This has been extensively investigated by scientists - it’d be a career making move if you could prove something that juicy! - but the problem is that the conclusions aren’t completely certain but rather comparing probability & the limited evidence to conclude that the lab leak hypothesis is increasingly unlikely. That doesn’t make the news and it especially won’t convince conspiracy theorists when there’s a raging political battle.
The for or against lies with the lab and the staff working there and the PRC is not going to allow an open and honest investigation to either prove or discount it.
So unless it can be proven to have come from somewhere else, you are likely never going to settle whether it was lab leak.
Since then there has been even more progress. Since 2015 or so it's been possible to "print" DNA of any sequence.
In fact as COVID started to spread in China and the sequence was released, a Swiss lab used this technology to print the genome of SARS2, inject it into some yeast cells, and voila, you have the virus. They wrote this up in Nature [2].
If you wanted to change a naturally sampled virus using this technique, say, to insert a Furin site, swap out an RBD, whatever, you can literally do it with a text editor and copy and paste.
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/39652
Suffice it to say, this has been a very active area of research (and DoD/NIH/NIAID funding) for many years.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7120940/
In light of this, people that are confidently dismissing or playing down the possibility of a lab l̶e̶a̶k̶ origin at this point seem to be exhibiting some kind of ideological commitment.
Saved a lot of money this year making Covid-19 at home using the SARS viruses I already have. Takes like 2 seconds
For some reason most discussions claiming that the lab leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory focus 90% of their effort arguing against being a bioengineered weapon and little time arguing against the actual strongest lab leak hypothesis: a zoonotic virus was collected and brought to a virology lab, where it was passed through humanized mice, a worker contracted it, and accidentally spread it in the city the virology lab was based.
The fact that people can pick out whackadoodles in Congress who argue for stupid theories doesn't make the strong theory weaker.
The bioweapon theory, however, is politically useful. If you want to start a war, or at least trade sanctions, a villain is a good place to start. Someone violating international law and gene splicing themselves a pandemic in a bottle is exactly the right kind of comic book supervillainy, without being technically impossible.
"Fire you? I just spent a million lives training you up!"
(For those who don't get the reference, https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/thomas_j_watson_209882 )
What an utterly extraordinary thing to say!
This is precisely Nature's gambit. She carefully engineered SARS-CoV-2 in a matter of weeks (to conceal the evidence, which was eaten), all naturally of course, but carefully, subtly made it appear like it might have been designed by mere mortals... and for this very purpose. Armageddon. When there's an imbalance, Nature corrects. And no one would deny there is an imbalance in the Earth regarding our species alone totally messing it up for all living things.
Forgive one another, and you will be forgiven.
In order to forgive, we must have the truth. Without it, we are in a fog of blind judgement and accusation.
Clarity of the source of this misfortune allows us to forgive.
I cannot say that I hold the full pantheon of the origin of these words to be true, but the four books that imparted this teaching to me have left an indelible imprint, and I cannot escape their mercy, justice, and hope.
I have read many other books, of course, and I believe in compassion. Though great calamity has befallen us, we might find any who have acted wrongly to be worthy of forgiveness.
When we grow beyond apprehension of recrimination, blind to fear of punishment for a cataclysm caused by ourselves and others, and only seek to salve our unwilling harm, perhaps then we will be able to say "move!" to a mountain, and it will move.
Yes, I have loved these books. Sometimes, they are my only solace.
The USA just launched a major assault on the human rights of 55% of its population (women and homosexuals), after a yearlong assault on the foundation of our democratic government, all under the guise of four books of "mercy, justice, and hope".
Forgiveness is not on the political table.
"it is possible for researchers to reconstruct the virus in a lab, using either fragments of virus from patients, or fragments of DNA that are synthesised chemically by biotech companies. " https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/19172
It seems you can basically type any sequence you want and have it made up.
You keep repeating this sentiment even though there are other comments that provide evidence to the contrary, that we haven't established that at all.
Do you have any sources to support this claim other than what are effectively op-ed essays?
Anyone claiming to disprove the lab leak hypothesis by making a claim against solely molecular engineering is either hilariously uninformed or intentionally misleading you.
I've only heard crack pots claim it was man made up to this point. I think repeatedly bringing it up or acting as if that's what lab leak means to most is disingenuous at this point.
>That doesn't eliminate the possibility that it was a natural virus which had been collected and subsequently escaped due to bad lab technique
That's what everyone is actually talking about. The man made conspiracy theory is a red herring that only serves to strawman and shut down legitimate discussion.
