Early ‘lab-grown’ Covid virus found in sample lends weight to Wuhan theory | Hacker News Reader

Early ‘lab-grown’ Covid virus found in sample lends weight to Wuhan theory

telegraph.co.uk

399 pointsforthelose344 comments

http://web.archive.org/web/20220209201918/https://www.telegr...

As the underlying Twitter thread points out[1], there's a significant confounding factor here: the sample is from 2019 but might have been processed in 2020, at which point the Chinese government's (public) timeline for COVID's spread admits of the possibility of contamination.

I don't think that completely deflates the evidence here. But as a layperson, I would like to understand the probability of happening to find COVID in an Antarctic soil sample in 2019 versus the probability that someone accidentally contaminated the sample with early samples in early 2020. Put another way: my (lay) intuition doesn't understand why there would be COVID in Antarctic soil, whereas it does understand how contamination might happen in a lab that was actively processing samples of COVID.

[1]: https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1491297806115807233

As a molecular biologist. I would say it‘s probably contamination of the samples. The confidence comes from the other contaminating sequences found in the same samples; the hamster DNA (and monkey was the other one I think). Both are routinely used as cells lines in biology labs for viral research (not 100% on the viral research bit, but makes sense). The author‘s conclusion that it was COVID grown in a cell line and it contaminated the samples next to them on the sequencing chip is plausible. This kind of contamination is rare, but not very rare. As the author points out, there are multiple points of failure that could have caused it. Each unlikely but plausible.

And that rare contamination would happen exactly with the most dangerous (at least world impact-wise), in decades? Still plausible?

It's a little hard to informally assign probability in cases like. We wouldn't be hearing about this if it weren't SARS-CoV-2, so what are the odds that (if it is contaminated) the sample we're hearing about in this case would be contaminated with SARS-CoV-2? Pretty much 100%.

Thank you for the context.

I don’t want to ask you to speculate out of the blue, but if you feel qualified: do you think it’s possible that COVID originated outside of a lab but that China has lied about the timeline to avoid embarrassment? That’s always struck me as a plausible scenario, one that seems to fall by the wayside in these conversations.

How could outside a lab be more embarrassing than a lab-leak? There would be nothing to blame China about an outside the lab scenario.

Depends on interpretation: one infers possible security embarrassment (or exposure of a secret), the other potentially total incompetence at failure to ID/notice/contain (or otherwise manage). Depending on which members of the Politburo care more about what perception, may in fact mold towards which one they feel more "comfortable admitting to" if the evidence is ambiguous.

From what I've read, they NEVER admit to anything.

Mostly true, but there is always nagging truths that surface at which point denial becomes worse for them. It all depends on what they are allowed to get away with; if other states balk vs capitulate, there are more rounds of diplomatic chess to go through.

They're denying the lab leak too.

But if it turns out that, say, there was an isolated outbreak in some rural area a few months earlier known to the authorities who covered up because they thought they had it under control (whilst also knowing it was new and SARS-like and worthy of study at their coronavirus lab) that would be hugely damaging for the Chinese government even if it spread naturally

Yeah, this is the kind of scenario I was thinking of: the PRC covers up all kinds of petty mistakes and refuses to acknowledge them even in the face of overwhelming evidence and the potential for exculpation from much more damaging theories.

But again, it’s speculation on my part.

I honestly don’t know. The molecular evidence suggests that COVID evolved in the wild. It’s either a natural spillover or a lab leak. But its definitely not a lab made virus. China is secret by default, maybe they don’t know if it’s a lab leak but are covering their tracks just in case it is.

Either way the molecular evidence doesn’t incriminate them. So it is frustrating how people buy into the political arguments not realising just how good molecular arguments are.

Sorry but what molecular evidence suggests it evolved in the wild, exactly? We haven’t identified a single predecessor mutation between the original bat Coronavirus and SARS-CoV-2, nor have we identified infections from the time period that are geographically between the habitat of the carrier bats and Wuhan. No one is disputing that it’s based on a bat coronavirus, but the thesis is that the bay coronavirus was modified in the lab and then leaked.

Nah, lab modifications have very obvious fingerprints - not of which exist in any of the samples. Separately from that, we've found nearly every mutation that was given as evidence of manipulation arising naturally in other populations. [Polypasic FCS: https://twitter.com/MichaelWorobey/status/147154651328101990..., ACE2 Receptor Binding is ancestral and evolvable trait: https://mobile.twitter.com/tylernstarr/status/14892571858255..., Natural insertions at s1/s2 cleavage: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098222... site, etc. etc.]

Who's actually claiming lab manipulation any more?

Isn’t some of the so-called gain of function research (and I do mean in the broadest sense) effectively controlled evolution over many cycles such that it evolves the correct mutations? And though I know the paper was retracted, what about those HIV-1 inserts?

Either way, empirically we have no conclusive evidence of natural origin (of the stages between the original bat coronavirus and the original Wuhan variant) nor of a lab leak. One also does not preclude the other; a virus of natural origin could still leak from a lab that studies such viruses.

> Isn’t some of the so-called gain of function research (and I do mean in the broadest sense) effectively controlled evolution over many cycles such that it evolves the correct mutations?

Yeah, this is called passaging but it's very unlikely (nearly impossible) that it was used here -- you'd have to start with a very close predecessor, much closer than Ratg13, and the work in cell cultures usually ends up deleting the FCS since it's not a very stable mutation unless being actively selected for. So to perform the subculturing necessary to gain all of the various mutations that set sars cov2 apart would surely destroy it's ability to infect humans. (https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210208/Furin-cleavage-SA...)

> And though I know the paper was retracted, what about those HIV-1 inserts?

That the paper was retracted should tell you enough, but what was missed at the time is that ratg13, which was unambiguously of natural origin also has the same alleged HIV-1 inserts (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7033698/). So it's pretty clear that the 'HIV-1 inserts' are just a common feature of ratg13-like coronaviruses.

> Either way, empirically we have no conclusive evidence of natural origin (of the stages between the original bat coronavirus and the original Wuhan variant) nor of a lab leak.

Right, but this is actually strongly suggestive of natural origin. We know what lab manipulation looks like and sars cov2 has none of these signs - in this case the absence of evidence actually is instructive.

Thanks for the explanation.

There is a hypothesis that the virus was modified in a lab by passaging it through transgenic animals that had more human-like respiratory systems. So that could account for its ability to infect humans. I don't necessarily believe that really happened (seems far fetched), but it's there any way to completely disprove that hypothesis?

I wasn't familiar with that theory, so leaning on others here (I'm taking out the cites since it really muddles the readability but they're in the source file). This all makes sense to me;

> A specific laboratory escape scenario involves accidental infection in the course of serial passage of a SARSr-CoV in common laboratory animals such as mice. However, early SARSCoV-2 isolates were unable to infect wild-type mice. Although murine models are useful for studying infection in vivo and testing vaccines, they often result in mild or atypical disease in hACE2 transgenic mice. These findings are inconsistent with a virus selected for increased pathogenicity and transmissibility through serial passage through susceptible rodents. Although SARS-CoV-2 has since been engineered and mouse-adapted by serial passage, specific mutations in the spike protein, including N501Y, are necessary for such adaptation in mice. Notably, N501Y has arisen convergently in multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in the human population, presumably being selected to increase ACE2 binding affinity.

> If SARS-CoV-2 resulted from attempts to adapt a SARSr-CoV for study in animal models, it would likely have acquired mutations like N501Y for efficient replication in that model, yet there is no evidence to suggest such mutations existed early in the pandemic. Both the low pathogenicity in commonly used laboratory animals and the absence of genomic markers associated with rodent adaptation indicate that SARS-CoV-2 is highly unlikely to have been acquired by laboratory workers in the course of viral pathogenesis or gain-of function experiments.

Basically if you wanted to study sars cov2 in transgenic mice with adapted hACE2 receptors, there are obvious mutations that you would engineer into the virus to make it more stable and pathogenic. None of these mutations existed in the first samples. But importantly, when covid was spreading in humans, these same mutations naturally appeared through convergent evolution in several variants. Contrary to many claims, the virus wasn't close to being optimized for pathogenicity which would've been the ostensible purpose of GoF research. It really "acts" like it was recently passed to an intermediate host, then fairly quickly began to infect humans.

[https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00991-0.pdf]

I do mot understand the assertion that one would "see evidence of lab tampering". No-see-ums are a thing.

The strongest version of the lab-created theory (in my view) is that they were studying coronaviruses / performing GoF research to understand the danger of coronaviruses. In that case, there would be zero point to using less efficient inserts or using esoteric seamless recombinant techniques to hide restriction sites.

The mere fact that we can make genetic modifications that are well hidden doesn't add any information to the story since there's no evidence at all of anyone in the lab using those techniques and the resulting virus has a bunch of strange mutations that both made it more pathogenic in some respects and much less in others -- but the hard to predict ones made it more pathogenic and the easily missed ones made it less pathogenic.

It's not solely the presence/absence of restriction sites that would indicate a lab-engineered virus. All scientists are basically using the same set of tools in terms of computation models and molecular techniques -- so when you see a spike protein that is "optimized for ACE2 binding" as many breathless people claimed -- you can tell that it actually isn't all that well optimized, and the genetics / stats package that would have been used to design the variant actually indicate several better options if you were trying to achieve high-efficiency ACE2 binding [see the discussion paragraph here: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/JVI.00127-20]

There are other indicators as well -- the additional proline in the FCS makes no sense from an engineering standpoint since it could very easily corrupt nearby helices, block the protease activity, or mess up binding through misfolding. Any competent engineer would have used a different amino acid there if they were trying to find a spacer -- or would have added another arginine to the beginning of the sequence to roughly double the odds of cleavage.

So you have to simultaneously believe they're very competent at the molecular engineering needed to silently design viruses, but incompetent enough to use inefficient inserts and miss obvious, readily predictable areas to make it more pathogenic. Until we find a precursor virus or a whistleblower, we're down to weighing probabilities and I'd put "engineering using seamless recombination" very, very low on the list.. like below 0.01%.

>The strongest version of the lab-created theory (in my view) is that they were studying coronaviruses / performing GoF research to understand the danger of coronaviruses. In that case, there would be zero point to using less efficient inserts or using esoteric seamless recombinant techniques to hide restriction sites.

I disagree. Your assumption that an engineer eill always go for the "most optimum" solution every time is flawed. If I have a more pessimum way to get 90% of the way there in hand, and need to wait two weeks for the most optimum component, I'll go with what gets me a result to get an interim datapoint to see if I'm even barking up the right tree.

>The mere fact that we can make genetic modifications that are well hidden doesn't add any information to the story since there's no evidence at all of anyone in the lab using those techniques and the resulting virus has a bunch of strange mutations that both made it more pathogenic in some respects and much less in others -- but the hard to predict ones made it more pathogenic and the easily missed ones made it less pathogenic.

Zhengli had extensive experience with those methods, picked up from years working with Ralph Baric and as someone who trains others, I assure you, you teach what you know works, and a student will generally build off of what their teacher knows for a fact works. You use the tools you have around you, and I'll wager they had a bunch more inventory from that work than otherwise. Do you happen to have copies of records of digestion kit purchases from around the time in question, and the ability to cross-check with WIV inventory records? If your answer is no, you have no business trying to rule it out as a possibility.

>It's not solely the presence/absence of restriction sites that would indicate a lab-engineered virus. All scientists are basically using the same set of tools in terms of computation models and molecular techniques -- so when you see a spike protein that is "optimized for ACE2 binding" as many breathless people claimed -- you can tell that it actually isn't all that well optimized, and the genetics / stats package that would have been used to design the variant actually indicate several better options if you were trying to achieve high-efficiency ACE2 binding [see the discussion paragraph here: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/JVI.00127-20]

Explain to me why the FCS codes for the motif most common in human beings if it's evolutionary route was through intermediate hosts, and not predicated on the fact that most laboratory tools are going to have a human centric bias to them (humanized mice, digestions being made for tge human genome benefitting from increased acailibility based off of economies of scale, thereby satisfying all prerequisite assumptions of how they got there by "bored stocker of lab does what they always do)? Also explain to me why the intermediate virus was not only not sampled earlier, but even now still comes to light out of concerns of cross-contamination? Given, if you went ahead and lined up some samples on a machine with a known tendency misalign, I can't account for not putting buffer space between samples, but in a way this just solidifies the lab origin even more. People make mistakes handling highly pathogenic material. Hence the absurd level of risk with GoF, and the warranted not putting the case down til an exhaustive accounting of what went on is arrived at with adverse inference being warranted at continued attempts to mislead or further muddy the waters.

>So you have to simultaneously believe they're very competent at the molecular engineering needed to silently design viruses, but incompetent enough to use inefficient inserts and miss obvious, readily predictable areas to make it more pathogenic. Until we find a precursor virus or a whistleblower, we're down to weighing probabilities and I'd put "engineering using seamless recombination" very, very low on the list.. like below 0.01%.

You're acting like people are thinking this was a specifically engineered bioweapon. I ain't one of em. Research is more organic. It's called "The Art" for a reason. I'm 100% comfortable this is an outcome of someone with the best intentions doing and experiment, getting more of a hot tamale than they bargained for, not paying enough attention during handling or disposal, and then having a bad time. This is the case no virologist period wants to be considered. That they are human, prone to mistakes that can cause lethal outbreaks, and that the rest of society should just let the entire thing rest because it was just nature, (with or without a guiding hand).

I'm sorry, I don't buy it. Find me an intermediate host that doesn't have "lab animal" or "GoF" subject written all over it, and we can talk.

Yuri Deigin did a write up: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7744920/

Ptoject E.V.I.D.E.N.C.E is still a mountain of circumstantial evidence that are in favor of availability of motive, means, and opportunity. Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli, and their research students would have had more than enough reasons to actually do digestions that don't leave restriction sites. When you're out to create a virus to base a vaccine off of, or to quantify a risk factor relating to making a zoonotic jump you don't want your tools of the trade leaving kerf lines that'll interfere with immunological response formation.

There's a couple other articles that have been written up by prominent bioethicists, and there's evidence of malfeasance in terms of funding GoF research indirectly.

The case stands. Preponderance of evidence warrants further investigation. Not the opposite. If it were truly so unlikely, why was the last decade filled with such interest in being able to do seamless inserts and viral reconstruction?

