“This shouldn’t happen”: Inside the virus-hunting nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance
vanityfair.com
vanityfair.com
- Kristian Andersen offered to abuse his power as editor to stealthily edit a preprint. He is the main author of the most notable paper supporting a natural origin, and has been one of the major resources of the natural origins camp. Now his scientific integrity is seriously questioned.
- Peter Daszak appears much more focused on finding new sources of grant money than on doing good science: "What was needed, he exhorted his staff, was a “change in culture” as “part of [a] mentaility [sic] to get money,”
- The Wuhan Institute of Virology is more of a second zone lab than a top lab: "The WIV was also viewed as subpar, especially when compared with the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute. Harbin was China’s Harvard, said the former DARPA official. The WIV was more like a safety school"
- EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak were seen by DARPA as amateurs in virology, not at all the expert frontline organisation that's been suggested before: "EcoHealth Alliance was viewed as a “ragtag group” and a “middle guy,” a backseat collaborator willing to get on an Air China jet, eat terrible food, and stay in bad hotels" "EcoHealth Alliance had “bolted on” a serious scientist, Ralph Baric".
I'm not sure why this is supposed to be compelling evidence. Are people who refuse to work unless provided first class plane tickets, meals at Michelin star restaurants, and five-star hotels expected to be more reliable? If anything, I imagine people would be way more willing fudge or flat out lie about their research if they were willing to get that kind of accommodation out of it.
Wait what?! Is this new information ? Because this is incredibly troubling
But here's the thing. Vanity Fair wrote about this theory in 2020 too:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/why-scientists-belie...
“The Discussion Is Basically Over”: Why Scientists Believe the Wuhan-Lab Coronavirus Origin Theory Is Highly Unlikely. Trump and Mike Pompeo’s favorite blame-China theory makes great propaganda—but dubious science.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/inside-the-the-viral...
"An opinion-section column and a British tabloid story are hardly enough to give the Wuhan lab theory full mainstream credibility"
The quantity of things that are true yet lack "mainstream credibility" is quite large, because the self-appointed mainstream isn't very good at figuring out what's true. The Ukraine labs story comes from evidence gathered from Hunter Biden's laptop, which, if we recall, resulted in the New York Post story about it being immediately frozen by Twitter in an unprecedented manner. You couldn't even share links to it privately. Justified because the story was "Russian misinformation" except it wasn't, and now even the NYT has admitted the contents are authentic. What was on that laptop, well:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10652127/Hunter-Bid...
The Russian government held a press conference Thursday claiming that Hunter Biden helped finance a US military 'bioweapons' research program in Ukraine. However the allegations were branded a brazen propaganda ploy to justify president Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and sow discord in the US. But emails and correspondence obtained by DailyMail.com from Hunter's abandoned laptop show the claims may well be true. The emails show Hunter helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor specializing in research on pandemic-causing diseases. He also introduced Metabiota to an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas firm, Burisma, for a 'science project' involving high biosecurity level labs in Ukraine.
If you rely on places like Vanity Fair then you'll always be behind the curve on these things, constantly saying that yesterday's lunatic fringe conspiracy is obviously reasonable, whilst today's is not.
That describes a huge proportion of contemporary politics.
In other words, the only way that Rand Paul can influence the situation in any meaningful way is through political means. So, I find it hard to fault the theatrics with Fauci as distasteful as there are.
I don't buy when politicians start being all like "look I agree with you and that's my end game but first we need to get rid of this guy, and then we win the election, and then we put this other guy in that position and then and then and then". It's not true he can't do better now, it's just not convenient to him and since it's convenient to me I will not support him.
As a member of the legislative branch, Paul's role is fairly narrow: he can summon the people who actually do the work to ask them pointy questions, and try to build support for changing the law. If you look at how things are done in the UK Parliament or other legislative bodies in democracies, it's no different. The question of who is in power is the key one they focus on because they can't micro-manage the details of every possible government agency.
I do think even in this very narrow role he may be succesful. There seems to be sufficient support built-up for an investigation to happen before long, whereas less than a year ago this seemed unfathomable.
“A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.”
― Kurt Vonnegut,
I understand he uses that character to push water down to his mill. That doesn't excuse his behavior on my regard and most of all it doesn't excuse his complete inaction doing actual research into where the virus came from instead of digging dirt on Fauci.
I thought so, too. His presentation was overly theatrical. But on the other hand, he has been vindicated on most of the points he made against Fauci. Any reasonable person would consider what they were doing gain-of-function research. I don't think Fauci has any maniacal plans or backroom pharma deals going on, he's just a corrupt bureaucrat trying to cover his ass for a series of incompetent decisions.
Just because you’re an expert in crazy people and you see them everywhere doesn’t mean this particular one is wrong.
And honestly, if you were a senator and had inside information that convinced you the pandemic was deliberate and funded by the US government, I would hope you’d act a little unhinged, too.
To me it's mind-boggling that you could get arrested and fined for violating covid-related restrictions but people who did much much much more potentially dangerous stuff are not only getting away with it but also kept getting financed by the government. Even if covid turns out to not originate from a lab, just the insane potential risks that came from the blatant violations of the GoF moratorium should have been enough to land people in trouble. Especially since us commoners were punished based on the possibility that we could transmit the virus, whether we were infected or completely virus free didn't matter.
The lab was doing GoF research with bat and pangolin Coronaviruses exploring if the spike protein can be modified to enter through the human ACE2 receptor. There are a number of papers from Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli on the topic with research done at the Wuhan lab.
