What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis? | Hacker News Reader

What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

unherd.com

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This is Alina Chan, one of the co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.

I’m going to answer some of the questions that have come up in the comments.

1. Are Chan and Ridley selling a book?

Yes, the updated paperback comes out in the US next week: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/viral-matt-ridleyalin...

The updated epilogue now discusses three significant new developments since the publication of the hardback that are being hotly debated in the comments here. The first was the discovery of a virus in a bat in Laos that is slightly more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than the virus studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology; but both are still not the progenitor of the pandemic. The second is detailed information about how prominent western virologists, who had privately thought the virus was likely manipulated in a laboratory, began to instead tell the public that no lab-based scenario was plausible. The third is a trio of conflicting studies about whether the Huanan seafood market was the site of a natural spillover of the virus from animals to people or just the site of a human superspreader event in December 2019.

As with the hardcover, half of our earnings from the book have gone/will go to charity.

2. Does the available evidence lean towards a market origin?

Some experts have asserted that there is dispositive evidence that the virus jumped from animals to people at the Wuhan Huanan market. However, their analysis failed to take into account the realities in the early days of the pandemic. Without access to the methodology and actual data collected by investigators in Wuhan, their interpretation unfortunately falls prey to ascertainment bias. Please see this thread for details: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1499794942012579843

At the moment, US intelligence, the WHO SAGO advisory group, and many top virologists and experts find both natural and lab origin hypotheses plausible and deserving of investigation. The evidence does not lean so strongly towards one hypothesis or the other that we can assume one as the default truth.

I personally think the available evidence points towards a lab origin but would not go as far as to say that there is dispositive evidence of it. Please see these 2 threads: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1524394197738049537 https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1539745736807616513

3. Can scientists manipulate and genetically engineer naturally found viruses without leaving a trace? In other words, can the genome of the virus tell us its recent history?

We describe the seamless genetic engineering capabilities developed in the years leading up to the pandemic in VIRAL. Due to advanced technologies, it is no longer always possible to use the genome of a virus to distinguish between a natural pathogen vs one that has spent time in a laboratory. Even top coronavirologists, including Ralph Baric who collaborated with the Wuhan scientists, have said that the only way to know is to look at the Wuhan lab records. You can also read my twitter thread: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1493733086089121794

Even the presence of the furin cleavage site insertion that is unique to the pandemic virus and is indeed what makes it a highly infectious pandemic virus is not “dispositive evidence” of either a natural or lab origin. Please see our peer-reviewed analysis here: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/39/1/msab327/6426085

4. Why does the lab leak hypothesis encompass so many different scenarios by which research activities could lead to the emergence of the pandemic virus?

A natural spillover hypothesis also encompasses several different scenarios, e.g., bat direct transmission to people in natural habitats, bat to people in markets, bat to farmed animals or wildlife to people in nature, at farms or market, etc.

This doesn’t mean that a natural or lab origin are insinuations. It just means we are lacking so much key evidence that it’s not possible to pin down an exact mechanism by which the virus emerged in the Wuhan human population.

5. Does finding close relatives of the pandemic virus in bats, e.g., in Laos, mean that its origin is natural?

No, because viruses that escape from labs were also ultimately derived from nature and we know that scientists in Wuhan had been collecting viruses from across 8 countries (China and SE Asia) where the closest relatives to the pandemic virus have been found. Please see the graphic in this tweet: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1522117270612451335

6. Is there anything to do about finding the origin of Covid-19 now? Isn’t it a dead end? And is that why interest is waning?

There is plenty to do to investigate the origin of Covid-19 using sources and data that exist outside of China. Please see a recent peer-reviewed letter in PNAS: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2202769119

And my thread on it: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1527381169729425410

It is very surprising to me that these feasible routes of inquiry have not been explored more than 2 years into the pandemic.

7. Have infected animals on sale at the Huanan market been found? Was there any evidence that SARS-like viruses were circulating in the Wuhan animal trading community before the emergence of Covid-19?

No. I recommend reading my medium post for more details: https://ayjchan.medium.com/a-response-to-the-origins-of-sars...

8. Regardless of the origin of Covid-19, shouldn’t the focus be on making sure there is more oversight and regulation of current and future pathogen research?

I agree and wish that we didn’t need to prove the origin of this pandemic to motivate scientific leaders to better regulate risky pathogen work. I have been dedicating efforts to this cause since last year and hope to be able to share some exciting news later this year.

Hey Alina,

thank you for doing the work that some others are seemingly afraid to touch! There are many fair-weather scientists, but researchers who consider all credible leads and data, no matter the popularity or political implications of the results, are much rarer.

I have two questions:

1. There were genome sequences removed from the 'Sequence Read Archive', at the request of Chinese scientists.¹ It was later portrayed by US authorities as something that commonly happens. As a layperson I'm curious if that's true and it's a regular occurrence that researchers in another country ask for data to be deleted from the archive. That seems odd.

2. In case you read Chinese, do you know about that Wuhan Institute of Virology job ad where they were looking for a researcher to study coronaviruses in bats, which was posted on their website a few weeks before the outbreak became known? I saw this myself in the very early days of the pandemic, possibly before people in the West were even aware that there was a serious outbreak in Wuhan. At the time I didn't think much of it, but then 2 or 3 days later they first deleted that ad, then the whole board and when I visited today I found their entire website has been completely reworked. Have you seen this and do you know if it was saved anywhere? Not that the job opening itself seemed suspicious and it's well known this sort of research was done there, but I just found it odd they would try to hide it.

¹ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01731-3

Hi,

Thank you for the support! :)

1. The deletion of published data is thankfully not something that commonly happens, but it is not against the rules of the NCBI database. Scientists who deposit their data into the database have the right to ask for that data to be taken down even if it has been published. That's why there is a concern that some scientists may have used this mechanism to delete original data with early Covid-19 sequences in it. Some scientists have called for NCBI to please allow them to search through deleted or suppressed data for these early Covid-19 sequences, but they have not been granted permission. Please see Vanity Fair's report on this: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...

2. I have seen an archived version of that job posting but, like you said, it didn't surprise me that they were looking for more coronavirologists - the Wuhan Institute of Virology does have one of the world's largest (if not the largest) bat coronavirus hunting programs. The website being revamped kind of goes into speculative territory - maybe it was just time to upgrade the site or maybe they did it to avoid negative attention. The more disturbing thing to me is that they did not share their pathogen database (taken offline in Sep 2019) despite a pandemic happening. The database was meant to help inform pandemic response, but when a real pandemic happened, the database could not be found anywhere. None of their collaborators, including in the US, have seemed to be able to provide a copy.

> At the time I didn't think much of it, but then 2 or 3 days later they first deleted that ad, then the whole board and when I visited today I found their entire website has been completely reworked. Have you seen this and do you know if it was saved anywhere?

https://web.archive.org/web/20200615000000*/http://www.whiov...

Thank you for posting.

Regarding your answer to 8, how important is gain of function research in the virology eco-system, is there sufficient reason amongst the powers that be within the discipline (that is, well-known researchers, leaders of departments or labs, funders and program managers, etc) to be wary of a funding cut for this research that they might be biased in dismissing the idea of a lab leak?

My analogy is in particle physics, the idea of supersymmetry is incredibly popular amongst the super start researchers, heads of parts of CERN, funding agencies, etc, that very few in the field are willing to admit the lack of evidence for supersymmetry at the LHC is in fact a crisis for the field after how many billions have been spent on the supercollider. My question is, is gain of function that important or popular in the field of virology? Why can't they just admit it's dangerous and chuck it, will enough of them suffer if they were to do so?

The vast majority of virologists are not working on gain-of-function research or with potential pandemic pathogens, but this type of research has some very influential backers who control significant sources of funding in virology and infectious diseases. This makes it very awkward and professionally risky for virologists to say that the top leaders in their field advocated for research that might have caused this pandemic and taken millions of lives globally.

National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) has been reconvened this year to review US government policies on dual use research of concern (DURC) and research with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPP/P3CO). Their public meeting is available here: https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=44823 Please also see my thread on it: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1499035660627419139

There is another public engagement session next week. Details here: https://osp.od.nih.gov/event/virtual-stakeholder-engagement-...

Based on these sessions and the history of the NSABB, I'm not confident that they will recommend measures to make this type of research more transparent or even safer.

The elephant in the room, as far as support for GOFROC (gain of function research of concern) goes, is Fauci. Several leading biologists (Marc Lipsitch, David Relman and others) have argued for years that the risk/reward ratio for GOFROC is too high to justify it. But it had to go all the way to Obama for Fauci to change course. Obama imposed a 3-year moratorium from 2014-17, which was lifted soon after he left office. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-wor...

Hey Alina, thanks for contributing so much to the discussion.

One thing that always made me balk was this interview on CCTV which shows researchers collecting bat samples (feces etc) while seemingly skimping on PPE and admitting to getting bit by the wild animals and having a clear skin reaction all the way back in 2017 [1] - Do you have any comment on that in particular? Supposedly these are researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology but all I have to go by on that notion is some news from Taiwan and the New York Post, since I don't speak Chinese this video is a little harder for me to personally verify...

[1] https://youtu.be/MNkyeUZHUoU

Hi Jamal, Yes, there is quite a bit of evidence (photos and interviews of the scientists) showing that the virus hunters in Wuhan did not always wear appropriate protective equipment while hunting for potential pandemic viruses in remote areas. We describe this and provide citations in VIRAL (will be on page 127 in the paperback). In any case, even with full PPE, you can get bitten or exposed to animals and their pathogens. Accidents happen, especially in an uncontrolled environment, e.g., a cave swarming with millions of live bats that you're trying to catch and sample.

> 1. Are Chan and Ridley selling a book?

Hej Alina! Thanks for being open with having an economic interest in this topic being dragged out into the open again.

> It is very surprising to me that these feasible routes of inquiry have not been explored more than 2 years into the pandemic.

It's not too surprising to me. International diplomacy works like this. With a more general picture in mind, specific topics often need to be swept under the rug. Otherwise international relations between any two countries would be constantly in shambles and we'd long have seen WW3, WW4 and WW5.

Note that I'm not advocating for any of this hush-hush. I'd also like to know what happened. But that's just not how international diplomacy works. In this particular case, if WHO wants continued support from China, then you need to carefully balance what and how you criticize. Nobody is helped if China leaves the WHO or next time doesn't even tell anybody that a pandemic is coming for fear of being bullied for this kind of thing. I'm sure the responsible bodies (lab people) will learn their lesson and be more careful going forward. That's the only thing we can hope for nonetheless. It's unrealistic to think China would be punished and all their labs shut down. This won't happen.

Hi, My perspective is that, if the pandemic started due to the virus hunting program which was a very international collaboration (US, China, several European, African, Asian, Middle Eastern countries), then it's not really a China-specific thing. It could just be that China is so much further along in their virus discovery and characterization pipeline (as the scientific literature points out) that unfortunately they were the first to leak one of these pandemic level viruses either found in the wild and sent to the lab or created in the lab during the process of characterization.

I don't think that a country should be singled out for punishment for having a lab accident (unless it can be demonstrated that they do not have proper biosafety protocols and accountability mechanisms in place; a case of reckless negligence). But I do think there should be new international agreements and penalties for suppressing information about an emerging outbreak, e.g., transmissibility of the virus, its genomic sequence, number of cases and geographic spread etc., and costing other countries time in preparing to respond to the outbreak.

