Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis
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In a way, the lab-leak hypothesis is comforting, because it means that nature with its own means did not manage to manufacture such a highly-transmissive disease, despite the facts of modern life, record human population and rates of travel. If it is not lab-made, then nature may do this again soon with another virus.
Sometimes this is indirect; there is some debate on why some Europeans have immunity to HIV, the current hypothesis is that it’s a result of us surviving the Black Plague.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.h...
"epigenetic modifications, activate cells of the innate immune system, such as monocytes, macrophages and natural killer cells"
I think I'm less optimistic than you in this matter. There's at least one counter-example to that statement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu that has the same order of magnitude of deaths as COVID-19, but in a world where population was ~4x smaller and I'd expect less mobile / interconnected.
Putting that to one side, Spanish flu happened in the context of:
- A society that didn't know viruses existed at all, only bacteria.
- The very recent discovery of aspirin, which was believed to be a wonder drug that could cure anything. Doctors didn't know what doses were safe and had a habit of prescribing lethal overdoses to people suffering from the flu.
- Widespread censorship by the authorities due to WW1. It became known as "Spanish Flu" mostly because the censorship was just less aggressive there, so that's where reports emerged from first.
For tech firm employees systematically censoring reports of bad reactions to vaccines, there are lessons here that still apply to the modern day. Spanish Flu would probably have been less deadly in a society with less censorship, and which was less likely to mass prescribe brand new miracle pharma products.
We are well past the point where nature is our greatest enemy.
A lab leak of such consequences has the attention of every hostile organization out there. Imagine the scale of hurt you could achieve, yourself remaining pretty much immune to detection and prosecution, by doing the same thing but intentionally. Bye-bye unrestricted travel.
Lab-leak != Lab-made
Which is the main argument against this kind of function research - there’s little gain compared to the risk.
“We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and HAE cultures,”
They were denied over Gain of Function concerns, and bam a year later the only Sars virus to be ever observed with those exact human-specific cleavage sites at the S1 S2 junction ravages the planet starting 500m from WIV.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
But the preponderance of evidence is that the leaked virus was modified before it was leaked. The critical spike protein in SARS_CoV2 is coded uses a sequence of amino acids that has never been seen before in any other coronavirus. I forget the names, but there are certain common amino acids that can be coded using several different functionally-identical DNA (RNA) sequences, and the SARS-CoV2 one looks like the sequences used in labs and humans, and never seen before in natural viruses. One nobel laureate in biology described this as a "smoking gun" that this was a lab leak when they first heard about it.
They have to determine what happened so they can do root cause analysis and institute procedures to make this less likely to occur again.
https://news.yahoo.com/china-locks-down-65-million-095328796...
> It said that outbreaks have been reported in 103 cities, the highest since the early days of the pandemic in early 2020.
Crazy, it's like the rest of the world moved on but China is still in 2020.
For example, nature did not intend to manufacture smallpox, when that became a thing 4-5000 years ago. Instead, some random pox virus (like monkey pox) infected some people and random changes happened to produce smallpox, which became endemic in the human population. Then, another mutation happened that caused hemmorhagic smallpox to become a thing and to start killing people (the vast majority of smallpox strains do not have high death rates, although they can cause bad disability, although no one knows if they would with modern medicine).
So nature can produce anything a human can. But certainly, human intervention to make a disease worse can also make terrible diseases.
"In May [2021], researchers reported that two coronaviruses in dogs recombined in Malaysia. The result was a hybrid that infected eight children."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/science/bat-coronaviruses...
To put it another way, a cell mutates based off of random chance. It doesn't have desires. We only have to go back as far as 1918 to see an example of a virus that could not have been engineered and was highly transmissible and highly deadly. As you say, in the long term that doesn't work out- the virus in that case mutated to be much more mild- which is why you won't see viruses like that surviving for long. But it still doesn't make sense to assume viruses evolve according to a motivation based logic.
I understand that most of the major viral pathogens have emerged in the last 10,000 years, since urban society replaced hunter-gatherer culture.
It has not been difficult to bring what naturally evolved under control in developed countries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecuri...
Is there any popular discussion or action regarding mitigation of both lab and natural origins for future?
It seems that both avenues are possible. If we know both are possible, that seems like enough knowledge to move forward with exploring possible mitigations for future.
I realise there may be hard reasons why no mitigation is possible, but i just never encounter popular discussion of what to do next.
The responses are effectively inherently opposite hence strong disagreement.
Did that actually help in this case? Or are gain-of-function advocates the science equivalent of employees who want to rewrite your webapp in the language du jour? They say it's for the benefit of the company (humanity) but really what they want is to play with cool toys and get promotions.
The second would be to prohibit gain of function research in general, especially with funds emerging from a country that has implemented such restrictions as the United States did.
"The Contested Origin of SARS-CoV-2" 26 Nov 2021
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2021.2...
Somewhere else in this thread, her medium is linked, and indeed she also writes clear and rational reviews of more recent literature.
https://project-evidence.github.io/
After reading it, it seems most likely to me that patient 0 was a person who collected bats for the lab with insufficient safety equipment, but the article itself doesn't really present a strong conclusion.
"We believe in holding the Chinese government accountable for changes in regulations and poplicies that can prevent another laboratory accident. "
why not focus on international standards?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2021.2...
It's a compelling list of "facts" but without sources and an understanding of the science it's difficult to ascertain whether this is a genuinely strong argument by a "blue check mark" academic.
Edit:
This is the Nature editors note on the only sources provided:
"Editors’ note, March 2020 We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus."
Well, 2 things:
1. An animal could be the source of the virus which could be leaked from a lab. Even with the lab leak hypothesis an animal is part of the chain, just not the last step.
2. There is also no evidence that the epidemic had no lab involvement. COVID was never found in any animal from the Huanan market.
The timing of the A and B lineages spreading at the same time strongly indicates multiple spillover events.
"So you simply cannot prove general claims that are negative claims -- one cannot prove that ghosts do not exist; one cannot prove that leprechauns too do not exist. One simply cannot prove a negative and general claim."
https://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/phil_of_re....
What would you accept as evidence of "no lab involvement"?
If I understand correctly, for some reason you find "no lab involvement" for that "last step" implausible.
Why?
"In May, researchers reported that two coronaviruses in dogs recombined in Malaysia. The result was a hybrid that infected eight children."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/science/bat-coronaviruses...
