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Comment by jasonhansel | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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

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.

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.

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.

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

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