think twice about punishing victims.

… With this logic, Hitler is also a victim.

We should punish this people by destroying their careers now, so that the incentives are aligned.

You're making the same mistake as lots of others here and acting like this is all scientists. Did you pay attention to how much disinformation spread and you want them to report every email from every scientist to the general public as relevant? Do you post every frantic email from every engineer in your organization as equally viable along side well thought out memos/emails about a given situation? I don't think you really want that...

I feel like it was impossible to really deal with this debate responsibly, what with the current state of society and social media where everyone has figured out how to weaponize false information, before we as a society have figured out how to really deal with it.

Even now it seems like everyone wants to elide the massive differences between "accidental lab leak" and "deliberate lab leak". Even now the common phrase is "lab leak" which can be taken either way. But if you ask anyone on twitter or facebook what "lab leak" means, but especially at the beginning of the pandemic, they would have immediately jumped to a deliberate bioterror attack scenario and there would have been no way to stop it. And we already had a surge of asian hate with what we dealt with.

> I feel like it was impossible to really deal with this debate responsibly, what with the current state of society and social media where everyone has figured out how to weaponize false information

So, the solution to this is lying. Right. That will make everything better. Oh and also make fact checkers tell people the truth is false information. FACT checkers. Yes. That will increase trust. Sure.

Fact checkers have determined this statement to be mostly false. While fact checkers have been proven over and over to be incorrect, we find the sarcastic tone of this post to be dangerous and have therefor decided the entire thing is false

Concealing all kinds of information to "protect" the sheep-like citizens is counterproductive and dishonest. An honest discussion is the best way to avoid spreading of false information which will always exist to some degree.

However politicians more and more try to avoid all discussion with the voters and just convince them of the rightfulness of their doing. If you don't accept their way you must be wrong, maybe even protected from false information, shielded for your own good..

They've taken it a step further in recent years. Not only should you be shielded, but if you have wrong think then society should be shielded from you. Australia is the most extreme example but you can see the punishment of wrong think creeping up everywhere

But at the same time the discourse has gotten far stupider. People just believe anything shared with them on Facebook and have no interest in seeing it debunked. I agree with you and GP that scientists telling people the whole truth is the only path forward but the fact is these scientists in this email chain did not have the whole truth, and we may never have it because China doesn't seem to want anyone to know the origin of this virus. So having a policy of not engaging in public speculation is not quite the same as a policy of silence or a cover-up.

It was always possible, but the elites simply didn’t want to do it.

> Even now it seems like everyone wants to elide the massive differences between "accidental lab leak" and "deliberate lab leak".

Mostly people who wanted to vilify the lab leak theory did that.

Totally agree with what you've said, but let's face it... the hate was always there. This whole situation has just emboldened the hateful to become violent both verbally and physically.

In the beginning I really thought the Trump white house would claim a biological warfare attack just so conservative americans would follow the health guidelines instead of the fuck you I won't do what you tell me posturing.

No they put people in a prison of two ideas because they didn't want to talk about it, for reasons.

Crying racism isn't an excuse for covering up and banning talk either. Nothing to do with Asians, just the CCP. It's racist to not talk about a lab leak because "they are asian".

It all starts with a hyperbole attributed to all peoples then the restrictions because that hyperbole you created could be true, even though there was no proof to such, and the effects are counterproductive.

Yes "lab leak" was the common and is the common phrase because we don't know if it was natural or a bio-attack. We were robbed of that national discussion by private companies coordinating with gov officials.

I have mixed feelings about this, and I certainly think it’s not as clear cut as HN is converging on, although I share the same instincts.

On the one hand, yes, science should be completely open and unhindered by geopolitics.

But recall that Trump was in the White House at the time.

We are a community of generally highly educated nerds with a strong understanding of science and engineering. We understand that all labs will have leaks, we often have first hand experience of the difficulty of making any system truly secure. We’re also probably not interested in making big political gains from this - rather our discussion might be “omg that’s terrible what went wrong and how do we prevent it from happening again.”

But Trump, his party, and many many people in the West would care only for the political capital they could make from it, with potentially catastrophic results that would make COVID look relatively minor.

At a time when a global pandemic requires international cooperation and focus, these decisions are very very difficult and we shouldn’t be too hasty to judge.

Trump is irrelevant here, in fact I believe a lot of people voting for him out of spite because they felt they had been lied to by the other party. You will not improve the situation with more paternalism. That is has degraded to "owning the libs" is a predictable result.

Yes, people jump to conclusion, but if you want to build a society of trust, you let some people jump. Others will hit the breaks if no conclusive information is available. Trump is not an excuse to withhold information at all. You have to make sure that the uncertainty of the information is clearly communicated.

> we shouldn’t be too hasty to judge.

You do judge yourself at the time you withhold information because you declared people incapable to making the same judgement.

> if you want to build a society of trust, you let some people jump.

If you want to build a society of trust, you need a sane president.

I don’t understand your point. Trump is the only leader who gave people the truth and was lambasted for it.

Both the US and the Chinese governments downplayed and lied about the severity of the virus. For months.

I don't know much about US, but for China it didn't last for months, 1 or 2 weeks maybe. It has been notified to the WHO at the beginning of January, on 23 January Wuhan was going full lockdown. And not lockdown like in the West, citizens were not allowed to step a foot outside even for groceries and the army was bringing rations to the people.

I remember then in March, a French newspaper highlighting how PRC hid the severity of the virus... I mean if they took these extreme measures in Wuhan, it's certainly not for a mild virus.

I don’t think you can seriously argue in good faith that Trump ‘gave people the truth’, he said whatever came to his mind. Sometimes it was pure fantasy, mostly it was deflection.

Perhaps sometimes it was truth, but only in the same way a broken clock is correct twice a day.

That's a laughably generous take.

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

> On the one hand, yes, science should be completely open and unhindered by geopolitics. > > But recall that Trump was in the White House at the time.

And so? Does the name of the current US president alter unrelated facts and findings?

It's almost a religious cause to some people. If _______ is in Office than I must do anything I can to protect or remove them. I think it's a symptom of watching to much cable news and not talking to real people with opposing views. Sadly this spills over into what should be research and fact based studies

You don't think an experiment killing 20 million people is worth it if we can make sure Trump doesn't have a good media-cycle? What are you some sort of fascist.

> At a time when a global pandemic requires international cooperation and focus

Someone should tell that to China.

> But Trump, his party, and many many people in the West would care only for the political capital they could make from it, with potentially catastrophic results that would make COVID look relatively minor.

There are plenty of people who voted for Trump and other Republican candidates who have scientific and engineering backgrounds. If I had to try to characterize those people, in terms of what makes them different from the science and engineering people who tend to vote Democratic, it is that the Trump / Republican supporters tend to be the entrepreneurs or senior management people in private industry, while the Democratic supporters are often management and staff at institutions in or aligned with government, health, and education.

It’s not fair at all to say that Republican-supporting science and engineering people care only for the political capital they can make. They actually want many of the same things as the Democratic-supporting scientists and engineers do— to prevent this from happening again.

The difference is that in this case, the Republican-supporters wanted their viewpoints to be freely debated, not denigrated by the mainstream media and/or censored by social media.

This might take the cake for the dumbest comment I've ever read on HN. With absolutely zero data/evidence, you're trying to categorize the views of millions of people, along with their professional qualifications. This is probably why the mainstream denigrates your views.

You know who else brings up the boogiemen every time they are caught red-handed? The Islamic Republic of Iran. Why, they are currently saying in their own media that they hitting the Ukrainian airplane with missiles was a heroic act that avoided a potential war with Trump.

>"Professor Andrew Rambaut, from the University of Edinburgh, also said that furin cleavage site “strikes me as unusual”."

>"He added: “I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan.”"

This pair of quotes has a completely different meaning from the original quote it sliced up:

>"I am also agnostic on this – I do not have any experience of laboratory virology and don’t know what is likely or not in that context. From a (natural) evolutionary point of view the only thing here that strikes me as unusual is the furin cleavage site. It strongly suggests to me that we are missing something important in the origin of the virus. My inclination would be that it is a missing host species in which this feature arose because it was selected for in that host. We can see this insertion has resulted in an extremely fit virus in humans – we can also deduce that it is not optimal for transmission in bat species."

>"... [this ellipsis (...) is from the house.gov transcription] The biggest hinderance at the moment (for this and more generally) is the lack of data and information. There have been no genome sequences from Wuhan for cases more recent than the 6 beginning of January and reports, but no information, about virus from non-human animals in Wuhan. If the evolutionary origins of the epidemic were to be discussed, I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan."

https://republicans-oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2... (pp. 8-9)

To emphasize the very last part: Rambaut is talking about genome sequences from human patients in Wuhan -- not laboratory data from the suspect WIV. But the Telegraph quote implies the opposite.

(Also, obviously I'm not picking any "side" here: dishonesty in the Telegraph doesn't vindicate dishonesty in NIH leadership, and vice-versa).

The article shouldn’t have quote this person in the first place - there are plenty of serious investigations into the lab leak theory from reputable virologists. I recommend Alina Chan’s new book: Viral.

This clarification also masquerades as a clarification of something important. This person quoted by the tabloid is irrelevant here. In fact this article does more damage to the credibility of lab theory than otherwise and your clarification just shows.

Frustrating both the article and your clarification of basically a meaningless source.

There is a vast amount of information regarding lab leak theory and potential origin spanning back 20 years even though China has shut any investigation with gag orders and complete lack of transparency. Too much to unpack.

My concern is this: People will read your clarification of the quote as if it’s something important to clarify. Source itself is garbage.

IDK, seemed like it was pretty important to clarify that a quote was used very deceptively!

Seems important to point out that Chan's co-author is a climate-change sceptic that is a hereditary peer in the British House of Lords after chairing the bank Northern Rock - famous for failing spectacularly in 2007. Very credible!

I think there is some sort of a misunderstanding.

I am saying that the source of a person who is not a virologist, has never worked in a lab environment and the general credibility of a tabloid (Telegraph.co.uk) does not give a good impression of the lab leak theory. I am trying to steering people away from the article.

And in so doing you advocate that people read a book written by a British Hereditary Lord climate change denier and a Molecular biologist? I don't think there is a misunderstanding.

Facts are facts. The fact is in 2019 there were 39,397 wet markets in China. How many virology labs were there in China handling Corona-viruses? TWO. One of which was TWO BLOCKS from where the wet market from where the original Covid-19 virus which started the pandemic has been traced to.

One might be forgiven for being curious as to the likelihood of the virus emerging from this particular wet market as opposed to all others.

That's not how probability works. You'd need to wait for thousands of years and several pandemics to know if they are more or less likely to emerge next to a virology lab. And then you'd need to control for the fact that virology labs are better at detecting dangerous viruses than average humans. Like how the first confirmed cases in the US were in Davis --- because there's a specialist unit at UC Davis that was already treating cruise ship patients.

That is actually how probability works when you are assessing the probability of uncertain propositions [1]. The prevalence of wet markets vs. virology labs should not be the only input but it is definitely relevant to our assessment of probabilities.

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

Oh, I never get to share this. Relevant SMBC comic; https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-09-08

Additionally the closest cave containing any viruses resembling SARS-Cov-2 are 1500 km away from Wuhan.

And when journalists tried to access those caves, the road was suddenly closed.

Indeed... And in creative manners. Here is the report from the visit: https://twitter.com/thejohnsudworth/status/13972233747457065...

Someone really really didn't want anyone near those mines.

Apparently he ran afoul of the Chinese government in 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/bbc-crew-attac...

Fair to also entertain the possibility that they were tracking him because of his previous reporting on land reform in remote villages, when he travelled into remote areas again 4 years later. He had to sign a forced confession the first time and if they caught him interviewing disgruntled villagers again, I’m sure they were ready to ratchet up the punishment.

The 2021 Twitter story sounds very similar to the 2017 one: being followed and physically blocked by people.

> As they walked towards her house, a group of men blocked their way, pushed Sudworth and smashed and snatched the crew’s cameras.

> “As soon as we arrived in Yang Linghua’s village it was clear they were expecting us,” Sudworth wrote in his account, referring to the woman the BBC wanted to interview.

Could be the mines, or could be the Chinese government harassing a Western journalist they already had an issue with.

The closest cave containing any viruses resembling SARS-CoV-1 are about the same distance away from Guangzhou where the outbreak was in 2003.

> One of which was TWO BLOCKS from where the wet market from where the original Covid-19 virus which started the pandemic has been traced to

TWO BLOCKS? Or a 40min drive? This is why the lab leak theory feels conspiracy-adjacent. Too much exaggeration.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/640/cpsprodpb/D961/production/...

> The institute is a 40-minute drive from the Huanan wet market where the first cluster of infections emerged in Wuhan.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57268111.amp

There’s plenty of valid scientific inquiry to be had regarding the theory once you get past the misinformation. But the political showmanship and the attraction of conspiracy theorists doesn’t help.

This is a common problem with conspiracies when they actually happened. You still get "conspiracy theorists" showing up with theories contrary to evidence or fabrications or misrememberings of details.

Which then discredits their own position -- even if the conspiracy actually happened -- because it didn't happen the way they claim it did.

There is a conspiracy theory that this method is used by conspirators to effect a coverup by discrediting skeptics of the official narrative.

>There is a conspiracy theory that this method is used by conspirators to effect a coverup by discrediting skeptics of the official narrative.

This is actual public disinformation practice, not a "conspiracy theory".

Moon landing conspiracy theories are full of discredited nonsense. It is a conspiracy theory to claim that the source of the discredited nonsense is the people who faked the moon landing, because the moon landing wasn't faked so there were no such conspirators to do that.

Distinguishing this from the other thing is the issue. They do it because it works.

Ah, now I get it.

I thought you were talking about cases when “conspiracy theorists” are actually right, but their positions get poisoned by attributing some ridiculous stuff to them, and/or by artificial influx of similar “conspiracy theories” that are easy to disprove, so that the original theory is dismissed by association. For example, in Russia they love to flood the information space with bullshit theories a lot to “dilute” the truth and to disorient the public so that you can’t distinguish between truth and conspiracy theories anymore.

There are multiple labs in Wuhan. Wuhan institute of virology is the main on people like to talk about but there was indeed another lab a block or two away from the wet market. I don't know if both were doing virology experiments.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Center_For_Disease_Con...

It’s a Level 2 facility, not studying bats or coronavirus.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/head-of-who-team-investigating-...

> “They also reported no storage nor laboratory activities on CoVs [coronaviruses] or other bat viruses preceding the outbreak.”

> The lab is classified BSL-2, a safety level at which air ventilation controls aren’t particularly strict, as they are in more secure labs. At that level, lab workers are usually dealing with pathogens that either cause mild disease in humans or which don’t typically spread through small particles that linger in the air. Researchers at that level don’t necessarily wear masks.

> The Wuhan CDC lab tested all of its staff for Covid-19 antibodies, it told the WHO in February. All staff tested negative, except one who tested positive, it said. That person was infected “due to family cluster transmission,” the WHO-led team’s report’s annex says.

> But Dr. Ben Embarek is the first to so explicitly question the team’s conclusion, published in a joint report with Chinese counterparts, that a lab accident was an “extremely unlikely” hypothesis.

> That wording was only reached after a 48 hour period of intense negotiations with Chinese counterparts said Dr. Ben Embarek, who said he would have preferred to designate an accident inside a lab as merely “unlikely.”

> The lab hadn’t published any work with bats since 2013, he said.

> “As far as we understand, they work mostly with parasites, not as much with viruses, so they have worked on parasites from bats.”

Yet, after fighting to label the lab leak theory “unlikely”, he throws a bone to the conspiracy theorists:

> “It’s also possible that someone is trying to hide something,” he added. “Who knows?”

In 2016, some of the scientists including Shi and the EcoHealth director, Peter Daszak, used the NIH funding to conduct experiments in Wuhan on live coronaviruses in a biosafety level 2 lab, according to published details of the work from [0]

They did do coronavirus experiments in level 2 facility.

[0] https://archive.is/KwZKn?

[edit] replaced link as FT makes it difficult to refer to them.

Did you paste what you intended to paste: "Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles."?

The research in question happened in 2016 and was called “W1V1”.

Regarding the 2016 work:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...

> Since bat viruses like WIV1 haven’t been confirmed to cause disease in human beings, her biosafety committee recommended BSL-2 for engineering them and testing them and BSL-3 for any animal experiments.

> In response to questions about the decision to do the research in BSL-2 conditions, Peter Daszak forwarded a statement from EcoHealth Alliance stating that the organization “must follow the local laws of the countries in which we work” and that the NIH had determined the research was “not gain-of-function.”

> The genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 does not resemble that of any virus the WIV was known to be culturing in its lab, such as WIV1, and Baric says he still believes a natural spillover is the most likely cause.

This theory is more than a few steps away from being a smoking gun.

The point is, they did work with coronaviruses in level 2 lab, and similar works might or might not have concluded by end 2019. (If not by these particular researchers)

Of course, but it bears repeating that it’s a theory lacking evidence at this point.

The idea of COVID leaking from a Level 2 lab 2 blocks from the Wuhan wet market is solely circumstantial.

> It’s a Level 2 facility, not studying bats or coronavirus.

It is indeed a level 2 facility, and it was being used to perform the bat coronavirus research outsourced to the WIV [1]:

The NIH decided the risk was worth it. In a potentially fateful decision, it funded work similar to Baric’s at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which soon used its own reverse-genetics technology to make numerous coronavirus chimeras.

Unnoticed by most, however, was a key difference that significantly shifted the risk calculation. The Chinese work was carried out at biosafety level 2 (BSL-2), a much lower tier than Baric’s BSL-3+.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...

This article talks about WIV (est. 2018), which is across the city from the market, not 2 blocks away and about 2016 research that was also not located near the wet market in 2016. The Level 2 lab only moved near the wet market in 2019, at which point the Level 4 lab was the one conducting the research.

Also from the article:

The timelines and genetic profiles don’t match up for a level 2 lab leak 2 blocks from the wet market.

> This article talks about WIV (est. 2018), which is across the city from the market, not 2 blocks away

It moved just before the outbreak [1]:

The lab, where Chinese scientists research mild human diseases with bats, was moved near the seafood market where the first COVID-19 cases were found just days before the outbreak, WHO investigators said.

Classified with a “Biosafety Level of 2,” the lab also has ventilation controls that aren’t as strict as other more secure facilities, according to the report.

I find it surprising how little attention this tidbit got; a move of lab equipment and animals probably involved external personnel not used to bio-safety procedures. Perfect opportunity for a virus to escape.

> The genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 does not resemble that of any virus the WIV was known to be culturing in its lab

The key words here being "was known", since the WIV notoriously took its database offline and even requested the deletion of sequences stored on US servers [2][3].

[1] https://nypost.com/2021/08/13/who-scientist-eyes-on-wuhan-la...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-24/u-s-confi...

[3] https://www.science.org/content/article/claim-chinese-team-h...

This line of reasoning forget a very important information: research labs are not built at random. This lab studying coronavirusses was built there precisely because this is a place where new coronavirusses have appeared in the past.

Will add a source later when not on mobile.

Not because Wuhan is a large, central city?

Couldn't find the source I was looking for, which was I believe from a french scientist (likely from the French CIRI that co-founded the Wuhan lab studying coronavirusses). So I will have to softer my above assertion that the lab was build "precisely" in Wuhan because it was a place where coronavirusses have appeared in the past, into the less convincing: this lab was build in China because that's were coronavirusses responsible for SARS have come from.

Still not completely random. And yes labs and wild animal markets tend to met in high population density area, so that's another non-random factor I presume.

This coincidence is indeed troubling, but before jumping to conclusions it's good to remember why there is such consensus against lab leak theory, by (re)reading the original report on the origin of SARS-Cov2 (https://zenodo.org/record/5075888) and the short history of SARS past outbreaks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS#Outbreak_in_South_China - which interestingly lists several past lab leaks).

I don't find any of the competing theory very obvious to be honest. What is very obvious though, and was made even more obvious to me when I was looking for that source, is the amount of political manipulation around this topic. The epidemic of manipulation of opinion is a greater concern that the epidemic of that virus if you ask me.

Can we refrain from posting articles about science from political newspapers, maybe?

Regarding Alian Chan, she and her co-author appeared on the Hidden Forces podcast a few months back and it's a pretty good listen to anyone unable to squeeze a book into their busy lives.

https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/lab-leak-hypothesis-alina-c...

dishonesty in the Telegraph in this case might be caused by scientific illiteracy, that is to say they might honestly have thought that their selective quotations were a reflecting the message of the longer quote.

Or maybe I'm being too lenient in attributing to incompetence and not malice here.

Also notice the last bit in the article:

The University of Edinburgh recently turned down an Freedom of Information request from The Telegraph asking to see Prof Rambaut’s replies, claiming “disclosure would be likely to endanger the physical or mental health and safety of individuals”.

James Comer, the Republican congressman who secured the unredacted emails, said it showed that experts like Dr Fauci had taken the Wuhan lab leak theory “much more seriously” than they had let on.

Sir Jeremy has been approached for comment but had not replied at the time of publication.

Basically journalists and politicians scour thousands of emails to find a selected quote that fit their sensationalist agenda, and then ask the persons involved for a comment. When they then explain how the quote is out of context, doesn't say what journalist thinks it says, or that new information is out. Then they get harrassed and bullied by a (mostly) online mob.

In other papers, perhaps, but the Telegraph famously hired (now PM) Boris Johnson who cut his teeth making up stories about the “evils” of the EU. I’m going to struggle to trust such an outlet.

It may have been credible once, but now it is just Pravda for conservatives. Nothing of value is left.

Might be a good time to remember the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect:

  “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray [Gell-Mann]'s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
  
  In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

I think the clearest article on topic is from Zeynep Tufekci https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.h... who says , repeatedly what we do not know and what is disturbing.

Somebody in HN recommended Zeynep Tufekci for covid coverage, and I'm really thankful for that, as IMO is quality scientific journalism.

If only it wasn't behind a paywall :(

https://archive.is/V0ERz

https://archive.md/V0ERz

Zeynep has been wrong so many times during the pandemic that it hurts. She will not admit to it, though. She claimed that the Delta variant would end the pandemic, in the same way it is claimed for Omicron now. She's very naive about how the immune system works. Her writing is generally more propaganda than science.

> She claimed that the Delta variant would end the pandemic

No she didn't - the article you're referring to is below, and what she said was more nuanced. It's also a reasonable analysis from the perspective of the time it was written (May 2021):

https://www.theinsight.org/p/we-need-to-get-real-about-how-t...

Citation? The best I could find with a quick Google was her NYT opinion piece [1], which pretty clearly couched her statements about Delta possibly being the last surge in hospitalisations and deaths in the US as a potential scenario and not a certainty.

Whilst I agree that she (and most other science reporters!) use simplistic models for immune system responses (possibly more for her readers), I’m yet to come across anything she’s written that has been very clearly wrong or she hasn’t later corrected/clarified.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/opinion/covid-winter-risk...

Did anyone else enjoy the irony of a group of scientists engaging in a conspiracy (of silence) in order to stop conspiracy theorists dominating a conversation about a probable (in their own eyes!) conspiracy?

You couldn't make it up.

