CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain.
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One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as saying:
> “Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Mr. Cotton said.
So... I'm not certain this is a development worth trusting. Maybe it really did originate from a lab! But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.
The new administration has been in office a week. There is a political incentive to release it now, but they couldn’t have meaningfully created the analysis for political reasons in five days.
CIA has been in the hot seat for long enough to be politically sensitive. Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce multiple reports for every conclusion. It's not implausible that this happened here. In any case, we're talking about a partian topic with low- and moderate-confidence reports with a President who has zero chance of holding China accountable on it. Parlour talk.
Multiple conclusions, not multiple investigations.
Supposedly because they've had more time to think about the conditions of the lab before Covid was released...
But really, nothing has changed except their biases. Nothing has changed on the solid evidence side.
Separately, if there were actual safety issues and stuff was leaking... Then we're incredibly lucky that it was something as tame as Covid, and not one of the more serious kinds of horrors that gain of function research has successfully produced.
That's fine. The really problem is all debate on such matters was shut down during pandemic. To the benefit of no one (except for maybe Biden trying to cajole to Chinese into something, or other. Or to protect USG's role in this affair by financing Chinese gain of function research).
There's never going to be any conclusive evidence of the source of covid, and anyone claiming they have certainty (who wasn't a witness to a lab leak) is simply lying to you. What they're doing is going along with everyone else worth listening to, who find the coincidence that we were funding banned research on coronaviruses in a lab a few feet away from the origin of the outbreak unlikely. They also find tales of non-lab origin both speculative and vague, while stories of lab origin are only speculative.
It's so strange to demand so much more proof of lab origin than one does of non-lab origin. The obvious reasons for that demand are that millions died, and that everybody involved with that lab can easily be named. Also weird that this observation is covid-skeptic coded, when in reality the worse you think covid is, the greater the crime that a lab leak entails.
We won’t, because the judgment of many of our cognitive elites has been impaired.
This is a bit of a digression, but I’m reading a tweet thread by a $2,300/hour attorney who is an MSNBC contributor that is making just basic logical errors in discussing the birthright citizenship EO. Not even on the merits, literally in just summarizing the implications of the argument being made on a page of a filing he screenshotted in his tweet. I’m persuaded that if you had these folks take the LSAT with questions that had a political coding, they’d score a 160.
We need to get back to prioritizing the institutional and values of the different professions above all else. The public should view our scientific and professional organizations as neutral actors staffed by people who put the institutions above their personal beliefs. They shouldn’t be wondering whether medical organizations would be saying the same things about the “Lab Leak” theory if it had involved Russia instead of China.
No surprise there. Some people are not, contrary to your apparent assumption, actually trying to analyze something logically and arrive at some form of truth. I very much doubt that this has anything at all to do with COVID.
African green monkeys later found to be carrying the virus were shipped to several labs in Germany and Yugoslavia; the virus hopped from the monkeys to lab workers and then from the lab workers to a small number of others.
It's not, zoonotic transmission has happened many times, lab leak is the extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence
Regardless of the source, it was dangerous but could have been better mitigated if it was taken seriously as a threat (not just a "common cold").
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/936217
So how many people have to die before this is no longer an extraordinary claim? Bhopal managed to change chemical manufacturing standards with "only" thousands or tens of thousands of deaths; but the 1977 flu is somehow completely forgotten.
Perhaps the death toll is so high that people simply can't believe it? YouTube's fact-checkers recently removed an unambiguously factual description of the 1977 pandemic, ignoring appeals well-referenced into the peer-reviewed literature with no stated justification.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-i-fell-foul-of-youtu...
So are you really saying p ~ 1/12 is an "extraordinary claim"? Is a 6'1" American man "extraordinarily tall"? There's unfortunately no standard map between English phrases and numerical probabilities, but I think most people would understand a much lower probability. If you really want to define it that way, then "extraordinary evidence" is likewise diluted to the point that the circumstantial case (emergence in Wuhan, DEFUSE) brings research origin easily into contention.
Yes, I think it is extraordinary to extrapolate one event in 1977 to a "once every fifty years" rate
I hope you're not going to count every natural spillover since prehistory in the denominator. The technology to culture and freeze an influenza virus didn't exist before ~1930, and the technology to genetically enhance a sarbecovirus didn't exist before ~2010. The absence of pandemics with such origin before that means nothing. No one had ever suffered a cancer induced by an X-ray tube before 1904; but that doesn't mean the risk wasn't there, and Edison's assistant still died horribly.
Can you explain why 2010 would be a reasonable start cutoff? That doesn't make any sense to me, since it excludes most of the time that a research-origin flu pandemic was possible. We obviously haven't had a research-origin novel sarbecovirus pandemic before maybe SARS-CoV-2; but when new technological developments occur, the most similar old technologies are our best model. Nobody had ever died in a plane crash before the Wright brothers, but anyone familiar with unpowered gliders could predict the risk.
Yes (DNI) [1] and no (State) [2].
[1] https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declass...
[2] https://oversight.house.gov/release/classified-state-departm...
Even if it leaked from the lab, the first affected people (mainly sellers) were from the market, which is weird. Occam's razor points to what you said.
I guess everyone loves a good conspirancy.
You're just repeating the conclusions of papers that made ridiculous leaps of logic based on circumstantial evidence. For example [1], which is the likely source of the argument you're (mis-)remembering, bases this conclusion on:
1) case histories from reported, hospitalized cases, which were probably incorrect (i.e. they just assume that the cases they know about are, in fact, the first cases), being "geographically centered" on the market in December (not November) of 2019 [2].
2) positive environmental samples near animal stalls in the market, of which they found two strains.
Neither of which is dispositive of anything, and more an indictment of the motivated reasoning of the academic literature at the time than anything else. If you bother to read any of the subsequent analyses, you'll find that there are a bunch of different lines of evidence (genetic and case reports, at the least), pushing the date of the first infections well before December.
In short, the first/WHO case reports were probably wrong, the virus likely broke out earlier and was circulating in Wuhan before these samples were taken. If that's true, it wouldn't be surprising, at all, to find positive environmental samples in a food market, and the tortured logic of this paper would fall apart.
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
[2] Seriously. Not joking. Here's the "methods" they used for this oh-so-rigorous analysis:
> The 2021 WHO mission report identified 174 COVID-19 cases in Hubei Province in December 2019 after careful examination of reported case histories (7). Although geographical coordinates of the residential locations of the 164 cases who lived within Wuhan were unavailable, we were able to reliably extract the latitude and longitude coordinates of 155 cases from maps in the report
They then take this data and blend it through a kernel analysis, wave their hands, and voilá! This this The Science (tm) upon which your confidence is based.
...oh, and by the way: the market in question just happens to be right next to the Wuhan CDC, and a major city hospital [3]. Weird, right? I'm sure it's just a coincidence. Certainly nothing worth including in a putative "probability analysis" of geographic distribution.
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-Huanan-Seafood-Ma...
If the disease had already been global, then retrospective testing of wastewater samples, nasal swabs obtained for other purposes like the Seattle Flu Study, banked blood, and other stored samples would have revealed that. There were some scattered claims that it did, but none that held up very well under scrutiny.
There are studies pre SARS-CoV-2 about coronavirus in natural environments (like bat caves), and they found motifs that we found also in SARS-CoV-2. Zoonotic infections are very common and specially for coronavirus, so it should be our first guess unless overwhelming evidence shows that the virus was originated in a lab (leaked or engineered).
Maybe it was a lab leak, but there is not stronger evidence for that, than for the zoonotic event.
Here is your bad science:
- H0: The origin is the lab.
- H1: The origin is a naturally ocurring zoonosis.
As evidence for H1 cannot convince you, you accept H0 without any proof. Great science! Problem is your H0 is wrong. H0 should be the most easy explanation, which is a zoonosis that has happened before thousands of times, and for which we have also evidence (you call it circumstancial, as this was a trial) like similar sequences found in bats nearby. You must get better evidence to prove the unusual lab leak hypothesis. Your H0 and H1 are reversed.
> There are studies pre SARS-CoV-2 about coronavirus in natural environments (like bat caves), and they found motifs that we found also in SARS-CoV-2.
You're doing it again here, but I think you're probably referring to Andersen's Proximal Origin:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
But nobody disputes that SARS-CoV-2 evolved mostly in bats; the question is whether its path from bats to humans included a trip through the lab. No genomic evidence can distinguish between a novel natural virus and a chimera of two novel natural viruses. As Davis Relman wrote:
> Some [that's Andersen] have argued that a deliberate engineering scenario is unlikely because one would not have had the insight a priori to design the current pandemic virus. This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory
https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2021133117
The WIV had the biggest collection of novel sarbecoviruses in the world.
As for the rest of your comment -- oy, talk about a straw man fallacy. There's absolutely nothing I said that requires the false dichotomy you've presented between H0 and H1 (i.e. there are other plausible hypotheses that aren't as extreme as the ones you've presented). Also, I don't "accept" H0. I just can't rule it out.
> H0 should be the most easy explanation, which is a zoonosis that has happened before thousands of times, and for which we have also evidence
Neither hypothesis is easy (i.e. likely). Natural, human-optimized zoonosis is incredibly rare in viruses. Making humanized viruses in a lab, starting from natural viruses, is actually straightforward. But when one of the world centers for doing that kind of work, on very similar coronaviruses, was right there in Wuhan...
https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(24)00901-2.pdf
It found that viral RNA and DNA from potential zoonotic hosts (palm civets, raccoon dogs) occurred together in some samples from the Huanan Seafood Market. But there's no question that infected humans were present there, and nothing in their study can distinguish an infected palm civet from a healthy palm civet near an infected human.
A different study by Jesse Bloom found that of all the animals present, viral RNA correlated most strongly with DNA from "catfish and largemouth bass":
https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/9/2/vead050/7249794
So were those the proximal hosts? Obviously not, since SARS-CoV-2 can't infect fish--the point is that this is all just noise. Live, unquestionably infected proximal hosts were found for both SARS-1 and MERS, within about a year of the first human cases. For SARS-CoV-2, we still have nothing beyond those tortured metagenomics.
Civets at the very least are known to be the host for SARS-CoV virus that jumped to humans. The first affected people all had in common the market, and not the lab. Samples from the market in early 2020 found a lot of SARS-CoV-2 everywhere, specially at stalls that were selling poultry and racoons. The market was stuffed with animals. As poor as the security was in the lab, the market was orders of magnitude worse.
I might be wrong but I swear I read they never found cov 2 in an animal that could transmit to humans
And of course the Chinese government restricts access--there's no way to prove a negative, thus no way to exonerate them. No matter what investigators are allowed to see there will always be the allegation that they aren't being allowed to see the important stuff.
But I see no reason to suspect a leak from the hot part of the lab. While it's not impossible I see no non-political reason to think it did happen.
It's obviously false if you just think about it, but you can also do some searching if you need some authority to tell you.
I would not trust any of these agencies to provide objective findings or conclusions, there is a lot of power on the table that's at stake.
The intelligence networks there were weak, and if people were talking about it, they may have assumed wrongly that there was something there.
Politicians hunting for excuses to do what they already want to do though, is definitely a thing.
Just to be clear: The people in charge are the CIA, not GWB. GWB was simply the right useful idiot at the right time in the right place.
I don’t know where you are getting your information from but it’s absolutely incorrect.
It was Cheney specifically who was relying on Chalabi whom the CIA had repeatedly dismissed as a fabricator which is what was used as evidence.
There were a lot of indications that it was wrong even at the time, like the inspectors’ reports. We knew about the unreliability of the dodgy dossier and how baseless Khidir Hamza was. The satellite evidence was sketchy and the rest was contradictory. Al-Qaeda was also not there and we also knew that. Let’s not rewrite history: there is no certainty in intelligence, but anyone not in the CIA’s pocket knew it was most likely wrong, a far cry from what you need to legitimately attack a country.
HANNITY: So he had them.
SADA: Yes.
HANNITY: Where were they? And were they moved and where?
SADA: Well, up to the year 2002, 2002, in summer, they were in Iraq. And after that, when Saddam realized that the inspectors are coming on the first of November and the Americans are coming, so he took the advantage of a natural disaster happened in Syria, a dam was broken. So he — he announced to the world that he is going to make an air bridge...
HANNITY: You know for a fact he moved these weapons to Syria?
SADA: Yes.
HANNITY: How do you know that?
SADA: I know it because I have got the captains of the Iraqi airway that were my friends, and they told me these weapons of mass destruction had been moved to Syria.
BECKEL: How did he move them, general? How were they moved?
SADA: They were moved by air and by ground, 56 sorties by jumbo, 747, and 27 were moved, after they were converted to cargo aircraft, they were moved to Syria.
We went into Iraq because the White House latched on to insufficient and contested intel of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq (the yellowcake and the aluminum tubes). It wasn’t about some rusted old artillery rounds with chemical weapons in them.
1) People I trust are skeptical, including people who are opposed to gain of function research. I've found Angela Rasmussen to be one of the better voices in terms of discussing the evidence for a natural origin, but she's far from the only one.
2) We have had two naturally occurring coronavirus epidemics during my career. A third is all but inevitable -- I wrote a grant in October 2019 suggesting a novel coronavirus as an example case for a modeling exercise, for example (sadly, said grant didn't get funded). So for me, there's a very strong prior on coronaviruses emerging as significant public health threats.
3) At the same time, I've come to distrust many of the voices who push the lab leak hypothesis, either because they're obviously doing so for geopolitical reasons, or because they've become addicted to being "the lone voice in the wilderness", despite it not being a risky position to take.
4) The lab leak hypothesis, in terms of evidence, relies on WIV, the Chinese Government, the WHO, etc. being broadly incompetent except when it comes to the characterization of the initial cases when SARS-CoV-2 emerged, which is arguably the hardest part of any outbreak.
My prior is that it is a zoonotic spillover event. Not necessarily that one, though there is some good evidence for it.
There were no similar reports in another place on this planet. (Since 99% of other places do not have full control of media and many have better healthcare so if it happened it would be less likely to go unnoticed)
Covid detected in wastewater samples
December 2019 in Italy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7428442/
>November 2019 in Brazil: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.26.20140731v...
They found covid in samples of the sewage system in SC state Brazil in November. 2 months before it came out of wuhan
https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/saude/novo-coronavirus-ja-estav...
>March 2019 in Spain: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...
Brazil recorded its first COVID death April 15, 2019. Initially taken as a data entry error by some, data for 2019 is still published nearly six years after the fact.
https://transparencia.registrocivil.org.br/dados-covid-downl...
November Brazil could happen because December is when rumours already circulated in China and October is when it was out in Wuhan already per your link.
April Brazil I don't know what to tell you, no sources support the wild claim that it was NOT a data error.
> 2 months before it came out of wuhan
Source? I bet it came out earlier. It was circulating in Wuhan before the pandemic according to WHO. Just people in China who are more likely to get infected are less likely to travel abroad (social class/sanitary conditions/etc) but maybe one person brought it out.
> A joint study published by China and the World Health Organization at the end of March acknowledged there could have been sporadic human infections before the Wuhan outbreak.
> Researchers from Britain's University of Kent used methods from conservation science to estimate that SARS-CoV-2 first appeared from early October to mid-November 2019, according to a paper published in the PLOS Pathogens journal.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52975934.amp
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/08/health/satellite-pics-cor...
That makes it odd that you're promoting an author who has claimed such evidence shows conclusively that spillover into humans--and not just a super-spreader event--occurred in the Huanan Seafood Market. I suspect that if you looked personally at the methodology behind the conflicted (Rasmussen's doctorate was under Vincent Racaniello, a longtime proponent of high-risk virological research) authors' claims, then you'd find them much less worthy of repetition.
> There’s really no explanation other than that the virus started spreading in the human population at that market
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/13/angela-rasmuss...
The claim that the location of spillover can be definitively localized within hundreds of meters from epidemiological data is core to the predominant theory of natural zoonotic origin, from an overlapping set of authors including Rasmussen.
Theories of a research accident almost never assume such localization is possible, not least because the earliest known cases weren't particularly close to the WIV. (If anyone's claiming otherwise, they've probably confused the WIV and Wuhan CDC.) So it's odd that you'd correctly note the near-impossibility of that localization, but then cite that as evidence against unnatural origin.
This makes me think you haven't looked much in the details yourself, and two of your four points above are explicitly arguments from authority. If you did look yourself, then I think your assessment might change.
The institute would never be full.
There is no "bring your child to work day" in China.
Weird conflation, unlikely... uunless you mean to muddy the waters and sow dis-information.
Why would Wuhan center being empty represent anything?
People don't rush to a random (unrelated) building when they get sick at the "market".
Coincidence, surely?
What are the chances of having a specialized infectious disease center next to where that type of disease spontaneously emerged?
More or less likely than a bat having sex with a panda possum?
No one, not even the cowardly academics, believed it.
This frankly makes me distrust you; in 2020-2022 this was absolutely a risky position to take for most public figures, let alone those on academia, let alone those connected to epidemiology. This remains the only time and topic I've seen blanket banned from discussing across all major US social platforms. Try looking up what the vibe was like in 2020-2021 especially.
It still isn't even acceptable to acknowledge the (blatant) possibility that Omnicron was intentionally leaked because of low vaccine effectiveness.
Opinions do correlate in the general public, and I guess that's why you've made that link. I don't think that trend holds among scientists, though--Deigin, Chan, Ebright, Bloom, etc. all have quite ordinary views on vaccine risk and efficacy.
Yet you propose no thoughts of your own. You only base it on your belief in people around you and your disbelief of people you assume are political. This sounds not scientific at all. Are you really an epidemiologist?
I was honestly hoping for more given that you’re supposedly an epidemiologist.
This is the problem with virology, it IS GoF. Expecting virologists to be objective in this is expecting the impossible, like expecting the WHO to apologize for sending Daszak as head of the fact finding mission. They were either THAT incompetent or THAT self interested in maintaing GoF/virology, damn the truth.
I suspect virologists still see themselves as guards on the wall and that we can't handle the truth. Which we already know from the early emails is how they thought early on, why should I assume their propensity for dishonesty has changed?
The lab leak hypothesis means "accelerated evolution" through either caged animals or "in vitro cells" infecting the lab personnel. Gene splicing and such are not necessary to make the argument.
The observed fact pointing to this is the number of generations required to produce the divergence between the first SCoV2 variant and the closest wild ancestor. It corresponds to something like 20 years (?) of evolution.
"...zoonosis (a disease communicable from animals to man under natural conditions)." —Laurie Garrett, _The Coming Plague_ (Ch 14, section IV)
Which is naturally how the word is used virtually all the time.
Transmission from lab animals kept for study in a biolab, you could argue either way. Transmission from humanized lab animals purposely subjected to serial passage is not really zoonosis in any reasonable sense.