"Nobody is helped if China leaves the WHO"

Are you sure? Is the goal of the WHO to generate accurate health advice, or to accumulate memberships?

Thanks for posting this here, and thanks for including some non-Twitter links.

My question has been the same, ( apology if this was already answered ) why do we accept Dec 19 as the starting date, when we have evidence that partial Wuhan lock down due to "lung disease" started in November when Wuhan blocked International ( but not national ) flight to Wuhan airport.

I am going to ignore the WeChat evidence for discussions on WuHan "lung disease" in October and prior since those could be fake. But surely flight schedule cant be made up?

Is there any evidence of a link between sars-cov-2 to other previously known viruses that the Wuhan lab might have had in its possession? Could there be a plausible candidate virus that might have escaped from the lab? Was any of this data public prior to the pandemic?

We cover this quite extensively in our book. I also have a manuscript that will soon be in peer review describing the relationship between SARS-CoV-2 and other known viruses. None of the publicly disclosed viruses could have plausibly been the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.

However we now know that when news emerged of a novel SARSrCoV with a novel cleavage site causing an outbreak in Wuhan… scientists in Wuhan did not tell us that they were working with 9 of its closest relatives, linked to mysterious pneumonia cases, and that they had been collecting 1,000s of unpublished high-risk samples from animals & humans across 8 countries, with a clear roadmap for synthesizing consensus SARSrCoV genomes and inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARSrCoVs. Their database meant to inform pandemic prediction & response remains inaccessible.

From the article, it seems that there's a general conspiracy to sabotage your book.

I really don't understand why.

Have you tried contacting Bill Gates and ask him to support you, and give your book more visibility?

I'm still an early career scientist so I do not have a way to contact Bill Gates.

If you've read Gates' own book on the pandemic, you'll see he would not be open to the contents of Viral.

For those with a bit more background in the sciences, there's an increasingly massive amount of evidence to support Zoonotic origin. Philipp Markolin has a good rundown:

https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g...

Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing (e.g. whether it's a natural virus that escaped or an engineered one, how different lineages showed up at the market, which lab it allegedly escaped from since the WIV campus is much further from the market compared to the CCDC, etc etc).

China is a bad actor and definitely contributed to the conspiracy madness around the virus by being so shut-down and performing such a half-assed investigation but unfortunately they would have done the same whether the virus came to be via the same animal trade that caused the last SARS outbreak or if there was some secret Wuhan project.

Most of the "evidence" against lab-leak is just weird insinuation.

Speculation about how the virus wasn't created wholly synthetically: nobody is seriously arguing it was, or it wouldn't be SARS-family.

Arguments that the spike protein binding domain wasn't synthetically engineered: it didn't have to be. It could have been serial passage in humanized mice, considering that's what Daszak and co had literally proposed years before the outbreak.

Arguments that because the original SARS-CoV-2 wasn't perfectly optimized to bind to ACE2, it obviously didn't come from a lab: Obvious nonsense. Why would you expect serial passage through a small number of humanized mice be as effective at optimizing binding to ACE2 as an epidemic sweeping through tens, then hundreds of millions of humans?

The Laos expedition is interesting, but having only just skimmed it I'm not yet convinced it means anything. Any samples with very similar spike proteins collected AFTER SARS-CoV-2 became an epidemic could indicate that SARS-CoV-2 had recombined with existing bat coronaviruses, rather than being a zoonotic source of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.

The sloppiness and drumbeat nature of these anti-lab-leak essays makes me not trust them. The lab-leak argument is speculative, sure, but we've sent people to prison for murder based on speculative inferences from circumstantial evidence; meanwhile, none of the arguments against lab-leak are solid.

Very well put. One thing I’d add, is that this entire debate regarding the lab leak hypothesis is entirely politicized, and I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth. Either theory is perfectly viable given the evidence we currently have.

You don't understand biology. It is possible to date the divergence of genomes using a genetic clock. So they know if those spike proteins had been recombinated.

Serial passage in mice can't be ruled out but is quite out there. Lots of theories can't be completely ruled out, but wild speculation like that is not very productive.

For the lab-leak theory to be true, a "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) has to somehow make it into a lab undetected. Additionally and alternatively scientists have to undergo something like this "serial mice passage". Which is not proven that it could work. And then they would need to somehow let the virus escape through an accident even though they knew it could be dangerous. And it would have to accidentally be able to infect Humans extremely well (which is a tall ask still). It's just... highly improbable.

The biggest single reason against the lab leak is this:

Its really fucking hard to reliably grow human virus. Yes, the Wuhan lab does it, but for like ~10 strains. It takes years of planning, and lots of money. Its not like you can easily hide that kinda shit.

Its not like you can dump the virus into a Petri dish, shove it in a incubator and have done with it. You need hosts and proxies. And guess what? something that replicates well in hosts doesn't replicate in humans. Not only that, there is a strong chance you have to modify the hosts to better accept the virus.

Also, its not like SARS-like virus is rare. MERS is relatively recent. MERS didn't catch on because you are very symptomatic.

I'm sorry, this is totally tangential to the topic, but... between all those versions optimised to bind to this and recombined with that - how do you manage all those changes? Do you have something resembling commits and branches?

That's the problem with lab-leak theory that it's basically unfalsifiable. No matter how strong evidence you gather against it you can always dismiss it with ease.

All of this post is pure speculation with zero evidence to support it.

Don't fall into the trap of taking the opposite stance of bad arguments.

> Most of the "evidence" against lab-leak is just weird insinuation.

Trying to refute evidence rejecting a theory is not equivalent to proving a theory, though. It's just broken reasoning.

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

>Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing

No it's pretty easy to see that they're pointing towards GoF research performed at Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab very proximal to the origin of the outbreak.

The intercept has done a great job FOIA'ing chains of emails showing real concerns with the veracity of a lab leak.

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

You do realize that in opposition to my point about it being weird insinuation, you posted a bunch of weird insinuation promoted by some of the dimmest people in congress? There was a legitimate debate in 2020 about the origin of the virus, which the emails "released" by the House adequately demonstrate. Now nearly all of the people in those emails have updated their priors to favor zoonosis, which is given as evidence of conspiracy instead of just people learning more about a novel virus.

Overfocusing on the market cluster is an error. First, because viruses travel easily – so even if 100% of early cases were around the market, it could have reached the market via a lab worker. And second, early overemphasis on the market cluster caused authorities to search for every case there, and ignore cases elsewhere – just as in the US, authorities missed early community spread because they didn't even consider/test people who hadn't recently returned from China.

If the crossover was zoonotic, and didn't involve EcoHealth/WIV/etc institutional actions, it should've been possible to find intermediate hosts, or viruses, in an earnest search.

Instead of finding those - in any of the hypothesized animals, anywhere from bat caves to Wuhan – we've instead found yet another bat virus that's closer-to-SARS-CoV-2 (BANAL) in exactly the Laotian caves where EcoHealth was collecting hundreds of viruses to bring to Wuhan (& elsewhere) for study and gain-of-function-enhancement. Researchers were routinely making such viruses more human-adapted, and researchers had specifically had sought money to add the same 'furin cleavage' functionality that a BANAL-like virus needed to become SARS-CoV-2.

It's not just China that was suspiciously half-assed in the early days, when the evidence either way for lab-leak or zoonosis could have been clearer. Fauci & Collins at the NIH were suspiciously half-assed too, & sent a clear message to everyone dependent on US federal research funding: "don't entertain this speculation if you want to be on our team".

Fauci was energetic in sending that message even when he was still downplaying the risk & saying masks couldn't help. That is: they were prioritizing narrative control over either investigation or pandemic control. Very fishy!

Both of your points are directly and conclusively addressed in the post..

> First, because viruses travel easily – so even if 100% of early cases were around the market, it could have reached the market via a lab worker

There were two distinct lineages at the market with a cluster of positive environmental samples in the wild animal section. I would love to hear a plausible theory on how two unrelated lineages came to be present there after human-human transmission.

> And second, early overemphasis on the market cluster caused authorities to search for every case there, and ignore cases elsewhere – just as in the US, authorities missed early community spread because they didn't even consider/test people who hadn't recently returned from China.

Not remotely true. I'd encourage you to read this paper: https://zenodo.org/record/6299600#.YjSWqDUxmUk

Lab-leak was a sensational "whodunnit" and the entire purpose of promoting it (true or not) was to distract from the far more important "what should we do about the pandemic." The people pushing for this distraction A. wanted to do nothing (economy in an election year) and B. once they realized that doing nothing was unwise, needed to cover for having pushed A too hard, with too many "aged like milk" statements and actions. It was the public health policy equivalent of shouting "look, a squirrel!" Re-focusing the narrative away from the squirrel and back onto the pandemic wasn't only not sinister, it was a gigantic face-palm that it had to be done in the first place.

That's also why interest evaporated: the two real reasons to push the story both expired in 2020. Now all that remains is idle curiosity. As far as I'm concerned: indulge. Go nuts. Now that you aren't worsening a public health crisis by pushing an election agenda, it really is just a fun little detective story, and I'm as curious as the next guy.

What makes you put on evidence in quotes?

The deletion of the bat coronavirus database at Wuhan institute of virology prior to the pandemic is an undisputed and central fact. Your quotation marks do nothing to diminish this fact alone's inherent demand that Occam's razor be inverted.

This is exactly what I mean about insinuation.

Spell out specifically what you think a deleted database proves and the sequence of events that would lead to it being deleted.

The timeline of this stuff is extremely important to disproving some of the sillier claims. This database that's a "Central Fact" was deleted several months before the first case of a virus with an unmitigated R0 of >5.

They would have to know there was a novel coronavirus spreading for months before the rest of the world. Aside from the rest of the obvious ways everyone else would know, DNA phylogeny of all known cases disproves this.

The conceit falls apart immediately.

Sure, but Occam’s is a logical shortcut, not a method of scientific conclusion. I personally suspect a lab leak origin, but I can’t say I have conclusive evidence. I just find it extremely likely based on a myriad of circumstantial evidence, and a lack of any conclusive evidence of natural origin.

This is garbage appeal to authority designed to make people embarrassed to hold an opposite view. I learned nothing from your comment and was simply told to trust this source you hid any arguments behind. It’s not fostering discussion and it’s strawmanning those you disagree with.

The fundamental premise here is that most people who are arguing about COVID origins simply don't understand enough about known factual biology to make informed arguments. The appeal to authority is important because, in the case where we're not particularly knowledgeable, we should use authorities as guidance on how to reason.

I agree with what the parent said although I wouldn't say the evidence is "overwhelming". The important point is: China's government is so secretive we can't tell if they were intentionally covering something up, or just destroying all the evidence without any knowledge of what it said, to avoid people speculating from the documents.

This is garbage appeal to ignorance designed to make people embarrassed to hold an opposite view. I learned nothing from your comment and was simply told to ignore expert opinion. It’s not fostering discussion and it’s strawmanning those you disagree with.

> China is a bad actor and definitely contributed to the conspiracy madness around the virus by being so shut-down and performing such a half-assed investigation

It definitely seems that the default reaction of any authoritaian/police-state environment like mainland China is to clamp down on things and restrict information whether or not it's necessary.

One needs to only look at the many examples of various scandals/disasters that have gone very briefly viral on Chinese language social media before the censors get to them (often within 8-12 hours of the breaking news) before everything gets deleted.

