Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

The more these claims based on minimal new evidence are repeated, the more it seems the virus may have potentially been released by nefarious actors as an attack on the population.

It's not implausable for an entity with knowledge and access to a virus being studied, to release a copy of it in the environment surrounding the lab while maintaining a high degree of deniability.

If it is so, then the question that remains is, much like in the case of Nordstream, which nation state has the most incentive to carry it out?

seems to me you're still leaving out a very important part of the news, which is that the confidence level is "low".

so right now the US government has multiple theories, none of which it is confident. it's just that of the reports that is not confident in, it might be the least not confident in the lab leak idea.

but the WSJ has decided to throw integrity aside and ignore that part in their headline.

Both headlines are clickbait compared to the content of the article.

I don't know about those specifically, but one of the earliest genetic matches we had is a natural virus called RaTG13 and was studied in the Wuhan lab. I think a closer match has since been found though.

> I'm not entirely up to speed but I recall hearing something about the US government funding them (without its own knowledge..?), so perhaps that info is not only in China's hands.

Yes, indirectly through EcoHealth Alliance, hence the "without its own knowledge" part.

Those who do reflexively apply probability assessments however, would do well to also perceive when to accept heuristic Good Enough solutions.

Lets say it is found out with definite proof that it was a lab leak. Then what? Grandma's dead, china killed her and there is nothing you can do. We are not going to let this ruin trade relations even more ($$$ LOL) so you're just going to have to forget about it.

Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of their head.

The first stage of grief is denial.

One wouldn't predict that to be the case with all of the scientists here. But given that it is, perhaps we can't fault the American people if they don't understand the nuance.

The truth is that "low confidence" is only meaningful in the context of COVID's origin if it is possible that a conclusion can be made with "high confidence". That doesn't seem to be possible.

Certainly not in the other direction if some agencies are concluding at this stage, even with "low confidence", that COVID was lab leaked. Further, certainly "low confidence" doesn't imply that the inverse conclusion is likely true.

The NYT's choice to over-emphasize the relatively meaningless "confidence score" is understandable given its prior investment in other views.

Rigid historical narratives have been built on less than low confidence intelligence conclusions. A conclusion is the conclusion when one has to be made regardless.

In the case of COVID, a conclusion as to its origin has to be made and yet the scientific evidence isn't likely to get better for either possibility. Short of confessions.

As someone who does understand statistics, it's made me dislike Nate Silver even more than if I didn't. It's been sad to watch his metamorphoses over the years from an interesting numbers guy with nuanced discussions on polling and models, to becoming the exact kind of pundit and talking head he used to make fun of. There's still a little bit of statistics on his site, but the overwhelming majority of content is the same trite punditry you'll find on pretty much any political blog.

And that's why media use these headlines (dark patterns?) and politicians keep making fake promises and get reelected.

#SAD

Then when they are taken to court for outright bullshitting, that's when they point out the "nuance."

Hold on. I'm not saying the lab leak theory is completely left field. But definitely the intent of this announcement is more of a deliberate political attack then it is a declaration of actual scientific findings. The "least crappy theory" is essentially not news at all. A more accurate title is "inconclusive." But that sort of title doesn't get people all riled up against china.

[] rephrased as their wording was a bit unfair to those that consume large amounts of fast food.

One of the better data scientists I've worked with explained to me that his entire job was 'quantifying uncertainty', and after working in the field I definitely believe it. You could play around with RStan for the weekend and gain an intuition for how evidence changes hypothesis and how a hypothesis could be the "most likely" but still "unlikely" in an absolute sense, all with tremendous uncertainty in your prediction.

Still, when you try to communicate the results of a model, uncertainty is simply hard to communicate when people are interest in using your analysis for a snap decision, and the uncomfortable truth is "we can't tell you" is a fine modeling result.

I linked a video above that explains it very simply.

There isn't much nuance to it at all.

So it ultimately depends on how you weight the 75% of groups that don't think there's evidence that it leaked from a lab.

Here's their overview of some of the stuff their National Laboratories have done: https://www.energy.gov/articles/75-breakthroughs-americas-na...

Are these people who are owed a serious apology the ones who actually attacked Asian-Americans? Or simply the ones who stoked racial animus prompting others to attack them?

That's the nuance.

It absolutely, literally isn't.

The headline says the lab leak is the most likely origin. The lab theory being the least shitty theory absolutely doesn't make it a likely origin: it is purely a statement about the information we have (rather lack thereof) on origins, not on the likelihood of any of those. Likelihood of origin doesn't even come into it given the current state of theories.

Its best understood after watching and grokking this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNv2PlqmsAc

Putting what is being said in the correct context, outlined in that video, which is how government typically operates.