For anyone honest, the big question here is how we prevent this from happening again. The conclusions seem pretty solid: be careful about pushing humans into wild animal populations, better surveillance for emerging diseases, and continue pouring money into research on things like rapid test and vaccine development so response times can shrink.
That's absurd. We know the grant that funded the WIV lab work was signed off by Fauci during a time when GoF research was banned in the USA. If you proved the virus came from a lab funded by the guy who literally funds your colleagues you would never work in the field ever again.
I'm not sure what to say further other than "I guess we're going to have to find a way to be comfortable never knowing". The analyses are compromised because the topic is too charged now. Too much is at stake based on one or another direction to trust any conclusions.
One could still say "My god! This virus could have been even worse, more deadly! Lab leak or not, the entire planet should double check conditions at all labs, ensure proper containment and processes exist!"
Any citations to share? I've only seen peer-reviewed evidence shared in this comments section that contradicts this claim.
Not to be glib, but what would be a legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth?
That this plausibly could have been of natural origin would seem to override any value in discerning where it actually came from.
If it was a lab leak, "Oops." We hastened it occuring naturally by some amount of time. Lots of people died, but that would have happened in an inevitable spillover event anyway, albeit farther in the future.
If it wasn't a lab leak, well there we are.
Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? Increase biocontainment protocols? Okay, so we've made human-origin less likely. We still have to deal with naturally-occurring in the future.
If the virus is a laboratory construct (e.g., a recombinant of two novel natural viruses with a human-chosen FCS; we can argue about how likely that was, but no genomic evidence can exclude that), then it would near-certainly never have existed without that laboratory manipulation. The pandemic could near-certainly have been permanently avoided simply by not constructing it. This was a matter of controversy long before the pandemic; such work was banned in 2014, but the ban expired in 2017:
https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-lifts-3-year-ban...
If the virus is naturally-evolved but sampled and released accidentally by scientists, then it might otherwise later have been released accidentally by infected non-scientists. It wouldn't have been necessarily though, especially since WIV researchers sampled remote bat caves that no other humans routinely entered. Sampling of sites with significant existing human traffic (farms, markets, tourism sites, etc.) seems like a clear benefit, a negligible increase in the existing risk of natural spillover. Sampling of remote sites without such traffic seems much less clear.
There's something weird about public attitude to biological risks. When the government did a controlled burn in New Mexico that got out of control and destroyed hundreds of houses, everyone involved recognized that they'd screwed up, even though fires also occur naturally, and even though controlled burns are a valuable tool in controlling natural fires. It seems that intuition doesn't hold for lab-origin pandemics. The 1977 flu originated from scientific research (although the exact nature of that research--whether it was a failed vaccine, or a vaccine challenge trial, or an experiment at the bench--is disputed), and it killed about 700k people. No one seems to care, and I don't really understand why.
> The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event, [...]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/
She goes on to say it wasn't a "laboratory accident", because it was probably a vaccine accident, either an incompletely attenuated vaccine or a trial in which vaccine recipients were deliberately challenged with live virus to test their immunity. That distinction seems like a legalistic game to me, intended to distract from the lesson that pandemic may teach us about this one; but I believe her historical background is good.
I don't know any mechanism by which those responsible would be punished, even if the exact truth came out, and even if they're still alive. I'm not even sure they should be--virology was still in its infancy then, and the escape presumably really was an honest mistake. Of course the more times this happens, the harder it gets to accept such an excuse, especially when deliberate efforts are made to minimize and distract from the lessons of the past.
Meaning, someone who didn’t walk in with a bias and look around the room for things that support said bias. This debate is packed with armchair experts who seem to have a larger interest in the politics than the science.
>If it was a lab leak, "Oops." …
Oops?!
>Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? Increase biocontainment protocols?
If you’re like most of us on HN, at work, when we make big mistakes that cost our companies money and users, we have thorough retrospectives, learn from our mistakes, identify root causes, build for redundancy and high availability, and prevent the same incident from ever happening twice. That’s what I’d expect to see if the lab leak (which you strangely keep calling human origin, as if a naturally occurring virus can’t leak from a lab) were proven.
> Okay, so we've made human-origin less likely. We still have to deal with naturally-occurring in the future.
We have naturally-occurring forest fires, yet as a society, we sure seem to put a lot of effort into stopping “human-origin” fires. This sounds a bit “fuck it, why bother trying to make anything better, something bad will always happen”.
I agree.
