It is so much easier to believe that the bad thing was made by bad people somewhere else, instead of confronting the reality that in fact we did it with our ever greater encroachment on the last remaining natural reservoirs - and will do it again, probably soon.
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210727042832/https://www.scien...
Coronaviruses are basically everywhere, as are bats. The greatest abundance of sarbecoviruses is far from Wuhan, though. The closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 were found in Yunnan and surroundings, near Kunming or Pu'er, and now in Laos.
Also, she says what I always assumed was the case:
> Scientists from around the world have overwhelmingly concluded that SARS-CoV-2 originated naturally rather than from any institution.
So Dr. Shi is obviously going to say the pandemic is of natural origin. Even if she personally believes otherwise, she's under the physical control of the PRC government, and would suffer grave consequences if she went against their official story. My point is that not even she thinks spillover in Wuhan is likely, though. The idea that the WIV was situated in Wuhan because of an abundance of nearby sarbecoviruses is bizarrely common, but it's neither anti-lab-origin nor pro-lab-origin, just wrong.
I tend to assume that covid-19 came about like (presumably) every other virus since time eternal; through random mutation in the wild. What I don't really understand is any sort of singular alternative theory of how it arose - it seems that every alternative is anomaly hunting or god of the gaps type arguments in search of some greater meaning behind it.
So with millions dead, shouldn't we investigate? There are many paths unexplored within reach of American or European subpoena, both in the WIV's collaborators and in sequencer reads from unrelated work that may contain early viral genomes as contamination.
Or that they collected one naturally-evolved virus, got infected in the field, and spread it from there? The WIV sent grad students into remote caves that no other humans routinely entered, specifically selected for their abundance of novel potential pandemic pathogens, with nothing more than nitrile gloves and a surgical mask. So while there are far more farmers and guano collectors (and others creating risk of natural spillover) than WIV grad students, the risk per WIV grad student seems orders of magnitude higher.
But what I wonder most would be, say that it was proven that covid-19 was artificially constructed through some method or other - what would it matter? I wonder if more people would get vaccines? Would China now know that they can unleash something like this on the world with relative impunity? Would it incentivize further research into biological weapons?
The DEFUSE proposal was described in this Intercept article:
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
For the previous two coronaviruses that emerged in humans (SARS-1 and MERS), animal hosts (civet cats and camels) were found within about a year. That's pretty good evidence of natural origin. For SARS-CoV-2, no such animal has yet been found, excluding animals known to be infected by humans like housecats or mink. That's not proof of unnatural origin--for example, Ebola is unquestionably natural but its zoonotic hosts remain mysterious. That's not what anyone expected, though.
For overall background, Alina Chan has a book. I haven't read it myself, but I've found her comments elsewhere to be cautious and reasonable.
I imagine telling an American that they are not allowed to hunt wildlife and sell it at market, and I don't think that would work. I wonder if China really has a much greater ability to enforce such a provision?
That seems out of our control, but I wonder what would be? Would preparations include mask stockpiles, and can we force people to wear them? It seems that mRNA vaccines can be created quickly, but can we mandate that people get them?
The ability to appeal to their self-interest? I doubt that any evidence would cause the CCP to deviate from its preferred story (which I think now is natural zoonosis outside China, then import on frozen food?), but they don't want a pandemic any more than I do.
So I'd guess that given evidence that certain research activities likely caused this pandemic, the Chinese government would quietly act to restrict them, all while publicly denying that they're doing so. Indeed, they might have already--Dr. Shi's group hasn't published anything even as dangerous as these BU researchers' experiment since before the pandemic.
As noted above, I believe that subpoenas should be obtained for all relevant records of the WIV's collaborators, and for any sequencer reads that potentially contain early viral genomes as contamination. The evidence for a lab origin so far is scattered and circumstantial, but that's just from various leaks and amateur open source intelligence; perhaps a formal investigation with subpoena power could learn more.
It does not seem that we've been able to contain the ambitions of North Korea, and Iran isn't looking so good either.
Just as someone might want to believe the moon is made from cheese. It looks a bit like it, after all. But to believe that, you have to ignore all that scientists have uncovered about the moon.
Proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis often believe the researchers have somehow enhanced the virus. The only way we actually know to do this is through evolution in lab animals. And even then it's pretty damn hard. Maybe multiple industrial-scale facilities could evolve a threatening Virus. At horrendous cost. Maybe. And even China couldn't hide that.
> This argument [that SARS-CoV-2 must be natural since it doesn't use a known backbone] fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2021133117
The WIV had the world's largest effort to collect novel sarbecoviruses from nature, often from remote caves that no other humans would routinely visit; so I don't see any reason to discount that possibility.
In order to make a pandemic Virus the components must be finely tuned to each other. That is only possible through massively parallel evolution. A lab can't do that. When a lab combines Viruses, it's mostly to learn the individual contributions of the proteins. These Viruses are way less "fit" overall.
A subsequent BU press release denies that the research involved gain of function, with bizarre arguments including the fact that since it's never been tested in humans (good?) we can't know it's actually more lethal in humans. This is obviously wrong, as many people have pointed out. For example, here's Marc Lipsitch at Harvard:
https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1582574061062098946?cxt...
My original quote is from David Relman, a professor of microbiology at Stanford who I wouldn't expect to "think like a computer scientist". Laboratories have been enhancing potential human pandemic pathogens for literally decades now, as measured by reproduction rates in vitro, mortality in their lab animals, and other similar metrics, and publishing in the open literature. For example, here's Relman asking Baric a question back in 2014:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw-nR6-4kQQ&t=2466s
If you were really unware that labs are successfully enhancing potential human pandemic pathogens, then a Google Scholar search for Baric will find many examples.
Anyways, even if you believe (quite falsely) that laboratory gain-of-function on such pathogens is impossible, that doesn't exclude a research-related origin for SARS-CoV-2. That could be a naturally-evolved virus, but one that was sitting harmlessly in a remote cave until the WIV sampled and accidentally released it. The WIV sampled remote areas that no other humans routinely entered, so it's possible in that scenario that the lineage would have died out in bats (or other zoonotic hosts) if the WIV hadn't released it into humans.
Nobody is asserting that genomic evidence shows SARS-CoV-2 to be natural anymore. Even the strongest proponents of zoonotic origin have moved on, to more complicated epidemiological and phylogenetic arguments like Pekar's paper.
Please, do share.