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That is why the director of the NIAID, which is a research organization and not a public health agency at all, took charge of the century's biggest public health situation over the head of the (sadly impotent) CDC, which should have been in charge of coordinating the US's response.
The scientific consensus that you were sold was never really a consensus. It was a power play.
By contrast, there's a strong consensus on climate change, for example, that involves a very large number of scientists who should know and who are not incentivized to believe it.
For the curious reader, here's a short introduction, the tip of the iceberg.
> Daszak’s $3.7 million NIH grant first set off alarm bells in early May 2016, as it entered its third year. The NIH requires annual progress reports, but Daszak’s year-two report was late and the agency threatened to withhold funds until he filed it.
> The report he finally did submit worried the agency’s grant specialists. It stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and killed 35% of the humans it infected. The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide. (A chimeric virus is one that combines fragments of different viruses.) These revelations prompted the NIH’s grant specialists to ask a critical question: Should the work be subject to a federal moratorium on what was called gain-of-function research?
> But the 2015 research paper he cited was not particularly reassuring. In it, Shi Zhengli and a preeminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina, Ralph Baric, mixed components of SARS-like viruses from different species, and created a novel chimera that was able to directly infect human cells. (Baric did not respond to written questions seeking comment.)
> If anything, the MERS study Daszak proposed was even riskier. So he pitched a compromise to the NIH: that if any of the recombined strains showed 10 times greater growth than a natural virus, “we will immediately: i) stop all experiments with the mutant, ii) inform our NIAID Program Officer and the UNC [Institutional Biosafety Committee] of these results and iii) participate in decision making trees to decide appropriate paths forward.”
> This mention of UNC brought a puzzled response from an NIH program officer, who pointed out that the proposal had said the research would be performed at the WIV. “Can you clarify where the work with the chimeric viruses will actually be performed?” the officer wrote. Ten days later, with still no response from Daszak, the program officer emailed him again. On June 27, Daszak responded, buoyant as ever:
> “You are correct to identify a mistake in our letter. UNC has no oversight of the chimera work, all of which will be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology…. We will clarify tonight with Prof. Zhengli Shi exactly who will be notified if we see enhanced replication…my understanding is that I will be notified straight away, as [principal investigator], and that I can then notify you at NIAID. Apologies for the error!”
> Allowing such risky research to go forward at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was “simply crazy, in my opinion,” says Jack Nunberg, director of the Montana Biotechnology Center. “Reasons are lack of oversight, lack of regulation, the environment in China,” where scientists who publish in prestigious journals get rewarded by the government, creating dangerous incentives. “So that is what really elevates it to the realm of, ‘No, this shouldn’t happen.’”
If anything, the lab leak “theory” has received too much media attention when the primary evidence (location of a lab) is easily explained by other factors.
Imagine a virus was spread from penguins to humans. It would not be surprising if research on the virus were conducted in Antarctica!
Beyond the general background already linked, Dr. Shi specifically did not expect that natural spillover of SARS-CoV-2 occurred near Wuhan:
> 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...
She could be wrong, but the idea that she chose her work location based on the natural abundance of sarbecoviruses is unequivocally false.
>Thesis: China is a backward country where basic hygiene is not followed and any animal will be eaten live and raw.
>Antithesis: China is more advanced than many first world countries, with state of the art biological research pushing boundaries beyond what current protocols can handle.
>Synthesis: An infected bat escaped from the Wu Han institute of virology and was promptly eaten.
Maybe it didn't come from the lab. Maybe it didn't come from China at all. But maybe we should have checked that? Maybe we should know if some senior coronavirus researchers at that lab got sick with weird illnesses in the later part of 2019? Maybe we should have confirmed their virus handling procedures were up to snuff, and that a lab leak was unlikely because they were such upstanding and responsible scientists?
If it were a lab leak then we’d expect the initial cases to cluster around the lab, and to show up in those who had contact with lab workers.
Nobody considered the lab as a source because the basic epidemiological evidence doesn’t support it.
There is no reason to believe it's possible to determine the point of introduction with such granularity from initial epidemiological data. The form of modeling behind these geographic claims shows no history of correct predictions, making them essentially unfalsifiable.
The misleading claims that you're repeating here are exactly those promoted by the scientific press, including both the highest-impact peer-reviewed journals and popular outlets like Scientific American. If you are willing to entertain the possibility that they'd misinform you and seek sources outside that bubble, then I believe you'll see that yourself.
I remember a few years ago seeing a map of the raw data that led to the wet market conclusion: While it was in the area, but they only got it to be the main cluster by ignoring like half of the data points. I don't think the earliest confirmed cases even came from there. It was far more likely the first "superspreader" event than the origin.