Alina Chan on this: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1480947600199229444

She's also on HN as of a few days ago, fingers crossed she chimes in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Ayjchan

Also on Hidden Forces podcast a few weeks back with her co-author:

https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/lab-leak-hypothesis-alina-c...

[But a leading scientist told Sir Jeremy that “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular”. Dr Collins, the former director of the US National Institutes of Health, warned it could damage “international harmony”.]

The entire foundation of science is based upon empirical observation and asking hypothetical questions. It is discouraging that scientists can make statements like this and get away with it.

Scientists do not have the luxury of pretending politics and bad actors don’t exist.

Politics and bad actors have always existed. Scientists should counter them with facts and honesty not censorship.

That's not how the world or mathematics (game theory) works

Can you think of a scenario where science has ever benefited from censorship? Correct me if I am wrong, but respectfully that is the argument you are making, right?

Not that science benefits from censorship, but that game theory sometimes necessitates it.

Imagine a scientist with significant political cachet. This allows them to receive more funding, do more science. They cannot optimize their behavior only for truth-seeking, because that fails to maximize their political capital. If they optimize for the former, they will be replaced by someone who is better at the latter.

Any scientist that relies on external funding must balance science with politics to continue to do science, sometimes this involves censorship.

> Scientists should counter them with facts and honesty not censorship.

Scientists must be careful in how they communicate, and organizations like the CDC and FDA need to staff expert scientific communicators who can explain complicated things to lay people. Bill Nye types.

"Vaccines contain dihydrogen monoxide, a chemical that killed over 200,000 people within hours in 2004" is a scientifically factual statement, but not a well communicated one.

The reality is not so rosy. Many virologists know that if lab leak is true their careers will be over. So I am very skeptical of how much obfuscations and disinformation spread by virologists is for the good of humanity and how much of it is just to protect their self interest.

This is how science works in the post-WW2 era. Most prominent scientists (in any field) seldom do science when they attain their stature -- they manage people (students and postdocs), and many become politicians for their institution or lab to attain more funding.

I'm curious, what effect do you see WW2 having on science itself? That is not intended to be argumentative, I'd like to hear your opinion.

By that point most of the low-hanging scientific "fruit" had already been picked. Due to increasing complexity and the high workload of running experiments, solo scientists could no longer make much progress. So they had to act as administrators and project managers, leading larger teams of assistants and graduate students.

Government funding of science and a proposal/grant system. Senior people spend a lot of time writing proposals, and need underlings to do the leg work. They also have to be politically savvy so their peers don't reject their proposals.

To expand on this, before World War II, there was far less federal funding for science, and I don't think university faculty had the need to bring in external funding that they do now. I don't know the history of requirements that faculty bring in funding, however.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK45556/

> warned it could damage “international harmony”.

I've never understood the argument that people would want to suppress the (accidental) lab-leak hypothesis out of a desire to protect the image of China. If the lab-leak hypothesis is incorrect, that doesn't change the fact that the virus originated in that country, it just means that the virus emerged from a wet market.

I'm not Chinese, but I'd imagine that a country's image is more harmed by accusations of having backwards cultural and food habits (and insufficient government regulation of dangerous markets) rather than potentially just one lone scientist making a mistake while working on advanced genetic research, which is a risk at any such lab in the world.

I agree. Should Galileo have suppressed his observations to protect the Catholic Church? If he had, would it have been in the name of science or something else?

An amusing factoid is that the Vatican astronomers bought one or more telescopes from Galileo and confirmed his observational data.

>> I'm not Chinese, but I'd imagine that a country's image is more harmed by accusations of having backwards cultural and food habits

You forget the politics. CCP can never be wrong or do wrong. That would risk their rule. I'm pretty sure they would rather see the country burning than admitting guilt and incompetence. You can see that kind of selfish behaviour at most of the leaders(I would dare to say even in recent US history) but in an authoritan system this is made worse/more dramatic b/c there is no alternative(i.e opposition to replace leaders in a peaceful way)

Yes, any evidence of a lab leak theory could decimate Chinese society and further oppression.

No, but it could hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.

> CCP can never be wrong or do wrong. That would risk their rule.

But by failing to regulate wet markets properly, aren't they equally at fault?

Perhaps the supposed logic is that a scientist at a lab doing this sort of research probably counts as a government employee, whereas someone storing animals unhygienically would more likely be self-employed, so that makes the government less directly responsible.

I'm not sure if that distinction really matters to people who want to blame China's government, though.

>> But by failing to regulate wet markets properly, aren't they equally at fault?

Not really. It's just "bad luck" and "nature's fault". I never heard anyone angry on the Chinese government for not adding more red tape /regulation to the wet market. If that would be the case we should have seen people protesting all over the world against public markets where sanitary conditions are not the primary concern of the merchants. I believe it'a well known that more viruses are expected to jump from animals to humans. It's just a matter of time/luck. Simply put, failing to regulate wet markets does not equal to developing and releasing a deadly virus.

You may not be able to replace the people at the top, but if a city in China is failing to to take active steps to contain an outbreak, you can bet that those local leaders will be replaced by the CCP.

Animal to human transmission is understandable though and forgivable as it happens all the time.

Human error would generate blame though and cost China tons of political capital with countries eager to calculate just how much damage this mistake cost them.

I would guess it benefits the US too since they had been providing business to the Wuhan lab and failed to vet them effectively. Here is a fun conspiracy theory: what if the US put high risk projects in China hoping that they could obfuscate blame from themselves in case it caused a public health crisis?

It's actually a serious path of investigation that took place last year. And documents actually show some US institution financing at least one lab in China. The motive wasn't to obfuscate blame but more likely to practice the research on a territory having less stringent regulation on this field.

>I'm not Chinese, but I'd imagine that a country's image is more harmed by accusations of having backwards cultural and food habits (and insufficient government regulation of dangerous markets)

Yeah, there could never be a virus transmitted between Westerners and their food. Some kind of "swine flu" is a ridiculous notion.

In all likelihood, the local government conveniently blamed the wet market while the propaganda machine at the national level started blaming Americans visiting Wuhan for a military comp. I seriously doubt bats from faraway caves were being sold in a wet market in Wuhan. I personally haven't seen anything as disgusting as a bat being sold in a wet market, but I suppose the possibility is nonzero.

As I understand, bats are believed to be the reservoir for SARS-CoV, but the virus was spread to humans via an intermediate host. It would be the same with SARS-CoV-2, with an intermediate host acting as an amplifier.

In a democratic country the "ruling party" and "love towards their country" can be independent. But in an authoritarian country this feeling is supressed.

A charitable interpretation would read the statement as "further speculative debate". Indeed, several of the lab leak arguments mentioned in that very article were subsequently disproven months later, and their unqualified and categorical assertions were arguably no less unprofessional (indeed, perhaps more unprofessional) than other scientists simply exclaiming, "Ssshhhhhh".

We can't know the precise motivations behind those who suggested Sir Jermey pipe down, but indeed that's the problem with such speculative discourse. When speaking with a public voice--which can arguably include private communications to political leadership--there's nothing per se untoward, IMHO, with demanding that professionals speak carefully.

It's a fine line, but I don't see anything damning in these e-mail disclosures even though I'll readily admit that many people, including professionals (scientists, journalists, etc), prematurely dismissed the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak.

Collins hasn't done anything except management and policy for the last 30 years. The closest he's gotten to science is writing books I'd put in the autobiography or philosophy section and tag it "theistic evolution".

At least as of 2011: "Collins remains actively involved in research, studying the molecular genetics of diseases including cancer and adult-onset diabetes. His group also is developing animal models of genetic disorders to test potential therapeutic approaches." [0]

[0] Kresge N, Simoni RD, Hill RL. The Molecular Genetics of Cystic Fibrosis: The Work of Francis Collins. J Biol Chem. 2011 Aug 12;286(32):e8–9. doi: 10.1074/jbc.O111.000248. PMCID: PMC3151108

Yes, that is the management part of his job. He runs a research group and probably has to spend much of his time looking for funding for that group while lightly supervising the actual science it is doing.

That’s what most senior scientists do. It doesn’t condone violating the norms of science, though.

> warned it could damage “international harmony”.

"international harmony" is just a front for hiding self-interest. Many elites, including the said virologists and bureaucrats, have significant financial or other ties with China. That's why any discussion of China and pandemics is very quickly buried with bullying and force [1].

[1]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FI3V-gdWQAkWyJS?format=jpg&name=...

This is the behavior of a priesthood.

"Science" is a big-money industry with motivated sponsors, government influence, and strict gatekeeping.

When the quote says "further debate would do unnecessary harm to science," it's talking about this, the big S Science industry.

The scientific method is a way to verify truths by testing hypotheses. The Science industry will kick you out if you uncover inconvenient truths or even test the wrong hypotheses.

> The entire foundation of science is based upon empirical observation and asking hypothetical questions

True, but it’s possible to ask questions that sway public opinion. Look at all the “studies” tobacco companies paid for. Or the racist scientific theories that attempted to justify slavery.

If you’re asking questions about a lab leak out of genuine scientific interest, that’s perfectly legitimate.

But if you’re asking out of a desire to win political points, stir up tensions, etc., that’s destructive.

There are plenty of actors on both sides, using the same tool of scientific inquiry for good and for ill.

Your examples don't match the point you were making. The bent studies from tobacco companies were falsifying answers, not just asking questions, and the racist theories were operating on a hazy pseudoscientific level that can't even be called "falsification," but were also, by another means, giving false answers.

There may have been a time in history when asking questions alone has been used maliciously, but it's neither of those.

They’re the end result of asking biased questions then manipulating answers to fit those biased questions. My point is that if you ask biased questions it won’t be long until someone provides biased answers.

You need to ask unbiased questions to get unbiased answers.

"Does tobacco smoking cause cancer," isn't a biased question... What's biased is answering it with a "no."

Right but when asked by biased people, with biased intent, it solicits biased answers. It looks innocent on the surface but it’s anything but.

If it's the people and their intent then I think we're agreeing that it's not the questions themselves, but the ways they can be biased-ly answered.

You're simplifying too much. The tobacco company example illustrates very well how you can distract and lead astray by asking biased questions. Leading (smoking) statisticians like Fisher continued to point out there may be confounding causes. He did not falsify data. Even a spurious discussion about a "smoking gene" was created. Asking questions may seem innocent but it can be done strategically and can hinder drawing the right conclusions. Eventually the scientific method would correct those views, but it took more than 40 years even though the statistical data was available from the start.

Judea Pearl dedicates a whole chapter (Ch. 5) of his The Book of Why to this example.

If China screwed up and didn’t follow proper first world standards for their research and directly caused 2 years of hell for the rest of the world then they deserved everything that would have come their way. To hell with the future of science in China, some fuck ups are too big to sweep under the rug. Sometimes you need destructive anger. Sometimes you need raw political backlash.

It’s really bizarre to me that western scientists would feel more obligated to defend the future of scientific progress in a foreign communist country (especially one that’s currently engaging in an ethnic cleansing not seen since WWII) over their obligation to their own country and more importantly, than their obligation to the truth. These people have taken scientific and technological progress as their god and it’s impossible to understand their actions if you haven’t.

It's not really bizarre. Money talks.

And nothing brings in the money like political clickbait.

There always will be someone trying to win political points from scientific questions asked by others. It's not a reason not to ask.

Motivation might go to bias. But, ultimately, if the science is good, the motivation should be irrelevant. Science and exploration, regardless of what motivates it has value.

> If you’re asking questions about a lab leak out of genuine scientific interest, that’s perfectly legitimate.

> But if you’re asking out of a desire to win political points, stir up tensions, etc., that’s destructive.

The trouble is that it's often both.

Suppose proof of a lab leak is bad for party A and good for party B. If no investigation takes place, people will assume it didn't happen. If we don't actually know the answer then party A is politically motivated to refuse to investigate and party B is politically motivated to demand an answer to the question better than "we don't know because we didn't look."

There may not be any party C who is completely disinterested and unbiased. You either investigate it or you don't. And either choice is politically charged.

Check out Peter Daszak twitter profile for an example for the abuse you will get if you speak out against the lab leak hypothesis:

https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak

Quite understandable if you would not want to participate in that.

Somewhat telling that you need a "throwaway" to point that out...

JudasGoat was already taken ...

But seriously. It is easy to be labelled "CCP-shill" or "useful idiot" if you question the lab leak theory.

And what is even crazier is that the lab leak-proponents are convinced that they are being censored. Even though they are completely dominating here (and elsewhere) in the hn comments, commenting on a pro-lab leak theory article from a major UK newspaper.

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram deleted millions of posts for simply discussing the mere possibility of a lab leak.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-...

That's not conspiracy, that's fact; and it's weird no one called you out on it.

I don't know to what extent the China Daily News, apparently a Chinese communist propaganda outlet[0], can be considered a reliable source in 2004, but back in the day the folks in Bejing seemed to be a bit peeved about their lab minions with regards to the first SARS epidemic.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040703130948/https://www.chinad...

And it weren't just the Chinese with a rather sloppy lab security, it seems.

https://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/CDS_CSR_ARO_2...

Better times back then.

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

Stumbled upon this thread on a related post here on hn and had to come to the conclusion that apparently news outlets are currently picking up some out of context details that seem to have long be debunked:

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

Does anybody have further reading on this subject?

Can someone explain why the furin cleavage site is unusual from a natural evolutionary view?

If a feature would make the virus very unsuccessful in bats, then how did it propagate? There had to be another cross-over species or something but no one has any data to suggest what that is. China has apparently made it impossible to do the work of piecing that together, so the lab leak hypothesis may never be put to bed. Maybe the party leadership believes a lab leak is likely even if they have no specific knowledge of it.

To add to my original question, is the furin cleavage site further adapted in the Omicron variant, explaining its increased infectiousness? If so, what is the difference between that and the Delta variant?

The Omicron variant is actual prior to Delta variant and prior to all other variants even so named Alpha variant. This article indicates why Omicron could be yet another lab leak. https://bprice.substack.com/p/lab-leak-20

EcoHealth Alliance, the main US funders of the Wuhan lab have been awfully shy about letting anyone see their data. There's a good chance proof is there and the data can legally forced out of them.

RootClaim discusses that claim and its perceived relevance [here](https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV... ).

Hmm, that's a nifty site, reminiscent in some ways of Metaculus but with an actual methodology behind it rather than just prediction aggregation. Very nice UI/UX as well. I'm surprised I've never heard of it.

Yeah, just saw it linked [in this comment](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29902330 ).

Currently, it seems most helpful in aggregating some of the arguments folks put forth in examining claims, including describing the basic issues and linking some references. Plus it seems to offer some insight into what folks are thinking.

Then from an academic perspective, I really like the sort of approach that they're trying to use. A well-developed implementation of that general approach would seem like it could be awesome.

That said, dunno if I find their current methodology or numbers too convincing, as far as actual conclusions go.

it kind of doesn't matter why it is, it just is (the why might also be unknowable, or too facilely reducible to just-so stories). And it's actually not TOTALLY unusual in coronaviruses, it's unusual in the coronavirus subfamily that COVID-19 comes from.

There is this very hilarious paper where they talk about this, but also rejigger the phylogenetic trees without describing how they pick what to put in and hide from the trees, e.g. they overload "trivially similar" sequences that happen to have furin cleavage sites, and then there are diagrams where they omit entire huge families of coronaviruses that don't contain the furin cleavage site to "lie to you with pictures" that the furin cleavage site is more common than it actually is.

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

It isn't unusual at all.

Many coronaviruses including MERS have a furin cleavage site and they're common and likely evolved independently multiple times, showing that this acquisition of an FCS is common:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...

The FCS in SARS-CoV-2 is NSPRRAR, we now know of sarbecoviruses like like the BANAL viruses in Laos which have NSPAAR, some other viruses like RmYN02 have NSPAAR or NSPVAR. If you insert an R into the BANAL spike protein you get the SARS-CoV-2 FCS.

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

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.428212v1

Finding bat sarbecoviruses which are one insertion away from having the original FCS really blows a gaping hole in this whole idea that the FCS is some kind of smoking gun.

Delta has P681R and Omicron has P681H mutations in the FCS region which may be behind why they're more infectious/transmissible. So the FCS is also still evolving and adapting to humans.

You're answering why furin cleavage sites in general are not unusual. Not why this particular furin cleavage site is unusual from a natural evolutionary view.

It's if you line up the related bat coronaviruses sequences they are all much the same in that region apart from Sars-Cov-2 which seems to have a clean insert of a PRRA sequence.

Hence the "bothered by the furin site and has a hard time (to) explain that as an event outside the lab, though there are possible ways in nature but highly unlikely." in the article. If it had got there through evolution you'd expect the adjacent sequences to vary more.

This kind of thing https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image...

Here is that kind of thing: https://ibb.co/T1YtShy

That is from:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7211627/#mmc1

Specifically the lower bit of figure 2:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7211627/figure/...

If RmYN02 picks up the QTQT sequence from recombination with other bat coronaviruses (or RmYN02 is a deletion away from a common progenitor we haven't found yet -- and the QTQT deletion is seen in SARS-CoV-2 variants in humans) then it is one insertion away from PRAAR which would be an active FCS, which is then one substitution away from the PRRAR SARS-CoV-2.

> Given that furin cleavage signals are present in other coronaviruses at exactly that point in the S1/S2 boundary region, it only LOOKS unusual, especially against the backdrop of SARS. The preponderance of evidence, coupled with Ockham’s razor (that the simplest explanation is preferred) dictates that the PRRA sequence has been conserved in nCoV2019 from a long ago ancestor virus. It is not of suspicious origin. The closest bat virus sequence is really not close at all.

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

Here's Bob Garry, featured in the article: https://mobile.twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1480930691919...

Some believe that Omicron (yes, the mutation) may be a leak from a lab that was doing research on the original version of Covid.

https://bprice.substack.com/p/lab-leak-20

It's an interesting read. Author puts forward a few arguments for why this may be the case (more research needed, of course, but pretty compelling in my view).

You know this effect, when you've been reading the news for years, and finally your favorite source has a story about something you studied or worked on, and you realize how low quality or outright wrong it is? The spell is broken and you realize how little they know about anything they write.

Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for anything at all they decide to?

These people have done a huge disservice to society - and the harm in increase of conspiracy theorists is likely helped by their contribution in hiding this information.

Yeah, the line in there about how "debate on such accusations will cause the voices of conspiracy to dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.", to paraphrase, almost made me laugh out loud.

Do they really not see the glaring irony there? They are creating the voices of conspiracy all on their own by hiding that information. They are the ones doing harm to science and international harmony.

Getting into crypto around 2012 dramatically highlighted this for me.

Many in here still regurgitate the same talking points I saw published then.

Could you list a few of those, please?

It even correlates with the price.

https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/

If you would remove the dates and the prices, I would not be able to tell the age of most of these headlines.

What an awful graph. Should be a logarithmic Y axis anchored at zero

It is if you zoom out completely

Ah, "rumors of my deaths were greatly exaggerated".

My opinion is something like:

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies will not die, but long term the current ones will become fringe techs except for some of their aspects which will be merged into the mainstream. It's too early to know which aspects will remain and which will go away. Plus at this point we cannot evaluate the beneficial/negative aspect of cryptocurrencies as a whole, but the general impression leans towards negative (a ton of negative externalities and 99% of the time used for raw speculation and we could have used those resources for things more beneficial to humankind).

I think the discussion over crypto is, like many other discussions currently, broken. Two groups of people arguing their side, not realising they are both wrong (and both right).

Good for you on getting in early. Crypto, as a concept, is extremely neat. It is a libertarians dream. It is an interesting movement, in this time of centralisation and consolidation of power.

Crypto, as a tool however, is a solution looking for a problem. A problem that most people do not have. The only reason that crypto is currently huge, is because it (currently) is a Make Money Fast scheme. Should crypto ever become a mainstream way of performing transactions, it will still have to abide by the rule of law, or risk becoming illegal.

If Bitcoin could develop and improve, all the while without being a ponzi-scheme, it would be great. And who knows, if POS ever worked out and we manage to transition the whole ecosystem, it may find some usecases in smaller applications. But as it is, POW is generating the CO2 of a large country, providing money to the wrong people (and I'm not talking about you), and preparing financial crash.

If you're sitting on a pile of bitcoins since 2012, I understand your point of view. But I'm not convinced it's a net benefit to us all.

Yep. I'm a case in point. At the beginning of this thing i went along with the mainstream narrative like a good sheeple. Now that i've watched how a narrative can go from 'your a crazy person to believe there COULD have been a lab leak' to 'yahhh it was probably a lab leak the whole time'...my faith has probably been permenantly destroyed in main-stream sources of information. Which sucks because idealy i just want to focus on what i'm good at and let others do what they are good at. But now its been shown that the people who are supposed to take care of gathering the facts and presenting them to the public have agendas and will lie if they see it fit. Not sure how any semblance of democracy survives with people like this in charge.

The nail in the coffin for me was when they would make articles about “700 people fired from X company for not getting vaccine.” When that company has like 85k people (which they don’t mention in the article and you have to look up yourself, of course), and it’s like “so less than 1% of the employees refused the vaccine?”

Even when they tell the technical truth, it’s so full of deception to sell ads I just can’t.

At least for me, in this instance I don't see why the percentage is of more relevancy than the total amount.

Yes, it's only 1% of a company, which is not a lot. But 700 people being fired is quite a lot, if we consider that this affects more than these 700 people. I'm sure a lot of these 700 people have a family at home.

In your example I don't really see why that is proof that they use the total amount for ad-driven clickbait. There are more than enough better examples for this, I think.

I assume you're talking about the Mayo clinic firing 700 people for not getting the vaccine(given it was exactly 700 people and it was 6 days ago).

I opened the first 15 results on Google and every single one mentions the number of people as proportion of the overall company size. The vast majority are in paragraph 1 or 2.

Could you link to the article (hopefully from a reputable source) that doesn't mention the company size?

They can’t because the articles all mentioned how few people refused. I don’t know what it is about this shit that drives people to become absolute morons.

And some of those employers are health institutions. And those institutions now have a worker shortage. And rather than bringing back those workers, many who have natural immunity from having had Covid, which can be proven by a lab test, instead they are telling people with active Covid that they can just come back earlier from quarantine.

So was the quarantine window wrong all along? Or is it changing now because we really need workers?

The real soon here is a complete erosion of trust in institutions. I think many folks greatly underestimate the extent of the harm caused by this loss of trust.

Honestly, good. I’m glad you (and others) realized this. With an open mind read about the history of the US during the age of 3 letter agencies (https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que...) (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jakarta_Method) I could go on and on with historical accounting books that are just accepted as fact… and try to square the circle that those kinds of things have stopped and the people in charge have your best interest at heart, and act in good faith.

But you're incorrect? The lab leak theory is still widely considered to be an unlikely possibility.

There is a vast difference between responding to someone by saying it's unlikely and responding to someone by calling them a Republican/racist/Nazi, which is how several of my questions about the origins of Covid-19 with regards to its seemingly unique and varied symptoms were responded to during the first year of the pandemic.

Sure. I am sorry to hear you have been insulted - my comment is not to be interpreted as a justification of rude online behavior.