Its pretty clear what they mean to any educated rational reader what was meant. The characterization you made is poor and doesn't aptly apply.

The fact the chances of it being a lab leak are so high does mean something, and I'd like to see those odds be lower for any future scenario, but to think that implies we can say with confidence "that's what happened" is, as was clearly stated, wrong.

"Most likely" might be technically true - in the sense that there might be a 2% chance it was that, but there's a hundred other possibilities each with lesser probability, so that one is on top. But it's not really likely at all. So writing the headline that way is absolutely designed to give you a false perception if you don't stop to think about that, which nobody will.

(don't focus on the actual number, that's just for illustration.)

However, it's hard to be too trusting of the US, I want to believe them but they just shot 3 balloons in hysterical panic that were just their own weather balloons just because we sent 1... so sometimes they seem to be wrong and we should keep an open mind.

The best would be that a bat shat on a pangolin a lab worker ate before going to work, he sneezed around and contaminated all his colleagues who spread it around and poom: wild bat + pangolin traffic + lab leak all together lol Now that we can all agree, what has changed ?

Surely we re not agreeing that China was making weapons or leaked voluntarily, so beyond us being weasels unable to accept we screwed up, not sure why we drag on: we ll never say we screwed up, the US will never entirely accept we didnt screw up, what then?

There is a way, or there would be a way had this not been in an autocratic country. A developed and free nation would have formed an independent enquiry and be given access to the lab, its staff and documents. That would have had a high likelihood to either find the cause there or rule it out with some certainty.

But this is China, and for some reason some people don't want to admit that it's a repressive dictatorship with no regard for human life, justice and transparency.

> Low confidence generally means questionable or implausible information was used, the information is too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid analytic inferences, or significant concerns or problems with sources existed [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_confidence

Questioning whether the virus emerged organically or came from a lab leak? That was equivalent to claiming the government is run by lizard people and the earth is flat. That's a public shaming and banning with prejudice.

If you can’t understand that slowing the spread (exponential growth factor) in a pandemic is priority number 1, and can’t understand that lockdowns serve that purpose then take up knitting or pottery or something and stop commenting on pandemics.

China is a highly population dense country with incredible means of public transit, and millions of people moving back and forth every day: these factors all serve to increase the exponential spread of the virus. Slowing the rate of infection helps reduce hospital and equipment overload, gives more time to develop a vaccine, and increases each individual’s chances of survival when they do become ill.

^ If you can’t understand the above then pottery and knitting.

Are there really reddit-ors who still think C19 was natural when ALL of the current evidence including genetic markers points to lab leak?

Yes, we can't say with absolute certainty, but the case for lab leak is MUCH stronger than for natural. Plus, why has China still not released the nature and details of the experiments that were conducted in that lab? You know why.

Anyone who doesn't see that lab leak is the most likely source is just being contrarian for their own ego or political reasons.

Covid, conversely, was EXTREMELY good at spreading among humans right from the start. This experience coincides with the exact category of experiments we know were funded in Wuhan, which include using directed evolution to get bat corona viruses to be able to infect human cells. They literally trained these corona viruses to be able to infect human cells.

Is this definitive? Of course not, nothing is definitive.

If you're interested in how these types of coverups play out in the real world, I recommend investigating the 1977 influenza pandemic. 700,00 people died due to a Russian lab leak and the entire scientific community kept it a secret from the public because they didn't want to embarrass Russia during the cold war. It took 30 years for the scientific community to come clean.

China not playing ball is like saying "I won't even give such a suggestion my time, how dare you ask me that".

That said - I fully agree it would have done leagues to help the narratives if they did play ball. Hell, the suggestion is that it was an accident in the first place. That should say enough on it's own if it's true.

I really struggle that anyone is seriously buying a single “truth” that is coming out of China.

I don’t know it was a lab leak, but I agree, if you are at all reasonable you can just see that China thinks it was.

The Wuhan institute was celebrated as an improvement over the facilities at which dangerous viruses had previously been studied in China. The 2004 SARS outbreak originated in a lab: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/

It’s a bit like Jaime Meitzl (sp?) said - for the first time in history you find a unicorn (furin binding site in a coronavirus) next to a lab that asked for funding to make regular horses into unicorns. But the lab says it’s “natural origin”.

You might interested in this paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2

"Discovery of a novel merbecovirus DNA clone contaminating agricultural rice sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China"

MERS is really nasty, this is clearly evidence of engineering, and guess what the system is unpublished.

Personally I suspect this paper (which came out a while ago but got "boosted" recently) could be the reason for DOE "confidence update".

Media have not reported on this and "the usual" zoonosis advocates have been remarkably silent about it.

The theory was that it was a virus they'd have sampled from immunocompromised miners working in the same caves that the bats with the most closely related viruses inhabit. They had some references to a report with something like that happening some time prior.