You raise a few objectionable assertions that I think is good to contemplate: - GoF was never banned - The ban was NIH funding GoF - The ban was lifted in 2017 anyways - Is this risky? The ban on funding it doesn't mean it's risky, as per se. - The potential pie in the eye risk are infinite, but what are the realistic risks? That really depends on the technical details of how the research is done, and where it's done. - Compare and contrast to activities that are very dangerous and have nearly infinite catastrophic risks but we do every day: driving, flying, operating nuclear power plants, refining oil, and much much more.
All of this research came out of the desire not to be caught flat footed by the next version of SARS or MERS. Overall global research did in fact prep us for SARS-CoV-2. Vaccines "made in months" that have stood the test of efficacy and safety? Months if you ignore the years of research behind it.
Is this particular thing excessively dangerous or not? I'm not 100% sure. Most of the "this is unacceptable" seems to be coming from people who seem to have a visceral hatred of Dr Fauci and who as head of the NIH was indirectly responsible for this funding. But I don't find that a reasonable line of reasoning. One thing I know, is every scientist I know is not paid a boat load, and care deeply about what they are doing and why.
Perhaps GoF is too 'dangerous', but maybe we should also hear about how it can be made safe, how does it compare in hazardousness to other common things that are deemed 'safe' and what the benefits are.
And the probability that what is created in a lab will be close enough to what is naturally occurring in nature to be useful are none to zero.
The first step is understanding. Until you understand how it happens, statements about whether or not you can prevent it do not make much sense to me.
For example: imagine you have not yet discovered that the unwashed hands of doctors are transmitting disease in a hospital. You might make a statement very similar to yours about how "even if we can figure out how people get sick, it's not like we can stop it".
This is a slogan with no logical value.
> Until you understand how it happens, statements about whether or not you can prevent it do not make much sense to me.
Except we do understand. It seems to me that you are lacking is basic scientific knowledge. Virus mutates naturally and become more virulent due to evolution.
> For example: imagine you have not yet discovered that the unwashed hands of doctors are transmitting disease in a hospital. You might make a statement very similar to yours about how "even if we can figure out how people get sick, it's not like we can stop it".
We can control our hands, we can't control viruses in nature.
Basically they're creating bigger and bigger fires and claiming that doing so somehow helps firefighters. Next we'll have nuclear weapons researchers claiming that higher yields are good to know about so we can work out how to protect against stronger explosions.
As an alternative, we need to stop development of new viruses, both naturally and in labs, including Russian and North Korean labs.
What? The risks for each of those, even the nuclear power plant operation, are extremely limited and localized. GoF research has potential near-extinction levels of risk. Nuclear weapons are the ony thing on remotely the same tier IMO. It's not to say that GoF is not a good idea, as clearly there is potential benefit. But to compare it to the risks of driving a car is apples to radioactive oranges.
GoF is often not lab engineering and the outcomes are not predictable and the range of possible danger is almost infinite. Even from perfectly well intentioned actors.
Nuclear accidents cannot be [1] limited and localized, and also [2] at the same tier as GoF (...since GoF outcomes are certainly not [1]).
From my point of view, you simply cannot assess the risk when the main party involved in taking and being responsible for said risk has proven itself to be so shady. We all know that there areinherent dangers to this type of research, but we can't account for human deception and tribal wagon circling on top of that.
The proponents of GoF could've come clean, been transparent and welcomed the scrutiny considering the insane magnitude of the situation. But they have not! Even if it turns out that this is purely zoonotic, the trust is rightfully broken imo. Maybe research should continue, even on GoF, but consequences should now be clear. The article details such a long pattern of deliberate obfuscation, gaslighting and outright manipulation that it's becomes impossible to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Also, considering that we went through the biggest pandemic of the past century during which most people have seen their lives literally dictated by arbitrary (and very low) risk thresholds that authorities have decided to follow... it would be a bit rich to now just say that we have to live with the risks of scientists fucking up and that we have to let the pros handle it. Yes screw ups happen, but asking billions of people to just live with the consequences won't work.
Again, 2 years ago I'd have said that we need to take the risk because it can have tremendous benefits. But as much as appealing to "commoners" might sound lazy, there's still something deeply wrong when we see a much stronger and visceral reactions/consequences to maskless "karens" than we do to the individuals involved with orgs like the EcoHealth alliance. Yes it's maybe a populist take, but at some point the elitism becomes so blatant that even populism makes sense
Didn't feel like it.
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2021/0...
Parent is solely focused on probability, when what really matters is outcome.
Lets say that for every 10 years: 1) p of lab leak is 0.002% vs 2) p of nuclear accident is 0.03%
Although (2) is much more probable, from a risk management perspective, (1) is unacceptable because risks compound over time and critically, the domain of outcomes are vastly less localized and certain than (2).
Because otherwise there are no valid reasons to create this kind of pathogens in labs; the chance the bugs created there will be similar to the naturally occurring ones are basically none and even less so that the vaccines or treatment will be or remain efficient treatment.
Ok that is totally made up.
There are plenty of reasons that researchers make dangerous pathogens that have nothing to do with ethnic cleansing.
Some of these methods even get published despite the risks that the knowledge presents https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10875
Are you saying literally no one at all wants this? Just that there are also other reasons to do the research? Something else?
My concern is that there aren’t just altruistic research directors. There are funders. There are politicians. There are militaries. There are covert agents. And I get really concerned how easy it is for actors with less savory, noble intentions to coopt naive researchers into participating in a larger agenda.
It’s super convenient for everyone to be able to have the plucky, innocent, earnest research director come out with shining optimism about the potential. And it’s a convenient reason not to totally slam the brakes on research that, for better or worse, may lead (may have led) to global pandemic.
https://guardian.ng/features/health/bioweapons-designed-to-k...
"A new report from Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk says that world governments have failed when it comes to preparing against threats like futuristic bioweapons powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and genetic manipulation. Such weapons would have to power to target specific DNA, and kill certain races of people leaving other swaths of the population unharmed."