What's notable about the SCov2 variant is how well it spreads between humans. It probably has made the jump many times, it's just this time it figured out how to spread.
“Low confidence” means that there is a lack of evidence and the statement is ambiguous; that it could be completely true, or completely false. The only lower confidence would be direct evidence that it is outright false. Given, as you said, how nearly impossible it would be to prove true, wouldn’t you think it equally nearly impossible to prove false?
Believe what you want, but even the CIA doesn’t lean on the side of you being right.
Obviously, it's not impossible.
But, there were even RNA samples from Covid found in other countries, months before Covid really spread in China.
I imagine the main problem with the superspreader event there was more that enough people ended up in the same hospital, and thus it was easier to identify that Covid was a distinct virus.
If it was crawling around in a less dense population, its spread would've been meh, and the hospitals might not even notice the spike much.
Well in this case it’s more like if if a new flu burst onto the scene with the following all being true:
- the epicenter of the outbreak being within a few miles of the CDC
- the CDC working specifically on gain of function for new strains of the flu
- the CDC being cited in whistleblower reports to the outbreak for poor safety and security protocols in the years prior to the outbreak
- inability to find the natural reservoir the virus crossed over from, despite years of searching in the biggest virus hunt in human history
- the closest naturally occurring relative of the virus being found in bats that are only native in areas hundreds of miles away (in this analogy, something like the upper Midwest), that also happen to be among the species of bats being studied by the lab at the CDC
- several CDC employees being among the earliest discovered cases, so early that they occurred before the disease was even picked up in the radar and were only discovered when searching for the earliest cases
- the US government preventing any none government health officials in or out of the area of the infection for several weeks after the outbreak
- the sole other identified potential outbreak location, the wet market nearby, was completely sterilized by the US government within the first two weeks of the outbreak, over the protests of international investigators who hadn’t yet been given access to it, thereby preventing them from ever being able to confirm or deny if it was the actual ground zero of the outbreak.
“Low confidence” doesn’t mean there is a lack of evidence, it means there is a lack of direct evidence. Problem is there is a lack of direct evidence for any alternative theory as well. There is, however, and overwhelming about of circumstantial evidence supporting the lab leak. The CIA isn’t going to issue accusations like this without a smoking bullet, which they will never have.
The reality is that had this occurred under any other administration, the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t be so taboo. But Trump is a serial conspiracy theorist and pugilistic nationalist, so the second he floated it everyone on the left, which includes much in academia, immediately disputed it in a knee jerk reaction, despite not having much evidence either way. Since then what evidence exists has increasingly supported the lab leak theory, but many are walking back from entrenched positions. If this had happened when Obama was president I don’t think anyone would be pushing back on this with the evidence that exists.
We should expect that the first outbreaks documented are those that happen to be close to facilities capable of identifying and documenting them.
There was a point at the beginning of the covid pandemic where the governor was declaring that the state only hand a few cases, and there was not great need for concern. The pneumonia death rates for the previous months showed a different story. For the previous two months the death rates were 10x higher that normal. Nobody seemed to have noticed that at the state level.
Most outbreaks follow a pattern where the disease shows up in small pockets for many years before it becomes an epidemic. HIV is an example. The first HIV death in the USA happened in 1969. The oldest confirmed case in Africa is in '59. The oldest suspected death in the US is '52.
Crossover tends to happen multiple times, and there is no reason to expect otherwise with covid-19. The problem with finding these cases is that it happened in an area governed by an authoritarian ruler. Authoritarians don't want to admit that there are things out of their control, and by inclination they conceal bad news, or news that makes them look like they're less than omnipotent. They shift blame rather than dealing with problem.
The love of the lab theory in the US seems to be driven by the same desire to push the blame on someone else. It takes the focus away from the incompetent response.
Perhaps the WIV secretly discovered the new virus by more sophisticated means before those doctors did. There's no evidence for this, but maybe. There is no possibility that a Wuhan-level outbreak occurred in a different city first, though. China keeps tight control of their mass media, but mortality on that level is impossible to conceal. Do you not remember 2020? The coffin shortages? So your implication that the WIV's presence somehow caused the first cases in a natural pandemic to get ascertained in Wuhan just doesn't make sense.
This topic is unfortunately politicized, and you're not helping. I think it would be helpful to spend more timing studying the scientific evidence, and less time speculating over the motivations of one's perceived ideological opponents.
I never said I was right. I said it makes a lot of sense and I believe it's probably true.
This is the sort of thing that neither of us can prove to the other at this point. You seem awfully aggressive to prove something though.
If you have access to the labs. Second hand information and extremely delayed visits to labs in a one party state are a whole other matter.
I assumed they overestimated a bit for effect and put it at around 1%.
Pandemics have historically happened somewhere around ever 100 years. What's that annual probability? 1%.
So if you knew NOTHING else, from a bayesian standpoint, if you have to differentiate a once in a 100 year spillover or a lab leak, you would put it at 50/50.
Now add in the fact that the outbreak occurred right next to a BSL lab. Now add in the fact that this lab specialized in the exact type of virus that caused the pandemic. Now add in the fact that lab workers at that lab got hospitalized with respiratory symtpoms in November. Now add in the fact that China responded with tons of secrecy, pulled down their genomic database of known viruses in their Wuhan lab, Xi issued a proclamation in February that they were revamping safety at BSL labs to prevent leaks, and that the virus in question is remarkably similar to one they found in 2013 thousands of miles away, and add the fact that there was a proposal to modify cornaviruses to have a furan cleavage site to perform gain of function research and that the COVID virus has just such a furan cleavage site, and this virus emerged remarkably well adapted to humans very very quickly. Now how about the fact that China pushed the wet market theory even after they'd figured out that probably wasn't the case? Now add in the fact that China let SARS escape from the lab TWICE in the previous decade.
How does that affect your truth value? All the facts above push the probalistic truth value toward a lab leak. There are a few facts that push it back a little the other way, but there aren't very many that I've found.
We have known about coronaviruses for almost 100 years, and we have been studying them due to their dangers for atleast 60 years, and it has likely existed since before humans could be called human. And it has been shown to be a highly virulent numerous times in many different forms. No matter how low the chances of winning the lottery, when literally billions of people are playing it daily, it is only of matter of when, not if, it turns into something more dangerous.
Now none of that comes anywhere near proving anything, but the fact that we have had multiple coronavirus infections in the past, many of which have come dangerously close to pandemic level infections, makes a natural occurrence seem the most likely source.
On top of all that, even if it did come from a lab, why does that matter? A handful of extra lottery tickets were sold and someone won from that pool. This isn't some bioweapon modified virus purposefully bred from a farm of human subjects, you would never be able to get away with such a program in a large publicly known virology lab and we aren't knowledgeable enough in viral genetics to make something like that without testing it on farms of people. There are no markers indicating engineering it in any way that we are actually capable of. And worst case it is something a mere handful of unguided generations away from a sample that was pulled from the public already and the lab got "lucky" with a random mutation on a petri dish they were studying.
As someone that makes forecasts for a living, I'd like to see what you're assumptions are about the base rates there.
As for how the facts produce modifications to the base rate, personally I think that a virus identified in a cave over a thousand miles away popping up in a very urban area right next to a BSL facility that specializes in researching that type of virus moves the needle toward it being more likely a lab escape. You seem to feel otherwise and I don't really agree. In particular, if you take the converse: suppose the virus wasn't known at all to man, you'd probably argue it also pushes you toward the conclusion that it was a natural spillover. (In which case, I'd be in agreement.) So I don't think that argument is really a logical one.
Your objection in the last paragraph, describing this as a "bioweapon modified virus" is really a classic strawman, and since it isn't the argument I was making I see no reason to indulge it. It is indeed a relatively ridiculous notion.
Also, just for precision, my own assessment of the truth value there is about 70% in favor of a lab-leak.
In the last few decades there have been 1-2 confirmed lab leaks per year. And they're often thing like "we found a vial of smallpox we didn't know we had" not new diseases.
Nature very capably produced colds, flus, a bunch of nasty diarrhoeal diseases, the many and varied sexually transmitted diseases, the hemorrhagic fevers, and so on. For "some new disease variant that I don't know anything about", my prior would be more like 1/99 lab leak to natural origin.
It’s flu season and Chinese don’t go zoom their Dr, they go and check into the hospital.
In other countries, it would be considered sociopathy to go to work with a flu, but we’re all Real Americans so anything different means… conspiracy.
So that intel doesn't push us one way or the other very much. Although perhaps the absence of known lab-worker hospitalizations is an argument against the lab-leak though.
The outbreak was likely to happen in a large population center near where the bats were. The actual probability that it went north and happened in Wuhan was probably 1-in-12 or so. And the first time there was a coronavirus spillover and pandemic, it happened in Guangzhou. So we rolled 1d12 once and didn't get a 1 and then rolled it again and did. Not that mind-blowingly improbable.
Also, not surprising that the lab was in a major city somewhat central and closer to the bats than e.g. Beijing. Because that is what it was set up to study.
> Now add in the fact that lab workers at that lab got hospitalized with respiratory symtpoms in November.
This has been asserted by a story in the NYT, but never proven and denied by WIV. There's literally no evidence of this.
> and that the virus in question is remarkably similar to one they found in 2013 thousands of miles away,
Still roughly a thousand base pairs and a few decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2. You can't get from RaTG-13 to SARS-CoV-2 in a lab, and there's no evidence they ever had live virus RaTG-13 in the lab.
> and that the COVID virus has just such a furan cleavage site
It had a novel PRRAR furin cleavage site which had never been seen before. Not one that humans would have ever guessed. That is actually strong evidence AGAINST it being lab-made.
As we've discussed, the greatest abundance of related viruses occurred around Yunnan and Southeast Asia. Dr. Shi herself didn't expect spillover in 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...
Wuhan was "closer to the bats" only in the sense that New York City is "closer to the alligators" than Boston. There's little reason to choose that phrasing except to deliberately mislead.
I've warned repeatedly that the failure of competent scientists to engage with the real possibility that their research caused this pandemic will result in a blunt and damaging backlash. We're watching that damage now in real time.
And SARS-CoV-1 occurred in Guangzhou. The closest known relative virus (WIV16) is 96% homologous to SARS-CoV-1 and was found in Yunnan as well, which is over 1,000 km away from Guangzhou. Either the range of the bats carrying these coronaviruses is much larger than anyone in the world (including Dr Shi) knows about, or else the "blast radius" of the animal trade in China is considerably larger than anyone knows about.
I don't think spillover of SARS-1 from bats in Guangzhou is commonly proposed. If you've seen it (and didn't just include that option for completeness), then I'd appreciate the reference.
I agree that unexpected things sometimes happen. Nobody expected spillover in Wuhan pre-pandemic though, and the WIV absolutely wasn't situated based on any such expectation.
The SARS-CoV-1 virus moved over 1000km from Yunnan to Guangzhou.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus moved over 1000km from Yunnan to Wuhan.
This is the same fucking problem. One way or another we know it has a solution that doesn't involve WIV due to the SARS-CoV-1 spillover.
If we can explain SARS-CoV-1 without WIV then we can explain SARS-CoV-2 without WIV.
> I don't think spillover of SARS-1 from bats in Guangzhou is commonly proposed.
I never suggested that was definitely what happened, and I kind of doubt it, I think the wildlife trade is more likely. At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if the range of the viruses in bats is larger than we know right now.
> Nobody expected spillover in Wuhan pre-pandemic though
Which doesn't mean it didn't happen.
> and the WIV absolutely wasn't situated based on any such expectation.
The central location made Yunnan a lot more accessible than if WIV was in Beijing, and puts it around about the same distance from Yunnan as Guangzhou is.
I guess we're just endlessly arguing the same uncertain technicalities now. I miss the days when actual new information was becoming available, and appreciated the chance to discuss with someone informed with opposing views. It would be nice to confidently learn the truth someday. Perhaps the new administration will release something, but I think it's much more likely they'll just poison the topic politically even more.
(Not to knock Emory students, I love them, but Emory has a relationship with the CDC and grad students can be cavalier)
any scientist that has any molecular biology wet experience will tell you this is exactly what they would have done (though us researchers would probably not have pulled from the patented BLAST sequences, since that selector is turned off by default by the NCBI)
Sigh. Here's the first line from the patent: "The present invention provides a cDNA of a severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus".
You don't think that two coronaviruses just might have similar structural proteins?
The article: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.33...
The sequence (reverse complemented) matches positions 2751-2733 of sequence ID 11652 attached to the patent: https://seqdata.uspto.gov/seqdetail?docId=US09587003B2&publi... - as the other person said, it's located in the S1/S2 furin cleavage site, and produces no BLAST hits outside the SARS-CoV-2 lineage.
It's not entirely clear to me when the sequence was incorporated into the patent - it doesn't look like it was in the first revision. But it looks like it was added before 2020.
The whole theory still has gaps (even if we assume someone was searching specifically within that patent, what would a screen look like to single out that sequence? It would have to be very high throughput and use very sophisticated modeling), but it's interesting.
Generally though, China is somewhat better suited to producing pandemics, because they have a larger and more dense population within which a disease can spread.
And MERS. It’s not like coronaviruses causing epidemics were very surprising at the time.
Interestingly it was also clearly airborne and able to spread long distances in aerosols moved by air currents. Investigators traced those air flows in some cases to explain movements of the virus. Yet despite being literally called SARS-2 the WHO and other self-declared sources of expertise all denied that this was possible, and attacked people who pointed out that it was. The desire for lockdowns and masks to be perceived as credible outweighed prior experience with similar viruses, turning those who tried to learn from history into pariahs.
This gentleman works in a US national lab, graduated top of his class in a top Chinese school and has friends that, at the time, worked in the Wuhan lab.
He, while very proud of being Chinese, was very critical of what he perceived his countrymen's lax safety standards. Myself, I can't judge that as I am not Chinese or an experimentalist so I deferred to his expertise and experience.
May be in the west? It was certainly well publicised in other regions.
Looking for reparations is secondary to that, but maybe not entirely unreasonable either; not that it'll ever happen.
Does COVID being a “plague” jibe with the talking point that COVID is “no worse than a cold”
Ultimately the question should be, how can we improve our systems to better respond to future pandemics. Does it matter if it was a lab leak? What will that do for those who died? Will revenge prevent a future pandemic from happening? Viruses and bacteria do not care about their nation of origin, once its out its out.
Yes, the annoying thing is that "the truth about covid" literally only matters to culture war grievances, it has no relevance whatsoever to the actual world. If it was a lab leak, then China needs to improve their BSL-4 safety... but they need to do that anyway[0]. If it was zoonotic, then they need to clean up the wet markets... but they need to do that anyway. The true origin of covid makes no difference at all, and I wish these people would just come out and admit this is all domestic political peacocking.
[0]: and so does everyone else, for that matter. The US has also had several close calls with BSL-4 leaks; if covid did originate from a lab leak, the fact that it wasn't from an American lab is just sheer dumb luck.
Conversely, if it were a natural outbreak then that bolsters the case for continuing gain of function research as before. Such research is precisely why we were able to identify the threat and within weeks assemble a vaccine, at least on paper. (Granted, the arc began long before 2019 with a through-line of research going back to the 2002 SARS outbreak.) And it's why we've many other advancements. Creation of CRISPR and related technology emerged in part out of gain of function research with viruses. Gain of function is a critical tool in testing hypotheses about how foundational molecular machinery works, and viruses are a convenient research model for exploring and testing ideas in that space.
But I'm not sure the origin should matter to that debate. And I'm even more sure it probably won't matter, even if we agreed on a definitive answer.
I get your perspective: an outbreak is an unfortunate byproduct of the risks necessary for scientific progress. No one couldve known how bad it would be. The damage is done, learn from your mistakes and move on. Very enlightened.
In the real world, people will lose their absolute shit. There would be near global demand for sanctions and reparations, and there's enough anti china sentiment that its a real possibility.
Backed into a corner, the world against them, they would have no other choice. It would be a matter of survival.
1. why?
2. that attitude strongly disincentives the discovery of the truth. If that were true I would support a cover up!
"Cover it up anyway" pretty much. There's precedent for this, we never got the full truth about 9/11 either. To this day the 100 page dossier is off limits to the public, probably for similar reasoning. The USA wants to play the board opportunistically without regard for justice or public outrage. And then people wonder why the public feels abandoned by their government.
Why is a lab outbreak worse than a wet market outbreak?
Some say the intent of a firearm is self defense, as the intent of a nuclear bomb is a deterrent.
Finally, what role does intent play in the poker world championship?
And for record of the court, arson by negligence is a criminal offense.
People just assumed that the wet markets were the cause of the problem, because they found them digusting (and wanted an excuse to blame it on the Chinese being evil).
In a less dense population, without many people going to the same hospital... You would just not have noticed Covid much.
> “Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Mr. Cotton said.
That could backfire in a couple ways.
1. China could say that they'll consider paying for COVID escaping their borders if the US pays for the damage the things that have escaped its borders have caused, such as greenhouse gases.
Yes, I know that China currently is emitting more greenhouse gases than the US, but since CO2 emissions stay in the atmosphere for several hundred or even thousands of years the US is responsible for more of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere than China is.
It's 26% US, 16% China, 7% Russia, 6% Germany, 5% UK, 4% Japan, 4% India, 2% France, 2% Canada, 2% Ukraine, 2% Poland, rounded to the nearest 1%. All the rest of the countries round to 1% or 0%.
That's a can of worms I don't think the US wants to open.
2. China could say they they'll consider paying, but only up to the amount of damages that would have been reasonably incurred if the US had handled COVID competently.
There were several distinct patterns in COVID deaths in the US. First, there were states like Washington that had a fairly linear growth in the cumulative number of deaths per capita from the start through April 2022, and then after that continued with a linear growth but not as steep.
Then there were states like New York, which got hit very hard in the first two months, because of a combination of nobody really knowing yet how to treat it and dense populations of especially vulnerable people. New York reached in two months a deaths per capita number that Washington took 22 months to reach.
But after those first two months, New York's deaths grew at about the same rate as Washington's, except during the Delta surge and to a lesser extent the Omicron surge. Washington's rate picked up during those surges, but not very much.
There were states like Florida. Its curve was like Washington's first 3 months, the switched to growing about twice as fast. By the end of 2021 it had almost caught up to New York. From then it and New York both continued at about the same rate was Washington, with Florida slightly higher so it passed New York in August 2022.
Other states tended to be a mix of those three patterns. California was close to Washington up until Delta, which brought it to near Florida, but then after Delta was was similar to Washington. A little better actually. Right after Delta it had about 70 more deaths per 100k than Washington, but by March 2023 was down to 56 more deaths per 100k.