By the way, what do you think of the tone of the other reply to my comment? (Did you perhaps see the now-deleted curse word at the end?)

> your a crazy person to believe there COULD have been a lab leak

I'm not really bothered about the true origin of the virus, except inasmuchas scientists lying about their true beliefs is incredibly damaging to public confidence, and energises conspiranoids. Lying about the benefits of mask-wearing was bloody stupid.

I no longer pay attention to statistics about infection rates and fatality rates. They are presented in the press without context (e.g. "It's a Monday, so results are skewed because some clinics report numbers for the whole weekend"). We get numbers with spurious precision. How can they know it's 251 cases, and not 249? Where are the error-bars?

It's really annoying; if you want to understand what's happening, you really do have to "do your own research". I feel ashamed to have just typed that, because that's a phrase mainly used by antivaxxers and QAnon conspiraloons, people who generally don't have the critical-thinking capacity to distinguish their left hand from their right, let alone evaluate research.

All of the lying and "nudging" and viewpoint policing is what made the "conspiraloons" so big (great word BTW). It was quite clear by March or April 2020 that a lot of lying was going on (wether "for the greater good" or some more nefarious reason) and also clear that everyone in media, politics, and science that should have been asking questions was instead giving a doe eyed acquiesce that the emperor was in fact wearing beautiful clothes.

> great word BTW

Thanks, but not mine. At one time I used to read Indymedia, an open-posting forum. There were a lot of pretty conspiraloonatic posts, often about 9/11 and "chemtrails". This was the early noughties. The word's been around a long time.

you might be interested in this ... https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/01/mainstream-media-has-...

I've kind of switched from my main source of info being mainstream media to it being following individuals, experts and other on twitter. Advantages:

- As individuals you kind of know what they know what their biases are

- You can follow all sides of the debates

- It's quicker by about 12 hours than the newspapers

You get to see the biases in the news when it breaks on twitter first and then you get the editorialised dumbed down version written up by journalists a few hours after. Obviously you have to be a bit selective about who you follow.

You've studied and worked on viruses?

"Trust the science" hasn't made people more rational, it has made "science" more dogmatic. I wonder what governments and the media will latch onto once they have eroded the trust in science, because there aren't many other trustworthy institutions left.

I agree, but I still consider it a step up to what we had before. There's always been institutions whom people are told to trust. For a thousand years it was the church. I think for most people to trust credentialed scientists from government institutions is a vast step up, even if they have sorely disappointed during this pandemic.

You mean the people who told us not to wear masks? I trust science, but that doesn't mean I trust every scientist.

If you really trusted science, you would trust that information and knowledge is dynamic and they don’t always have the right answer at the beginning, just an answer that gets changed over time as more knowledge pours in.

I’m guessing you prefer your scientists to be absolutely right at the beginning right?

Anthony Fauci has explicitly admitted on camera that the reason "masks don't work" was promoted to the public initially was to conserve PPE for the highest-risk health workers [0]. It was NOT a case of the science changing:

> So, why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?

> "Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."

[0] https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...

But they explicitly told us that at the time: “don’t rush out and buy masks, we don’t have enough for healthcare workers as it is, you don’t need them more than they do.”

The right just took some sound bites and excerpted the rest of the discussion to “prove” that Fauci was lying, while everyone else was rolling their eyes, and still are.

People hear the things that support the story they want to believe, and then ignore everything else that doesn’t support their preferred narrative. You don’t need a PhD in psych to realize that.

that's not how i remember it.

I think you are being a tad too generous here. That wasn't the explicit messaging. Public health officials and experts did in fact lie and palter in that case. Part of the messaging was explicitly "masks are not effective in preventing general public from catching COIVD" [1] You could reasonably see it as a "noble lie", however.

The whole thing is also complicated by the fact that science on surgical masks etc. wasn't (and isn't) that clear. During the 2009 H1N1 flu, CDC also recommended against face masks for ordinary people. See this SSC article for more on that. [2]

[1] e.g. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-cdc-says-americans-don...

[2]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t... (Scott, like you, is also sometimes a bit too generous :-))

Well technically, that's correct. Most masks that are typically worn are not very effective at preventing the wearer from catching Covid. They are effective at reducing forward transmission. The exception is proper sealed n95 or other filtering mask, and those require training to use properly, as well as being in short supply.

The problem often is that some people assume that scientists are priests in a religion called science.

That's a humbling point. Thank you.

Don't trust the people that report the science though.

The gutter press has to sensationalise stories to sell the newspapers and get viewers. It's a race to the bottom. A quarter not vaccinated!!! vs 75% vaccinated so far. Guess which one they run with? Let's not forget cherry-picking the science too, and that the media is a massive echo chamber.

There's no problem with science, but like any other industry, it has its own language, which isn't accessible to the average person, so someone has to simplify it. Journalists should not be that 'someone'.

When politics is mixed with any other field, that field generally becomes a subfield of politics - not the other way round.

Much like mixing garbage into food. You get garbage, not food.

TBH, I think "Trust the science" is often used as a euphemism for "Trust authority", which isn't always good advice.

Also, the science itself doesn't really work as advertised. There is this book titled "Betrayers of Truth" [1] which I reluctantly recommend on that. The authors are sometimes a bit too harsh (e.g. about Millikan), but I think they have a point overall.

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

"Trust the science" I think has been corrupted a bit in an Orwellian way by the likes of

>Dr. Fauci On GOP Criticism: ‘Attacks On Me, Quite Frankly, Are Attacks On Science’

whereas I'm more into

Feynman: The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific 'truth'.

War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Fauci Is Science.

Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13624175

it's great to have a name for this.

Except that according to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect the spell is never broken for most people. They turn the page and resume reading as if the source was still trust worthy.

I'd argue that for most people that's still the case.

It's easy to pontificate for a few hours, days, weeks even, and much harder many years and decades down the line for someone else to objectively evaluate the way you access media and say: "J decided to give up on X media after discovering the 'spell' and even decades later they stuck to their decision".

My money's on most people giving up these "major" decisions due to practical reasons or sheer boredom, somewhere down the line.

You could say that we almost want or need the lies.

The rest think they can winnow grains from chaff due to:

Dunning-Kruger effect, in psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general.

https://www.britannica.com/science/Dunning-Kruger-effect

Government officials are not one homogenous group, and neither are scientists.

Please remember that most people who belong to one of those groups truly want to get to truth and improve our knowledge and lives.

It's much more reasonable to think most government officials and scientists don't care one way or the other. Some outliers in both groups are malicious, some outliers are benign.

If I'm to extrapolate my personal experience I'd say that most only care to look like that. All my respect to the real ones.

In this case they unfortunately did act as a completely homogenous group.

Epidemiology at least had the Great Barrington Declaration, it had Anders Tegnell. There were a tiny minority who spoke up. Where was the equivalent group for virology? The fact that these guys were lying and lying as a group had to be figured out by deep investigation and lawsuits by outsiders.

> Please remember that most people who belong to one of those groups truly want to get to truth and improve our knowledge and lives.

I no longer believe this.

I think this view is overly negative. First of all, consider the timing of this all; this was super early days. People, including many experts, had much less facts then, and the topic was sensitive. I think it's perfectly reasonable and even necessary that ill-founded but hard-to-disprove theories such as the lab leak theory at the time are examined critically, but to do so requires a healthy debate - in particular, a debate in which people constructively interpret what other's say, and don't take it out of context. The back and forth helps focus attention on all the various factors and indirect or partially trusted evidence.

But that means people must be able to propose ill-founded hypotheses. They'll be proposing tons of them as they try to separate fact from fiction!

In an idealized world you might do this in the open. Unfortunately, media outlets and social media including hacker news will take things out of context, as both the telegraph and this very discussion is doing right now. That's simply not a valid interpretation of the participants opinions and their confidence in them. Selectively quoting "experts" while they're still forming their interpretation of the data is misleading, because it removed the whole point of expertise; the reason you trust such expert opinion is because it is informed, and the social contract here is that experts should refrain from misusing their authority when they're not sure of their conclusions. And most generally do that to maintain their reputation.

So what to make of this? I think this could simply be part of a normal healthy debate; one that never saw the light of day simply because (a) evidence was lacking, and alternative explanations (e.g. of that furin cleavage site) emerged, and (b) given the lack of evidence and the unfortunate impossibility to express a nuanced opinion and have it be interpreted by the public correctly due to the charged atmosphere at the time, many chose simply not to speak.

That's not to say there aren't a few people that probably acted in bad faith, but the vast majority looks perfectly reasonable to me. And if we want to avoid this in the future, we need to have an atmosphere where nuance is expressible; otherwise you simply can't expect people to open up about potentially explosive hypotheses that they themselves don't even really support but cannot rule out; the damage to their reputation and to society would be too large.

I am sorry but the buck stops when instead of letting science, data and on-going process be determined by what politicians might say. Yeah it’s tough, but the only right thing to do and what everyone deserves. The cards need to be on the table at some point and publicly scrutinizable.

We had people banned from the discussion for suggesting ideas that run counter the official story. This isn't reasonable anymore, this is a propaganda instrument and not something that was nuanced at all.

The mistakes that were made need correction. Don't advertise diversity, live up to it.

I was banned from the biggest national (Norway) Facebook discussion group on the pandemic for posting a comment reasoning about mask usage and whether the official guidelines might be factually incorrect. That's far into propaganda and censorship territory.

That's not fair. But excesses like that are related to the same underlying problem, which is lack of nuance, trust, and honesty in public debate.

Additionally, I think you should consider the fact that facebook simply is not a great venue for discussing such things. They cannot tell fraud from fact, don't have a process for doing so, and instead have social dynamics that encourage irrational conspiracies. What exactly should have been done? I get that they certainly ban the wrong things at time, but the real problem here is the platform, which kind of makes it inevitable that either that happens, or that misinformation spreads like wildfire.

But really: the moment to allow a public discussion like that to come to it's own (unguided) conclusions is not in the initial chaos of uncertainty. The consequences of uninformed, unmoderated speculation running wild are still visible everywhere. On the one hand, mostly everybody accepts that healthy debate is a useful social tool, but on the other hand the current zeitgeist is one in which we've not socially learned to distinguish between the right to shout whatever we feel is truthy from the wisdom of relying on that to form public opinion.

Clearly, mistakes were made - but we need to consider the alternative to partially incorrect guidance by experts, which is sometimes extremely dangerous widely and deeply held beliefs formed by social media echo chambers.

Hopefully future generations will have better habits when it comes to dealing with this kind of information overload, and a greater ability to put one's own suspicions in perspective relative to experts, but that's clearly not an easy task. We don't know who to trust, why to trust them; we do our own research, but poorly and with terribly limited resources; we trust others that appear to be like us without having a way to really judge how great their interpretations are nor to recognize which are flawed, and all this is spiced up by the fact that some of these beliefs about facts blur into deeply held moral axioms - which we as a society don't universally share, leading to easily exploitable deep divisions.

...so, while it's deeply unfortunate that your potentially valid observations were silenced, I'm not sure I really believe the alternative would have been better, on facebook.

I agree that there's merit to some of your points. But at the same time, some of this borders on the tautological when it comes to the challenges of our time.

On a personal level, I find this story to be more of a funny (tragic?) anecdote than a degrading violation of rights. What does it say about the direction our society is headed? Facebook is the only public forum where I (or any of most people) could have significant reach in this discussion.

Letter to the editor? Couldn't have gotten it published at the time. My Slack groups of highly-educated, economically powerful friends and acquaintances? Sure, and through those channels we all had access to much better curated information than any official channel. Friends and family? You bet. Local Reddit groups? Sure, all of the 30 people who read it.

This isn't only an issue regarding times of crisis. Access to precise information in matters big and small is increasingly filtered through similar mechanisms. Economic decisions, career advice, knowledge of how to best position oneself in the world and so on. All trends channel these advantages to a smaller and smaller elite that is capable of making sense of the world, where finding the useful truths in a sea of uncertain signals is increasingly difficult.

I'm not really suggesting a solution, rather pointing out that this is an insidious challenge with great potential to cause strife if we can't figure out a way to properly democratize it. It works well if you're really smart or well-connected. Not so much otherwise.

Agree that banning individuals from expressing ideas (more like completely plausible theories) has done great harm.

> this is a propaganda instrument

What exactly is this "propaganda instrument"? Just trying to latch on to what you're trying to suggest.

There might have been lies, distortions of the truth, misunderstandings, assumptions, ignorance, but "propaganda" implies some kind of motive and objective by a particular actor or set of actors.

With perhaps the exception of parties responsible hiding any remnants of the truth in order to avoid blame (aka a cover up), what was the motive/objective and by whom?

For me, the purpose of the lab in China and the possibility of a contagion leak makes complete sense with no conspiracy theories needed. Even the Chinese Government/CCPs response makes sense (not defending it, just obvious based on their track record).

I can imagine multiple ways in which the resulting pandemic could be used as an instrument to cause and inflict political harm in order benefit rivals or perhaps entire states and regimes. But the only way I can describe what has actually resulted is an all out frenzy and turmoil.

> but "propaganda" implies some kind of motive and objective by a particular actor or set of actors.

Speculation about motives is difficult, my most prominent idea is that a subset of scientists agreed it was better to craft a noble lie than to be transparent with their ideas. Repeating a lie often enough so that people believe it to be true is a law of propaganda.

> lies, distortions of the truth, misunderstandings, assumptions, ignorance

I don't see how a "distortion of the truth" has less requirements for a motive than propaganda. What do you believe was the motivation to distort the truth? If you have an idea I would gladly entertain it. I don't think "misunderstanding" fits the case where people were targeted for dissenting views.

> a contagion leak makes complete sense with no conspiracy theories needed

Yes indeed, this would not have needed any conspiracies at all, but we got one for political reasons as the "official" message was crafted to deny the possibility of a leak outright by a subset of the scientific community. For personal gratification or just to calm the public or any other reason is of secondary importance here. The fact remains that there were attempts to suppress such views.

> the resulting pandemic could be used as an instrument to cause and inflict political harm in order benefit rivals or perhaps entire states and regimes.

The problem is the lack of transparency and intentional lies, this is off topic.

If it was an accident, there must be consequences for research like this. Maybe it has to be disallowed, perhaps more security is needed. I can see how such measures might run counter to the interest of the group that came up with the idea to neglect that possibility. Just to make it very clear, that is speculation about a motive and is not substantiated. Substantiated was the lack of truthful information.

>I think this view is overly negative. First of all, consider the timing of this all; this was super early days. People, including many experts, had much less facts then, and the topic was sensitive.

I think you're missing that the lack of access to facts was a willful manipulation of the geography the "debate" took place on, which shows just what an effective strategy it was.

> I think it's perfectly reasonable and even necessary that ill-founded but hard-to-disprove theories such as the lab leak theory at the time are examined critically,

There's nothing ill-founded, it was then and is now the most reasonable and plausible explanation for the outbreak. You can do the same back of the envelope calculation today that I did 2 years ago, and nothing has made it less valid:

1. There's 100 cities in PRC with >1 million inhabitants.

2. There's one (1) lab in PRC doing work on bat viruses.

The probability that the outbreak happened in the same city as the one with the lab by pure coincidnce is therefore about 1%.

That's not a proof, that's not a definite argument, that's just evaluating how plausible the hypothesis is. You can tweak the values to be more charitable if you want, say note that Wuhan is a large city and we shouldn't count smaller ones, or point out that there might be a few mor labs doing the same kind of work but with less prominence. That merely lowers the lab leak's plausibility to 50%. I.e very plausible.

To get the 1% figure you have to include an unstated assumption, which is that a novel virus is just as likely to emerge from this lab as from all top 100 cities put together.

If we try to make a rough calculation from an unknowledgeable starting position, it might be more reasonable to say "just as likely to come from each 1M+ city as to come from each lab [of which there is one]". Then, if we didn't know the geographic origin, the lab probability is ~1% ( = 1/(100 cities + 1 lab)), but knowing the geographic start point you'd get 50%

P(this lab given Wuhan) = P(Wuhan given this lab) * P(lab) / P(Wuhan)

P(this lab given Wuhan) = 1 [this lab is in Wuhan!] * (1/101) / (2/101)

Fact is, there's nothing that points to Wuhan as being a more likely source of viruses in the first place. It's not a tropical rainforest area, for instance. And indeed, the closest wild relatives we know of have been found much farther south.

I agree? In the above I'm assuming equal likelihood between each lab and each city, rather than equally likely to have come from any lab vs any city. The second is a poor starting point as it suggests having two, 100, or 1M labs would mean no increased chance of coming from a lab vs 1 lab. That's why I suggest the first.

That's one aspect to consider, sure. But with all due respect - people have publically tried to analyze this question from all kinds of angles, and there are lots and lots of equally valid extremely indirect bits of evidence, and people that have looked at this with a lot more time than me and (I'm guessing here) you to invest in the question, and they haven't been able to really conclude on this matter either way.

But when you take specific bits of evidence out of the great soup surrounding this and highlight them, it's really easy to draw the wrong conclusions, or to get the feeling that this bit of evidence simply due to familiarity is more trustworthy than some other evidence. And we also have biases towards evidence we understand, which kind of makes sense, but is also a problem, as non-experts...

Related to "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect", though I guess in this case the amnesia is replaced by a red-pill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

> Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for anything at all they decide to?

For me it was the masks. The masks were my tipping point.

At some point at the beginning of the pandemic they said that the disease was totally not airborne and that masks were useless. I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that) very serious in TV explaining to all the citizens of the republic that we should not buy nor wear masks. That we should clean our doorknobs and vegetables, wash our hands, and avoid touching our face. If we did that we would be safe, no need of masks.

Just two weeks later, he appeared again on TV announcing that wearing masks was now mandatory. That it was the most important thing to do. Without any correction on the previous statement. Without any explanation of whether the previous statement was wrong due to ignorance or intentionally (to save masks for health personnel). Not only he was a liar "for our own good", he acted as if people hadn't even a two-week memory! An utmost lack of respect.

I found it extremely offensive that a democratically elected president treats the citizens who elected him as little children, and not as adults. I don't believe any of the stupid conspiracy theories, but I have more sympathy for the conspiracists that follow these theories (I am compassionate to them) than for the evil lying politicians.

Even before the masks, they were presenting "case fatility rates" as "infection fatility rates" (by just calling them "death rate", which everyone understands as risk of death when infected), when there was hardly any test. Of course if you only test people who show up at the ICU, you will get a very high death rate. That was obvious from the outset and I think deliberate disinformation as a scare tactic.

It is not before June that they started admitting that the IFR was way below 1%, when the first serology studies started showing up (though I came to believe that this number is meaningless, you need to look at IFR by age).

Sam Harris invited Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease MD from John Hopkins in early April 2020, and his estimate at that time was around 0.5%. So it's not like the information wasn't there.

Well yes the information was there, I remember clearly that back then, we had the "perfect" measurement (for such an early study that is): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_P...

14 people out of 2666 died, hence 0.5% death rate (because I don't agree with the estimate that only 700 individuals got it, I saw no good reason not to consider everyone got it, but even without that, it'd give low 2%)

A retrospective on who said what on the matter of death rates would be extremely interesting to pick the ""good"" medias and the ""bad"" ones

A great number of politicians still don't understand the difference between cases and infections. So you see for instance travel from rich countries in Europe being banned, and rich European countries banning each other, purely because they do enough testing to quantify the number of infections. And when Omicron arrived it was the countries with the highest sequencing capacities that were in the firing line.

I think this is more nuanced.

In the beginning, testing was very sparse and unavailable so it's hard to blame anyone for just looking at the obvious infections. It took a while until we even understood that the majority of cases are asymptomatic and very mild.

The 1% IFR is trueish across all age groups but not so much when you look at specific age groups. You can clearly see it in current German data: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105512/coronavirus-covi...

You might have an asysmptomatic child with a 0.003% IFR and hand them to your grandparents for caretaking, with a quite high chance of putting them into the ICU if infected. So it's not so easy to deal with like a cold.

Also, variants might change the distribution and death isn't the only negative outcome of a COVID infection. It's a systemic disease affecting all organs which will put a strain on the health systems for a long time to come, especially if it becomes endemic and people will just keep reinfecting themselves year after year. It's too shortsighted to just dismiss it as a cold just because cases are often very mild.

> I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that) very serious in TV explaining to all the citizens of the republic that we should not buy nor wear masks.

I don't remember this from Macron, but rather from Véran (Health Minister), but I could be wrong. anyway, at the time this was a more than reasonable request.

Because the very first persons we had to protect were health professionals, and we didn't have enough masks for everyone. (We didn't even have enough for health professionals)

> If we did that we would be safe, no need of masks.

I'll need to check again what he said, because I really don't remember that part, and I remember that the "L’usage du masque en population générale n’est pas utile" made sense to me, precisely because we had to protect health professionals first, which contradicts that part.

> anyway, at the time this was a more than reasonable request. Because the very first persons we had to protect were health professionals, and we didn't have enough masks for everyone.

So that makes it ok for them to lie? I do not agree. And the trust is lost as a result.

They should have explained that we should prioritize masks for health care professionals if that was their reasoning.

I don't see the lie. As I said, I don't remember them ever saying that it was safe without mask. They only said it was not useful.

I would actually say that at the time, it was counter-productive for the general public to wear masks, because it prevented protecting health professionals.

I agree there is a bit of conundrum that "not useful" is not exactly in between "counter-productive" and "useful", and here you could argue that the "not useful" in Véran's mouth meant "doesn't protect". I definitely wouldn't blame you for that, and yes I'm being very nice to them for my interpretation.

The reality is that had they said "yes masks are super important, but it's even more important to give them to health professionals", we'd have seen what we saw with hydroxychloroquine (which is that people who actually needed it couldn't get it), but 10 times worse. Could they have twisted their words 7 times more in their mouth before saying it, so that it's not factually a lie? Yes sure.

This may be unpopular, but I'm actually fine with polititians manipulating the truth in that scenario (_if_ we accept as a starting point that the shortage of masks was already unavoidable, and the best option for public health was to convince the public to minimise purchases). Part of the job of politicians is to act as a rudder for the general public, and if tragedy of the commons applies to a scenario, a politician doing what they can to counteract that effect, even by deceipt, isn't fundamentally wrong (if it's for a genuinely good cause and the situation didn't have a less distasteful solution). If polititians need to tell us that there is no fuel shortage to avoid a rush that worsens the fuel shortage, so be it. It is (and _should_ be) assumed that polititians are manipulating the truth, the only question is whether they're doing it at a level and for a cause that are acceptable.

I am _much_ less comfortable by similar behaviour in scientists. Science is built on trust and a pursuit of truth, lying is anathema. This is true both within scientific debate, and from the outside, when scientists share their perspective it should be a counter balance to the more flexible interpretation of truth provided elsewhere.

Tldr: Polititians can and should play politics (politics _is_ mostly white lies, or just lies, depending on your cynicism level). Scientists should not, it hurts the reputation of science as a whole.

I get your point. But the long term damage doesn’t justify the lie. That’s a race to the bottom.

And what happens when the scientist and politician is in a hybrid role, like Fauci? Folks don’t trust Fauci because credibility, in general, has been harmed. Q conspiracy theorists thrive in a world of distrust. Chronic distrust of politicians is too high a price to pay to justify the use of the occasional manipulation.

