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Comment by ThePhantom | Hacker News Reader

The lab leak hypothesis makes the most sense. The lab in Wuhan which researches coronaviruses conducts experiences on animals, including bats. Like other labs, there are dedicated personnel for hydrating and feeding the experimental animals. Notably, there are "wet markets" in Wuhan where live animals are sold, including bats, which harbor coronaviruses. Someone who is working in the facility in charge of maintenance of experimental animals has a choice of either sacrificing the animals as per protocol, or selling them to a wet market to make extra money. The most likely scenario was that someone sold the animal, most likely a bat, to a wet market, which happened to contain a virulent coronavirus strain that then infected humans.

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Did I just read this correctly? “janitor steals a highly modified and virulent bat and sells it for $10 in a wet market”

Why reach so hard to link this to a Wuhan wet market vs a generic leak? They didn’t sell bats at the market as far as I have read, and what’s the difference? Lab leak is a lab leak.

> Lab leak is a lab leak.

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.

We are told that they visited the market. But in reality it doesn’t make much sense why a busy wet market produced only a couple of covid patients.

Indeed, you don't need such a complicated theory. 3 doctors researching a coronavirus end up in a regional hospital, but before they get ID'd with a virus they interact with others in the local community helping it quietly spread among people with stronger immune systems.

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%...

It’s definitely plausible, but then wouldn’t you expect multiple outbreak sites?

* In and around WIV

* In and around the scientist’s homes, families and neighborhoods

From the news I’ve seen all of the initial known cases were traced back to the market.

Not necessarily. If you look at the nature of superspreading events, it's quite often confined to a single site as opposed to infecting people they meet as they travel. In addition, most of the transmission comes from a minority of infected people, look up "overdispersion".

I don't understand the mental gymnastics to discredit the lab leak hypothesis. The fact that the lab and epicenter of the virus are in the same geographic area make it the likely scenario and warrants the most investigation. The efforts to look past this seem artificial.

You don't need to "discredit" the hypothesis very much, because it shouldn't have any real "credit" to begin with. The only evidence for it at all seems to be the proximity of the Wuhan lab to the first known outbreak, plus the fact that 3 researchers got sick in November (i.e. flu season) with some unknown virus. If you ask me, that plus $5 might buy you a cup of coffee.

it's a hell of coincidence that out of all chinese cities the outbreak started in the one city housing the premiere institute dedicated to researching coronaviruses... so there is no smoking gun evidence, but it's a reasonable hypothesis... anyway, no one apart from the chinese ministry of state security will ever know for sure one way or another

Isn’t that mixing causation with correlation. The lab is there because there are lots of virus sources there.

This is definitely the most sensible explanation, since it's quite well known that Wuhan is the most important transportation hub in China since even before the lab was a distant dream in some postdoc's imagination.

And China does have the world's largest annual human migration, in the Spring Festival.

If I was in the planning department at whichever ministry that made the final decision on placement, putting the most prestigious and well funded lab studying dangerous human transmissible viruses at the world's most likely place to originate such a virus is an obvious choice.

i.e. during a few weeks every year Wuhan could easily be 10x more likely to be ground zero then any other city ever.

Wow, you did quite the somersault there.

Account created 22 days ago with the profile description: "Long time lurker, only made an account to comment about FPGAs..."

So this seems like low-effort trolling.

> The lab is there because there are lots of virus sources there.

That's patently false.

I don't see any evidence in either your or the GP's post.

So you discredit an incredibly likely theory that a rapidly spreading epidemic from an origin city in a totalitarian state with a highly specific lab focusing on coronaviruses, based on lack of credit?

I don‘t know what to say.

It's called "lack of available evidence." You can't use the fact that there isn't evidence of a thing happening in order to give the theory weight. When the evidence comes out, if it exists, and if it ever does come out for general consumption, then my opinion is subject to change.

Why not just say it came from North Korea? There's just about as much publicly available evidence for that as there is that it came from a lab leak in China.

> You can't use the fact that there isn't evidence of a thing happening in order to give the theory weight

I can and I will, because of the fact that there is some evidence that the Chinese Government made efforts to hide evidence around Covid 19’s origins and their history regarding uncomfortable truths.