Texas was like Florida until Omicron, which it handled better, and after that it was similar to Washington, or even a little better. It had 140 more deaths per 100k than Washington right after Omicron, but only 115 more by March 2023.
By March 2023, which is when the data I'm using ends, Washington stood at 206 deaths per 100k population, California at 256, Texas at 322, New York at 396, and Florida at 404.
Tom Cotton's state, Arkansas, was basically the same pattern as Florida, except with a higher rate. It ended up at 431 deaths per 100k by March 2023.
A good case can probably be made that somewhere from 25% to 50% of the Florida deaths were due to Florida's lax handling of the pandemic.
That too is probably a can of worms many politicians would not want to open, especially if their state is one of the ones that China would be arguing should get greatly reduced damages.
Or just covid. I remember after PRC lockdown when regional countries were publishing their inbound repatriation flight test data and basically they only got very low digit covid positives, i.e. it was epidemiologically containable. At same time you have all the news of western travellers spreading covid to different countrries because they kept borders open.
"Genetic analysis and several unusual characteristics of the 1977 Russian flu have prompted many researchers to say that the virus was released to the public through a laboratory accident, or resulted from a live-vaccine trial escape"
Ex: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/vaccine-derived-p...
In general, people prefer understood risks to new risks because the system is better adapted to them — both biologically and politically.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2887442/
I will have to have a discussion with the editors of that page.
> the result of vaccine trials in the Far East involving the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus (C.M. Chu, personal communication)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm1141
That part is genuinely uncertain though, and probably unanswerable. Historical surveillance was weak, and those who do have information may not wish to implicitly confess to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
No one is seriously questioning that it spent ~20 years in a lab freezer. There was some speculation about virus frozen in the Arctic or such; but since that's never been observed to happen any other time, and multiple labs were known to be working with frozen and thawed virus, I think that's pretty abandoned.
Sure, it’s not a gotcha if we divorce such a statement from all of its surrounding context.
But context in communication is incredibly important, and it’s unwise to analyze these kinds of statements in a context-free manner. I find it occurs on this site fairly often; it seems endemic to engineers. I try hard to avoid it myself, but frequently fail.
The relevant context here, of course, is the rabid anti-China sentiment expressed by folks like Sen. Cotton for years, dating back to well before the COVID pandemic. I take no position on whether or not his views are accurate or fair - but a context-informed analysis of the situation suggests that Sen. Cotton (and others) are not simply seeking truth and accountability: rather, they seek pretext to justify their views.
1) Multiple departments of the executive branch were saying this under Biden too.
2) The US gov’t funded the biological weapons research lab at Wuhan. Mr Cotton has been a senator for 10 years, and therefore was around when the funding was approved. So if he wants to find someone to punish, maybe he should look in a mirror.
Briefly, under Obama gain of function research was banned for a while. During this time Fauci signed off on illegal grants to fund GoF research, funnelled through a British NGO in order to evade detection and the ban. The NGO didn't do the research themselves, they then sent the money to Wuhan to fund experiments done there. Thus Fauci was using US money to do banned research, which he then lied about under oath to Congress. It's for this sort of reason that he's now been pardoned by Biden, as otherwise he would likely have been prosecuted. Whether you can actually retroactively pardon someone for any/all crimes without actually specifying what for and without that person actually having been found guilty is a bit unclear, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology
This lab was an international cooperation, from back in the days where there were such things.
Vertiginous to think about the layers of unknowns.
Go watch "A Bridge Too Far" (WWII). Read the story of the Son Tay raid (Vietnam). The many overestimates of Soviet capability during the Cold War. The underestimates of North Korean missile capability. Sometimes uncertain intel really works, as with the attack on the bin Laden compound in Pakistan.
Retrospective intel questions may never be answered. It's known that the US atomic bomb program had another Russian spy who is mentioned by code name in VENONA transcripts, but that spy was never identified. There are still arguments over whether the explosion of the Maine in Havana harbor in 1889 was an accident or a hostile act. It's still not clear why Turret 2 of the USS Iowa blew up in 1989. Huge amounts of effort were expended on all three of those questions, all of which were important at the time, and yet they remain unsettled.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Article-Principles-...
Let's say that any donation to any Democratic campaign makes you a Democrat (ignoring for a moment that being against Trump isn't the same as being for Democrats). By that logic maybe half of the signatories on that letter are Democrats--and also a few are Republicans. Also many "Democratic" signatories signed a letter against Obama when he revoked Brennan's security clearance, so how in the tank can they really be? Also the main way the Hunter Biden emails were "authenticated" was via DKIM, which would allow you to mix fake emails in with real emails (we recently learned you could do this with $8 of server time). Too farfetched? The Russians did it to Macron in 2017. Also let's not equate creating a false basis for a full on war with 51 intelligence professionals raising doubts.
I think you may have the causation reversed. I voted for Biden in 2020. But the intelligence community has no credibility and are just trying to get us into war with Russia. That letter never should’ve been taken seriously by real democrats.
I really don't give a shit about how credible the US IC is; no part of my identity is invested in how well they do their job. But the attempt to generalize this out to the parties themselves rankles, and is trollish.
I think where I disagree with rayiner is that I believe she _was_ toxic. Her endorsement is certainly one of my grievances with the party, as a Democratic voter, and we saw the big tent collapse because of, in part, the current hawkishness of that part of the leadership.
"She is a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face."
Trump has a (literal) record of advocating for and perpetrating violence against women and minorities. I don't know of any elected Dems who called it anti-woman (there's a trend of taking any Dem on X as representative, which isn't a good survey), but if they did that's the nicest thing you could say about it.
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FWIW I agree the Cheney thing was boneheaded, and the defense of "she offered to campaign" is... prrrrrrretty wimpy. Some people argued you needed to shake people in the middle free, but no one in the middle likes Liz Cheney; she's mega conservative.
Trump’s comment is a common way democrats have criticized hawks since the Vietnam war: asking if they’d be singing a different tune if they were the ones in the trenches getting shot at.
The fact that you’d invoke the “women and minorities” card to defend Liz effing Cheney is proof that the CIA has learned how to use wokeness as a psyop to eviscerate the antiwar left.
Cheney comes from a family of chicken hawks and lots of people have had similar quotes about them.
The Cheney thing reminds me of people's attitudes towards John McCain. His history in the GOP: also not great. But in the end, he did have some principles; it's not unreasonable to celebrate them.
None of this is really germane to the thread, I just get irritable when directly partisan Democrat vs. Republican politics end up here.
Most leaders are aware that people might cue off of what they're saying and do something very bad, so they stay far away from rhetoric like this. Trump (deliberately IMO) does the opposite for political gain. So even if I agree this is about combat, what's the difference? He's once again engaging in his pattern of dehumanizing his opponents and advocating violence against them, which has led to actual violence.
Elsewhere you pointed out this is pretty similar to Vietnam War protests. I think generally that's right (again "Fortunate Son"), but there are some differences. First is there isn't a draft; we have an all volunteer force (though there's a big discussion to be had about economic exploitation and multi-generational military families). Second, she wasn't even in Congress during Bush 2 and AFAIK had no policy making power where she was at State.
Do I love Liz Cheney? Hell no; her policy positions are one disaster after the next. I believe she should be vigorously opposed in every election she runs in. But do I think she should be subject to wink wink "sure would be a shame if something happened to Liz Cheney" rhetoric from maybe the most powerful person on Earth? Absolutely not; no one deserves that.
> I don’t blame (Dick Cheney) for sticking with his daughter, but his daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb. She is a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.
She has a rifle, and there are nine other guns pointed at her. When are people facing a firing squad given their own weapon? The quote is literally a textbook “what if the war hawk’s shoe were on the other foot” trope.
There's a difference between talking like you're an LLM trained by focus groups and endangering your political rivals with your rhetoric. A lot of Democratic senators are/were good at that. Don't make yet another false equivalence here.
Hawks are by no means the majority of democrats, but Romney 2012 types are the margin democrat voter. And while the majority of democrats aren’t hawks, the party’s dominant principle as of late seems to be trusting credentialed experts, which makes them suckers for the intelligence community.
Also, Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney suggests that her campaign thought that Romney 2012 voters were their marginal vote.
Self identifying with a political party erodes critical thinking skills. Unless you can criticize the stupidity of all, including those you vote for, you are limited by your own stupidity.
Self identity ignorance is prominent in religious cultures where the church must be protected. The congregation will protect a priest or pastor that is sexual predator and pretend their actions didn't take place to protect their community. They loose their identity when their church is harmed, same with latching to political parties.
I agree parties shouldn’t be so ideologically rigid, and for the most part they aren’t. Jamie Dimon and AOC are both in the same party, as are Marco Rubio and Tulsi Gabbard. People who refuse to work within a party unless the party agrees on every issue are simply not interested in outcomes. That’s fine too!
I mean this respectfully: how old are you? Because that isn’t a “Fox News” comment at all! Until five minutes ago, Democrats were the ones who criticized Bush-era republicans for their fixation on Russia and efforts to keep fighting the Cold War: https://youtu.be/T1409sXBleg?si=Pz2Yd_vY4ZARbcvs
And yes, the intelligence community has been trying to get us into a war with Russia or its proxies since the 1950s. The whole idea that Americans have “allies” or “interests” in Eastern Europe is a Reagan-era CIA psyop.
I don't want to parse through everything here, and you definitely won't find me defending the intelligence establishment. All I'm saying is what tptacek said up there: stretching the Hunter Biden laptop letter signatories into "Democrats" stretches too far, and if that's the evidence you're bringing against the Iraq War and Valerie Plame you're coming up short. You have a big platform here; I think if you were a little more judicious about the claims you make you could do a lot of good, and I think we need that right now.
I don’t know what’s in the inner minds of other democrats. But out of the two parties, they’re cuddling up to all the ones who have been wrong for the last 50 years about foreign policy.
See I knew there was something I liked about you haha.
Hopefully this doesn't come across as deflecting or whatever (HRC has a lot of takes I disagree with, I think she would have been a very good president, but I'm more of a Warren or Booker guy). I think being an effective leader in the US at the level HRC was for decades is a lot harder than people really know. I'm not talking about the mechanics (though those are also hard), rather I'm talking about the effect it has on you as a human. I think the act of building a mental model of public opinion is fundamentally corrupting, but if you don't do it, you'll almost certainly lose power to someone who does (or you could be in a super safe seat, but that's not an option for everyone). You probably also think a big part of your job is representing your constituents, so there's a huge amount of balancing divining and representing their positions vs. leading them to where they might not necessarily be. The stakes are also bananas: you're talking about the lives of tons and tons of people. This is all very hard; I can't really overstate how mindfucking it can be.
So to come back around to your point, let's take an incredibly cynical view and say HRC authorized the Iraq War because that was the obvious power politics move. It's not wrong to consider, "I'm pursuing values I think are important, I'm effective at it, the odds of someone doing better or being more principled than I am are very low--after all this game is by itself deeply corrupting to even the best of us, taking a stand here has almost no upside, I do want to be president one day, OK I vote yea". This all really reasonable, then you throw on the pile her changing her vote would've made absolutely no difference, and she's the junior Senator from New York where 9/11 happened, and at least I start having a lot of sympathy for her vote. I don't mean to diminish the full on tragedies Iraq and Afghanistan were, but these are the kinds of stakes and incentives we're working with here.
So I try to be pretty kind to electeds, even on both sides, because the incentives are truly nutso. Maybe you're Trey Gowdy and you don't love having 5,000 Benghazi hearings, but you've got this plum committee assignment you don't want to lose, so here we go. Maybe you're John Boehner and you don't love being asked vaguely racist questions about Obama's birth certificate constantly, but you're finally Speaker and this is the zeitgeist. Anyway, I earnestly think we urgently need some kind of deep governance reform or whatever. It's almost impossible for the system to produce good outcomes. I'm not saying get the torches; I am saying start putting it in party platforms and get candidates on record about it.
Finally, you ask how I could trust her after her Iraq war vote, but Democrats are pretty used to not having our policy preferences represented in office. Again while I think HRC would have been a very good president, there are other people I'd have preferred. But that's what primaries and party politics are for, and that process is... imperfect. I voted for Obama in the '08 Iowa caucus largely because of her Iraq War vote and--hilariously--I liked Obama saying you wouldn't need an individual health insurance mandate (oh to be young). But, to resume a partisan stance, I think the Republican party--and Trump in particular--is dangerous enough to merit fierce and vigorous opposition in a general election. It's hard for me to imagine a Democratic candidate that was so bad I'd stay home on eday.
> I don’t know what’s in the inner minds of other democrats. But out of the two parties, they’re cuddling up to all the ones who have been wrong for the last 50 years about foreign policy.
I'm bad at foreign policy and mostly stay out of it. But my uninformed opinion is that while Democrats haven't done a bang up job, Iraq and Afghanistan aren't on us, and Trump's banging on NATO and creating some kind of comic book villain council of strongmen seem like obvious bad ideas. Strong disagree that Dems are now taking direction from Iraq/Afghanistan architects; I just don't see any evidence of that at all. Biden withdrew from Afghanistan at great political cost, after all.
To me, the Iraq War was a predictable disaster rooted not in bad intel, but the mistaken concept of liberal universalism (emphasis on universalism, not liberal). Clinton is a smart, probably well meaning person. But what she shares with George W. Bush is liberal universalism, and that’s a bad and dangerous idea. It’s been a bad and dangerous idea that’s gotten us involved in countless non-defensive wars over the last 50 years.
In that respect, the Democratic Party today is a lot closer to the bad old GOP than it was 20 years ago. Between Ukraine, helping overthrow Assad, what Blinken allegedly did in Pakistan, rabble-rousing about “human rights” in Bangladesh—the Democratic Party today is full of liberal universalists. They’re not literally the same people who got us into the Iraq War, but the ideology isn’t any less dumb today, and will result in similar disasters.
What Trump understands that democrats don’t is that non-Americans aren’t Americans. The conceit underlying the Iraq war is that Iraqis were Americans. If you overthrew the dictator keeping them down, they’d build a democracy. And it was a monumental error. And the same is true for Syria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, etc. This is a conceit that liberal universalists cannot let go of.
While I do think what you describe under the label of "liberal universalism" mostly makes sense, I do challenge it's consistency. By all measures, some countries are trending towards becoming liberal democracies. Why shouldn't we help them?
Ukraine being a viable liberal democracy, a useful geopolitical ally, and in opposition to a destabilizing and dehumanizing autocracy, makes for a perfect candidate for support beyond naive global liberalism. It is in our interests in many practical terms, separate from ideology.
I agree the Iraq War was premised on deeply faulty assumptions and complete naïveté about other cultures. Governments grow out of culture (a popular saying is "people tend to get the governments they deserve", which is maybe a little insensitive re: stuff like minority rights but not otherwise totally wrong); you can't really just poof a democracy into being; you can't just assume people will adopt your values. I do think we're way more circumspect on this now than you do though, I mean we haven't done another Iraq/Afghanistan. I'll also say that even though Republicans snicker at it, Jake Sullivan's foreign policy for the middle class is a pretty big departure for the establishment. That's a substantial positive change.
I also agree you can't 100% import "Americans". But, my worry with Trump's rhetoric here is that he ignores you can 99% import Americans, the children of the remaining 1% are fully assimilated, and that this has always been the case. There's so many ways we could make our immigration and asylum systems more humane and sustainable, but the GOP has ratfucked our immigration and asylum systems for decades to win elections (this is their move: break a part of government and then be like "look government is broken"... well yeah) so things will be trash for the foreseeable future.
The Iraq war was not about bringing democracy to Iraq. It was bad intel about a nuclear weapons program in Iraq. The intel for a nuclear weapons program was weak and flimsy and the disagreement within the intel community was strong, but the White House pushed hard to support the pro-nuclear program viewpoint.
While I agree we should not have gone into Iraq, I disagree that it was an inevitable disaster. Iraq was a disaster because there was zero post invasion plan in place. The government was purged of “regime loyalists” which was basically everyone. This did two major things that shaped the country. First, it put thousands of police and soldiers out of work, giving the later insurgency a large employment pool of trained personnel that needed money and resented the US for destroying their lives. Second, it created a security vacuum directly after the invasion, creating crime waves throughout the country when it needed stability. Iraq was a primarily urban society used to central governance (unlike rural/tribal Afghanistan, for instance) and it is likely it could have transitioned to a new government.
While it is dangerous to think everyone can be like Americans, it is just as dangerous to think Iraq and Afghanistan are basically the same, or that all interventions and goals are the same (nation building in Afghanistan vs minimizing genocidal civil war in Syria).
EDIT: I reread and I definitely gave the impression that Rayiner posts in bad faith a lot. I don't think that, and I apologize.
Not quite, and you can't possibly capture all of that paper in that sentiment. For instance, there's this excerpt:
> People’s judgments and willingness to accept analytic findings are framed by multiple factors, including backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs. Every decisionmaker has cognitive biases, including theories that guide them (e.g., the liberal international order), beliefs about how the world works (e.g., the arc of history bends in a particular direction), or sacred beliefs (e.g., all things happen for a reason). Thus it is essential for the analyst to understand as much as possible about the decisionmakers and the environment in which they operate.
Military intelligence will happily give you high confidence leads that are entirely wrong because, by all appearances, the information came from a source in the right place with the seemingly right motivations when in reality they can be playing 4D chess better than the analyst.
The confidence level can only be expressed in finite ways but it can be analyzed in almost infinite, one of them being that the information needed to develop "high confidence" has disappeared and the window of opportunity to gain insight has long passed. Personally speaking, I do not think we will ever find out the origins because a whole gaggle of people with various interests had a vested interest in a particular answer at the time. This is the byproduct of a democracy and bureaucratic system which has not been functioning nominally for quite some time - doubly so now.
I would go so far as to describe the events at the time as parallel construction.
Maybe it leaked from the lab; maybe it was released? As far as I understand (but tbh, I have not kept up as much with immunology news) the alternative theory of the virus hopping from another species hadn't been confirmed, as no reservoir had been found. Does anyone know if that had been the case?
> So... I'm not certain this is a development worth trusting. Maybe it really did originate from a lab! But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.
0. COVID-19 was mostly harmless. Even more so than Douglas Adam's books. 1. China reacted asif they'd accidentally released a bioweapon. 2. China did what it does best, shut the F up on the world stage. 3. Everyone saw China's reaction because this isn't the 1950s and the internet exists. 4. The developed nations freaked out until there was data, hence the first set of lockdowns in Europe very quickly. 5. 2-3 years later after media pantomime, sectarian politics, holier than though preaching from everyone, the WHO declared the "emergency" over.
Some countries achieved 80%+ vaccination rates, didn't see 20% die. Some only achieved 50% and didn't see 50% death rates.
We now have a serious economic tab to be paid because of the BS pushed by developed countries in a panic that might have been less dramatic had there been information available from day 1.