No, no, no. I'm sorry. Just. Not. Buying. It.

There's little question that most of SARS-CoV-2's genome evolved naturally in bats, especially the spike given its close identity to BANAL-52. I believe that SARS-CoV-2 is very unlikely to have been derived in a laboratory from any known virus, including RaTG13. I'm not sure how you'd distinguish between a novel naturally-evolved virus and a laboratory chimera of two such viruses, though.

The WIV had the biggest program in the world to sample novel coronaviruses from nature. In DEFUSE, they sought DARPA funding to make chimeras of such viruses, with novel FCSs. That proposal was rejected for safety concerns, but we don't know what work continued with other funders.

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...

Your links above support the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 is natural. They don't exclude that it's unnatural, though.

I mean, sure anything's possible -- but WIV had the biggest program to sample coronaviruses because there are so many coronaviruses in China and they've had epidemics caused by zoonotic spillover in the past. The reason there were funding proposals of all sorts to study bat coronaviruses is because literally everyone in virology was terrified of a bat coronavirus like covid19. I don't think "the west" fully appreciates how much SARS changed research in China.

> I'm not sure how you'd distinguish between a novel naturally-evolved virus and a laboratory chimera of two such viruses, though.

BLAST sequencing against known viruses would do the trick. (https://www.viprbrc.org/brc/blast.spg?method=ShowCleanInputP...)

You could come up with a conspiracy theory to say they were hiding their most dangerous pathogens as part of a defense program so we wouldn't have access to the sequences of the progenitor viruses -- but the fact that we had staff helping in WIV and literally no intelligence has come out to that effect blunts the theory in my view.

I'm 99%:1% confident it was natural spillover and probably 75%:25% that no lab had ever seen the virus before the first people got sick.

Sars cov2 was a bat virus -- so it needed an intermediate mammal host with human-like ace2 receptors to spread to humans. So WIV would have had to have developed this unnaturally, which we would be able to "see" in the DNA or it happened naturally. Those two things don't seem remotely 50:50 likely to me.

By "two such viruses", I meant two novel, unpublished viruses. I don't think that requires any great conspiracy from the WIV, just the normal delays between sampling, sequencing, and publishing. RaTG13 was sampled in 2013, but the full genome wasn't published until after the pandemic.

And interesting odds. In your p = 24% case where it's natural spillover but a lab had seen the virus before people got sick, are you assuming that a researcher got infected with a naturally-evolved virus, whether directly from an animal on a sampling trip or from a culture in the lab? It's hard to see why they'd be concealing their prior knowledge of the virus otherwise.

I'd personally bet maybe 20% lab-manipulated (by a DEFUSE-like path), 50% naturally-evolved but accidentally released by researchers, 30% true natural. I'm less sure that SARS-CoV-2 needed a non-bat animal host given BANAL-52's spike, though that leaves the question of how BANAL-52 got so closely-adapted to human ACE2 rather mysterious. (I wonder if SARS-CoV-2 but with the BANAL-52 spike would infect humanized mice? I guess that's exactly the kind of curiosity that might have started this pandemic...)

As to the abundance of coronaviruses, I assume you're aware that the closest bat viruses have been collected far from Wuhan, and Dr. Shi herself didn't expect spillover in Wuhan:

> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201206204844/https://www.scien...

SARS-1 emerged far from the bat caves too, but wildlife trafficking there was quickly identified as the likely conduit. I understand there's some debate as to whether civet cats (and not some other animal) were actually the proximal host for SARS-1, but that's still much stronger evidence of zoonosis than we have for SARS-CoV-2.

> cov2 was a bat virus -- so it needed an intermediate mammal host with human-like ace2 receptors to spread to humans.

My understanding is that bats like the chinese horseshoe have perfectly suitable ACE2 receptors for getting infected by sars-cov-2 as-is, and that the main reason for wanting an intermediate host is to explain how the virus got in contact with humans because humans don't really interface physically with bats, but I'm totally out of my depths here. The article linked below makes it sound like the virus can infect a wide variety of mammals, including bats and humans, with or without the now famous furin cleavage site, so it doesn't seem like the smoking gun lab-leak proponents like to brandish it as.

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200420/ACE2-receptor-exp...

This closely mirrors my probabilities;

https://medium.com/advances-in-biological-science/explained-...

It's extremely unlikely that the jump was from bats -> humans just based on how 'optimized' the ACE2 binding and furin cleavage sites are. It's theoretically possible that it happened at some time in the past, and then serial passage in humans led to the more 'optimized' virus but that seems pretty unlikely too.

Are you aware of BANAL-20-52's spike? That's a bat virus, and it's only 16 AA substitutions (plus no FCS) away from SARS-CoV-2:

https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1440309655087902720?la...

I've seen no explanation for why the spike of a bat virus would be so well-adapted to human ACE2, but apparently that one is. That's an argument against the need for an intermediate host, whether that host is natural (e.g. a non-bat wild animal) or not (e.g. hACE2 mice in the lab).

and labs are incapable of combining naturally sourced mutations.

What do you mean by "probably"? My understanding is that it's unquestionably contamination, since no one is suggesting the virus was actually in Antarctic soil. The only question is the provenance of the contaminating sample, the likely possibilities being:

1. Virus cultured in a lab, in monkey or hamster cells but with virus originating from a human patient. This wouldn't be evidence of lab origin of the virus. It would still show that China is concealing important facts about the early origin of the pandemic though, since the recovered viral genome is among the most ancestral (closest to the closest-known bat viruses) known. It should thus have been scientifically noteworthy enough to publish, but that genome was unpublished until these Hungarians dug it out.

2. Virus cultured as part of a scientific experiment, before the beginning of the pandemic. That would be the "smoking gun", but nothing yet allows us to distinguish between this and case (1). Sangon Biotech's customer records might answer this, since they know when the sample was sequenced and what other customers' samples were sequenced around the same time. Those aren't too easy to get, though. I've seen speculation that Illumina's cloud services may contain significant information within reach of American subpoena, but no concrete action.

Other comments speculate that an infected lab technician could explain the reads, but that wouldn't explain the hamster and monkey DNA.

I was just hedging my statements really. The rest of what yoy say addresses other important considerations well so I don’t have anything else to add.

particularly the end of README.md:

"On Feb-8-2022, I e-mailed the Chinese authors of the paper to ask about the sample deletion and restoration. They e-mailed back almost immediately. They confirmed what they had told Istvan: they had sequenced the samples with Sangon Biotech (Shanghai) after extracting the DNA in December 2019 from their samples. The suspect that contamination of the samples happened at Sangon Biotech. They deleted the three most contaminated samples from the Sequence Read Archive. They do not know why the samples were then 'un-deleted.'"

(end quote)

> If it was sequenced in early 2020, it may have been contaminated from experiments carried out by researchers trying to learn more about the emerging virus.

That seems like--by far--the most probable explanation.

I'm not even sure if it would need to have been researchers studying Covid--it could just have been that the technician handling the samples was infected and contaminated the samples accidentally, or that the equipment had previously been used with samples unknowingly contaminated with Covid.

In fact, that could have been the case even if it was sequenced in December 2019, since Covid was already spreading in the population at that time.

Yes, and that's supported (albeit weakly) by the fact that 3 researchers at the Wuhan lab became sick with flu-like symptoms in November 2019: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210524/wuhan-lab-researche...

> 3 researchers at the Wuhan lab became sick with flu-like symptoms in November 2019

So 3 out of 300 researchers probably got the flu during flu season? is that low or high for a typical facility of 300 people during flu season? (300 as of 2014 maybe more now? https://www.nature.com/articles/nj0447)

> He said the lab was “very well-run” and the researchers didn’t show evidence of COVID-19 antibodies.

That counters the assertion that it was covid.

Let's pretend that they did in fact have covid and the antibody tests were wrong or they are lying. Is it that surprising that they would get it if it was the ground 0 for covid which spread like wildfire there regardless of original origin?

I think people imagine that the way virus research labs work is that when you start a research program you go into the lab, and then you stay in the lab 24/7 until your research is done, having no contact with people other than fellow researchers working on the same project. When your research is done, you go through decontamination and quarantine before being let out.

In reality, of course, it is like most other jobs. You arrive in the morning, work for the day, and go home. You break for lunch. Maybe you have lunch in a lunch room or cafeteria the employer provides, maybe you go out. In either case you are around plenty of other people.

Your chances of getting colds and flu during cold and flu season as a worker at a virus lab or about the same as the chances of any other worker at a similar sized white collar job in the same city.

I guess the real question is, how many came down with flu symptoms in November 2018? Or 2017?

Or how many were deleted from the Wuhan institutes website and memory-holed permanently.

Look up Huang Yanling a WIV researcher who dissapeared off the face of the earth in December 2019.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/covid-19-coronavirus-wuhan-...

That doesn't necessarily mean anything, I also became sick with flu-like symptoms in November 2019. 3 people could very well be one guy showing up to work when he should've called in sick and then coughing at a meeting.

Here's what I wonder: what if the people associated with the Wuhan lab don't even know if it was a lab leak? What if they couldn't even prove it was if it was, or vice versa?

That could explain a rush to downplay a lab leak too. It wouldn't be "oh crap we leaked a deadly virus." It would be "oh crap... wait... did we leak a deadly virus?" followed by over a year of them quietly attempting to figure out what happened and not being sure.

One of the things I've learned in this life is: never assume malice when stupidity, ignorance, or carelessness is a sufficient explanation. Maybe they don't know if it was leaked because they didn't keep clear records or a complete history of samples.

Of course this is almost scarier: the idea that we are doing GOF research that's dangerous in such a way that it could blow up without us really even knowing what happened. At least if a chemical plant or nuclear reactor blows up it's obvious what blew up.

If it was a lab leak, presumably the people at the Wuhan lab would have DNA sequences on the coronavirus strains they were experimenting with. Even if they weren't doing this on a regular basis one would have to imagine that they would have inventoried and sequenced the coronavirus samples they had in their lab soon after COVID-19 was identified in the public.

This is what I always found difficult to reconcile with the idea of it being a lab leak. We know what viruses the lab was working with, and SARS-CoV-2 wasn't one of them. If the outbreak came from their lab, why was the virus completely unknown to them? It's a science institute that was openly publishing its findings like any other.

It couldn't have been pre-emptively covered up either, unless they knew ahead of time this virus was going to leak (that is to say, they leaked it intentionally) and then we're no longer in reality.

Maybe there's something I'm missing, and please explain it to me if you can, but with that in mind I never quite got how the lab leak idea can add up.

Very few research groups in any field have published everything they're working on. Sometimes that's a deliberate choice, to avoid enabling rivals; but even when you're trying to be as open as you can, it takes time to write stuff up.

The WIV has claimed that they'd published sequences for all the viruses they were working with. But in the same way that the Hungarian team found SARS-CoV-2 contamination in Antarctic soil just now, a different team found a novel Merbecovirus in a rice dataset from a different group in Wuhan:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533

That Merbecovirus couldn't possibly be an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2; but if the WIV had one unpublished virus, then it gets harder to claim it's ridiculous to think they had more.

The WIV also had a database of viral genomes, available as a public website. That website went offline around September 2019. The WIV has cited "hacking attempts" as the reason why access was removed. They've made no attempt to restore access in any form, including those that obviously present no information security risk (e.g., a dump on a flash drive).

https://zenodo.org/record/4512260

I think this is the relevant line of inquiry.

>We know what viruses the lab was working with, and SARS-CoV-2 wasn't one of them.

Do we really know what was being worked with at the time of outbreak?

Plenty of published literature exists for the years leading up to the outbreak. It shows that they were working with viruses with all of the component parts of CoV-19. Their published research also shows that they were genetically combing these viruses so that they can cross species barriers and testing their ability to infect and spread in living models.

There were publications as recent as October 2019 where they were modifying chicken corona viruses with engineered furian binding sites very similar to that of CoV-19 so that they could cross the species barrier.

The question then becomes how much data typically gets shared for projects in progress before publication. I don't know what this standard practice is here.

The most informative post I have seen on the topic was shared back in April 2020 here on HN [1]

https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...

They would have samples of every step of the experiments, which would also be perfect for faking the discovery of the missing link to the last known wild type. You just take one of the samples and claim to have found it in a pangolin or whatever, and prove your innocence. The fact that they they didn’t do that, suggests they couldn’t.

Presumably. Have you ever seen what a complete disaster some academic and large corporate projects can be? NASA lost the original Apollo data tapes for example.

Large organizations are usually clusterfucks.

If the latter, then this blows Chernobyl out of the water

Agree.

Whatever it is it has already blown Chernobyl, Long Island, Fukushima and the rest out of the water.

Even if we include the two nukes, this virus has been much more deadly than all nuclear war, power and experiments over the last hundred years together.

(Note that I do not support dropping nukes, the coronavirus was probably an accident IMO, the nukes were not, I'm just pointing out that we overreacted to the dangers of of mostly peaceful and useful nuclear technology.)

Remember how, just a few months ago, one could get banned from Social media for suggesting Covid-19 originated in a lab? "Fact Checkers" were hard at work silencing that content and attributing it to "conspiracy theorists".

If it was really a mistake, why not simply be transparent about it and admit it, instead of destroying and concealing evidence?

When you have nothing to hide...

You can also get hit by fact checkers for claiming that the Earth is flat. What are they trying to hide?

If everyone were arguing in good faith I’m not sure you would see as much of this deplatforming stuff. There was tons of propaganda claiming COVID was definitely a lab leak when there is no proof.

There is still no proof. I think it’s possible but a natural origin is also possible. There are loads of undiscovered viruses out there waiting to jump hosts and party.

If they genuinely don't know, and want to, surely they'd be more open with their data and collaboration.

As it is, we get a constant drip of new evidence sort of pointing the finger, but no conclusion. The evidence is also all coming from 3rd parties, not the Chinese themselves, which further adds suspicion, and still there seems to be no new evidence in support of natural migration from Yunnan caves.

That’s not really how most organizations work, even in science: a lot of people will be most concerned with the blowback to the institution which has a real cost in funding, careers, etc. That’s often not even a deliberate decision but simply having an accurate sense of the potential costs but far less confidence that the problem actually happened.

> If they genuinely don't know, and want to, surely they'd be more open with their data and collaboration.

Two possibilities, it is a lab leak or it is not. If it is a lab leak, there will be terrible consequences for the people involved, the lab, and China in general. If it is not a lab leak, then the current status-quo is maintained.