Plus it's simply ineffective. Enough people saw through the lies such that all the masks sold out anyway. I reckon an honest approach and appeal to morality would have seen more masks donated to hospitals than simply telling people that they don't work.

That's a fair point, although in this case drawing attention to the shortage would have made it even more newsworthy, and might have made the few greedy profiteers more fervent in their desire to buy up all stock, even as the average person reduced their buying. Appealing to morality works better when each person gets an approximately equal vote. If one arsehole can counteract the good behaviour of 10, that weakens the honest approach.

Whether it would have actually been worse or better I can't really guess, but I do see your point that it might have worked and definitely wouldn't have weakened public trust the way the dishonest approach did, so yeah, I'll concede that was probably a bad call.

Not only distrust of politicians. I'd say the mainstream media have suffered from a similar loss of trust over the last years because most outlets simply repeat official guidance from the WHO or national agencies.

100%. And for me personally, I think the most powerful discrediting tool is juxtaposition of their changing positions.

It’s very common to see “super cuts“ of the media pulling a complete 180 on positions. Those are super compelling to the public, who are generally in alignment in hating hypocrisy.

The error that the experts and politicians made was that they only considered N95 or surgeon's masks and didn't have the insight to realize that any face covering would reduce transmission if everyone was wearing them.

Plenty of people own scarves and handkerchiefs, and for a while people were making their own masks at home. So the initial message could have been that any face covering helps and that N95 masks need to be reserved for healthcare workers and responders.

Yes, certainly would have been a better angle. I suspect bad/limited data played into that, but it does seem like a fairly obvious direction to go in nonetheless.

a politician doing what they can to counteract that effect, even by deceipt, isn't fundamentally wrong

A politician manipulating the public is an attack on democracy, since democracy relies on having an informed demos. Condoning such behaviour shows how much faith a person has in (true) democracy.

I don't have faith in true (aka direct) democracy. It relies on the average person being well informed enough about everything involved in running the government to make good decisions. It also relies on every person in the country acting in good faith for the benefit of all, which at best you could convince _most_ people to do _most_ of the time.

I do have faith in representative democracy to do _approximately_ the right thing most of the time, or at least minimise how bad the bad results will be.

In other words, I think people are better at deciding who to trust to run the country than they are at actually running the country. Given that, it should be no surprise that I also think there will be situations where the person trusted to run the country will realise that telling the public the whole truth will be a bad idea, because they are better at interpretting that truth than the public is.

Lying to the public is not (imo) a slippery slope that inevitably makes anyone who goes down it a monster. Polititians can be something other than perfectly honest and actually satan, and in fact they must be. I think a perfectly honest polititian would be a bad thing overall, even beyond the fact that their career wouldn't last very long.

Where on that scale they should be is in the end in the hands of the public, via our democratic vote. Certainly I don't support constant lies and hiding of things the public needs to know. But that isn't what we're discussing here, we're discussing a single lie used for a good cause (though I admit it was probably not the best solution to the problem, it was at least a logical concept: convince people who need masks less to not panic buy masks, leading to more masks for people who need them more).

> This may be unpopular, but I'm actually fine with polititians manipulating the truth

Sadly, this not unpopular.

As an Asian American, this baffles me a little bit. We knew the virus was airborne since January 2020. It was all over Chinese/Taiwanese/SEA news outlets. I live in New England, Asians here started wearing masks months before others. I remember purposely choosing to go to Asian Supermarkets instead of Stop & Shop for safety back then.

I'm Italian and the events in February and March 2020 made it very clear to me how the anglo press largely just ignores foreign sources. The "debate" about lockdown in the UK mirrored the Italian one almost day by day, with a delay of 3 weeks between here and Italy. Italian sources and discoveries were either ignored or discounted. It was like watching a child "discover" on their own how to start a fire.

If they do that with sources in a relatively easy and popular language, I cannot imagine what they do with complex Asian ones.

Even though I usually like to stay away from political topics on here, but it pains me that a country I (used to) love so much, UK, is spiraling deeper and deeper into a void. So much so I have to believe its leadership no longer acts in favour of the country. For reasons unknown to me, however it is long known Brexit was a wanted scenario for Russian geopolitics, as laid out in their textbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

Thanks for pointing out the book. Terrifying.

One guy writing a book in 1997 that argues France and Germany should be strongly united in a Union, does not imply anything about the decision of British voters in 2016. You're peddling a literal conspiracy theory there.

Well, if said book is the de facto textbook for their foreign policy students, then yes I would say at least the intent was there to influence things the way they occurred. How much did that effectively take place, now that's a conspiracy theory.

Stop blaming the Russians, they can only exploit the rot if it's already there. It reminds me of Germans blaming everything on the Nazis after WW2 conveniently forgetting they voted for them and cheered them on.

I still blame them for exploiting the rot. I wish they could behave like a normal country instead of trying to destabilize most of the world.

I do believe all superpowers are doing that, US has a long history too to back certain leaders/powers etc.

... and if Italy learned the lessons from Asian countries, the initial spike in Italy would not have been so devastating.

I think a more fair take would be that most countries did not take COVID19(in particular, the early variants which were much more dangerous) seriously enough until there was a major source of infections in their country, at which point it was obviously too late.

There are some exceptions(in particular, New Zealand, which is in the Anglo world that you malign), but I think in general it is a true statement.

That's not it, the problem with Italy was in the way they were treating them and the fact that Italy is mostly old people (after government policies drove out young peoples for decades).

Several Italian doctors criticised the Italian guidelines (in particular about giving corticosteroids) but they were silenced.

We also don't know the real numbers of Asian countries, do you trust the numbers given by the CCP?

> do you trust the numbers given by the CCP?

No less, or more than for the USA.

Most Asian countries are not China. The standards of reporting in places like Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore are probably better than the west.

The world tends to respect the anglo press more than the rest, because they work in the world's current lingua franca, they are historically less subject to governmental influence, and effectively report (and affect) the state of the biggest superpower on the planet. In some cases (covid, Judith Miller, etc), it becomes evident that such high respect is often unwarranted. I say this from a place of sadness, not anger. It's not a criticism of anglo countries per se, but of cultural attitudes around certain sectors, inside and outside such countries.

> in particular, New Zealand, which is in the Anglo world that you malign

NZ and Australia largely benefited from their geographical and economic periphery to achieve the level of safety that they did. By the time the virus got there in critical numbers, it had already been taken seriously in the anglosphere as a whole because of the UK debacle. I'm not saying their lockdowns didn't help (they very much did), but it's easier to enforce controls on entrance in far-flung corners of the world rather than around the backbone of the world economy.

The UK has been one of the freest countries in terms of restrictions.

I wasn't happy with the restrictions but they never went as crazy as the rest of Europe. Overall I'm glad we had Boris and not someone from the other side who would have been even more draconian - even if having a real conservative would have been better.

Which countries do you have in mind when you say "rest of Europe"? For example, Switzerland (one country I've been following pretty closely) seems have had less strict restrictions than the UK pretty much throughout the pandemic.

(To be clear, I'm not qualified to say which is a better approach, I'm just curious about your comparison.)

Interesting conclusion given by almost every measure the UK restrictions have been more draconian than the rest of europe.

Same in France, we mirrored Italy with a 10 days delay or so, yet didn't take advantage of that warning. And that's despite YouTubers all over the place warning about that. I literally watched our government ignoring reality.

> the anglo press largely just ignores foreign sources

As I recall, one of the first things that happened in response to the pandemic was loads of our foreign correspondents either not getting sent in the first place, or getting pulled out.

For something like an earthquake or tsunami, there would be reporters on the ground filing in-person reports within days. Somewhat understandably, nobody wanted to send reporters to outbreak hotspots.

It wasn't until further into the pandemic that journalists decided interviewing randos from their living rooms over skype was good enough.

From what I can tell, the UK and US press pushed the argument that the UK and US should've learned from Italy primarily because journalists there hated the current governments and wanted to portray them as uniquely incompetent, which meant they had to spin them as worse than Italy even though that was a trainwreck. The problem is that the information coming out of Italy was utter garbage.

For example, Italy was reporting zero cases when the US and UK weren't, and exponential growth is really slow at the start - you don'tt just go from zero cases to hospital collapse in an instant. The only way this makes sense is if Italy was failing to test people hospitalized with Covid symptoms even more totally and completely than even the US, which had an official policy of not doing so for patients without travel from China yet still managed to pick up unlinked cases at a much earlier stage. Which means the information on how Italy ended up this way was useless and not applicable to other countries, and all the hospitalisation and death rates were worthless too - and remember, no other country in the world had Covid spread from China result in the kind of outbreak that Italy experienced, their major outbreaks all seem to have come from Italy. So other countries had no way of knowing whether to expect something more like Italy's experiences or their own prior experiences and also no way of knowing what if anything could prevent this.

The information on how to treat Covid patients from Italy also seems to have been hot garbage. Like, their information and treatment policies around stuff like intubation and ventilators which every other country based their policies on likely outright killed a bunch of people. On the other hand, the UK found the first effective treatment for patients with Covid that was actually confirmed to substantially reduce their risk of dying - yet somehow, you don't hear the press arguing that other countries whose outbreaks happened after the UK's should've been able to do better because they had the UK to learn from like they do with Italy. What they have been doing is comparing the total number of deaths with other European countries (rather than per-capita figures) to falsely make it look like Covid was more deadly here than everywhere else.

In Spain, up until the 8th of march the government was inviting people to go to women's marchs and saying everything was under control.

A guy in charge of the job safety for national police was demoted because he decided to buy and give masks to policeman.

Media affiliated with the government was actively trying to ridicule everyone, calling people alarmists, fascists or whatever insult they came up with. That includes science divulgators, medical personnel, etc. Pretty ugly.

Then, suddenly, the 9th of March we had a very worrysome situation and yadda yadda.

Not to mention the mask thing.

I mean, how in the hell are you going to trust any of this any more? I know I don't. Now if something else happens you have to be very careful, they may be lying to you, or having a combination of lies and stupidity.

I guess this is what happens when the selection of elites is optimized for marketing purposes.

IMO, this is a problem inherent to electoralism. The types of leaders that are best at winning elections tend not to be very good at actually leading. That is why we need to start gradually moving away from this outmodded version of pseudo-democracy. I believe the future of democracy lies in the combination of of deliberative citizens assemblies (such as those that have been taking place in Ireland) and deliberative, consensus-seeking online platforms (such as the vTaiwan project). Elections still have their place, but they should not be the primary mechanism by which we conduct democracy.

Yep, I (in the UK - no asian heritage) was also aware of this by around February/March 2020 due to posts here on HN. But even otherwise smart and well informed people that I know seemed clueless about these things until many months later.

What exactly did Macron ever do to earn your respect?

Everybody has my respect by default, until they make a major fuck-up like Macron did there.

Maybe he fucked up sooner than that, thus not being worthy of respect at that point. But I'm not interested in politics at all so I missed it.

>Everybody has my respect by default

That's terrible, and doubly so when you apply it to politicians.

So if a stranger comes up to you on the street to ask you the time, do you immediately insult them for being an inferior human not deserving of your respect?

In my opinion, not giving respect to fellow humans by default is the terrible choice.

No, I am neutral to them. Respect is earned. But it is a spectrum, not a binary choice.

>In my opinion, not giving respect to fellow humans by default is the terrible choice.

Not every walking person deserves to be called a "fellow human".

He picked up his english teacher. I'm sure all his mates went crazy when he told them.

French teacher. Not that it makes any difference, though.

> I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that) very serious in TV explaining to all the citizens of the republic that we should not buy nor wear masks.

Ah! This one is actually a story of "the lesser of two evils".

You can't really tell people to buy masks where there is none available, and you can't really tell there is nothing to do unless you want to put every one in panic mode. You can't really trust people to act rationally in the presence of a new and unexpected situation that nobody trained for, and you can't tell them that you're also as unprepared as they are for that.

So, handle the situation like you want, there's no way you aren't damaging something. I guess it was easier to take a slight (to medium for some government staff, Olivier Véran) reputation hit and announce it to the press via your health minister, than risk a state-wide panic meanwhile you are fixing the mask situation (remember the stockpile was left in a degraded state and wasn't usable).

If you think of it, the only reason why getting vaccinated is not yet mandatory is because of the next elections in May. You wouldn't risk to alienate ~1/6 voters (again, they are the most motivated ones and they refused to get a shot despite not being allowed in restaurants), if it's not national-security-like important. So I suspect it will become mandatory either when we crossed the threshold where it's really dangerous (500.000 covid case per day, we're currently at 350.000), or after the elections, in june. Whichever comes first. With our current trajectory, you could expect the president or the prime minister to announce it in about two weeks, despite having said differently in previous announcements.

> I guess it was easier to take a slight (...) reputation hit,

Not a reputation hit. A credibility hit. Essentially 100% of what they say now is lies to my ears. If their policy is to lie to me "for the global good", this is the most rational position.

I'd have preferred if they had told the truth as they knew it (the disease is airborne, masks help you to avoid infect people, please leave all masks to health personnel, people who hoard masks will be severely punished).

Precisely this. The occasional manipulation to try and prevent a run on toilet paper or gas stations is not worth a total loss of credibility.

> I'd have preferred if they had told the truth as they knew it

This is perfectly understandable, however, in this situation, the truth or any version of it weren't available. If you tell everyone that masks are the best way to avoid getting infected, but there is none available, then you are creating and invoking the worst case scenario immediately: No masks available for anyone, No idea when you will get shipments, and 60M panicked citizens to manage.

Still better than living in a post-truth society.

Still, they could have explicitly said two weeks later that they lied for our own good because of the shortage. We know they lied, so they could at least admit it and rebuild some good will.

> If you think of it, the only reason why getting vaccinated is not yet mandatory

The vaccine is close to mandatory since June 2021, and is now becoming even more so, that with the negative tests not even counting any more.

I don't really by the election arguments: people who aren't vaccinated already don't vote Macron for the most part, they're already alienated. I'm pretty sure Macron doesn't want their vote, he wants scapegoats.

I also heard there are constitutional hurdles in making the vaccine mandatory (because it's not officially out of test phase yet), as well as that pesky thing about not compensating people who suffer side effects (aside from having regular health care like everyone else).

Your predictions still make sense, though. I'm not sure they're probable, but they're definitely plausible.

> Ah! This one is actually a story of "the lesser of two evils".

Well, there could have been a third route - Buy out the entire supply, then announce that masks help, but they do the most good on the faces of doctors and nurses so the supply of N95 masks has been reserved for them by the government; and those who can sew their own cloth masks are encouraged to do so.

The decisions were made in a hurry, and our politicians aren't doctors or scientists, so some mistakes are to be expected. But there's no denying the early stop-buying-masks announcements were a mistake IMHO.

Politicians will never or very rarely correct their statements. It is for the same reason as football referees. I took up refereeing as a hobby and we were taught very firmly by the ref coach that no matter what decision we take, we stick to it and never change it. Because that is a sign of weakness and will degrade the quality of the game even more than that individual decision.

I'd hope that our elected representatives did not treat us as adversarial football players, but maybe I'm asking to much.

Well people are rooting for the parties as if they were football teams. Especially if there are only few political parties.

I haven't yet given up on society, only on the current generation of shitty leaders.

Happened in the UK as well, Boris (and to be fair the WHO) told us masks were counter productive. That they might get you to stand closer to people and touch your face more, increasing your chances of getting Covid.. All presumably to save a mask shortage; But we know, and they should have known, that the public doesn't buy the same kind of masks that our NHS buys and there never was going to be any shortage.

This encouraged examples like; people walking up to you in the supermarket explaining why you should take your mask off. It lead to some number of deaths, probably 10s of thousands in the UK as this policy lasted for six months and it undoubtedly was part of the reason care-homes were hit as hard in the first wave.

Now here we are a year later, and no one has been held accountable, no talk of this in the media, no anger. Not only were we treated like children, we were treated like children by incompetent heartless leaders that got a lot of us killed, and there seems to be no corrective process for this.

> All presumably to save a mask shortage

I don't think so. There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic about whether masks would be helpful. We didn't know if the virus was airborne and there was a question about whether the masks would actually be helpful. For example, the masks could have had very low benefit but encouraged people to touch their face more.

Whitty in March 2020: "In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that. The only people we do sometimes use masks for are people who have got an infection and that is to help them to stop it spreading around."

I think this was a mistake: common sense suggests that they should have had some effect (and the evidence ended up supporting this). But I don't see any evidence for it being deliberate misinformation to avoid pressure on mask sourcing.

I also think that this one mistake should not be held up as the key problem in the pandemic. Public health information in the UK has generally been very good. Most of the missteps in the pandemic were from poor governmental decisions.

> no talk of this in the media

This is absolutely not true. I've seen this issue discussed ad nauseum.

As far as I know, the advice that wearing a mask doesn't protect you very well from getting Covid has held up pretty good; they're a lot better at protecting everyone else from the mask wearer.

The logical flaw then was that telling people to just wear masks if they're infected doesn't work very well if highly contagious people don't know they're infected, which turned out to be the case. I can see where it might have taken awhile to figure that out, but still the lack of transparency about how these decisions were made and the resulting credibility deficit is a problem.

"the advice that wearing a mask doesn't protect you very well from getting Covid has held up pretty good; they're a lot better at protecting everyone else from the mask wearer."

They're actually no good at anything. You can compare places that were right next to each other and which differed only in mask mandates, or look at the times mask mandates were introduced and removed. Cases don't shift.

See the graphs here, where the numbers from different nearby regions are overlayed on the same graph with the times of mask mandate rule changes:

https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...

That's why when you dig into the citations of a paper claiming masks work, you invariably find some invalid evidence, like they'll be citing model outputs as evidence of real-world effects, or they'll cite a study whose CI includes zero, etc.

This is nonsense. You can't do comparisons like that.

For example, mask mandates tend to get imposed when cases are rising, and removed when they fall. To say they have no effect on cases is to confuse cause and effect.

The conspiracy site you link to has no interest in looking at the data dispassionately. There's a reason why we have data science and peer review to investigate these things.

The site I link to isn't a "conspiracy site", it's a blog written by a guy who does lots of data analysis. Please, have you not learned yet that this word is meaningless anyway?

There are lots of cases where mask mandates were not added and removed at the times you claim, which were geographically next to each other, and in which there was no observed difference. There are lots of cases where mask mandates were added and the trend of the case graph didn't change at all. These are evidence against the hypothesis that masks work which was, note, the standard belief prior to mid-2020. That's why public health officials all said mass masking doesn't work. It's because it doesn't.

> The site I link to isn't a "conspiracy site", it's a blog written by a guy who does lots of data analysis.

Those aren't mutually exclusive. Anyone can throw some graphs together on a blog. Why should we trust him over papers that have been peer reviewed by experts in their fields?

It's a series of cherry-picked comparisons. Why is he comparing Germany to Sweden? They don't even share a border. Why not UK to France or Peru to Ecuador? Did he pick those countries because it happens to support his theory?

We don't have to wonder, because he admits it: "Perhaps the clearest example of the delusional political obsession with pretending masks matter is found in Southern California." Oh, great. So why are you showing us the "clearest examples"? Why not a comparison of the other places which aren't as "clear"? How can we determine if it's statistically significant if it's not a systematic study?

There are lots of other problems with that page. He's a crank.

Because the experts aren't really experts and peer review is useless? They routinely publish totally unscientific stuff and peer reviewers don't care, I can list 5 examples off the top of my head.

Why compare Germany and Sweden - because their case curves are virtually the same despite wildly different levels of masking. Because providing counter-examples is how you disprove a hypothesis.

Remember that he doesn't actually need to do lots of statistical analysis of this because mask theory is a total one. It doesn't come with caveats like "sometimes in some countries it works and others it doesn't for <reasons>", it doesn't even come with effectiveness numbers. It's just masks=less COVID. To disprove a theory this simple you only need one counter example. But this guy shows lots. He makes a big pile of graphs not because it's actually necessary to prove the point, but to try and ram it home to people who are in denial about it. There isn't just one counter example, there are a huge number of counter examples, and any one of them is sufficient to invalidate "masks = universal and effective COVID countermeasure" as a belief. That actually is science!

If mask mandate proponents were proposing a very subtle and complex effect where it was expected that sometimes there'd be no impact etc, then yes, the counter-argument would need to be correspondingly complex in return. That isn't the case here though.

I think that's largely true of cloth masks, but well fitted N95 (or similar) masks also protect the wearer.

Droplet transmission works via the eyes as well though. Hospital staff wear an N95, full garments, and a face shield for example - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR25COr2FSs - and also depend on the hospital having adequate ventilation. And it "sort of" works most of the time.

That still implies that the masks are doing something. Of course it's not 100%. And it's worth noting the hospital staff have much greater exposure than the general public.

> There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic

Among the civilian population, perhaps. Not among politicians and health officials. At least Fauci, WHO, and Finnish health authorities HAVE come out afterwards and admitted that they lied about masks to conserve them for health personnel.

> At least Fauci, WHO, and Finnish health authorities HAVE come out afterwards and admitted that they lied about masks

This is not true. I think Fauci etc. admitted that a reason masks weren't recommended early on was partly to conserve masks. That's quite different from the claim that they actively lied about them.

Perhaps. But we had a pandemic during the Obama/Biden admin, but no stockpile of appropriate PPE, masks, etc. This was, we were told, the pro-science administration.

Pandemics are such a common trope that Hollywood has made multiple (bad) movies revolving around them. Yet it appears we were unprepared for the basics.

What Fauci said or why isn't important. The question we should be asking is: Why were in that position to begin with? We were warned - time and again - and each time that warning was ignored.

> We were warned - time and again - and each time that warning was ignored.

And at least in the US, their are 1000s of people receiving good money to take that warning seriously. And they still failed.

This is wrong. The Obama administration did quite a bit to prevent future pandemics and the Trump administration dismantled it all pretty much immediately. Three things come to mind: the pandemic playbook, the pandemic response office, and the public health observers in China that were all recalled under Trump.

I love the reaction you get when you tell people there was literally something created & called “Pandemic Playbook” which was devised because they were expecting a pandemic in the next decade or two.

& what happened to the Pandemic Playbook created by the 44th presidential administration? It was completely discarded by the 45th presidential administration.

What proceeded to happen during the 45th presidential administration? A somewhat predicted pandemic. It’s too bad they didn’t have a playbook that told them step by step how to properly handle it…

And I love when ppl are so sucked into a particular narrative that they ignore the question being asked:

Where were the stockpiles of appropriate equipment? Or did the playbook say such things would fall out of the sky, like manna from heaven?

Fact: The 45th didn't discard them. In fact, the gov bought masks from Facebook and (I think) Google who did have a stockpile (but evidently not for pandemic purposes).

You're loving the playbook but missing the fact that some basic and necessary execution never happened.

…sigh

Feel free to use the search engine of your choice to search “US PPE Stockpile” & read any of the multiple credible articles that come up as the first results of the search. As it was known nearly immediately after COVID started, the stockpiles were mostly depleted - and what wasn’t depleted was mostly expired. This is why you saw pictures and videos of nurses demonstrating their supplied smocks disintegrating into dust as they put them on.