>whether or not it's necessary

The thing is they've studied the revolutions of 89 and the more recent ones too. They know they don't know what will be the thing that will finally get people out in the streets so they clamp down on everything. Who could know before hand that Mohamed Bouazizi setting himself on fire would trigger the Tunisian revolution, and that that would help trigger the Arab Spring? China is very worried about potential Mohamed Bouazizis.

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

> It definitely seems that the default reaction of any authoritaian/police-state environment like mainland China is to clamp down on things and restrict information whether or not it's necessary.

That tactic loses them the benefit of the doubt across the board. As long as their default reaction is to suppress everything, my default assumption is that they're guilty of every accusation they suppress.

One thing I would point out here: Shi Zhengli is the principal bat-borne sarbecovirus researcher at the WIV. When the pandemic first came to light, the first thought Shi Zhengli had was, "Oh my goodness! That might have have come from our lab! Let's investigate! I wonder if the municipal health authority has got it wrong. I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China."

Zhengli goes on to report that she was apparently enormously relieved to discover that so far as she could tell, the outbreak had not come from her lab.

All well and good, but... When she was told about the nature of the epidemic, and the kind of virus it was, why was Shi Zhengli's first instinct that it might have leaked from her lab? Don't you think this is curious? What does she know that made her turn to that possibility immediately? Why didn't she simply assume, like most others, that it was some new natural pathogen arising from zoonotic transfer?

> "I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China"

Which in itself is an extremely odd statement, to the point I think it might have been taken out of context or mistranslated.

If it was going to happen anywhere, Wuhan was one of the most likely candidates - to the point they built the lab there to do the research.

You'd have to ask her -- but all of the initial reasons that everyone was unsure also apply to her. There was a novel bat coronavirus pandemic near where her lab studies bat coronaviruses - why wouldn't that be your first thought?

I feel like Unherd's article is actually misstating things. For example, "no infected animal on sale in the market or elsewhere in China has been found..." In fact, Bloomberg reported:

"Disease detectives arriving from Beijing on the first day of 2020 ordered environmental samples to be collected from drains and other surfaces at the market. Some 585 specimens were tested, of which 33 turned out to be positive for SARS-CoV-2... All but two of the positive specimens came from a cavernous and poorly-ventilated section of the market's western wing, where many shops sold animals."

The Unherd article also claims: "There is no evidence of exposure to SARS-like viruses among Wuhan market traders prior to the Covid outbreak." But CNN reported:

Research helped [Michael] Worobey come up with a map of the earliest cases that clusters them all around the market. "That so many of the more than 100 COVID-19 cases from December with no identified epidemiologic link to Huanan Market nonetheless lived in its direct vicinity is notable and provides compelling evidence that community transmission started at the market," he wrote.... "The virus didn't come from some other part of Wuhan and then get to Huanan market. The evidence speaks really quite strongly to the virus starting at the market and then leaking into the neighborhoods around the market.... So many of the early cases were tied to this one Home Depot-sized building in a city of 11 million people, when there are thousands of other places where it would be more likely for early cases to be linked to if the virus had not started there.""

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/18/health/covid-origins-market-t...

Interestingly Worobey actually signed a letter demanding the lab leak theory be investigated. But he now believes there's -- in his words -- "a big red flashing arrow pointing at Huanan Market as the most likely place the pandemic started."

I don't think anybody doubts that the first superspreader event happened at the Hunan market. The question is whether the first human/animal crossover happened there. With a high k disease like Covid-19 you might very well have a chain of transmission many links long before it starts going exponential as in, for example, what contact tracers uncovered about how the virus first got into France.

The unherd article just advertising for the author's book. This is a cry for attention.

Yep. Ridley and Chan wrote their book when the lab leak idea was vaguely more plausible, but even then it really overstated the evidence. It's aged very poorly.

These are simply not contradictions. To restate what you’ve posted:

-Unherd says no infected animal has been found on sale in China.

vs.

-Disease detectives found Covid positive environmental samples at the animal market

————

-Unherd says no market traders were found to have been exposed to Covid

-A researcher found 100 Covid cases from the same month in the vicinity of the market.

———-

Animals vs environmental samples. Infected animal traders vs infected people living near the market. It’s apples and oranges and does not support the claim that the Unherd piece misstated the things you quoted.

Hmmm, Bloomberg... Can anyone comment on what that tiny chip could be in the following article?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

Here is a hypothesis that fits the data perfectly (but that could have a somewhat low prior):

- A poor studen has discovered that there is a demand in the wet market for bats.

- The student works at a lab that either has an in-house breeding area for presumably healthy bats, or that buy such bats from an external vendor.

- The student sees the opportunity for some extra income by selling some of those bats to the local wet market

- By some accident, one or more of the bats sold have been infected with some of the virusues being studied at the labratory.

Edit: A variation of the above idea would be if some bat-specialist (someone with skills for catching, keeping or transporting bats were working both the for virology institute AND for the wet market). This person could have, in some way, facilitated transfer of a virus from the institute to the wet market.

There is probably a number of such possible ways to associate the lab with the wet market, simply based on the two having a shared interest in bats.

The prior might be higher than you think

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/47531/did-a-chi...

I've heard it from someone who was in China after the pandemic emerged. Apparently some Chinese people believe exactly that. Some of the lab animals were sold to the wet market. And that's how the virus jumped from animal to host. Although evidence is scant. Then again it's China.

That's a very well researched article you link to, but assumptions are tricky things:

> The fact that there were two distinct lineages early on is of critical importance, as this could imply a hidden community transmission for months (lineage A could’ve evolved into lineage B) before the outbreak at the Huanan market. Alternatively, the two lineages could have evolved in an animal reservoir from a shared MRCA before separately jumping into humans at the market. Option one is compatible with a lab leak scenario, option two is not.

Option two assumes that the lab had only one lineage of the virus - but it collected samples out in the wild and could easily have collected both together, mixed and stored them, and leaked them together. So the wonderfully detailed analysis rests on this assumption.

> Option two assumes that the lab had only one lineage of the virus - but it collected samples out in the wild and could easily have collected both together, mixed and stored them, and leaked them together. So the wonderfully detailed analysis rests on this assumption.

They were two lineages of the same virus, commonly seen in repeated spillover transmission. Explain specifically how you think they would "leak" both of them together - because the theory in your comment eliminates the option of an infected worker spreading the lab virus.

Two things are clear:

1) If it was a lab leak, it was from a well-documented collaboration between American and Chinese biological weapons researchers.

2) It's extremely likely a leak like this will occur in the future, since these sorts of weapons programs are common.

I don't see why most people should care if it was a leak or not. It doesn't have any impact on (2) moving forward.

> It doesn't have any impact on (2) moving forward.

Of course it does. If we know how the leak happened, we can increase safety measures to avoid it happening again in the same way. How is this not obvious?

A peculiar thing about humans is that we can learn from our mistakes. That doesn't happen if we try to pretend there was no mistake to begin with.

That is an excellent article and, as the authors say in the first paragraph, lengthy and informative.

The combination of Chinese secrecy and Trump demanding that they pay reparations have poisoned a lot of discussions.

But come on, a novel bat virus exploding from the world's main research facility about bat viruses that was first reported by a doctor from a hospital in the same city with symptoms from the wife of a researcher at the Wuhan facility?

That's a lot of coincidences. And Jethro Gibbs doesn't believe in coincidences ;)

>symptoms from the wife of a researcher at the Wuhan facility

I'm interested to confirm this, do you know what their name is/was or where I could find more information on this?

The WHO called for further investigation into the lab leak theory which means they have not dismissed it and believe it deserves a proper investigation.

It's hardly relevant what the WHO says or does in this discussion. They've shown themselves to be biased and untrustworthy on more than one occasion.

More and more, I find that lableak (which started with genuine scientific uncertainty) is not driven by genuine curiosity or scientific inquiry, but by the strength of it's emotional narrative.

Lableakers like Alina Chan started as maybe genuine, maybe opportunistic scientific dissidents who got boosted into the spotlight by conspiratorial-thinking prone rightwing networks. They build and got caught up in echo chambers that for years now created their own self-sealing reality.

However, we know today that the scientific evidence turned out to be entirely one-sided for a natural spillover event and not a lableak, which is why the 'cover ups' have to get bigger and bigger, include independent scientists all over the world, and the establishment, and mainstream journalists etc. and the actual evidence is not much talked about anymore in lableak conspiracy land.

Their problem lies entirely with the evidence already available, and no amount of evidence that is 'missing' can remedy that fact. We can happily grant a 100% leak rate from the WIV, and it would not move the needle on zoonotic origin any more. We can grant perfect cover-ups and secret viruses, and it would not suddenly make the available evidence square with a lableak scenario.

That is the reality. And all lableak proponents have been doing is to distract from it.

Thank you for showing how you started with zero genuine curiosity or scientific inquiry, instead opting for a total dismissal and refusal to actually consider the possibility.

It is not that you had any reason to believe she was wrong. There is far more evidence for it than what Alina has shown.

Have you read the WSJ's constant updates on this story? They have singlehandedly pressured China and the WHO into re-looking into the situation--the only reason nothing has come of it (yet) is they are stalling for any final answers (again).

The "lableak cannot be real" proponets are the least scientific people around. I almost put you in the same group as a Flat Earther, a Young Earth Creationist, and a Scientologist. You're a little better, maybe.

Two reviews of Markolins work are worth reading before you take it seriously:

https://twitter.com/EmaNymton90/status/1540235304854032385?s...

https://twitter.com/gdemaneuf/status/1507092599945166849?s=2...

Ah yes, reviews written by the eminently qualified "Not my name" spelled backwards and a data analyst for a bank... I'll pass.

And saying that China would have an interest in spreading the virus seems fishy to me too, they almost decapitated the Communist Party by having a giant dinner at the onset of the pandemic.

Since you don’t even mention Daszak, while regurgitating the position he established years ago, you are per definition arguing in bad faith.

Please, for the love of us all, stop attacking humanity..

Doesn't the article have a table of contents?

What happened to plain HTML documents with a table of contents at the top that enables to get an idea of the structure of the document and jump back and forth between the sections?

What happened to zoonotic hypothesis? Any updates? Was culprit identified by means other than Bayesian reasoning?

In terms of a natural (non-engineered) virus leaking from inside a lab (zoonotic transmission can happen either side of a wall), how is the current evidence pointing in one direction?

Not sure where the "weird insinuation" is?

Definitely not true. There is lots of circumstantial evidence for research-related origin but no dispositive evidence for zoonotic or research related Orion. And Markolin… well… not worth your time

What's your explanation for the fact that Moderna patented the very specific 19-nucleotide sequence that codes Sars-COV-2 furin cleavage site in 2018?

Just think about what you're claiming here with this silly question. You honestly think Moderna patented a sequence multiple years ago, and then what, shared their research with the Chinese to unleash a virus and create demand for a vaccine they hadn't invented yet? Why in the world would they patent it before that?

It's literally the dumbest nonsense.

A more direct refutation though is that the authors were extremely out of their depth and didn't remotely understand the results from their BLASTing. The moderna sequence is the reverse complement and doesn't even encode proteins. In the DNA repair context for which Moderna the patent covers, it codes for a specific (Non FCS protein) and can even be found in birds. Did Moderna invent birds too?

https://twitter.com/emmecola/status/1468569894245572612

https://twitter.com/MGerdol/status/1496130768854212624

Uhhh do you think it MIGHT have something to do with the fact that Sars-COV-1 had already caused an outbreak and the WHO already had already placed these viruses on their watchlist of viruses with the most potential to cause a pandemic...