China _has_ hidden and or destroyed a lot of "evidence" making certain discussions mute. (Again they are good at this let's not pretend otherwise).
Western countries, who, _like china_, jumped on a "who can punch themselves hardest with policy?" approach to this unknown now want someone else to blame.
Aka because we can pin a small significance and serious fault on China being a bad neighbour. (Snooze to the sensible this isn't news, china is very private about internal policy and now even more so) We are choosing to blame them for everything to get motivation up to get them to pay the bill...
This unfortunately was clear winter of 2020 and is clear now, it's just taken 4-5yr for politics to go through it's "he said she said" cycle. And I'm not referring to the US or UK political cycles this is the slow bi-partizan we all need someone to blame rather than be introspective and realise __"We should have handled this better"__.
> 0. COVID-19 was mostly harmless. Even more so than Douglas Adam's books.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I found out that my father and his partner had COVID. He lived, at the time, about 12 hours drive from me. Where he lived, his support network was thin (to say the least) - the little family he had nearby needed to keep away because they were responsible for caring for my cousin with a severely weakened immune system. His friends, sadly, also contracted COVID around the same time.
I called him twice a day, and each call he was worse than the last. I decided to rent an AirBnB nearby. My partner and I packed up the dog and everything we needed and drove overnight to get there.
We masked up, and got supplies at Walmart. We brought them to my Dad’s house and left them on the patio - retreated a safe distance - and my Dad came to retrieve them. He was in an awful condition, and his partner was worse.
For the next week I came to their porch every few hours, and called my dad, and we spoke with what little breath he had. He dictated his last will and testament to me. I delivered pedialyte, meal replacement shakes, pulse oximeters, anything to help them make it through. I forced them to get up and move around a little from time to time, and took notes on their condition. They wouldn’t let me in the house.
One day, before I arrived with supplies, my Dad told me they had called an ambulance for his partner. They took his partner to the local hospital… and the hospital turned him away because they had no beds. They essentially sent my Dad’s partner home to die.
By some miraculous turn of events, they survived. They have issues walking and breathing to this day, but they survived.
It’s one of the more agonizing, awful things I’ve ever had to watch. COVID-19 wasn’t harmless; it killed millions. I saw it up close. Especially early on, it was virulent and deadly, and very nearly took my parents from me. It did end up taking a lot of people in my extended social network. They died agonizing deaths.
How dare you paint it as “mostly harmless.”
Yes I am sorry for your loss. Now let's get to the point.
Because I understand statistics and am making sweeping statements I can and will make them from an objective viewpoint. Please do NOT sensor proven facts. I don't care for bible thumping tora humping nonsense that does not match reality. I'll take 2k years of religion and raise you 50 years of tech, oled TVs and microprocessors.
I know someone who ended up hospitalised and several years later does from complications due to a winter flu, doesn't mean we shut down society _every year_.
CV19 was a novel virus introduced into an existing population without any pre-existing immunity. This meant we will see complications, deaths at every age group and people's lives ruined by something that most 4yo, 25yo and 68yo will simply shake off.
Again the statement of millions dead _DOES NOT_ match the real world where several developed nations with populations sub 1B did not have dead numbers into the 10M+ of healthy individuals.
People died yes. This is expected. It is an illness. People die of staph infections. Life is unfair.
That _DOES NOT_ mean that this is equivalent to small pox. It's not a bioweapon it just meant the subpopulations who we identified really early (2020) should have isolated or accepted their risk.
The rest of society should not bend for the risk (again high survivability even in at risk groups). If it did we wouldn't sell guns, scissors or cross the road.
I hope that people do not treat you with the callousness with which you treat others.
> Because I understand statistics and am making sweeping statements I can and will make them from an objective viewpoint. Please do NOT sensor proven facts. I don't care for bible thumping tora humping nonsense that does not match reality. I'll take 2k years of religion and raise you 50 years of tech, oled TVs and microprocessors.
My friend, you are speaking gibberish. I literally have no idea what you are trying to say. Maybe check your house for a gas leak, or something. I don’t mean it in a dismissive way - I quite literally cannot make heads or tails of what you’re saying here.
> Again the statement of millions dead _DOES NOT_ match the real world
The dead are dead whether you like it or not. Sounds like the pandemic didn’t affect you personally. Be grateful for that, and be kinder to others.
You effectively told me to shut up because of the way you feel when talking about facts. This is the ultimate in anti-intellectual, dishonest and selfish statements.
Check yourself before engaging in conversations about FACTS.
You waltzed into a thread about the CIA suddenly changing their tune about where COVID came from; and started making assertions that it wasn’t that bad.
I shared a deeply personal story about exactly how bad it was, from my vantage point. I expressed outrage at your dismissal of the suffering and many deaths that occurred. “How dare you” isn’t the same as “shut up.” But it is a strong suggestion that you’re being uncharitable.
> Check yourself before engaging in conversations about FACTS.
I scrolled through your comment history and based on some recent arguments with the mods, it sounds like you’ve have a bone to pick with people on this site.
Log off and touch grass, man.
I'm telling you facts because for 4+ years nobody listens.
I've been correct in calling every detail about CV19 because I was involved and shut out of the early criticisms of the modelling based on the data. I'm correct and I'm just shouting into the void so that I can go away and rest easy that "I told you so", I tried ignoring it but frankly shouting until blue in the face helps my conscience easier.
You didn't just share a story you took offence to my position and tried to shut it down. Again, not approaching discourse honestly and openly. Please learn to be wrong. I know I can be. But again not when I'm stating hammer and nail facts. The earth is round, sky blue and water wet. Not the Orwellian everyone has a story type "facts". Words have meanings, please don't let that get lost for the sake of future generations.
Again mostly harmless is met with, the worst story I personally have is discomfort and complications. This unfortunately is not deaths by the millions of healthy people. But it is obviously real, it's just a different thing.
If it were fruitless you wouldn't have engaged from an aggressive stance and I wouldn't be telling you why your wrong. Cognitive dissodence does hurt when it breaks but it's all for the better :)
For what it’s worth: I continued to engage because I used to be like you - argumentative, hyper assured of my own intelligence, and certain I was correct about everything. I wish someone had pointed out earlier that I was being a massive asshole.
Hence, trying to politely engage with you a bit. I feel like it’s the kind thing to do.
I'm going to engage in good faith still again and see if we can get past the point of it being uncomfortable for you.
I made a statement aligned with the indisputable reality that COVID did not lead to huge amounts of deaths among the healthy working age population.
Ironically the USA gives us a very good example of this. Their jab rates are close to 50% across multiple age brackets. If COVID was really really bad we would expect to see many more Americans dead than say in the UK where the jab rate hit >80% in most age groups.
This is not a statement about treatment efficacy or safety. This is a statement that we should be expecting to see many more dead without treatment if the treatment were essential comparing 2 relatively comparable subs populations.
This result given the population sizes can also be deemed to be ignorant of the health care model adopted.
This is also not a statement that COVID didn't kill. This is also not a statement that COVID didn't mame. This isn't a statement that water isn't wet or that the vaccine caused autism.
You told me about the worst experience of your relative. It's is unfortunate for them. I did not wish them ill. I did not deny that this happened. You demanded that I change my statement because of their and your experience.
I'm sorry that they may have suffered in the real world not being fair. But let's be clear NO, I will not change a statement of fact.
Again, I'm not wishing them ill, but there is a world of difference between suffering and an uncomfortable hospital visit and death. This fact does not mean I am wishing ill will upon anyone.
I'm not being argumentative, I'm being corrective. Yes I was insulted by being shut down for feelings, but that is a philosophical line I will never cross based on the last 4 years. Feelings too are important, I'm not saying they're not, but they don't solely define reality.
I think we've been able to reach this point without name calling again so in good faith I'll wish you a good day, week, year and life and too to those you love and care for.
100% expected fatalities above about 70 and hospitals struggling for oxygen supplies. Yes it was not that bad.
No that’s not an exaggeration, that’s why lockdown 1 happened.
After that is just memeing from both sides about microchips and death walkers without masks on.
The it wasn’t that bad is honestly true. Again it was a novel virus introduced into a population with no immunity, but frankly keeping the economy going would have been better than paying people to stay at home and worry.
The cost is starting to come home to roost if we’re not careful and the socioeconomic results of a global depression could genuinely kill more, displace more and lead to political turmoil and violence.
That is not worth just telling gran I’m sorry, the rest of us can go outside but we recommend you don’t.
Again practicing lecturer in applied stats talking so I understand the gritty details of the models and projections.
It seems fairly clear to me that a lot of people are much more concerned about finding someone to blame for the last pandemic than about preparing for or preventing the next pandemic.
War happens to be my least favourite colour for a bikeshed...
The correct response is likely to spend significantly more on doing actual research and a great deal on making sure everyone is well contained. It’s likely a good idea to locate such labs outside of highly populated areas as part of a defense in depth strategy.
Strongly, strongly disagree. When even a teeny risk of escape means that millions of people could die, I think a much better argument is to simply make certain types of research completely off limits.
I'm certainly not the only person who thinks this. Zeynep Tufekci, who in my opinion had the most rational commentary during the pandemic, argued that much virus research just doesn't work from a cost/benefit analysis. For example, even if the root cause of COVID wasn't a lab leak, it's probably not a great idea having researchers milling around bat caves collecting sick bats and what not - it's very possible a zoonotic virus made the jump not necessarily in the lab but from researchers specifically looking for zoonotic viruses.
The benefits of research here are also human lives. So doing nothing has a real cost and the benefits extend indefinitely into the future.
Suppose you’re deciding between a 1% chance of a lab leak costing 10 million lives and a 20% chance you save 50 million lives over the next 100 years. That’s heavily weighted towards doing something, while still carrying significant risk. Some people would still say the risks aren’t worth it, but it’s not an obvious decision.
That is, when people want to do something-- risks tend to be understated and possible future benefits tend to be overstated.
I don't back the precautionary principle, but I do think risk in cost-benefit analysis has to be viewed from a pretty cautious place, in general (not just science).
One goal for disease likely to cause pandemics is ultimately to create better treatments for those already infected. There’s a long lag between a vaccine being designed and scaling production and distribution to actually protect people. That means there’s going to be a lot of people infected in an outbreak, including many vaccinated people.
Take antimicrobial resistance, you need to understand how microbes gain resistance by actually creating resistant bacteria/fungi etc before you can develop efficient countermeasures.
With COVID there was a lot of confusion around using masks and disinfecting public spaces in the early days. A better model of the disease could have been really useful both in the early days and how people responded to mixed messages.
How, precisely, do you believe that gain of function will benefit us the next pandemic?
Edit:
Swap “aid” to “benefit us” for hopefully better clarity.
The Intercept wrote an article about it: https://theintercept.com/2023/07/12/covid-documents-house-re...
It begins as:
House Republicans on the subcommittee probing the origin of the Covid-19 virus appear to have inadvertently released a trove of new documents related to their investigation that shed light on deliberations among the scientists who drafted a key paper in February and March of 2020. The paper, published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, was titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and played a leading role in creating a public impression of a scientific consensus that the virus had emerged naturally in a Chinese “wet market.” The paper was the subject of a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, which coincided with the release of a report by the subcommittee devoted to the “Proximal Origin” paper. It contains limited screenshots of emails and Slack messages among the authors, laying out its case that the scientists believed one thing in private — that lab escape was likely — while working to produce a paper saying the opposite in public.
The newly exposed documents include full emails and pages of Slack chats that were cropped for the report, exposing the “Proximal Origin” authors’ real-time thinking. According to the metadata in the PDF of the report, it was created using “Acrobat PDFMaker 23 for Word,” indicating that the report was originally drafted as a Word document. Word, however, retains the original image when an image is cropped, as do many other apps. Microsoft’s documentation cautions that “Cropped parts of the picture are not removed from the file, and can potentially be seen by others,” going on to note: “If there is sensitive information in the area you’re cropping out make sure you delete the cropped areas.”
When this Word document was converted to a PDF, the original, uncropped images were likewise carried over. The Intercept was able to extract the original, complete images from the PDF using freely available tools, following the work of a Twitter sleuth.
I understand how WIV could have caused a pandemic, but I don’t understand the other direction — how WIV doing gain-of-function would help the situation in which there was a zoonotic origin, eg at the wet market.
The person I was replying to said that our opinion on gain-of-function should depend on the origin — but I don’t understand how gain-of-function would have helped at all. Only how it poses a risk, whether or not this particular virus was such an example.
The problem is just that P(avert catastrophe) is fairly low, and P(create catastrophe) is substantially higher.
I am not in the sector but AFAIK there has been no direct benefit from GoF. There is huge potential which some experts believe outweigh the risks, which is why it is controversial, and that is why it has been politicized.
Protecting the funding and ability to continue the research would explain why scientists have a preference for spillover as opposed to leak. Then there are the politicians...
Has there ever been benefit to such research? People fall back on wishy-washy "we could learn ___" when trying to defend it, but with how long it's been going on have we ever actually had a solid benefit from it?
We might have the usual problem with every high-powered technology, from the fission reaction to the silicon fab: the underlying science is viewpoint-neutral, but people will be overwhelmed by doom scenarios associated with it.
What am I missing here? That biolabs are the only human made thing that can be made absolutely 100% secure?
This is not true.
GoF includes any research that amplifies specific characteristics. Transmissibility or severity of infection are just two of those possible dimensions.
For example, the research that enables us to produce insulin (and tons of other biologic medicines) with E. coli is GoF.
I lean on the side of banning GoF that's designed to increase transmissibility of a contagion, but that is indeed just a subset of GoF generally.
We can sharpen the language and say "ban GoF research that increases transmissibility of infectious disease", for example.
There's also GOFROC (gain of function research of concern). That's better than just GOF, but rather vague.
GoF contra: might cause a pandemic, kill millions, probably did.
So, yeah, I don't know, tough decision.
Most folks had no idea about the sort of GoF being done, and the attitude of many researchers (highly dismissive of risks) should worry us a lot.
We should also be more worried about zoonotic transmission too, and press harder to ban wet markets.
I don't think these conclusions compete, that’s the point; the actual fact of the matter regarding origins doesn’t much affect the weight of the damning evidence.
Even if you don’t think the lab leak was the source of COVID-19 virus, we know for a fact that lab leaks occur even at the highest level security facilities.
I’m not sure about gain of function research one way or the other, I’m just commenting that leaks will happen.
1. What's the probability distribution and damage distribution of GoF research lab leaks? It's not zero-- it likely has enormous long tail risk. But:
2. What's the probability distribution and damage distribution of not knowing as much about how gain of function happens in the wild? Because nature is doing some of these GOF experiments on its own, without much effort at containment.
When you compare the massive risks of spillover from animal populations, which have millions of interactions with humans every minute of every day, with the risks from a small number of highly contained biology labs, the ratio between the two risks is so enormous that this entire discussion is absurd.
It's kind of absurd that he have hundreds of millions of farmers and hunters interacting with infected animals every day, and nobody cares, but then we have a few researchers interacting with the same viruses under highly controlled conditions, and that's what we're worried about.
The reason is that people have watched too many sci-fi horror movies and listened to too many xenophobic / fear-mongering politicians who want to find scapegoats.
The problem with imposing even tighter conditions on research is that you end up making the research much more difficult, expensive, unattractive to actual scientists who have to live their lives. And all that for security theater, just to pander to ignorant politicians who won't actually be satisfied.
We take the effort to air gap infected or security critical IT systems, but can't be bothered to air gap humanity from existential threats. If protecting all of humanity from the next pandemic is too much work for virologists, maybe it's best that they consider another career?
> We take the effort to air gap infected or security critical IT systems, but can't be bothered to air gap humanity from existential threats.
My whole point is that we're not air-gapped in the first place. Millions of humans are interacting with infected animals every day, under conditions that are much less safe and controlled.
Imagine if all of your data had been leaked to the public internet, was mirrored across a dozen websites, and was being downloaded 1000 times a day, but then one security researcher had your data on an encrypted drive, and only read it on an air-gapped computer. Would you be more worried about the one security researcher, or the dozens of publicly accessible websites?
> If protecting all of humanity from the next pandemic is too much work for virologists, maybe it's best that they consider another career?
They are protecting you, and the thanks they get is that you scapegoat them, hound them online, and cheer when they get fired. You should be grateful that people like Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology worked so hard on understanding coronaviruses for decades, and warned about the risks of a pandemic. Instead, without any knowledge of the subject, you're participating in a witch hunt against her and her colleagues.
Factory farming is indeed a dangerous breeding ground for infectious disease which needs to be addressed. Farmers, however, are not performing gain of function research on the diseases in their herd. The largest danger of factory farms seems to be the widespread application of front line antibiotics, which is another issue entirely. Attempts to conflate the two are disingenuous at best. Unscientific whataboutism at worst.
> people like Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology worked so hard on understanding coronaviruses for decades, and warned about the risks of a pandemic. Instead, without any knowledge of the subject, you're participating in a witch hunt against her and her colleagues.
I've worked in science for more than a decade. I have lab experience. I have never named or witch hunted anyone as you seem to have. I have advocated for the most basic level of isolation of potentially dangerous experiments, and this is your response.
Thank you for demonstrating the arrogance which underlies the problem.
The phrase "gain of function" has become a general-purpose bogeyman, but 99% of the people using it have no idea what it means.
Farmers are interacting with viruses that are far more dangerous than the gain-of-function viruses. Gain-of-function experiments are generally just characterizing properties of viruses that already exist out in the wild. An effective way of doing that is to insert a component of the wild virus into a virus you can already grow and have characterized in the lab. The lab virus gains a function, but that function already exists in the wild.
> I have advocated for the most basic level of isolation of potentially dangerous experiments
Shi Zhengli and her colleagues are taking far more than the "most basic level" of precaution. Yet you're participating in the witch hunt against her and the virology community.
Government committees just don't have anywhere near this level of goal alignment, and it's not as if there is a lot of media whose best interests aligns with prevention either. You aren't getting a lot of information in the future out of a group of people you badmouthed a year ago.
Sure, technically it “isn’t our problem” when some new disease breaks out in another country. But when (not if) it is eventually our problem, it’ll be a very big problem.
That's why avian flu was allowed ro spread to cows in 16 states.
"Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time."
The Department of Energy concluded with low confidence that it was a lab leak.
The FBI concluded with moderate confidence that it was a lab leak.
The CIA's new report also concludes that they have low confidence that it was a lab leak.
It's important to note that low confidence is a positive number, not a negative number.
The wet market theory loses some credibility given some data points, but the lab leak theory remains plausible.
China has had lab leak origins in the past, so this would not have been unprecedented.
China obstructed and delayed the investigation.