- Yishan Wong, once Reddit CEO and still very much in the know, admitted to the following (direct quote):
> Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic because the "debate" included ...massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting, and abuse that spilled over into the real world - e.g. harrassment of public officials and doctors, racially-motivated crimes, etc.
- Twitter had a CCP-affiliated person on their board of directors during Covid
- I assume everyone here is familiar with the Lancet letter.
1. If you dug in to the authors of the now infamous Lancet letter ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_(COVID-19) ), you could see how they had huge conflicts of interests.
2. Early on in the pandemic, you could see how some people went to a lab leak (intentional or not) theory very quickly with no evidence (e.g. "The China Virus"). On the flip side, though, I think you had a lot of people pushing against this who felt that any acknowledgement of a potential lab leak was playing into "conspiracy theories". So my point is that you have to trace incentives on both sides, and both sides had incentives that were actually against finding the actual truth.
3. I think the other thing that is extremely important is to realize that nearly all humans prefer some explanation to "I don't know". Even today you see people on both sides of the Covid origins debate who are adamant their position is right, when I think the real situation is more "Some lab leak or escaped zoonotic virus being studied by a lab is more likely than not". So early on in the pandemic, you had people confidently proclaiming their personal theories as facts that weren't backed up by evidence. And importantly, the truth nearly always eventually comes out. You say "that hypothesis was totally suppressed for the mainstream media for about 2 years". That timeline is wrong, there were lots of things being reported in early 2021 about a potential lab leak - this article that summarizes the state of reporting is from June 2021: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-media-cal...
people went to a lab leak (intentional or not) theory very quickly with no evidence
It was known at the time that the Wuhan lab was studying coronavirus, and known they had both safety and security lapses. That is far from proof, but it is evidence.
Also, the incentive was to blame China was mixed. At the time, Xi had recently the US, and both sides were advancing a trade deal. It was a moment the US govt was trying to improve relations, and particularly get US agricultural sales to China boosted. The lab leak talk was tamped down for months. It wasn't until March that you had US officials really start to talk about it.
To the extent that they were looking at gain of function, they were also looking at loss of function. My understanding is that the research was looking at how random point mutation affect infectivity, both positively and negatively.
They were using also using virus evolutionary pretty distant from covid 19.
There are corona viruses present in species in the wet market that were much closer to covid 19. (eg pangolin caron’s viruses)
Blaming the wuhan lab is like finding that your child has been eaten by a tiger and the blaming a house cat breeder on the other side of town.
There's no serious question that the WIV has unpublished viruses--even with no attempt at secrecy, every active research group has unpublished work. Researchers found an unpublished merbecovirus in contamination from shared equipment. This isn't related to SARS-CoV-2, but shows the claim that the WIV had zero unpublished viruses to be specifically false. Public access to the WIV's database of viral genomes was removed early in the pandemic, and never restored.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2
Pangolins were initially proposed as the proximal host, but that's been abandoned for years. After a long delay, the paper in Nature was extensively corrected, following Alina Chan's discovery that the alleged multiple samples were all from a single batch of smuggled pangolins. These were probably infected during trafficking, in the same way that housecats are sometimes infected by SARS-CoV-2 but aren't the source.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2
The goal of research like DEFUSE was gain of function, a deadlier or faster-spreading virus. That goal wasn't always successfully achieved, but that's true for all goals. The point is that skilled researchers specifically trying to achieve a goal (like by directed evolution during serial passage, or by genetic engineering) are much more likely to do so than would random point mutations alone.
None of this means it's certain that SARS-CoV-2 arose from an accident at the WIV. The picture that you've received isn't accurate, though.
> An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
This means that for there to be a conspiracy, the conspirators have to communicate with each other about it. Many people would read your post and conclude that you think that there's a centralized organization that all the journalists get their marching orders from.
I feel like in reality you probably think that the journalists, like most humans, are very good at knowing what is "in vogue" and what is "outside acceptable discourse" for their circles, and so they engage in systematic bias.
A lot of arguments over conspiracy theories consist of people using the dictionary definition of the word scoffing at people who are using the second definition of the word.
There are not "a few (orders of) magnitude" in probability between these hypotheses.
That would at least need to be 1% vs. 99% and that's being charitable.
What we need is an education system that teaches people to simultaneously entertain conflicting hypotheses and update the belief in them as information becomes available.
Your post is the perfect example of what that doesn't look like.
(Footnote: There are a number of examples in history for pathogens leaking from labs, and for zoonotic origins, so having such strongly biased priors under poor evidence in either direction really just shows that you want to believe something.)