EDIT:

> The SARS-related coronavirus was one of several viruses identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2016 as a likely cause of a future epidemic in a new plan developed after the Ebola epidemic for urgent research and development before and during an epidemic towards diagnostic tests, vaccines and medicines. This prediction came to pass with the COVID-19 pandemic.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/after-ebola-...

EDIT2:

The research effort to predict future outbreaks evolved into some really cool stuff like this:

https://spillover.global/ranking-comparison/

Inevitably one of these will result in another outbreak and inevitably there will have been a lab trying to study it in preparation and inevitably another big-brain is gonna find some patent or paper that predates the outbreak and use it as "evidence" for their conspiracy

Of course it is zoonotic in origin. Otherwise it wouldn't have been novel. Viruses don't appear from thin air.

Thank you for posting this. WHO-China report found that COVID almost certainly came out of China and the market is just the amplifying venue. It's the racist and xenophobic groups that are trying to incite hatred against China by spreading propaganda.

I think understanding the origin is important, but I also understand why it wasn't a media fixation during the pandemic itself.

1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic

2) Unlike the nuclear analogy in the article, pandemic virus outbreaks happen naturally, and fairly frequently. Combined with the huge increase in global travel, when one does happen it can be around the world in every airport before anyone has even identified it.

So in the big picture this type of outbreak seems inevitable, not anomalous or inherently preventable.

Understanding the origin, either by cross-species origination or a laboratory containment breach, is indeed important and significant and should be pursued, but I also understand why the search for that answer isn't at the top of the 24-hour news cycle.

> 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic

I have the opposite opinion.

If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread. That could have saved millions of lives.

We spent the first several months of the pandemic under the belief that it wasn't airborne. This ended up being false.

If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe and continuing without appropriate safeguards puts us at great risk.

> If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread. That could have saved millions of lives.

The lesson here is not “we need to prove it was a lab leak,” the lesson is “we need better visibility inside China.” Which is also true for viruses that arise naturally inside China.

Do you think that if you could prove with total certainty that it was a lab leak in 2019, that would change China’s approach to secrecy in the future?

> If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe and continuing without appropriate safeguards puts us at great risk.

Do you think we can stop secret viral research in China if they want to do it?

One of my frustrations with the “lab leak theory” is that it seems to cause fuzzy thinking about future preparedness.

We can’t control other nations and we can’t stop natural viral evolution. Future preparedness is the same as past preparedness: detect and respond. We just did a bad job of it with COVID-19. The lesson is: do a better job.

Airborne was always known; debate was droplet vs aerosol (particle size and thus dwell time/radius). Not really a binary distinction anyway; a matter of degree.

> If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread.

You're assuming that the lab "designed" it like a new vehicle engine complete with horsepower and torque specs.

Even given it was produced in a lab through chimeras and serial passage then they still wouldn't have known what they had. They wouldn't have known its characteristics in a human population. They wouldn't have known how long its incubation period was, or when peak symptoms and peak transmissibility happened, they wouldn't have known its virulence, or its R0 in a human population or pretty much anything. They'd might have receptor binding assays against the human ACE-2 receptor. That knowledge and $4.25 will buy you a latte, but it won't predict the trajectory of a pandemic.

And why aren't you annoyed at the coverup that China is doing of its zoonotic origins and that China isn't cleaning up all of the trafficking in live animals like palm civets and racoon dogs? We know SARS-CoV-1 happened, and there was no BSL4 lab to blame it on, so it was definitely zoonotic, yet still fairly unexplained, and nothing serious was done to prevent it from happening again. Now the US is blaming the WIV lab and China is feeding its domestic population propaganda about how the US did it, and still nothing is being done to address the mechanism that we know created SARS-CoV-1. There's still a known virological time bomb there that nobody is doing anything about.

And the reason why China wants to cover up the zoonotic origins and kick the can down the road is that it can use the lab leak theory to push the domestic propaganda that the US did, along with avoiding the political costs of clamping down on the animal trade. And there will be a political cost to doing that. Imagine if in 2009 that the H1N1 pandemic happened in a US pig farm and was 100 times worse, and then Obama tried to ban bacon to prevent a future pandemic.

I'm going to be blunt here. No one with medical training thought this wasn't airborne.

> That could have saved millions of lives

But that still doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic. That's coulda-woulda-shoulda reasoning.

This pandemic was raging inside China for months before it reached the US. What the Chinese government did by not allowing international observers and researchers and preventing the spread of information DID result in millions of lives lost. We could have had the vaccine available MONTHS in advance.

> If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe

Even if it wasn’t a lab leak, it could have been. So whether it was or was not should not change your opinion about the danger of this type of research.

I really have to ask. Did we really not have any idea how corona viruses spread before? If so, what other virus families we are unaware now and why aren't we spending lot of money to prepare for all of them?

I meant the consequences and response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021.

Of course there are longer term and big-picture consequences if it was a lab leak. Which is why I said it was important to research and understand the origin. I just get why it wasn't top priority during the actual pandemic response.

Edit: And of course there are geopolitical implications. I think the same point applies, at the time the focus was on the response and avoiding inciting a political battle over something that wouldn't have a near-term benefit.

What...literally everyone knew there was AT LEAST airbone risk of infection. Not sure where you got your pandemic information?

> I also understand why it wasn't a media fixation during the pandemic itself.

You list some reasons, and I have in my mind a different reason.

There was a media blackout on the lab leak hypothesis because China put the kibosh on it, and since the US is dependent on Chinese exports for healthcare, PPE, defense and other critical supply lines, we did not want to piss them off.

Direction to the media for this blackout came from the US State Dept, and Mike Pompeo confirmed as much in semi-public comments that I will link if I ever find them again.

edit: this isn't the source I was thinking of, and it fingers the IC not State. I will keep looking https://www.newsweek.com/mike-pompeo-intel-officials-wuhan-l...

Concerning number 1) that is doesn’t change the Consequence I agree, but the response I thoroughly disagree unless you means strictly short term.

Came or not from a lab, SynBio and gain of functions experiments have the potential of re-doing this of way worse.

So basically the only truly important response that is not damage containment is to prevent this from happening (or happen again).

Honestly beside fringe groups I don’t see any initiatives happening, if it was up to me I’d kick gain of function experiments into the same realm as chemical weapons.

There are a variety of natural phenomena and human activities that are liable to create new dangerous viruses and/or bring humans into contact with them. Gain of function research presumably belongs in this category; so do certain food and livestock handling practices, development at the wildland-urban interface, climate change, and a host of other things.

The question is how much incremental risk do these activities expose us to, what is the cost/benefit of curtailing them, and what can we feasibly curtail. The risks are what they are, and while we might be misjudging them, knowing the origin of a single event is not especially helpful in recalibrating.

Nature breeds extremely serious viruses all by herself; a depressing possibility here is that humans just don't have that much influence over the risk of another pandemic no matter what we do.

I meant how we were dealing with COVID-19 as it spread, not future consequences which I agree do matter.

Once we identified and sequenced the virus, knowing the origin wasn't going to change how many people were on ventilators in hospitals.

> 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic

What??? I honestly expect more from HN readers than blatant china-apologists.

OF COURSE it changes the consequences! We tell China to hand over all research and distribute it to scientists around the world so that research doesn’t start from ground 0. If it could have accelerated understanding of the virus by several months, imagine how many lives could have been saved!

Instead China deleted all their files and kept quiet. They literally don’t care about millions of deaths.

My understanding is that we did not start from ground zero, already had a large scientific understanding of similar coronaviruses, had the virus sequenced very quickly, and then proceeded to get a vaccine tested and to market in a historic record-breaking amount of time.

Of course we should research the origin and, if a research lab was the source, take action to prevent it happening again. I'm not saying there should be no consequences, just countering the article which comes off as "why isn't this the number one priority??"

I guess I'm more cynical, maybe even conspiratorial. My theory is that NIH was possibly, even if indirectly, contributing funding to the research that caused the outbreak, and that the major corporate media networks are there to shill for the establishment forces in the government and hushed this story as not to humiliate Fauci and the NIH.

I've seen Rand Paul credibly grilling Fauci on this issue a number of times and each time, the propaganda machine on reddit came out to damage control for Fauci.

The larger problem, beyond whether we funded this or not, whether or not it was a bat, is that the media and leaders in the government have repeatedly shown themselves to be completely undeserving of trust and so you're left guessing what the truth is with whatever limited information you have access to.

Rand Paul isn’t credible on nearly any topic, but especially not SARS-CoV-2. We are talking about a man who proposed banning masks on public transit, knew he had COVID but didn’t inform anyone but instead spread COVID amongst a bunch of elderly Senators, and spent time railing against vaccines for children.

The man is a non-practicing eye doctor who pretends to medical knowledge he doesn’t have.

I don't even think it's that different from nuclear. The fact that Iraq had no WMDs (and I have doubts that anybody in the intelligence community really thought they did) got swept under the rug too, after a ton of civilian deaths there and military deaths on both sides. People just make stuff up and then it's too late.

Your "no priority" stance doesn't hold ground if the article is to be believed. The lab leak theory wasn't just low on the agenda, it was actively avoid altogether.

We already had intense media speculation about the source of the virus at the start of the pandemic because _people wanted to know_. It would have been nice to have a proper investigation at the start of the pandemic as they may have caught evidence before it could have been destroyed.

This proper investigation would never have happened. China started a trade war with Australia for promoting an independent international investigation. I think the fact that China is willing to go to bat (pun intended) over this is a great argument for international sanctions no matter the origin, but I'm just a nobody on the internet.

Thank you for posting this. We know that COVID couldn't have come from China. It came to China through frozen meat packages. WHO-China report already stated that fact. Dr. Fauci also believes that.

The only reason we can't find evidence because other countries wouldn't collaborate, for obvious reasons. Racists are trying to blame China because of lack of competence of their leaders.

My comment says nothing about whether or not China or a lab leak was the source.

> Racists

There's the exact reason "why it wasn't a media fixation": people calling anyone a racist for thinking bad of China.

> WHO-China report already stated that fact.

"China said so, so it must be true."

Excellent satire. Please post more.

Wasn't SARS-1 stopped largely with contact tracing? You're saying that understanding the origin of the virus does not help the production of a vaccine in any way?

Big difference between the two: with SARS-1 you first got symptoms then become contagious, with COVID-19 it was the other way around. Obviously the second one is much harder to control, and if that had not been the case there is a fair chance that the pandemic would have been stopped in the initial phase.

Knowing where the virus is, how it spreads, and its genetic sequence are of course important. But I don't think CNN running segments about whether it came from a lab or a bat in 2020-2021 would have helped with any of those points.

I think the important point is not whether this outbreak was in fact a lab leak, but that it is entirely plausible due to gain-of-function research.

Even if this one wasn’t a lab leak, the next one very well could be. The risk/reward profile of that sort of research is insanely unfavorable.

Whatever toy gain of function research someone is doing in a lab vastly pales in comparison to the enormous gain of function 'experiment' we are right now performing worldwide with the continued high transmission rate of COVID-19.

Look at what variants like Omicron BA.5 and BA.4 have evolved into, they are quite possibly the most infectious and dangerous air spread pathogens known to man. These didn't come from a lab, we cooked them up by dropping all mitigations and pretending the pandemic was over instead of quashing this virus for good.