It's so far the only theory I've read that seems to match the evidence.

The evidence doesn't seem to indicate that it was engineered, or that it was a product of gain of function research on animals. I think there would have been more solid evidence pointing in that direction by now, if that was the case. They would have published something related to it, or non-Chinese researchers connected to the lab would have known something.

Yet there's no evidence of any related animal resorvoir, and the virus was very well adapted to humans from the very start. And everything points to the virus passing through the lab somehow. Those things put together seems to point at them having sampled a virus that already made the jump to humans, and that somehow during the sampling, or retrieving the sample from storage, the virus escaped.

He got popular with the video that he recorded, but it did not contain the photo of the medical report of patient zero.

The worlds billionaires, combined, made more money in 2020-2022 than the previous 20 years combined. When there’s that much money involved, one must be a little suspicious.

ALL categories are going up. Ergo, risk is going up exponentially.

No need for conspiracies. Just a proper parsing of the words "lab leak"

BSL-4 labs have gone from 40 to 60ish in the last 25 years with another coming online almost every year.

BSL-3 labs are virtually uncountable and are in the 13000ish range in the USA alone (sorry, can't Remeber source)

Put it all together, and only an idiot STARTS with natural origin.

Also, there will be many many more.

We need treaties tightly regulating all biolabs around the world. Any countries not agreeing with the treaties should be blacklisted from entering entering or exiting countries that are part of the treaty, perhaps even restricting trade as well.

The decontamination protocols and entry / exit procedures for every biolab should be unified, worldwide, with strict and regular third-party circular auditing around the world. This allows labs to maintain their secrets; only the perimeter / filter are subject to this.

That would be the sensible course of action as a matter of Earth defense.

The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years. Allow the development of vaccines for extant viruses, but completely ban all Dr Frankenstein activities with viruses. No more "invent a virus in a lab to beat nature to the punch" horse shit, with is flagrant weapons development under the cover of civilian research. As soon as the virus started circulating through the population, did these researchers share their knowledge and help develop a vaccine? No, they buried their involvement and covered up everything they knew. They were no help at all, and never intended to be. Burn their books which describe how it is done, and silence the people who already understand it with the threat of criminal imprisonment for sharing their knowledge. Encourage major religions to amend their rules with strong taboos against this research, and institute harsh economic sanctions against any nation that doesn't participate in this ban.

Does this seem extreme? It shouldn't. This field of research has the power to kill billions and no demonstrable upside. It is even more dangerous than nuclear weapons; because at least a technician at a nuclear weapon production facility would be hard pressed to release his work on the global public of his own initiative. Smuggling a virus out of any lab is trivial, all it takes is a single madman's willingness to sacrifice himself as patient zero.

We're the villagers in an "evil wizard" scenario. The wizards have been meddling in dangerous forces beyond the understanding of common people, and it's getting people killed. The solution is to storm the wizard's tower and throw the wizards off the top of it.

wtf????????????? I have no idea what you are on about

1. Too many first world countries do not want to open up that can of worms because it might come back to bite them in the ass over the various things they have inflicted environmentally on the rest of the world.

The US and Europe for example are responsible for the overwhelming majority of greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere--yes some other countries are now emitting comparable amounts to current US/EU emissions, but because CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years the US/EU emissions from the past 200 years still massively dominate and will for a long time.

2. Calculating the reparations amount due to a given country would require an analysis of how much of their losses were due to their poor handling of COVID. There's too much risk that such analysis could conclude for many countries that their net losses were way higher than they would have been had the country handled it better.

If you suffer $X loss but then only get say 1/10 $X in reparations because that analysis concluded that 90% of your loss could have been avoided if you'd handled it better, your citizens aren't going to be happy their government got the 1/10 $X in reparations. No, your citizens are going to be annoyed their government botched things making COVID 10 times worse than it had to be.

I'm all for complaining about US tactics, but it's 100% incorrect to try and claim that the Iraq War was "worse" than COVID-19.

If that's the case it'll just slowly outscale any singular event like the Iraq War over multiple human generations of deaths and damage.

It might be true that no bats were sold in Wuhan wet markets, but this methodology doesn't seem the slightest bit credible.

Imagine if you were selling bats (is that legal in China?) from a likely illegal source (probably illegal in China?). Would you give honest information about the animals you were selling, particularly knowing how criminals can be treated in China?

You might as well ask suspected drug dealers how much crack they're selling in schools: you'll get the same quality of answer.

Because it's a virus that doesn't discriminate based on race or geography? Yeah, I have doubts (to put it mildly.)

Interesting strategy!

This is going to hurt China’s long term influence. Countries are diversifying their strategic supply chains, on shoring capacity for thinks like chip fabs. This weakens China’s geopolitical clout because they won’t be able to control the bottleneck.