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/...
How would the scientists of the future ask for funding if it turns out they themselves directly caused an epidemic? It is a black eye for science, it provides ammunition to the "anti-science" crowd.
In contrast scientists are in the drivers position if the cause was all natural. Then they can propose to be the "defendenders" of the humanity against the next danger.
No wonder that there is strong headwind against any other narrative. Remember all it takes a single dissenter to bury a paper.
It is the in the vital (short term) interest of every scientist to say that the origin is all natural!
If you read the papers that claim natural origin, these turn out to be extremely weakly argued. A heat-map plot here and there, some evasive language when it comes to evidence. But the quotable conclusion is always formulated much more strongly.
Whatever about the strength of the natural origin theory, the idea that there's a conspiracy of silence from all the scientists in the world (including ones who would love to give the Chinese authorities a black eye) just doesn't seem plausible. You said it yourself - all it takes is a single dissenter to bury a paper.
Even so, if the system isn't hiring people who don't need to be told what to investigate and what to leave alone then the system is doing it wrong. Ideological guardrails and discourse policing take care of the bulk of compliance. The few kooks who insist on honest debate, well, people like Fauci and Francis know what do do about them. The sociopaths at the top have no compunction about ruining careers and make sure that is widely understood. Occasionally they'll kill a chicken while the monkeys watch to remind everyone.
If someone doesn't know this about Science and Scientists now, after cigarettes and cancer, the replication crisis, and now 2+ years of pandemic evidence smacking us in the face, then they don't want to know.
what else could you bring up?
The real black eye for science is the refusal to consider a line of inquiry because the answer might be unacceptable.
Yes, but this is what happens when science and politics occupy the same bed, as they did for COVID. Politics is what made certain answers unacceptable.
I conclude that scientists are more truth-motivated than you assert.
Admitting scientists may have caused the pandemic is on a whole another level. Societal status and funding may be pulled. The cost is so huge it makes relevant scientists unlikely to admit any of the sort.
As for the scientific establishment (eg the NIH in the USA), it is very politically aware and was apparently determined to speak with a single voice. Somewhat ironically, this may have made it impossible for them to put an end to lab-origin hypotheses, even if they are false.
Do you see the problem with your reasoning here?
If you say scientists are not a monolith, then you don’t get to make sweeping generalizations about them.
But science isnt a country, most scientists arent politicians and most would prefer the truth to out.
But scientists aren't in a single domain, they're cut up into biology and physics and etc... And they're further divided into specializations, and then specialties...
And if we don't discount that they're human, they have families, careers, friends, and nations. And at this point we're talking about a pretty narrow cross section of the population, even narrower when you take into account the few that publish, and minute when you finally arrive at who among them can be counted as prime drivers.
And what would the geopolitical consequences be if an objective finger driven by unanimous assent pointed itself at some culprits? All the deaths implicated in the disease, all the destruction, the damage wrought economically - they're culpable for it all. Would it be war or sanctions? Could it be handwaved away?
There's a lot of reasons, at scale, that such data is better kept quiet, and long lists of lots of individuals in many high places which immediately evince one of conflicts of interest if we do take it for granted that it was a fuckup.
What didn't you like about Pekar 2022?
Essentially Pekar's argument is a "two introductions of the gaps"--that if their model of a single introduction doesn't conform to reality, then it must have been two introductions. But the other possibility is simply that their model is wrong. I see no reason to exclude that. Here are some Twitter threads expressing the same concerns in more detail:
This is only an attack on science if you are already anti-science.
Ignoring that contingent, it's still important to do a full postmortem after a catastrophe. If a bridge collapses, people don't say "oh well, life moves on". They figured out why it collapsed, and then design the next generation of bridges to not fail in that way. If you don't do the analysis, you can't do the mitigation.
All those yells, just from touching the pots.
Sorry, but this absolutist, finalist stating of facts, is verz unscientific in itself. Were does that sentiment, that yelling the loudest and ascribing every oppossition evil motives come from?
Its not very democratic. Not very scientific either.
If the virus had come from the lab, you'd expect the early cases to cluster around the lab. Instead, they were centered around a wet market, just like the early cases of the original SARS were back in 2002.
This is completely aside from the other reasons that make a lab leak extremely unlikely. It's public knowledge which viruses the lab in Wuhan works with. The lab regularly publishes its work, lab members go to conferences to present their work, there are international researchers at the institute in Wuhan. There would have been no reason at all for them to hide SARS-CoV-2 prior to the pandemic, and there is simply no shred of evidence that they had SARS-CoV-2.
Finally, I would just encourage anyone who's wondering how much stock to put in Ebright's claims to scroll through his Twitter account. The online persona he cultivates is, to put it very politely, that of a troll.
No, because it's not proposed that the virus leaked out of the lab building into the nearby air. I presume it's more like a person who worked at the lab getting infected, and then moving around the city as normal, needing only to infect one other person, anywhere in the city.
The earliest known cases are people who worked at the market or lived right next to it. That's exactly what you'd expect for an outbreak caused by animals at the market.
There appears to be consensus on the latter: the wet market (although some do wonder about the mystery illness in Summer of 2019, in US).
https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/07/11/2-dead-unknown-respirat...
"A news report from Virginia says that two people are dead and 18 have been hospitalized following an outbreak of an unknown respiratory infection at a retirement community. What could it possibly be?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Detrick#2019_closure_and_...
So, were these "mystery illnesses" caused by vaccinated US military personnel who work in F.D. cranking around Washington DC metro area?
[0] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/final-j...
Two points about RaTG13:
1. RaTG13 is not the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. It's not even the closest known relative any more. A closer relative has since been found in the wild, in bats in Laos.
2. RaTG13 doesn't even exist in live form in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It only exists there as data on a hard drive, obtained by sequencing traces of RNA in a swab taken from a bat in the wild. A replicating form of the virus has never actually obtained. It's much more difficult to isolate a replicating virus than it is to sequence RNA in a sample. In fact, the WIV has only ever isolated three SARS-like viruses, all of which are publicly known and have been heavily publicized by the WIV (because it's a big deal, scientifically, and reflects well on them).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
The main issue I have with the 'lab leak' theory is that I haven't seen much evidence one way or another. Hitchens' razor applies- what can be stated without evidence can be as easily dismissed without evidence. I personally don't see any issue with the idea of this escaping from a lab (a friend who used to work at the CDC told me some rather scary stories about working there), but there's no serious evidence it was the case here.