Source please? Everything I've read about latest Omicrons suggests that they are more transmissible, more likely to evade immunity, and substantially _less_ severe in terms of hospitalization and deaths. By and large, this is what you'd expect to happen at the end of a pandemic, regardless of our response.

> quashing this virus for good.

This is impossible. You'd kill the host together with the virus.

> we cooked them up

When you say “we”, who do you mean exactly? How did they cook them?

Can you explain why you believe the pandemic is not over?

The only alternative to this experiment is China's currently policy. There isn't much of a middle ground because anything short of aggressive testing, lockdowns, and quarantine won't be enough to stop the spread.

As someone in tech, what bothers me is all the attention AI gets for possible ethical problems, while biologists are doing some pretty scary experiments with potentially large-scale negative consequences, and they've gotten relatively little attention.

Biologists have well developed frameworks for judging the ethics of experiments that has been built up over a century of horrifying missteps.

AI is at the "hire and fire until they get a sycophant" stage in the development of proper ethical review methods.

It's also very weird that the same type of people who normally talk about corporations/governments covering up pollutants do not talk about how many people could die from a potential lab leak.

There's no proof of "gain of function" experiments at all or specifically linked to Sars-Cov-2. It is heavily unlikely that such an experiment would switch a virus from un-pandemic-able to pandemic-able. The mechanisms to do that are entirely theoretical.

So it's not clear at all that gain of function would have been able to create a Virus like Sars-Cov-2 out of a hypothetical bat virus. And there is no evidence any such research has been going on. Nor is there any evidence the virus has passed through the Wuhan lab in question at all.

This is the conversation we need to have, on an international level.

When Australia proposed an international investigation into the origins, in direct response, China started cyber attacks, resentencing Australian prisoners to death, and used economic warfare.

This seems like a conversation we can not have, if China has any say in it. And for a natural origin spillover event, it sure wants to have its say...

Fun fact, Covid did leak from a Chinese lab, but it was in December 2021:

>A lab worker was bitten and infected by a mouse infected with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant at a high-biosecurity facility in Taipei.

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

Taipei, the capitol of Taiwan, is not a Chinese entity. This is a lab leak from a Taiwanese lab.

From the Wikipedia link: "A lab worker was bitten and infected by a mouse infected with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant at a high-biosecurity facility in Taipei [Taiwan in December of 2021]".

From there, news articles speculate that "this will add credibility to the lab leak theory [if confirmed]" and this "gives legs to Wuhan lab leak theory," which is hardly conclusive.

I don't see how this incident would indicate that SARS-CoV-2 initially came out of a lab. It demonstrates a possible vector out of a lab, but I'm guessing that's already a well-known vector when dealing with lab animals, and it doesn't provide any evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was actually developed in a lab or initially spread from one.

It’s because there was a series of scientific papers that pointed very strongly to a zoonotic origin: https://mobile.twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1499406148...

Would that exclude a mishap during a specimen-gathering field trip?

Did you read the thread?

The Proximal paper was used by Chinese disinformation bots to skelch any debate about a lab leak. I take that as a Streisand effect. Same when Fauci strongly and publically rebuked the Indian bioinformatics pre-print paper talking of the GP-120 HIV inserts. That is how I came to know about those inserts and their interesting history.

So strangely, the grossly unscientific propaganda effort that was the Proximal Origins paper may have had the reverse effects, at least, it had on me.

Anyone contributing to this virology conspiracy (why they were put in charge to lead the investigation and theory building, and not the way more qualified biosecurity experts?), including voluntarily, like Angie Rasmussen, has Chinese propaganda tainted blood on their hands.

What’s your scientific criticism of the paper?

Let’s not forget that talking about the lab leak hypothesis last year resulted in censorship among social media platforms and YouTube

This is why free speech is important, it is impossible to rely on “fact checkers”.

The lab leak hypothesis was also pretty tightly coupled with the bioweapon/intentional release theory which is part of why it received so much push back.

Also I don't recall the specific fact check messages but if they were in line with "there's no hard evidence of a lab leak" I'd say that's still pretty accurate.

That’s not a justification. You’re just saying that some speech you approve of was tied to some speech you disapprove of, so both should be censored.

No speech should be censored.

> The lab leak hypothesis was also pretty tightly coupled with the bioweapon/intentional release theory which is part of why it received so much push back.

No it wasn't. The media often takes the most extreme case in order to denigrate the whole side that they don't like.

It was tightly coupled to that stuff by fact checkers and other opponents to silence any questions.

No, that was some intentional conflation bordering on propaganda.

Let's not forget that the lab leak hypothesis was championed by political figures who were embarrassed that they were woefully clueless about how to implement pandemic response plans, even though their agencies already had those plans in place for years, and that their aligned media pushed these conspiracies without evidence.

Why is that a justification for heavy-handed censorship of a topic? Do you think that's right?

Just a reminder that the predecessor of COVID-19, SARS-CoV-1 leaked from the lab 4 (yes, four) times. The Wikipedia page lists 3 of them:

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

Biosecurity incidents are shockingly common.

Just a reminder that the predecessor of Covid-19 was a pandemic of zoonotic origin that had multiple spillovers from animal hosts into humans. That virus was eventually studied and some lab workers were indeed infected but the origin was unquestionably natural.

Just a reminder that the origin being zoonotic and lab leaks occurring are not mutually exclusive.

A lab specialized in investigating Coronaviruses in the city where the first outbreak was, is at least suspicious imo. The fact that the Chinese authorities weren't exactly helpful (to my knowledge) in debunking the lab-leak hypothesis is extra suspicious. But then again, if they really would have wanted to cover it up, they might have looked for another city to point to as the source of the outbreak, I don't know how feasible that would have been though.

It is a little suspicious, but also not too far fetched: Where would you put a lab researching Coronaviruses? Somewhere near where it exists in the wild.

No. It’s not where they exist in the wild. The closest related virus (RATG-13) to n-cov-2 come from northern china (Yunnan), where they were imported to the Wuhan virology lab to study. What a coincidence!

Well, the level of coincidence also depends on the number of coronavirus research facilities, and the number of cities. If there aren't very many coronavirus research facilities, and there are many cities, it becomes an unlikely coincidence.

>Where would you put a lab researching Coronaviruses?

Antarctica perhaps? Not in the middle of a freaking city.

There is an episode of Lex Fridman's Podcast with Jamie Metzl on the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K78jqx9fx2I Metzl is highly confident of a lab-leak. However, lab-leak doesn't require that the virus has been tampered with and I somewhat agree that is important to know if the virus escaped due to inadequate lab safety.

Exactly. People yelling "censorship" forget that the lab leak theory was mostly about how COVID was engineered as a bioweapon, which still remains a conspiracy.

On the other hand, existence of this conspiracy has been used to shut down perfectly reasonable discussion around a less outlandish lab leak for months.

Even in this post opponents of the lab leak theory are still bringing up this bioweapons conspiracy - but I can't see a single lab leak proponent suggesting it's an engineered bioweapon.

The issue is the existence of this outlandish fringe theory was used to censor all reasonable discussion on the lab leak.

The unfortunate fact is that the only plausible consequence of a public acceptance (by government officials) of the lab-leak hypothesis, is that funding for research into viruses would get a lot more restrictive. Maybe not less funding, but it would go to far fewer labs, which have the highest levels of containment.

The profession which knows enough to settle this question, thus has a massive conflict of interest. We cannot expect bankers to say that the response to the GFC should be to break up banks. We cannot expect generals after a war to say that they screwed up. We cannot expect intelligence agencies to say that they should have less power and more oversight. Scientists are human, they want to keep their job and not have to move to another city to do it.

What is actually going to happen, is nothing, until and unless a second lab leak kills a lot of people.

It's not that the origin story is not important, it's not that people don't care, it's that it is a distraction.

It doesn't help solve the crisis.

The article makes the comparison with a nuclear bomb. This is a bad comparison. If we were attacked by a sentient creature, we could reason with it and mitigate further damage or escalation.

In the case of a virus, it's good to know to prevent future pandemics maybe, and there is an academic interests, but it doesn't help with the current situation.

The origin story is paramount to preventing future outbreaks and to the loss of, and disruption to, our way of life. The US took the same position on combating terrorism when it rooted out Al-Qaeda. To stop future loss of life, the root cause needs to be identified and dealt with. I vehemently disagree with the assessment that the origin is not instrumental to the defense of future outbreaks.

Finding the root cause of an unprecedented disaster might not reverse the history of that disaster, but it would help prevent future similar disasters. Now we are clearly aware of the costs. It isn't a distraction to look into the cause of a disaster as we are able as a society to work on many different problems at the same time.

It does help with our current situation of being very vulnerable to highly contagious respiratory diseases. COVID is probably never going away. To have another one join if this could have been prevented would be far worse for us.

I think this is correct. I also think the point being made is that we SHOULD spend more time learning lessons and applying them to try and prevent some of the future pandemics. Imagine if we can prevent just one out of the next 10 pandemics through investment here. That would be millions of lives saved!

Part of the problem with the covid pandemic is how much we let our guard down. For example, the Global Health Security and Biodefense unit — responsible for pandemic preparedness — was established in 2015 by Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice [0].

This was then disbanded under Trump and its head Timothy Ziemer, top White House official in the NSC for leading U.S. response against a pandemic, left the administration [1].

Jon Oliver has a good segment on why we need to focus on preventing future pandemics [2].

[0]: https://time.com/5806558/administration-officials-fight-crit...

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v-U3K1sw9U

> It doesn't help solve the crisis.

It doesn't help solve the crisis and it doesn't change attitudes toward gain-of-function research. The pandemic itself, regardless of origin, highlighted the possible consequences. Even without a connection to research - and even more so with the mere possibility - it heightened concern about lab safety, and made the risk/reward calculations around GoF research even less favorable than they already had been. The community of people capable of performing or funding such research was already on top of it - again, regardless of origin. Public finger-pointing is only likely to rile up nationalist sentiments which would interfere with establishing better procedures and protocols governing virological research.

The lawyers and diplomats have some work to do, but (especially in light of today's news) I suggest that the rest of us including the media have some higher priorities for how to spend our time/energy.

> it is a distraction. It doesn't help solve the crisis.

This is extremely naive. Do you really believe it won’t happen all over again?

The real crisis is not Covid. It’s how easy something even worse than Covid could be started today.

If this is true, it seems like science trying to have it both ways.

Usually, there's desire for media to share scientific evidence in ways that are engaging to the public to recognize our best scientific conclusions.

What I'm taking from your portrayal is scientists know best what ~"helps the current situation."

Despite the origin being important, and that the public wants to know about it science doesn't want evidence on this matter and doesn't want it covered by the media or for it to influence the thinking of the public.

These seem like political behaviors, not scientific ones.

Hiding the cause also prevents anyone from fixing the cause.

Based on what China's reaction to the source-chasing-efforts, I have no doubt it is where this is originated.

Wuhan is a huge city with the only lab on earth that works with SARS, virus-leak is not uncommon in China over the years(including SARS-1 that was leaked a few times but was contained quickly), after COVID China issued lots of new policies including stricter lab management, and new leadership from military to be in charge of Wuhan lab, and hide the initial samples of COVID, and started a diplomatic propaganda to paint USA as the virus maker.

Lack of transparency in China proves nothing. CYA is standard operating procedure there, regardless if there is any guilt or not. Up and down the chain they will cover for each other, if not for the simple reason they themselves don't know what shit their superiors or underlings are up to...