Whether it leaked from a lab or not, China covered it up. China covering it up is not necessarily evidence that it was a lab leak. If there was any truth to it (which they may not even know), they probably wouldn't want it reflecting poorly on the state. China is big on "social harmony", so you don't have the right to know.
Whatever happened wasn't necessarily intentional. China made some deeply embarrassing and shameful decisions around this time and they won't want to promote them, but they were also not alone in making mistakes.
If China concluded it was a lab leak internally and shared that, there wouldn't have been as much need for the world to speculate, analyze and investigate so much which only hurt China's reputation more.
Coincidences occur, serendipity occurs. Most people have experienced one. As a result, proximity to the lab is not solid proof, but it is not the only datapoint either.
If China was more transparent and cooperative, there could have been more information to make higher confidence conclusions with.
Officials are saying that, true.
I have "low confidence" it actually is true. Everyone since the election has been scrambling to kowtow to the new boss to avoid his wrath.
I have no idea if the report's conclusions are correct, but I doubt a report like that was created in three or four days. Tasking expert analysts, reassigning the manpower necessary and going through legal and secrecy review in 96 hours would be extraordinary for a large bureaucratic agency. Sure, it could happen but that kind of all-hands, crisis urgency is hard to keep quiet. It's something we'd hear about from insider leaks.
I think it's more plausible that the report existed (because we know the CIA did look into it multiple times already) and the previous director had decided not to release it. And now the new director decided differently. Both of those decisions (not release vs release) were probably politically motivated to some extent but we don't have to jump to assuming an entire new report was fabricated with different conclusions practically overnight. After all, most government agencies that looked into it already concluded with low or medium confidence that it was a lab leak. It's not like the CIA report conclusion is an outlier here.
They are just choosing to believe the lab leak hypothesis now, because they spent more time thinking about the conditions of the labs before Covid started.
...
And it's still low confidence... Since there's no evidence.
Sad stuff, really. Any self respecting person would just not express their opinion in such a situation.
Just about the only value of this new report is that it tells Trump what he wants to hear.
Trump has thrown the China hawks under the bus. To the extent anyone is winning accolades by pushing this hypothesis, it's in giving Trump leverage in a trade negotiation. That's too marginal to motivate an adverse conclusion at the CIA.
(Counterfactual: Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce reports for every possible conclusion, and then pick the one that would please the boss.)
That is a perfectly valid hypothesis. In the EU there are also doubts as to what Trump's actual goals are. People are preparing for the scenario that first Biden and now Trump are driving a wedge between the EU and China, whereupon Trump will suddenly change course and be China's best friend. (The unspoken second thesis is that the same scheme applies to Russia):
https://www.politico.eu/article/fear-and-loathing-in-davos-e...
"There’s another scenario that has the Europeans worried: After getting a reluctant EU onside with his anti-Beijing agenda, the famously fickle Trump could U-turn and end up ganging up on the bloc with his “very, very good friend” Xi Jinping, China’s president."
"There’s precedent for that: In 2020, after years of escalating hostility during Trump’s first term in office, Washington and Beijing struck a mini trade deal aiming to increase U.S. exports to China and to ease their trade war."
"Now, Trump has billionaire China dove Elon Musk in his ear — and he needs Washington to retain good ties with Beijing to keep his electric vehicle company Tesla afloat."
The EU should have its own China policy irrespective of the Trump Administration's.
The decision to not release by the previous director and the decision to release by the new director probably were political to some extent. But I agree with you that the report's impact is too marginal to assume its creation or conclusion was politically motivated. But I think that for a different reason: I doubt adding yet another "low confidence" agency report onto the pile of existing ones changes much - either in geo-political super power negotiations or in the mind of the American public.
The issue has been played out and it's not top of mind or relevant anymore. The majority of people have already made up their minds one way or the other - or decided it doesn't matter anymore and they don't care. Pretty much everyone already acknowledges we'll never know for sure.
1. Coronaviruses are hard to contain, even if you have good practices. For example, the earlier SARS outbreak (from the early 2000s) had several documented lab leaks, including multiple within China (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/).
2. The US state department was aware that China was conducting dangerous research on coronaviruses on poorly managed labs a few years before the COVID-19 pandemic (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...).
3. The WHO got completely manipulated by China, either willingly or just due to their incompetence. For example, it is well documented now that the WHO publicly praised the Chinese government but privately was concerned and frustrated by the lack of transparency and sharing of vital information, including blocking visits to Wuhan (https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-china-blocked...).
4. The NIAID (Fauci’s agency, under NIH) conducted gain of function research through a third party, EcoHealth Alliance. The grants are all public and document gain of function research, which was illegal since President Obama had banned it through an executive order. There was evidence that the NIH helped EcoHealth craft their grant language in a way to avoid oversight processes that would have blocked the grant (https://theintercept.com/2021/11/03/coronavirus-research-eco...). Note that the president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, is a listed author on gain of function publications from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. After years of trying to bury this, the Biden administration finally blocked funding to EcoHealth in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/health/us-government-suspends...).
5. China only allowed a WHO visit over a year after they knew of the COVID-19 outbreak, in early 2021. They only allowed specific people to participate in the investigation, and the only person allowed from the US, was the same Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance who participated in the research at Wuhan Institute of Virology (https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/03/asia/wuhan-coronavirus-who-ba...).
Can you provide a link to the executive order? It sounds seriously strange.
So it's not clear what the actual order entails and how temporary it was. And the whole advisory language ("asked scientists") seems to be kinda distinct from "banned".
> The grants are all public and document gain of function research, which was illegal since President Obama had banned it through an executive order.
In general, these kinds of conspiracy theories just collapse when you start pulling the threads.
You think it's a conspiracy theory that Obama banned GoF research? OK, it was through an OSTP directive working with the NIH rather than an EO, but that's splitting hairs. It also wasn't banned, but only subject to a higher degree of scrutiny.
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/10/17/doing-d...
You can only assume from this that whatever was going to be found would have been unfavorable to them. Although that would be the case with both the market theory and the lab leak theory.
For example, maybe the people shutting down the investigation had no idea what it would find and just didn't want to take the chance.
The first large cluster of infections was associated with the Huanan Seafood Market, and retrospective analyses of influenza-like-illness patients and blood donations in Wuhan found no evidence of earlier circulation.
Sampling of many individuals prior to December 2019 showed no positives for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, suggesting that the virus did not spread widely before the market outbreak.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not known to have possessed a sufficiently close backbone strain to engineer SARS-CoV-2, and there is no public data indicating they had undisclosed viruses that match it.
Specific genomic features, like the furin cleavage site, appear suboptimal for an engineered virus (e.g. the PRRAR sequence and an out-of-frame insertion), which fits with a virus evolving naturally rather than through targeted gain-of-function work.
Several closely related bat coronaviruses have partial insertions near the S1/S2 region, suggesting that such changes can occur naturally over time and need not be artificially inserted.
A negative binomial pattern of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, with many zero-spreader events and a small number of superspreader events, is consistent with a spillover followed by rapid amplification in a crowded market setting.
Evidence of multiple potential intermediate animal hosts (e.g. wildlife farmed animals) further increases the probability that a bat coronavirus evolved into SARS-CoV-2 through natural spillover events rather than intentional engineering.
Early cases identified at the market and lack of widespread pre-epidemic infection clusters elsewhere in Wuhan align with the idea of a swift zoonotic jump to humans in late 2019.
I’m not clear on what exactly is being alleged by these agencies?
The Wuhan lab collected samples from that area and the lab is only ~10 miles away from the market.
Those wet markets are huge vectors for a viral spread, so a virus being spread there doesn't necessarily mean it started there.
Why that market in Hubei and not first at a market closer to Yunnan? It might be more profitable to transport and sell them there, but it's still a long way to travel and avoid spreading during that time just to end up at a market so close to that lab.
A lot of reasoning around whether a lab leak is more likely doesn't require it to be engineered or modified in any way.
The closest _known_. The second closest was found in Laos, also 700 miles from Wuhan (BANAL-52). Except it's in the other direction.
So we know that close cousins of CoV-2 are pretty wide-spread.
> Those wet markets are huge vectors for a viral spread, so a virus being spread there doesn't necessarily mean it started there
The thing is, does it really matter? We can say with a high degree of confidence that SARS-CoV-2 was _not_ engineered. So even if the very first jump was in the lab, it was likely a result of insufficient biosecurity measures. But the virus (and its close cousins) are still out there in nature, and it's a matter of time until a new spillover happens.
The lab leak hypothesis doesn't depend on GoF research. CoV-2 could have a natural origin, been collected by the WIV, and leaked into the city. This has happened before.
That said, there's no way to evaluate if it was engineered. Some methods of engineering are indistinguishable from natural selection, and fingerprints from detectable methods have a very short half-life in a fast mutating virus.
>So even if the very first jump was in the lab, it was likely a result of insufficient biosecurity measures.
Virtually no one is claiming otherwise. This is a weakman argument.
>and it's a matter of time until a new spillover happens.
At the start of CoV-2, everyone told me that it takes years to develop vaccines. I told them it takes days to develop and weeks to test. Turns out that I was right. If the mortality rate of CoV-2 had been 3%, like early reports suggested, then the mRNA vaccines would have been in production by March.
Do you have any links, articles, or further reading you could share to help me understand where the high degree of confidence comes from?
This guy seems to be convinced of the exact opposite conclusion that is is indeed engineered. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d-eqdRSx7Y
What? You're aware that Yunnan literally shares a border with Laos?
And the closest natural match? WIV16 at 96.0%, again found on bats in Yunnan, again very far from Guangdong - where that outbreak started.
So I think it must be because Yunnan has a lot of bats? that's why all the closest matches are found there?
Likely, the virus was not engineered but was stored in the laboratory.
There’s 17 intelligence agencies that all staff knowledgeable experts on all sorts of topics. Our government is Leviathan.
Yes it is, but the evidence is non-specific. China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis. The cover up is consistent with either theory, but it is the only reaction consistent with a lab leak.
this is a blind assumption. they may just be covering up 100% of all things, especially when the international community (i.e. Trump) is trying to push/blame them.
China attempted information control on SARS-1, but rolled most of it back by April. They still haven't done this for SARS-2. That's not proof, but is a difference. Enough small differences can add up to a large difference.
This insinuates the only reasonable conclusion is PRC lab leak. The only fact is we don't know where covid originated, only PRC was the first to detect and acknowledge it, and for doing so, US under PRC hawk admin tried to weaponize for propaganda war. PRC can still say covid come out of Fort Detrick, and until US opens up soveriegn US soil to WHO investigation (good luck now), then this is all a US coverup and it would be perfecty cromulant position and as "true" as anything CIA claims.
>If China was more transparent and cooperative
If US under Trump and Pompeo wasn't utterly antagonistic to PRC during time frame, there might have been more cooperation. This new CIA spin is continuation of the same geopolitical games.
One in which the virus developed naturally, was collected in a remote location, and was being studied in a lab when it leaked from the lab into nearby human society.
One in which it was not a dangerous virus originally, and it became dangerous in the lab through human agency, either maliciously (e.g. bioweapons research) or accidentally (e.g. gain-of-function research).
Note that in the first theory, the virus has a natural origin, but the pandemic originates in the lab leak.
These two theories get mixed up constantly, either by accident or on purpose, who knows. For example look at this CNN story:
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/01/25/politics/covid-19-lab-lea...
First paragraph: “The CIA now assesses the virus that causes Covid-19 more likely originated from an accidental lab leak in China, rather than occurring naturally”
Deeper in the story: “Every US intelligence agency still unanimously maintains that Covid-19 was not developed as a biological weapon” and “almost all American intelligence agencies also assess that the virus itself was not genetically engineered.”
So it didn’t occur “naturally” but also wasn’t developed or engineered. Makes no sense.
I'm struggling to see the practical difference. Ebola naturally evolved. I'm not sure I'm be more incensed if an American lab released natural versus artifical Ebola into the population.
Whereas an "artificial Ebola" would never have existed without it being intentionally created, so all the deaths aren't just time-shifted, they wouldn't have happened otherwise. They're new.
Plenty of plagues have evolved in the last thousand years. That doesn’t mean they, or their deaths, were inevitable.
GoF research is so obviously a bad idea. The risks are enormous and the rewards are minuscule. But lab leaks of natural viruses are indicative of problems too.
Remember, it is a virus that caused a global pandemic, despite all the efforts made to stop it. Based on that, I think it is highly likely that whether the lab leaked it or not, it would have made its way to humans by itself. In other words, there would effectively be no way to tell one scenario from the other.
You literally just reduced 3 theories to 2: lab leak natural virus, lab leak medical GoF, and lab leak bioweapon. These theories get collapsed because there's no practical way to distinguish between them. A 4th theory, intentional release, is often used as a weakman for all lab leak theories, but isn't actually a leak at all.
>So it didn’t occur “naturally” but also wasn’t developed or engineered. Makes no sense.
Yeah, someone wants to split hairs, but it's impossible without knowing the specific definitions they want.
The viruses could evolve quite a lot in an immunocompromised individual.
The virus was then probably leaked as part of the work to sequence its genome. So they wouldn’t have published anything on it yet.
I don’t think they did any GoF research or engineered the virus in any way.
I’m fairly certain China knows a lot more about what actually happened though.
A lab leak is not impossible, but there are good reasons to suspect a natural spillover event. There have been a number of studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests that the Wuhan wet market was the origin.
Those are not mutually exclusive theories.
It could have been a lab leak that was then superspread by the visit of an affected lab worker (or someone they came into contact with) at the wet market.
The current evidence points to at least two different spillover events (of slightly different variants) at the market, followed by spread of the virus in the communities surrounding the market, eventually radiating out to the rest of Wuhan. There is solid evidence now for each of those statements.
If you try to reconcile that with the lab leak theory, you end up with an ever more implausible theory: two different scientists got infected in the lab with different variants (of a virus we have good evidence never existed at the lab in the first place), then both of them went to the market (where the same types of wild animals that caused the original SARS outbreak in 2002 just happened to be sold) and infected people, but somehow they didn't infect anyone else at the lab. It's just one implausibility stacked on top of the next, all with the goal of avoiding what the data is obviously saying: the outbreak began at the market.
A single worker gets infected/accidentally releases multiple variants, sloppy worker messing up twice doesn’t seem that crazy. A lab leak is also consistent with an infection person visiting a location that experienced a separate variant.
And that’s just a few options there’s also things like an intentional leak followed by another intentional leak etc.
I’ve read that the lab was intentionally set near that wet market, so there being overlap like this doesn’t seem extraordinary.
You're now positing that a lab worker got infected with multiple variants (which wouldn't exist in the lab, by the way, since they would work with cloned virus), then traveled across town and spread the virus at the market.
The evidence all points towards a spillover (two, actually) at the market, but you can always make the lab leak theory ever more convoluted to keep it alive.
Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely. There's a good chance that the lack of safety was in the culture and not just one careless person. In November and December, several Wuhan Institute personnel were reporting unknown illnesses and took standard precautions (weeks of isolation) over it. It sounds like they weren't equipped to deal with a class of pathogens that they were working with.
We actually have a very good idea of what research was going on there. The groups in question publish their research, give talks at international conferences, upload the viruses they discover to US databases, talk with colleagues abroad, etc. We have a very good picture of what they were working on, and every indication is that they didn't have any virus closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
> Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely.
If that were the case, you'd see the outbreak centered on the lab. It wasn't. It was centered on the market, on the other side of town. So you have to start making implausible - and obviously motivated - assertions that two different lab workers went and infected people at the market, without infecting any of their colleagues or anyone else along the way.
There literally was an outbreak among lab workers in November to December of 2019. Many of them got sick with something that looks vaguely like COVID and quarantined over it - this is a standard precaution when you work around weird pathogens. Social media from these workers was suppressed when they talked about getting sick. Chinese whistleblowers discussed this at the time.
I'm frankly surprised you haven't seen any of this evidence given your interest in the subject.
And we only know about the research they published, not what goes unpublished. That includes various kinds of failed research, research that someone did for fun and wouldn't make it past ethics boards (a not-infrequent problem for this type of virus research), and research that was done under the table to nefarious ends.
No, there wasn't.
The 1st Trump administration leaked a rumor to the press that three workers got a respiratory virus sometime in the winter in 2019. Even if true, that's completely uninteresting. A large percentage of Earth's population gets any number of respiratory viruses every winter.
I have no idea where you're getting the rest of the details that you're claiming ("looks vaguely like COVID," "quarantined over it," etc.). They're not even in the Trump administration's leaks, and I suspect you're getting them from the online rumor mill.
> And we only know about the research they published, not what goes unpublished.
We actually know much more than what gets published. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology regularly go and give talks at international conferences. There are visiting scientists at the WIV from other countries, including the United States. WIV scientists upload RNA sequences that they gather in the field to US-based gene-sequence databases. This wasn't secret research. It was out in the open. They would have had no reason at all to conceal the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 if they had had it. Yet there's no indication whatsoever that they had it. Everything we know indicates that they were just as clueless about the virus when the outbreak began as everyone else.
Given that, it’s plausible that sloppy lab handling procedures led to someone being infected with multiple different viruses that were present in the same part of the lab.
None of this proves the lab leak hypothesis of course, but a lab worker being infected with multiple variants simultaneously (or separately) is a perfectly plausible outcome.
If the virus is spreading in farmed animals, it will have many chances to spill over into humans. In fact, this is exactly what happened with the original SARS in 2002.
It's striking how similar the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak is to the original SARS outbreak. Almost every detail of the spillover is identical: unknown coronavirus emerges at market in major Chinese city selling wild animals.
In the case of SARS, the animals were not culled for months. The entire SARS response was slow - the virus kept spreading in farmed animal populations and kept spilling over into humans.
With SARS-CoV-2, the Chinese government immediately ordered all the suspect animals to be culled. No test results for those animals have ever been released, if they were ever even conducted.
> the closest virus in a wild population was a bat coronavirus located 1000 miles away.
Guangzhou, where the original SARS emerged, is just as far away from the bat populations and Wuhan is.
It's been 4 years. When are we culling the COVID animals? The answer is that there's no culling because there's no animal population with a virus that is close enough that it could have been the basis for COVID.
The closest known wild-type virus - the one in those bats from over 1000 miles away - is still missing several key features (eg furin cleavage sites) that would be exceedingly unlikely to have all evolved multiple times in the few animals that made it to the wet market.
Almost every animal population that has resulted in a pandemic in the past has been pinned down in a matter of months and "dealt with." Obvious examples are SARS, MERS, and the recent influenza pandemics. That hasn't even gotten close to happening with COVID. This is a core competency of public health agencies, much more so than you might have realized.