Additional information from a biochemist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjfvHOcfEUQ
> There are plenty of reasons that researchers make dangerous pathogens that have nothing to do with ethnic cleansing.
Such as? The article you posted merely states that it is possible and that they "wish" it will lead to more vaccine research, without saying how.
There were alleged leaks from a whistle-blower from the CCP regarding developing bio-weapons that targeted specific gene sequences attributed to certain ethnicities.
This is literally the purpose of gain of function virology research. Modify bugs in ways that could be seen in nature and explore vaccines and treatments.
There are no reasons to believe the mutants created in laboratories will arise in nature nor that the vaccines or treatments will be effective compared to what nature does. Added to the fact that GOF research never produced any kind of meaningful treatment or response so far and given how they are dangerous and leaks happen all the time; they should be outright banned.
The research should not be done because it has not proven to provide beneficial treatments.
What do they learn from these studies? The drawbacks to GOF is clear - but what are the potential gains that makes the risks worthwhile?
There's two objectives of this type of research. One is that after you have the new virus you can try different drugs on it, so that if gets out you can rapidly control it. Usually the drugs you try are ones that the company you work for sell or have a patent for. I think creating a pathogen and then testing how you can cure it with stuff that you can sell for a big profit creates a conflict of interest if it's also your responsibility to be sure it's not released, but apparently I'm pretty alone in this conspiranoic belief.
The other objective is creating a bioweapon, or getting ready for one. The US allegedly withdrew from researching bioweapons in an offensive manner but offensive and defensive research are very similar in that field because you speculate what viruses your alleged adversaries have and then recreate them to try the vaccines against them.
I wouldn't be surprised if it goes the same way, push the little guy into trying it and then push everything else in the supply chain so that their meat can only be used for low margin cheap shit.
And hopefully enough of the people in those conversations then write their representatives.
We don’t ban pen tests, just because people who have 0 understanding of it are sacred of it.
https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Esc...
And there are highly qualified experts in the field who view GoF research as the most likely source of COVID-19, so on what basis are you so confident that it doesn't pose a major risk?
So shouldn’t be base our regulation on that reality?
Scientists are only human and bio research labs don't have the same culture of continuous improvement and lack of blame that have let the airline industry, say, get to its current level of safety.
EDIT: Oops, forgot to add the citation
[1] https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/taiwan-investigates-covid-lab...
Synthetic recombinant bat SARS-like coronavirus is infectious in cultured cells and in mice
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0808116105
One of the listed authors is Ralph Baric.
>From the 75-page proposal, a striking detail stood out: a plan to examine SARS-like bat coronaviruses for furin cleavage sites and possibly insert new ones that would enable them to infect human cells.
>A furin cleavage site is a spot in the surface protein of a virus that can boost its entry into human cells. SARS-CoV-2, which emerged more than a year after the DARPA grant was submitted, is notable among SARS-like coronaviruses for having a unique furin cleavage site. This anomaly has led some scientists to consider whether the virus could have emerged from laboratory work gone awry.
Should I interpret it as a would-be unbelievable coincidence that they would be working on the very same furin cleavage site that is unique in CoV-2? Or should I interpret it as obvious - maybe the furin cleavage site is the most important part for infectiousness, and so we should expect any new human-infecting virus to have changes there, and should also expect that to be the area scientists focus on.
Without expert knowledge, I have no way to tell, but it feels like the sort of thing I could very easily interpret incorrectly one way or the other.
But then other experts said that it's just a coincidence that could arise naturally.
Now we learn that EcoHealth had these plans to insert FCS's in viruses, yet they stayed quiet during the whole FCS debate and didn't mentioned it until it was found out from FOIA'd emails.
And not only that they didn't mention it, they kept saying it's just a coincidence and to say otherwise is a conspiracy theory.
(Hoping somebody here can shed further light. I don't want to spread misinformation, and I'm not able to corroborate this myself, so be skeptical; however we have seen a lot information manipulation or suppression in every direction the past few years, so be skeptical in the other direction too)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10542309/Fresh-lab-...
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/moderna-patented-cancer-ge...
>But as COVID-19 rampaged across the globe, the Chinese government’s commitment to transparency turned out to be limited. It has refused to share raw data from early patient cases, or participate in any further international efforts to investigate the virus’s origin...And in September 2019, three months before the officially recognized start of the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology took down its database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, refusing to restore it despite international requests.
lets make it a bit harder for you :) - the approved EcoHealth NIH grant for the coronavirus GoF work in Wuhan had the "Human Subjects Included" checked.
Politically, Trump targeted China from the beginning of his race in 2015 and never backed down. We didn't need the further fan geopolitical or realpolitick flames when we needed at least minimal international cooperation.
I wish I could trust that people will respond with neighbor-first mentalities when disasters like pandemics arrive. I feel it might be unpopular with the HN crowd, but I believe the anti-public health measures tantrum will be used to justify a lot more draconian measures when the next global disaster comes around.
it's hard to give up the simple mantras, but if we want more efficiency we need more complexity in our policies.
> I believe the anti-public health measures tantrum will be used to justify a lot more draconian measures when the next global disaster comes around.
on one hand, that might help to decrease the spread, on the other hand, spending resources on measures that are easy to enforce, but still not terribly effective is a bad trade off. (for example testing a lot more and organizing our life around respecting the result is a lot less draconian than simply shutting everything down, yet these nuances were mostly lost on people.)
Wow.
The sequences were accurately described in a peer-reviewed paper that the Chinese scientists in question published (well before Bloom's preprint). The raw sequence reads, which were deleted from the NIH database, added nothing. The important information (the mutations in the sequences) were already listed in the paper.