And it is entirely rational, even when they believe that there hasn't been a lab leak, to shut down any investigations into it, because all such work or information would just add fuel to the fire, regardless the "objective" outcome.

The lab-leak hypothesis is meta-scientific. When it was first tossed around, the lab leak hypothesis generated two predictions:

1. We would find evidence that someone was doing experiments on furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses.

2. We would find that the furin cleavage site matched a known sequence.

We did not find 2, which should have been easy to find. Eventually, we found 1, since a rejected DARPA grant proposal affiliated with the lab in Wuhan emerged.

Then, we found 2!! with a plausible explanation of why no one had found it earlier -- you had to turn on "patented sequence search" on NCBI blast, which is turned off by default. An easy mistake to make. As a professional biochemist for a decade I had no idea that blast had a patent sequence search, much less that it was turned off by default (which, btw is a sensible setting).

The scientific method says given a model it should make independent predictions (ideally unlikely) which are later verified. The evidence for a lab leak should be considered relatively strong.

Can you link some sources here? Call me skeptical, but if the evidence is as convincing as you make it sound, then it implies a pretty widespread conspiracy among experts (of many countries and affiliations) who would understand the implications yet are deliberately mis-communicating via their podcasts, news appearances, papers in famous journals, etc. Are there any papers published on this or is it just in the book that the authors of this article are selling? I'm not sure if I'm confusing this author with a Matt Ridley who seems to be an eccentric but minor British noble who writes about fringe climate change ideas?

Edit: Ok I figured out the source of the claims, it's the Alina Chen (I didn't realize she was co author) stuff. And it is indeed the Viscount Matt Ridley himself!

I haven’t been fixated on this by any means but I remember reading an article months back that looked at the timeline and locations of the early cases and compared them against the locations of the market and the research facility. I came away thinking that the animal market hypothesis seemed much more likely than the lab leak.

Back up a bit. What the fuck is "meta-scientific"?

I don't find any arguments around the furin cleavage site convincing. This kind of cleavage site is pretty small and the number of variations that have good efficiency is limited. The presence of a specific furin cleavage site is not clear evidence of genetic manipulation.

We did not "find" 1 from any rejected DARPA grant proposal, that's nonsense and completely unsupported by the actual grant proposal. You cannot presume one leads to the other, that'd be like trying to cite a patent on a perpetual motion machine as conclusive proof perpetual motion machines exist.

I would argue that continuing to state what you have here qualifies as disinformation, and think HN should remove it immediately, lest HN become yet another breeding ground of this kind of anti-intellectual memetic drivel.

Sorry but the post above is unscientific sophistry. Science is about weighing competing theories by examining the relative strength of evidence. The evidence is strongly in favor of zoonotic origin. What's posted here is an exercise in confirmation bias, not rigorous scientific thinking.

You can BLAST that furin cleavage sequence and find matches in other non-patented sequences, though. Here’s one from 2011 (bases 286 to 304, reverse complement): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleotide/DN616748.1

Someone should contact the patent holder and let them know they're being infringed upon. ;)

Rather than just saying "we found..." and expecting people to take it at that, provide sources. If I went and looked up everything anyone claimed, that's all I'd ever do.

From June 9:

> Over two years after the coronavirus was first detected in China, and after at least 6.3 million deaths have been counted worldwide from the pandemic, the World Health Organization is recommending in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe is required into whether a lab accident may be to blame.

> That stance marks a sharp reversal of the U.N. health agency’s initial assessment of the pandemic’s origins, and comes after many critics accused WHO of being too quick to dismiss or underplay a lab-leak theory that put Chinese officials on the defensive.

[0]: https://www.wivb.com/news/world/who-covid-origins-unclear-bu...

Can you tell more about 1 and 2, maybe with some sources added? this is pretty big

>> The lab-leak hypothesis is meta-scientific. When it was first tossed around, the lab leak hypothesis generated two predictions:

When and where were those two predictions published? Can you give a link?

>We co-authored a book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, on this topic in 2021 and it proved to be an odd experience. Eschewing speculation and sticking to what we could prove, we delved deep into the evidence and wove together the threads that linked bat viruses from southern China or Southeast Asia with an outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019. We concluded that it was impossible to be sure yet, but two theories were plausible: spillover from an animal to a person at a market, or an accident in a laboratory or during a research field trip.

> Our book received praise from readers: we received letters and emails from senior scientists, politicians, businessmen, journalists, and others commending it as a non-fiction whodunnit.

>All that was gratifying. But it stood in marked contrast to the reaction in much of the media. CNN invited us on to discuss the book then cancelled at the last minute — at the behest of their health editor. The BBC simply ignored the book altogether, as did the other mainstream US and UK networks.

The mainstream media is the enemy

If you want to be taken seriously on scientific matters, then co-authoring a book with Matt Ridley, a well known climate-change sceptic, is a strange choice.

If the lab leak hypothesis is proven beyond all doubt, then it embarrasses China.

Embarrassing one of the world's superpowers is broadly seen as an undesirable thing to do.

Ergo, scientists producing findings backing up the hypothesis will find plenty of opponents whose first and only job is to discredit them in any way possible, from denying their papers publication (looking at you, ResearchGate) to publicly attacking them on social media (Dr. Malone).

Lab leak theory is never going to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. For that to happen, Chinese government would need to cooperate. And it is almost an axiom that they won’t, if it has a slight chance of making them look bad.

> Reviews were mostly bad — in both senses of the word. That is to say, they were highly critical and inaccurate. In some cases, the authors said things that made clear they had not read the book but had made up their minds to dislike it. Not one but two virologists told us on Twitter that the book was full of lies — and that they had not read it. An odd thing for anybody to admit to, especially a scientist.

If you call yourself a "scientist" you have an ethical duty to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Perhaps not in the formal sense of a doctor's Hippocratic oath, but in the tradition of Galileo and Copernicus.

Jon Stewart's classic lab-leak rant on Colbert's show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8&t=178s

I dig it because it's like a summary of half of the Marvel movies, where the protagonists spend the entire adventure solving a problem they caused themselves.

Like, without the Thanos thingy, iron man is not a bloody hero, he is a villain. He is responsible for so much death and destruction it's not even funny. Black Mamba, killer. Black panther ? Maintains in place a political system that clearly allows any psychopath to access absolute power. Hulk, a time bomb. Thor ? He let his genocidal brother of the hook as soon as he is nice for 2 minutes. Spiderman ? Give an deadly bot swarm to the first father figure that smiles at him. Dr Strange ? Accept the request to GHB the planet and almost destroys it because a kid ask for it for 30 seconds.

It's a well known trope in sups stories, but for some reasons a lot of viewers really believes they are heroes. Even as a kid I though Batman was stupid for spending times fighting one criminal at a time with all his money.

Now, we are seeing a lot of this in today's IRL world.

Progress is saving you by giving you drugs for all the diseases it increases: diabetes, cancer, obesity, hormonal dysfunctions, etc. It's giving you a car so that you can you can go work in a remote place you would never have to work to without progress. It gives you software to organize your day to fit all the thing you would not have to do without progress.

Ok, it's tongue in cheek. I love progress.

But still.

There's all these tornado research facilities in the same place we keep getting tornados!

Thank you for this. I hadn't seen it.

Jon Stewart has a rare talent of imparting both logic and comedy simultaneously. Ridiculously awesome guy.

The lab-leak hypothesis has been suppressed because it is a politically unauthorized thought.

If the hypothesis is investigated and proven true, powerful people stand to face justice, which is of course unacceptable to these very people, and so the idea has been banned by way of media silence and by way of association with other unauthorized politics, i.e. with those who are right of center.

Not to mention you’d see a rise in anti-Asian hate crime as disturbed people take out their frustrations.

lol jet fuel melt zoonotic origin beams right

One thing I've noticed as a result of the pandemic: there are many people who think that Listening to Experts is the same thing as Doing Science. Everyone who has strong feelings about the lab leak hypothesis (in either direction) would do well to remember the Litany of Tarski:

    If SARS-COV-2 escaped from the WIV,
    I desire to believe that SARS-COV-2 escaped from the WIV;
    If SARS-COV-2 did not escape from the WIV,
    I desire to believe that SARS-COV-2 did not escape from the WIV;
    Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.

Just because the CDC or some other experts say it didn't happen doesn't mean it didn't. Just because Fox or some other conspiracy theorist says it did happen doesn't mean it did.

With the lack of any really strong unequivocal data supporting any real hypothesis, I think people got tired of arguing about it and recognized that throwing around huge claims with massive implications was probably irresponsible.

That won't stop a number of them from trying to warm it up again every now and then.

If a claim has massive implications, then it would be even more irresponsible to not recognize that possibility. The world can't learn from the past if we're not able to even consider what might have happened in the past.

I initially dismissed the lab leak hypothesis because surely nobody would be stupid enough to make new SARS virus strains on purpose. They’re worthless as biological weapons, and the risks are insane.

Then it turns out that that is precisely the type of research the Wuhan lab does regularly.

And then when our prime minister merely suggested an investigation, China put punitive tariffs on billions of dollars of our exports to them.

Because clearly, that’s how innocent governments with nothing to hide act.

Immediate, massive retaliation for merely suggesting that someone should look into things.

But everybody should believe the Chinese government! They told you: it came from a pangolin in the market. Why would they lie?

They lied about the reason for the punitive tariffs, sure, making up some insane story about centrally orchestrated “dumping”.

Okay, so they lied. But not about Wuhan! That would be unethical…

I think the more likely case is Hanlon’s Razor — Chinese government officials figure it could have leaked due to their lax safety standards, and just don’t want to look into it for fear of someone conclusively proving this.

> ...because surely nobody would be stupid enough to make new SARS virus strains on purpose. They’re worthless as biological weapons, and the risks are insane.

If we wait until the next pandemic hits, we will be months or years behind the curve, trying to understand it and develop treatments. Millions more people will die because we'll have been caught on our back foot.

Lucky for the human race, viruses are statistically more likely to mutate, over time, in particular ways. So it's possible to make pretty good guesses about where future would mutations might occur. So if we deliberately create those mutants in a laboratory, we can study which strains look particularly virulent and/or dangerous.

Yes, there ARE risks to this strategy, in terms of lab leaks. But the vast majority of virologists and epidemiologists have known for decades that deadly worldwide pandemics of novel Coronaviruses are an inevitably in the 21st century... It's just a matter of time. We will definitely see several more pandemics, at least as damaging as COVID-19, befor the century is out.

So even without a lab leak, we would only save ourselves a couple more years before nature did the job, itself... And it will keep happening, over and over with new Coronaviruses, for the foreseeable future. The human race can do very little to slow it, let alone stop it.

They lied, and it's been documented - but that cuts both ways. They also lied about wild animals being sold at their market.

From Bloomberg:

When an international group of experts organized by the World Health Organization traveled to Wuhan, China, earlier this year to research the origins of the coronavirus that sparked the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, they visited the Baishazhou market, which is larger, but perhaps less well-known (internationally, at least) than the Huanan market, where many people initially believed the virus first jumped from wild animals to humans.

The research team was told only frozen foods, ingredients, and kitchenware were sold there. But a recently released study that had previously languished in publishing limbo showed, thanks to data meticulously collected over 30 months, that at least two vendors there regularly sold live wild animals, Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg also notes that one of the earliest recorded COVID-19 clusters in Wuhan [December 19th] involved a Huanan stall employee who traded goods back and forth between the two markets."