Potentially a lot to lose and not much to win by releasing the data. Ideally, we should make it so that there is no negative consequence if we finally discover that it is a lab leak, but because politics, it is impossible. It is like the common advise of never talking to the cops. Ideally, if you are innocent, you should say everything, but the police is not interesting in proving your innocence and very interested in proving your culpability, so the usual advise is to not say anything because it will be used against you.

Edit: In fact, again because of politics, if it really is a lab leak, I think that proving it will make the entire world a worse place, we are better off not knowing. Not now, at least. For science, it would be good to know, but considering the situation, I bet the data will not just be used to better study viruses and improve lab safety.

RATG13 was sequenced in 2018. The only place this virus was emerging, was in a lab.

Even if this were true and they were studying covid post-outbreak, where did all of their samples of these precursor viruses go? And why are they covering them up?

The idea that in 2020 maybe they were continuing to conduct GOF research on SARS-CoV-2, with everything going on, and then being so sloppy as to infect antarctic soil samples is better... I guess?

I'd think the nature of the three mutations in between circulating virus and bat coronavirus maybe lowers the odds of it being postpandemic but maybe not.

I am not implying GOF at all, please don't twist my words.

I am merely pointing out that if you were to study the virus after it emerged, you would be studying SarsCoV2.

If the lab were working with a precursor to the virus (in any fashion), it is perfectly reasonable to question where that sample came from.

Does your single-issue account mean to suggest that sequencing a close-ish relative of COVID in 2018 means they were growing it in a lab? I can‘t think of a good explanation that would link sequencing to lab experiments.

RATG13 is 96% similar to Sars-cov-2 which means there is a staggering 1200 mutations between them. For reference, Delta and Omicron are both about 40-70 mutations away from OG Sars-COV-2. And that‘s after 2 very good years for Sars-COV-2 evolution!

My username is just a coincidence. I create a new account every few months and I've never used this one to discuss this topic.

The only points I am trying to get across are

(1) This lab was working with a precursor to the virus we know and it's perfectly reasonable to ask where the sample came from

(2) The fact that they deleted this sequence and also RATG13 and others leads one to believe that these aren't innocent mistakes and are worth investigating further to determine why they are going to such lengths to destroy data.

They didn't delete RaTG13. The WIV published a Nature article describing RaTG13 in early 2020, identifying it as the (then) closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2.

Far from destroying or hiding data, the WIV is the institute that publicized the existence and highlighted the importance of RaTG13.

RaTG13 is decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2. You don't get from RaTG13 in 2018 to SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019 in a lab or in nature. You don't get that from serial passage and you don't get that from gain of function in a lab, or any kind of lab created chimera. You get it from serial passage over decades of time through probably hundreds of millions of animals in a natural gain of function experiment.

RATG13 was brought back to the lab in 2015. Sars-CoV-2 was more or less stable when it emerged into human populations, indicating it was already adapted to humans or humanized animals, and none of hundreds of millions of wild animals that could have brought this about have been found.

We can handwave all this away, but it makes me uncomfortable.

You don't get adapted to human via spreading through hACE2 expressing mice.

You get adapted to humans via serial passage through humans.

> none of hundreds of millions of wild animals that could have brought this about have been found.

Based on the headline article it sounds to me like China has found them but they're not releasing that information publicly.

It is probably an important factory farmed animal in China and they do not want to shut down the trade or have international pressure force them to shut down the trade. It may be as politically attractive to them as the idea that Obama should have shut down pig farming and ban bacon and pork chops if the 2009 H1N1 pandemic had been 10 or 100 times worse.

Prob shouldn’t be eating meat from China anyway. Due to the lack of regulations the animals are not given vaccines and such to prevent known illnesses in livestock. Tho there was an article a few years ago which said this is changing, some farms are now taking the hit on cost to vaccine their livestock as people are avoiding the meat in favour of imported meat for safety.

You're not going to get it from eating the meat. Its the farmhands who have direct contact with the live animals that are the issue. Or all the workers and buyers in the wet markets handling live animals (and cleaning up their shit).

Vaccinating the animals would be a start towards being able to maintain the farming of animals while reducing the risks of future spillovers.

And they may want to buy as much time as they can in order to put those kinds of safeguards in place before everyone starts screaming at them to shut it all down now, which is really my point.

We've already found another previously unknown naturally occurring bat coronavirus which is less dissimilar to SARS-COV-2 than RATG13 and better suited to binding to human ACE2 receptors.

The most logical conclusion isn't "RATG13 is very far away from SARS-COV-2 so the lab must have done a lot of work to it", it's "wherever SARS-COV-2 came from, it wasnt RATG13 in the last five years".

The reason why the "lab origin" argument gets sneered at so often even though there's nothing remotely implausible about the basic "lab leaks happen" bit isn't just the politics of it, but also the insistence of some of its most passionate proponents for chasing red herrings.

"so the lab must have done a lot of work to it"

That's sort of the core misconception right there.

People don't understand that what we do in labs is pretty much just small scale incredibly shitty hacks that use exactly what nature does, but we can't possible scale it up.

When labs do "serial passage" experiments that is just emulating nature and evolution and natural selection. We're changing the fitness function the virus needs to live within and then passing it through a dozen or so animals and seeing mutation and selection at work in the output.

We can't do that on the scale of million or billions of animals in a lab. Serial passage through a million animals, however, is just another Wednesday afternoon to natural evolution.

The white tailed deer in the United States are now a huge bioreactor doing a serial passage gain of function experiment to produce deer-adapted SARS-CoV-2. It is possible that Omicron came from a similar natural experiment in rodents.

All our factory farmed animals are just large bioreactors for serial passage / gain of function experiments with millions of animals.

No lab can ever scale up to those levels.

Fauci disagrees with you, he considered serial passage in a lab a plausible explanation:

> Fauci wrote: “?? Serial passage in ACE2-transgenic mice.”

https://theintercept.com/2022/01/12/covid-origins-fauci-reda...

Not the first time I've disagreed with Fauci

The original paper, which is more informative and less spin-heavy, suggests an infected technician or PCR test of a virus sample were relatively unlikely to be the source.

It also suggests there were likely samples taken from at least three different infected hosts, one of which was a southeast Asian human and two of which are common lab animals and cell cultures known to have been used for published studies of SARS-COV-2. This is of course consistent with a novel virus discovered in humans being tested in animal cell cultures (whether before China had publicly acknowledged COVID-19, or in January when it was publicly disclosed and it's known that SARS-COV-2 being studied in animal cell cultures) as well as the more sensational scenario

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1330800/v1

The interesting part is that this sample sequence seems more ancient than the most ancient one made public by China so far.

Exactly, maybe I'm missing something, but how could this be a result of testing the virus once it had spread, unless these samples represent a virus that reverted back to an intermediate stage.

This has always seemed like a plausible scenario to me for the origin of this virus. It's just too bad it might have occurred in China, considering their government's propensity for dishonesty and suppressing information. I wonder what the handling/research would have been like if it had leaked from a lab in another country, like the US or Canada for example. Would those governments have been more forthright if one of their labs were to blame?

> Would those governments have been more forthright if one of their labs were to blame?

I'd say maybe not.

But the Chinese are a lot better at suppression!

Defenestration is a very effective tool....

US health experts (Fauci, Collins) and UK ones (Jeremy Farrar) were also trying to suppress the lab leak hypothesis, as evidenced by the FOIA emails.

I think a lot of people now believe that the lab leak theory is the most likely explanation

Many people are saying that?

Yes they are - sometimes the most obvious explanation is the simplest one: it leaked from a lab.

If radioactive animals were found running around outside a nuclear power plant in the USA, would anyone believe the owners of the nuclear power plant saying that that was probably a coincidence and the plant never had a leak? Probably not.

If radioactive animals were found running around outside a Chinese nuclear plant - what would their government say?

Nearly every government on the planet under every governing system has experienced some dishonesty and information suppression over the pandemic, its hard to say which place would have been better

“But at least people would be able to talk about it” thats the goto() rebuttal amirite?

> Nearly every government on the planet under every governing system has experienced some dishonesty and information suppression

Yes, but the Chinese government is especially known and openly, blatantly and ruthlessly supresses information.

If this situation happened in US, UK, Europe, Australia, Canada, and other less developed nations, it would have been far more transparent and impossible to cover up.

This is a really polarizing theory for a lot of folks, but it's completely precedented. SARS-CoV-1 leaked out of [edit](three separate labs (one in China, one in Singapore and one in Taiwan)) in the early 2000s - and these leaks were acknowledged by their respective governments, including the PRC. [1] And a whole bunch of other diseases from a whole bunch of other labs over like a hundred years. [2]

It could have happened. I'm not sure it did, but it certainly could have. This isn't some fringe crackpot theory - and it shouldn't ever have been treated as such.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC403836/

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

The theory was not "crackpot", but it was asserted with 0 evidence back then. The evidence is judged, not the theory itself.

> it was asserted with 0 evidence back then

The bat theory was asserted with way more force at the time with even less evidence.

I think you mean wet market theory. This is true, but at least there was a "high bayesian prior" due to that being how it happened in the past. Nonetheless the wet market proponents were irresponsibly aggressive in their forcefulness.

As other commenters mentioned there was a “high Bayesian prior” for lab leaks, too.

All of the previous lab leaks were of known viruses that had previously spilled over into humans via natural processes, then were collected and later leaked out (again). I'm not aware of any truly novel viruses that spilled into humans through a lab leak. Are there any examples?

What's your threshold for novelness?

We can't truly know just how novel covid-19 is; we don't have sequences from the database of coronaviruses, and even if we did it might have leaked right after it was collected, without having been sequenced yet.

Is "novel" the right criteria here? If Covid didn't have asymptomatic/pre-symptomatic infectiousness, it'd still be novel but may not have become a pandemic. Therefor may not have even been noticed, no tests developed for it, etc...

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

funny story, my elementary school was across the playground from this place, but moved out of that location the summer before the virus leak.

> This is true, but at least there was a "high bayesian prior" due to that being how it happened in the past.

I'm not an expert in the history of viral origin stories, but I'm pretty informed, and I'm not aware of any documented examples of pathogens emerging from public markets.

To be clear, I'm aware of lots of examples associated with pig and chicken farms, and several viruses that are presumed to have emerged from various kinds of "bush meat" (monkeys, guinea pigs, deer), but even these are pretty much correlative lines of evidence. A documented case of a virus emerging from a wet market? No. Moreover, if you've been to one of these things, it's pretty implausible as the source of a respiratory virus. They're usually outdoors, or in vast spaces. At least in farms you've usually got a farmer hanging around in a small building with hundreds or thousands of identical animals on a regular basis.

The evidence for the wet-market theory has always felt like one of those things that "scientists just know"...until it turns out they were repeating apocryphal stories to each other. This happens far more often than scientists care to admit.

H1N5, SARS

Neither originated in wet markets that we know of. Both appear to have been circulating in the community before the first cases were reported:

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/34/Supplement_2/S58/459...

> In summary, the present evidence indicates that the H5N1 strains that caused the Hong Kong 1997 outbreak were reassortants from multiple cocirculating avian influenza virus strains

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3323155/

> On January 2, 2003, two cases of atypical pneumonia in the city of Heyuan, Guangdong Province, were associated with transmission of infection to several healthcare workers at the hospital (5). Investigation by the Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention led to the identification of clusters of cases in six other municipalities (Foshan, Jiangmen, Zhongshan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhaoqing) from November 2002 to mid-January 2003.

You're cherry picking reviews. Don't get me wrong, I 95% believe the lab leak theory for COVI9, but the wet market theory has a reasonably credible history.

> You're cherry picking reviews.

I literally took the first two papers I found via googling.

> the wet market theory has a reasonably credible history.

You're free to cite some of this history.

It was also damaged by the fact that a bunch of true crackpots asserted that COVID-19 was a bio-weapon released by either the Chinese or the US Military. There is zero evidence for that, and it makes no sense.

I heard someone once describe that kind of germ warfare as "attempting to use a grenade as a handgun." Yes it hurts your opponent, but...

Someone will bring up the fact that China seems (if you buy their numbers) to have had good success containing COVID, but the thing is: there's no way they could have known this would be the case. What if they released it on purpose and their containment efforts failed? What if it mutated into something 5X as deadly and 100X as contagious? Viruses don't take loyalty oaths.

Also: the global recession it caused probably did not do China any good in terms of net economic growth.

Also also: why would China release it inside their own country? Why not drop it in some random airport somewhere? If they really wanted to target the USA the thing to do would have been to drop it in Bethesda, Maryland and then spread a lot of anti-US conspiracy theories.

Lots of reasons it would have been a stupid idea to release it on purpose. China's leadership might be evil in some ways but they're not stupid or careless.

Yep, one of the confounding factors of this whole conversation is that there have always been several theories under the heading “lab leak.” Some of which were completely plausible (though had little to no evidence) and some of which were 10 layers deep in actual conspiratorial lunacy (also with similar amounts of evidence).

There is precedence for this, too. Still is, although we currently don't use the same terminology as we did during the cold war. You could argue that terrorists who strap themselves into bomb jackets also demonstrate this, and I've heard the acceptance of "collateral damage" thrown around as yet another aspect of it.

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

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

At t=0, none of the theories had any evidence. That's cause for investigation, not derision.

In the news today: scientists say they are totally not at fault when a lab-grown virus escapes from a science lab! When asked for how it could happen then, they said "Oh no no no no, it must be some people, uh... COOKING AND EATING BATS! Yeah! It must be the cooks, or the patrons, or someone else, BUT TOTALLY NOT US, because, uh, there's a market right by our lab!"

Just for the lolz I would have asked if they are frequent patrons :)

IDK, but I tend to apply Occam's to the theory, and to me, the alternative theory looked a LOT more crackpot-ish...

The first outbreak being down the street from the Wuhan virology lab is in fact evidence. Not conclusive by any means, but it's an event that is more likely to occur if the lab leak theory is true than if it's false.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30280803

> The Wuhan Institute of Virology is China's premier virology research lab, its first biosafety level 4 lab, and one of the very few (or only one?) that was doing gain-of-function research. Wuhan has a population of 12M, which is just under 1% of China's population.

> The fact that the virus emerged there, of all places in China, is non-conclusive but highly suggestive circumstantial evidence.