Depends on the process. If the retrospective process is a big PITA that goes nowhere, and management is only going to support changes that it wanted before the incident, regardless of any knowledge uncovered by the evidence, then minimize the reporting and hide under a rock for a while, try not to get management attention again.
Which scenario seems more applicable to a government lab in Wuhan?
I don't think we're going to get the straight information from the lab, because the incentives aren't there. If they admit they did it, everybody is mad, and CCP has to take action to save face, and the lab team doesn't want to face that. If they admit they didn't do it, nobody believes them.
Outside of finding some lucky samples, like a good match from outside the area in say October or November, I don't think we're going to get anything definitive from forensic analysis of virus DNA. I'm not an expert in the field, but the same sequence gets interpreted different ways by different experts; and usually with some wishy-washyness.
The data quality for the early pandemic isn't getting any better or more independent from the same officials we don't trust.
If we can't get a story we trust from the horse's mouth, and we can't figure it out through forensic analysis, the best way forward is to figure out what interventions would be reasonable if we assume lab origin and what would be reasonable if we assume natural origin and do the practical interventions.
Do we?
See: built to burn
Ban gain of function research.
There are many virologists who make compelling arguments that the hypothetical benefits of the research (which have yet to materialize) pale in comparison to the risks.
Every day that goes by that GoF research fails to materialize any of its hypothetical benefits makes the case against it ever stronger.
But I also look at it the other way: COVID was perhaps the smallest scale event that could produce fundamental change in the way we (as in, humans) approach biodefense and disease control.
If we needed a wakeup call, better to have it now than ~2100, when we're estimated to reach peak population + continued concentration in cities.
If it were discovered to be a lab leak from something previously discovered in the wild, especially from a NIH funded lab, hell would break lose and it would hurt many aspects of biological and medical research.
Full integrity is the only chance we have of having a healthy political atmosphere where the public can trust the establishment.
If it turns out it was a lab leak, from using SCID mice or other human analogues, we might get new systems to prevent such a thing from happening again. Maybe researchers have to work in a diving bell system, who knows. We get to decide! We can create whatever we think we need. The system is not fixed. Look at animal research support systems like IACUC, created in the 80s, and now a useful fixture in biomedical research. In the lab, we lament IACUC sometimes, but they are a good check in the system. Why couldn't someone like IACUC raise the bar?
I agree with you that knowing it was a lab leak does not fix the past, and can increase the blame game near term. On the longer arc, it is important to know.
What would we do differently? We put people like Fauci in prison for funding dangerous research that was specifically prohibited by the Obama admin —- then lying about it. We’d defund and disband the WHO for lying to our face while carrying water for China. Even the name “Covid” was made up to protect the Chinese. The WHO didn’t rename MERS, Zika, Ebola or any number of dangerous diseases with a regional connection. But for Covid? They bent over backwards to obfuscate Chinese responsibility. And Fauci? Lying to the American people and Congress over and over again while knowing good and well he helped fund it. And note the NIH and other US federal agencies aren’t required to disclose royalty payments from scientists in their employ. People making decisions about this virus literally got paid from the very corporations creating the treatments. If any scientist that had any influence got paid a single dollar from a company benefiting from their decisions — that’s a conflict of interest of extraordinary proportions. If an Army general gets paid a royalty from a defense contractor that general would be thrown in prison. Rick Marcinko went to federal prison for allegedly doing when happens all the time in our national health agencies.
The world should be outraged and Fauci should be in prison. What would we do differently? Not fund Chinese research. Demand full and absolute transparency from our public health agencies especially when it comes to research funding and financial ties to those who profited immensely from this.
Rand Paul’s questioning of Fauci was spot on. But people are too blinded by political parties to open their eyes.
Same as how the toxic trash USA sent to China for fake recycling was USA trash, and same as how the outsourced manufacturing of "American" products to American specs is Chinese-American manufacturing.
at this point, all of that has been scrubbed for good, and nothing factual will ever come out.
The whole thing is so strange. I think back to the odd videos from China at the very start of people collapsing in the street. Only the first videos the world seen of the pandemic and they had nothing to do with reality but no one cares. No big deal.
Your response is, oh well?
In terms of spillover, there is zero guarantee it would happen naturally. For any virus, it could, it may, and for some it has.
But for any specific virus, it is absolutely not guaranteed.
And purposefully training for human compatibility in a lab, clearly makes that maybe, a certainty, and if insufficient precautions are taken, that is a crime against humanity.