On the other hand, many people would like it to be true, because it feeds into a conspiracy narrative. People can't believe things like global, deadly viral pandemics can occur naturally, even though they do.
The fact remains that there are people out there who want to make stuff like that in a lab. That kind of "work" needs to stop.
Thats what I take away from Covid whether it came from a lab or not, it very well could have given what goes on in labs. The fact that a lab leak is highly plausible is the problem, not the truth of it happening in this case.
If by some weird accident of history the research wasn't the actual cause of the virus-- it's just an accident. The problem was that we setup a situation where if it wasn't human originated, it's only a fluke.
No we need much more of such work. Why do you think we had a vaccine so fast? We were able to create an Ebola vaccine before?
Given that there are really only two plausible hypotheses, and nondirect evidence of either, we have to speculate based on circumstantial evidence.
And if one hypothesis is floated around the media, we need to raise the other one as well.
I'll also point out that some people don't like to believe that there can be global media conspiracies, even though there are (cf. "masks don't work unless you're a trained medical professional" propaganda at the beginning).
That's not a conspiracy, that's just common shared knowledge.
There is no direct evidence for god not existing. Given that there are only two possible hypothesis, that he exists and that he doesn’t, we need to teach both sides to children, and the case for a 4000 year old planet with dinosaur bones buried to confuse scientists must be taught at equal level!
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-china-blocked...
Say mr X was seen at the crime scene at 10 am, he also knew the victim and lots of people have seen them fight a week ago, the victim had just came out of the bank with 20k$ in cash in a bag, mr X who's broke have been seen driving a car a month after the crime worth 18k$.
There is no evidence mr X killed the victim, but he probably did it.
Your argument removes probability, we have many coincidences linked to the lab leak theory, we don't have a 100% evidence that supports it, so we can assume it probably leaked from the lab, maybe it didn't, and since we can't quantify it with precision and a certain negligible error margin, we can use a language where probably happened means >50% and maybe happened means <50%.
A woman can safely assume her husband is cheating if she catches him flirting with girls online, find a different long hair on his coat everytime he travels for work, etc.
The problem is that none of the circumstantial evidence for a lab leak is remotely as convincing as your hypothetical.
And most of it tends to be spun. Read the linked thread and note how many times the author throws out terms like "much more likely to be lab-generated" without evidence. We don't know any of that. We have very limited understanding of wild pathogen evolution in general. Likewise the "1000 miles from bat viruses" thing is spun. We don't know that either! We just know what we measured, not what we didn't.
And you can spin it the other way, anyway: we know that the presumptive covid ancestor was at least as close as 1000 miles, on the same continent and within easy travel distance of a migratory flying species. It's true, that if the closest relative was in Argentina, that getting it to Wuhan would require a lot of weird argument. But from Yunnan? Seems not unreasonable.
People continue to bang this hypothesis, and... it's not a bad hypothesis really. But the reason consensus among experts is behind natural evolution is that natural evolution remains a clearly better hypothesis. I know that's upsetting to people who want to believe the lab theory for whatever reason, but it is and remains the truth. Until someone finds better evidence, the lab leak is going to remain a popular conspiracy theory only.
Conspiracy theorists will always say they have enough evidence for their theory, of course.
implies people conspired to create a pandemic. Which detracts from the first point of it being a lab-leak.
> what can be stated without evidence can be as easily dismissed without evidence
So we should never develop a hypothesis? Given the lack of any indicators lending support to any of the plausible hypotheses put forward, I think its fair game to discuss the lab leak version.
If you recall in the early days of the pandemic, the lab-leak theory become a politically divisive one in the US, pitting right against left for no good reason other than the fact that the "other side" held an undesirable view. It was labeled as a conspiracy theory, incorrectly. It is very simply, a theory, and it should be discussed on par with any other theory.
>On the other hand, many people would like it to be true, because it feeds into a conspiracy narrative.
I wonder how many such people would exist if there wasn’t such a massive media and big tech push to silence anyone discussing lab leak. At peak manipulation you were labeled a racist for discussing lab leak and permanently banned from most (all?) big tech platforms.
I think the problem is that there is very little evidence exists for the other explanations - and an absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
The lack of non-circumstantial evidence for the "Lab Leak" theory can be partially explained by the fact that China blocked investigations within the lab until 2021, and there are obvious and strong geopolitical reasons why they would want to destroy evidence if the 'lab leak' theory WAS true. This is from a country already known to perform cover-ups.
So this is the problem - if the hypothesis was true, any biological evidence would have most likely been intentionally destroyed, which means we can't really apply 'Hitchens Razor'.
Oddly Vanity Fair has done the best deep-dive I've seen on this. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...
Well, there's evidence of transmission from mammals to people — "Sequencing has subsequently shown that mink-to-human transmission also occurred."
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe5901
There's evidence of novel coronaviruses occurring in mammals and then infecting people — "In May [2021], researchers reported that two coronaviruses in dogs recombined in Malaysia. The result was a hybrid that infected eight children."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/science/bat-coronaviruses...
There's evidence of "vendors selling live mammals, including raccoon dogs, hog badgers, and red foxes, immediately before the COVID-19 pandemic" at a Wuhan market.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
There's "Multiple positive samples … from one stall known to have sold live mammals, and the water drain proximal to this stall, as well as other sewerages and a nearby wildlife stall on the southwest side of the market, tested positive for SARS-CoV-2."
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
Please be more specific.
Note that the addendum to the paper was added in March 2020, when Peter Daszak and many others directly associated with the Wuhan Institute were working covertly[0] to destroy any rational or scientific debate about the origins of covid. The Lancet letter was published on 7 March 2020.
[0] Daszak and many of the other co-signers to the Lancet letter which "strongly condemned conspiracy theories” declared no conflicts of interest.
His actions were a self serving attempt to muddy the waters on investigation of the virus origin, and may have prevented conclusive proof one way or the other from ever emerging. I doubt Daszak himself knows for sure. But if there is a risk that you are responsible, why not try cover it up anyway. Just in case?
Same reasoning goes for the Chinese government.
I think this is missing Occam's razor - many people believe it because they've seen more evidence that it is true than the reverse, but they aren't necessarily good at judging evidence.