The reasons it was are very obvious, when you had Donald Trump consistently making it a political issue to further his re-election.

Particularly serious is trying to confuse a possible lab accident with a deliberate weaponization of a virus.

And the other side calling anyone suggesting a lab leak a right wing conspiracy nut wasn't politicizing it?

tbh it went both ways

Was Trump the one making it political? Or were his opponents making it political by using it as a cheap excuse to accuse him of racism/xenophobia, as they did when he suggested a travel ban in March while democratic senators were explicitly encouraging citizens to visit their local chinatowns?

The amount of retconning that's being attempted to shore up how dismal of a response Trump's administration had to Covid is something to behold. People were calling trump racist/xenophobic because he was calling it the china virus and the kung flu in the face of a huge rise in attacks on AAPI americans and still lying about his travel ban and about Pelosi visiting Chinatown..

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/trumps-false-claims-about-...

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel...

Joe Biden and the democrats strongly supported Xi's ascent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQaBdlu4rL4

So, I'd say that this actually wasn't an example of TDS the left really supports Xi and China.

So you are saying the democrats knew what Xi was going to do? Why are Democrats always ascribed to having talents of precognition and ultimate power to control the country yet they are also seen as "blundering idiots" by republicans?

biden is a liberal but he isnt a leftist by any stretch

Two words "China virus" . He absolutely was promoting it as a theory to radicalize his base further and scare them thus making them more likely show up and vote for him so he could protect them from "the other".

He left people on stranded on a cruise ship because he didn't want the "numbers" in February 2020.

I hadn't realized how dogmatic so many people are about "believe science" until the pandemic. It's mildly terrifying.

It also spills over into other domains. If people feel they aren't allowed to be curious or skeptical about the origins of CoV2, how are they going to feel when you tell them manmade global warming is "settled science"?

Curiosity is what fuels life. It's not healthy for us or for our discourse to suppress it.

It's of course not: believe science.

It's: obey authority. That's what they really mean when they say it. It's philosophically very wide, it represents a much broader spectrum for the person using it than just science. What you're witnessing is a coward's soul laid bare, when you witness someone shut down discussion with bumper sticker regurgitations.

When you read the history of any given authoritarian regime of more recent times, there is a large fraction of the general population that tremendously assists the monsters into coming to power, through endless acquiescing. They're the gray moralists, the fence sitters: who am I to have a brain, who am I to have an opinion, little me, who am I to do anything, who am I to hold an opinion separate from such and such important person, I do what I'm told when I'm told without asking questions. They're zombies and they're terrifying to observe in action.

Except it’s not the introspective people that have nuanced opinions driving this. Right now (on the right and the left) it is being driven by people with absolutist opinions based on contempt for authority and facts.

I think calling them cowards is wrong. These people probably are just as spread out on the anti-authority front as any other group. They just appeal to different authorities, and in this case the Gentile Society's authorities were saying that a lab leak is unacceptable belief.

Also at the time, there was huge reactionary responses to Trumpism, BLM was in full fling, and there wasn't much mental space (and time) left for most people to make clear informed decisions. The trustworthy-looking authorities were saying it's not a leak... and wink-wink if you think it is, you're a Trump supporter.

Now that US internal politics is a lot less saturated with crazy stuff, it seems like there's more breathing room for people to sit back and requestion their prior beliefs. And the audience is more receptive, more ready to hear, less occupied with anti-Trumpism.

With regard to this particular personality axis, I often wonder if companies like TikTok, Facebook, Google, etc have a propensity score (or similar) associated with each user.

Sorry man I'm gonna believe Fauci on how to deal with a virus rather than a random person on the internet. I don't have decades of experience in virology and infectious disease. And guess what? He was right, and the republicans were wrong. do I believe he is always 100% right? Of course not. There was nothing in what he said that seemed illogical though, unlike Trump and his fellow republicans and whackadoodle online conspiracists.

While I agree that dogmatic belief is not a good outlook for progress, here we should be talking about the alternatives.

And the alternative to a supposed "scientific belief" is "wishful thinking".

You suggest a terrible alternative. Much better would be "believe nothing".

It is terrible, but it is what we are looking at.

It would be naive to believe that every single person out there is equipped with the knowledge and the critical thinking skills to discern between good and bad information, thus it would be vastly preferable that people trust science.

This is called a strawman

To be clear, we're talking here about the general category of "things stated by scientists", not the more specific "things stated by scientists about the findings of the scientific process." Many people conflate the both of these as "trusting science" — and that's a problem.

You can believe in scientists' claims about what scientific studies say/mean, or about what the scientific consensus on a question is — without believing any random claim a group of scientists makes about any random subject.

Specifically, there is strong reason to treat scientists as just like any other group of people, where claims about how the work of science gets done (e.g. whether it's possible for a lab to have an accident resulting in a leak) are concerned.

Yeah, I get it. What I don't get is flat-earthers...

They obviously don't listen to the right priests or scientists. Or subscribe to the right YouTube channels.

Maybe they suffer from a deficiency of midichlorions.

It’s just the ultimate “fuck school” and “fuck authority” stance, these people don’t actually care whether satellites are really orbiting the earth or if there really is a giant wall of ice preventing us from seeing the edge, they just want you to know how deeply they reject the prevailing narrative.

Settled science isn't science it's religion and politics. Many things get super seeded by new theories. Even the number of planets in our solar system has changed a number of times.

I am sorry Pluto is a Plant, it is Settled Science... ;)

Biggest plant in the solar system. I wouldn’t trust whoever planted it.

Also a Disney character…

Agree, and take it further. This insight should be the centerpiece of the next generation of suggestion algorithms! The truly science-minded adult should be actively seeking data that disproves their currently held beliefs. This does not mean, however, that you must endure endless, pointless flat earth screeds; ideally you should be able to take individual claims and mark them "settled", a state that can only be invalidated by the output of a new, concrete experiment.

I bought the book The Skeptical Environmentalist, for just this reason. I love hearing dissenting opinions from people who aren't a PR firm flunky. Bjørn Lomborg was and is paying a high price for his honest heterodoxy, and the least we can do is listen and not lump him in with the self-serving, lying Koch brother funded PR machine. That effort is driven by the psychological requirement of emotionally manipulating people to your side, not by an intellectually honest questioning of "common sense", and it's a real shame the two get confused.

Zombie apocalypse 24-7 forever. That's how it is. Not to sound nihilistic or anything.

I contend that the large majority were not so dogmatic, rather a concentrated effort was made insisting that to do otherwise was shameful. The wild elevation of an institute director to public spokesperson further muddied that water. Anthony Fauci's absolute unwavering denial of any possibility that doesn't suit or credit his policies has cost the US greatly and by extension the world

“Believe science” can be just another way for people to outsource their thinking to someone else. Authoritarianism is attractive to humans on a primal level. Obviously no one person can be an expert in all areas, but it seems like many people have lost the skill of considering alternative viewpoints and practicing humility. If you can’t present your opponent’s argument in a compelling way but instead only engage with the most extreme fringes of an idea, that’s a pretty strong tell.

Because science proved to be correct. We have vaccines and various treatments for it because of trusting science. The ones who wanted ivermectin suppositories and bleach injections were proven wrong in the long run many of them dying unnecessary deaths painfully and on ventilators. I do have some respect for experts who have spent decades studying things over an orange president and infowars.

Mere weeks after Covid-19 arrived on our shores, nearly every media, social media, and scientific establishment were in lockstep denouncing the "fringe", "far-right" lab leak theory, and suppressing it as best they could (Twitter banned people for posting about it in 2020). Not only was it fringe, it was racist too! Before any real, thorough research had been done, they stated with certainty that it definitely did not come from the lab. How could they know so quickly?

Its scary to see how quickly our formerly respected institutions were to suppress a legitimate inquiry, simply because... why? It was associated with Trump? It offended China?

Anyone who argues for more social media censorship needs to look long and hard at the lab leak theory and how it was handled. These corporate giants that are supposed to be the arbiters of what constitutes misinformation got it wrong, and they got it spectacularly wrong. They got it wrong to the detriment of people who want to know what really happened, and they got it wrong in favor of America's greatest adversary.

One reason could be because some of the people responsible for researching origins were personally involved in funding gain of function research in these labs. Some scientists privately supported the lab leak theory, but they abruptly changed their minds for unknown reasons. https://republicans-oversight.house.gov/release/comer-scalis...

Also you could argue that Virologists also have a conflict of interest, speaking out in support of the lab leak theory would not only jeopardize their ability to continue receiving grants from the NIH, but also could result strict regulations/bans on the majority of their research.

So Virologists have a choice: A: State that this virus is natural and be hailed as heroes as funding into your field and research floods in. B: Back the Lab Origin betraying all of their colleagues, become social pariahs and hated in society for being guilty by association for 6+ million deaths. All while you life's work and career all gets thrown down the drain.

For a Virologist supporting the lab origin only has downsides.

> Its scary to see how quickly our formerly respected institutions were to suppress a legitimate inquiry, simply because... why? It was associated with Trump? It offended China?

Because it immediately led to an increase in anti-asian hate crimes. That included effecting Chinese-Americans who have literally never been to China and south east asians that were mistaken as Chinese.

It is difficult to have a nuanced discussion about lab safety in the public view when there's a big chunk of the political sphere that will use it to rile up their base. It sucks that censorship is the better option but we've learned from 9/11 that people are anything but reasonable - I had wealthy middle eastern neighbors who fled the country within a week of the attacks and, after everything that came from 9/11, it seems like they made the right decision.

> Because it immediately led to an increase in anti-asian hate crimes.

I'm asking the following as seriously and as respectfully as I possibly can, and let it be known that I abhor all crime.

Was this anti-Asian hate crime story ever real, or was it a media narrative designed to bash Trump?

Just to play Devil's Advocate: what if crime rates in cities where many Asians tend to live are going up in general? How would you be able to distinguish between anti-Asian hate crimes increasing, and crime in general increasing? Is the rate of crimes against Asians going up relative to the rate of crimes against say Latinos or Whites or Blacks? Is the rate of crimes against Asians increasing more or less in say Red regions that might tend to be influenced by Trump's rhetoric versus Blue regions that might be less likely to tend to listen to his rhetoric? Has the media even bothered to ask this question and analyze the data, or were they quick to instantly rush to blame Trump for any Asian that was a victim of a random crime in order to score political points.

I don't know myself as it requires a lot more research than I can do right now, but what I can see as factual is that there are probably hundreds of stories about crime going up in the last couple of years for every big city.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/major-crimes-up-38-in-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/opinion/new-york-rising-c...

https://gothamist.com/news/why-are-shootings-and-murders-ris...

Just my 2 cents. The data might not indicate what the media says it does and I would say that we should recheck all of our initial premises about the last 6 years.

Hate crimes against AAPI went up 339% last year: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/anti-asian-hate-c...

That's remarkably higher than the average increase.

Thank you for the contribution, but the article doesn't seem to dive into the types of stats that would be necessary to answer the types of questions I asked. I will try and look deeper into some of the stats cited and their methology to get a better picture of their point of view though, thanks.

Is there any evidence that those hate crimes were connected to people concerned about the experiments conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

That's the kind of question that can't reasonably be answered - we don't and, I personally think, can't really track the personal motives of crimes in a logical manner since hate crimes are generally pretty illogical actions.

The most legitimate response you could hope to get to such a question is some anecdotal evidence.

Agreed. So why do people try to stifle reasonable debate about a plausible theory by making unfalsifiable allegations tying that theory to hate crimes?

The hypothesis that links the increase of hate crimes to the idea that the virus was intentionally created and/or spread by the Chinese, is also “plausible”.

The reporting of harassment and hate crimes usually involve the aggressor’s statements at the time of the occurrence, thus it is perfectly possible to link a physical or verbal attack to a motivation.

There isn’t a concerted effort anywhere to stop the debate about the lab leak hypothesis, and proof of it is the widespread coverage in media, from MIT review to NYT.

There is though a more unified push of such hypothesis made by right-wing outlets, like this one, FOX, or NYP, among others. And, if anything, that should give us pause, as this is more about shaping public opinion than informing.

I'm a Canadian American[1] living in Vancouver so I can tell you subjectively that it has seemed to be a lot more common to see anti-asian graffiti on buildings and the like - and also, objectively, anti-asian hate crimes are up in Vancouver by over 700%[2][3] - now Vancouver has a really complicated relationship with asian immigrants, it hosts a large number of RoC expats from the Chinese Revolution so there are frequently clashes between them and PRC expats (especially whenever something happens with Hong Kong) and it's also dealing with a housing crises that is made much worse by an influx of foreign capital (mainly from RoC/PRC) so I don't know if it's fair to blame COVID for all of that increase - but it's definitely dramatically out of line with previous years increases and, while Trump still is a factor up here, it's less focused specifically on the American political sphere and probably a fairer representation of "western" political sphere reactions in general.

1. I emigrated after university - I grew up in Massachusetts and Vermont and was in High School when 9/11 happened if you're curious how that gels with my previous comment.

2. Guardian Article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/23/vancoucer-anti...

3. Linked police report https://vancouverpoliceboard.ca/police/policeboard/agenda/20...

I think the virus starting in China is more to blame for the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes than a technical discussion about whether it was more likely that the virus came from animals mixing in a wet market, or from the L4 Virology lab, with questionable safety practices, specializing in bat coronaviruses that was located 500ft away.

> Not only was it fringe, it was racist too!

It wasn't "racist" per se, but it was subsequently used as an ideological weapon.

There was a clear consequence of tying COVID-19 with some sort of WMD released by the Chinese, and it was the increase in violence against AAPI folks.

> There was a clear consequence of tying COVID-19 with some sort of WMD released by the Chinese and it was the increase in violence against AAPI folks.

Nobody said WMD. Most likely culprit is irresponsibly risky experimentation combined with documented poor lab safety practices.

That said, even if there was a direct link between theories about Covid-19 origins and a rise in hate crimes, does that mean that those theories shouldn't be discussed? If the search for truth leads to unintended and unfortunate side effects, does that mean that the search for truth should be abandoned in favor of burying our heads in the sand? Or worse, adopting an alternate reality that is more harmful to us, like maybe the Chinese Communist Party "theory" that Covid came from a US Army lab.

> Nobody said WMD.

