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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://peakprosperity.com/more-evidence-covid-19-may-not-be...