It doesn't make much difference either way. Given the number of people in the world, it seems likely we're going to see similar waves of disease in the future. The Asia-Pacific region has been on high alert for exactly this happening for 20 years, this could easily be a 1 in 40 years pandemic or worse as the world keeps getting smaller. And if it is even half plausibly a lab leak then given where tech is up to it takes one lab anywhere with bad safety standards - this is almost a level of risk that is hitherto outside the human experience.
I mean, the furan cleavage site certainly counts as evidence of a potential modification if it hasn't been observed in any of the natural coronaviruses and inserting it in the position it is was the subject of a grant proposal just a couple of years prior, at the institute in close proximity to the outbreak.
There's also the fact that US intelligence leaked that a couple of workers at WIV were hospitalized with COVID-like symptoms in November, before the outbreak was otherwise detected which is an unusual event for working-aged people. That is an extremely suspicious timing and location of an unusual event in more than one person, though we don't have confirmation of the causative agent.
Also, while we're back into speculative evidence, I found the behavior of the Chinese government was very suspicious throughout.
I found it very interesting that there was a nation-wide initiative in China toward enhancing lab safety at BSL labs which was rolled out relatively quietly a few months into the pandemic. They also pulled their viral genetic database offline after the outbreak. Non-transparency is expected, but a couple of those actions seem more damning.
I feel like this isn't publicised enough. The lab leakers are louder and people definitely seem to want it to be true more than natural origins and they are not being honest in their attempts to dismiss these papers.
A counter:
https://ayjchan.medium.com/evidence-for-a-natural-origin-of-...
As for Angie Rasmussen - she is hardly the dispassionate scientist that you seem to want to portray her as, in your post[0]
[0] https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/a-toxic-milie...
Haven't we learned enough over these years of misinformation and "fake news"?
TLDR the tweet string from the actual Dr of Virology: evidence so far points to natural but more info is needed
covid-19 origin's
And first jumped to human in coastal Bengkulu/West Sumatra in Indonesia
I'll try to get time on these events
end of 2008: origination in SW india near Mangalore
1Q2013: first jumps to humans in BGK/WSU indonesia after an animal outbreak on the coast in late 2012
first substantial human outbreak: Mid 2013 slightly inland from outbreak location.
but of course there's no political capital to be made by blaming these poor places ....
feel kind of sad to consider how much of the crazy blame game is actually driven by knowledge, desire for truth and competence, and how much of it is just driven by political competition....i guess the motivation doesn't matter...the result matters. the output is not about truth it's about politics and narrative ... so sad....
Zoonotic origin is the obvious choice. As a general rule, nature is way better at evolving pathogens than humans are. The problem with this theory is we haven't yet found the wild population from which Covid originated. Now this can take time, sometimes years. But for SARS/MERS this was established relatively quickly. The other problem is the bats widely thought responsible were hundreds of miles away from Wuhan.
Since Covid has entered certain wild animal populations it's possible we'll never know.
That leaves us with lab origin. Lack of evidence for anything else is not positive proof for lab origin of course. But lab origin hasn't been ruled out either.
There are lots of variations on lab origin theories. Deliberate release, accidental release, naturally-occuring pathogen, gain-of-function reserach, the authorities knew, the authorities didn't know, etc. Given the asymptomatic nature of Covid I personally think that if this is the origin, accidental release is the most likely cause.
So what evidence supports this? The CCP's failure to cooperate with WHO investigations is a big one. Right at the beginning, WHO fell in too quickly with China's narrative too. Plus China did punish the doctor who originally raised the alarm about a novel coronavirus (who later died from Covid).
I personally think it's way more likely that China doesn't want to know if it was lab origin rather than they're covering it up. Like there's literally no upside to finding out. Every level of the government doesn't want to know or be the one responsible for screwing something up. It's a bit like the Columbia space Shuttle disaster where it was suspected a foam tile damaged the shuttle but using satellites to image the shuttle met with internal NASA resistance. Part of that was there was nothing they could do but also people just don't want to know sometimes.
Another issue: the missing coronavirus database that China had that was taken offline in late 2019. Weird timing. Again, no proof of anything. Perhaps it's changed now but as of last year this hasn't been examined by anyone in the West (like the WHO).
It wasn't for SARS though. It took 14 years to identify the theoretical native reservoir in bats (ironically the result of the bat coronavirus study programmes the lab-leak hypothesis centres on) in a different province from the SARS outbreak. Civets were identified early on as the probable intermediate animal although the links with the Tanuki are arguably stronger, and we don't know how, why or where the interspecies crossover happened. So basically the same origin debate, without any of the political intrigue.
If there was a popular theory that the SARS epidemic had started as a result of a lab had collected bat coronaviruses, manipulated them and leaked them, there would arguably be less evidence against it
My assumption from close to the beginning has been that most likely, some low-level employee at the institute considered it a job perk to take animals he was supposed to have euthanized and cremated and sell them to a vendor at a market he had connections to for a few yuan.
Does this prove lab origin? No. But barring compelling evidence otherwise it makes lab origin the most likely cause.
And for HIV or took close to a decade, so let’s see where we are in 2030. The argument “we haven’t found it after 2 years so it must not exist” borders conspiracy theory.
What kind of evidence do you need? This paper is full of evidence that if you combine the probability of each event happening, the probability that it was accidental is really small. So the burden of probability should be to prove that it wasn't leaked which isn't proven after 3 years.
it's not just personal profit, I mean if it's true how would you react to it? Putting aside how it would affect research, it also would make many people including such in power blame China for it. Which would be a political nightmare not just for China but also US, EU, etc.
So if any secret service has proof it was a leak you can be sue they wait until there is a major conflict with China. Like e.g. because China attacking Taiwan before the US/EU become more independent of TSMC. Through at that point of time there is also a lot of insensitive to just make up a "proof". So the public probably will never know for sure.
If you are witness to a cover-up, that's not a signal that "no evidence" is a good position to take.
There is evidence they lied about what they were doing. What does that say about the probability of the existence of positive evidence?
They aren't covering up something that would make them look innocent I'll tell you that.
WRT policy, it doesn't matter where the leak actually occured. We should treat both scenarios are likely and plan accordingly. If the next leak does come from a lab, it's obvious the Chinese will cover it up anyway.
Back in the 70's, when the Pentagon was concerned that the Soviets were up to something, they would sometimes say in response to a world event that "And we have no evidence that the Soviets are behind this"-- as tongue in cheek "proof" of how clever the Soviets were about hiding their tracks.