This was in fact a not uncommon claim. It wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the backlash if concerns about an accidental leak been expressed as questions rather than with certainty, by people who weren’t also making racist statements or otherwise acting in bad faith about the pandemic (you could easily find Republicans saying it was both mostly harmless and a Chinese attack just sentences apart).

> If the search for truth leads to unintended and unfortunate side effects, does that mean that the search for truth should be abandoned in favor of burying our heads in the sand?

I think this is a take as naive as it can be.

Not only can we read about this lab leak hypothesis across all media outlets, there is an ongoing debate about its validity in most respectable ones. Debates should include opposing opinions, I presume?

There are also plenty of historical examples of why public opinion driven by media outlets does not qualify as the “search of truth”. Reporting itself has mostly nothing to do with that, either. This hypothesis and many others could be true or false, but the vast majority of the population is simply not able to reach an informed conclusion, even more if we take into account that not even experts have enough information to do so. Thus, one shouldn’t believe otherwise, while ignoring the fact that it is already being used to push public opinion in a certain direction.

> Not only can we read about this lab leak hypothesis across all media outlets, there is an ongoing debate about its validity in most respectable ones.

This was not the case throughout 2020, into 2021. Discussing the lab leak publicly was a great way to get banned from Twitter or branded a misinformation-spreading fringe alt-righter, a-la-Rogan. This was despite the fact that there was no less evidence supporting its probability.

> This was despite the fact that there was no less evidence supporting its probability.

In the first half of 2020 there was no evidence whatsoever. Even if the hypothesis is proven true in the future, promoting it without any supporting evidence is indistinguishable from just lying.

It was indeed peddled by right wing outlets earlier in 2020, coinciding with the ongoing trade war between the US and China [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory

Alex Jones’ counter-influential powers on one ’side’ appear to be substantially greater than his influential pull on the other.

It was denounced because at the time there wasn't any evidence, mostly racism (see: "kung flu"); the accusation was rooted solely in a desire to rile up the president's base. It generated substantial harassment and violence against anyone who even appeared to be of Chinese descent, another reason it was denounced; not because of some vast media conspiracy.

> It was denounced because at the time there wasn't any evidence

There was, and is, no evidence of the theory that it originated from a zoonotic leap at a wet market, which is arguably more racist because it places Chinese culinary practices in the spotlight instead of risky science experiments.

It was denounced because the scientists (like Peter Daszak) who were cited by the media in stifling the theory were the same scientists who were backing the risky research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that likely lead to the lab leak. There was a clear conflict of interest that was undisclosed to the public.

They were doing exactly what they should to tamp down crazy far right wing propaganda that was aimed at incentivizing the public towards violence against asians. If you had evidence of a lab leak then present it and then you can promote a theory that is likely to result in violence towards individuals otherwise please keep it to yourself until you have proof.

> They were doing exactly what they should to tamp down crazy far right wing propaganda that was aimed at incentivizing the public towards violence against asians.

What you've just said is baseless. Nobody "aimed" this theory. The theory simply came into being because it is plausible, probable, and just made sense if you looked at the facts of the situation objectively.

The lab leak theory was plausible from Day One, and anyone who said otherwise was motivated by ideology or fear.

> If you had evidence of a lab leak then present it and then you can promote a theory that is likely to result in violence towards individuals otherwise please keep it to yourself until you have proof

There is more evidence of a lab leak than there is of a zoonotic jump (none).

I'm sorry but it is quite naive not to see the Republican elite have used the covid issue (like so many others) to frighten their followers into believing the astroturfing on facebook, twitter, reddit, etc to convince people that covid is many things: a hoax, a progressive attempt to get us to take vaccines that will sterilize us, an attack from China, and on and on. The party that produced Q anon from a prank on 4/8chan isn't appealing to the fear portions of the brain? They're doing this to sell their policies which are meant to enrich the elite (0.1%)? I think you should take a step back and look at the big picture of what Republican leaders are up to. It's certainly not for the benefit of the masses.

> This isn't some fringe crackpot theory - and it shouldn't ever have been treated as such.

I agree. I think it got labelled as crackpot because a lot of the early proponents were suggesting that it was leaked on purpose, which strays well into conspiracy theory territory.

You could say that but, based on some revealed communications it also feels (we can never truly know what was in their heads) like there was a concerted effort by denouncers of the lab leak theory to conflate lab leaks with purposeful leaks to discredit the lab leak theory.

> I think it got labelled as crackpot because a lot of the early proponents were suggesting that it was leaked on purpose, which strays well into conspiracy theory territory.

Maybe, but the early communication allowed for no dissent:

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

> The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife

> Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.

That's not ambiguous language. Pretty much a blatant slamming of the door on all non-natural theories of origin. Anything else was labeled "conspiracy" at a very early stage.

I remember when it was racist to say it came from China and to wear a mask.

When it was racist to wear a mask? Have to admit that's a new one for me.

Not necessrily mask, but defenitely people brought of the question of "cleanliness", which might be very close to hand washing and mask wearing: https://www.vox.com/2020/2/7/21126758/coronavirus-xenophobia...

There are still plenty of people who will accuse you of sinophobia if you dare acknowledge the ongoing genocide happening in China.

A lot of what you mentioned was written by Peter Daszak who is one of the main suspects in terms of lab involvement in the origins. The closest wild strain to covid was found in Laos and there is no wildlife trade to Wuhan but Daszak's organisation seems to have been collecting samples there and shipping them to the Wuhan lab. And then when people say "what samples, lets see" you get stonewalling. Before having too much of a go at the Chinese we should subpoena and get the records from that lot (based in NY).

Your italics seem to be indicating an “appeal to incredulity”. But you don’t present any actual logical argument for why anyone should not believe it was leaked intentionally.

Plenty of people seem to still believe it was leaked on purpose. I don't understand why. It's right up there with the flat earth and chemtrails on the scale of to what end would they do that, and why wouldn't they do something more effective?

Is there any more evidence that it originated at a lab in Wuhan and not at Fort Detrick, MD, as some Chinese say? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58273322

To get a comprhensive and upto date overview for the lab leak theory and its evidence I would recommend reading the following four long form articles in order (primarily to get good context on how the narriative has evolved).

As background:

[1] Jan 2021 - Intelligencer: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...

[2] June 2021 - Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...

[3] Oct 2021 - New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-mysterious-ca...

[4] Feb 2022 - Inference Review https://inference-review.com/article/thunder-out-of-china

The points presented in these articles are all thoroughly well researched and balanced. IMO the points and facts raised taken in a mosiac paint a palpable picture of events.

From the last articles conclusion:

THE CURRENT SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been, and continues to be, a public health catastrophe—the most serious in a century. Questions about the origins of COVID-19 are, at once, matters of legal, financial, and moral concern. For the moment, researchers can do no better than to hope for an inference to the best explanation; and, for the moment, the best explanation seems to be that the virus escaped from the WIV.

The WIV was the biggest transporter of viruses to Wuhan from all over Asia, including many SARS-like viruses from Laos and Yunnan. Phylogenetic analysis shows that the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak was perfectly localized in Wuhan, as all strains that have been found in other locations are descendants of the Wuhan strain. Had the virus been circulating undetected in other parts of China, virologists would have eventually noted those pre-Wuhan strains and their descendants in the phylogenetic tree. Even after sequencing over six million SARS-CoV-2 genomes, no evidence has been found of pre-Wuhan SARS-CoV-2.

Not only was the WIV the biggest reservoir of SARS-like viruses in Wuhan, if not the world, its scientists were engaged in creating novel SARS-like and MERS-like chimeras and potentially supercharging their transmissibility and pathogenicity. With these circumstances in mind, consider the following facts:

Shi and Jiang were experts in spike protein cleavage and were working on a pan-coronavirus therapeutic to inhibit post-cleavage fusion of the virus with cell membranes. Jiang had previously created a novel furin cleavage site via a 12-nucleotide insertion, though not in a coronavirus. In a joint grant proposal the WIV and EcoHealth submitted to DARPA they suggested creating novel human-specific cleavage sites. Taken together, these points make the 12-nucleotide insertion that has created a novel furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2—so uncharacteristic of SARS-like viruses—look extremely suspicious.

The behavior of the WIV and its scientists also raises any number of troubling questions. The viral strain RaTG13 is a case in point. First collected by the WIV in 2013, RaTG13 was sequenced in 2018, but not disclosed until after the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. In their initial disclosure, the WIV failed to mention how or when they came to possess RaTG13, failed to indicate that it was previously called Ra4991, failed to cite their own 2016 paper first mentioning it, and seemed to imply that they only sequenced the sample after the outbreak. This does not seem like the behavior of scientists trying their utmost to establish how a Laotian or Yunnan virus came to cause an outbreak in Wuhan.

None of these points is in itself conclusive, but the circumstantial evidence is more suggestive of a lab leak than an act of nature.

There is an additional reason to take seriously the question at hand. It is prophylactic. Knowing at last that COVID-19 had its origins in the WIV would go some way toward enforcing a worldwide ban on gain-of-function research—research that is almost as useless as it is dangerous.

Thank you for the response, I appreciate it and will read up.

A known, actively-studied virus leaking out of a lab is precedented, sure. Mistakes happen.

A novel one leaking out is a bit different.

How so? I am genuinely curious.

They might had been holding out samples before publishing. People discover novel viruses all the time and publish papers based on these novel viruses. It's just that these viruses or publications based on them don't make the headlines outside of academia. That's why it's so important that publish their virus database, which they have taken down on Sept. 2019, right around the time of emergence of the pandemic. Unfortunately they will never publish that database.

> How so? I am genuinely curious.

A tiger escaping a zoo is unusual. A previously unknown species of tiger escaping a zoo is substantially more unusual.

> Unfortunately they will never publish that database.

This one? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/science/coronavirus-seque...

What about a unknown species of tiger showing up next to a lab collecting tigers from all over the world and engineering hybrids?

WIV was bringing in bat's and pangolins from all over asia and engineering them to cross between species and enter cells using the a human Ace2 protein pathway. They published several papers you on their success making new viruses that do exactly this.

This is not proof, but you have to admit it ups the probability.

I'm not sure, but my understanding is that there are two databases of interest. The NIH one that WIV uploaded sequences to, and a separate WIV database. The WIV database went offline entirely in sep 2019 and hasn't come back. In early 2020 sequenced uploaded to the NIH were deleted. A some the NIH sequences were the ones recently restored and mentioned in your link.

I feel like I am reading a Snopes fact-checking article here. The arguments I presented are deliberately twisted enough so that they can be "debunked". Your linked article doesn't even mention WIV, let alone the database that was taken down on Sept 2019.

> A tiger escaping a zoo is unusual. A previously unknown species of tiger escaping a zoo is substantially more unusual.

One of the closest relatives of SARS-CoV2 was discovered in 2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaTG13 and only published in 2016 or later. So yes, it's very common for labs to have virus samples and then publish later. And a pandemic killing millions is also an unusual event. The cause of an unusal event is by definition one or more unusual event(s). I am not sure exactly what you are arguing here. Speaking of unusual events, viruses routinely escape labs: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/20/18260669/deadly....

Also, please present facts. Not some weird zoo and tiger analogy. Viruses are collected for research purpose in labs, not to sell tickets to general population to make money. And, research is by definition novel or _previously unknown_, if you will.

The whole business of making novel viruses in the lab is quite recent. It's gone I think from hardly everyone doing it 20 years ago to loads of people doing it now and it's still on the increase. It's only a matter of time for something to go wrong.

This is where unfortunately the mass public messes things up. There lots of possibilities that exist as to the origins of COVID. However, everyone I know who thought lab leak was possible, also thought it could only be lab leak and accepted that based on little to no evidence. They themselves rejected that any other origin was possible. The same is said of animal origins. Essentially people picked sides with lack of evidence for whatever their popular theory is. So what we are left with is two sides who point at the other for being the bad guy while doing the same bad thing they accuse the other of.

I remember at the very beginning people jumping from the fact that there is a lab in Wuhan to the conclusion that it must have come from there which is different than what's happening nowadays where it's a theory based on data or am I looking at this wrong?

In the beginning it had a very xenophobic after taste, at least what laypeople were sharing on social media.

To be clear, I don't care much if it came from a lab. I'd probably even prefer it at least then we can do something about it and avoid it going forward rather than this being a random nature thing that could happen again at any time.

It was labelled as racist and sold through the news. Many people felt that xenophobia aftertaste. The message was designed to make you feel that way.

> It was labelled as racist and sold through the news. Many people felt that xenophobia aftertaste.

You don't remember when the sitting president called it "kung flu"[1]? I don't need a newspaper to see the xenophobia in that.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-53173436

What is the xenophobia in that? Jokingly calling a virus that originated in China after a martial art that originated in China.

That's xenophobic... how?

It’s xenophobic for the same reason that any ethnic or national joke can be: it takes an incidental fact (we believe that COVID originated in China) and mixes it into a stereotyped ethnic or national identity (kung fu is from China and Americans think of kung fu when they think of China).

Put another way: it takes our laziest view of a ethnicity and uses it to make light of a disease that we think came from there, one that everybody is unhappy about. It doesn’t take much to see the latent xenophobia in that.

where were all the offended people when we had the 'spanish flu' or the 'german measles'.

While I'm sure they probably were people that got offended by it I like to think that we've grown to be more sensitive to these kinds of issues in the past 100 years to not tolerate present day xenophobia based on past xenophobia.

TIL that there were "German measels", in Germany we just called them "measels".

"German measles" is Röteln, more properly in English rubella (vs. measles / Masern, also often confused with rubella due to some languages using "rubeola" for measles). The name also has nothing to do with Germany; it's a mistranslation of "germanus", cognate to "germane", i.e. a disease "like measles".

In other words, it's not German and it's not measles. Hopefully a lesson in using this naming pattern for diseases...

What is the point of this comment? We can and should do better than our progenitors.

Also, it's worth actually reading up on why we called it the Spanish Flu: our allies in WWI originally called it the "American Flu," but changed it to avoid offending us.

Edit: it's also worth nothing that (1) "Kung Flu" is significantly different in content from "Spanish Flu," and (2) it doesn't have to be the case for anyone to be offended for xenophobia to be wrong.

"Jokingly"?

The current issue aside, racists and xenophobes basically always attempt to evade responsibility by claiming they were "only joking". Such claims should be tossed in the trash bin where they belong. First, it's not a joke, and it's not funny. Second, they're lying...they didn't intend it as a "joke" and don't really even understand what a "joke" actually is, for the most part. And third, it's not relevant whether it was a joke or not.

