Covid-19 Likely Originated with Lab Leak, Energy Department Finds in New Report | Hacker News Reader

Covid-19 Likely Originated with Lab Leak, Energy Department Finds in New Report

news.yahoo.com

40 pointsbelter11 comments

I don't think we have a trustworthy source on this.

WHO is strongly disincentivized towards concluding it's a lab leak. However, the Republicans (who have their tendrils through many agencies) are strongly incentivized towards concluding it's a lab leak. I no longer even trust the CDC to be independent.

I'm extremely suspicious of this report, though--the energy department is not where you'll find the skills needed to evaluate where it came from. Thus I think the most likely explanation of this report is that it's Republican propaganda.

From the article:

The Energy Department, which oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, made its judgment with “low confidence,” the Wall Street Journal reported... Four other agencies and the National Intelligence Council assess with “low confidence” the pandemic was likely caused by natural transmission from an infected animal.

The other thing that gets me is the Energy Department said this back in 2021. There's since been a bunch of additional research done -- swabs in the market, cases traced back to points of origin -- that at least make the "market origin" more convincing than it was in 2021.

> The other thing that gets me is the Energy Department said this back in 2021. There's since been a bunch of additional research done -- swabs in the market, cases traced back to points of origin -- that at least make the "market origin" more convincing than it was in 2021.

Do you have a source on that? AFAIK it seems to be the quite the opposite.

A lot of media attention was incorrectly put on the sea food market ruling out the lab leak based on some studies done on Chinese data [1] but the caveat was no animal lineage was found, only that people near the market had experienced similar coronaviruses, something we've known since the start of the pandemic.

> Nevertheless, some virologists say that the new evidence pointing to the Huanan market doesn’t rule out an alternative hypothesis. They say that the market could just have been the location of a massive amplifying event, in which an infected person spread the virus to many other people, rather than the site of the original spillover.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00584-8

CNN (citing peer-reviewed studies) reported that it was much more than just people "near" the market:

"Researchers determined that the earliest Covid-19 cases were centered at the market among vendors who sold these live animals or people who shopped there... 'All eight COVID-19 cases detected prior to 20 December were from the western side of the market, where mammal species were also sold,' the study says. The proximity to five stalls that sold live or recently butchered animals was predictive of human cases."

That's from about 7 months ago.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/26/health/wuhan-market-covid-19/...

One criticism I have heard of the data collection around this wet market is that from the beginning, chinese officials rules out a lab leak. Not because the data said so, but because it would look bad for them. So this has cause a lot of data collection only around this wet market and places connected to the wet market. Which, unsurprisingly, has led to lots of cases found connected to the wet market and not many other places.

> "this has cause a lot of data collection only around this wet market"

I hadn't heard that. That's an interesting theory.

I guess my response would be: has it changed where data is collected? Drilling down into the report, their data came from "individuals who had used a COVID-19 assistance channel on Sina Weibo, a Chinese social media platform." It wasn't originally intended for public reporting on case locations -- so there's not any mechanism there for filtering out cases from one location while favoring cases from another.

While they focused on the wet market that doesn't mean they would have ignored cases from people who didn't go there because they would have to identify cases first and then find out where they were. At the time it simply wasn't feasible to check those near the wet market to see if they were infected. The focus was on the wet market before we had viable large scale testing.

Only checking the wet market would only make sense in an immobile society.

"The sale of wild animals without permits in China carries severe penalties involving steep fines and imprisonment. The tick study that documented the sale of illegal animals in the Huanan market observed, however, that the sellers were not too concerned about law enforcement, and that plainly illegal animals were openly sold. It is unclear whether any of the animal traders engaged in illegal wildlife commerce have been since found, fined or punished. The swift clear-out of the market may have been intended to protect them as well as the law-enforcement officers and local politicians who had looked the other way."

"The Contested Origin of SARS-CoV-2" 26 Nov 2021

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2021.2...

> … the caveat was no animal lineage was found…

"… there were no opportunities to sample the markets to look for animals infected with SARS-CoV-2. Chinese authorities closed and cleared out the markets soon after the epidemic started…"

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2021.2...

Just "… SARS-CoV-2 virus on a number of surfaces, including on cages, carts and machines that process animals after they are slaughtered at the market."

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/28/1160162...

The Energy Department is far more credible than spy agencies as they actually do biological and genomic research.

The DOE absolutely has the skills to evaluate this. The US National labs have arguably the most sophisticated biotech research facilities in the world. I don’t think it’s as widely known as universities, but a large fraction of the worlds basic life science research is actually performed at the National labs. For example, the human genome project was mostly done by them.

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