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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.

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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.

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 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.)

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.

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