<edit> to expand-- this was a standing joke which was useful for reducing workplace stress, not often a serious claim </edit>
MY main issue is that we even have to consider it. We have plenty of horrific diseases studied in labs that could (and do) escape at times but are very much worth studying. Designing new ones should not be a thing.
And many people would like it to be false, because they don't want a) public uproar about what sort of activites go on in these labs, b) fear of losing money, c) embarrassment
We'll never truly know where it all came from.
Isn't that what most people believe? To me it seems people can't just believe all of this was not a coincidence at all, artificial hyped through oligopoly media, not even as deadly as advertised, and just another bamboozle to keep everyone in their hamster wheels.
Viruses, as opposed to farts, don't smell, but otherwise they are similar. If someone coughs outdoors, the aerosols containing the viral particles just spread around and soon their concentration becomes negligible. If someone coughs, or just breathes indoors, the aerosols spread, but if the space is not very large, their concentration will stay elevated, enough to infect other people.
With this preamble out of the way, what is the hypothetical scenario where the pandemic starts in the market? Covid does not spread from dead meat, it's an airborne disease. Was there some live bat (or pangolin) that was sneezing in some enclosed space, and some people acquired the virus there? A google search shows links with evidence to the contrary ([1], [2]).
Here's and NY Times article [3] that's arguing for the non-lab-leak origin, but you'll notice they are using misdirection (e.g. "dozens of species that can carry pathogens that infect humans" -> ok, this says nothing specific about Covid, but is written to prime the reader to think Covid was among those pathogens).
Overall, the simplest explanation is that one lab worker acquired the disease from aerosols in the lab produced by the lab mice infected with the virus. The worker then left the lab and stopped here and there (home too) and left aerosols that some other people inhaled. Whenever it was outdoors, the aerosols did not cause infections, but sometimes when it was indoors, they did. Is it possible that that person went to the market nearby to have lunch or dinner and coughed or sneezed while indoors, and some of the market workers, or co-diners got infected? It does not sound outrageous.
You can envision tons of plausible scenarios with an initial lab worker getting infected, but you need to get into contorted scenarios to cook up a theory where some bats from a few thousand kilometers away get transported to Wuhan and fail to infect anyone on their way, then the disease explodes like a bomb in Wohan, and then nobody is able to find evidence of those live bats being sold in that market.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2
[2] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/science-blog/wet-market-sources-co...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/world/wuhan-animal-market...
[4]
"New studies say Wuhan market is the only ‘plausible’ source of COVID-19 pandemic"
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2022-07-26/new-studies...
“I was quite convinced of the lab leak myself until we dove into this very carefully and looked at it much closer,” Andersen said. “Actually, the data points to this particular market.”
Here's an example illustrating how bad of an argument that is:
It appears to be reasonable to assign the "your mother is a [insert derogatory term]" hypothesis a higher prior, in Bayesian terms, just based on the many familiy members whose image/status would it directly or indirectly damage if found true (your dad, your uncle, your sister, your grandparents), and which therefore would be compelled to paint it as unlikely.
> It appears to be reasonable to assign the "your mother is a [insert derogatory term]" hypothesis a higher prior, in Bayesian terms, just based on the many familiy members whose image/status would it directly or indirectly damage if found true (your dad, your uncle, your sister, your grandparents), and which therefore would be compelled to paint it as unlikely.
If something major happened that made it a difficult binary choice between either that and <insert an alternative>, then certainly it would be reasonable to assign appropriate priors if you were forming your opinion exclusively by interviewing my relatives. (On the other hand, if my family members or relatives were in positions of significant power/esteem/status that they stood to lose if what you say were true, had significant social influence and a degree of control over mass media, then reweighing priors in such fashion would be advisable regardless of your source.)
In fact, it would make much more sense to argue the opposite (not that I would necessarily agree with this reasoning either). The fact that so many institutions would see their reputation damaged if a lab leak was known to have happened makes it less likely for the virus having originated from a lab leak a priori, as said institutions would put in place strong measures to avoid it.
On the Bayesian level though, what can make sense would be to argue that the fact that so many institutions would be damaged post hoc if a lab leak were to be known, then the weight of evidence against the event which has been provided by such institutions should be lower.
I was going to joke, but this is NOT TRUE AT ALL
Based on my life experience, a more correct idea is, "as said institutions would put in place strong measures to avoid appearing to have caused it"
This tilts the argument back the other way.
Look, I don't know about lab vs natural origins of COVID-19, but I do know that big, human orgs tend to have more CYA theater than actual preventative measures in place.
Wouldn’t weighing evidence play a key role in assessing relative likelihoods of two possible causes of an event that had already occurred?
Especially since any remaining evidence is not conclusive. (As it happens, there appears to be evidence of some of the parties involved acting in ways that prevent further evidence gathering, too.)
This is the same kind of issue as why it’s important to separate the regulator from the regulated.
It's called a prior for a reason.
I support neither treating an accidental leak (if it occurred) as a crime, nor blaming any individual for it.
That aside, the key is not quite “existence of people who could be blamed” but “existence of people who stand to (or think they stand to) lose a lot in terms of image/power/funding and have a certain degree of influence over the outcome”.
(Before you ask why am I not blaming Bill Gates for this pandemic then, there are of course other considerations that go into weighing priors. Using only this factor alone makes it indistinguishable from conspiracy theorising.)
Also the principle of adverse interference. China destroyed/made unavailable a lot of documents. It is reasonable to infer that the destroyed documents had evidence of a lab leak.
If you consider those as viable hypotheses in the first place then sure. In current context there is a binary choice between two already established and well-informed hypotheses of similarly high likelihoods, and if one of them is significantly more favorable to a party with control over evidence we might expect a stronger proof.
It often takes years or even decades to find the original animal source of viruses. Sometimes it is never found, such as with ebola.
The second argument is backwards. Reality is more wild, chaotic, unpredictable than the baseline set by entertainment, and that's because it's easiest to reach people when you build upon what they already expect. As TVtropes would put this: "Reality is unrealistic". If you put too much unexpected things in a medium, as you say people won't buy it. But while storytelling is often bound by this constraint, reality isn't.
Please note that I don't take a side with this comment. I want to know the truth, as I imagine many do, and I want to get there with a story that really makes sense, and doesn't just appeal to my nonrational parts.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnreali...