In 2020, the lab leak sounded like a conspiracy theory to me and I thought it was a matter of time until the animals were found. Now, with it clear that there is no population of animal hosts with a similar virus in a similar area (given huge databases of bat coronaviruses that were developed post-SARS), it's looking increasingly like a virus that has been through a lab IMO.
The animals were culled right at the beginning of the pandemic. The Chinese government immediately ordered all of the farms that raise the types of animals that caused the original SARS to cull their stock. We have never seen a sequence from any of those culled animals, either because no sequences were taken, or because the government doesn't want them to be published. In any case, culling the potential host population would have been a very effective measure for preventing the virus from spilling over again.
> The closest known wild-type virus - the one in those bats from over 1000 miles away - is still missing several key features (eg furin cleavage sites) that would be exceedingly unlikely to have all evolved multiple times in the few animals that made it to the wet market.
First off, the fact that the closest known virus is in bats 1000 miles away is not at all surprising. With the original SARS virus, the closest known virus in bats was also from a site about 1000 miles away from where the human outbreak started. Second, other coronaviruses have furin cleavage sites, so this is something that has evolved multiple times. Third, we're not just talking about a few infected animals. We're talking about a population of infected animals, maybe on different farms. The few that were brought to the Huanan market in Wuhan seeded the outbreak in humans, but they were part of a larger infected population.
> Almost every animal population that has resulted in a pandemic in the past has been pinned down in a matter of months and "dealt with."
This is not true. It took literally decades to locate the origins of AIDS. We still don't know the origins of Ebola (not a pandemic, but it has caused a series of large regional outbreaks and is the subject of intense study). There is a vast diversity of coronaviruses in bats, and the more scientists look, the more they find.
> it's looking increasingly like a virus that has been through a lab IMO.
Literally every piece of evidence has pointed towards the market, from epidemiology (which has firmly established that the outbreak radiated outwards from the market) to genetic evidence (multiple lineages of SARS-CoV-2 present in the very stalls where wild animals were being sold at the market).
The standard zoonosis theory here predicts that multiple spillover events are likely, because there's a population of infected animals that is in close contact with humans.
Virtually simultaneous, in time and space, zoonosis events from different strains at the same place is still possible, but reaches much lower on the scale.
The Chinese government has been very sensitive about the idea that the virus came from a farm.
> it would have pinned covid on basically a bad luck case once and for all.
The US would still have tried to make maximum propaganda use of that. If you recall the early "wet market" discussion, it was highly accusatory, and often blatantly racist.
Yes, the “at-risk”, not the “incubator”, and notice the plural form to “farms”. China has never pretended having found a farm that would have been the source of the virus.
> The US would still have tried to make maximum propaganda use of that
The US (the state & government) was very far from having tried to make maximum propaganda use of anything regarding covid.
> it was highly accusatory
Well yes, it was highly accusatory of the typically awful hygienic condition of these markets. That's not racist so, that's just a fact.
Just days after the virus was discovered, the Chinese government would have had no idea which farm the virus came from. They ordered a broad cull. They might have destroyed our ability to trace the origins of the outbreak by doing that, though from an immediate epidemic-control perspective, it was the correct decision. Maybe they did do testing at those farms, but maybe they didn't. In the case of the market, we know that China CDC only came in and did testing after the local authorities shut down and sterilized the place. Officials were probably much more worried about the immediate spread of the virus than scientifically tracing the origins of the outbreak.
> The US (the state & government) was very far from having tried to make maximum propaganda use of anything regarding covid.
The Trump administration went to great lengths to use the pandemic for propaganda purposes. At first, Trump was "nice" to the Chinese and even praised their response. However, after the virus took off in the US and it became clear that the Trump administration had completely mismanaged it, Trump pivoted to yelling, "China! China! China!"
> Well yes, it was highly accusatory of the typically awful hygienic condition of these markets. That's not racist so, that's just a fact.
There was a huge amount of racist "bat soup" discussion in the United States early on in the pandemic, followed soon by racist phrases like "Kung flu." I remember a viral post that showed a random Asian person eating a bat (it turned out the photo wasn't even from China). That's what the atmosphere was like.
This wasn't an informed discussion about the viral spillover dangers of wet markets (which are ubiquitous in much of Asia, not just China, and are often the primary way people buy groceries). It was mostly people who have no idea what they're talking about (and who have never visited a wet market) talking about dirty foreigners.
That seems unlikely, given that - per Wikipedia - the WIV opened in 1956 and the wet market opened in 2002.
“Wuhan Branch of the CAS.[4] Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it was founded in 1956 and opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory[5] in 2018.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology
There was also a separate BSL-2 facility that moved right before the outbreak which also got news coverage due to the timing. But I think that was more confusion as they shouldn’t be working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-...
Baric testified that he had specifically warned Shi Zhengli that the WIV’s critical coronavirus research was being conducted in labs with insufficient biosafety protections. When he urged her to move the work to a more secure biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) lab, he testified that she did not heed his recommendation. Because the WIV continued to perform coronavirus research at what he considers an inappropriately low biosafety level, Baric said of a laboratory accident, “You can’t rule that out…. You just can’t.”
In 2004, nine people were infected with Sars and one person died after two researchers were separately exposed to the virus while working at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing. In November 2019, just a month before the first confirmed case of Covid-19, more than 6,000 people in north-west China were infected with brucellosis, a bacterial disease with flu-like symptoms, after a leak at a vaccine plant. [1]
The Chinese facility hosts one of no more than six BSL-4 labs in the world that had been conducting contentious “gain of function” research on bat-related pathogens before the pandemic, according to Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University [1]
Just given the above, the statistical likelihood of coincidence is so absurdly low it alone means there needs to be overwhelming evidence to the opposite to overcome it. At no point has this been the case.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/a0badd5d-4d88-4a3b-b019-61c6d8275...
But a 2 spillover event suggests there was a pool of infected animals with multiple lineages that were all already capable of zoonosis. So why only a single secondary event? This suggests the pool was small, contact was limited, and that the pool wasn't sustained for long. OK, then it's comparably likely that a mutation would happen on either side of the spillover.
The problem with positing that the mutations happened after spillover is that the timeline is way too short. Multiple variants were present at the market just weeks after the initial human cases. That points to differentiation before spillover, probably on the farms where the animals were being kept.
I suppose that could happen if what they were carrying wasn't capable of human transmission yet, but was capable of infecting some species of the live animals at the market, but that's a big if.
There's till the problem of the second lineage which would indicate multiple zoonotic crossover events.
Or if infected carrions from the labs were sold at the market – I suppose it only takes a low-ranking employee wanting to make a few bucks.
All of the evidence people argue over can fit together.
Original virus was brought from the south of china, was studied in the lab. Unclear if it was engineered. Somehow in the lab an animal was exposed. Either purposefully for study or accidentally. Animal dies or will die soon so a rouge employee takes it to the market to sell the meat for some pocket money. First cases show up in lab employees they are smart enough to quarantine. Full outbreak starts at market from animal source.
Right, but in 2020 and 2021, the US was doing everything it could to discredit those who were trying to possibly discredit China. And the WHO was doing whatever China wanted. No scrutiny was to be tolerated. That in and of itself is very fishy.
The US funded the lab and the specific fields of research. I have no idea how people can still be banging on about lab-leak origin being a racist plot against the Chinese. Covid probably leaked from US lab experiments in China. The rest of the world should be raging against the US and China both.
$250k is nothing for something this size.
Dr. Tabak testified in this hearing that the NIH was funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China through a grant to EcoHealth.
Of-course this was in "direct contradiction" of the earlier testimony given by Dr Fauci under sworn oath. But hey - he has already been pardoned for it.
The only thing that can be laid at China's feet is ignorance of what was going on in their labs and the useless attempt at media suppression once the virus got out. However, anyone who has studied the facts in detail would easily form the judgement that a subsection of the U.S. government had the majority share of culpability.
Yeah, the NIH isn't blameless if the lab leak hypothesis is true.
The idea that this assessment needs a goal is strange, because it is the most reasonable assessment, but the idea that it discredits China more than it discredits the US is bizarre. Maybe it does for the Chinese people, who can see that their government is willing to put Chinese people in danger in partnership with a US that was nominally refusing to put American people in danger. Turns out viruses don't need visas so it didn't matter, but maybe it's the thought that counts.
However, what the (classified) evidence indicates is somewhat separate from whatever public posture the CIA finds useful to take.
What's public record is that ABC News reported[1] that two anonymous officials claimed there was an internal intelligence report in late November discussing an outbreak in China, and that it was briefed up the chain. All other news outlets then picked it up, with attribution (ABC News says someone else says...) buried deep in the text per usual. The report was immediately denied publicly by various officials and in over 4 years has never been corroborated, not even with other anonymous sources.
Plus, even if it were true, what's the relevance? It originally made headlines because it implied the Trump administration was slow to react; in particular, that they possibly had as many as 4 additional weeks in which to begin preparations. But it doesn't speak to origin. Most advocates for both the natural and lab-leak arguments all agree that the COVID-19 outbreak began sometime in Fall 2019. It's not a point of contention except possibly when comparing one overspecified theory against another overspecified, straw man theory. There are so many degrees of freedom to either theory (or rather, group of theories) that an early or late start doesn't significantly weigh in favor of one or the other.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-c...
But they are saying that they have low confidence, and that there is no new evidence that changes anything.
They're just changing the way they're biased, because they think that the lab's conditions weren't particularly safe.
But then, we might as well expect that dozens of dangerous viruses should've gotten out.
There are also many cases where adversaries both know the true story, and know the other knows the true story, but neither side finds it in their strategic interest to publish the truth e.g. the optics are terrible for both for different reasons.
That said, this particular case of the CIA publishing a report seems performative for domestic politics rather than strategic, which also happens all the time. There was nothing new or novel. The internal view of the intelligence community has been pretty consistent for years.
https://peakprosperity.com/more-evidence-covid-19-may-not-be...
So if you believe that your lauded international bodies are immune to politics and the abuse of authority, then maybe it will work. The rest of us prefer international bodies to be forums and coordination points for the real authorities.
I read "Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley" and it convinced me the lab leak theory was at least fairly likely. The proximity of the outbreak to WIV -- which was doing gain-of-function research of bat coronaviruses -- is convincing. Occam's razor and all.
Of course the immediate jump to conclusion in the first few months by some who found it politically expedient was no better either.
People need to be more comfortable saying I don’t know but we are looking into it.
The lab leak theory was extremely plausible even assuming no secret conspiracy at all. Lab leaks do happen, that lab did do gain of function research, the State did shut down investigations, etc.
1.) Do they have an incentive to conspire?
2.) Do they have the ability to conspire?
Where both are true I think conspiracies exist every where, often to such an extent it just gets labelled as corruption rather than conspiracy.
There was a huge overlap because within a month it became completely taboo for anyone who cared about not being seen as an alt-right activist to say anything about it. Even freaking Jon Stewart got caught in the instant-cancellation blast [0].
A major problem with our world today is that anything that the alt right supports instantly becomes taboo for the rest of us. People are more concerned with distancing themselves from the alt right than they are with finding and supporting the truth—and that goes for just about anything, not just COVID.
[0] https://nypost.com/2023/02/28/jon-stewart-recalls-outrage-af...
All other theories sound as made up bs.
I think you have to accept it is now unlikely we normies will ever know the truth.
The post, and its comments, are worth reading still IMO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26750452#26751943
Thanks for the dose of epistemic humility. I'm willing to go one step further: It's plausible that no one knows the truth. Keeping secrets is hard. If someone knew they might've died in the early stages of the outbreak.
• If it was a lab leak, then even if the people responsible are dead, there was likely data that could trace it back. It is unlikely that data still exists or is findable, for obvious reasons.
• If it was not a lab leak, it may be impossible to find evidence to prove that is the case.
The response in China, once things got out of control, included locking sick people in their homes. This form of quarantine is probably good to reduce spread, but it is also probably bad for the health of the patient. If there are multiple people in the home, it is probably worse for all of them. China also has a lot of multigenerational households (grandparents, adults, children) which means the vulnerable are together with people who are lower mortality risk, but higher risk for traveling and getting infected. I don’t know what percent of households in Wuhan were like this, but it probably played some sort of role.
We also forget that it wasn’t only China that got wrecked - Italy also had substantial challenges.
On the other hand, if your healthcare system isn’t overwhelmed, people are wearing masks so initial exposure is low, and you are caring for/separating the sick from the healthy, the outcomes are probably exponentially better.
It certainly seems that later strains were less dangerous though.
Edit: my original comment was not intended to be a reply to you, but to the parent.
* A worker could've been infected while hunting for viruses in a cave.
* Someone could've been infected prior to the sample being ascenioned.
Given the ridiculous response from everyone involved, I'm just going to assume it was an accidental biosecurity breach of a natural specimen. It happens frequently enough and enough puzzle pieces seem to fit. Not that I care or think anything should come of it, other than hopefully learning better biosecurity procedures.
Why bother assuming? Why isn’t “I don’t know” good enough?
No sorry necessary. I just think it is interesting how hard it is to not have an opinion about something beyond "I don't know." We all seem to feel more comfortable making an assumption and picking an answer, even when it won't change our behavior and not picking has no cost.
I hadn't thought of this before. I wonder if we naturally formulate an opinion or hypothesis when we're curious about something. Which I did again just now.. huh.
The take away is not that we'll never know. The take away is that governments conspired to obscure the truth, control public opinion, and censor dissent.
From what I understand, one theory is that China has for decades tolerated unsanitary wet markets that allowed dangerous diseases to evolve, get stronger, and eventually transmit to human hosts. They'd been warned about this over and over again and had failed to implement the required policies, leading to a preventable pandemic.
The alternative theory has China accidentally letting a disease leak from a lab.
From my perspective, if anything the lab leak theory is the one that makes China look better: at least it emphasizes that it resulted from China's scientific pursuits and not their lack of health codes!
Why would the China hawks need a lab leak in order to China hawk?
At the end of the day, all that any sane person should care about is preventing another similar pandemic.
If anything, one reason why the China hawks may prefer the lab leak theory is because it makes China look more threatening than the alternative: the we-couldn't-enforce-basic-health-codes version of the story doesn't mesh well with the image we have in the West of the CCP as an all-powerful Big Brother that has complete control over every aspect of their citizens' lives. It instead projects a CCP that can barely perform the minimum functions of a state, which is harder to be afraid of.
A lab leak plays into the stereotypical German or Russian mad scientist trope of the 20th century: the incredibly powerful supervillain who in their hubris (nearly) destroys the world.
- No samples were ever found, nor were any sick animals, in the market where it supposedly started. Period. Nothing.
- No evidence of genetic mutations and variants leading up to crossover, no intermediary host ever found.
- It just happened to start infecting people in the city of a lab which had been doing extremely similar experiments AND had issues with releases before.
- WHO rushed the investigation, involved Chinese scientists in the investigation, and the Chinese government did not cooperate in any way, shape, or form - no samples, no lab data, nothing. It was just "trust us." And everyone dusted off their hands and said "well, no evidence. Done then!"
The world's governments pushed the "zoological crossover" theory because the only alternative would be...what? Accusing the world's largest source of manufactured goods of killing 8 million people? And what would we do, exactly?
Level economic sanctions against a country producing most of the world's stuff? That is by and large quite self sufficient, far more so than most nations?
And there's zero evidence to support the lab leak. All the research they were doing on live virus was based on SARS-CoV-1. You can't get SARS-CoV-2 out of that. And while they sequenced RaTG-13, there is no evidence they ever had live virus, and RaTG-13 is still around a thousand mutations and a few decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2.
SARS-1 had a CFR of 11% over all ages, 55% for >65. That's about 10x as deadly as SARS-CoV-2. The situations are thus not comparable--with SARS-CoV-2, we'd expect much more cryptic spread before someone gets sick enough to seek medical attention, and illness much more easily misdiagnosed as flu.
There's also zero question that the WIV had unpublished viruses during the pandemic, since they just published 56 new sequences collected "between 2004 and 2021". So do you really think it's impossible that they actually had 57?
I don't give that a lot of credit.
Both theories would presumably have people that are culpable due to violating safety rules designed to prevent exactly what happened. But I suppose a lab screwing up is more embarrassing to China than a hick selling wild animals or whatever illegally.
But of course, there is considerable bias to view traditional practices like wet markets more favorably than modern practices like virology labs. So, in reality, the virus leaking from a virology lab would be found far more condemnable than the virus being contracted randomly at a wet market.
Whether or not someone gets punished is largely irrelevant. It isn't like 1 billion people in China would have sat down and decided to violate lab safety protocols; there'd be some supervisor somewhere who made mistakes. What happens to such a hypothetical person is irrelevant in the scheme of the damage the virus caused.
And more realistically, if it was a lab leak, it was likely some lab technician being careless, or some thing breaking and whoever was responsible, not fixing it quickly enough.
China had a duty to run the lab safely, it breached that duty, and so China is responsible for the harms and losses caused by its negligence.
Missouri actually filed suit against China, and it is set to go to trial next week. It will be interesting to watch. If Missouri were to get a judgement for all the costs created by the virus, it could theoretically collect Chinese-owned assets in the US.
And, the news has been full of stories about one particular Chinese asset the US would like to have held in the US: TikTok.
Conversely, say the same person got equally badly sick while visiting a friend who works in a US government lab that researches and deals with live viruses. Wouldn't you feel the US government has a higher chance of losing a suit on this?
Under the wet market scenario, it's not instinctively clear to me what was unreasonable about the practices of the vendors at the market. Does selling bats more likely than not result in spreading disease? Or selling bats in proximity to pangolins? It seems like the vendors were doing the same thing vendors have done for millennia, not doing something unusually or obviously substandard.
This was literally outsourced US DoD research...
To my mind, there are a few reasons why people are so fixated on the lab leak thing
1) It makes the pandemic deterministic (bad lab security means an outbreak) instead of stochastic (wildlife spillover). That is, to be frank, even as an epidemiologist who is very skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis, a comforting thought.
2) It's a popular topic in the Substack/Medium set, because it moves the pandemic back into their wheelhouse of expertise, international relations, policy, etc. It becomes a human problem with human solutions.
3) It appeals to the contrarian mindset.
4) All of the lab leak papers at least attempt to show definitive proof. In contrast, actually finding the source of spillover events is the work of decades (and isn't always or even often successful). "Science is slow and uncertain" is a less compelling narrative.
Wuhan has a population of 13 million. It would be surprising if the city didn't have a lab doing virus research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#List_of_BSL-4_...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-...
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/inside-wuhan-lab-covid-p...
Lots of cities have "a lab doing virus research". There's no reason to shift to that broader category except willful obfuscation, though.
As to prior spillovers, proximal hosts have been identified for those other two coronaviruses (SARS-1 and MERS), for both within a ~year of emergence. For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting.
It's to point out the earlier argument that the mere presence of a virology lab in a large city should be a point of suspicion.
