Hacker News Reader

Comment by derektank | Hacker News Reader

Both the FBI and DOE, which have their own foreign intelligence gathering capabilities, had previously assessed that COVID was caused by a lab leak with moderate confidence. So while I agree with you that the truth will likely remain shrouded in some mystery, most of us that believed it originated from zoonosis at first (and I would include myself in that camp) should update our priors both based on the CIA assessment and previous assessments

View on HN

Lab leak and zoonotic origin are not mutually exclusive.

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.

Although it's not specified in common dictionary definitions...

"...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.

Most accurately, lab leak and spillover event are not mutually exclusive theories.

...and the most likely scenario is that it was leaked due to a mistake. Sloppy lab procedures. If anything, this should point to MORE regulation around GLP principles with more transparency and oversight, not less. And while I see some merit in determining potential risk, it should be only done with computation and computer modeling now, not an actual virus.

Closest *identified* wild variant. The thing is it's made the jump before, making the jump again isn't astounding.

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.

Are the FBI or DOE assessments public? What I last read in the peer-reviewed public literature seemed to point strongly to animal origin and not from a lab.

> Are the FBI or DOE assessments public?

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...

I think you are confusing “lab leak” with “lab made.”

No, the academic papers that were published strongly pointed to the origin being the market and from wild animals, not lab animals.

You are being downvoted, but you are right. Evidence suggest that patient zero was someone in the Wuhan market, around november 2019, and the SARS-CoV-2 genetic "signatures" where all found in wild animals for sale in that market.

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.

> Evidence suggest that patient zero was someone in the Wuhan market, around november 2019, and the SARS-CoV-2 genetic "signatures" where all found in wild animals for sale in that market.

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...

The disease might have already been global at that point, it doesn't exactly have conspicuous symptoms. Wuhan was a place where somebody thought of looking for anything unusual.

Doctors in Wuhan first identified the pandemic due to the unusually high volume of sick and dying patients, not by any sophisticated means. There's no public evidence that the WIV was involved in the initial discovery of the novel virus. Zhang Yong-Zhen was the first to publish a genome, in Shanghai.

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.

Your guessing of my sources are wrong, thus your message is a strawman fallacy from beginning to end.

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.

You provided no references, and you've made your claims in generally nonstandard terms. Given that, I don't think it's reasonable to criticize other users for guessing incorrectly what you meant to say.

> 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.

Well, I cited a canonical paper making the argument you're advancing, so if it's not that, then...

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...

I think you're referring to this paper (or other similar analyses):

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.

How is occams razor pointing you to a fish market where they didn’t find it in any animals that could transmit it, next to a research center working on similar viruses, where people commuted from there via the market, where documents exist pointing out poor security practices, and where the Chinese government restricted access?

Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market also sold the following seafood items: raccoon dogs, hedgehogs, weasels, badgers, hares, squirrels, civets, rats, porcupines, coypus, marmots, foxes, minks, wild boars, etc.

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.

They sold lots of animals, but they found no viruses in the animals themselves right? Sampling found it in the environment, but not in the animals?

I might be wrong but I swear I read they never found cov 2 in an animal that could transmit to humans

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06043-2

It always happens. Local authorities are more interested in not killing business and tourism than they are in preventing low-probability epidemics. Thus a cover-up by the locals is to be expected.

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.

I have pretty much given up on trying to discuss this rationally on any Internet forum. The only people who seem to engage have very strong priors that are impervious to new data. But it's been a year so I guess I needed a reminder to myself in the futility of the endeavor

Actually, we probably can never prove that. Could the animals have come to the market via the lab?

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.

The peer reviewed literature is written and reviewed by the people who were funding/doing that kind of GoF research, so it isn't a reliable way to decide what's true.

My priors include none of the agencies having expertise in epidemiology.

Why would you think that?

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.

You are wrong, something that you could have easily checked yourself. There are many sophisticated epidemiology groups throughout defense and intelligence. It is a longstanding critical part of their mission, for a variety of end purposes.

My prior includes neither agency can provide genetic analysis which would be the easiest way to convince a professor of virology that this theory has any merit.

My priors include all the agencies (the Intelligence Community, arguably the deep state) having ulterior political and personal motives. Does noone remember the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction hoax that the CIA cooked up for GWB?