You can not argue in good faith on grounds of evidence or no evidence if not all parties are playing open and fair. A totalitarian Government with an overarching system of controlling it‘s population and information is certainly not supporting good scientific research and discovery.

> I don't understand the mental gymnastics to discredit the lab leak hypothesis.

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.

A big problem was that Trump was into this theory early on: the Chinese virus, from Wuhan. Let's time travel back to May of 2020 for example: "Trump claims to have evidence coronavirus started in Chinese lab but offers no details" [1].

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...

I think this is the problem. Many are claiming a lab leak is the most likely / probable simply because of the proximity of the lab. We should investigate absolutely, but just saying the lab is there so a leak is the most likely doesn’t make sense.

I don't know if it does make the most sense. Some context:

https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html

75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. How many of those do we have start to finish routes from animals to humans? And if we don't have that route, how many of those are we suspecting of being lab leaks?

If they wrote in their conclusion that it was "low confidence" I think they have good reason for saying that.

> 75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. How many of those do we have start to finish routes from animals to humans? And if we don't have that route, how many of those are we suspecting of being lab leaks?

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.

There were no bats being sold in the Wuhan wet markets. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2

> On each visit, vendors were asked what species they had sold over the preceding month and in what numbers, along with the prices (US$1:RMB¥6.759) and origin of these goods (wild caught or captive bred/ farmed).

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.

The amount of pure speculation in this post is surprising, coming from a logicalmonster.

Are those activites illegal in China, or just in your mind? If it is not the former, then your point collapses like a two legged stool.

I am not a lawyer from China and I doubt many posters here are either.

When you have imperfect information, trying to understand a complicated world can never be perfect, but we all still do that anyway because we have to. There's no other way to reason about the world because we're always going to have imperfect information about so many topics.

But I can use my limited knowledge of China, and a reasonable understanding of human nature, to understand that the polling methodology seems unlikely to yield trustworthy results.

Until proven otherwise, I think it is a perfectly reasonable to think that people in China who might deal in some quasi-legal trades wouldn't be perfectly honest in a poll due to concerns about what might happen to them if they admit to something that might be seen as illegal.

Deleted

> It spectacularly backfired on them.

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

Release a plague you can’t control through the wet market next to your virology lab, knowing that it will spread among your own people and those of your allies first, and then also probably circle back, hoping that it will be worse for the other guys, sure (somehow) that the war that you started out of nowhere is to your own net benefit.

Interesting strategy!

I doubt it. It was almost immediately clear that the world’s reliance on China for some things was a problem. I think this was a pretty clear outcome, because before COVID there were people already harping on that single point of failure.

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.

Well, as the poster said, it backfired on them lol

(I do not believe in the intentional malicious leak theory, to be clear)

It’s so fascinating to me to see someone formulate a hypothesis based on nothing “I think they did[purposely leak a global pandemic-causing virus]”, and then immediately turn around and relish in China’s failure at the thing you claimed they did. Like, do I do this too, and I’m just not aware of it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34927481

> I think they did thinking the West wouldn’t have developed a vaccine so fast.

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

Note: Wuhan was closed to interprovincial traffic very early on. The International Airport, however, was left open.

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.

C) Trapping foreign citizens in their country would have caused an international incident when very little was yet known.

Every country understands the concept of Quarantine. There would not have been even a blink of an eye within diplomatic channels. At least I don't think so. It also doesn't jibe with the tight lipped behavior of the Chinese Government, and the iron fist they dropped on their academic establishment that under no circumstances were virological materials to be widely published without Party approval.

The clamp down on information exchange does not strike me as the actions of a group with everyone else's best interests in mind. And given that we have hitherto been pretty chill with China on the whole, I really think if they had gone "screw it, international travel lockdown"; you'd have seen materials and humanitarian relief being flown in in order to help out with citizens stranded overseas. We may not even be having this conversation, because to be frank, how China did decide to react just doesn't make any sense except in the context of someone with something to hide.

In my opinion, the simplest explanation of this is: a worker at the Wuhan facility was accidentally infected (mistakes happen) and it was able to spread. It was not intentional.

An intentional leak would be an attack. I don’t recall that being on the table during the early part of the pandemic. I’m sure there was a least one person suggesting it but I recall the lab leak theory being the most ridiculed was some kind of accident or mistake at the lab resulting in an infected worker. …probably asymptomatic to boot.

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