> An unconfirmed intelligence leak further claims that work was actually performed
And how much should we trust unconfirmed intelligence leaks?
> For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting.
Part of what's different here is that the entire world shut down, and the trail went cold.
I understand the desire to blame someone, but the features of the virus are all things that have evolved in naturally in other coronaviruses. The amount of mixing that happens in a single human body in a lingering infection dwarfs what labs do in a year.
Even the most "suspicious" thing about the virus, the furin cleavage site, seems to be something with a natural evolutionary path: https://bmcgenomdata.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...
But we know it's not just "a virology lab", which indeed is not uncommon. It's the world's largest collection of related viruses, and one of only two sites in the world (with UNC) known to have proposed to enhance a sarbecovirus by genetic engineering. That's a much narrower thing.
The comment that you responded to used carelessly broad language, but I did not. So why have you reverted to that?
> Even the most "suspicious" thing about the virus, the furin cleavage site, seems to be something with a natural evolutionary path:
That's one researcher's unfalsifiable speculation, and the unusual coding has also been proposed as evidence of genetic engineering. I think the ability of genomic evidence to resolve that question of origin has been generally overstated by both sides. After DEFUSE it's certainly not evidence against lab origin, though.
The reality is that we don't know. The CIA's updated position is "lab" with "low confidence", and both parts of that seem correct to me. Public opinion has swung further towards lab origin than I would; but after years of smearing anyone who entertained that possibility as a conspiracy theorist and banning their social media accounts, it's no surprise to see a backlash.
Almost all origin theories "blame someone", since the usual alternative to lab origin is trafficking of wildlife known (from SARS-1) to present high risk. So I don't think that bit of amateur psychoanalysis explains much.
>It makes the pandemic deterministic
I don't understand why determinism comforts you, but you do you. Unfortunately, a lab leak is totally stochastic, and I hope this revelation doesn't keep you up at night.
>It's a popular topic ... because it moves the pandemic back into ... policy, etc. It becomes a human problem with human solutions.
Zoonosis is a wet market hypothesis, not a random encounter. China failed, and continues to fail, to ban or regulate the wet markets to solve the problem. Zoonosis is clearly policy and human problem.
>It appeals to the contrarian mindset.
The lab leak appeals to anyone who groks statistics. Wet market zoonosis could happen at any one of 40,000 Chinese wet markets. But a lab leak could only happen at one of ~2 Chinese laboratories. Zoonosis happens more overall, but lab leaks are more probable in the direct vicinity of the lab specializing in collecting and studying samples of this exact family of viruses.
>finding the source of spillover events is the work of decades
The reservoirs for both SARS and MERS were found quickly with much less interest. The probability of the lab leak increases every day that we don't the reservoir. Worse, at this point even finding a reservoir isn't definitive, because we would need to establish that the reservoir predates the pandemic, and that it didn't spillover into the animal population from humans.
Given all publicly available information, the lab leak is far more likely. The uncertainty is very high, because China destroyed or concealed the data. Unless someone's memoirs leak it in 50 years, it's unlikely that we'll ever know.
*I think these were the levels, I'm going from memory.
But yeah this topic is extremely politicised (not just by the US mind you, but also by China). So it's hard to say what's the truth. I doubt we'll ever find it.
The lab leak theory does make sense though IMO. I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. But yeah, I take this at face value. And to be honest I'm just really happy that this is all behind us.
> The agency made its new assessment with “low confidence,” which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete.
That's not reason to trust it. But "a bad thing happened in the 80s and that's all I need to know" isn't a compelling argument either.
Like I said, that's not the same as knowing that they're following the rules now. But it isn't the same organization by any stretch.
He was the president at the time - yes - he had better info than you. The people saying it wasn’t a lab leak had motivation to do so - and the head of that group just took a president pardon for their efforts.
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
Yep. Just checking to make sure I’m following along correctly.
When did the CIA come out against lab leak? Everyone's been spitballing low- and moderate-confidence guesses.
The FBI & Energy Department have both said that they think it's a lab leak.
There were almost certainly some politics involved in the decision to release the report now, but it's not like the CIA were staunch advocates for zoonotic origins up until now, and again: Biden's FBI and DOE were already leaning this way!
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-origi...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan...
From "we don't know if it was a lab leak or spread from the market" to "we think it maybe is". Sure, they started this investigation with Biden, but just released it a couple of days ago AND they have even low confidence on it. So, why release it if the confidence is low? Why now? The answer is: new government, new conclusions.
In 2014, Obama administration halted the so called "gain of function" research because of laboratory accidents.
In 2017, Trump administration restarted the research. See links below.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/white-house-to-cut-fun...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih...
The U.S. government, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provided funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an American non-profit organization focused on studying emerging diseases. The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses.
The fact they can't prove it and have low confidence on this theory means it has absolutely zero credibility.
I see a pattern in the news these last month of warmongering, from the US to China. Maybe I'm wrong but history has shown that with the us, everytime they want to make a war they first got to brainwash their population into that for a few years and then they find any convoluted reason to get in while pretending they're merely defending them or others.
PRC maintains covid came from outside of PRC, they have no reason to let their labs be scrutinized by outside actors just because Mike Pompeo / CIA made up antiPRC propaganda. That's want weak idiots do. Reality is PRC already waste effort entertaining WHO, until US reciprocates by openning up US biolabs for international access to entertain PRC propaganda, they nor their narrative or people that endorse them have credibility either.
US govt funded some research in the lab which leaked the virus in Wuhan, is Chinese govt funding Fort Detrick?
As as I said when you are trying to spread propaganda, at least do it right.
I hope you're too young to have lived through that 2001 era propaganda because it was the exact same narrative. Put the burden of proof on your opponent with demands that you know can't be accepted.
If you're not too young then you failed twice at the very same propaganda technic. Congrats.
A quick summary of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av2Hax3Bg1U
(1) The area where the Nyctereutes spec. (german: Marderhund, I have no idea how it is called in english) where kept, there where a lot of DNA of Nyctereutes and a lot of nucleinacid of SARS II.
(2) From the beginning there a two lines of the corona viruses laboratory-confirmed. From the evolutionary speed of virus mutation it is nearly certain that the separation had to be taken place months before. About 8 times a corona-variation had been aquired by man. From this infection chains 2 virus-types had survived to be confirmed in Wuhan. A person who works in the laboratory would have been working with a clonal virus that is not mutated in that way.
(3) The market is the center of all infections even if you take out everybody that is known to be at the market, not the laboratory.
(4) For the animals at the market a analysis showed that they had been ill/infected (not specifically corona)
These are all separate published aspects that points to the same thing.
The part starts at 2 hours 23 minutes 30 seconds - you have to use auto-translated subtitles which are unfortunately not very good (german language)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Drosten
edit: grammar
now an exact match of that length isn't impossible, but which is more likely? that this managed to be exactly correct on accident? or some grad student was told to just copypasta every furin cleavage site in the database into a GOF library and surprise surprise the most virulent form that became a pandemic came from the sequence that is engineered to be efficient.
any scientist that has any molecular biology wet experience will tell you this is exactly what they would have done (though us researchers would probably not have pulled from the patented BLAST sequences, since that selector is turned off by default by the NCBI)
could you cite this? not because i'm questioning the statement's credibility, but because i'm curious (and you could save me a lot of time from even knowing where to begin to look for credible information for myself—full disclosure, lol).
Here. you can do it yourself. databases are public.
CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG
The linked commentary [1] raises several interesting points.
"Unfortunately, the authors did not provide details of their BLAST research. The patent database that they used contained 24,712 sequences. Yet, by querying BLAST, we obtained a database of 46,121,617 patent sequences with an average length of 560 nucleotides. The authors should give more details and justification for their query, especially if they queried the full database but a posteriori restricted their computation. Of note, with such a large database, and despite the fact that the average sequence length decreased, the probability of finding at least one sequence containing one of the 16 patterns previously mentioned may rise to 68% under assumption 2."
0: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.33...
1: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.33...
The absence of CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG from any mammalian or viral genome in the BLAST database makes recombination in an intermediate host an unlikely explanation for its presence in SARS-CoV-2. You can verify for yourself that there are no other sequences with an exact match.
The subsequent comment about statistics of blast searching is irrelevant.
"According to the current phylogeny, FCS appeared independently six times in the Betacoronavirus lineages, demonstrating that FCS insertion is compatible with natural evolution (2, 7, 8). [...] 7. Wu Y, Zhao S. Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses. Stem Cell Res (2021) 50:102115. doi: 10.1016/j.scr.2020.102115"
is that not relevant?
It's like wondering why a single building caught fire, when the shocking thing was that the whole world caught fire. Surely the lessons to learn are with 'how to deal with a spreading fire', and not with 'how to prevent a fire'.
If so, I think it's pretty important to investigate, how the NIH could violate the EO without appropriate oversight, and to hold those who made those decisions to account.
From: https://unherd.com/2025/01/the-criminal-pardoning-of-anthony...
"Fauci claims — in a curious echo of Trump — that he is the victim of partisan threats of investigation and prosecution. “Let me be perfectly clear: I have committed no crime and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me,” he said in response to Monday’s news. Yet it was noticeable that the pardon is backdated to 2014. This is, coincidentally, the same year that the US three-year ban on gain-of-function research took effect and also the start date for an NIH grant to Wuhan that biosafety experts such as Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, believe is linked to the “reckless” research that sparked global pandemic. “The pardon is a travesty,” he told me.
The evidence has shown clear efforts to avoid such scrutiny. One memo disclosed that “Tony” had told David Morens, a senior adviser to Fauci, how to avoid requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), suggesting that he stop using government-issued phones for his gmail accounts. A leaked email indicated that Morens was coached on evasion of FOIs by Margaret Moore, Fauci’s long-serving assistant — who pleaded the fifth when asked to testify. “I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” he wrote. Another senior aide to Fauci misspelled key conspirators, presumably to avoid searches intended to fulfil FOIA requests."
If you have lots of data, you can find all sorts of patterns. Now your looking at misspellings and inferring things from it..
More importantly, I don't care about 'getting justice' on an indvidual. I want lessons learned on how to deal with a new pandamic.
The fact that you Americans are playing politics with this, is the most shameful fact of the whole thing.
You can't prevent someone with mental problems setting a tree on fire to smoke out the deamons in their head. It's a huge distraction and waste of energy that could be spent on the things I wrote about earlier.
China had a bit of a freak out when the pandemic first started and pretty much silenced everyone close to the lab and kept everyone else out. It was until months/years later that China started allowing chosen data out, and who knows the truthfulness of it.
Authoritarian regimes, especially China, are the furthest thing from transparent.
How is it more racist and Sinophobic to support the lab leak theory vs the wet market one?
The lab leak theory has single individuals messing up.
The wet market theory judges an entire nation's culinary habits.
Of course racism has nothing to do with the Truth of COVID's origins. Im was just always perplexed how the lab leak ended up spun as more "racist" than the wet lab one.
I understand why the NIH (who appears to have funded this) would want to spin this.
What was in it for CNN and MSNBC to spin this as racist when, IMHO, blaming COVID19 on culinary habits is far more racist? What was in it for Rachel Maddow to lecture America about the lab leak when she could have more effectively lectured us about financing the whole thing?
It was all so stupid.
Here we are told that the "C.I.A.’s new director, John Ratcliffe, ... wants the agency to get “off the sidelines” in the debate."; that he's long favored the lab-leak theory (which is a politicized issue); and of all the things a brand new new CIA director must do, we see that this was Ratcliffe's first priority. We know that the CIA did not choose to release the report before the Trump administration.
I think the overwhelming evidence is that it's a politicized action. Would Trump or his team lie or mislead? Of course. We can't give them the benefit of the trust until proven false; they have embraced deceit.
Unfortunately, even though they weren't always credible before, I think that means that these things are now meaningless, other than as clues to Trump's and others' intents: Why prioritize this messaging? Whose idea was it? And always, cui bono - who benefits?
And right below the headline on the Wall Street Journal they even stressed that the CIA says it had 'low confidence' in its finding...
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/cia-now-favor...
“I’ve said from the beginning that Covid likely originated in the Wuhan labs. Communist China covered it up and the liberal media covered for them. I’m pleased the CIA concluded in the final days of the Biden administration that the lab-leak theory is the most plausible explanation of Covid’s origins and I commend Director Ratcliffe for fulfilling his promise to release this conclusion. Now, the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world.”
Considering it's "with low confidence", someone else could've published the findings focusing on the low confidence rather than the fact that their needle is pointing more towards "lab leak".
Is that really true? Even supposing it was a leak from a lab, is punishing China really our top priority? What does it accomplish? What does it look like?
That sounds like the goal isn't to find the actual cause, but to seek excuses to justify whatever it is he wishes to inflict on China.
Worth noting is that this is a low-confidence report. I'm not accusing the director of divulging a low-confidence report under the belief that the public will accept it as categorically true because they have no sense of how CIA confidence levels work, but they're willing to believe the director wouldn't publicize it if it wasn't true.
... you should have low confidence in the truth of my last statement.
The intel community never dismissed the lab leak theory. The discrediting of it was 100% a psyop
I suppose flat earthers make heliocentrism and the laws of physics politicized theories too, then.
I think the conversation about this has been repeatedly horrendous because it seems like people don't really understand that there are lots of degrees between "virus in research lab" and "genetically engineered bio-weapon." Though obviously there's more embarrassment and culpability on China's side (by most standards) with a poorly controlled lab situation than some rando, basically serf by implication, selling bush meat at a bazaar.
https://oversight.house.gov/release/final-report-covid-selec...
The house oversight committee investigated for 2 years and came to this conclusion. The CIA is falling in line with the rest of the government.
>The single most thorough review of the pandemic conducted to date
>The FIVE strongest arguments in favor of the “lab leak” theory include:
>The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
>Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events.
>Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels.
>Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.
>By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced.
Intuitively, it seems to me like there aren't that many, so it's a pretty interesting coincidence that the virus started right next to such a lab.
However, if coronavirus labs are common, then it's not an coincidence. Can anyone point to research that answers this question?
From a political and public safety standpoint, I think the US government and WHO probably felt they had a moral obligation not to point the finger at China during the height of the pandemic. And now we have the opposite -- a cult of hate has taken over the US government, and they have much to gain by preaching hate against China (Trump was in power in 2019, but he only had presidential powers. Now he has absolute power.). So, in either case, it's quite hard to get undistorted information.
SARS-CoV-2 might also be a naturally-evolved virus collected and accidentally released by researchers. The field for that is a little wider. I believe the WIV had the world's biggest collection, and the closest relative published before the beginning of the pandemic; but the BANAL viruses collected by the Institut Pasteur du Laos are now closer. I think there's a few more teams, though with smaller volumes of work.
Naively, I'd think "an American-funded lab in China with American collaborators had an accident" blames China less than "Chinese wildlife traffickers supplying Chinese tastes for exotic wildlife had an accident". The political perception is generally not too tethered to reality, though.
The problem is that huge swathes of the medical community politicized the pandemic for a specific political purpose, especially in the USA. For example, the Moderna vaccine trials were delayed 2 weeks to change the protocol to appease a political activist in the medical community accusing Trump of trying to ram an unsafe vaccine through. Naturally the trial results were available immediately after the election.
I have a question for you: do you trust the provenance, integrity, and completeness of data from the earlier stages of the outbreak in Wuhan?
Nope.
And yes, I am equally cautious with my opinions about it being a zoonotic spillover event. I consider it the more likely of the two explanations, but far from definitive.
I don't think anybody ever explained why exactly it was "racist" to think that labs can leak in China just like has happened many times all around the world, but wet market theory and the dangers of the Chinese food customs is "not racist".
Does anybody know? There were many people online who more than went along with this. Why was it not the other way around?
Organisations I understand, they have whatever hidden motives. But normal people in the "lab leak theory is racist" mob, they never explained why it wasn't "wet market theory is racist" instead.
Noting that the above statement honors the notion that flu ought to be named after the country of origin.
https://sundayguardianlive.com/news/fauci-described-indian-r...
"...Indian researchers wrote that the composition of the 'inserts' in the Covid virus was similar to one found in HIV-1."
> Putting these together, we believe that there is a close evolutionary relation between 2019-nCoV and bat coronavirus RaTG13. The four insertions highlighted by Pradhan et al. in the spike protein are not unique to 2019-nCoV and HIV-1. In fact, the similarities in the sequence-based alignments built on these very short fragments are statistically insignificant, as assessed by the BLAST E values, and such similarities are shared in many other viruses, including the bat coronavirus. Structurally, these “insertions” are far away from the binding interface of the spike protein with the ACE2 receptor, as shown in Figure 2, which is also contradictory to the conclusion made by Pradhan et al.
We cannot ignore the timing or the fact that the release appears to be the direct consequence of the previous director not believing the information he had passed the evidential bar and the new directory believing it does.
It's new signal on the question, which is always nice-to-have, but I'll be digesting it with a huge grain of salt given its pedigree.
Just for the people who have forgotten what actually happened.
The Wuhan incident was very well documented, it's just that nobody besides the eye kept a record of it and blindly trusted someone else to do it.
Take a look at the reports for yourself, don't trust political bias.
Either story isn't a great look for the CCP: either they failed to maintain sufficient health protocols to keep diseases from spreading in wet markets, or they let a dangerous virus leak from a lab. There's no theory for its origins that have the CCP looking competent, so I'm not sure why it's such a politicized topic.
"Rootclaim" then bet $100,000 on being able to back that claim in a independant structured 18 hour long debate of their own devising .. and lost the $100,000.
The Rootclaim assessment was worthless.
See: https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses...
Or watch the entire 18 hour debate in which that claim was shredded.
Given your user profile about: it's easy to see why you might give weight to Saar Wilf's Rootclaim project .. championing this particular result while ignoring its full history seems professionally questionable.
I don't have time to watch the 3hr debate or read all of that article (which makes some misrepresentative statements, and like your response, is rather venomous in tone), but here is the response from rootclaim about the debate outcome: https://blog.rootclaim.com/covid-origins-debate-response-to-...
I also know from experience that scientists, and people in general, are often not well trained in the kind of probabilistic reasoning that is required for combining and weighing up multiple sources of evidence.
It was 18 hours.
Three blocks of six hours.
Plus preparation time by both parties and the multiple judges who were chosen to have the kind of expertise to weigh up arguments.
Both parties were invested in making a case, and each put up $100,000 in escrow to add weight to the debate.
The case that you put forward lost.
It was debated by the person that put it forward.
He lost.
What confuses me however, is his dismissal of two pieces of evidence in table 2 which he says should be ignored "following the presumption that HSM is the first SSE", and yet earlier, in footnote 24, he states "We are very specifically NOT conditioning on that place being HSM" (talking about the first SSE location). Can anyone enlighten me about this seeming contradiction?
