I mean guys, it supposedly started next to a lab that studies the virus and they've yet to find the original bat population spreading it. If I made a Contagion 2 film that asked you to suspend your disbelief wrt. these two facts you wouldn't buy it.
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.
If you were doing controversial research using controversial methods how transparent would you be?
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.
We now know that early cases were centered on the market, that both strains were present in the market, and that the types of wild animals that caused the original SARS outbreak in 2002 were being sold at the market.
Say a group of animals intended to be euthanized were actually clandestinely sold at the market, it's completely reasonable that the virus could have mutated at the lab in the animal population before being transmitted to humans. In fact, this is literally exactly what occurs during gain of function research, when scientists are explicitly trying to get a virus to mutate in live animals.
There is simply not any hard evidence to concretely prove either hypothesis. Any evidence that points to the market can just as easily be involved in a lab leak scenario.
When you have no comprehensive data on transmission, and no audit trail of how the animals arrived at the market, it's not possible to determine origin from super spreader. The evidence for both would look identical!
You're now just asserting, without any evidence, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology sent animals to the Huanan market. We already know that wild animals from the countryside are shipped into the market to be sold, and that this is exactly how the original SARS outbreak in 2002 happened. So why would you suggest that the animals came from a lab?
"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.
Many people have only vaguely followed this issue. Those who have been following it closely know that a lot of basic facts have actually been settled over the last year. The location of the initial outbreak in Wuhan (namely, in a market that sold wild animals similar to the animals that caused the original SARS outbreak in 2002) is one of those settled facts now.
You may have chose your language precisely, but you've read meaning into the text that wasn't there.
An epicenter is NOT where a thing started, and it's not in any doubt to even the most die-hard conspiracy theorists that the market was "the early epicenter". The fact that the initial major spread event happened there is pretty clear, the question is where did the virus originate - where exactly did it become the coronavirus we know and love? Did it mutate into that form by being passed between animals stored in the market? Was it brought to the market from bats caught in the wild? Did a lab employee doing highly sensitive transmissibility research pop to the market on their way home to give their spouse a hug?
The idea that these are "settled facts" flies in the face of papers like this that go to great lengths to hedge their language. There are things we know. There are things that are likely, or less likely, or unlikely. There are things we have been prevented from knowing.
There are lots of opinions. There are people with settled opinions. There are settled opinions that have come about with the best of intentions (worries about stoking sinophobia and anti-science thinking, worries about lack of accountability and governmental deceit). There are those shouting their "truths" with the best and worst of intentions, whether aiming to promote truth, or peace, or clickbait.
You may have chose your language precisely, but your language is shouting about your settled opinion, not settled facts.
(P.S: "The paper is much more definitive than you're claiming" - since the sentence I wrote was just a chain of quotes from the paper, without any real commentary, I'd be interested to know how you feel the paper was "much more definitive")
This paper does not go to great lengths to hedge its statements, and the authors have very explicitly stated on numerous occasions that their work rules out the lab leak idea.
> An epicenter is NOT where a thing started, and it's not in any doubt to even the most die-hard conspiracy theorists that the market was "the early epicenter".
The paper addresses this. First, the fact that multiple strains of the virus were found directly in the market is a very strong indication that there were multiple spillover events at the market. Second, it has now been established that wild animals that are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 were being sold at the market during the time period when the outbreak began. This is a big deal, because this is exactly how the original SARS spilled over in 2002. Third, the concentration of cases at and around the market, but not around the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is also strong evidence that the spillover was associated with the market, not the lab. If it were in the lab, there would likely be a cluster of cases at the lab itself, and in the surrounding areas where people from the lab frequent, not on the other side of the city, where wild animals that have caused previous SARS coronavirus outbreaks happen to be sold.
