House panel concludes that Covid-19 pandemic came from a lab leak

A lab leak doesn’t necessarily mean that it was created in a lab; it could also be a natural zoonotic virus that was actively being studied and accidentally infected one or more researchers.

If you are prepared for long and detailed you can look at Ralph Baric's testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus. He's probably the world's leading authority on coronavirus gain of function research and was involved in proposing research that would have produced something near identical to covid along with the reasons for doing so scientifically. He proposed such research in association with the WIV and it didn't get US funding but it seems very possible they went ahead with what he was suggesting anyway.

From the testemony:

>[The] first part was that we were fundamentally interested in why didn't sarbecoviruses have a furin cleavage site...

>Feline infectious peritonitis virus, it's an enteric form, it's got a furin cleavage site, it replicates, and it got very mild infection. When the furin cleavage site is lost, it kills the cat. So it's a flip, right? Furin cleavage site is the loss of -- it's protecting from virulent disease. So the data going into that proposal, the exact role of furin cleavage site was not clear. We were interested in it because most other coronaviruses in family had those sites. Why didn't sarbecovirus?...

And then about a year after proposing playing around with that, this never found in nature thing, a sarbecovirus with a cleavage site, pops up by the WIV. Bit of a coincidence it seems to me.

What incentive does a House of Reps Subcommittee have to get it wrong? That is, why can some government inquiries be trusted to be approximately good-faith scientific inquires, whereas others (perhaps this one) cannot?

(I ask out of genuine naivety to US political research/processes/inquiries)

The house panel is more interesting than a North Korean kangaroo court say because most of the virus research which may or may not have caused covid originated in the US and China. The Chinese aren't saying anything much so that leaves the US and the house panel has been about the only body that has been able to compel people to testify. For example Peter Daszak was one of the main funders of the WIV (Wuhan lab) and so you'd want to ask what did you fund but he was replying that he can't say anything because he had a confidentiality agreement with the lab not to disclose. The house panel however had the power to make him testify in spite of the non disclosure stuff so it's been able to get better information.

I agree. OTOH, why does it matter to select one of the options? How is this more than a blame game?

National health authorities are structured to communicate WHO health advice and policies. WHO in theory is an international health policy body but as many international institutions its mission gets distorted by bad actors who were granted membership.

It seems perfectly obvious to me that it came from Zoonosis: https://marketwise.substack.com/p/did-covid-19-come-from-a-l...

It matters because it affects who we prepare for the next pandemics. Should we tighten regulations for labs? Should we ban wet markets? Where should we monitor how closely?

Perhaps you could enumerate the facts relating to the lab leak theory? All I have is:

1) A virus research lab was located in an area where novel viruses have tended to emerge.

There are several issues with the lab leak theory:

1) Creates a target for (racial?) hatred and blame - i.e the Chinese.

2) Absolves us from blame, 'a few bad people' (like in the movies), instead of general human encroachment on the natural environment.

3) Feeds the anti-science narrative.

I can think of a few reasons why it was important to tackle misinformation around the lab leak hypothesis:

* Racism. In the wake of COVID, xenophobic attacks increased against Asian people - particularly the Chinese - in many countries including the US. The idea that the virus may have been created by people from China would only exacerbate this.

* Phobia of science. If virology labs are seen as a threat to society, they may well get less research funding and less entry to market. We see this in the EU where people are terrified of GMOs for largely misconceived reasons.

* General information quality and politicisation. The lab leak hypothesis is one of a great number of dubious conjectures and conspiracy theories that have their claws in political debate in the US. Other examples include climate denial, vaccines causing autism, the birther and truther conspiracies etc... . The collective consequence of this is a lot of wasted money, air time, and energy debunking increasingly bizarre and contrived claims, and a lot of political advantages gained by unscrupulous figures taking advantage of public gullibility.

Banal explanation: there is the red party, and the blue party, and when the red party started claiming it was a lab leak, the blue party doubled down on the opposite.

I have some sympathy for the blue party here, as the red party came up with the idea of "alternative facts" and the evidence for a lab leak, unless there was some top secret government material we don't know about, was sketchy at best so the red party was much more certain of their claim than the evidence would have allowed for. But that doesn't prove the claim either right or wrong.