The early cases were very heavily concentrated around the wet market, but not around the lab, which is more than 10 km away.[0]
> a lab that studies the virus
The lab did not study SARS-CoV-2. It studied viruses that are about 20% different from SARS-CoV-2. We know what viruses they were working with, because they publish papers, go to scientific conferences, etc.
> they've yet to find the original bat population spreading it
It took about 10 years to find the bat population that the original SARS came from. In the last two years, researchers have gotten closer to the origin of SARS-CoV-2, which appears to be somewhere in southwest China or northern Laos.
"It started"..."solidly established" - that's enough inaccuracy for most HN people to ignore the whole of your post.
Compare that with the context and abstract of the paper you've cited: "the earliest human cases", "circumstantial evidence", "earliest known COVID-19 cases", "spatially associated with vendors", "insufficient evidence to define upstream events"
At this point, it is all opinion vs opinion based on circumstantial evidence or the lack thereof - and claiming anything else is either a) Faith or b) Misrepresentation.
That's simply not true at all, whatsoever. See for example this paper sequencing early samples of the virus: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/38/12/5211/6353034?logi...
The "wet market" samples are less similar to closely related bat strains than other early samples which are unrelated to the market.
The market is close to a major hospital. If the virus was circulating, it is unsurprising that a super spreader event would occur there. But saying that the market is the point of origin, and this this is "very solidly established" simply flies in the face of known facts.
> The Wuhan CDC laboratory moved on 2nd December 2019 to a new location near the Huanan market.
[0]: page 119, https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/final-j...
If you were doing controversial research using controversial methods how transparent would you be?
It's Brandolini's law [0] in action, and no matter how many times virologists rebut these positions the same old tripe gets wheeled out again, and again, and again. If you ignore rebuttals and just repeat yourself + get 20k likes on twitter how many people are going to see a rebuttal like the excellent one from Dr Rasmussen here - https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/15669764417361715...
The recent science papers which have been closely peer reviewed and none of these guys have been able to rebut (but oh have they tried, since they are VERY inconvenient for lab leak), instead it's the same tired nit-picking and misunderstanding.
For a break down of the science papers read https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/15519378265808240... which goes into painful levels of detail to explain what the paper discovered and why it's so compelling and why it all but rules out lab leak.
It's sad to me that somebody with a name and position and blue tick abuses that position to spread what amounts to misinformation, but that's where we are in society I guess.
If you want a test, see how these lab leak advocates have reacted to any paper or data that pushes back against their claim. It has been a mad scramble to attack, nit-pick, dismiss and smear (Ebright especially likes confict-of-interest implications). These are not honest people.
Referring to: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787
So a paper on a lab-made coronavirus related to SARS that can infect human cells from Wuhan on topic about the origins of a coronavirus related to SARS that can infect human cells that caused the pandemic from Wuhan, is a separate personal desire?
>It's about a completely different study that didn't result in any pandemic.
Because after the article was published, Wuhan stopped working on this, right? Or is expected China (or any other country) publishes everything related to something delicate as this?
Seriously this "rebuttal" is anything but excellent. The ironic answers to good remarks makes it even worse. Sounds more like trying to evade the ~~points made~~ info given rather answering them.
As for the papers, origins of pandemic and origins of virus are distinct things. So, yes, we can all agree that evidence shows that pandemic started in the market, and as virus can infect animals sold there, this points towards that virus came from animals. But genetically is there anything that can distinguish a natural from a lab-made virus?
The other lab leak hypothesis is that a specimen collected and cultured by scientists, infected a lab employee and this patient zero then transmitted the virus to others. This is a plausible option, and it is being researched. However it is less plausible than wild transmission based on a simple numbers game. What is more likely, a breakout infection cause by a dozen scientists specifically trained and equipped against this possibility, or a transmission to one of the millions of other people who routinely interact with these bat populations? Both are possible, but one is much more likely. Before covid19, WIV had published research indicating that novel coronaviruses routinely jump from bats to humans in that part of the world. Most of these viruses aren't don't last in human hosts, but it's clear that it was only a matter time before something nasty got through. After all, it's already happened once before.
The real nail in the coffin is that research[0] has shown that there were at least two, independent transmissions of sars-cov2 to humans. For this to happen as part of a lab leak it would require WIV to have found and cultivated 2 different strains of sars-cov2, and then each of those strains would have to escape the lab.
Till those questions have been answered I remain skeptical about the origin.
>These findings suggest that infected animals were present at the Huanan market at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic; however, we do not have access to any live animal samples from relevant species. Additional information, including sequencing data and detailed sampling strategy, would be invaluable to test this hypothesis comprehensively.
>The sustained presence of a potential source of virus transmission into the human population in late 2019, plausibly from infected live mammals sold at the Huanan market, offers an explanation of our findings and the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
It doesn't eliminate or prove anything. Only makes a case that zoosis is a good hypothesis.
I linked a thorough thread from a domain expert explaining in detail why the claims are false. These things have been addressed/debunked many, many times but still get repeated because the untruths get amplified and the rebuttals not.
What exactly are you hoping for?
From the CDC's ever changing guidelines, the liability-free, fast tracked vaccine that doesn't actually mitigate transmission, the labeling of media pushed medical hypothesis as "science" and any debate as heresy, the effortless militarization of common citizens to socially pressure and attack their neighbors into compliance, and the coordinated "fact checking" campaigns of powerful organizations that have turned out to be complete lies. It's all done lasting damage to societal trust... from our own families and neighbors, to the heights of academic and governmental leadership.
People are rightfully asking many questions. Are the FDA, CDC, and the WHO corrupted by big Pharma companies and political groups that care more about saving face and profit than the truth? Is academia similarly corrupted to create research that supports the chosen narrative? Is "trusting the experts" really the embodiment of science... or one of religious zealotry?
this was much more of a presentation problem then anything. of course the science will change in the middle of new viral outbreak, people's perception of science just isn't that.
>liability-free, fast tracked vaccine that doesn't actually mitigate transmission
of course you'll fast track a solution when you have a global pandemic? seems like a no brainer? and I don't recall transmission ever being promised, only a substantial lower chance of severe infection and death - which was a main goal to help reduce loads on hospitals?