The 45th administration had the responsibility to refresh the stockpiles, and they purposely chose not to. If you’re unaware of this, your snark is a bit funny as you appear to be the one suckered.

Secondly: As for what the government bought after they remembered the stockpile is screwed, also for the small bit of it that was still useable.

“The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use,” - Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor, 45th Admin

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2020/4/3/21207140/jared-kus...

So much to the point that at least one state had to buy shipments of PPE in secrecy & then guard the distribution of said shipments with their National Guard. Everything not done in secrecy or guarded was being “appropriated” by the Feds, for reasons not hard to imagine given the statement of the aforementioned advisor.

There’s a lot more to it, but I digress.

Somebody here is indeed a sucker - but I do not believe it is I.

So we had a stockpile that wasn't a stockpile, that wasn't effective? That ran out in no time at all? That's some great spin. Thanks.

I’ll leave anybody who comes across this discourse a simple

Google “Trump administration stockpile budget cuts”

and stop attempting to discuss in good faith with you, who apparently really wants to be right on the internet when they’re completely wrong.

Again, fair. But it still doesn't answer the question:

We were clearly - and across multiple administrations - under prepared...why? And why is no one (read: media) seriously asking why?

That is, again for example, even an undepleted stockpile wasn't going to be enough.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/08/donald-tru...

I won't dispute Trump exaggerated. That's a given.

On the other hand, all I can find are articles on the stockpile being depleted and that even if full there were numerous warning about full not being enough.

So again, a simple question: Why? And why isn't anyone willing to ask why?

We knew this was coming. We even got a warning. And still not even close. But no accountability??

You're confused. Where did I mention "pandemic playbook"? It's a _very_ simple question:

Dear Uncle Sam - Where were the stockpiles of appropriate supplies?

That's it. We can move on to other discussions but let's start with the basics first.

I heard a story about California preparing for the case of a pandemic in reaction to SARS many years ago (Schwarzenegger in 2006) stockpiling medical gear and building mobile hospitals that could be quickly moved to hotspots as disaster relief. The next governor (Brown in 2011) then cut funding to retain and renew it in an attempt to slim down the states budget.

"Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus"

- Surgeon General, Feb 29, 2020

Please stop spreading misinformation.

I am not spreading misinformation. Please don't throw accusations around.

Previous Surgeon General Jerome Adams is not the same person as Fauci.

I'm not in the USA, but looks like your surgeon general in Feb 2020 was not an ideal choice for the post. He sounds like a political Trump appointee.

Even so, the full tweet read:

"Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!

They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can't get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!"

...so it sounds like he was quite upfront about the idea that mask use was partly being discouraged to avoid pressure on sourcing masks for medical professionals.

The original point you argued against is if he lied, not if he lied for a good reason.

You can't even keep your own arguments straight.

In grandparent post you stated "There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic about whether masks would be helpful".

In this post you are stating "mask use was partly being discouraged to avoid pressure on sourcing masks for medical professionals".

So which is it? Were they recommending against mask use because masks are not helpful, or were they recommending against mask use because masks are so helpful that we actually need to conserve them for medical professionals? Which is it?

If you're going to lie, at least make up a consistent story.

> Were they recommending against mask use because masks are not helpful, or were they recommending against mask use because masks are so helpful that we actually need to conserve them for medical professionals?

Masks are clearly going to be more effective when used by trained personnel in a clinical setting. For example, removing masks using gloves and disinfecting hands before touching faces. There isn't necessarily a contradiction here in thinking masks could be effective for medical personnel but not the public. Although, as I have already said, I think they made a mistake.

> If you're going to lie

If you don't have the wit or politeness to enter a discussion without throwing insults around please find another forum to argue on.

This is 1) obviously about supply chain issues, so upfront with the reasons and 2) seems to be genuine about not believing masks are effective in preventing COVID. If that is accurate this is not a lie, because there is no intent to deceive.

Alternatively admitting that makes one look better than admitting “I didn’t know” or even “I was wrong”.

The inability of public health officials to simply say “we got X wrong” when they pivot massively erodes trust; ironically admitting “we were wrong; we know better now” would have done the opposite: it would have increased trust.

> This is not true. I think Fauci etc. admitted that a reason masks weren't recommended early on was partly to conserve masks. That's quite different from the claim that they actively lied about them.

You state that masks "weren't recommended" which indeed would be different from "recommending not to wear masks". However, Fauci didn't merely abstain from recommending masks, he actively recommended people not to wear masks. Yes, he actively lied about it, and he has openly admitted that he has lied about it. Now please stop spreading misinformation.

To be fair, that's not an unreasonable concern for them to have. Masks running out for healthcare professionals would have been an absolute disaster.

BuT hE LiiiEEEEEdddDdDddDdDdd

This is exactly the problem. No matter what it is not ok for someone to lie for what they perceive is the greater good, but scientists who we thought we could trust show that's exactly what they do and keep doing.

Trust is what our entire society is built upon and the foundation of science.

These people aren’t scientists their doctors acting as public health officials it’s a very different group. These people don’t have much hard data at the start and simply get a lot of things wrong such as the need to keep disinfecting everything.

They also have the dual jobs of keep people alive and keeping society functioning.

No matter what. Really? I'm pretty sure we all have a line we wouldn't cross. No good having a society built on a foundation of science if the planet is destroyed by a nuclear war for example.

If you can lock up the entire population in their homes you can ban the sale of masks to non-medical personnel. It was always an excuse.

>wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all.

I remember this, at the time we knew people who were infected (and infectious) could take more than 10 days to show symptoms, and if they didn't wear a mask they could infect hundreds. We also knew that anything less than an N95 wasn't designed to protect the wearer anyway (though as it turns out it does), but rather everyone else from the wearer. So it was really disingenuous of them to suggest your mask doesn't protect you, as they knew its everyone else's mask than protects you..

By the time it hit Italy we knew it was airborne, even if not by official measure, out government and the WHO kept this BS up for months after that.

Maybe we watch different media, as i have seen nothing about this issue. A few articles online, hidden away, nothing proportional to the seriousness of the issue.

It took a very long time for the Swedish FHM to say that masks work, so I don't know why everyone assumes that the rest lied to prevent a mask shortage.

Seeing as at the start, it was 100% known that covid spreads for weeks, prior to showing symptoms, that people may never show symptoms and spread, and further that tests did not exist for months, and were in short supply thereafter, any mask policy predicted upon being aware of infection would be negligent, incompetent, and just plain dumb.

> I don't think so. There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic about whether masks would be helpful.

Just like anything, reality is a bit more complicated. I don't think there was any genuine uncertainty about whether masks were helpful or effective, as we already knew that at minimum COVID-19 was droplet spread due to it being so similar to SARS. The issue was whether or not the public could correctly and effectively use masks, because wearing them properly is important as improper wear can actually /increase/ exposure to capture viral particles on the mask material.

But rather than just be honest and tell people the truth, they chose to spread simple lies.

> It lead to some number of deaths, probably 10s of thousands in the UK

Is there solid evidence anywhere that masks are important one way or the other? While it is plausible that a mask could prevent an infection in an encounter, I've not yet seen anyone waving something conclusive around that masks prevent infections over the course of a pandemic.

I've managed to avoid the coronavirus for 2 years now and as far as I can tell the future still has me getting COVID in it. I'm still not clear what role the mask is meant to play in that forecast.

No there isn't. The studies touted have serious issues, but because they align to 'consensus' nobody checks, not daring be called some misinformation agent or 'anti-vaxxer.'

They knew this after sars. It's not hard to find the evidence from after then.

It's just a nice visual way to make people feel safer against the thing they're told to fear.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069

Unfortunately many parts of this paper are beyond me, but this study does appear to find that community level masking has an impact, but it is a study that used actual communities and tracked compliance (and impact of different interventions on encouraging making)

Actually look at the peer review of that study done by Cornell and released this December. When the actual data was analyzed it showed masks had no effect.

Interesting - do you have a link by any chance?

AFAIK, this is the only really good study of mask-wearing. It's large (300k people!), and it's randomised. It tried two kinds of masks, "surgical" and "cloth":

> We used high-quality surgical masks that had had a filtration efficiency of 95% [standard deviation (SD) = 1%]; this is substantially higher than the filtration efficiency of the cloth masks we designed, which had a filtration efficiency of 37% (SD = 6%). These cloth masks had substantially higher filtration than common commercial 3-ply cotton masks, but lower than hybrid masks that use materials not commonly available for community members in low-resource settings (54).

The key result:

> We find clear evidence that surgical masks lead to a relative reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence of 11.1% (aPR = 0.89 [0.78,1.00]; control prevalence = 0.81%; treatment prevalence = 0.72%). Although the point estimates for cloth masks suggests that they reduce risk, the confidence limits include both an effect size similar to surgical masks and no effect at all. (aPR = 0.94 [0.78,1.10]; control: 0.67%; treatment: 0.61%).

It's a shame that even with such a large study, the phenomenon is so noisy that we can't get a strong signal here. But i think the takeaway is that masking has an effect, but it is rather small.

There's a lot more detail in the paper. Including this gem:

> We find no evidence that any of our village-level or household-level treatments, other than mask color, impacted mask-wearing. For mask-color, we see marginally significant differences, small in magnitude. In surgical mask villages, blue masks were more likely to be observed than green (adjusted percentage point difference = 0.03, [-0.00,0.06]), and in cloth mask villages, red more likely than purple (adjusted percentage point difference = -0.02, [-0.04,-0.00]). Text message reminders, incentives for village-leaders, or explicit commitment signals explain little of the observed increase in mask-wearing. Compared to self-protection messaging alone, altruistic messaging had no greater impact on mask-wearing, and twice-weekly text messages and a verbal commitment had no significant effects.

> I've managed to avoid the coronavirus for 2 years now and as far as I can tell the future still has me getting COVID in it. I'm still not clear what role the mask is meant to play in that forecast.

I think a key target was spreading out the infections so that hospitals weren't overwhelmed. And delaying infections until vaccines were available. Imagine if everyone in the country had gotten covid over the first half of 2020.

Something to note, is that while it is possible we might all eventually contract COVID (or its variants), there is real benefit in contracting it as late as possible, and not being among the first group that gets it. The vaccines greatly blunt the severity of illness, but even outside of vaccines our treatment regimes are better for the hospitalized.

So if wearing masks pushes your infection date out to when vaccines are available (and you get vaccinated), it is not unreasonable to assume the inverse (that not wearing masks led to earlier infections and thus worse outcomes, and death)

Note that we are still spending a fortune globally on enhanced cleaning regimes and special anti viral detergents to prevent an airbourne virus getting onto our hands.

> This encouraged examples like; people walking up to you in the supermarket explaining why you should take your mask off.

I attended FOSDEM in Brussels in 2020 right at the beginning of February, after COVID was identified, but before the big push of lockdowns in March. I had to transit through Atlanta to get to EU, and had a long layover so left the airport to visit a friend. While I was in the airport and flying, I wore a P100 rated half-mask respirator with cartridge filters the entire time. Recently the TSA and airlines had been experimenting (and now fully implemented) facial recognition for identity verification in US airports rather than handing the TSA your ID. It's supposed to be optional, but I got delayed 20 minutes in an otherwise empty line re-entering Atlanta because the TSA agent on duty wanted to argue with me to take my mask off and how masks were ineffective, and that's what the doctors/CDC (based in Atlanta) said, and how arrogant I was that I thought I knew more than the CDC. I kept my mask on. I didn't get COVID, and in fact still haven't had it at this point (although I'll likely get Omicron) by following common sense precautions and being vaccinated.

The telling people not to wear masks or buy masks was one of the biggest things for me that immediately let me know that the public was being lied to and manipulated. I've made a point of keeping up on the latest research and sharing what I know with family and friends directly, including preparatory advice. I already had a "pandemic prep kit" in my prep supplies, which had plenty of respirators, and I shared them with family and friends early on when they were hard to get. To me, it's utterly obscene how often even /basic/ easily verifiable facts were lied about to the public, masks especially.

Now that this has been politicized as an issue in the US, it's just made it harder. Here I am knowing the government lied consistently throughout the pandemic to everyone and that many of the "precautions" were nonsense, but the entire time advocating masks and vaccines... nobody on any political aisle likes truthful information since their selection of "truth" cannot match with reality.

The CDC and WHO are still spouting off about cleaning surfaces without, to my knowledge, one single well-documented case of surface transmission.

It's not a long stretch to question if anything the CDC recommends actually comes from caring for public health at all rather than private interests.

The US is becoming more and more the outlier in over-hyped fear and infantalism vs a world moving on.

It is a long stretch

To be fair, I believe more the criticism about masks and I'm on the side that they're pretty useless. Their first explanation made more sense.

People are certainly reusing them, they keep touching their face to adjust them, they don't respect distancing rules because they have a mask on, a lot of masks are not filtering enough.

On top of this they're annoying.

With the risk of covid being so low, masks are too much of a hassle for me to bother and I wear them only to avoid fines from the totalitarian regime I live in (and I'm certainly not changing them or buying any, I'm still using some I managed to get for free).

Must be really frustrating to be completely wrong about masks.

Would it have been different for you if he had elaborated on the reason for the changed policy, and apologized for what he said earlier?

Also, in the first case, did he express it very categorically, or did he say something like "to the best of our knowledge, the virus..."?

In Canada our leaders said the same things, no masks required… as they shipped our stockpiles of PPE to China

No, this didn’t happen.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ottawa-face...

Yeah, they shipped it because they didn't expect they will need it even when WHO was suggesting that there is a likelihood of cases in other countries...

Same thing happened in the US. It made no sense to everyone and degraded public trust at a critical juncture.

I think in the case of masks, it is highly plausible there was no deliberate attempt to mislead.

While at the time it seemed pretty clear to me that masks had a high probability of being helpful, there was a dearth of research that would support this conclusion - indeed the very limited research conducted on public mask usage did not seem to support it.

On top of this, I believe a major contributing factor was that many medical experts were used to very stringent mask protocols, and did not seem to consider the obvious differences between a hospital setting (where Covid may be rife) and every day life where it is a medium-to-low risk event, and carried over their belief that anything less than their stringent (and unrealistic protocols for the public) would render them useless.

I saw many regular doctors expressing this belief on Twitter at the time, as well as explaining how mask fitting was a laborious process, and that without this the mask would be useless, or that if you touched the mask while taking it on or off it would be worse than useless.

So, I think it is entirely possible that experts were giving leaders and journalists their honest assessment that masks were useless for the public - no doubt more exuberantly than they would have done if masks were plentiful, but not necessarily dishonestly.

I don't disagree that public messaging is highly manipulated in general, but I think it is more plausible that this particular case was fabricated by flaws in the decision process rather than dishonesty.

Another point on top of yours, at least in the EU, was that there was a plain shortage of masks and every single functioning FFP2+ mask was needed for hospitals and ICUs.

I have often observed discussion on how this might have been a convenient political move in the beginning when the EU had no way to get masks except for waiting on Chinese orders. But that's the realm of conspiracy again.

Exactly the same thing happened in Spain. +1 to everything you said.

What the hell? Our understanding of COVID was literally changing day by day. It would be dishonest to NOT change based on the updated science.

I’m so surprised and disappointed this absolute bullshit shows up on HN.

It’s not unscientific to change your mind when presented with new evidence, quite the opposite. It is, unfortunately, unpalatable as a politician to be uncertain, even when the facts demand it. I blame our culture of “leaders always know”.

The alternative is that governing massive democratic countries is incredibly difficult and it requires lies/facades/manipulation to ensure stability. Imagine the largest project you've ever worked on and then imagine scaling it up by many orders of magnitude.

Conspiracy theorists almost always operate in negative space and are unable to stand on their own.

Happened in my country as well. In the beginning of the pandemic when there were a lot of unknowns, authorities made blatantly incorrect statements and decisions and even contradicted one another. People stopped trusting the government, the doctors, the news. Even now they're saying thay vaccines are risk-free which is quite simply factually wrong, they have a favorable risk/benefit ratio but the risks are not null.

No wonder there are conspiracy theories all over the place. News are disinformation, you can't trust anything you read and uncertainty is at an all time high. People no longer trust these authorities but they still need to make sense of the world so they start looking for patterns. Sometimes they see things where there's nothing and sometimes they're right. I have a lot of sympathy for these people.

Isn't this more a failure of the scientific advisors? Surely they would be able to deliver a clear verdict on this (eg. definitely transmitted by aerosol, definitely not transmitted by aerosol, or possibly transmitted by aerosol so urge caution).

>For me it was the masks. The masks were my tipping point.

Before covid we knew masks were effective. Doctors obviously wear them during surgery. masks are important when dealing with HIV and such.

So when Fauci and others came out and said masks didn't work. They were knowingly lying. Worse yet, there were instructions on how to turn a tshirts in masks as well as how to produce hand santizers. They took these down.

The correct decision would have been to say exactly the fear, 'we have supply issues, we recommend cutting up old tshirts.' Not only does it prevent spread, it solves all problems.

Then we went a week later and they talked about 'new normal' and '2 weeks to flatten the curve'. Their lying didn't stop. They lost any smidgen of trust they had. Then they came out with emergency approvals to use experimental medicine for something that clearly isn't a vaccine and they are lying and calling it a vaccine? Sorry but this amount of lying should make literally everyone question their motives.

Climate change is mostly that barometer for me.

So when I see this article cites Viscount Ridley, the climate change denier, I pretty much put it in the same category of bullshit as all of that stuff

This is assuming I've not spotted its in the Telegraph first, which is enough to know its almost certainly lies and misrepresention.

I've reached the same conclusion about the Telegraph. It is Pravda for conservatives.

And what makes you so sure that climatologists have way higher standards than virologists? Clearly, the institutions themselves are not enforcing even the most basic standards of integrity on scientists because they've been fighting the release of these emails for two years.

The fact that you dislike the Telegraph because it's conservative is irrelevant. The evidence here is absolute proof that scientists, as a group, systematically lied to and manipulated both the public and governments for two years. Their goal was simply to ensure people didn't stop blindly trusting them, which might cause them to lose funding and power. There was no higher purpose yet nobody in the field of virology stepped up and pointed this out publicly. Many of them knew and were saying so in private emails, but - and this is critical - none of them spoke out. Not one.

Climatology is in reality not better. The ClimateGate emails have largely been forgotten now but it was also very clear in those that they were manipulating the peer review process, manipulating the temperature records and more in order to get the outcomes they wanted. They admitted it quite openly, at the time even Guardian writers like Monbiot were shocked by it.

Yes, the fog of Gell-Mann's amnesia is lifting. It's probably peer to peer communication like this. What would you do before? Send a letter to the editor of the very same news source to tell them they were full of shit?

Over the years, I've had direct knowledge of or involvement with maybe a dozen or so events that have ended up in the mainstream news. And in almost every case it has been inaccurate in some way, sometimes getting basic facts wrong and others having significant bias or spin that was misleading.

This hasn't given me great confidence in the accuracy of the reporting for things that I don't have direct knowledge of.

I'm very surprised to find someone on HN who lists the Daily Telegraph as their favourite news source.

This remoinds me of Climegate where cherry-picked phrases taken out of context were used to try and smear scientists. I'll wait to see the words in context.

I'd like that. One of the problems here is seeing the words at all - this stuff has only come out after over a year of freedom of information requests.

Some additional perspectives:

Snopes is highly skeptical: https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/16/lab-leak-evidence/

An r/science essay from a PhD in virology is highly skeptical: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...

While Root Claim estimates an 83% chance of a lab leak: https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV...

Snopes and the science page on reddit are not confidence-inspiring sources, to be honest. We need an authoritative investigation (led by WHO/CDC) into the origins of the virus to be able to make knowledgable statements. Until that happens, there is only hearsay and speculation.

I wouldn’t trust the CDC or WHO. We need an independent group who don’t have any baggage on this issue.

CDC can’t be trusted to even make a simple covid test and they don’t want to admit scientific research killed 20 million people.

Sad truth is that CDC/WHO are one of the most competent authorities on the matter, and they have experienced experts in the relevant fields. Only when politics comes into play, that the organisations' actions and intentions are called into question. The ideal thing would be to somehow remove international political considerations from the equation and then ask WHO to conduct an investigation.

Of course, the chances of that happening are probably lower than an actually lethal virus leaking from a lab.

It's not a science page on Reddit, the source is a published virologist who himself cites dozens and dozens of sources.

I find it odd that people are commenting about how this doesn't inspire confidence, but "rootclaim" as well as an editorialised headline from the telegraph is.

Snopes and Reddit are not credible.

The source isn't Reddit, it's a published virologist, and he himself cites over a hundred academic sources. Reddit is the medium.

I am very confident that SARS-CoV-2 has no connection to the Wuhan Institute of Virology or any other laboratory. Not genetic engineering, not intentional evolution, not an accidental release. The most plausible scenario, by a landslide, is that SARS-CoV-2 jumped from a bat (or other species) into a human, in the wild.

A year later and we are yet to see a zoonotic link, but of course it’s the “most plausible scenario”.

The reality is that we will likely never know because it’s not in chinas best interest to allow any real investigation into this.

SARS's zoonotic link was only established in 2017. You can't expect it to be find. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And it's going to be harder for this virus than SARS.

Right now, over a year later, reality is conforming exactly to what you would expect to happen starting from that hypothesis a year ago. So I don't even understand why you're mentioning it, it's not a logical argument.

According to this

> Sep 9, 2003 (CIDRAP News) – Chinese scientists found that animals sold at street markets in Guangdong, China, carried a coronavirus nearly identical to the SARS coronavirus, according to a report published recently in Science.

> The animal viruses were found in Himalayan palm civets and raccoon dogs, which were sold for food in the markets, according to the report. The findings indicate a route of transmission between species but do not reveal whether these animals are the virus's natural reservoir or contracted it from another source, according to the report.

Source [1].

The same thing didn't happen for SARS-CoV2. I believe none of the animals in the wet market has been tested positive for SARS-CoV2 or SARS-CoV2-like viruses [2].

[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2003/09/animals-...

[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/26/1021263/bat-covi...

Wait what? So we agree that they didn't find the oroginal reservoir, just a similar virus, right? Meaning, that it's not a zootoc link, as you previously asked for. You understand that it isn't possible anymore, because the current SARS-CoV-2 would almost certainly displace them now that it's endemic, correct?

So why do you expect the same thing to happen now that it's very unlikely, knowing that there is no way to know that these viruses actually are the ancestors and may very well have been cousins of SARS, that would have disappeared if SARS was more contagious.

To find an actual virus that is actually an ancestor of SARS, we had to wait until 2017. What you cited wouldn't meet the criteria you yourself set forth, and for this virus it would be impossible to find on the same timeframe. So I really don't get neither how this validates your point that we would expect to find the zoonitc link in a year, nor even how it would fit into an argument that it's unexpected we didn't find this.

I think you've misunderstood the difference between the proximal and reservoir hosts, because your comment is almost entirely wrong. As noted in the article linked above, scientists researching the original SARS found the exact (within the few mutations expected on any short transmission chain) virus that infected humans in palm civets and raccoon dogs, within about a year. These are the proximal hosts, i.e. the hosts believed to have infected humans. Once a proximal non-human animal host is found, we can be very confident that the virus is zoonotic.