From the point of view of the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the sequences themselves were not interesting. They were from fairly late in the Wuhan outbreak, and they were only very short segments of the viral genome. The Chinese paper in question was actually a technical paper testing a new sequencing technology. The message of the paper was, "We have this new sequencing machine, and we're going to show it off using some random CoVID patient samples," not, "We've identified particularly important patient samples that will shed light on the outbreak in Wuhan."
What Andersen and Fauci objected to was Bloom's accusation that the Chinese scientists who wrote the paper were engaging in deliberate deception and were part of a cover-up. Bloom had no evidence of that, and there's nothing to indicate that the Chinese scientists' explanation is incorrect: that they meant to upload the data to a Chinese database but didn't get around to it. After all, the raw data itself wasn't that interesting, and was already accurately summarized in their paper.
In my opinion, Bloom owes his Chinese colleagues an apology. Accusing people of covering up a pandemic with no evidence is a pretty low thing to do.
>Taking a look at your post history, you seem to spend a considerable amount of time defending China, what's up with that?
Even if they fucked up by committing a legitimate mistake doing honest work, the cover-up is a legit conspiracy and downright criminal.
Wow
This article from the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology is also candid and informative: https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/policy/112121/gain-of-func...
There are also clips out there of Ralph Baric talking openly about making modified viruses (can't find it now but I believe he mentions it casually in passing in this lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE_H7dTqJXU ).
I guess I get why these researchers are so cagey about sharing in simple terms what they do. The facts have a huge potential to be twisted and weaponized politically in this situation, and I'm sure the rationale for the research is very complicated.
That said in my opinion there needs to be transparency around these kinds of incredibly risky ecological engineering projects.
Another thing,"self-disseminating vaccines": there are researchers who propose the creation and release of engineered viruses in animal populations adjacent to people (to prevent pandemics with zoonotic origins of course!):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-1254-y
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=self-disseminating+vacc...
It's hard to ignore the double edged sword of research like this though. Is there any question that this "biosecurity" technology has inherently troublesome uses as bioweaponry? The potential for sabotage by misanthropic / malthusian actors is also really unsettling. The game theory involved is probably really gnarly and I can only wonder what twisted offspring of mutually assured destruction intelligence agencies are using to grapple with this stuff, and to rationalize this kind of research.
During the cold war there was a kind of presumption that every life is worth protecting. Unfortunately I have a feeling that with the reality of climate change this belief is not as universal as it once was. I worry that it's quite common for people in positions of power to have Malthusian beliefs about overpopulation and stuff in the face of climate change.
(To be clear, I'm not in any way suggesting covid-19 was intentionally released as a tool of depopulation. I'm making a point about the game theory that has so far prevented nuclear catastrophe... I have trouble seeing what holds it together under the normalization of ethical frameworks that see depopulation as necessary, and wondering how that factors into the chess games that governments, defense agencies and their propagandists are playing right now...)
Humanity is so technophile these days... instead of doing the sensible thing (leaving bat caves alone, ending mass animal farms) we seriously think about massive bio-engineering of wildlife only so that we don't have to stop the bullshit we're doing.
Madness, utter madness.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?404875-1/pandemics at 1:16:30
I can't get over just how insane this sounds. He goes on to claim it's to then check whether humans have antibodies to these mutant viruses they'll create in the lab, except why would there necessarily be that much antibody cross-reactivity between lab-engineered viral spike proteins and spike proteins that spilled over from bats to (eventually) humans naturally?
> And in September 2019, three months before the officially recognized start of the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology took down its database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, refusing to restore it despite international requests.
This was a private database, not meant for the public, but rather for sharing data with colleagues off-site. It actually remained online until early 2020, when the WIV says it came under sustained attack and was taken offline. It should also be noted that this private database was only in existence for a short time period in the first place - less than a year, I believe.
I should warn everyone that this is far from the only error in this article. The lab leak theory has become ever more heavily rejected in the scientific community, as more evidence has piled up on various fronts (the early outbreak clustered around the market; two different viral lineages were discovered at the market, including on stalls where wild animals were sold, suggesting that there were multiple spillovers at the market; new viruses have been found in Laos that are closer to SARS-CoV-2 than anything previously discovered).
It seems, however, that the lab leakers are making another effort to push their case in the press, for a popular audience that doesn't know better.
The reasons might be that it is unaffiliated with scientific community and the editors probably don’t care if they burn a few bridges (it’s not VF’s core topic)—other outlets might be worried of being excluded from information streams and inside scoops for inconvenient reporting that could cost some individuals a lot of money in future grants.
As a non-US resident I also feel like there is an unfortunate consequence of political positioning, where the range of viewpoints acceptable to be held by left- and right-aligned US media is seemingly narrowing (so a left-aligned editor would not want to publish something that counters the conventional bat origin theory, and a right-aligned editor may not want to give even more airtime to the problem of COVID that they may consider insignificant), while most media becomes left- or right-aligned.
On that note, it is possible VF’s research is also funded by somebody politically aligned in some way and thus interested in exploring this viewpoint. Not to say it is mutually exclusive with truth, from what I read VF’s points are consistent and well-supported.
[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
Edit: removed note mistakenly assuming TFA is from 2021.
The Intercept does as well, but I don’t feel that it’s mainstream despite the good reporting.
> nothing there qualifies as good reporting
That’s a bit of a strong position. I lean right, but even I feel that some of their coverage is great despite the difference in ideology
"COVID-19: Schools for more than 168 million children globally have been completely closed for almost a full year, says UNICEF"
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/schools-more-168-milli...
"30-40 percent of minority and low-income students weren’t learning during lockdowns"
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leadi...
"We find that the pandemic led to 97 million more people being in poverty in 2020." - World Bank
https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/updated-estimates-impac...