It seems likely to Goldstein that some authorities didn't want the presence of a thriving wildlife trade to become public knowledge. "It seems to me, at a minimum, that local or regional authorities kept that information quiet deliberately. It's incredible to me that people theorize about one type of cover-up," he said, likely referring to the hypothesis that the virus actually leaked from a nearby government-run lab, "but an obvious cover-up is staring them right in the face."

https://news.yahoo.com/virologist-suggests-coronavirus-origi...

Even if it wasn't the lab leak this time, it seems like an awfully dangerous practice for limited scientific value.

I am all for looking into things, but this all sounds really familiar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discredited_HIV/AIDS_origins...

I think there is something in human psychology that gains some kind of comfort thinking everything is controlled by humans. Like accepting that we live in a chaotic universe we have no control over is scarier than some imagined Dr. Evil character that we can blame events on.

Not saying it’s not worth looking into, just that a lot of these same people think there is a laser satellite starting forest fires.

Given the evidence, it's easier for me to believe a covered up mishap at the lab than anything else. If anyone is going to chabuduo something like this, try to cover it up, then blame the US and everyone else, it's China.

There are obviously some conspiracy theory versions of this but the main origin of a more sane lab leak theory is by exclusion, which is to say that it existed because no other theory had definitive proof.

The most obvious alternative candidate is zoonotic origin. To many this is still the leading theory and it's likely the most plausible. But the smoking gun for zoonotic origin is finding the wildlife population of origin. This hasn't happened yet. Given the attention, that's a little weird but it's not that weird. Sometimes it takes years.

The most plausible form of the lab leak theory is that this was an accidental leak of a strain they had. Even that raises questions. If it's a strain they had, where did it come from? You run into the same issue as zoonotic origin. Could it be the result of gaint of function or similar research that would've modified a wild virus? That's possible too.

The only evidence here is circumstancial. China had, for example, not cooperated with WHO early on in investigations. Any investigations have been limited in their terms of reference. There was a DNA database of coronavirus strains that was taken down in 2019. Kind of weird timing but no tdamning. When I last looked into it this hadn't been examined by third parties. Maybe that's changed now?

So what's happened? Nothing. Because there hasn't been significant movement here on this or any other theory.

Lot of discussion here on the 'dispositive proof' by Worobey et al. and the lack of intermediate lineage between lineage A & B (after intermediate genomes were ruled out without having access to the raw data to properly QC). A recent paper casts some doubts on at least extent of animal zoonosis (it any occurred at all) - indicating at least several of the early market cases were due to human to human transmission.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512...

What seems to get lost on people is that no animals in the market tested positive for a SARS-2-related virus.

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1370392/v1

Whatsmore the early lineage A virus was only found in one environmental sample, all other env samples were B and all human infections were B.

Both points cast serious doubt as to whether the market was really the origin - or just a superspreader location.

Using a different method than Pekar et al., Caraballo-Ortiz et al. estimate a lat Sept/E Oct ancestral virus emergence in Wuhan. If correct, we can probably discount the Hunan seafood market as the origin, and need to look esewhere in Wuhan

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34931186/

While I 100% am most invested in the idea it was from some type of wild animal (probably a bat - scientists have been warning us for YEARS that when we encroach and destroy habitats of animals we are pushing our luck for exposing new diseases) I did/do have a pretty niche theory that I saw almost nowhere else. So to be clear - obviously - I do not actually think this is likely:

September 2019 there was a large explosion at one of Russia's top viral research labs (supposedly also bioweapons) in Siberia due to large natural fires in Siberia - link below

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49727101

Officials then declare the explosion and lab not to be an issue and everyone moves on.

Is it not possible that something was accidentally leaked from this lab? I am not implying intent here - just that we could be dealing with an accident caused by the huge, huge fires. This is the same lab that later develops the Russian COVID vaccine.

At the time the only other reference I could find to this was a joke made by a comedian in Russia which they very quickly cracked down on:

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/04/07/russia-opens-crimi...

I posted about this once before on Hacker News and got a TON of downvotes. Not trying to spread misinformation or something here at all.

Your Russia theory is on par with the one from the Chinese government saying the virus came to Wuhan from the US via some frozen food.

We need some sort of international protocol on how to do gain of function research. Something like putting these labs in remote places with strict quarantine protocols. This whole business of doing stuff like this in city centers is absolutely insane

What I really want to know is "so what?" I mean, it would be great to learn about the origin and then take steps to reduce the chance of the same thing happening in the future.

But it appears most people just want to point the finger and that no change would result.

In fact one could imagine potential improvements for either case, some of which might be worth doing regardless of the actual origin.

The change is that western countries could put a halt on transferring incredibly dangerous technology to mainland China, since they have developed a track record of carelessness and coverups.

(Wish I didn't have to say this, but this is not a racial comment-- BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs in the US are filled with ethnically Chinese people and have much stronger safety records.)

I think this article is a very good example of the sort of pseudo-compelling argument. It's like one step along the road between 4chan conspiracy to Tucker Carlson. It's lots of stuff that sound like reasonable arguments, but are actually not. It starts by couching itself in the actual concensus - other people concluding that's a possibility! - Yes, that's true, but what they're concluding as a possibility out of a cautious appraoch, you're pushing as actually being true. Then they start marking their own homework - we published our book and everyone reasonable and smart said it was great, and everyone who disagreed clearly didn't read it. Now we go to the greatest hits - the big bad mainstream media.

Now we start mis-representing our opponents. All we want is an open scientific debate! But it's too controversial! That might not at all be true, but we're going to say it anyway. It might be that the actual scientists decided that there weren't merits to your argument to justify inviting you to debate it, but who cares - let's just say they're afraid of controversy.

People are threatened by our work. We're not extremists! We're moderates! We're perfectly reasonable people who are just going to slip in this laundered conspiracy theory that Fauci funded the Wuhan lab. But don't worry, let me quote this anonymous scientist to back up every worst accusation you could make of scientists.

Everyone is covering this up because of vested interests you see! If you look up the author you'll see that he comes from this as a complete neutral outsider making cold-eyed judgements of the evidence. He's definitely not from the exact far right nutter idealogue ecosystem that you'd expect him to be from.

There's a nugget of truth in the article - the lab leak is possible as an explanation, and that China isn't to be trusted to investigate. There's nothing in this article that actually advances any evidence beyond that. The rest of it though is just the same thinly veiled conspiracy theories that have been going around since Trump going on about "The Chinese Virus".

Do you realize how ridiculous this sounds to someone who isn't partisan and doesn't watch mainstream media? Besides the blatant lies like saying Fauci didn't fund the wuhan lab you use political terms like labeling people right wingers because they don't agree with you. That's the same strategy as the mainstream media you are defending. Then you mock people for wanting an actual debate. You need to get out of your bubble. Stop mindlessly believing everything you see on CNN without question.

Note this also:

>> Imagine if the accidental launch of a nuclear missile had killed 21 million people. It’s hard to believe the world would shrug and say: let’s not bother finding out how it happened.

In other words, somebody did this and we have to find out who it was!

So much about just asking questions, I guess.

Here are two "damning" articles about the lab leak theory, for some reason these articles were not widely seen but highly recommend them if you are searching for the truth around the origin of covid:

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

and:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...

Its pretty much alive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/health/germs-fort-detrick...

Considering the history of 'budget cuts to cut government spending' combined with 'innovation' causing many environmental and social disasters in the US, I see a lab leak from the US Army's lab in Maryland much more credible than anywhere else. Budgets get cut by 75% by Trump Admn. The Army labs 'get creative' in cutting costs and the rest follows.

The lab seems to have started having 'problems with its sanitation and security'. Upon which the US government tried to get the army shut it down. Army refused. The government had to get a court order to shut the lab down around June 2019. At this point, a 'pneumonia' outbreak was reported in the retirement communities around Maryland. Also, the army team that went to military games to China, Wuhan were trained here before leaving for China.

Note this kind of thing probably happened before, and it will happen again: Loosely regulated private and state GMO research is a MAJOR risk for entire humanity - just one lab screws up due to budget cuts or while trying to 'innovate', and you can never take back what gets out of that lab.

Imagine if this was coupled with the “publish or perish” academic culture. Do any universities have similar labs?

Ding! Had to really dig through the comments to find a mention of this...

Pre-pandemic blood samples were later tested and found positive in europe

Which makes the wuhan-zoonotic vs wuhan-leak a false dichotomy.

I blame, the uneducated about viruses, wuhan-institute-janitor with the dead animals, on the food market, instead of expensive cremating them, making a little money in a side hustle.

Cluedo its fun for the whole family.

But it provides nothing tangible regarding responsiblity.

The janitor is clueless on the danger(the government does not properly educate its citizens, which have medieval concepts of medicine), a culture of side hustles & "stealing from the man that steals" is normal in all post-sovjet countries.

The problem here is that the risk is systemic. Meaning, the societal characteristics to be found in all post-sovjet totalitarian societities, will produce this again and again, against all promises of reform. Which makes outsourcing exponentially dangerous endavours to these places a crime.

I do not blame ccp-china there. That potemkin village of a working society is very obvious for anyone willing to watch and able to look past "brute" reality-i-command-you-so sovjet style propaganda.

I blame those who thought they could perform already irresponsible endavours for cheap without oversight there.

Yes, medieval concepts of medicine. Why do you think those life animal markets still exist? Because frozzen food is considered "bad" for your chi. Now, im going to pretend that outrage at outrageous behaviour could have consequences.

So basically authorities were peddling lies, then after getting caught red-handed, they doubled-down on the lies and tried to gaslight the public and label doubters as conspiracy theorists. How can the government rebuild trust after such behavior? It would be hard to rebuild trust after the lies on their own, but the actual gaslighting is just insane... Governments have been acting like literal psychopaths. Everyone knows you can't trust a psychopath.

For those of you complaining about conspiracy theories: this is why there are conspiracy theories. Supernatural theories will fill in the gaps. People cannot live without a cohesive worldview.

The origin of Covid, the biggest cataclysm in 100 years or more, will be understood either rationally or irrationally.

Investigating the origin of covid goes beyond the utility of preventing a recurrence or finding justice, both of which are also critical.

> But what has disappeared is any real or urgent interest from the media

How do we determine this? Isn't that just normal?

So many stories are just unseen until someone can prove something. If they haven't been able to then there you go, it's not much of a story.

Yeah there's lots of speculation in the media but it comes and goes and no surprise that something so far unproven faded from view.

The whole world is tired of COVID. We all just want to move on.

Besides, what are we going to do when we do confirm it was a lab leak? We can hardly make these lvl 3/4 facilities any more secure than they already are, and it’s not as if China will ever actually take any form of blame (nor would the US, if it leaked there).

Not have those labs? That’s one solution. Is the study of virology worth all the loss and suffering caused by a pandemic?

I am surprised at how little publicity Jeffrey Sachs comments on this issue has garnered.

There is a good interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZa5k87ByOk

> If we don’t investigate, what signal does that send to bioterrorists?

Have there actually been any bioterrorists?

I remember that after September 11th 2000, there was a scare regarding envelopes with supposed Anthrax in them, and that fizzled out as a false alarm (AFAICR).

Now, there's plenty of other kinds of terrorism - private and state-run; and there are chemical weapons of course. And in ancient times, I read that dead bodies would be catapulted into besieged cities.