>labeling of media pushed medical hypothesis as "science" and any debate as heresy
medical hypothesis are a part of science? and I think there's definitely room for debate on how vaccines, closures, masks, etc. could have been done - but when the debate is just over if masks or vaccines even work it's kinda silly to be wasting time talking with the "opposition"
>the effortless militarization of common citizens to socially pressure and attack their neighbors into compliance
I don't see the problem with this sort of social pressure in regards to a pandemic. it's not like being reported to the "covid gestapo" for not social distancing for something
No, that was the spin after it became clear they didn’t prevent infection or transmission. When they were given EUA they were sold as 95% effective at preventing covid[0], and there are plenty of clips of officials including the president of the US saying if you get vaccinated you won’t get or spread covid. Nothing about reducing symptoms. Heck, read the prescribing info[1]. It still says the indication is to prevent covid, not reduce symptoms.
[0] https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
[1] https://labeling.pfizer.com/ShowLabeling.aspx?id=15623&forma...
No. Science very very rarely changes. The confidence in the possible explanations is what changes. They communicated low confidence information with high confidence. The trust was destroyed with, what appeared to be, a concerted effort to silence those that accurately communicated the low confidence, or presented other equally possible, and far too often eventually-correct, understandings. I think this covers all the other points, above.
You cannot seriously have a debate about this mistrust without acknowledging the role of misinformation and motivated actors looking to sew mistrust.
Remember when 5G causing Covid was trending? Or memes about how hot water in a netipot would kill it? Or that if you had a strange cold anytime in 2019 you probably already had it?
Theories about microchips in the vaccine started spreading before the vaccine was announced. People becoming magnetic after the vaccine was trending.
The whole back and forth, unquestioning compliance at all costs strategy, and purposeful deception just makes everyone exhausted, skeptical, and builds resentment.
The worst part is that there isn’t any big plans in place to get supplies for better-than-N95 respirators for hospital workers. I have doubts even N95s will be widely available to the public by the next pandemic.
The CDC's ever changing guidelines were good, but their not admitting that at some point the had been wrong or worse were flat out lying did hurt societal trust a lot. The fact that social pressure on our neighbours and government recommendations failed to such an extent that we needed extra policing just to get people to keep to reasonable curfews sucked.
I don't know where you pull the "effortless militarization of common citizens .. who attack" from, but a. that didn't happen, and b. it was the people who did not follow government recommendations and social pressure that were out there militarizing and attacking their neighbours.
People are asking questions, that's how science works. But basing laws and regulations on established science and expert advice, that's how society is supposed to work. You can be angry about the state of science, or about the corrupting influence of pharmaceutical companies, but don't throw out the baby with the bath water. The fact that we've been able to respond swiftly based on expert advice and on established science is a good thing. Maybe next time we'll make sure those experts and scientists have more competence and better alignment to our ethical values.
Sure, its similar to previous iterations which have undergone human testing. Sure, we have a good understanding of how they work, theoretically. The FDA isn't an entirely corrupt and incompetent organization. But without human efficacy and safety data, it feels beyond likely to me that acceptance rates among even the "silent majority" of people will be low.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-authorize-new...
[2] https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2022/06/29/biden-harris-admin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenoviridae#Use_in_gene_thera...
It's conceivable to implant the mRNA of a vaccine similar to what was used for COVID-19 into a transmissible virus and inoculate (or kill) large segments of the population.
Has there been any clear proof established, either for the support of this or to the contrary?
[1] "Coronavirus emerged in Italy earlier than thought, Italian study shows" (Reuters, 2020-11-15): https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
[2] "Researchers find coronavirus was circulating in Italy earlier than thought" (Reuters, 2020-11-16): https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
[3] "WHO asks for re-checks of research on when coronavirus first surfaced in Italy" (Reuters, 2021-06-01): https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
Meanwhile, there has been quite a number of reportings (on two studies) severely undermining the lab leak theory. Generally speaking, these (US) studies claim to have genetic evidence for an animal-human-animal-human transfer in Nov. 2019 at the wet market and swab samples of cages tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Here's a sample:
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
[2] https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/covid-19-originated-at-...
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62307383
[4] https://www.newsweek.com/wuhan-lab-leak-theory-undermined-ne...
(For me, there are political motives too strong behind the lab leak theory, to accept a mere conjecture that fails to connect the dots. Grave accusations require proof. Especially, if you haven't ruled out contradicting candidates.)
Whether or not this lab leaked the virus and caused the pandemic, I'm wondering why they are interested in engineering new variants of SARS-like viruses in the first place?
Are the detractors of the lab-leak theory saying "Yes, they engineered plenty of coronaviruses in the lab, there's just no evidence that any of them leaked out" or are they saying "No, this lab was never trying to engineer new coronaviruses"?
A reason may be so they can know how a similar naturally occurring virus may work.
I get whiplash from watching how rapidly the public gets jawboned. I’ve seen many people, even those close to me, completely switch positions on ‘strongly’ held beliefs. Not only do they not acknowledge the inherent contradictions but they seem to have forgotten holding the original positions in the first place. Those without memory are living in an ever changing present, and those of us with memory are stuck with a past that no longer exists.
Three weeks later there’s this giant pandemic. I remember telling my wife about it in December before Christmas but now I can’t find any articles dating back to that time.
My point is not that the lab leak is true, but in this modern world is it literally impossible to know what’s true and what’s propaganda.
I think your memory might be slightly off, although in completely understandable ways. Placing events on a personal timeline can be difficult.
FWIW, I've not found Algoila to be a reliable search engine for HN. In fact, when I narrowed my search down further to link it here, as below - that article disappeared from the results. (Also doesn't help that keyboard input to the date picker is totally broken)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1578182400&dateRange=custom&...
In addition to having research the nearest known ancestor to sars-cov2, and proposing inserting the FCS that distinguishes sars-cov2 from it's ancestors, the project proposed treating bats in the wild with the humanized virus to make the bats immune to it.
It's about as close to mad science as you get outside of the movies.
I don't really know how much it matters if covid was directly caused by the lab leak when you can look at their actions and say that they would reasonably been expected to cause this outcome.
"Mom, I swear, I didn't cause the explosion! yes, I was maxing random chemicals I found in the garage, in violation against the established prohibitions, and the chemicals I was mixing happened to be the exact sort that caused the explosion. But it wasn't me!"
The fact that there was a moratorium on gain of function research means that even more of the culpable parties all the way up the funding chain are incentivized to lie about the whole thing.