I don't live in the US so that didn't really carry any weight for us.

I don't watch mainstream news, but I got the exact same impression from people. Usually from the tinge of disgust in their voice every time they say the word "China."

The west got played by China state run media. They were still calling it the Wuhan virus while actively calling anyone else who did so racist. They called anyone who closed their borders racist while blocking domestic travel but still flying truckloads if people out of Wuhan on international flights.

The west sucked this up and any mention of china in any capacity got you called racist.

not a surprise - most of the supposed 'outrage' found on social media - and repeated by the mainstream media - is completely manufactured by foreign governments.

> people jumping from the fact that there is a lab in Wuhan to the conclusion that it must have come from there

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is China's premier virology research lab, its first biosafety level 4 lab, and one of the very few (or only one?) that was doing gain-of-function research. Wuhan has a population of 12M, which is just under 1% of China's population.

The fact that the virus emerged there, of all places in China, is non-conclusive but highly suggestive circumstantial evidence.

>I remember at the very beginning people jumping from the fact that there is a lab in Wuhan

To be fair, at the time it was know that the Wuhan lab it was one of the leading two labs in the world working with bat and pangolin coronaviruses. They were genetically engineering and combining them and testing them in animal models. One of the primary investigations was modifying proteins so that they can infect hosts using human ACE2 pathway.

How is "There's a lab a few blocks from the virus epicenter which does GoF research on coronaviruses and there's only a small handful of such labs in the whole world. This probably isn't a coincidence." different from "a theory based on data".

So I would say, yes, you are looking at this wrong. Saying, "Well you were right but you couldn't possibly have known because you had insufficient information" is tantamount to believing "no one could possibly draw correct conclusions from less data than I could". Hopefully it's clear why that is wrong.

I'm not a big fan of lesswrong, but here's a pretty influential essay on the extreme version of the phenomenon of drawing conclusions from apparently insufficient data, and how it isn't just coincidence: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s....

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that everyone who believed this theory is more intelligent. That would be the most absurd thing of all! What I am saying however is that you can't distinguish between the people who believed it because they performed a (very!) minor Einsteinian feat and those who believe it just because they were told and like the theory. But you're better off not going around and calling them all racist or saying they all just guessed, because at least in some cases that isn't true, and would be anti-intellectual.

Most relevant paragraph from link:

"Of course, Einstein did turn out to be right. I try to avoid criticizing people when they are right. If they genuinely deserve criticism, I will not need to wait long for an occasion where they are wrong."

I think that there is sleight of hand in a lot of these politicized arguments. People are conflating a lab leak with being developed in the lab.

There’s plenty of precedent for lab leaks. What the conspiracy theorists are lumping it into is that it was created AND leaked. See Rand Paul and his whole Fauci interrogation

Considering whether it is polarizing or a crackpot theory would be an ad hominem fallacy anyway right?

I’m totally open to the idea that it was a lab leak of some sort. What I’m opposed to is certain political figures presenting that theory as fact, without evidence, for political gain at the expense of an entire race of people.

The CCP isn't a "race of people" any more than the federal government is. I could be wrong, but I don't remember a single accusation being leveled at Asians. I do recall a lot of accusations being leveled at the CCP and also the US federal government though.

The CCP is not a race. But everyday Asian Americans (not just Chinese, mind you) have seen a staggering rise[1] in racially motivated crimes because of baseless and intrinsically racist assumptions about their role in COVID[1]. It is difficult to square the latter statistic with claims that our political leaders didn't levy blame at their expense, particularly given their own words[2].

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/anti-asian-hate-c...

[2]: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2021/03/420081/trumps-chinese-viru...

Obviously. To educated, generally egaliatarian people like you and I that makes sense. However the ignorant uneducated sorts out there on the edge looking for a reason to hate Asians (and others) even more and to attack them for imagined "reasons". That's why people say hold up and wait for some proof. The far right and other racist groups love this stuff and we can see that in the 3-5x increase in violence towards Asians in cities all over the country.

Can you link us a mosaique of all the perpetrators of asian violence? Id like to see those far right racists. Im asian and my wife is too we were in new york. The perpetrators were clearly not trump voters.

It's a little ironic to be talking about racism, and then claim you can visually identify a "far right racist" in this way.

The accusations are not against Asians. But the inciteful rhetoric has coincided with an uptick in hate crimes against Asians.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7364747/

SARS-CoV-1 was not a novel virus, these were lab accidents that happened after the initial outbreak which was unrelated to labs. Obviously, it's not impossible for an outbreak involving a novel virus to happen because of a lab leak but 'completely precedented' doesn't sound quite right - you're equating two fairly different kinds of event.

Marburg virus was a previously unknown virus when it jumped from monkeys and monkey tissue cultures to researchers in three labs in Marburg, Frankfurt, and Belgrade in 1967.

It matters that the Chinese government is actively trying to prevent any third-party investigation into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus

They're doing that because they are traditionally secretive about mistakes in their back yard, and because there is zero upside to them finding the actual source. The CCP doesn't believe in the intrinsic value of openness in science and government.

It doesn't matter whether they did it on purpose like an evil mustache twirling villain, or some group of bats conspired to sully the good name of china, the rest of the world will still scream angry things at china. There's no way for them to win, so why bother.

Meanwhile the accusation of china doing bad things conveniently lets the rest of the world ignore the massive and blatant mistakes they made once the virus made it to their borders, as if an unfeeling chunk of proteins cares about national interests or what you call yourself

It should be treated as fringe until there is some proof. Initially Trump and the other fringe were claiming almost immediately it was a lab accident (or even intentional) before there was ANY proof at all. Don't do that if you want people to take you seriously.

SARS-CoV-1 leaked out of [edit](three separate labs (one in China, one in Singapore and one in Taiwan))

It is of course very misleading present to these "leaks" as evidence of "lab origin". Especially given that these were all incidents of, not surprisingly, lab workers contracting the virus after it had been brought into the lab for study, and fully a year after SARS-CoV-1 started infecting the public at large.

The overwhelming consensus is that SARS-Cov-1 has zoonotic origin with a number of intermediary hosts suspected, including civets, bats and cats.

This isn't some fringe crackpot theory

Well... let's just leave the terms "fringe" and "crackpot" to the side for a minute. Being as we're both open-minded, curious individuals at all.

The bigger point here the quality of one's reasoning -- and the argument you're presenting here -- "Lab workers infected by a virus 2 years after a public outbreak evidence lab origin" (my paraphrase) -- is patently specious.

Such that I'm not sure you even believe what you're saying, actually. Not that I'm saying you're lying to us. But seriously -- did you stop to think at all basic chain of cause and effect here?

Did you?

> It is of course very misleading present to these "leaks" as evidence of "lab origin".

To be clear I don't have any evidence of a lab leak origin [edit](for COVID-19), and did not claim to!

"It's completely precedented", you said, apparently in reference the lab-origin hypothesis.

Indeed, I was referring to the idea of viruses and bacteria escaping from research labs and then, occasionally, spreading within a community. I provided evidence of this claim. I wasn't saying that I believed that COVID-19 specifically escaped from a/the lab. I do not have evidence of that. Apologies if that was unclear.

I was pushing back on the initial out-of-hand rejection of this idea.

I wish this report got us any closer to really knowing[1]. Unfortunately, it just feeds on the same emotional headlines and conspiracy spreading sites as the last 2 years. When HK Tweets, the Daily Mail, and Washington Times are your starting point[2], each containing their own unsupported allegations, with Chinese[3], Russian, and US agit prop all vying for their place at the table, reasonable people will respond with, "come back when you have some evidence", or "and this helps how?". Should the WHO be able to actually do their investigation, yes, but do I really trust the Director General Ghebreyesus, no, because he's been uniformly awful from denying human COVID transmissibility to denying boosters.

**** [1] This Fine Telegraph - Feb '22

_The timeline matters a lot here. If they were sequenced in Dec 2019 then it’s exceptionally important, because [China] holds SarsCov2s not discovered until December 30 to 31._

“On other hand, if sequenced in early 2020 then they could be contaminated with some early patient samples and still concord with Chinese government timeline. Right now, it doesn't seem there is enough info to narrow down timeline to distinguish between these.

“All we can say is that these samples were contaminated at Sangon Biotech with some early SarsCov2 viruses, some of which appear to have been from lab-grown samples.” *****

====[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/25/timeline-... - March '21

Dec. 30, 2019: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issues an “urgent notice” to medical institutions in Wuhan, saying that cases of pneumonia of unknown cause have emerged from the city’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.

Jan. 5, 2020: Earliest known tweet suggesting China created the virus. @GarboHK tweeted: “18 years ago, #China killed nearly 300 #HongKongers by unreporting #SARS cases, letting Chinese tourists travel around the world, to Asia specifically to spread the virus with bad intention. Today the evil regime strikes again with a new virus.”

Jan. 23: A Daily Mail article appears, headlined: “China built a lab to study SARS and Ebola in Wuhan — and U.S. biosafety experts warned in 2017 that a virus could ‘escape’ the facility that’s become key in fighting the outbreak.”

Jan. 26: The Washington Times publishes an article with the headline: “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” An editor’s note is added March 25: “Since this story ran, scientists outside of China have had a chance to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They concluded it does not show signs of having been manufactured or purposefully manipulated in a lab.” ======

[3] Immediately after, we have Chinese propaganda saying it came from US deer and Fort Detrick. May '21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz2A7Bb3Rxo

"This isn't some fringe crackpot theory - and it shouldn't ever have been treated as such."

A big concern was the bloodlust against China - and that by humouring this theory, there could be fatal consequences for Chinese nationals across the world, and a potential public desire for retribution.

I can understand why the theory was shut down - a large chunk of society isn't capable of understanding that "this is just one of those unfortunate occurrences. I can forgive this lie.

> It could have happened. [...] This isn't some fringe crackpot theory

Those contentions don't follow. Yes, if covid existed in Wuhan as a sample under study, it absolutely could have been leaked. The question is whether it was or not, and your "could have" doesn't speak to that.

The linked article does, a little. It's not great evidence but it's something, and the sequence seems to be an early/transitional variant that hasn't been heretofore attested. That's something.

But prior to this? There wasn't anything but some general circumstantial evidence that coronaviruses were under study and that maybe that involved gain of function research. So arguing for a lab origin yesterday was, if not "crackpot", at least premature.

Today? Maybe, I guess? I think if nothing else this opens up an avenue of investigation. There are probably a lot of samples in freezers around the world that passed through the handful of Chinese institutions in question in 2019. If more of those turn up, then I think the "fringe" folks may actually have something.

But you don't get to argue for something like that (literally accusing people of being responsible for the most damaging public health event of the last century) before you have the evidence.

Like most polarizing things these days, it seems like the only right response is "I don't know, someone should look into that." This is exactly the feeling I got with the love-hate for every new drug (Ivermectin, etc). No one knows anything, don't act like you're right or wrong, gather evidence and assess based off that.

The lab leak theory in particular seems to continue to get evidence supporting it.

Just a reminder that Bret Weinstein and crew once again predicted the exact nature of the leak, including citing Peter Daszak involvement, a full 6 MONTHS before the lab leak theory started to go from conspiracy theory to mainstream :

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6LNtlcsTWPtTCJvuOb5zi5

Bret Weinstein has also been making wild, alarmist claims about mRNA vaccines. He's not a credible scientific voice at this point.

What were the alarmist claims that didn't actually pan out?

That the mRNA vaccines have killed tens of thousands of people in the US, and that they'll render people infertile.

He's presented ivermectin as a miracle drug that is "something like 100% effective" at preventing CoVID-19, and said that people should take it instead of getting vaccinated.

In other words, he's an obvious crank who is giving extremely dangerous medical advice to a very large audience.

The leaked DARPA report confirms that it was a lab leak from Wuhan. Why is this report ignored by the media? Am I missing something?

I mean the Atlantic posted about it which is similar to the Telegraph posting about this, what standard would you like to see?

Aside from a footnote on wikipedia next decade it makes no difference in reaction at this point

hopefully it affects funding for future such research

If anyone else wants to read this, there are lots of google hits for 'darpa leak covid wuhan'

The Atlantic carried a piece on it: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/lab-leak...

The DAPRA thing doesn't do that really. It was a proposal to do iffy virus manipulation from Peter Daszak that got turned down. Whether such research went ahead anyway is unknown presently. Maybe Daszak knows? You'd imagine he might.

covid may have leaked from Wuhan, but the origins of research have started in the US in UNC-Chapel Hill where there is Biosafety Level 3 high security virology lab.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02903-x

The gain of function for coronaviruses has been successful in UNC-Chapel Hill as of 2015 when other researchers raised alarms that this research is extremely dangerous and US government pulled funding out of this research. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787

After public funding for corononavirus Gain of Function research disappeared, UNC's visiting researchers, scholars, postdocs went back to Wuhan to continue research at Virology Institute.

And the rest is history.

And the rest is history.

Speculation, you mean.

I just presented my interpretation of events based on a couple Nature articles and some other research/news that surfaced during early days of covid spread

everybody can form their own opinion based on what is in there

Sure, it's a free planet and all.

Just saying -- there's a distinct between forming an opinion based on "what could have" happened -- versus on what we actually know to have happened.

is there a single person on this planet who is alive today and actually knows what has happened?

Well then I guess anything could have happened, right?

"distinction"

I would encourage folks to listen to this podcast episode from April 2020 for some background on how the virus itself can carry detectable earmarks of being natural or lab-grown and what we see in SARS-CoV-2 based on that:

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/dvheexn/coronavirus...

Gives you some good additional questions to ask when reports like this come out.

Also from TFA: "If it was sequenced in early 2020, it may have been contaminated from experiments carried out by researchers trying to learn more about the emerging virus."

Then where did the virus sample the lab was working with come from? Was it also from Yunnan where RATG13 came from? (1500 miles from Wuhan).

Why are they destroying all of their virus samples of everything that can trace the lineage of the virus? Why are they going out of their way to delete all of this data out of public databases?

(RATG13 had to be retrieved from the trashbin of history as well.)

If you believe that this all harmless and that this is all a normal part of studying the virus, you might be in the market for a bridge. Possibly two.

Your account name is ratg13, yet you're making wildly incorrect claims about RaTG13.