But have there actually been groups of people over the past, say, 100 years who tried to release a malevolent virus into a civilian population anywhere?

Virus is of zoonotic origin, not from some weird gain of function experiment that leaked. Period. The real problem is that the Chinese government (who I don't like very much) have such an ingrained culture of secrecy and censorship that prevented vital information from getting out that was the cause of the pandemic. Had we known by November 2019 it could spread through the air we might have stopped this in its track much earlier and saved millions of lives.

I have tried to get a biologist / someone with more scientific knowledge than me to either help peer review, confirm or debunk this paper by Steven Quay:

https://zenodo.org/record/4642956

It seems so scientific and created a buzz when it came out, it has been the most thorough explanation of the lab leak theory, but I never saw a decent discussion that either helped confirm or debunk the ideas within.

I think it's kind of rubbish but 140 pages long and most serious scientist have better things to do than going through all that.

But at a glance he seems to be using bayesian analysis in a not very valid way.

They claimed they can investigate without Chinese cooperation, then complained in the end that Chinese obfuscation prevented them from getting their conclusion?

There is only one reason I would hope it is a lab leak. A lab leak is a mistake that theoretical can be controlled via more stringent systems. It is something that has a limited footprint in terms of initial infection vector.

If something like this did arise from zoonotic sources via a market - this will be the 1st of many such cases that we will endure going forwards. Controlling something like that is nearing impossible.

>Controlling something like that is nearing impossible.

Why is preventing or reducing the probability nearing impossible?

There are two sources that most people talk about:

1. The Wuhan Institute of Virology

2. A particular market in Wuhan.

However, all we really know is that Wuhan is the first city with a lot of cases. It is entirely possible that the virus, or a virus precursor was active in a small population somewhere else. Also, there are a lot of labs in Wuhan besides the WIV.

I suppose it's possible, but is it likely? Given the virality of Covid if it was present in another city before hand that city would have been the first to get a lot of cases.

"Covid cases are rising again. In the UK, they have broken through the 200,000 infections-a-day threshold for the first time since April. " -> where are they getting this data? All data online is showing about 18K cases per day.

We're in a post-truth society. Whether something is true or not is irrelevant.

Recently (6/20/2022) our boy Tedros, head of WHO, stated that Lab Leak is the most like explanation for the COVID pandemic.

https://www.indiatvnews.com/news/world/covid-virus-likely-le...

So there's that.

Plus the obviousness of the circumstantial evidence combined with utter lack of evidence for counter-theories, for this going back to 2020.

And finally the evidence that ALL of those who purported the counter-theories were DEEPLY involved in funding Wuhan for exactly this kind of "Gain of Function of Bat Coronavirus" research. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck .... it's a duck.

Why do we ignore history and not consider the possibility that COVID was intentional - by a rogue government or corporate cell, or a individual such as Dr. Bruce Ivins (Amerithrax, Ft. Detrick)?

Okay, but cui bono?

Why do we ignore history and not consider the possibility that COVID was intentional - by a rogue government or corporate cell, or a individual such as Dr. Bruce Ivins (Ft. Detrick)?

The gang’s all here.

But don't worry the 'scientific hive mind of the internet' will now come to correct this, except it's no longer a pointlessly political topic. It's fairly set in stone the blame lies with the chinese state.

Also it's extremely unlikely to kill you if you're under 50 to the point of being not a statistically significant cause of death (unlike guns). But we still need to acrew so much national debt that we might as well have put humans in a space colony as a species...

The people who lied and censored the people who talked about the theory realized that there was just about nothing in this world that showed that it was false, or really true. https://thehill.com/policy/3517712-who-report-on-covid-19-or...

A hypothesis is something that can be disproven. Lab leak was never a hypothesis. It was never more than a talking point. Even just looking at the inconclusive evidence, there was zero indication it was true (the genetic changes between covid 19 and it's natural cousins were random for instance, not targeted as they would be for a man made pathogen).

Lab leak does not require that the pathogen is man made.

It's amazing that ppl still consider China a "bad actor" when they fairly promptly (a little delay but still months of lead time) warned the world and completely stopped the virus within their borders to this very day. The bad actors are the western governments with millions of dead on their hands trying to point the finger anywhere else.

If your post was meant as sarcasm, you should probably call that out.

If it wasn't... wow.

“What happened to it” - as far as I can tell it has passed into common acknowledgement.

It's on the trash heap of nutter conspiracy theories that didn't pan out.

Cloud observations render Giant Watering Can theory obsolete.

Wait the article says there's 200k cases in the U.K everyday now? Why is google reporting way lower? [1]

[1]https://i.imgur.com/u6KABa5.png

I guess it is because the UK stopped doing as much testing. Presumably Google is reporting the number of positive tests (or something) and many people with covid don't bother getting tested any more.

The ONS is still doing random sampling and extrapolating to say how many people in the country are infected. "Around 1.7m people in the UK had coronavirus in the week ending 18 June" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51768274

You are misquoting, its estimated infections not cases. Not everyone who has an active infection gets a test and reports it, in fact its a small fraction.

Presumably it's based on the ONS estimates.

> But what has disappeared is any real or urgent interest from the media and the scientific establishment in finding out how it started.

It is the biological weapon that cant be proved it is a biological weapon.

Its symptoms are particularly nasty in a low humidity environment, like air conditioned vehicles, buildings and desert environments.

Too good to be truth. People will always blame others, even animals, never themselves.

Who are you talking to?

I was full of holes.

> As you may have guessed from our strange spelling, UnHerd aims to do two things: to push back against the herd mentality with new and bold thinking, and to provide a platform for otherwise unheard ideas, people and places.

Ahh yes, definitely the mission statement of a reputable source.

UnHerd has a following among conspiracy theorists, but its journalism is pretty good! E.g. here's an interview with Sajid Javid (UK minister for health) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7yZZKlg-m8

When the first sentence is factually incorrect, it's tough to read on. The UK doesn't have 200k cases a day, it's less than a tenth of that.

The figure is based on this study, which currently puts it at 241K cases per day: https://health-study.joinzoe.com/data

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/24/covid-infectio...

"Overall, it is estimated 1.7 million people in private households across the UK had the virus last week – the highest figure since the end of April."

With less than 20k cases per day you would need to accumulate them for 3 months to get 1.7 million cases.

Estimated infection != cases.

I will just say this:

Interest in developing and deploying nuclear power dramatically declined after Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl incidents. This lead to an increased reliance on carbon-based energy sources like Coal and Natural Gas, likely killing hundreds of thousands over the years.

I think skittish virologists rightly concluded that a lab-leak mea culpa would have a similar effect on virology and perhaps broader medical research. The author disagrees, but history has shown us what happens.

If Three Mile Island and Chernobyl had been covered up and left to conspiracies the earth would be several degrees cooler right now.

Excuse me, but scientists are not public policy makers. Their job is to follow the evidence, not publish based on what they think will happen if they do.

Total nonsense. Chernobyl was covered up by the most brutal and inhumane regime ever. It's this exact cover up and lack of responsibility that disgusted a lot people and lead to the hatred and fear nuclear energy is drowning in.

There will always be cavemen that will fear what's beyond the cave exit, but they are powerless, albeit vocal, and are not responsible for the stagnation of nuclear research.

Well, I for one am a firm believer in the Labrador-Leak hypothesis. Anyone who disagrees surely is not a TRUE scientist. Just look at the numbers. More labradors than ever before. Statistics never lie. Everybody knows that Labradors are dogs.

What are attempting to communicate with this comment?

If I don’t see health authorities taking lab safety seriously by thoroughly and publicly investigating, why should I believe they take vaccine safety seriously? The framing damages credibility.

Why should you believe they take food safety seriously? Why should you believe they take water quality and treatment seriously? Or the authorities who oversee the safety of aerospace or airbags or what your bank is allowed to do with your savings? Vaccine safety is an awfully specific thing to double down on considering the overwhelmingly broad set of things that you rely on public servants for (specifically ones who regulate health), the very small number of times you need to get a vaccine in your life, and the sheer numbers and public nature of trials around vaccine testing.

Because Western authorities have no power to investigate the Chinese?

What happened is that they are clearly lying to us, and they hold all the evidence. What do you want us to do?

Either they're lying to cover up a lab leak, or they're lying up to but not including about lab leak.

Multiple near-nuclear events happened during the cold war, averted several times only by a single Soviet soldier using his common sense. We didn't find out about that until much much later.

Give it a few decades, and we can hope to find out.

Gulf on Tonkin, anyone?

It's not that I don't care, it's that it's not a fight I believe can be won this decade.

9/11 cost us ~ 3000 lives? And we spent 20 years fighting wars, killing 100s of 1000s of people, bombing the shit out of entire countries, and trillions of dollars in trying to exact revenge.

COVID kills 1,000,000 people (and counting...), which is 333X the death toll from 9/11; and we just shrug and do nothing?

Just doesn't compute.

One is an intentional act by a group of people. The other is, at worst, an accident where the main actor is a molecule.

The bigger problem there is the response to 9/11, not the response to Covid.

Discussion of the "lab leak hypothesis" isn't helpful and has on the contrary done a lot of harm. The problem is that a "lab leak" is understood as something evil, intentional or reckless. The research into bat viruses however is vital. There is also no evidence that Sars-Cov-2 even originated in a bat, much less passed through a laboratory.

> intentional or reckless.

Yes, that would cover all lab leak possibilities, wouldn't it? If we assume the premise of a lab leak, then logically they either they did it on purpose or it was an accident. The union of intentional and reckless gives 100% coverage. You might as well say "the grain silo blew up intentionally or due to recklessness." No shit.

> The research into bat viruses however is vital.

Grain silos are vital to society, but if one blows up accidentally then wouldn't you say it's important to recognize the accident and enact measures to make similar accidents less likely in the future? The importance of grain silos to society is not an argument against investigating the role of negligence in grain silo accidents. If this research killed millions of people by accident, then figuring that out matters so new security measures can be enacted.

Two years and I have yet to read an explanation of what this hypothesis is. Were they careless with a natural virus? Did they modify viruses? Did they release a nature virus on purpose? Did they accidentally release a modified virus? What's modified even mean here, studying random mutation? Engineering things?

It's Schrodinger's Argument. It's all of them and none of them and it always shifts depending on who you're talking to. So I've concluded it's the largest, dumbest motte-and-bailey argument there is.

But at least we can all agree, whatever it is, there's no practical lessons to be taken from it.

The article tries to define it:

> an accident in a laboratory or during a research field trip

Which, yes, is incredibly vague. I give them credit for at least ruling out the "Evil Chinese Scientists intentionally create and release deadly virus!" bullsh*t.

One plausible "lab" scenario: A baggage-hauling laborer caught the proto-COVID-19 virus in a bat-filled cave during a routine "collect samples of germs from bats" expedition, then unknowingly spread it back in Wuhan.

My opinion: For useful-fact-oriented folks, the Lab Hypothesis is mostly a tedious waste of time. For those motivated by hot-button emotions, attention-seeking, etc., the most lurid and cartoonish versions of the Lab Hypothesis are by far the best. If they can conjure such images in the minds of their audience - withOUT having to spell them out, for reality-checkers to attack - then all the better. Hence the remarkable scarcity of Lab Hypothesis explanations.

> at least we can all agree...

No, we can't all agree. On anything.

Given that the Chinese have shut down investigation, how would you expect anyone to tell you exactly how it happened?

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