I think it starts with recognizing that there isn’t a single theory but two: the simple one is that someone working with animals had a breach of safety protocols and got infected. That one was never controversial - literally everyone who works with lab animals has safety training about this – and a number of different scientific groups looked for evidence which could support or undercut that theory.

The second one is that it was a deliberately developed strain (a few variations: genetically engineered weapon, “gain of function” research gone wrong, etc.) which was released, often with claims that it was intended to attack the west or force government control of everyone. Those claims were not made scientifically and were often accompanied by racist and/or false political claims or abuse directed at political opponents which strongly suggested that the motive was not understanding but political damage control (Trump was running for re-election on economic grounds until this upset the race). The few people who suffered any consequences for this almost uniformly claimed they were being “censored” for the first part, but we know that it was the latter because many people who asked the same questions without the abusive behavior had no consequences - there were multiple scientific papers, for example, looking at evidence of human modification in the viral genome.

This divide lead to the dynamic you’re seeing: pretty much everyone who isn’t primarily motivated by exonerating Trump looked at the evidence, saw that there isn’t any support for claims of artificial modification or intent, and moved on. The people still banging on about it aren’t adding new information or insight, and that means everyone who isn’t politically aligned with them is tired of hearing the same old things.

The main suspects if it was a leak did an active disinfo campaign to stop people accusing them. These being the Chinese government, Fauci and associates and Peter Daszak.

There's info on that and what went on from Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the time who naturally was involved in trying to control it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMlhvnMpRU0&t=119s

That mentions the Chinese and Fauci but not Daszak.

It seems a lot of the reason the weirdness is that back in the 1960s and 70s the US did bioweapons/defence research and then in 1975 ratified the Biological Weapons Convention outlawing that.

But come the 9/11 attacks Cheney and others thought oh dear maybe Bin Laden will do a bio attack next and transferred the defence budget to Fauci to keep on doing biodefense covertly. This continued until covid and then it was all a bit - how dare you suggest we were doing what we were doing.

There is also hostility towards Redfield for saying what happened but as well as being the CDC head at the time and about the only person in communication with the Chinese CDC when Wuhan happened, is a published virologist, a medical doctor and also he used to be in the military and run the US biodefence program so he's not your average crank.

> I guess this is the start another 4 years of ignoring science

Ignoring paid scientists isn't the same as ignoring science.

From the ACX post I linked in another comment, it seems that pre-pandemic the WiV was very much forthcoming and sent around notes of what viruses they'd collected and what they were doing to other countries' researchers:

> Are we sure they had neither [BANAL-52, which is one mutation away from COVID, and some other related virus]? Yes. Remember, WIV’s whole job was looking for new coronaviruses. They published lists of which ones they had found pretty regularly. They published their last list in mid-2019, just a few months before the pandemic. Although lab leak proponents claimed these lists showed weird discrepancies, this was just their inability to keep names consistent, and all the lists showed basically the same viruses (plus a few extra on the later ones, as they kept discovering more). The lists didn’t include BANAL-52 or any other suitable COVID relatives - only RATG-13, which isn’t close enough to work.

>

> Could they have been keeping their discovery of BANAL-52 secret? No. Pre-pandemic, there was nothing interesting about it; our understanding of virology wasn’t good enough to point this out as a potential pandemic candidate. WIV did its gain-of-function research openly and proudly (before the pandemic, gain-of-function wasn’t as unpopular as it is now) so it’s not like they wanted to keep it secret because they might gain-of-function it later. Their lists very clearly showed they had no virus they could create COVID from, and they had no reason to hide it if they did.

Sure! You don't have to ask to ask here, you can just post.

Did you read the LA times? They were in full damage control mode. I wonder who sponsors them the most nowadays? It's not like the government just funded millions and billions post covid into pharma corporations (to the point where they became the dominant component of government funding and to the point where these corporations began to compete with the MIC for funding) that could just use that money to get journalists to "sweeten up" the blowback to their dangerous and negligent practices.

But that said, I still take the republican biased report with caveats. They were washing up their own vaccine related leveraging as a "success" in it, even though it also contributed to many problems.