"Among a cohort of 432,302 persons aged 2–19 years, the rate of body mass index (BMI) increase approximately doubled during the pandemic compared to a prepandemic period. Persons with prepandemic overweight or obesity and younger school-aged children experienced the largest increases."
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm...
"Covid-19: Children born during the pandemic score lower on cognitive tests, study finds"
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2031
And the civil liberties of literally billions of people were curtailed. Just India and China, which both imposed severe lockdowns, collectively have a population of 2.8 billion.
In Canada, thousands of people were locked in their room in their last year of their life:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/long-term-care-covid-...
It appears the analogy is lost on most people. "Smoking gun" evidence would not be some kind of absolute proof of the virus origins. The whole point of the analogy is that if you find the just-fired gun, and a gunshot victim, you don't need to have seen the actual shot to deduce what happened and with what weapon. In the case of COVID-19, the smoking gun would be the virology lab down the street from the virus epicenter. Of course, smoking guns are rebuttable: there's the possibility that another weapon was involved and all the evidence vanished. But you can't consistently say that there's a smoking gun and yet we lack sufficient evidence. At this point there is sufficient evidence to reach a conclusion, and all that remains is to weigh it.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is on the other side of Wuhan from the market where the early cases were clustered. That market sold wild animals that are known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, and the virus was even found on the exact stalls where those animals were sold.
On the other hand, it's public knowledge which viruses the WIV has been working with (this was known even before the pandemic), and those viruses are not the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. They're not even the closest known relatives - those were found by a French team in Laos.
They took down their database in September 2019.
What you're talking about is a private, password-protected database that was used to share data with off-site collaborators. It was actually available until early 2020, when the WIV says they took it offline because of persistent attacks.
And yes, if there was a super-spreader event at the WIV of course you're going to be able to find viruses on lots of surfaces like the animal stalls.
That we knew what viruses the WIV was working on was why back in early 2020 I was very skeptical of the straightforward lab leak hypothesis. But articles like this one and books like Alina Chan's have convinced me that that isn't actually true, we wouldn't necessarily know about them until there were publishable results maybe years down the line and we do have evidence that the genomes of some viruses that they were working on were scrubbed from the records.
SARS also began at a market that sold the same types of animals, in a city far away from Yunnan province.
SARS-CoV-2 comes from Yunnan or Southeast Asia (its closest known relative comes from Laos), but once it gets into farmed wild animals, it doesn't necessarily stay there. These animals are traded over long distances. Heck, Hong Kong had a population of hamsters with Delta a few months ago. The hamsters caught it in Europe, made it all the way to Hong Kong, and then infected a human (this is established based on the viral genetic sequences in the hamsters and the human).
> we wouldn't necessarily know about them until there were publishable results maybe years down the line
We knew plenty about the viruses the WIV had found before the pandemic. RaTG13 (until recently, the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, and the center of a lot of conspiracy theorizing which we can now say with 100% certainty is wrong) was uploaded to an NIH database years before the pandemic. The conspiracy theorists made a lot of stink about 8 viruses that Dr. Shi Zhengli had mentioned in public talks. Those viruses turned out to be too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to be of much interest.
Most of these viruses don't actually exist in live form at the WIV. The WIV only has three live SARS-related viruses, and each one of them is very well known to the outside scientific community. It takes a lot of effort to isolate live virus from bat fecal samples, and it's something the WIV heavily publicizes when it succeeds.
> we do have evidence that the genomes of some viruses that they were working on were scrubbed from the records.
I've followed this story and haven't seen any evidence of that whatsoever.
A lot of people weren't even on this site back then... but this is exactly like watching the "ClimateGate" scandal play out here on HN over a decade ago, and in fact even involves some of the key players like Matt Ridley! Now, over a decade later, it turns out some messy dendrochronological paleoclimatology did not in fact represent a conspiracy invalidating the entirety of climate research and global warming is an even clearer threat.
In another decade we're going to have a much better understanding of horseshoe bats, asian animal markets, and coronavirus evolution... and not a single one of the breathless accusers involved in these screeds will ever apologize for flogging conspiracy.
Yeah, science is messy, scientists are flawed humans, desperate for money and generally terrified of bad PR and the mob. But the entirety of viral reverse genetics can't be thrown into an ill-defined "GOF" bucket. What constitutes acceptable risk and GOF in these areas has been an active debate in virology for as long as I can remember, and the quality of this dialogue is not going to be aided by this circus.
Careful, this wording implies "if we evolved from apes why are the apes still here" logic.
Actual "ancestors" have all been dead for a bajillion of their generations. All we can hope to find are cousins, outside of some rare time-capsule situation.
And again, I was asking for specific evidence of a natural origin. Evolution has plenty of evidence even without living common ancestors between primates and humans.
Please read more carefully. I did not say "years". I said "their generations". The average virus generation is very very short.
> If COVID-19 has natural origins, then the ancestors should still exist
Again, you persist in confusing ancestors with relatives.
Insofar a particular viral-particle or sequence can even be considered "alive", they will "die" as a mandatory part of reproduction, kicking off millions of slightly-different descendants.
It's as if you're holding a fresh-caught salmon and insisting that you ought to be able to find its wild ancestors somewhere in the water. No, it doesn't work like that.
> Evolution has plenty of evidence even without living common ancestors between primates and humans.
That is true, but when you say "we should be able to find a living common ancestor", that's idiotic because that means finding AN IMMORTAL CREATURE 4+ MILLION YEARS OLD.
It's unethical to do things just because China doesn't want you to do them?
Basically, imagine you find out a rival scientific group accidentally made a dataset public. Imagine that you found out how to reverse-engineer an AWS URL at which you could access the data. Now, you analyze this data and publish your own paper on it. Most scientists would view that as a form of theft.