Another point: while both judges are qualified scientists, their expertise is in microbiology/virology not epidemiology, but it is the epidemiological aspect of the situation that is the most contentious part of the analysis, and AFAIK the part that swung the decision in favour of zoonotic origins for both judges. Without prior assumptions they both agree that the DNA evidence favours the lab leak theory.
This is the CIA, which will make any kind of claim, true or false, if it suits their aims.
Well, it does signal their aims.
Curious to have a discussion on this with anybody knowledgeable on the topic.
Sorry, but that borders on historic revisionism. People are so against the lab manufactured hypothesis because millions of posts regarding it on social media were suppressed and blocked across Facebook, Twitter, and others; and because high-level US officials pressured scientists to claim that it was more likely natural origin than a lab leak despite their actual beliefs; and because a vast section of media and academia blithely swallowed and pushed Daszak's paper in The Lancet despite obvious flaws and massive conflicts of interest. Dissenting views and evidence were heavily suppressed, no matter how convincing or reputable.
The narrative was so forcefully shifted that any discussion of a lab leak was often met with hatred.
And all that was well before most people were infected multiple times.
> At the same time, I've come to distrust many of the voices who push the lab leak hypothesis, either because they're obviously doing so for geopolitical reasons, or because they've become addicted to being "the lone voice in the wilderness", despite it not being a risky position to take.
It's an incredible phenomenon, the collective memory blackout that seems to have taken place regarding the vibe in 2020-2021. Never before, or even after (so far), have we seen a more strictly coordinated ban on discussion of a specific topic across all major US social networks. It even reached as far as Wikipedia.
Here's what Yishan Wong (ex-Reddit) has said about it
> 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.
There are many problems with this reasoning, but the biggest one is that if true, it should have rightfully caused mob behaviour.
Gaza War (2023-present): <100k deaths Ukraine War: <1 million deaths Korean War: 2-3 million deaths Vietnam: 1.3-3.4 million deaths Covid: 6+ million deaths
Don't suspect maliciousness if something can be explained by stupidity!
This was a likely source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8490156/
There was a Chinese master thesis found on the web about this incident that was translated. I can't find any sources now anymore. Maybe it was this one: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/a-chinese-phd-...
Nope. This one: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/masters-thesis-analysis...
There is even a girl that worked in the Wuhan lab and has likely died from this Virus. https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-mail-on-sunday/20210117/2...
No facts changed, just a Trump appointee starting work.
does it conclusively establish that the virus leaked from WIV? no. but i’d say it at least moderately probable…
And ultimately it doesn't matter. If a contagious virus is coming to your country, your best response is independent of its origins. And if your response was a complete shitshow, finding a scapegoat in Wuhan won't make your response any less of a shitshow.
The US's response to covid under Trump was a ridiculous shitshow. Nothing more to it.
- https://naacp.org/articles/spread-disinformation-and-how-we-...
Personally I'd guess it was almost certainly a lab leak doing research similar proposed by Ralph Baric (the world's leading researcher on this stuff) as described in his testimony to a congressional committee. His work was proposed for US funding and didn't get it but probably the Chinese conducted much the same research themselves and the research pretty much is to make covid for research purposes. One of the viruses he mentions interest in has an insert amino acid identical to covid.
Re. what the sensible authorities at the time have to say I give you the head of the CDC at the time and the chair of the Lancet covid enquiry:
CDC Redfield: "[The US] contributed to the research that led to it and that's to say is that the US government was very involved in funding the Chinese lab that did this research..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMlhvnMpRU0&t=119s
Lancet, Sachs: "Where do you think Covid came from".. "Covid um the question is which lab and in which way. It almost surely did not come out of nature uh it almost surely came out of uh a deliberate research project ..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS-3QssVPeg&t=6493s
Also amusingly on of the scientists most active in implying anyone suggesting a lab leak was a crank or conspiracy theorist at the time of the outbreak was Kristin Anderson. Later his slack chats were subpoenaed and he was saying in them “The main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” He then got a $7m grant from Fauci totally unrelated to saying the research Fauci funded couldn't have been the problem.
The US has absolutely no interest in prooving that the virus leaked from there.
American involvement is barely an inconvenience. For those most eager to blame it on China, it was the fault of one American. They would like to punish him, too, but he has received a preemptive pardon. (Either to avoid political persecution of an innocent man, or to cover up the dastardly deeds of their domestic political opponents; take your pick.)
After Tiananmen, the CCP planned many contingents next time something similar happened.
Cue, the [2019 Hong Kong Democracy Protests][1]. The MSS releases Covid19 at the peak of the protests (actually they do pick Wuhan so they can use lab leak as a plausibility if needed) in Sep 2019 and later they use the lockdown laws to completely clamp down the protests.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_Hong_Kong_pr...
So basically neither had real evidence, but one was favoured?
Animal origin still seems more likely to me, but less than 5 years ago, since we have a missing link one would expect to see.
It does favor an accidental lab leak over a targeted weaponization and release, but it doesn't contradict a lab origin.
There was no evidence for a zoonotic origin other than it was possible.
There was little evidence for a lab leak other than it was possible, but at least there was some.
Here's a technical article at NIH discussing the theory of no known natural origin for a nucleotide subsequence
"Dr Robert Redfield, who led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Trump administration, told Vanity Fair that he received death threats from fellow scientists when he backed the Wuhan lab leak theory last spring. "I was threatened and ostracised because I proposed another hypothesis," Dr Redfield said. "I expected it from politicians. I didn't expect it from science."[1]"
The US State Department were told to not to explore claims of Gains of Function research:
"According to an investigation in Vanity Fair magazine published on Thursday, Department of State officials discussed the origins of coronavirus at a meeting on 9 December 2020. They were told not to explore claims about gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan lab to avoid attracting unwelcome attention to US government funding of such research, reports Vanity Fair.[2]"
We may never know the truth, but its clear that there was politics being played since the beginning of the pandemic to obscure the truth, and not just by China.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57352992
[2] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
How can following a trail possibly be no better?
And with the main competing theory (covid spreading from a wet market in a city that contains a biolab) also being consistent with the hypothesis that it was an accidental lab leak, to me the balance of probabilities always seemed to favor the lab leak hypothesis.
Yet saying that Covid probably originated from a lab leak was once branded as dangerous misinformation, with seemingly no evidence to support that claim
https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
Because of a lack of access and free speech it's hard to get verifiable evidence to it's origin being from a lab leak or a market in either direction.
Unfortunately, because of that lack of access mistrust and conspiracy theories spread like wild fires.
It's important with science to understand that there is what happened or what is observed and to separate that away from wishful thinking or feelings.
In short a few prominent people claimed it was racist to suggest that China's research or wet market contributed to the origins of COVID. They were mistaken but with the highly politicized environment, it helped distort opinions at a critical time. The claims of racism have since been demonstrated to be at least partly false (that is, there is a legitimate case to be made that China's researchers or wet market did contribute to the origin of COVID, and that China's leadership hid most of the evidence that would be used to make a case).
People who merely "suggested" the lab could have leaked, and asked to investigate more, were being called racist.
But not racism to declare that the virus must have come from a wet market where the savages eat uncooked bats and pangolin.
Now the goal posts have shifted to “lack of evidence” knowing full well china would nuke the city before admitting they caused covid by negligence.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-...
Exactly right. Remember any comment daring to question the authorities was shouted down to oblivion. Anyone daring to question lockdowns or other draconian measures were met with fire and brimstone. I lost a lot of respect for HN during Covid.
I feel it’s important to not forget the level of adherence to authoritarian rule that infected the population during Covid. Even places like HN were not immune. “Just following orders” was SOP even here.
Do we actually know if NIH was doing gain of function research (on Corona viruses) in the Wuhan lab? It sounds like another right wing conspiracy theory but if people have high quality sources for this being true I’ll happily change my mind.
https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/2024/06/ecohealth-alliance...
EHA has been warning for decades that a coronavirus pandemic is likely, and that governments should be taking steps to prepare for it and to make it less likely. Then, they're proved right, but instead of society thanking them, they're subject to a politically motivated witch hunt, with the aim of distracting from the US government's disastrous pandemic response.
The scientific evidence that the outbreak began at the market is overwhelming at this point, and there's never been a shred of evidence for the lab leak.
If you think otherwise, then you have not been following the scientific publications on the subject for the last 5 years.
So yes, EHA has been proven right, and you're hounding the very people who dedicated themselves to warning the world about the threat of a pandemic.
https://x.com/thackerpd/status/1880465349373751438?t=oBbkfRZ...
https://peakprosperity.com/more-evidence-covid-19-may-not-be...
The trust in the media was already low before this and I can't imagine that this news will make things better.
The natural origin bitter-clingers are still citing papers that claim to lean towards natural origin with the thinnest possible evidence. I admit I'm not a virologist, but I am a bit skeptical that this community would be completely forthright with us.
I can't shake the feeling like there might be fire where there's smoke: the Chinese government has not provided access to the WIV's data, for instance. The Chinese government deleted the virus's genome sequence from GenBank before later releasing it publicly. The closest relative to Covid-19 in known databases is RatG13, a virus from bats that was discovered in caves thousands of miles away, a complex that the researchers at WIV had used to collect samples. Peter Dasnak of EcoHealth alliance had previously submitted a plan to the DoD to introduce furin cleavage sites to existing coronaviruses to do gain-of-function research (or some euphemism for GOF to evade restrictions), a proposal that was declined, but within which there are still comments extant where they discuss outsourcing the riskiest research to China. Peter Dasnak led the delegation from WHO to China but never publicly disclosed that he had, only several years earlier, been interested in research that would have produced a virus that very specifically resembled Covid. A small group of influential scientists and bureaucrats were discussing via email that it certainly appeared to be a lab leak to them until they met in person to speak with Dr. Fauci in February 2020, after which they abruptly stopped discussing the possibility of lab-leak and worked to submit the Proximal Origin letter to Nature that claimed a consensus among scientists that it must be natural origin -- based on the airtight logic that if a lab wanted to make a coronavirus it probably would have done it differently. Those authors did not disclose the influence of Peter Dasnak and Dr Fauci in drafting the letter. Subsequently, the US government used the existence of the letter as authoritative evidence of a natural origin in order to lean on social media companies to censor speech about the potential of a lab leak. Meanwhile, the fact remains that in order for Covid to have made a jump from an animal species, it would have to be extant in the population of an animal species -- or a variant clearly one mutation away would need to be. It's been 5 years and we haven't found an animal with Covid.
Of course we'll never get the smoking gun because the data you'd need -- the experimental data from WIV -- is likely gone forever. Why would that be? Why wouldn't a leading research center on coronavirus virology -- perhaps the foremost in the world -- hide its records when the big event that represents its entire reason for existence -- a coronovirus pandemic -- has shown up in the world, conveniently on its doorstep? Shouldn't that be their time to shine? Are you going to blame that on Trump's rhetoric? Why hasn't all of Baric's data from UNC been released to the public yet, then?
It is really pretty amazing to me that many people will likely go to their grave thinking "oh, no, no scientists released a paper that says the natural origin is still a live theory, I don't have to listen to any of this conspiracy nonsense" simply because they can't live in a world where Trump was right.
Not to mention that the main paper cited for this was written by ... Daszak, yet again. And it was endorsed by 26 other people who all had conflicts of interest, under a Lancet editor who since admitted that he knew Daszak had a massive conflict of interest, which wasn't admitted publicly for a year.
Ain't it odd that media never really ran with that story? That neither Dems or Republicans had much to say about Daszak? It didn't too viral on social media, there were never any TV interviews where they showed people reacting to being told that, no documentaries about the flaws of the Lancet paper and how it was pushed; it was never part of any drive to change policies, etc. Seemed odd to me anyway.
Another good overview is at:
https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses...
The 18-hour video debate
The Rootclaim debate was structured over 3 days with 3 thematic blocks;
* the first block was about the geographic location and the evidence for the Huanan market versus the Wuhan Institute of virology being where the virus came from
* the second block was about the SARS-CoV-2 genome and whether its genetic features more likely arose in nature versus gain-of-function research
* the third block was about probability; how can the evidence be grouped and what probabilistic assumptions should be taken to accurate reflect odds of the evidence occurring
Each side first got 90 minutes to lay out their cases, then another 90 minutes together to respond to questions.
No matter how you slice it, this is a serious effort and time investment, as the preparation alone of materials and research into it probably consumed hundreds of hours from speakers and judges alike."Synthesis of Chimeric NovelSARS-CoVQS: We will commercially synthesize SARSr- Cov glycoprotein genes, designed for insertion into SHCO14 or WIV16 molecular clone backbones (88% and 97% S-protein identity to epidemic SARS-Urbani. These are BSL-3, not select agents or subject to P3CO (they use bat SARS-CoV backbones which are exempt) and are pathogenic to hACE2 transgenic mice. Different backbone strains increase recovery of viable:viruses identification of barriers for RNA recombination-mediated gene transfer between strains™. Recombinant viruses will be recovered in Vero cels, or in mouse cells over-expressing human, bat or civet ACE2 receptors to support cultivation ofviruses with a weaker RBD-human ACE2 interface. "
In vitro testing of chimeric viruses: All chimeric viruses will be sequence verified and evaluated for. i) ACE2 receptor usage across species in vitro, ii) growth in primary HAE, iii) sensitivity to broadly cross neutralizing human monoclonal antibodies that recognize unique epitopes in the RBD. Should some isolates prove highly resistant to our mAB panel we will evaluate cross neutalzation against a cited number of human SARS-CoV serum samples from the Toronto outbreak. Chimeric viruses that encode novel genes with slower potential will be used to identify SARSr-CoV strains for recovery as full genome length viable viruses.
In vivo pathogenesis: Groups of 10 animals will be infected intranasally with 1.0 x 106 PFU of each vSARSr-CoV, clinical signs (weight loss, respiratory function, mortality, et) followed for 6 days..."
S2 Proteolytic Cleavage and Glycosylation Sites: ... We will analyze all SARS-CoV S gene sequences for appropriately conserved proteolytic cleavage sites in S2 and for the presence of potential furin cleavage sites".... Where clear mismatches occur, WE WILL INTRODUCE APPROPRIATE HUMAN SPECIF CLEAVAGE SITES AND EVALUATE GROWTH POTENTIAL IN VERO CELL AND HAE CULTURES."
I apologize as the copy and paste from a PDF is not ideal. If anyone ever wanted a smoking gun, this is it. The WIV proposed to build SARS-COV2 in 2018/2019. The key point is that when someone proposes this type of research, they often have already done the work and the funding will be used to generate the next result needed for future funding.
Also, one item that the world conveniently forgot was that half of the specialists in this field believed passionately that the only way to prevent the next Pandemic was to create super viruses in the lab (this is in the public record). Given the extensive history of lab leaks and suspected lab leaks, this path is absolute and complete hubris and folly. The same folks who were pushing this agenda (and the DEFUSE proposal is filled with little notes as to how certain rules could be skirted) were the folks who immediately claimed that it was absolutely impossible for this to be a lab leak.
This proposal was shopped to a number of different US agencies in 2019. This means that there were likely dozens of individuals in multiple agencies who reviewed this proposal and said absolutely nothing when the pandemic broke.
Hong Kong protests?
It also gives conspiracy theorists and low-trust communities a bone to chew on, since UFO hysterias are proving to have an increasingly short shelf life.
Meanwhile in reality they’ve all but named the goddamn specific animal that brought it from the zoonotic pool and introduced it to mankind.
Handwringing about the existence of a somehow malign bio lab in a city LARGER THAN NEW YORK that has DOZENS is preposterous. There’s no evidence, no scenario, no whistleblower, no documentation, nothing. It’s a chew toy for low-information busybodies who need this to be an evil foreign plot.
And it’s boring and sad, particularly when America’s first dictator is installing a profoundly corrupt lunatic who is here to overturn germ theory.
Have some dignity.
Sources documenting this: National Review, New York Post & Daily Express US.
US government lies, and then calls "misinformation" on people who call out the truth. Now they are being held accountable to go back to the truth. Which is why the CIA is now switching 180-degrees from a Lie to the truth (non-Lab to Lab).
The announcement of the shift came shortly after Mr. Ratcliffe told Breitbart News he no longer wanted the agency “on the sidelines” of the debate over the origins of the Covid pandemic. Mr. Ratcliffe has long said he believes that the virus most likely emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology....
Another senior U.S. official said it was Mr. Ratcliffe’s decision to declassify and release the new analysis. There is no new intelligence behind the agency’s shift. Rather it is based on the same evidence it has been chewing over for months.....
To boost the natural origins theory, intelligence officers would like to find the animal that passed it to a human or find a bat carrying what was the likely ancestor of the coronavirus that causes Covid.
Similarly, to seal the lab leak, the intelligence community would like to find evidence that one of the labs in Wuhan was working on a progenitor virus that directly led to the epidemic.
Neither piece of evidence has been found.This is the first US presidential change of power I'm following consciously. Have there always been such abrupt 180° turns and pledges of loyalty as now? I feel like I'm watching The Godfather.
> This is the first US presidential change of power I'm following consciously. Have there always been such abrupt 180° turns and pledges of loyalty as now?
No; this is 100% new. This is in no way a normal Presidential transition of power.
The US is clearly setting up China to be the next Big Enemy, the USSR 2.0. The US establishment expects--and arguably is fomenting--economic and possibly eventual military conflict with China. The "lab leak" declassification neatly fits into that narrative.
We may never know the truth or it may take decades to find out.
There's really only two likely theories here: zoonotic origin and lab leak. There are many variants of "lab leak" but the most likely is that it was accidental. It's more fringe to claim it was intentional. This sort of thing has happened before [1].
There is circumstancial data for this like China not cooperating with a WHO investigation back in 2020 and 2021 and a Wuhan Institute of Virology virus database in SEptember 2019. To my knowledge, that has never been recovered or examinted by external parties. My theory is, like every government (including the US), China doesn't want to know the answer to this question. There's literally no upside. Would you want to be the official who oversaw a leak like this? Would you want to be in charge of the government at that time? Nobody wants that. Governments love ignorance.
The zoonotic origin is still more likely but it has the obvious problem that we haven't (yet) identified the host animal. Also, Wuhan is quite far from the bats that might be the likely source.
It might be a complicated origin, such as a person or animal being infected with multiple strains and a replication error creating the virus from multiple sources.
But the main point here is we're going to see a lot of anti-China sentiment being drummed up by the US in coming years. This is bipartisan too.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
Based on their reaction we may know that they either knew something very bad (i.e. failed experiment) or were suspecting something so bad that could, at least in their theory, kill the population or massively decrease it.
In other words something was fishy and they overreacted.
Yeah, a really bad virus.