> RATG13 had to be retrieved from the trashbin of history

The WIV is the institute that publicized the existence of RaTG13 and highlighted its relation to SARS-CoV-2. They published a very high-profile Nature article on it early on in the pandemic.[0]

What's the conspiracy theory here? That the WIV secretly turned RaTG13 into SARS-CoV-2, and then when the pandemic broke out, proceeded to publish a detailed description of RaTG13 and its relation to SARS-CoV-2 in one of the most prominent international scientific journals?

0. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7

Can someone give me an ELI5 on how lab-grown viruses work? (or point me to resources to learn more)

Is the process mostly trial and error? Do you just mutate something a lot then study its properties? If so, are typical labs chock-full of these world ending viruses and one happened to escape, or are the dangerous viruses typically "rare"?

How much "engineering" can you do? Do you have levers to control the virality and deadliness? Can you specify it to only target people with specific genes?

What's the barrier to entry in terms of knowledge/cost/equipment? Can someone google the covid genome sequence go "print" it out easily?

Basically I'm trying to understand the risk of having some depressed grad student unleash covid 2.0 upon the world.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02903-x

it is called Gain of Function research, when zoonotic viruses (such as bats coronavirus) are grafted with proteins (such as Spike protein and its furin cleavage motif) that make it extremely virulent to humans.

Such research on coronaviruses historically has been done at labs in USA and China and considered extremely dangerous (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787)

quoting https://inference-review.com/article/thunder-out-of-china

"You can manipulate [coronaviruses] in the lab pretty easily, it is the spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus zoonotic risk. You can get the sequence, you can build the protein. We worked with Ralph Baric at UNC who did this, insert into a backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab. So, you can get more predictive when you find a sequence. … The logical progression for vaccines — if you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s try to insert some of these [other spike genes] and get a better vaccine [72]"

Link to the study: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1330800/v1

Found via: https://biotechnews.net/2022/02/09/antarctic-soil-sample-fro...

Honestly, I'm disappointed.

The Telegraph is known for being a conservative-leaning media outlet with a mixed track record for fact checking [1]. All of the links in this article just point back to the Telegraph, with no primary source links available from this article.

The OP created an account 2 hours before they posted this article.

I posted a long-form article from well-researched pro-science outlet (MIT Technology Review, which should be a slam dunk for a cohort like HN) yesterday to crickets [2]. I'm not bitter that my post didn't get upvoted, to be clear.

I'm bitter that we're upvoting spurious content instead of balanced, fact-checked research.

Have we lost our desire for factual research and content?

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

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30277185

One of the three analyzed files has a last modified timestamp of Jan, 14 2020:

https://twitter.com/dmoulding/status/1491593763466088448?s=2...

That could be the time of sequencing.

I really recommend this book which probes both natural and lab-leak origin theories https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/58647975-viral

IMHO, it is very likely that lab-leak is the origin, though it does not have definite evidence.

Here is a Bayesian (but somewhat old) analysis from Rootclaim https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV... giving lab leak over 80% chance.

Regardless of where your opinion stands, the way the Chinese government, WHO scientists, and even some American scientists handled (and continue to handle) the search for the origin of Covid is despicable.

Contrast to the incredible lab work of African scientists when Omicron first came out.

Maybe if they had taken the correct measures in the beggining, it would never turned into this cluesterfuck. China will be accounted one day for this.

You make it sound like the spread of covid could have been avoided. Only some island nations managed to prevent the spread and even then they are merely delaying the inevitable.

Mabybe, When SARS break into Asia, WHO recommended closure of all airports and the governments instituted quarantine into the region. If the Chinese government did not tried to hide covid from the world, maybe it could be contianed in a smaller region. Maybe.

SARS more deadly and less transmissible. There were plenty of countries that still ended up having enough advance notice, including the United States (Italy was already getting screwed by covid at the time), yet that did it no good.

Plus, we don't exactly trust the Chinese government in the first place, so using it as an excuse just sounds downright lazy.

China publicly announced the outbreak on 30 December 2019, just a few days after detecting the first patients, before they even knew for certain what it was caused by.

The Chinese government gave the the US government a detailed briefing on the outbreak and what it knew about the new virus on 3 January 2020, less than a week after discovering the first patients. China publicly announced that a novel coronavirus was responsible for the outbreak just days later.

Despite these very early warnings, the US government took almost no measures for more than two months. Even after China locked down 60 million people in Hubei province in late January 2020, the US did nothing of significance to control the virus.

The US waited until it had a full-blown, massive outbreak in New York City to react.

What could China have possibly done to convince the US government to take the virus more seriously? Seeing China implement massive lockdowns wasn't even enough to spur the US into action.

And if the work prior administrations had done on disease surveillance and assistance to other countries in handling outbreaks hadn't been ripped apart, that would have helped as well.

Lot of folks to blame.

>China will be accounted one day for this.

Boy, have I got a bridge to sell ya.

Covid was already in Europe by December 27th, 2019. The pathogen was first noticed in China on December 29th, 2019, with a few dozen patients hospitalized in Wuhan presenting with pneumonia, during peak flu season. China notified the WHO of a pneumonia of unknown cause on December 31st, 2019.

One week before, there were only a few hospitalized patients.

With a few dozen hospitalized patients, you would expect perhaps several hundred patients infected, many asymptomatic, and many with mild symptoms.

Please explain what you would have done to prevent the spread of Covid given these facts, how the virus could have been detected earlier, and what reasonable steps could have prevented global transmission.

We now know that Covid was likely transmitting in China by mid-November 2019, and the earliest case dates to Dec 8. But it's not very easy to identify a novel pathogen when there are single digit numbers of patients presenting with flu-like symptoms during peak flu season.

> China will be accounted one day for this.

In much the same way those dastardly oil companies will pay for covering up their knowledge of global warming in the 70's and not doing anything to stem the tide when it was trivial to do so. Punishments to large organizations don't happen when we have weak governments since the organizations just slowly dissolve the guilt as members retire out.

Isn't there a lawsuit going on against Exxon?

Im curious, do you think what they did significantly matters? COVID was already in Europe by the end of 2019, it seems unlikely that there was any chance to stop the spread before that.

How do you hold them accountable, and for what exactly? Do you blame them for all 800k+ deaths in the US? It seems we mostly did that to ourselves.

contrast to Ebola, too

I'm not sure I understand how to contrast the two things. They are entirely unrelated.

> Contrast to the incredible lab work of African scientists when Omicron first came out.

And yet, if hindsight is 20/20 those South African scientists probably should have kept their mouth shut since the entire world (briefly, I'll grant) responded to the open sharing of information by essentially embargoing the country - while China remained in a pretty positive light through early COVID receiving praise for aggressive lock downs and quickly produced procedures to help try and stem the spread of "the disease that just happened to hit them first".

You can say that one of those parties acted in a way we'd like to see more of in the future - but the world's reaction rewarded (or was neutral at least) China and punished South Africa. It sucks but it's true.

Also when a lab in Taiwan got fined after they reported a researcher studying covid in a BSL3 lab got bitten by a mouse and got infected. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4387611

What is the lesson here? If pathogens leak from your lab, cover it up and tell no one. These researchers in Taiwan got punished for doing the right thing!

>The Hungarian team say that when it first pointed out the discrepancy in the sequencing data, the samples were immediately removed from the genetic database by the Chinese, although have since been restored.

Panic mode activated

Lol, until a couple of months ago we knew it was a lab leak because we couldn’t find an animal harboring the virus.

Now, apparently, we know it’s a lab leak because there’s a chain of 4-5 different species that were harboring the virus.

This is the epitome of a conspiracy theory. There is no consistent theory. It’s just a gish gallop that seeks to mold whatever morsels of new information we find into evidence of the same priors, even if the latest piece of evidence “proving” the priors contradicts the last piece of evidence that was supposedly “proof” of the priors.

US and China together leaked this virus due to greed and a careless attitude. Thousands of people died and the entire world lost a couple of years of their lives.

These people should be found, mercilessly punished.

https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-1177047/v1_covere... - The study in question

Thought it was some guy from Wuhan who ate a bat soup. But this is really interesting

Link to the original paper https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1177047/v1

It's disingenuous of the Telegraph journalist not to provide links to, or attributed quotes from, the Hungarian scientists.

After doing some in-depth research to find the original research or reports I've found nothing published by the Hungarian institutions nor Dr Jesse Bloom - the only person quoted in the article. Having dug further I don't take his statements at face value either, for the reasons described below, since there's more than a hint of preconceived bias in his general thrust and previous publications.

I REALLY wish journalists would clearly share published sources to original research and data for such important events rather than stir up controversy without demonstrating a strong foundation. Especially when claiming this is a "finding".

For clarity, I've no opinion on SARS-Cov-2 origin but I do want to see claims well-supported by evidence.

I went looking on both the mentioned Hungarian web-sites [0][1], searched biorxiv, and checked the Bloom Lab [2] publications since the only person quoted is Jesse Bloom [3] who claims to have reproduced (Hungarian) results. In my research I also found a prior report by Bloom in June 2021 [4] reporting 'recovery of deleted files containing partial sequences' [4] that were soon criticised by multiple other scientists; e.g: "...The language of the paper is unusual, its contains a significant degree of supposition and conjecture, cites blog posts..." [5].

[0] https://univet.hu/en/research/topics/

[1] https://www.elte.hu/en/facts

[2] https://research.fredhutch.org/bloom/en/publications.html

[3] https://research.fredhutch.org/bloom/en/members.html

[4] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.18.449051v1....

[5] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/23/health/coronavirus-sequen...

Updated: just discovered there's a recent github repo [6] created by Bloom with much more detail. Telegraph should really have pointed to this.

[6] https://github.com/jbloom/PRJNA692319_public

Update 2: Pre-print [7] of the Hungarian report (see [6] for details as to why it was rejected by Biorxiv several times).

[7] https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1330800/v1

The pre-print's introduction suggests the most likely cause of contamination is machine misalignment. Date of sequencing has not been determined other than to say late December 2019 to early January 2020 (when results were sent to the sample submitters).

"We think that the most likely scenario is that the SARS-CoV-2 sequence fragments are not from the Antarctic soil samples,but are mistakenly assigned reads from another sample(s) sequenced on the same flow cell at the Sangon Biotech sequencing facility in Shanghai.

The equipment, Illumina HiSeq 4000 that was used for sequencing according to the project’s metadata, is known to be prone to barcode misassignment errors6,7.In a nutshell, as detailed in Illumina’s whitepaper6, this artifact is related to the exponentially increasing density of next-generation sequencing (NGS) chips. Nowadays a single flow cell has such a large capacity that it is rarely filled up by a single sample. For example the 12 antarctic soil samples in PRJNA692319 altogether contain around 320 million paired end reads, while Illumina HiSeq 4000’s capacity is up to 10 billion paired end reads. The increased capacity is utilized through multiplexing, which adds unique sequences, called indexes or barcodes, to each DNA fragment during library preparation.Before final data analysis, sequencing reads from pooled libraries need to be identified and sorted computationally in a process called demultiplexing. This allows large numbers of libraries to be pooled and sequenced simultaneously during a single sequencing run. After adapters are ligated to nucleic acid fragments, the products are cleaned up to remove any free, unligated adapters. Libraries can be cleaned up by a bead-based or gel purification step to remove free adapters or primers. Failure to remove free adapters or primers can lead to contamination of prepared libraries and may result in index hopping and misassignment. As a results, sequencing reads from other, not related samples that are sequenced on the same flow cell can get into our samples."

I really dislike conjecture when it comes to Covid information.

Also, just generally, I’d love to know the “and then what” if this were true. What happens? Does the world just point their finger? This is a serious comment

Regardless of whether or the corona virus was a lab leak several things are certain. A moderately lethal virus that is highly transmissible can be created in a lab and those nations with this capability now know what the effect of releasing such a virus will have on a country. As biological knowledge and capabilities increase the purposeful release of a virus becomes more realistic.

Warfare between advanced countries has changed the last decade or so. Cyber warfare, disinformation, fomenting dissent, and creating biological threats are much easier and more disrupting now. It does not require bombs and bullets to bring an advanced nation to its knees.

> A moderately lethal virus that is highly transmissible can be created in a lab and those nations with this capability now know what the effect of releasing such a virus will have on a country.

It has also demonstrated the connectedness of the supply chain and the fundamental impossibility of safe biological warfare. Even the countries that tackled COVID effectively still saw an enormous social and economic hit. Barring pre-vaccinating your own population before releasing it, I guess, but that invites nukes lobbed your way when the rest of the world figures it out.

I'm more worried about bioterrorism than nation states being dumb enough to use it.

Yeah. My take away from all this is that New Zealand might be the only country in the world that has even a small chance of engaging in bio-warfare without foot gunning itself.

It is just all round a bad idea.

Nuclear war is more unsafe than releasing a corona virus and yet it is a possibility. Releasing corona virus is not as bad as a nuclear strike. Where does it land in terms of how to respond. There is no threat of China invading the U.S. and vice versa but there is a threat of causing a global disruption. China is much better equipped to deal with a viral outbreak than the U.S. This is especially so given the effects of disinformation regarding vaccines has caused. The CCP is much better equipped to deal with supply chain issues than either major party in the U.S.

Sometimes just the threat of releasing something is enough to change the response other nations are willing to do. If China invades Taiwan are we willing to risk dire consequences by militarily intervening? Suppose a virus is released but has less effect on people with genetic markers that East Asian people have but Europeans and Africans do not.

I believe your view of how a corona virus can be used is too limited.

What exactly is the problem if it were created in a lab. Why are some people so hellbent on refusing to consider the possibility?

I suspect the answer here is politics. Eearly into the pandemic, the lab-leak theory was being conveyed mostly by conservative voices.

This time article dives into this idea: https://time.com/6051414/donald-trump-wuhan-laboratory-leak/

Diplomatically, it would have required more of a confrontation with China, which would could lead to less trade and economic issues. Had it been a lab leak in a much smaller country? I could see both parties taking a much more confrontational role towards that country.

20 million deaths, according to excess deaths counts, because of scientists doing experiments they knew were dangerous?

It would destroy confidence in virology, they would be regarded as mass murderers.

> These are not from seals or penguins but from African green monkeys and Chinese hamsters.

That's two new animals to me in one sentence.