I’m curious. What motivation for purposefully leaking such a virus would ‘they’ have?

There's a hanful of ways you can look at that:

Wuhan International couldn't be closed without consent from Beijing.

Beijing didn't grant it because

A) Poor information propagation Or B) Someone made a weighty geopolitical decision that in order to best serve China's interests, it was time to make this everyone's problem, leaving the International Airport open as a result. Or C) some combo of the two.

I don't know your particular balance in regards to the actual Overton Window as extended to humanity as a whole, but I damn well know where it registers on mine.

It’s an interesting question though. Working off of a lab leak theory, how did the first known cases all come from the wet market?

Is it just coincidence that an infected scientist traveled to the outdoor market and infected others?

With human to human transmission, you’d think it would have spread more rapidly among a scientist’s friends & family in an indoor setting.

When the US was doing contact tracing early on, I think the number of outdoor transmissions was extremely low.

It's a 45min drive between the Hunan market <> WIV building:

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/30%C2%B022%E2%80%B235%E2%80%...

I’m not sure I beleive in Dead Internet Theory so much as I believe in some form of unknowing indoctrination theory.

That if you take the people with these hardline defensive of authority opinions away from the internet for a bit, explain a new event to them, when they get back on the internet, none of the people they normally deal with have the same opinion of what they learned about “offline” at first.

I think we unintentionally have created a mind control device.

According to the Swamp, Trump cannot be right about anything ever, therefore the virus' origin is unknown and don't call it the Chinese flu because that's racist - even if the early Chinese accounts of the disease literally called it the "Wuhan pneumonia". This became Woke dogma the minute Trump said the opposite.

This whole thing has been disgusting and if we were a serious society thousands in leadership positions would have been fired or resigned in disgrace. Instead, Hollywood made fan films about people who quite easily fit the definition of having committed crimes against humanity, Tedros still has a job, and the WHO won't see any reform - it will see a major expansion of its power. I fear for the next pandemic, because if it's anything deadlier than COVID it might legitimately end civilization given the amount of incompetence we've now entrenched into our civilizational safeguards.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/donald-trump...

None, as far as I know. Nor should it be particularly surprising that no animal origin for COVID-19 has yet been found. The animal origin for SARS was only discovered in 2017: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 The first outbreak was in 2002. We're less than 4 years away from the first known outbreak of COVID-19, so dismissing a wild animal origin at this point is extremely premature at best.

It happens pretty often, we just don't hear about most of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

Using that name should've never been controversial and making it controversial was creating drama where there was none. The fact that people are still hurt about Trump saying that years ago shows how unprepared we are to have a discussion about anything.

Avoid the passive voice.

News companies and social media content moderators, who dislike Trump and overwhelmingly donated to his opponent, decided that the lab leak was not credible.

There was very clearly something exceptional about it, since we shut down much of the world for a year.

> Absent of other information, why is this the most probably explanation?

Again, the simple fact that the most severe viral outbreak in decades originated near a research facility for that same kind of virus, was reason enough to push lab-leak to the top of valid theories.

I think the help from China would be in the form of helmets, gear, and 122mm rounds. Nothing really technologically advanced to test weapons against.

Indeed, which is why I think it should be given more weight in the article. The actual terminology is easy to understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_confidence

I don't "want" to believe it, and generally believe folks who were touting it as fact up to this point were cranks. Even now it's still extremely murky, and as I said, there are a lot of unanswered questions.

After working in a BSL3 lab, I've seen some fairly poor working practices including someone infecting themselves, presumably due to sloppy working practices. There is a reason why lab leaks are common, if not vastly less consequential than the lab leak under discussion. It's because people are people, and they make mistakes, whether that's accidental or deliberately breaking the rules. It does make one question whether we can work on dangerous pathogens safely. I'd have to say, after direct experience of work on multiple diseases of varying types, that for many of them I have serious doubts. When it comes to Gain of Function, I think it should be banned worldwide. We aren't capable of working to the required level of stringency to guarantee safety.

To provide a concrete example, look at the German researcher who infected herself with Ebola. In a BSL4 facility. Not even involving GoF research, just the regular virus. Even top researchers slip up. This one made the news due to the severity, but how many are quietly buried, or not even reported within the organisation at all for fear of the consequences. It happens, and I've seen it first-hand.

Unfortunately, it doesn't matter.

It will lead to more people losing trust in the media and flocking into extreme social media silos.

The problem is still here, even if the cause of the problem makes no sense.

“The virus accidentally leaked from a highly sophisticated lab in China” is somehow racist and dangerous, but “Chinese people can’t stop eating weird stuff at a wet market and the virus jumped to humans from there” isn’t.