Much later, Dr. Shi discovered that the greatest diversity of similar viruses was in bats. The bat viruses are less closely related to human SARS than the palm civet or raccoon dog viruses; but there's a lot of them, and they look ancestral. We therefore believe that the virus mostly evolved in bats, then was transmitted to the palm civets and raccoon dogs, evolved a little bit more there, and finally was transmitted to humans. This was very important in understand the evolutionary history of the virus, but provided no new information on how humans were first infected.

Knowing one of the classes of host doesn't imply knowing the other:

1. For the original SARS, we found the proximal host within about a year. Much later, Dr. Shi found the reservoir host.

2. For SARS-CoV-2, we knew the reservoir host immediately, because it's closely related to the original SARS. After two years of searching, we still haven't found the proximal host.

If one exists, the proximal animal host of SARS-CoV-2 is probably in China. Since China has seen low human spread (probably more than their official statistics, but clearly far less than the rest of the world), I don't see why you'd expect a human variant to displace the original zoonotic variant. There's also no particular evolutionary pressure for that--a variant evolved in humans might happen to be more transmissible in the proximal host animal, but that's not what's getting selected for when the virus is transmitted between humans.

That a person cited sources should not be seen as a sign of the quality of the work. Nor should be the amount of citations the person makes. In some cases the lack of citations can be used to suggest a piece of writing should not be taken seriously. But never the other way around.

It's extremely common for people to reach a conclusion, and only then to go looking for research. And, then, to be looking only for research which backs up their claims. Since there is often extensive research backing up both sides of issues, and also because these people rarely actually examine closely the articles they are citing (upon inspection the articles are often speaking about something different, saying the exact opposite thing, etc.), the citations have nearly zero positive value.

That doesn't change that I was correcting an incorrect statement. Someone said the source was Reddit, it isn't, it has multiple sources, none of which are Reddit.

As far as I'm concerned this is a complete non-sequitur.

The source is undeniably Reddit, in a sense (in the sense that it is opposed to a peer-reviewed journal).

Regardless, I directly addressed a portion of your comment. I believe the portion was meant to borrow some of the creditability of serious journals and give it to Reddit - which is, perhaps, a bad idea, for the reasons I laid out. To label my comment a non-sequitur is ridiculous.

In no sense is the source Reddit, anymore than the source of a New York Times article is paper, or the source of my word is your screen.

Citing sources is meant to borrow the credibility of the source for elements of your argument. Not to attribute that credibility to the sheet of paper your pen is inking.

I suspect you've locked onto the specific denotation of "source" as being an individual article. That is not the only denotation of the word. It can also refer to, as examples, persons or journals.

I absolutely haven't. A source can be an article itself (as in the content), or it can be an organisation (a joirnal, a newspaper), or it can be a person. I'm saying that the source isn't the medium over which the content itself is delivered. So for example, the New York Time is a source, so is any given article and it's associated author. However, the blank paper on which it was printed isn't a source, neither is the ink it was printed on, and correspondingly a website which merely relays words is not a source, but a medium.

True, that's another sense of being sourced from a journal

Several top virologists have publicly tarred lab leak as racist conspiracy theory, while privately discussed that not only it is a possibility, some of them believed it's highly probable. Here's a very recent email that has been released yesterday [1]. So forgive me for not taking another virologist's take on why lab leak is improbable on redit seriously.

[1] https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1480930691919618051

So now a single passage out of context that accounts for 4 out of 1000 differing nucleotides is proof positive that the author's mind was absolutely settled that it was a lab leak? Give me a break.

This is what I've written:

> while privately discussed that not only it is a possibility, some of them believed it's *highly probable*.

This is what you have written:

> proof positive that the author's mind was *absolutely settled* that it was a lab leak

Judge for yourself. I am not going to respond to any of your comment on this thread. Peace.

There is actually only one of these people that pronounced themselves about the implausibility of it being a lab leak. The only email attributed to him don't say that he thinks it was "highly probable", just that he didn't find at the time an explanation for those 14 nucleotides.

Do you have something about Mike Farzan saying, in public, that it was very unlikely that the lab leak theory was true? Or is it then incorrect to say that individual virologists were saying privately one thing and publicly another?

That PhD virologist comes off as not credible at all, as part of their response is to deny the entire possibility of lab leaks in general. Their argument is that industrial accidents are simply caused by incompetence or lack of funding, and WIV is well-funded and run by competent people: therefore, bad things simply cannot happen. Their attitude is fundamentally unserious.

https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did... (4.1)

>"I say this as someone who has been to these conferences, who knows many scientists who work on dangerous viruses, and work in facilities like the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We virologists know this group, we know about the WIV, and the WIV facilities do not frighten us. We do not view WIV as “unsound” or “risky” or “dangerous” or “incompetent” (76)."

>"We’re not worried about BSL4 labs that are well-equipped, well-funded, etc. (like the WIV is)."

>[...] "We biosecurity people are also very concerned about new BSL4 labs being built in developing countries in South America and Africa (99). But, you know what’s interesting? The WIV and its researchers are part of these committees that get together and discuss what to do about these challenges. They are part of the people who are helping to decide what is “safe enough” for a BSL4 lab! We here in the US agree with the WIV about what “safe” means (76). And the biggest reason for that is that we here in the United States helped train WIV researchers. We are the ones who taught them how to work with these dangerous viruses (76,100,101)."

(There are no buffer overflows in this C code: I'm very competent and experienced and how dare you).

It doesn't seem at all line they're claiming that lab escapes never happen. Just that this particular lab is known for being extremely safe, and that it's therefore unlikely it would have had a leak.

For a leak of such a virus to happen from a BSL4 facility that routinely handles much more contagious viruses, you would need incompetence or funding issues, yes.

Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy for a reason.

Just because they are “leaders in the field of safety” doesn’t mean that a lab leak is impossible, just unlikely.

You can argue it's a logical fallacy, doesn't change I was responding to a strawman.

The argument isn't an argument from authority either, it's just that they are well known for using very safe procedures.

> Just that this particular lab is known for being extremely safe, and that it's therefore unlikely it would have had a leak.

This is nothing but disinformation.

> Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats.

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

> Instead, there is Chinese evidence that the lab had safety problems. VOA has located state media reports showing that there were security incidents flagged by national inspections as well as reported accidents that occurred when workers were trying to catch bats for study.

[2] https://www.voanews.com/a/covid-19-pandemic_chinese-lab-chec...

That's interesting, because when you ignore the spin on both texts, you find out there is no contradictory information at all. Yet you could that it's nothing but disinformation. You should also note that the article is in the Opinion section, and doesn't actually publish the cables.

The cables the is factually claiming is that US officials learnt that the research going on at the lab indicated that there is a high risk of a coronavirus causing a pandemic, that there is a risk of zoonosis, and that there are risks associated with this research. There are no specific claims of bad practices or mismanagement, and it is entirely likely that the author is using those words to refer to the decision to do this kind of research as well as GoF research when he talks about unsafe practices and mismanagement, as they are the only material issues with safety and management he mentioned.

Beyond that, I don't see any evidence the lab was operating unsafely. If the virus really was in those populations, you'd need two unlikely things to happen, since we all agree the virus wasn't engineered.

First, the Chinese government needs to have made the conscious decision not to release proof that the virus was natural. Indeed, if it was being studied alive, the WIV would absolutely have identified it and a precursor. They could have offered one or both of these, or returned to where they found it, and pinpoint an origin, absolving themselves of all these arguments.

Then, the virus, which would belogically present in bat populations in those populated areas, would have had to escape a BSL4 lab, but not have escaped into society beforethen? What's the likelihood that it could have, while weakly infectious and poorly adapted to humans, managed to go through the protections of a BSL4 lab, but not managed to make it out of those animals?

I don't have the time to go through lawyer-speak arguments. The cables from officials regarding WIV safety have been verified. Just because it's on the opinion page doesn't mean it's false. It has way more credibility than some random virologist's claim about WIV safety on Reddit. Period.

Just few points:

* There's no agreement that this virus hasn't been engineered. Ralph Baric has said that just looking at the DNA it's not possible to distinguish whether a virus has been engineered or not. Alina Chan had raised this point and Vox has even made a correction on their article [1]:

> A previous version of this story stated that SARS-CoV-2 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies … assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty. (h/t to Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for her critique and input)

Please don't spread misinformation.

* A bio safety expert has weighed in and also expressed his concern about possible lab leak of SARS-CoV-2 [2].

* Viruses escape labs on regular basis [3]. Someone else on this thread also posted a link of a recent virus escape from a Taiwan lab.

* This is not the first time a lab leak happened and virologists tried to cover up. It happened during Soviet era in the 70s [4]. The truth came out after the fall of Soviet Union.

[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22734496/genetic-engineer...

[2] https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1479170984343064579

[3] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/20/18260669/deadly...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/20/world/europe/coronavirus-...

> The cables from officials regarding WIV safety have been verified. Just because it's on the opinion page doesn't mean it's false. It has way more credibility than some random virologist's claim about WIV safety on Reddit. Period.

The cables were written by an entrepreneur and a manager, and the opinion section isn't willing to publish them. That's not lawyer speak, that's the lengths you have to go to in order to interpret a shady opinion piece that goes to lengths not to provide the actually interesting information.

> There's no agreement that this virus hasn't been engineered. Ralph Baric has said that just looking at the DNA it's not possible to distinguish whether a virus has been engineered or not. Alina Chan had raised this point and Vox has even made a correction on their article [1]:

You can't prove a negative. That's all the substance in what I've quoted.

> Please don't spread misinformation.

Where have a I tried to prove a negative?

> Viruses escape labs on regular basis [3]. Someone else on this thread also posted a link of a recent virus escape from a Taiwan lab.

You should read my reply - from that article, the infected scientist was at the time not wearing his PPE. The infection was due to his incompetence, and wouldn't have happened if he was actually following BSL4 regulations. It seems his colleagues saw this and thought it was fine.

> This is not the first time a lab leak happened and virologists tried to cover up. It happened during Soviet era in the 70s [4]. The truth came out after the fall of Soviet Union.

Don't try to beg the question, please.

> A bio safety expert has weighed in and also expressed his concern about possible lab leak of SARS-CoV-2 [2].

Now we're finally getting somewhere. I assume who you're referring to as a biosafety expert is James W. LeDuc. All he's saying is that it's a possibility and that it needs to be investigated - so I don't see the disagreement. This was in April 2020, before a lot of the evidence we are relying on came out. Beyond this, his interlocutors points seem not be factually accurate, or at leasy hasty conclusions that later did didn't bear out.

> You should read my reply - from that article, the infected scientist was at the time not wearing his PPE. The infection was due to his incompetence, and wouldn't have happened if he was actually following BSL4 regulations. It seems his colleagues saw this and thought it was fine.

that's.. worse though, right? that's an incident in a BSL-4 where an incautious scientist disregarded regulations, without his colleagues calling him on it, and leading to the release of SARS. that's the reality - regulations are always broken, colleagues are always complacent. why would WIV or any other BSL-4 be any better?

> why would WIV or any other BSL-4 be any better?

Why would they be just as bad?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7088173/

> In this study, an international survey based on volunteering was conducted in biosafety level 3 and 4 laboratories to determine the number of laboratory-acquired infections and the possible underlying causes of these contaminations.

> The analysis of the survey reveals that laboratory-acquired infections have been infrequent and even rare in recent years, and human errors represent a very high percentage of the cases.

> Today, most risks from biological hazards can be reduced through the use of appropriate procedures and techniques, containment devices and facilities, and the training of personnel.

> Just because it's on the opinion page doesn't mean it's false.

No, but if it’s a red flag that the author has an agenda, or wants to jump to a conclusion without gathering enough evidence required for the news section.

> It has way more credibility than some random virologist's claim about WIV safety on Reddit. Period.

Reddit is the medium of distribution, as it was intended as kind of a springboard to an AMA. Could have been posted on Medium, Substack, etc. For what it’s worth, he is a published virologist: https://scholar.google.com.co/citations?user=8wCwbNUAAAAJ&hl...

I’m not saying he has the right take (I don’t know enough about virology to evaluate his content), just that it was a widely circulated, comprehensive and researched piece of content about the lab leak theory, as were the other two articles.

In a sea of half-thought out opinions and conspiracy theories these 3 articles actually spent incredible amounts of time and published evidence (on both sides of the theory) that can be analyzed and debated in depth.

Beyond that, the original SARS escaped at least once from a BSL-4 lab in Taiwan:

> The scientist had been working on a SARS study in Taiwan's only biosafety level 4 lab since June, the Taiwan statement said. [...] A chest x-ray showed pneumonia in his right lung, and polymerase chain reaction tests of throat and blood samples were positive for the SARS virus.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2003/12/taiwanes...

The idea that "BSL-4" implies "negligible risk of accident" seems to be empirically false. In any case, the WIV was creating chimeras of novel coronaviruses with much looser precautions, at BSL-2:

> The Chinese work was carried out at biosafety level 2 (BSL-2), a much lower tier than Baric’s BSL-3+.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...

> tripletao 2 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | on: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, b...

Beyond that, the original SARS escaped at least once from a BSL-4 lab in Taiwan:

Many viruses have come to infect people in BSL4 labs, when they happen to be run incompetently.

From the exact same article you cite :

> The AP report quoted Dr. Shigeru Omi, the WHO's Western Pacific regional director, as saying the patient most likely was infected by some spilled liquid he saw on the surface of a test tube. Omi said the man was working without protective gear, such as a gown and gloves, at the time, according to the report.

Which, again, does nothing to oppose the thesis in the original post, which is that these viruses won't escape a BSL4 lab that's actually operating competently at the BSL4 level.

> The idea that "BSL-4" implies "negligible risk of accident" seems to be empirically false. In any case, the WIV was creating chimeras of novel coronaviruses with much looser precautions, at BSL-2:

That was also explicitely addressed. In 2013, the WIV was not a BSL4 lab.

A BSL-4 lab operated by researchers who never made mistakes would probably be quite safe. Unfortunately, they're instead operated by flawed humans. If you look at the safety culture of nuclear engineering, aviation, or other fundamentally dangerous activities that we nonetheless manage to practice safely, then you'll see practitioners who recognize that. They don't dismiss accidents or near-accidents as human error, even if a human failed to follow a procedure, and instead look for better ways to build systems tolerant of the human errors that inevitably occur. The attitude I've seen from many virologists--or at least, from the virologists with the perhaps-questionable judgment required to become the public face of these arguments--is disturbingly different.

And yeah, the WIV was working with novel bat-origin coronaviruses at BSL-2, not 4. That makes the risk of an accident yet higher, which makes our reddit virologist's argument that "BSL-4 labs like the WIV are really safe" not just bad but also dishonest. So I'm not sure what you think is addressed?

ETA: And I see that the reddit post talks about the WIV doing work at BSL-3 before they opened their BSL-4 lab. This claim is unreferenced, and as far as I can tell it's false; Dr. Shi confirms that they were working at BSL-2:

> In an email, Zhengli Shi said she followed Chinese rules that are similar to those in the US. Safety requirements are based on what virus you are studying. Since bat viruses like WIV1 haven’t been confirmed to cause disease in human beings, her biosafety committee recommended BSL-2 for engineering them and testing them and BSL-3 for any animal experiments.

The reddit post could easily be read to imply that after the BSL-4 lab opened, all work moved to the higher BSL; but it never actually says that, and I'm not aware of any evidence (or even any claim from the WIV) that it did. There's a strong incentive to work at lower BSL even when a higher-level facility is available, since the extra precautions significantly slow work. I therefore believe it's likely that work was continuing at BSL-2 in 2019.

First of all, if a transmission can happen at a wet market, it can also happen inside a lab. One doesn't need a virology degree to understand something this simple. As a matter of fact that's exactly what happened in a Taiwan lab [1].

[1]: https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/taiwan-investigates-covid-lab...

So much data drops and narrative shifts taking place re:covid data. Allegedly those [1] project defuse documents submitted to darpa we're legit. How they gonna wiggle out of that if so? Brace for house of cards collapse.

[1] https://www.projectveritas.com/news/military-documents-about...

I looked up Major Murphy using Marine Online's Locator: he shows up, with his place of work as the Office of Naval Research. My initial skim of the docs didn't raise any immediate red flags to me (things like poor adherence to Naval Correspondence standards for documents). Seems legit. Just my $0.02...

Have you read the actual documents?

Most of it is Murphy’s unsubstantiated opinion.

All the quotes in the video are from Murphy’s opinion and not from the leaked funding request documents.

Nowhere in the documents is any proof that DARPA rejected the research due to gain of function concerns.

All we know from the documents is that HealthAlliance requested funding to research and vaccinated bats.

That’s it.

Everything else is fan fiction by a soldier.

>>>Have you read the actual documents? Most of it is Murphy’s unsubstantiated opinion.

His letter to the Inspector General lists reference documents. Even a cursory search via DDG yields some of them, which were covered on HN when they were released back in September ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28965770 ).

https://newsrescue.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/defuse-pro...

https://drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/defuse-p...

https://drasticresearch.org/2021/09/21/the-defuse-project-do...

>>>Nowhere in the documents is any proof that DARPA rejected the research due to gain of function concerns.

Here's the rejection: https://drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/hr00118s...

"The team discusses risk mitigation strategies to address potential risks of the research to public health and animal safety but does not mention or assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research and DURC. Given the team's approach does potentially involve GoF/DURC research (they aim to synthesize spike glycoproteins that may bind to human cell receptors and insert them into SARSsr-CoV backbones to assess capacity to cause SARS-like disease), if selected for funding an appropriate DURC risk mitigation plan should be incorporated into contracting language that includes a responsible communications plan."

Major Murphy's letter also states: "When synthesized with the EcoHealth Alliance proposal, US collections confirm EcoHealth Alliance was performing the work proposed. The analysts produce their reports in a vacuum, absent the context the proposal provides. As a fellow at DARPA, I could see both, and can do the synthesis."

Do you have access to the intelligence agency collections plans, and/or their analyst outputs? What information do you have that contradicts his statement that his conclusions are corroborated by Top Secret intel analysis?

>>>Everything else is fan fiction by a soldier.

Are you ready to retract that accusation?

Fool me once shame on you. Fool me 30 times , I'll keep on trusting you

Is there a way to disprove the lab leak hypothesis?

Disprove it? No. We do innocent until proven guilty in our jurisprudence.

This isn't a US legal case; it's a scientific inquiry. Either lab leak or zoonosis is plausible, so you can't say one isn't the default until the other is proven. You don't flip a coin and say "heads until proven tails".

This seems like the misuse of impressive sounding words. The hypothesis has nothing to do with US law. It’s a question of whether there is sufficient empirical evidence in support of the prevailing hypothesis, that the virus originated from a market in Wuhan.

No, there isn't especially after 2 years. This does not however mean that in the absence of wet market evidence that the only possible answer is lab leak.

Yes - an animal host or reservoir is found. It's unusual after 2 years none has been found.

There are many animal hosts or reservoirs. The issue is that it's not obvious wether they got it from or gave it to humans. You really need the most direct ancestor virus.

AFAIK the known animal reservoirs got it from humans. Do you know any animal reservoir that we still don't know how the animals have got it?

We don't, and that's the issue, we can't know unless we find an ancestor virus. It's also very possible if could have wiped out the original virus in all original reservoirs. It's very difficult to do this now and for endemic viruses in general, and it took a very very long time to do for SARS where this wasn't a problem.

I thought they thought it might be pangolins? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32380510/

Yeah, that's a theory, but I don't think it's settled yet

That is a very old article in pandemic research time. Pagolins aren't thought to be the likely intermediate animal any more.

A quick reminder of what scientists said in early 2020:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/28/how-did-the-co...

> “we really don’t know” how accurate the origin story is, she says: “There’s some sort of connection [to the Wuhan market] and there were people exposed to the market that were infected.”

> Baker says what is “very likely” is that the virus originated in a bat. “It’s a likely scenario but we will never know. The market was cleaned up quite quickly. We can only speculate.”

> “These wet markets have been identified as an issue because you do have species interacting,” she says. “It’s an opportunity to highlight the dangers of them and an opportunity to clamp down on them.”

> Turner adds: “We’ve found the ancestors of the virus, but having broader knowledge of the coronavirus in other species might give us a hint about the evolution of this thing and how it jumped.”

There has been other wet market origin stories as well, so I think absent other evidence it seemed like the Occam’s razor answer.

Turned out that it's basically impossible to test just us 7.something billion humans.

No one is out there testing a billion bats (or many more billions of mice and what not). Animal patient 0 is probably dead already anyway?

Good luck with that search.

We still aren't 100% sure about Ebola's reservoir, so that isn't necessarily a smoking gun.

Ebola didn't break out in a modern city of 10m + people.

The progenitor of the SARS-1 outbreak in 2003 wasn't found until a decade later in 2013.

There's a lot of research which is getting closer:

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-871965/v1

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21240-1

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.5847...

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.428212v1

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-885194/v1

https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2021/10/11/in-search-for-co...

The immediate source - palm civets at a local market was found almost as soon as they looked, about four months after the outbreak. Tracing back where they got it from took longer.

After the discovery of WIV1 in bats it was found that it efficiently infected human airway epithelial cells, and since the palm civets were never linked to any outbreaks it is possible that the virus had directly hopped to humans from bats and that the palm civets were unnecessary as an intermediate species. It was also later found that it infects racoon dogs, ferret badgers and domestic cats. There was never any conclusive proof that raccoon dogs were responsible/required and that now looks unnecessary, which is a good example of how over a decade later what we think we know can change.

I believe that:

1. The closest known animal viruses to human SARS-1 were found in civet cats in 2003, within about a year of the first discovery of the virus in humans.

2. No animal viruses closer to SARS-1 have since been discovered. Dr. Shi discovered various viruses in bats that we believe are ancestral to SARS-1, including WIV-1 in 2013. This is significant because we believe SARS-1 evolved primarily in bats, but those viruses have lower genetic identity with SARS-1 than does the virus found in the civets.

If you disagree, please link a paper.

Based on the above, I don't understand why you'd think 2013 is the important date. Within about a year of the emergence of both of the previous two novel coronaviruses in humans (SARS-1 and MERS), a near-identical virus was discovered in animals (civets and camels). This is suggestive but not conclusive evidence that those animals first infected humans, and strong evidence that those viruses existed in nature--somewhere, even if not exclusively in those animals--before they emerged in humans.

For SARS-CoV-2, no such evidence has yet been found. This doesn't prove that SARS-CoV-2 is of unnatural origin, and I assume you'll mention the uncertainty in Ebola's zoonotic hosts shortly; but I don't see how anyone could treat that as irrelevant, except out of willful blindness.

Discovery of WIV1:

[Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389864/)

WIV1 grows in primary human airway epithelial cell cultures:

[SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence](https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048)

> Together, the data demonstrate that the WIV1-CoV spike can mediate infection of human airway cultures with no significant adaptation required.

And thanks for putting words in my mouth but no, I'm not confusing those with MERS.

I didn't mean to suggest that you were confusing anything with MERS. I just brought MERS up to show that not only had we found an animal infected with SARS-1 within about a year of its emergence in humans, but we'd also found such an animal for MERS, on a similar timescale. This means that SARS-CoV-2 is the 1/3 for which we haven't, not impossible just by chance but slightly more surprising than just 1/2.