In this case, Bloom can say that the data was so much in the public interest that what he did was ethical. However, the data didn't actually shed any light on the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
I'm inclined to say the way he obtained the data isn't such a big issue, since the raw data itself isn't useful, and because the Chinese team had already published a paper that described the only interesting parts of the data. What I do fault Bloom for is making unfounded accusations against his Chinese colleagues. That's something he should apologize to them for.
Most people want to blame a lab, but the obvious answer is more likely imo.
https://theprint.in/science/lab-leak-is-the-biggest-suspect-...
- an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city
- an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city with a virus lab
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor and has a furin cleavage site (not present in RaTG13, SARS, or other similar coronaviruses) occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor, and is funded by a group (EcoHealth) which has filed grant applications for research that attempts to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like bat coronaviruses
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor and has a furin cleavage site (not present in RaTG13, SARS, or other similar coronaviruses) occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor, and is funded by a group (EcoHealth) which has filed grant applications for research that attempts to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like bat coronaviruses, and multiple years later no animal reservoir of this novel coronavirus has been found, despite the massive incentives for this. In fact they seemingly haven't even been able to fake it by infecting some wild animals deliberately and claiming that they found the zoonotic origin.
I could go on and on but I think you get my point
https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/18631
It’s rudimentary but demonstrates quantitatively how probabilities favoring one origin scenario or another can be reached. Easy to copy-paste it so any set of priors can be applied and collectively estimated,
More rigorous treatment can be found at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345753939_Outlines_...
There are other similar types of analyses out there if you google around.
Let's go with the more specific scenario. Then P(last bullet | WIV lab leak scenario) becomes P(outbreak | WIV lab leak &c.) because we've conditioned on everything but the outbreak part. I'll guess this is 0.001, which is generous because it's very unlikely for a mere exposure to turn into a pandemic. Exposures to natural potentially pandemic viruses happen every day, most don't become a pandemic. P(WIV lab leak scenario) is difficult. There are a lot of different lab leak scenarios that could have happened instead, but we also don't care that much about trivial differences. Let's be really generous and say P(WIV lab leak scenario) = 0.25 because it's one of I think 4 plausible covid origin sites in Wuhan. Probably it should be lower because it's plausible that Wuhan was only the site of the first superspreader event, not the origin. And let's say P(outbreak) = 0.2 because we seem to get a potential pandemic every 5 years or so. Then P(WIV origin | outbreak) = 0.00125.
There are all sorts of problems with my analysis of course. Even if I haven't made any mistakes, the numbers I conjured up are entirely unconvincing. With only one datum, we have hardly any objective support for our probability estimates, and Bayesian analysis only gives a semblance of objectivity to our prior opinions.
Edit: I have no desire to support either side here, just to point out that probabilistic reasoning doesn't help much here. Whatever happened, happened, regardless of how (un)likely it was.
On P(WIV leak):
Wikipedia[0] lists 50 lab leaks (or more precisely, failure of lab biosecurity measures) in the past century. The actual number is probably much higher because people and institutions like to hide their mistakes. So the base probability of a lab leak happening from a lab that studies pathogens is only moderately low to begin with.
But P(WIV leak) is probably significantly higher than average here, because WIV had worse than average safety procedure.
- According to leaked cables from 2018, american officials & scientists were already concerned about unsafe practices & lack of properly trained personnel at WIV[1]
- WIV researchers collected unknown viruses from bat caves with only hazmat suits + surgical mask as PPE, and handled vials of viral vector specimens without even masks[2]. If they demonstrated poor attention to safety outside the lab, it is likely that they disregarded it within the lab as well
- I recall reading something similar involving Shi Zhengli but I can't find the link now
- Shi Zhengli admitted (!) that bat coronavirus research was performed under BSL-2 and BSL-3 conditions, both of which are significantly more lax than BSL-4[3]
On P(last bullet):
It's a pretty specific scenario, so this probability is very low. It's specific in a way that's meaningful and relevant though, it's not like the specificity came from extraneous things like "and the virus' genome is between 29 and 30 kb" or "and the outbreak occured in a city whose name starts with W".
On P(last bullet | WIV leak):
This probability is essentially a function of the infectiousness of the viruses in the WIV.
> it's very unlikely for a mere exposure to turn into a pandemic. Exposures to natural potentially pandemic viruses happen every day, most don't become a pandemic.
Strongly disagree. The viruses in WIV were deliberately altered, via either natural selection in host cells or direct genetic manipulation, to be significantly more infectious in human cells than a random virus found in the wild would be. It is unlikely for human exposure to a random new virus to lead to a pandemic. That is not the case for human exposure to a new virus that has been altered to be much more competent at infecting humans. Especially considering that these viruses we're talking about are coronaviruses, which are already significantly more infectious than the average virus. SARS2 also has features that are the sort of features we might expect from a virus in the WIV, such as the furin cleavage site and competence at infecting cells through ACE2. WIV research definitely focused on the latter and possibly on the former, so this attribute of the outbreak also increases P(last bullet | WIV leak).
There is also one known precedent for (some pandemic outbreak | some lab leak) which is the 1977 H1N1 flu epidemic. It isn't known with certainty to be from a lab but there is a general consensus that it probably is.[4]
Sorry for not providing numerical estimates for any of these. That would feel super handwavy and they would be, like you admit, entirely unconvincing. Besides, any motivated person can adjust his priors until Bayes spits out the desired outcome. In any case, I feel that the WIV leak theory is simply a more parsimonious explanation of the particular attributes of this pandemic than the zoonotic origin theory. However I doubt there will ever be a "smoking gun" for either theory.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovnUyTRMERI
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20201206204844/https://www.scien...