That should be the real take away from all this (but it won't be, it'll be forgotten): stop censoring and editorializing platforms, you don't know any more than those you mean to control and the "experts" have repeatedly proven themselves untrustworthy.
Because there is "a" wild life market in Wuhan which does sell wild bats from far away (and many other animals which can get/transmit covid).
There is zero evidence for a lab leak, there is plenty of evidence against it (the randomness of the genetic changes between naturally occurring Covid 19 predecessors being the big piece). Yet people are (with flowery language) pretending that lack of evidence makes the "hypothesis" more likely.
Side note: Not looking at evidence doesn't make it not exist, nor does declaring that there is "zero evidence".
First, it's all just Twitter comments. So it's only evidence that someone typed it into Twitter.
And second, what happens to overlap with reality isn't evidence of a lab leak. The fact there is a virus lab in Wuhan doesn't mean there was a lab leak, any more than the fact there are labs in Africa proves aids was man made.
That's the problem here, people don't understand what evidence is, and they don't understand because making up bullshit is much more fun.
It's an overused example, but it's a good one. Flying is extremely safe. Not because it's an inherently safe activity, but because every time something happens we stop and ask why. We don't accept simple answers like "the pilot screwed up" we try to find all of the root causes and contributing factors. Then for each of those we try to find a mitigation to avoid the problem in the future.
It's not unreasonable to want to know what caused this pandemic so we can try to avoid the next one.
And you don't see a problem with this?
You seem to assume the lab-leak hypothesis assumes malicious intent in creating the virus, but most people are actually concerned about negligence and/or a malicious coverup of the origin.
A definitive answer to the origin of covid could help answer the following questions:
- How much do I trust U.S. public health institutions?
- How much do I trust Chinese public health institutions?
- Should gain-of-function and other high-risk virus research be conducted? And what should the safety standards be of such research?
- Is there a problem of forced consensus/centralization in the broader scientific community?
If a plane crash killed a few hundred people, no one would question the need for a thorough investigation, root cause analysis, and preventative measures for the future. Or consider the security reforms put in place after 9/11, which killed thousands. This pandemic killed millions.
For sure we should use this as a lesson to increase safe guards regardless. But discussing those measures would require actual domain specific knowledge, so you’ll never see it on HackerNews (to speak nothing of Twitter!)
WIV Worker - WIVW Janitor/intern/low paid employee - J
WIVW to J: Dispose of these bats J: Ok J takes bats to wet market J sells bats for 50 bucks J to WIVW: Got rid of the bats for you. WIVW to J: Thanks.
And why The Lancet published the initial letter dismissing lab leak, clearly coordinated by EcoHealth alliance?
And why Daszak also was on the WHO investigation team?
And why to this day no one apologized, let alone got fired for this?
If you don't admit these (now-obvious) facts, you are not discussing the lab leak hypothesis in good faith.
0- https://twitter.com/mattwridley/status/1565242836710309891
If there is a chance you are responsible, why not cover it up and muddy the waters, just in case?
No idea.
> And why The Lancet published the initial letter dismissing lab leak, clearly coordinated by EcoHealth alliance?
No idea.
> And why Daszak also was on the WHO investigation team?
No idea.
> And why to this day no one apologized, let alone got fired for this?
No idea.
I am not better informed as a result of your comment.
Asking questions is not a proper way to educate or inform people. That I don't have answers to your questions doesn't lead to any conclusion, nor does it make me doubt anything.
As a general rule: If you want to know if X is true, look for "positive" evidence. Not absence of evidence. Asking questions almost always is merely saying "Hey, I don't have all the answers" - not "Hey, there's no good answer so the answer must be Y".
To all the people who think this is the best way to deliver information to their audience please stop. 1/1
He didn't write this for HN users to read, it's pretty unrealistic for us to expect people format their publishing to fit the preferences of nerdy HN readers.
Whatever the case is, no, this is not circumstantial. If this is indeed a lab break, then action must be taken immediately for anything like it not to happen again. I don't mean "pointing fingers", but triggering a thorough review of all such labs worldwide and up security measures. This must not happen again.
TL;DR if it's a lab leak, it's actionable to us as humans to prevent further occurrences.
However if only one sick transfers it somewhere it spreads in the environment where it is easy to spread - smaller (semi) enclosed space, a lot of people in that space, particular humidity and etc.
E.g. if I got a virus in laboratory and then spread it on the plane carrying 200 passengers, the first outbreak would be on the plane. However we can't say it "originated" on the plane.
Right? Has anyone done this yet?
The pathological human obsession with narratives such as this often does more harm than good.
No useful investigation can now occur. No punishment can be meted out. Any lessons learned from one origin or another can be learned now regardless.
Deliberate LLH: China (or, if you’re in China, the US) developed a weapon and essentially released it on the world. This hypothesis basically tells us nothing because we’ll never actually validate or invalidate it. There’s also no mitigation for future leaks because if it were deliberate you can always deliberately do it again. Also, it probably does have racist/xenophobic/propagandist motive pushing it along at various levels. Even if this were true it doesn’t matter because we’re obviously not going to nuke cities or cut off trade or roll tanks or hang leaders in response.
Accidental LLH: Hypothesis goes that there was gain of function research and a sample accidentally escaped the lab. This is actually pretty likely, but has the interesting feature of it not mattering whether it’s true in this particular instance. Regardless of whether COVID-19 itself fits this, COVID-19 indicates that GOF research should be banned! There is no need for collaboration-harming “repercussions” (or cries for repercussions, since they’ll never happen anyway).
Deliberate LLH: Doesn’t matter if it’s true because 1) we’ll never know and 2) even if it we’re true, no one could do anything about it.
Accidental LLH: Doesn’t matter if it’s true because 1) we’ll never know and 2) even if it were false, the correct course of action is to ban/mitigate GOF research.
It’s a complete shame that these have not been better distinguished from one another.
https://i.imgur.com/v4xg9u1.jpg
source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-27/did-covid...
That is to say, I have no idea what you're implying here.
Someone was playing/checkin out a virus, its in a place which exotic animals are sort after to be consumed. It would not surprise me if someone 'pinched' a couple of bat's from the lab to make some $$$ on the side at the markets and then the rest is how its been portrayed (except for the constant finger pointing its from other countries, china knew about it, they blocked local flights but continued to let international flights out, if you put 1 and 1 together, it does make 2. No way around that.