And yeah, you'd mentioned WIV-1 above, and I'd assumed that's what you meant from the 2013 date. I noted this in point (2) of my grandparent comment. I just don't understand why you think that's more significant than finding the near-identical virus in civets. The SARS-1 civets might not have first transmitted SARS-1 to humans, but the WIV-1 bats definitely didn't--they're very different viruses, and while WIV-1 might indeed be able to infect humans it's definitely not what caused the actual outbreak. So why pick 2013 and not 2003?

We have no proof that civets gave us SARS-1 and not the other way around.

Since it was also found in raccoon dogs, ferret badgers and domestic cats which one of those was the actual intermediate animal? Civets were just the first identified. Either one of them gave it to us and we gave it to the other three, or possibly we got it from bats and gave it to all four. AFAIK there's no conclusive phylogenetic analysis establishing which species got it from whom.

MERS is much more obvious what happened.

I think you're strictly right there. If they'd obtained sequences then they could have built that tree; but as far as I know they didn't, perhaps because the cost of sequencing was higher back then. That's still more evidence than we have for SARS-CoV-2, though.

With SARS-1 we had the additional evidence that some wildlife traders had antibodies, presumably from mild infections by related viruses in the animals they handled. There's again no genomic evidence to exclude "reverse zoonosis" there, but the timing seems to make that pretty unlikely.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1140695/

Yes, clear animal reservoirs, viral lineage, old samples from human or animal infections with precursor variants. No position on the question, just answering your question about proof.

That would only disprove the genetic manipulation part, but not necessarily lab leak. A WIV lab staff can easily contract virus from a bat inside the lab. This essentially what happened in Taiwan, where a lab staff got infected with COVID from a mouse [1]. To disprove lab leak you also have to show either 1. WIV or any other labs in Wuhan didn't have any virus samples that can be an ancestor of SARS-CoV2 2. we can establish a very clear and well understood route how the ancestor of SARS-CoV2 arrived at Wuhan from Yunan province, where the horseshoe bats live, including how it became so good at infecting humans in a very short period of time.

[1] https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/taiwan-investigates-covid-lab...

With SARS original they found the source as infected animals at a local food market. Something like that would pretty much disprove a lab leak as the source as it did that time.

If a virus essentially identical to the original wild type SARS-CoV-2 is found in a wild animal population that would be fairly strong evidence against the lab leak hypothesis, although not an absolute disproof. Researchers have looked and not found such, so it remains an open question.

So far the closest we've come is a bat virus in Laos but it has some significant genetic differences.

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

Also Ecohealth Alliance and WIV collected viruses in Laos. So in terms of natural origin vs. lab leak the viruses found in Laos don't increase probability on either side.

Couldn’t someone just inject the original virus into a nearby animal population and say ‘look what we found!’ ?

I'm not a biologist but I believe it should be repeatable, i.e. the animal should be able to pass it on in lab.

Non-human animal-to-animal transmission has been observed, like on Danish mink farms. But you can sequence the virus from many human and non-human infections and build a phylogenetic tree from the sequences, knowing that each variant should have all the mutations of its ancestor plus maybe some new ones. In such a tree, the proximal zoonotic host should have infections with no human-infection ancestor. This was observed for the original SARS (palm civets) and MERS (camels), each within about a year. For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting.

No. The only way to disprove lab leak theory is for the CCP to disclose the WIV databases and records of what they were studying. Otherwise, just because it was found in some animal doesn’t quite disprove it. WIV was actively collecting virus samples from mammals for research funded by the US tax payer money through Eco Health Alliance.

If you are inclined to think the CCP knows / is covering up a lab leak; you are also inclined to think that they'd release fake disclosure data to cover it up.

I prefer an independent third party audit.

Faking data is much harder: it’s easy to forget to remove something, change numbers so they don’t match other numbers, or make up numbers which have the statistical signal of manufactured data. Even being a great power does not prevent these kind of mistakes, because of the skill level censors would need in multiple scientific fields to make a good forgery. People get away with it in minor papers in the social sciences all the time, but with a million eyes on the data sets in this case, someone’s gonna see it.

They wouldn't have to actually fake scientific data - they'd just release everything else they were working on, omit the problematic files, and go "see? we showed you everything - there's nothing to see here!".

Time tables, budgets, staffing docs, those are readily forgeable. Any leftover discrepancies can be chocked up to clerical error. This is doubly so if the problematic research was classified or compartmentalized - files pertaining to those programs are often designed to be easily expunged.

Ultimately, China could release as many files as people ask, and never be able to settle the debate. You can't prove/disprove the existence of files they claim do not exist.

Our best bet would be whistleblowers - ideally multiple trusted and independent ones - who can testify to a hidden program. However, we can't use the lack of whistleblowers to prove the lack of a program, which is where we're stuck today.

Well, who says they haven't tried to do that. The 2013 Mojiang mining incident was claimed to be a fungal infection, while it was later proven it was a viral infection.

The Mojiang mine viral outbreak actually occurred in 2012.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

An animal sample from the wet market that was shut down. (I spooned they were all bagged).

If they were all destroyed, then go get a sample from their natural reservoir (wherever those animals came from)

Let me respond to this question with another question. Can you disprove the existence of space aliens? No, you cannot, because they are statistically possible. Are they plausible? That isn't what is being asked here, the plausibility, just whether something is possible.

To whose satisfaction? Scientifically? It seems possible if the evidence still exists or could be found, based on a few of the other comments here. Politically? The faction that will never be satisfied, parted company with the scientific community, before the pandemic was even on the horizon.

As a scientist, I would have been OK with learning about the hypothesis from a credible source and letting it play out. I would have been OK with letting the public know about it. However, realistically, good faith investigation of the hypothesis would have been utterly drowned out by hysterically amplified versions of the same hypothesis that were already in circulation.

An interesting tidbit.

The image of Wuhan on the map in the article shows WIV down the road across the river from the wet market.

Something that gets zero screen time is the Chinese CDC is literary across the road from the wet market. They have since moved / unlisted that address.

This does not mean a lab leak, but its a weird thing to be left out of the conversion.

> the Chinese CDC is literary across the road from the wet market

I would looove a source on that, please. Can't find anything with a quick search and haven't heard that before.

I can read Chinese and saw it on a Chinese map at the start of the pandemic, when I was looking at the huanan wet market.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Center_For_Disease_Con...

No. 288, Machang Road, Jianghan District, Wuhan

If you duckduckgo the address you can see a bunch of academic papers listing that as the address.

Its not controversial. Just no one has ever brought it up.

Only media that reported on it was this

https://nypost.com/2021/08/13/who-scientist-eyes-on-wuhan-la...

Again, this doesn't prove a lab leak. But its a weird fact to leave out of public discourse.

> its a weird fact to leave out of public discourse

It surely is. Thanks for getting back to me, appreciate it.

I wonder if having additional two years worth of data changed their mind.

We see how easily this virus mutates. Recent research indicates that Omicron evolved for some time in mice without breaking out back into human population.

Natural origin is way more playsible than ww thought in February of 2020.

This "natural" origin theories kind of sound like conspiracy. Bats, mice, lemurs.. Somehow wildly different DNA parts combine, and virus perfectly adapted for human population emerges from cave with zero prior human contact...

If Omicron evolved in mice, we should be able to find it in wild mice population. Or maybe partially replicate its evolution in lab on mice population.

We know virus synthesis is possible, it is accessible even to small national governments, universities and research centers. But mainstream agrees there is ZERO chance of that happening. Nobody would invest couple of million dollars, to end pandemic once for all.

Not all mice, some mice, somewhere.

This virus in the form we encountered, spreads among humans best, but it also can spread between a ton of other animals. Most probable explanation is that it originated from civets (second best) and infected a single person with immunity sufficient to suppress it but insufficient to eradicate it. In this person it multiplied and mutated learning how to infect human cells best and finally one mutation allowed it to skip to another person. And then it spread like wildfire because it was already adapted to humans because it mutated in one human for months or years already and just learned how to overcome immune suppression enough to break through.

It stayed in single person for months, and somehow it got more infectious in this person, without infecting anyone. It is perfectly adapted to stain airborne and pass lungs, but it gained that inside person! And it only gained mutations related to higher infection rate and severity, nothing else, no other random changes.

Omicron DNA was "forked" in July 2020. It was not detected until now, when it spread like wild fire. Unless we find missing links in nature, I find natural origin very unlikely.

Let's skip omicron for now.

While the original strain was evolving in patient zero it was acquirng various random mutations.

The ones that were not beneficial for infecting human cells and thriving in humans didn't survive.

Threre were few possibilities.

I don't think it could evolve some mutation that would trigger immune system of that person into overdrive causing it to kill all variants of the virus. Very unlikely.

Other option is that this virus might have evolve lethal mutation and kill patient zero without infecting anone else.

And the third option is that eventually virus did stumble upon mutation that increased viral load that this person was shedding to levels sufficient to infect another person.

And since it managed to break out of a person that was fighting with it for months or years it's no surprise that it did well in the next and next billion that followed.

The above is most likely scenario for me.

I think we'll eventually find closest relatives of that virus in some civet somewhere. But that will prove exactly nothing to anybody who believes in lab leak origin.

> Let's skip omicron for now.

Are you talking about omicron now or original Wuhan virus?

Omicron stays mainly in upper respiratory parts. It does not go deep into lungs and body as other variants. That makes it less lethal, not because it is somehow milder. Normal cold is also quite lethal, once it spreads through body, but it never gets a chance.

I am happy to accept theory it stayed in single host for several months, and gained a few mutations. But that does not explain its DNA code. You do not get this type of mutations without spread in massive population. And there are no random bit flips, that should accumulate over several months.

> But that will prove exactly nothing to anybody who believes in lab leak origin.

This is not a religion, there is no "believe". Lab leak (or artificial synthesis) is just a theory that explains origin of virus very well. Dismissing it without investigation would be unscientific.

I was talking about original strain as indicated by "let's skip omicron for now".

> This is not a religion, there is no "believe".

Religions are not the only things people believe in. Some people believe in lab leak exactly the same way some believe in flat earth. With fierce conviction despite complete lack of evidence with just surface level clues.

> Lab leak (or artificial synthesis) is just a theory that explains origin of virus very well.

It's a hypothesis. Most likely unfalsifiable because I have no idea what could prove it wrong. It doesn't explain a single thing about coronavirus and has no predictive power.

> Dismissing it without investigation would be unscientific.

What is posited without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

You are of course free to search for evidence even though it was dismissed. And come back if you find any.

Some people looked for evidence over last two year and so far they haven't found anything new or interesting.

It is really hard to tell if you are trolling. Anyway, it is all flat earth nut whack conspiracy, have a good day.

What exactly sounds trollish to you?

I believe that in my previous comment I haven't said a single controversial thing.

As for omicron I can share conspiracy theory I invented for fun.

Here it goes.

Omicron is the result of effort of biohackers group. When pandemics happened they set a goal of evolving milder version of sars-cov-2 to serve as a natural, self-administering covid vaccine. They experimented using mice and human tissue to periodically check for infectiousness. When they noticed they got a version that has trouble infecting human lung tissue and Delta started to threaten the world they decided to relese their version covertly.

They'll never admit they did it because Omicron will kill some people too, they are just hoping it will be less. At that scale they know they are saving millions regardless.

This article is kind of self defeating - based on the article the scientists expressed uncertainty over the origins of covid, but the title is "Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab" which seems to prove their point exactly?

I don't know if this is common knowledge but there's an equal and opposite theory in China that covid came from the us. I just did a search for "covid us" on Baidu and this is the third result https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/114737709

along with suggested search queries "Is the new crown virus caused by the United States?" "Is the new crown pneumonia a virus released by the United States?"

(crown = omicron, I'm pretty sure)

I think there is a real possibility that covid is a lab leak, but it's impossible to find the truth when everyone is eager to point the finger at (other ethnic group)

The story is more about how this was covered up which destroys any faith you had in our scientific leaders who are clearly making decisions base on their political goals, and not on the truth. It is the same way Dr. Fauci admitted to lying to the public about masks not working so that he could achieve his goal of having masks being saved for healthcare professionals. When your leaders are known to be lying to you, especially on something much bigger than even 9/11 or pearl harbor, this sparks the kind of outrage that should get those in charge fired. They by their own e-mails and admissions are lying about the science of the biggest event in our lifetime in order to achieve completely separate goals from science. Even if their goals are the most noble in their own eyes to serve as preventing international issues, it is still a disservice to every single scientist that is practicing with the goal of finding the truth. They are trying to act like the parents and that everyone else is the child. It's like those movies when they hide things from the public so as 'not to cause a panic,' but even worse as their hiding of the truth has resulted in censorship of actual science being researched, not to mention censorship on social media platforms.

I'd agree if there's actual science being suppressed, but it seems to me there is none, just a lot of speculation and finger pointing without evidence on all sides.

Despite the lack of solid evidence more than a quarter of Americans already believe in the lab leak theory. In this very article any private expression of uncertainty has been twisted to serve a political agenda. I would say that these scientists' concerns are well founded.

The science is suppressed because people are and have been fearful to even research and make a claim contrary to the socially allowed claim. There is actually lack of solid evidence of natural evolution of the virus as well and they have yet to find any connection to any animal with the virus, not to mention the viruses spike protein would make it not infectious in bats where the origin was hypothesized. Yet, speaking about natural growth has not resulted in censures or labeling of researchers ass fringe. The issue is not that there isn't solid evidence of a lab leak, it's that there isn't solid evidence that it wasn't a lab leak either. This article goes into detail on why lab leak is still a leading theory: https://bprice.substack.com/p/yes-we-need-to-keep-talking-ab...

In America, the president placed tariffs and sanctions on China. The opposing political party then tried to remove him from office twice.

There was an erroneous political hit job made by the losing candidate, spreading misinformation about the president's ties to Russia.

Then a virus appears, just blocks from a Research Institute that researches the very type of virus that is now in the wild.

Our leaders initially told us masks were not necessary, and that closing the borders would be bad for combating the virus.

Police in Australia are beating people in parks for not wearing masks with clubs. Our leaders fired the very people we need to operate our supply chain for not being vaccinated.

Call it conspiracy, but you don't read novels like this.

“Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction: if it could be told, How much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold!” -Lord Byron

And we have research now that hypothesizes that Omicron incubated in mice and then jumped back to humans.

If that hypothesis is true, then we have a fine example of something running in the background in a reservoir and then Hey, Presto! suddenly appearing to be mutated specifically for humans.

If that's true, then all manner of "weird" things suddenly become both plausible and probable without any human intervention at all.

As for "lab leak"--at this point all we can do is shrug. China will NEVER allow that to be investigated if there is even the slightest possibility of being true. Period. Full stop.

Barring a whistleblower with hard evidence, we'll never know.

"If you find that [a government] has lost, destroyed, or failed to preserve any evidence whose contents or quality are material to the issues in this case, then you may draw an inference unfavorable to the [government]." West Virg. Jury Inst. 5.03

Okay. China created it. Now what? I have yet to see anyone explain what they would do with the result that is somehow beneficial.

Does knowing this help fight it? Does it help stop it? Does it help treat it? Does it help stop the spread?

Let's say China even INTENTIONALLY did it. Then what? You gonna invade China? Exactly how are you gonna make someone like Apple pull out of China when they should already be doing that NOW for other reasons?

I regard the "lab leak hypothesis" like I regard news about celebrities--worthless and unactionable.

It's simply a "boogeyman" to focus hate to create the "in group" and the "out group" for propaganda purposes.

You seem very convinced of your position. But there's a whole world of options in between "unactionable" and "invade China."

Such as?

Assuming the best, the parent asked a bunch of questions (in an admittedly dismissive and argumentative way) to try and invite some kind of response that explains what China gets out of it, and what the world does next if we could somehow prove China created the original virus.

So … let’s assume China created it. Now what?

What’s the next step and response if it was an accident?

What’s the next step and response if it was intentional?

Edit: I’m asking because I’m genuinely curious about what the next step would be. I mean, it’d satisfy my curiosity and interest in knowing the cause and origin. But then I want to figure out what the world response should be.

If you honestly dispute that there are options in foreign affairs between "do absolutely nothing" and "full scale military invasion," then our worldviews are so far apart that I don't think fighting about it on the Internet will be a good use of time for either of us.

You seem to be grossly misinterpreting my comment. I’ve said nothing at all to suggest there are no options in foreign affairs between "do absolutely nothing" and "full scale military invasion”. Where are you even getting that message?

I asked what you thought those options are since you seem to have some opinions. Or at least a few of them. Specifically.

I don’t see how I said anything that indicates I’m trying to fight on the internet about our worldviews.

> I’ve said nothing at all to suggest there are no options

Great. So you agree that there are other options in between do nothing, and an invasion.

Both you, and everyone else, agrees on that idea. So that means that you personally can think of some in between those two extremes.

There are all kinds of forms of cooperation between countries: economic, political, financial, scientific, legal, regulatory, transportation, trade, military, etc.

One option instead of full scale invasion is to cut back or attach strings to some of those forms of cooperation.

This happens all the time.

In this specific scenario, it might look like: Spend $100M upgrading Wuhan lab security and we won’t indefinitely ban travel from Wuhan Province to the US.

Or, more aggressively: Shut down the Wuhan lab or we will release tons of hacked data about corruption in the government.

Not saying that these are smart options, but you get the idea of the spectrum of options between total absolution and total aggression.

> There are all kinds of forms of cooperation between countries: economic, political, financial, scientific, legal, regulatory, transportation, trade, military, etc.

Oh, for sure. Those are certainly the broad categories of foreign policy and cooperative (and coercive) action.

I appreciate the specific ideas. I really am just curious what others’ ideas are on specific actions that could be taken if there was suddenly definitive proof tomorrow of origins.

The world is so incredible dependent on China for just about everything from the simplest tools to cars, computers and medical equipment. My guess is that it would change nothing, we would still be letting them produce everything for us because it is so much cheaper, and keep letting them grow their economy at record speeds.

Back in the day, that inconvenient time we used to refer to as “history”, there were people called “robber barons”, massive child labor, unsafe working environments &etc.

If (the collective) we just shrugged it off because we didn’t want to offend anyone do you think things would be any different today?

Few people are really answering the question, and I can only assume because everyone knows that the answer is "nothing". Western thought doesn't really work well when it's dealing with a non-Western entity that can defend itself. So while people are up in arms about the lab-leak hypothesis, they can't think past just being upset at China. We can't press China militarily without the Western way of life being threatened, we can't threaten them economically without the Western way of life being threatened and we can't blackmail them because the first two methods are nonstarters.

> Such as?

> What’s the next step

Stop trusting sources or information coming out of china, if western sources contradict it. Thats the next step. Update your informational priors, to disregard them. And then also convince other people to disregard them, and make fun of people you know, who uses those sources, if there are contradictory western sources.

> Okay. China created it. Now what? I have yet to see anyone explain what they would do with the result that is somehow beneficial.

Assuming that is true.

Are you asking what China would have done with the result of researching COVID?

Same thing anyone does with research?

Or are you asking what we do with the information as to why something bad happened?

Same things / reasons we want to know why something bad happened?

Also if it did leak from that lab, who funded that work? And how can they be held liable?

Who is they?

By the context English if you read it again is that “They” would be the people that funded such work.

The way it is actionable is, that next time when you are. dealing with the CCP, you should not trust their words and proceed with precaution.

Another action the world can take is to hold them responsible for actions. This may be in various ways like non co-operation, economic sanctions etc

Except that it’s not inactionable. If it happened once (accidentally, I’m presuming), it can happen again. It’s not like the Wuhan lab is the only source of such research. So it’s entirely legitimate to question the value of such research, especially if a leak could result in a global pandemic.

Yeah...

Q: What would happen if we deliberately did everything possible to artificially create the circumstances leading to a pandemic?

A: A pandemic

Any value of such research SHOULD be questioned.

That doesn't answer the question about what the West is supposed to do to China should the lab-leak hypothesis be true.

Well, politically speaking, sanctions would certainly be possible - if not for the virus they (hypothetically) created, then for what would in retrospect look like (in this hypothetical) a clear attempt at a cover-up.

That said: it doesn’t even need to go that far - whether the response should be punitive, it doesn’t need to be. The scientific communities in China and the west are collaborative and could negotiate agreements not to do GoF research. US groups were funneling money into China to do GoF research on coronaviruses, which could be stopped.

> what the West is supposed to do to China should the lab-leak hypothesis be true.

The west, or society, should use this as evidence of basically not trusting information from the government of china, if it is contradicted by more neutral or western sources, in the future.

So, for example, if someone is talking to you personally, and they try to use evidence from that government, and you have other evidence from western sources that contradicts it, you should just laugh in their face. Call them a mean name and ridicule them.

What do you mean it is non-actionable? If it was a lab leak we can determine what conditions lead to the leak and adopt better safety measures.

The lab leak was most likely a protocol error and without a collective awareness of the cause, the population cannot push our elected leaders to demand better safety protocols.

Who is "we"? And if it's a weapons lab, what makes you think China is going to allow geopolitical adversaries to poke around to make a more secure and safer environment? This idea works with countries that can't defend themselves against the West such as Iraq, but it's always backed by an invasion. No such option exists in the case of China, so their sovereignty will remain unsullied.

A weapons lab? I could be wrong, but I thought the scientists were doing gain of function research because it helped them get published.

If there was an international agreement to stop gain of function research, then that motivation would be gone.

Well, at the least the US could refrain from supplying further funding to the WIV, and any other virology labs.

The people of the USA. Apparently, the lab in Wuhan was performing gain of function research with funding from NIH. Now what is up for debate is if that specific research was what led to Covid-19.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-r...

Ban gain of function research because it killed 20 million people?

Your logic is like BP saying “hey it doesn’t matter how the oil spill started . . .”

It's actually even worse. It's like, "we don't care how the oil spill started, or even if there are oil spills, or even if 'oil' and 'spill' actually have any business being used together, because what use could pointing a finger have?"

> Ban gain of function research because it killed 20 million people?

And how do you plan on enforcing this on China? Or on Russia?

I'm still waiting for all the armchair geniuses to explain this one to me.

You can be ready for when some idiot does this research or not. Those are your options unless you've got some magic way to go to war with nuclear powers that I am unaware of.

All banning gain of function research does is leave you unprepared when it happens.

Unless you've got a way to enforce this on China, this is unactionable. It's simply propaganda to rile people up.

1) If it was an accident, what are you going to do? If there is anyone sane in the leadership of the lab with knowledge of how this occurred, procedures have already changed. What more do you want them to do? You're NOT going to get a gain-of-function ban without some form of strong coercion. What will it be?

2) If it was intentional (and I see no gain for China if it were), what do you plan to do? You will have to somehow do something to cause actual harm to Chinese leadership. What? China is already guilty of genocide, and all the West does is shrug.

Hell, it would almost be better if this were an intentional release if not for all the dead. The emergence of Omicron would demonstrate to the idiots worldwide who thought they could control a virus that the idea is laughable and that the virus will quickly evade whatever you think are your protection measures.