I completely agree that WIV's practices were dangerous and irresponsible, and that they are a plausible origin at all is a crushing condemnation. There's an old piece of advice: imagine that what you're doing ends up on the front page of the newspaper, and consider whether you would be proud or ashamed. If the latter, do something else. WIV clearly didn't follow that advice.
The facts in your post are all correct to my knowledge, I only quibble with the emphasis on infectiousness. The uniquely dangerous aspect of SARS-CoV-2 was its several-day period of transmissibility in the absence of symptoms, not its infectiousness, which for early strains was not that remarkable. Without asymptomatic transmission it would probably have been contained and quickly forgotten, like SARS-CoV-1. We need to adopt methods that will detect and contain viruses like SARS-CoV-2 so we're better prepared for when SARS-CoV-3 shows up.
The alternative explanation to the lab leak is that the lab was studying factors like infection through ACE2 and furin cleavage sites because they were things considered likely to happen on their own, and were worth preparing for. Studying and preparing for possible mutations is what gain-of-function research is for.
Also, half of the bullets sound like filler. "An outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city" is definitely filler, and I'd estimate that P( "outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses" | "an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city with a virus lab" ) is probably not that far from 1.00.
And at the end you seem to be proposing the fact that they haven't faked a zoonotic origin is evidence that it was lab-created? That sounds backwards.
When faced with sourceless, pointless suffering, there's not much else to do than clean up the mess and prepare for if it comes back. A person or group of people to blame gives them someone to direct their anger at. If there's a villain, then it's possible to get revenge. People are motivated to create and believe explanations that give them someone to blame, so such explanations deserve more skepticism than others.
The creeping escalation is fun and dramatic, but here it's mainly serving to puff up the amount of evidence at hand.
You actually sort of can make that argument, yeah.
At this point, with the lab leak theory having become a lot more popular over the past year or so, the Chinese government would kill to be able to point to an animal reservoir. If they can't find it, the incentive for them to try to fake it is huge. My initial assumption is that if they haven't faked a zoonotic origin, it's probably because they can't, not because they don't want to. By assuming this, I'm assuming that they have basically looked in all the places possible by now, which seems reasonable because they have a lot of manpower and we're 2+ years into the pandemic. If they can't get the virus to infect bats/pangolins/etc, that indicates that the virus didn't originate in the wild and hence supports the lab leak theory
When the outbreak began, China immediately culled virtually all the stock at wild animal farms throughout the country. That is where they thought the virus came from, and they wanted to prevent any more spillover events. One side-effect of that decision is that the animals that most likely served as the intermediate hosts are gone.
With the original SARS in 2002-2003, it was much easier to find the wild animal farms that hosted the virus because the Chinese government did not quickly move to shut them down. The farms remained open for a long time, and there were repeated spillover events.
My guess is that the first reaction of government officials this time around was to just cull all the animals and eliminate the danger right away, and that tracing the origins of the virus wasn't on their minds at that moment.
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs where the closet natural resivoir sharing a similar bat virus population is between 800 miles (Yunnan province) or > 1000 miles (Laos)
Other, more closely related viruses have recently been found in nature (by a French team in Laos). That immediately 100% rules out all the conspiracy theories that have to do with RaTG13.
I'll also just mention that Wuhan happens to have wet markets where wild animals were sold until the end of 2019. The initial outbreak was clustered around a market that is known to have sold wild animals that are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. That market is on the opposite side of the city (and it's a big city, about the size of NY) from the WIV.
But in the case of COVID-19 lab escape versus zoonotic origin, the latter doesn't predict that the Chinese government and EcoHealth Alliance would attempt a coverup of the virus origins, so we really aren't talking about two hypothesis that explain the (same) data, and therefore this isn't really an appropriate candidate for the application of Occam's razor.
To say it in other words, politicians will bullshit the populace in any case, they do not care if what they're saying is true or false as long as it makes them look better
Please remember a thing: there are thing that can't be really know, even if someone tell the real truth we can't know if that's true or not. While there are other things that can't really be hidden that much, banally by their size, we can't know them at the smallest details perhaps, but we can know enough.
Like we read about "a soldier kill a journalist in a certain place", we can't really know if it's true, if the killer was a soldier and one of witch side etc, even if the real truth is published, even with a non-tempered video of the action appear etc. But we can know that there is a war, that's can't really be hidden or mocked up in the modern world. Again we can't really know what's up in that war but war but we can speculate (in the Latin sense, witch means exploring) who profit, who want what etc.
For covid it's not different. We can't really know it's origin, it's real effects etc, but we can know who profit, and who loose. That's enough to act. The fact that:
- covid is natural
- covid is an artificially modified virus leaked from a lab
- covid is leaked by accident vs on purpose
- ...
does not really matter. What it matter is that "thanks to covid" our western world is far more similar to China after it. That big of IT, between those who have founded covid propaganda, research etc, are between the biggest earners from covid, like big pharma. That's matter because that's not just "good business" form them but a crime. The fact that such crime was crafted on purpose, to what extent, just ridden at the right time does not really makes much differences. Morally, politically, ... it makes big differences but since we can't know that for sure it does not matter, the effects are still the same, and those are what it matter.
Learning this is crucial to be part of a society. We can't know anything, we should master the uncertain part, we can't measure anything, we should master the art of "loose tolerance" etc. The society, the reality is not a computer program, imperative style, we can know just reading source code, it's level of complexity is just too big, and that does not means we can't know anything.
There is another building few hundred yards from the market but if you mention this on HN your comment gets flagged (probably by Chinese bots).