People who have followed the scientific investigations into the origins of SARS-CoV-2 over the past 2.5 years know that the lab leak theory was always highly unlikely, and that all the evidence that has come to light has made it ever more unlikely. At this point, lab leakers (or at least those who are trying to keep their theories halfway consistent) are trying to argue that the virus somehow got from the lab to the market, where it began spreading. Their theories are becoming more convoluted and contrived as the evidence rules out each version of the theory, and it's getting a bit absurd.
A lot of people want to believe the lab leak theory. Scrolling through the comments here, there is a substantial overlap between this group and anti-vaxxers, as well as other people who oppose any efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus. I don't think people are clinging to this theory for rational reasons.
Things like:
> the authors have very explicitly stated on numerous occasions
... appeal to authority, and then fails to mention even one of those occasions, instant ignore
> First, the fact that multiple strains of the virus were found directly in the market is a very strong indication that there were multiple spillover events at the market. Second, it has now been established that wild animals that are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 were being sold at the market during the time period when the outbreak began.
This feels like an attempt at causing a "baffled by BS" response, something HN is particularly immune to - though I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and presume you're simply trying to use the correct nomenclature. In reality, you've not said anything here that contradicts anything I've said - multiple spillovers simply indicates that an animal reservoir existed before or concurrently to the initial outbreak period - it doesn't give any evidence for or against any particular primary source. If the unfamiliar terminology doesn't cause people to instantly skip, the lack of new insight will.
> Third, the concentration of cases at and around the market, but not around the Wuhan Institute of Virology
Generally speaking, I wouldn't expect there to be a large number of cases of a disease spread at or near a facility that deals with the testing of viruses and has strict containment protocols. Don't know about you, but I would hope they know how to wash their hands 99.9% of the time - I would hope a virus finding its way out of the campus or shared between professionals would be an extremely rare event.
That said, it would be interesting to see a side-by-side study, with the same statistical techniques, of a similar type of lab. There have been other lab leaks every few years, but as the paper points out, the large amount of attention brought about by the pandemic means a lot more data about this leak than we usually get.
> People who have followed the scientific investigations into the origins of SARS-CoV-2 over the past 2.5 years know that the lab leak theory was always highly unlikely
... and it's exactly this intuition that stokes skepticism. Because if something was always considered unlikely, that's rarely the basis for sound science.
> Their theories are becoming more convoluted and contrived as the evidence rules out each version of the theory
Again, this statement suffers from low sample size, lack of examples, and uneven evaluation. A supporter of your POV presents a new hypothesis? Tries to find evidence to support or refute it? That's great! Science at work. A supporter of the Lab-leak theory presents a new hypothesis? It's just an absurd convoluted and contrived new theory because they couldn't get their last one to work.
And again, people skip over it, because the bias is obvious, and it doesn't come close to answering the question that laypeople are searching for answers to - i.e. where did SARS-CoV-2 originally come from.
Anyway, hopefully this has helped you see why a rational rejection of your arguments in this particular space is not evidence of tinfoil hats clinging to irrational conspiracy theories. By all means, bring your faith. Bring some evidence too, and many of us would love to join you. But without the evidence, a certain assured opinion is not going to help you here.
Looking at the comment section here, I do see a large number of anti-vaxxers, and their comments appear to be very popular. I've noticed this quite a bit on HN, and I'm not sure what the reason for it is.
I know a lot of people both in tech and in scientific research. While tech people are generally very clever, that does not necessarily mean that they all understand how scientific research works, or that they keep up with the latest research into coronaviruses. A common mistake that some technical people make is assuming that their reasoning ability in programming, engineering, etc. somehow means that they don't have to have domain knowledge to discuss a different technical subject.
You have to actually follow the research into coronaviruses to find out what's known about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Simply put, people who get their information from Ebright's Twitter thread are not in a good position to evaluate this question.
> By all means, bring your faith. Bring some evidence too
I linked to a very thorough scientific paper on the subject, which establishes that the initial outbreak in Wuhan was at the market, not at the lab. If you're calling that "my faith," you're just not arguing in good faith.
> 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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic#2019
Also, the new location is over 5km from the market.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Wuhan+Centres+for+Disease+Pr...