And all this ASSUMES that it actually was a lab leak, which the current hypothesis about jumping from mice back to humans decreases the Bayesian prior on dramatically. If Covid can jump that quickly from humans to mice and back, gain of function is suddenly frighteningly common. And the research into gain of function, rather than being banned, needs to be ramped up hard.

What a sadly modern philosophy... Sure, why should we learn anything from the past? Let's just adjust the past to be whatever's most convenient for today. If it's not convenient at this immediate moment right now, let's just ignore it ever happened. Those millions of people who died unnecessarily? "Boogeyman" "propaganda" for the "out group"?

I do think it would be actionable as sibling comments point out, but I would find this knowledge interesting by itself (intellectual curiosity, I think we are at the right place for this).

> focus hate

That wouldn't be me.

I would feel bad for the people who caused the leak (edit to be clear: if this is what happened, not assuming anything here). To be at the origin of such a pandemic spanning multiple years with all the repercussions must be uncomfortable.

I think you're likely to be underestimating how psychopathic / purely driven by their research to the exclusion of all other factors these people are likely to be. You're probably assuming they have a normal / social / reasonable level of empathy, which is an assumption you're extending them, not necessarily one they deserve.

I don't know and I don't assume anything. I was only talking about my own curiosity on the origins of the covid. Though I haven't seriously looked into any particular thing about this recently, including today.

That may work for domestic public opinion, but getting any international sanctions to stick on China would require a lot more than circumstantial "they won't let us investigate" evidence. International "law" (if such a thing truly exists in practice) is wonky, and rarely based on nuanced views or established facts.

Even domestically, that above quote only applies in specific cases - civil cases, or criminal cases where it can be proven evidence was actually destroyed. I'm not personally aware of clear evidence of bad-faith destruction of evidence right now on China's part. China's refusal to allow a third-party investigation would then be more similar to pleading the 5th, something even US courts are prevented from punishing.

There is another hypothesis that an immunocompromised patient who took some type of drug that induces DNA mutations in the coronavirus, similar to what Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics offers. If COVID-19 stayed in the patient's body for a long time, it would have time to cause many mutations before transmission.

There’s no shortage of people regularly inhaling carcinogens either.

> If COVID-19 stayed in the patient's body for a long time

Related article (https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/recent-ebola-outbrea...): “Recent Ebola outbreak emerged from someone infected 5 years earlier”

In that case the lack of mutations is how they estimated the lengthy dormant period.

Here's an excellent video covering the data on the mice/omicron hypothesis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH1u1GIPU2A It's by Dr. John Campbell who I just discovered and his coverage of the pandemic is by far the most informative and evidence-based that I've found so far.

Or, y'know, altered lab mice for further GoF...

> If that hypothesis is true, then we have a fine example of something running in the background in a reservoir and then Hey, Presto! suddenly appearing to be mutated specifically for humans.

Isn't this the case with all zoonotic viruses? The reservoir is all the other species? HIV was also found in monkeys. We are all affected by the reservoir because we are also part of the reservoir.

Whistleblower exist. The question is which country got the balls to prosecute. USA Biden? France Macron? Justice can only be served or enforced if there is a court operates it. When the most powerful nation own chief justices cowered to Antifa and BLM back then to even take on the fraud cases, anyone dare to take down dragon of the east. How many leaders scared of critisizing Kim or the Talebans? It is not whether China allow investigate it is no one brave enough to do a Covid Nuremberg...not even US military.

Certainly could hurt. Saying anything related to China at that moment could sound like conspiracy theory, xenophobia or racism, certainly bringing in question the reputation and professionalism of these scientists.

Now... "Scientists believed..." Considering the realm of professional scientists, beliefs have no value and should be guarded unless sufficient evidence arises. They behaved well by not announcing it.

Their behavior maybe questionable if it has had any negative impact on the awareness of the problem. But that is another matter and not something one should omit if the problem, initially, turned out the be clearly serious. AFAIK, that was not the case.

It’s anti-scientific to not consider a leak from the lab studying coronavirus in a city where a novel one appears.

Where do you think hypothesis come from? Ingenuity based on educated beliefs is a the very core of science. The above stance sounds a lot like the cult of science which has become so pervasive.

They did not behave well. Many scientists put forward the seafood market and then animal vector believes which have equal or less evidence.

This continues the trend of most* "conspiracy theories" proving to be true 6-12 months after they are dismissed by the mainstream.

Excepting completely ridiculous ones, but even those sound more and more plausible with every confirmation.

I don't think pizzagate is doing well. The thing is a Wuhan lab leak never really was a conspiracy theory. Theorizing a bat coronavirus may have come from the nearest known source of bat coronaviruses doesn't really require much conspiracy.

I find it important to note that "believed" suggests that their beliefs were based on as-of-yet insubstantial data to prove this was the case. Not that this really stopped this hypothesis from being explored in the public (even people like Trump jumped on it).

The way social media works today, I find it reasonable not to share all of your beliefs without gathering enough proof to either prove or disprove something.

I completely believe in open debate, but that's not what modern media provides: it usually goes for the most sensationalist angle it can get. And it leads to overarching reactions from the public when none is needed.

Trust the science, yeah, but don't necessarily trust scientists. They're people, same as anyone else.

Jon Stewart's take is brilliant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8&t=170s

> "The name of the disease is printed on the lab's business cards!!"

But the reason the Left in the US couldn't even consider Wuhan as the source, is because the Right (well, Trump himself) wanted to say that because it was "China's fault", that his Administration bore no responsibility for dealing with it.

Doesn't it make sense to establish a lab near a source of what you're studying? You don't establish a tropical botany lab in Antarctica.

Left/right (false binary) politics aside, doesn't it make sense to focus on finding a solution prior to focusing on prevention/blame?

If by near, you mean the same continent, then yes. The candidate bat caves for the zoonotic origins of sars-cov-2 are spread out over east and southeast Asia, and are nowhere near Wuhan.

The lab received funding from the US, and GoF research happens all over the world, so the China bad narrative overlaps quite poorly with the lab leak theory. The proper reaction to the lab leak theory would be more along the lines of reconsidering the cost-benefit analysis on gain of function research, where a single leak can lead to tens of millions dead and perhaps more next time.

> doesn't it make sense to focus on finding a solution prior to focusing on prevention/blame?

Why not both? One reason to hurry the hell up is that evidence may be destroyed and the people who know something may be silenced or disappeared.

People often forget what entity coined and pushed the term conspiracy theory.They only see the word in mass-media attached to individuals or groups and take it for granted.

Even if theories said by 'legitimate'(/actual) conspiracy groups are false, that doesn't mean we're so quick to dismiss a discussion about it.Often the discussion itself is more important about the truth discussed, and in some cases people quickly change their minds when presented facts.Same goes in reverse: you cannot call someone a conspiracy-nut when you cannot disprove his claims and more over his claims gradually become accepted by society.

This is why the general public has issues with such persons or such big claims: they are not capable(or willing) of thinking some people are capable of such malice, and they're willing to dismiss even a discussion because: 1.it's uncomfortable; 2.the truth is hard to reach; both unreasonable arguments to shutdown a discussion, let alone charge someone (which in US this apparently has re-surfaced). A society becoming so intolerable of listening to such people is the first symptom of societal collapse.You can call this a conspiracy, or just check a history book. The difference is that we can somewhat verify information more quickly now, as long as people keep their innate filter on and stop consuming garbage.

What happened was the best case scenario. China has highly plausible deniability and was the first and possibly hardest hit victim of the whole pandemic. Further, there is virtually no way China has benefited from the pandemic in a way that would make a premeditated leak plausible. If this thing was China’s fault, it seems most likely that it was accidental.

Imagine if this thing had leaked out of Iran, Israel, or Russia with hardish proof. We’d potentially be looking at world war right now.

I have read this (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...) about the origins of Covid and one phrase that called my attention was:

"Dr. Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, said that from the very first reports of a novel bat-related coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, it took him “a nanosecond or a picosecond” to consider a link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Only two other labs in the world, in Galveston, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were doing similar research. “It’s not a dozen cities,” he said. “It’s three places.”"

I don't know who is right.

A lab that does bat related research and is located where bats have traditionally shown these viruses, it's hard to determine cause and effect.

"When I first heard about the Arctic, I thought about that Arctic ice research institute in a nano second. There are only two places. There are not a dozen places, it's two places."

>A lab that does bat related research and is located where bats have traditionally shown these viruses

But it isn't - the bats carrying coronaviruses live 600+ miles away. Wuhan was actually used as a control in a paper on bat coronaviruses as a population that wasn't exposed to them.

Ah didn't know, do you have a map with all the bat viruses say last 20 years in the wild + Wuhan? Couldn't find one, perhaps I don't have the right Google keywords.

PaulGraham hypothesized this way earlier in a tweet. But the important realization to me was that not all riches are the same. Not all rich people have access to the most important information. Certainly being rich in tech sector is powerful.

The people in charge of the investigation should be totally independent from these scientists.

That would otherwise be an obvious conflict of interest.

Hopefully they will be as independent as the credit rating agencies are from the financial institutions they evaluate...

So what makes it so difficult to prove that a virus is not naturally occurring? Because that would be the starting point to all this and without proof this would continue to be theory without any actually basis and point.

My only two thoughts on this:

Think of the consequences of finding slam-dunk evidence that a government was aware of, led to, and covered up the creation of a world-impacting virus. Either intentionally, or unintentionally.

Think of the consequences of suggesting so without slam-dunk data.

I figure that's the calculus that went through leaders minds. I just didn't like it when early on, people suggested reasonable if improbable (given the lack of high quality data) hypotheses, and major journals published opinions/letters saying "if you think this, you are a conspiracy theorist". talk about framing a debate!

The connectedness of the earth's inhabitants including microscopic beings is in full effect and spotlighted by Covid. Regardless of where the Covid strain originated, we can't deny how closely linked every being on earth is. I ruminate on this known and cliche fact, but I struggle to pin point why. I know we are all connected and its obvious we share one planet. I know we all share distant relatives and descended from simpler earth-life eons ago. But living through the connectedness of Covid is both frightening and enlightening.

Is there a way, outside full transparency from China in some "perestroika" type situation which seems highly unlikely, we will ever really know for sure?

It's also possible that the Chinese authorities themselves don't even know exactly what happened. Despite their authoritarian surveillance state they aren't omniscient.

Massive push for gag orders and having to sign in red ink over “severe punishment” for discussing anything related to COVID across the entire science community in China? Every virus related paper must be approved by CCP before publishing it or they’ll face severe consequences.

I have by default zero trust in CCP. So they would need to go out of their way to disprove it. Even then, I would question forgery and fake made up data to show to the world. Ethics goes out of the window when it’s party’s reputation.

It's easy to make sure you don't know what you don't want to know if you don't go looking for it.

To give a recent Western example, here is a story in two acts:

"An Intelligence Report Will Say UK Spy Agencies Found No Evidence Of Russian State Interference In The Outcome Of The Brexit Referendum"[0]

"Boris Johnson refuses Russia report's demand to probe 'meddling' in Brexit vote"[1]

[0] https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertonardelli/intelligence-report...

[1] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/breaking-boris-johnso...

As much as I hate it, plausible deniability is a common and effective Standard Operating Procedure for many organizations and governments.

"Two basic rules of government: Never look into anything you don't have to. And never set up an enquiry unless you know in advance what its findings will be." - Sir Humphrey Appleby

We will know for sure after CCP falls, just like we learned many of USSR secrets after it fell (for example it’s anthrax leak in the 70ies)

At this point I'm not sure the CCP will fall anytime soon, they managed to implement capitalism even better than many Western European countries (they still lag the US in that respect, but catching fast). CCP will fall only if capitalism as we know it falls.

These article is full of “this one scientist did something” and extrapolate it to “all western scientists are bad and holding out information” without considering those same scientists didn't think it was plausible. You can't take one scientist's belief and extrapolate to all scientists. The person who wrote this article is just trying to do this for shock value.

The New Yorker article gives a much more detailed look at the evidence for both natural origins and lab leak.

“ The Mysterious Case of the COVID-19 Lab-Leak Theory”

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-mysterious-ca...

The science community played ball because government pays their checks. The problem they were trying to avoid is unemployment. You can't hold it against them for protecting their fundamental interests. They were acting so as to protect science only to the extent that people would no longer be able to receive funding for being honest with the public.

I think many don't fear unemployment, they fear loss of access (funding). Science isn't cheap. Proper facilities are important. Good virologists may not be independently wealthy (and they need good colleagues).

I'm sure many would continue their work unemployed, but that too would be part of the fear. If a leak can happen in a BSL4 facility and you know some would rather continue their work in their basement than give it up entirely, that alone should terrify you/everyone.

Related interesting info, well worth a read:

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

I highly recommend the book “Viral” by Chan and Ridley to anyone curious about this pandemic’s origin.

Dear HNers, please consult the post history of OPs account. It is a newish account which has been used daily to post controversial ideological and political flame baits, mostly related to COVID conspiracies, pandemic denialism and low-key misinformation.

If I'm not mistaken, this comment of yours is itself a violation of HN guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29902131

welcome to the bottom of the page! You're in good company though, we have tea and snacks.

Unfortunately HN users are not somehow special and immune to flame bait. This type of content would dominate the front page if it weren't manually down-weighed.

Meanwhile, truly technically interesting projects like clip guided diffusion and GLIDE have zero coverage or discussion here. It's a shame but the larger the community the more topics tend toward the mean.

Can you explain why you think this telegraph article is part of a conspiracy theory?

The scientist in question believes there is a 50% chance of it being a lab leak, according to the article text (down a bit from their initial estimate). The scientists didn't believe focusing on a debate over this possibility was worthwhile, knowing many would focus on this possibility instead of discussing actual action. Just as predicted, Trump, Fox, and the UK equivalent, the Telegraph, duly focus on the possibility of a lab leak and consistently argue against action. They say over and over again it will soon be over, it won't really do much harm, etc. Trump, Fox and the Telegraph are consistently proved wrong over and over again. Hacker news libertarian crypto idiots lap it up, and literally use the word "sheeple" to discuss everyone who's not part of their bizarre cult.

The problem with lying isn't that your lie won't work, it will work to some extent. Heck it can even do good! I'm sure in this case it did turn down the temperature momentarily, which may or may not have been good, depending on who you ask.

But no, the real problem is that lying spends trust very quickly, trust that you need later, for instance when there is a vaccine on the horizon. Most humans have a baked in BS detector, that stops taking repeat liars seriously. This is a good thing.

It’s interesting to think about this from a Bayesian perspective. What is the posterior probability we expect the virus to have originated from a Wuhan lab, given the outbreak happened in Wuhan?

You can't disprove the existence of unicorns. But that doesn't mean they exist or we should discuss the matter or make decisions based on them being real.

That's why science cannot lead. Scientific truth is not political governance .. human groups live in relativism and noise.

Trust the science and experts, huh? What a joke.

A genocidal totalitarian regime that harvests organs from non-violent political prisoners may be responsible for the worst accident in human history and the people we count on for the unbiased truth are covering it up.

I wonder what they'd do for more funding.

Being called anti-science is starting to look like a compliment.

And their's more:

>Chan said there had been trepidation among some scientists about publicly discussing the lab leak hypothesis for fear that their words could be misconstrued or used to support racist rhetoric about how the coronavirus emerged.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory...

Ironic because Chan has been a media crusade about it. Every news org seems willing to give her air time even though she's turned up zilch. Now chiming that the media is suppressing is the cry of someone who has staked their career on an argument they can't win it's merits. If she (or anyone) had some viable proof then it would be guaranteed to be splashed on every front page.

I think you’re mistaking a book tour for a media crusade.

relevant other sources

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27367394

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K78jqx9fx2I

Somewhere inside a document somewhere there is going to be a forgotten cursor.

https://twitter.com/BillyBostickson/status/14811938000728350...

So, did it leak from a Chinese lab? If so, why isn't China being held economically and ethically liable? Why do they continue stonewalling any investigation and suffer zero consequences?

On one hand, China hasn’t faced ethical or economic consequences for literal concentration camps so why would this be different? On the other hand - would you really seek to punish an entire nation for the (supposed) actions of a few careless scientists?

> literal concentration camps

I've seen this repeated hundreds of times, approximately 0 times with proof. Can I find these camps somewhere? Are there photos? As it stands, a casual reader must conclude this is part of a propaganda campaign vilifying China.

I didn’t think I had to cite sources, since it’s been incredibly well covered but if you want to get started down a dark road here’s a link to the top hit on duckduckgo https://nypost.com/2020/08/28/chinas-260-concentration-camps...

The general lack of action by governments and corporations means a casual reader must conclude nobody with any power cares, since they’re all getting rich off china.

That article doesn't say much to me. They've found... buildings? And how do they know what goes on in them?

It's mostly witness accounts from people they claim have been in there, frequently people the Chinese government says are terrorists. There's a natural friction there which makes it clear that there's definitely a group unhappy with the Chinese government (and vice-versa), but it's very hard to not just devolve into outrage porn while looking around for what goes on.

Respectfully, the coverage is good but figuring out what is true from what is essentially (biased, one-sided) eyewitness accounts and blurry satellite images is not easy. I'm not doubting there is something going on, but I'm looking to know what precisely it is (holistically, not from an outrage perspective) and for that this article just doesn't suffice.

Because mistakes happen. The correct course of action would be to help them ensure it doesn't heppen again, with procedures, audits, etc.

The headline should be: "Everyone asking if this could have been created in a lab was ignored or ridiculed in 2020 by the same scientists who now look like complete buffoons"

are there any articles interviewing relevant staff from the wuhan lab, in the last 12 months?

have they issued any statements?

Yes, they said it’s not them /s

would hurt... their careers. I presume.

Unforgiveable.

Wimps.

Feb 2020

You know what hurt more? The divide that sprouted from the obfuscation of the truth and its pursuit.

> “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular”.

You know what else causes unnecessary harm to science, public trust and health policy? Repeated and condescending lies and gas-lighting from those in charge.

so also does the firehose of conspiracy theory's, misinformation and lunatic fringe that appears to be the overtly noisy minority on all forms of media these days.

Deliberate misinformation directly from your government meant to control the reaction of the masses is orders of magnitude more dangerous than your right-wing uncle meme-ing on Facebook.

Not even close.

Not sure I agree.

Its harder for Gov to keep a secret than it is for a facebook group to maintain a lie.

much much harder.

And there are various degrees of accountability to every level of a Gov. Not as much as I'd like and not as reliable as i'd like it to be, but its there.

there is zero, zilch, no accountability for facebook liars.

I'm going to jump in here, because I wanted to make a point about conspiracy theorists, too.

What pisses me off most about this is that now it's so much easier for a conspiracy theorist to believe in government cover-ups of big, important things. One of my family members is way into all this stuff, and next time I tell him cancer isn't cured because how would all the experts across the globe all simultaneously keep that a secret--he's gonna point at this.

People can be stupid and believe really crazy ideas, but let's not have governments and experts lying to the people they represent.

The problem is that the lab leak was dismissed as a conspiracy theory as are many of the things that have now come to pass, e.g.: ineffective vaccines, side effects.

Pair that with the disinformation coming from once trusted institutions, e.g.: 5 vs 10 day quarantine, sending health care workers to work while still positive.

It's no wonder people are giving more credence to these fringe groups. The government has nobody to blame but itself for such poor messaging.

But don't you see the conflicting positions here...

on one hand The Gov and bureaucracies in general have ham-fisted the response. This surprises no one really. we all know that Governments can be awful at these sorts of things.

yet somehow they have masterminded the development and release of a contagious bio weapon and done it in damn near perfected secrecy?

How can someone hold both those statements with equal weight in their minds at the same time.

does. not. compute.

The "Government" is not one monolithic being. They are composed of various people/orgs with varying capabilities. Some are incompetent and some are competent at the work they do.

thats exactly why its so ridiculously hard to keep a secret. its made up of thousands of people, all with their own personalities, objectives, desires, beliefs and competencies.

Manhattan Project. Tonkin. For a long time, everything Snowden proved.

It's doable, and has been done.

And is being done.

Ok, but can you please not post unsubstantive comments or flamebait to HN? Your comment here is low-information/high-indignation. We're looking for the other way around.

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

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

I can't believe how stupid these people are.

The "Torygraph"? This newspaper has always been shrill semi-Fox News tripe.

Probably when Trump started to brag about it, saying that "he knew" it came from China, he was leaking some CIA information that he couldn't talk about it. Unfortunately it transformed the issue in a political issue and therefore people couldn't talk freely about it without the risk to be canceled.

So for anyone reading this and seeing other comments about gain of function. The first thing you should realize is that the people here commenting about gain of function have no idea what they are talking about. They are completely clueless about micro biology and have never read any of the published papers that were labeled gain of function. For someone naive you would get the impression from the news that the research was a slam dunk obvious case of gain of function. But if you know some biology and actually looked at the papers then you know this really fuzzy and ambiguous and really does depend on how you define "gain of function".

I’m curious if anyone has investigated the recent leaks from Project Veritas (https://www.projectveritas.com/news/military-documents-about...). It suggests once again, that the NIH/NIAID grant to EcoHealth Alliance was in support of gain of function research at WIV involving SARS-like viruses. As a reminder, EcoHealth Alliance’s president, Peter Daszak, is a listed author on various WIV papers that explicitly describe gain of function research, and was suspiciously chosen by the WHO as the only US representative in the WHO’s visit to WIV in early 2021.

From this new leak of documents, DARPA’s rejection of the NIH proposal (https://assets.ctfassets.net/syq3snmxclc9/5OjsrkkXHfuHps6Lek...) specifically calls out that the proposed NIH research seems to be Gain of Function but the proposal doesn’t admit it (DARPA is effectively accusing the NIH of falsely describing their research). This is exactly what Professor Ebright previously accused NIH and NIAID of, which is systematically avoiding the frameworks meant to prevent dangerous GoF research (https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/26/how-anthony-fauci-sy...). And it is also what Senator Rand Paul, among others, accused Dr Fauci of in past senate hearings.

If true, this would be insane. Covering up the leak, hiding early treatments, killing millions of us. And I'm not implicating CCP in this, those docs point to USA origination.

At the moment I feel like it all just fits too easily. So skeptical about whether or not it's a convenient plant.

Some of the previously identified papers listing Peter Daszak as an author were already damning, as they explicitly describe creating infectious clones of SARS-like (SL) viruses that can spread easily (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4936131/). The related grants are all still searchable and listed on the official government websites:

> Recently, another bat SL-CoV strain, SHC014, has been demonstrated to use human ACE2 by the construction of an infectious cDNA clone (12). Furthermore, animal infection experiments indicated that SL-CoV WIV1 and SHC014 could replicate efficiently and caused low pathogenesis in ACE2 transgenic mice (12, 13). The fact that the native bat SL-CoVs could use human ACE2 without any mutations indicates a high risk of interspecies transmission for these and similar coronaviruses that may exist in natural reservoirs.

I am not sure how Fauci has managed to avoid accountability so far - I guess his aggressive behavior at Senate hearings has worked. But this new leak suggests that another government agency (DARPA) also accused the NIH/NIAID of conducting gain of function research in violation of the law and in violation of basic ethics, all using taxpayer money. If true and not a plant, it might just be enough to break through the lack of attention around this.

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