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Comment by y-c-o-m-b | Hacker News Reader

This and the fact that the initial WHO research team was closely regulated in their activities by the Chinese government, with the WHO later being denied access to data and further analysis. China has delayed and denied independent analysis. They burned trust when it was most important to the investigation. They are not to be trusted.

I don't know what the chances of a catastrophic viral outbreak being located next to a BSL-4 lab is, but it must be absolutely astronomical considering China has only 2 such labs in a country that spans 3.6 million square miles.

EDIT: Correction, looks like there's 4 (now?) BSL-4 facilities: https://www.globalbiolabs.org/map

My point still stands

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> I don't know what the chances of a catastrophic viral outbreak being located next to a BSL-4 lab is

Much higher than random. The location of the laboratory was close to the researched organisms, specifically bats. It also means that people had close contact with bats, on purpose, much more than in other areas.

This does not make any source more likely by itself. But there's a decent correlation why we see research on X right next to where we find X.

Do you know where you got this idea? I've seen it endlessly repeated, but I've been unable to trace it to any authoritative source.

In any case, it's completely wrong. Dr. Shi herself didn't expect natural spillover anywhere 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.

The BSL-4 also isn't very relevant. As described in the link above, the WIV worked at BSL-2, with correspondingly greater risk of an incident if one of their viruses turned out to infect humans. The point of extraordinary coincidence is their collection of novel sarbecoviruses, which was the biggest anywhere in the world.

Parent was asking about "catastrophic outbreak" not about COVID specifically. Other labs are not relevant in this calculation either. The question was about the likelihood of outbreak being colocated with a research facility and I stand by the answer - higher than random.

We're talking about SARS-CoV-2. We know that's a sarbecovirus, and we know the WIV had the world's largest collection of sarbecoviruses. That's the extraordinary coincidence that has prompted all of this debate. Your comment clearly implied that wasn't actually so surprising, because the WIV was located in a place where natural zoonosis was also believed to be more likely. That's completely false though, per the comments I've quoted from Dr. Shi herself.

It's certainly possible that other labs are deliberately located close to natural populations of the other organisms they're studying. That's not relevant in a discussion of the WIV and sarbecoviruses, though. There's no reason except obfuscation to shift focus to some broader question when we have facts specific to SARS-CoV-2.

In case you wish to clarify: Do you agree that specifically as to SARS-CoV-2, the probability of natural zoonosis near Wuhan was no higher than (and actually lower than, per Dr. Shi) random?

Wuhan has a BSL-4 lab since 2018, but it wasn't used for coronavirus research.

Most unversity cities have virology groups, and coronaviruses became a popular research subject after SARS, particularly in China. The probability of finding a coronavirus researcher group in any large Chinese city was probably fairly large in 2019.

This greatly understates the WIV's uniqueness here. Lots of groups study coronaviruses, but the WIV had the biggest collection of novel SARS-related viruses in the world. The proximal host of SARS-1 was found soon after the first outbreaks, but its origin in bats wasn't known until Dr. Shi discovered it.

The WIV had also proposed collaboration with UNC to engineer a virus structurally similar to SARS-CoV-2, a chimera of two novel sarbecoviruses with a human-designed FCS. This wasn't funded, but an unconfirmed leak claims the WIV continued this work alone:

> The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/inside-wuhan-lab-covid-p...

> don't know what the chances of a catastrophic viral outbreak being located next to a BSL-4 lab is

This should give you an idea:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

Yeah I’m afraid we may never find out the whole truth unless some whistleblower sneaks out with a bunch of evidence or some new genetic techniques come about that let us know without a doubt it was man-made rather than various credible sources saying “most likely it was engineered”

And beyond the location near the lab there are some other things that would be a bit of a coincidence.

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