I have cystic fibrosis, and the Chinese hamster has been used in quite a bit of CF research and medication production.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9002671/

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

I was hoping the monkey would actually be green-ish

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=African+green+monkeys&iax=i...

But then I realized there aren't any green mammals...

https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1357,0...

Chinese hamsters are actually very common pet animals.

Next step is having them featured on the cover of an O'Reilly book, or as a character in Aggretsuko.

More about their derived cell lines:

- African green Monkey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vero_cell

- Chinese hamster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_hamster_ovary_cell

Upvoted, not for the article but for the discussion here, that generally suggests it was contamination.

The Chinese repeatedly deleting data from shared databases is one of the craziest parts of the pandemic timeline.

If they want the world to believe they are not responsible, they are doing a terrible job.

Where are the sources here? Shouldn't there be an arxiv link or something?

Giant watering can conjecture revisited - but cloud theory remains persuasive.

Another year passes. Still waiting for conclusive proof of an animal origin.

It's pretty obvious that we are not going to have "conclusive proof" of any kind of origin.

Yeah, the only conclusive proof we've gotten is that China demands everyone shut up and not piss off China.

There's some political piece missing to the whole story of Covid. From the lab theory suppression, the draconian lockdowns, vaccine mandates, etc. There are a ton of details that just dont add up.

Hypothesis: ideologically-aligned people across governmental, media, scientific, and corporate entities sincerely believe totalitarian measures promote common welfare.

Given the propensity for ideologically-aligned people to consume similar information sources, distributed and uncoordinated actions may unwittingly work toward a common, unspoken goal. These people may not need to ever know each other. I recommend reading about memetic warfare [1] for a strategic overview of targeting and infecting a receptive host population with ideas. Remember that ideologies matter, especially to those people with power over the direction of society.

We may also hypothesize that at least some of those ideologically-aligned people do in fact know each other and agree upon plans-of-action. If you don't believe such meetings occur in practice, I encourage you to hold a high-level leadership position in a large organization and attempt to propagate measures such as the imposition of totalitarian measures across society. You simply cannot do it alone.

The reality is likely a combination of both approaches: some people promulgating a totalitarian agenda (though the word "totalitarian" will never be intentionally associated with the agenda), and more people agreeing with and therefore furthering that agenda (even those those people may be opposed to totalitarianism when identified as such).

[1] Brian Hancock, "Military Memetics: The Future of War," https://westernman.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Memetic-Wa...

What details dont add up? Everything you listed sounds like standard reactions from people/governments with different viewpoints on what works for the virus.

It is such a shame that the Chinese government has been actively trying to obscure the origins of this virus from impartial investigations for the last 2 years.

Is it such a stretch to think China purposefully leaked the virus to distract from their takeover of Hong Kong, and soon to be Taiwan?

This shouldn't be a political issue. If viruses that kill millions are leaking out of labs, we need to know about it so that we can put a stop to it.

Nothing political about it.

Even if a lab leak doesn't turn out to be the cause, which I fully grant as a possibility, the censorship and political correctness of scientists, policy makers, and journalists are antithetical to the core scientific process and root cause analysis that would save lives and prevent future mishaps.

Literally everything is political at some level and always has been.

No it isn't and I'm tired of being told to pretend it is. I do things daily which are in no way political, all people do.

What's something you think isn't political?

-----

In my opinion, politics is in everything because it's simply the word used for how societies (on all scales) decide how to operate. Everything we interact with has been influenced by politics.

Luckily, in much of the first world, we no longer debate the politics of most things.

> ...politics is in everything...

I don't know your intent, but this seems like a disingenuous setup.

If someone were to say: Drinking a glass of water. You could abstract the concept into fluoride, costs, access, etc; None of that applies to the action of me consuming the water. The same goes for sitting, standing, breathing, blinking, scratching an itch, waving to my neighbor, etc.

> None of that applies to the action of me consuming the water.

Yes it does. How did you get that water? How do you know it's safe to drink? Do you need to worry about water access? Etc. Etc.

As expected.

I'm not interested into turning conversations into competitions, especially when you're ignoring most of the list to focus on a single thing you can lean into to be right.

Enjoy being right, I don't care to waste my time with dishonest discourse.

With all due respect, you took the stance that "not everything is political".

Therefore, the rational argument is to let you pick something that "isn't political" then demonstrate how it is political. There's literally no other way to demonstrate this point based on the pretext you set.

No, you don't get to hide in the back of the train when you wrecked the front.

You asked cpsns a bait question. Your "rational argument" was a setup, and it's dishonest in conversation. You had no intention of engaging in conversation, you wanted to prove your point no matter what was said.

Even knowing it was bait I forced myself to respond with the little good faith I could muster with "seems like".

You ignored the entire context of what I said, focused on the sentence that you seem to have misunderstood, and tried to snap that trap shut with a weird response where you repeated my own abstraction point back to me for some reason. You then ignored the last line, which was a list of actions that are in no way inherently political. You started off disingenuous, and continued to be.

No, the physical action that I was intentionally clear on, is not political. Tipping the glass, and swallowing the fucking water is not political. Nor is laughing, tying my shoes, pulling my socks up, seeing a bird fly by, etc.

All things make up everything, afterall.

My water came from the well I had dug in a rural area, that I had tested to make sure it was safe for my own consumption. There was no governmental involvement; not local, nor state, nor federal.

Outliers are included in everything.

At least we're lucky that the government keeps the moon in orbit and the sun burning.

As I said, be right, enjoy it, that seems to be important to you. I find your approach to conversation in this subthread dishonest and myopic. Do your thing, but miss me entirely with all of that sketch.

>Literally everything is political at some level and always has been.

The Big Bang was political before humans even evolved?

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Everything involving people

If a government accidentally killed millions of people across the globe, how is that not political? Even a diplomat killing someone in a car accident causes a political incident, I don't see how you could remove political repercussions from an accident that kills millions. There's little incentive for a government to admit responsibility and lots of incentive to hide it.

> Nothing political about it.

It's not only about politics but also about money.

If it came out, with certainty, that some lab worker messed up, it could lead to further moratorium on virus research. The grants would be cut, money would stop flowing. Some people's wealth depends on that money not stopping.

The thing that's so frustrating about this is how some hyper-partisan hacks poisoned the whole damn line of questioning by conflating weaponized/deliberate release with "laboratory accident". SMH my head.

It is completely inconsistent to think a political structure that would put a million people in forced work camps would never ever do something like this deliberately, or cover up an accident.

Calling people partisan hacks for mentioning that does nothing to surface truth.

I actually do find it extremely hard to believe that even the Chinese government would be able to internally formulate a plan to intentionally release a virus without droves of bureaucrats coming out as vocal whistleblowers. When you have a large organization (especially one as large as the Chinese government) you're going to have some actors with strong ethical beliefs. Deciding to take this course of action (for some reason whatever it may be) and then actually implementing this action would be incredibly difficult.

Silencing discussion about an accidental release is in a completely different ballpark where you're working to (in your view) prevent harm - not cause it. The intentional weaponized release angle of lab-leak entirely preempted any reasonable discussion on the matter.

Don’t you just need literally one guy who you blackmail and then kill afterwards?

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

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

Is your feedback that if I see something incendiary the worst possible thing I can do is counter it, but instead I should downvote, flag, or simply ignore?

It wasn’t obvious to me my comment was furthering a flame war, but if the above heuristic is a good one I will try for that.

I get frustrated when I leave 500 good comments only to get dinged for an outlier.

User rcpt shared the, much more legible, twitter thread this kinda trash telegraph article is citing, reposting as a top level comment since the parent comment there is being modded: https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1491297779855278082?t=...

And my response based on that:

>Thanks, that twitter thread actually makes sense, unlike the telegraph article. The conclusion seems to be that we need a timestamp on when these samples were sequenced. If in Jan 2020 it is fine, if its in 2019 it catches the Chinese Gov in a lie. The sequences themselves are not unusual for early COVID and have been seen before, but the context of human cell lines suggests they were being cultured. >So, no conclusive evidence of lab leak without a known timestamp we don‘t have. The telegraph is editorialising for clicks.

wild stuff

Two hour old account posting crazy right wing propaganda to HN? Why aren't these insta flagged? And wow, sensible comments are already greyed out. Is HN getting brigaded?

I don't see any evidence that HN is getting brigaded. This is a divisive issue. There are lots of users on all sides of the question, and it's a topic that's easy to get activated about.

OK, you will know better than I. But I wasn't overreacting. It seemed odd to me that literally 20 minutes after this was posted, there were a non-controversial response about possible contamination which had been downvoted enough to turn grey. That to me suggested an agenda.

As far as I can tell, these perceptions are nearly always coming from our own unconsciouses. We have almost no objective data about who is behind the little bits of information we see on the internet, or why they have the views they do, and so these little particles of information organize themselves according to the shadowy magnetic fields in our own head. The overwhelming majority of the time, who's actually on the other side of the transaction is someone else just like you, holding their views for the same reasons that you hold yours, and perceiving the same sorts of insidiousness in the things they disagree with or dislike.

Just to be clear: I don't at all mean to pick on you personally! "You" here means all of us because it appears to be a universal (or, to be nice, near-universal) bias.

I've sometimes called this the "surrounded by demons" experience: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Dan! OP was a 2 hour old account! Demons? LOL. I'm not experiencing the shock of discovering my fellow HNers don't think like myself - that ship sailed in 2016, believe me. I'm experiencing the suspicion of the site getting astroturfed by God knows who for God knows what. I think being skeptical of any China stories during the Olympics isn't being overly paranoid!

Anyway, as always, we appreciate your hard work!

They're just little demons.

> In May 2021, a team of US evolutionary biologists published research on what an ancestor to Covid-19 should look like, and came up with two options. One had the same three mutations found in the samples.

Whichever way you boil this down, the following is a true statement: COVID-19 leaked from a lab in China.

Clearly, whether this was the 'original' COVID-19 strain or not (it appears to be the oldest mutation we're aware of so far), this particular sample that should never have had COVID-19 on it, did have COVID-19 on it. The sample was clearly infected at the lab.

If this sample had COVID-19 on it, why not another sample? And if we have virus samples travelling from sample to sample, it's not difficult to believe that the 'mover' here was the lab scientist/technician.

The real question is when this lab leak occurred:

> “The timeline matters a lot here. If they were sequenced in Dec 2019 then it’s exceptionally important, because [China] holds SarsCov2s not discovered until December 30 to 31.

Don't hold your breath on getting a true answer here, there is no way the CCP would ever lose face and admit fault, not in a million years. Be prepared for claims it was sequenced on December 32nd.

The most important thing about all of this is the lack of relevance. Regardless of where the virus came from we have to deal with it anyway and it is certain that there will be more viruses including but not limited to coronaviruses spreading among humans. Being more careful with laboratory work and processes might be a start, but being truly ready for what we have every reason to expect means a lot more than that. Looking backward is not going to get us very far with this problem. We need to look forward and actually do the work to have processes, protective gear, and robust care systems in place.

It would inform our decision as a society on whether or not to engage in dangerous virus research. We do RCA in tech to prevent repeating errors. Why should we not care about this with the pandemic?

I agree with that in many ways.

However, I cant help but think that we do need to understand the causes of Covid-19.

Our society should be able to prevent this kind of thing in future. Regardless of it's a Lab Leak or Natural Transmission.

Just moving on and doing better next time isnt the entire solution.

All aspects of this Pandemic can be investigated, studied and learnt from!

Next time things could be considerably worse!

If we know it came from China we might embargo them for causing the mass casualties.

Consider the source.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-telegraph/

Excerpt from the link:

Bias Rating: RIGHT Factual Reporting: MIXED Country: United Kingdom (34/180 Press Freedom) Media Type: Newspaper Traffic/Popularity: High Traffic MBFC Credibility Rating: MEDIUM CREDIBILITY

They want you to read their paper, not to inform you. Should be no supprise they are posting polarizing statements with little to no proof.

Personally, I believe the lab leak is plausible. Doesn't make the paper a good source of info.

Just read the Twitter they're citing

https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1491297779855278082?t=...

probably the url should be replaced with that anyway

Thanks, that twitter thread actually makes sense, unlike the telegraph article. The conclusion seems to be that we need a timestamp on when these samples were sequenced. If in Jan 2020 it is fine, if its in 2019 it catches the Chinese Gov in a lie. The sequences themselves are not unusual for early COVID and have been seen before, but the context of human cell lines suggests they were being cultured.

So, no conclusive evidence of lab leak without a known timestamp we don‘t have. The telegraph is editorialising for clicks.

You can find the research being reported on, just a quick google away.

Here you go: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1330800/v1

On HN, we go by article quality, not site quality [1]. Most major sites produce a lot of bad articles and a few good ones. Because we're trying to optimize for intellectual curiosity [2], it's important to let the good ones through while weeding out the bad ones (or at least try to). It's also increasingly the case that certain classes of article are limited to certain classes of publication—because each publication excludes what doesn't match its ideological coloring. This isn't a great development—it would be better to have more neutral sources—but that's increasingly where we find ourselves. Since intellectual curiosity is (almost by definition) not primarily an ideological emotion, it follows that we should try to stay open regardless of the coloring of the source. That doesn't mean trusting it, of course—only considering it.

One of the criteria we apply in cases like this, especially when it's a major ongoing topic like this one, is whether the article contains significant new information [3]. That's generally a better lens to look at these things through.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Your patience, Dang, is admirable. You might be the only force that prevents HN from going feral, Reddit-style.

That's flattering! but by far the strongest force is that most of the community wants HN to remain a site for intellectual curiosity. If that weren't true, it would be a lost cause; but because it is true, I feel empowered to make posts that represent that point of view.

Woah! I didn't expect a response from dang!

I think this article is light on facts and high on sensationalism, making it a poor quality article that does more harm than good.

Re reading my comment, I see how I failed to communicate that and focused more on the source than the paper.

I will keep this in mind in the future, thank you.

Thanks for the kind reply. It doesn't always turn out that way :)

I like this policy. Heck, given today's climate I love this policy.

What makes "mediabiasfactcheck" a more credible source of info than the outlets it is labeling, judging and sorting into categories? Is the founder Dave Van Zandt a famously reliable, neutral, fair person?

If the Daily Telegraph says that "mediabiasfactcheck" has a mostly Clown bias with Medium Rare Credibility, will you consider such ranking equally reliable?

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