This whole thing is absurd. We go after corps for spying on people, governments for bias, but if the truth is a lab leak killed 100s of millions, "Oh well".
Come on!
What's the goal here? Is this some weird US political "my guy vs your guy" thing?
It was "And if we did all of that, how much would it decrease our future risk of zoonotic spillover?"
The non-absurd version of this argument is that risky virological research will provide a public benefit offsetting the possible harm. None of its advocates seem able to articulate significant examples of that benefit yet, though, and even a small probability of millions of deaths is quite a lot of harm.
The non-absurd version of this argument is that we can't police everything, everywhere, especially across national borders with sovereign, independent governments in power.
So taking that into account, there's always going to be a fog over truth in certain places.
We can spend substantial amount of effort trying to pierce that, probably fruitlessly, or we can focus that effort on things we can actually change and improve.
By that logic, why bother trying to stop human CO2 emissions, or nuclear profileration. Afterall, controlling them requires policing phenomena that occur across international borders under the jurisdiction of numerous independent governments.
[0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market,+Fazha...
It's not at all far-fetched to think the virus piggybacked 10 miles before finding a nice home for itself at a wet market, after which it went gangbusters and infected lots of people. Obviously the virus proliferated in the market, but that doesn't necessarily make the market the origin. The two bottom 'Weibo data' maps from the first link show clusters on both sides of the rivers and also very close to the lab.
That's just the most obvious bit of bias, but I'm confident that article isn't being as fair-handed as it's pretending to be.
You're mad at the author for not pointing out the WIV (Which had 0 confirmed cases anywhere near it until much later in the pandemic which is what the two bottom charts are referring to) but then you also grant that it looks like the market was the center of spread?
In any case, they directly address this;
> Importantly, even pneumonia cases that had no association whatsoever with the market (no work, travel, visits, or contacts there) still centered around the Huanan market and could not have been subject to ascertainment bias. The market was the only place in Wuhan where early cases had a clear association. There are no other epidemiological links to any other place in the city, other clusters only started forming later in Jan-Feb (Weibo data, shown above) and became more representative of the city’s population density.
> It is worth mentioning here that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (the alleged ‘escape’ laboratory working on CoVs, not shown in map) is located on the other side of the Yangtze River, South West of the Dong Hu lake, more than 16km away from the Huanan market, and no sickness clusters of cases were shown anywhere close in December 2019.
As for:
> It's not at all far-fetched to think the virus piggybacked 10 miles before finding a nice home for itself at a wet market, after which it went gangbusters and infected lots of people.
You still need to explain how there are two distinct lineages at the market among the first cases!
Picking and choosing one data point to be skeptical of is useless, the totality of the evidence needs to be weighed.
Yes, an article comparing two possible originating locations should obviously show both on that graphic (especially when both places are well-within the frame of the image); I can't see any good reason for the author to have omitted that.
> but then you also grant that it looks like the market was the center of spread
Yes. And that's not contradictory to the lab leak idea, because people aren't trees and they go places after work. I think it's entirely reasonable to hypothesize that the virus escaped from the lab on a person and ended up successfully taking root in a less-than-sanitary wet market just across the river. If two-headed turtles started showing up at a Popeye's 20 minutes away from the Turtle Experiment Laboratory, would you say that Popeye's was the source of the two-headed turtles?
> You still need to explain how there are two distinct lineages at the market among the first cases!
Again, there's no reason both theories can't be true here. The caged, dirty animals definitely seemed to be the virus' first stronghold, but that doesn't mean that the new bat virus couldn't have come from the New Bat Virus Laboratory 20 minutes away from the wet market.
> Picking and choosing one data point to be skeptical of is useless, the totality of the evidence needs to be weighed.
My point is that it made the bias of the author nakedly apparent. It's an pro-wet-market argument piece, not an objective look.
Actually, YOU do. You need to explain how a virus made two separate rare hops to humans in the same place, at the same time, in two different forms. This is possible, but statistically unlikely. The (vastly) more likely hypothesis is that it made only a single cross-species hop, which then spread and mutated later.
That's the Wuhan CDC. It's across the street from the market and has a virus lab. Google Maps will not show you the correct location but you can put the address (湖北省武汉市江汉区马场路288号) and it's close enough. Or use Baidu Ditu and find it's right in the middle of the clusters in your first link, ~300m south of the market.
Dunno if that point is just offices or whatever though.
Also you have the wrong address, put in the Chinese name on Baidu and you'll find it's in walking distance to the market. Like literally just across the street.