Also troubling are minor details not really related to the main lab-origin theory presented in this article:
> In 2011, two scientists separately announced that they had genetically altered Highly Pathogenic Asian Avian Influenza A (H5N1), the bird flu virus that has killed at least 456 people since 2003. The scientists gave the virus new functions—enabling it to spread efficiently among ferrets, which are genetically closer to humans than mice—as a way to gauge its risks to people. Both studies had received NIH funding.
I'm not saying the NIH is directly responsible for these programs, but it seems prudent to cut back on deadly virus creation.
These people should be named, shamed and shunned, and at the very least, be legally prevented from working with anything vaguely related to biology.
Fauci was receiving credible death threats and even on this topic thread here there are a number of dead comments with comments similar to (and I quote): Fauci must be executed for us to move forward.
The idea that people voice approval for executing people they disagree with is so repugnant and contrary to the idea of civil discourse I don't find it surprising people start yelling in science meetings about the topic.
Or should they just be forgiven because they were scientists with good intentions.
The US President promoted the virus spread because it hurt NY and NJ more than the South.
If you execute everyone negligent, society will collapsed. And then when you look at the negligent executions, more.
If someone released this plague on purpose, then it would be the clearest case for the death penalty that has ever occurred. Do you honestly disagree?
Essentially none of the virus’s main mutations are things that could have occurred without human involvement and certainly not on the timescale since its last common ancestor.
If you knowingly drive a car with no brakes and kill someone, how is it less bad than driving a functional car and killing someone on purpose?
They knew the Wuhan labs had massive safety issues, from years prior to the pandemic. They knew GoF research was risky, and did it anyway. They knew covering it up was criminal behavior, yet did it anyway.
But if it were developed with good intent, and released by a pure non-negligent accident, that would
Roughly, if it was deliberately developed with the intent to release, that would justify the same for everyone in the management chain with knowledge of the plot. But that responsibility would stop at the level where the plot intent was hidden.
From the article, it seems the most likely clue would be that the entire US chain and the WIV lab leadership was intent on developing knowledge to stop pandemics, but the Chinese military's involvement in the lab produced corrupt work on some team. Whether this was even known to the lab leadership, or they could know it is doubtful.
To take that and say that everyone all the way up the chain to Fauci should be executed is to advocate for guilt by association. If you want that, you should move to China, Russia, or some other autocracy, because it has no place in a democracy.
If you have some evidence that Fauci had intent and directed anyone to create and release such a virus, you need to produce that evidence before calling for his execution.
(note, I know you specifically avoided making such a call, but your message is easily read as supporting such calls)
My objection was to this idea that “death” is so far afield from the realm of reasonable discourse... and that there’s definitely nothing going on and we should just move on with the rest of our lives.
There needs to be the largest criminal investigation the world has ever seen. It should make the 9/11 commission look like peanuts. The possibility that this was done on purpose needs to be taken more seriously than probably any issue in the history of human civilization, because if people are able to do this in purpose and get away with it, then it’ll likely lead to the end of human civilization. Perhaps no one committed any crimes… but millions died and we need to be damned sure that we know exactly why.
It could even end up not only as a cause for death penalties, but for a hot war.
One huge problem is that China also knows that they would be the target in a hot war. So, they will do what they're already doing - attempt to destroy all evidence and bar access to the rest.
The other huge problem is that scientists would see such an investigation as, at the very least, risking the end of much viral research for generations. So, it may be hard to find enough good scientists in the field who DGAF about the consequences for their field, despite the fact that one of the best arguments for continued research is a finding that it WAS a weaponization attempt. Far better to make actual bio-secure facilities and develop models and vaccines than get blindsided by something even worse. But anti- hysteria will more likely rule the day.
There may be some solution to these problems, but I haven't got it.
So at this point, we are obviously already in a war against autocracies. As can be seen with RUS supplies of EU natgas, the result of interdependency is coercion, not actual democracy springing up via interchanve. CCP is obviously implementing similar long-term plans on many strategic technologies.
The only way forward today is to literally ban cooperation on this kind of research with such autocracies. CCP has just demonstrated that they will NEVER provide key information in an emergency, no matter how much they 'promised' or 'contracted' to be open.
Yes, international cooperation among peoples can be a wonderful thing.
But we've already done the experiment. If the other people are ruled by an autocracy, it is only poisoning our democracies and building vulnerabilities to future coercion.
There's a lot of people in power all over the world who have made decisions these past few years and it won't be surprising when people seek retribution (some of which who will seek for it to be payable in such decision makers blood).
And it could be worse, if the aggrieved are not satiated (within or outside the rule of law), people may seek retribution payable by such decision makers friends and families… metadata trails left all over the place would make such easy at scale…
The only other person I found talking about this admittedly far fetched theory was a random Russian comedian - he made some jokes about it and the Russian government IMMEDIATELY came down super hard on him and he had take it all down.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-...
> Quick left amid a bitter U.S. trade dispute with China when she learned her federally funded post, officially known as resident adviser to the U.S. Field Epidemiology Training Program in China, would be discontinued as of September, the sources said.
It's hard for me to forget the fake Time Magazine cover that the last president had hanging in his golf cabinet. One of the blurbs on it reads "Global Warming: A New Age of Extinction". It creeps me out to think this person who openly subscribes to a "racehorse" theory of eugenics was in charge of the US government during the leadup to the pandemic and during its immediate response.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/time-asks-donald-trump-...
Doesn't seem like an entirely trustworthy person..
I don't believe a PhD in virology is necessary to understand that this is some risky business. Not being in-line for patent royalties (or retributions--prisoner's dilemma and all that) may have made his lips a little looser than those of his co-workers.
That is not any kind of idea I ever entertained in the past, but it is so outrageous that yes, I would apologize to you on behalf of OP if you had proof of it.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10652127/Hunter-Bid...
> The emails show Hunter helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor specializing in research on pandemic-causing diseases