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.

I feel that that could've been an honest mistake too.

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.

In the run-up to the second Iraq war there were a steady trickle of articles documenting the corruption of the intelligence process.

>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.

That is very literally the opposite of what actually happened.

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.

Here’s an actual account from someone in the room that lays out the entire situation. https://youtu.be/5iNrGhmr5p0

> I feel that that could've been an honest mistake too.

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.

The CIA did not cook up the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction hoax. Paul Wolfowitz had to create an entirely new intelligence agency with hand-picked analysts to get that result, because the existing agencies refused to make that claim.

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

According to Iraq general, WMD were moved to Syria about 6 month prior to invasion, then Syrian government used them against rebels.

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.

“Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” George W Bush.

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.

The CIA was very skeptical about the WMD story and there were lots of leaks that made that clear.

Seriously, I remember the Bush admin going after the wife of a CIA operative by leaking her identity after he spoke out about the war intel being bullshit. As someone who was following the Iraq war from the left side and pretty disgusted by it it definitely seemed like it was being pushed hardest by the GOP with anti-war information coming out of the CIA or even military. Granted leakers don't represent the opinions of an agency but this narrative that the CIA was the real villain (not that they aren't) that hoodwinked the poor GOP strikes me revisionist whitewashing.

While I am very skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis as an infectious disease epidemiologist, the DoE has a fair amount of expertise via the national labs.

Can you please share the reasons why you are skeptical?

A few reasons, though as I note in another comment, I'm not an expert in spillover events, my area of interest kicks in about a week later. So there's a few:

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.

Can you elaborate on point 4? Your comment is interesting but I don't entirely follow.

Basically, things like "It started in Wuhan near the WIV" implies that we actually have found the first case, etc., when this is notoriously difficult to do, especially with a disease that can have mild or asymptomatic presentation.

Doesn't the same difficulty of finding the first case also apply to the wet market theory?

Indeed, so it could be some unidentified third place. There are few labs and many other possibilities for people to come into contact with animals, so that third place was probably not a lab.

Yep.

My prior is that it is a zoonotic spillover event. Not necessarily that one, though there is some good evidence for it.

If you followed events at the time and the suppressed rumours from doctors in China end of 2019, the new illness began exactly around that area actually (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang etc).

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)

>no similar reports

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...

Spain paper was not peer-reviewed.

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.

There was similar report about sudden increase of cases of atypical pneumonia at Oct 16, 2019 in Krasnoyark Krai, Siberia, Russia: about 700 cases per week, which is similar to Covid-19 levels.

The main database of samples and viral sequences of the Wuhan Institute of Virology went offline on Sep 12th 2019.

That's a smoking gun. And next month it was likely already circulating in Wuhan (https://www.reuters.com/world/china/first-covid-19-case-coul...), coincidence.

> 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.

No, it doesn't. Quote from the article:

> 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.

Satellite images of Wuhan may suggest coronavirus was spreading as early as August 2019:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52975934.amp

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/08/health/satellite-pics-cor...

Would it mean it was active earlier but a critical mass was needed to cause a pandemic? Or it evolved in humans while circulating Wuhan?

I agree with that statement. Even with prior warning, and knowing the virus could be introduced only at an airport or seaport, Western public health authorities managed to trace approximately zero cases to their introduction. So it's hard to believe the same tools would succeed at the much more difficult task of tracing the very first cases in China.

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.

I think her arguments are solid, I'm just not certain they're definitive. But I do find her presentation of those arguments to be both detailed and accessible.

You might not be certain they're definitive, but she is:

> 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.

I believe these agencies may have other kinds of intelligence data such as satellite photos of the (empty?) Wuhan Institute of Virology carpark, spikes in mobile phone activity in the area etc. So assessments are made on more than just biological principles.

The hospital was full.

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.

I would argue you are sowing disinfo and I honestly dont know what point you are trying to make. Spikes and/or significant reductions in activity as indicated by external data sources, and particular the timing thereof, will obviously be very useful for determining the sequence of events.

The hospital, sure.

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.

The virus evolved in an AIDS patient.

> or because they've become addicted to being "the lone voice in the wilderness", despite it not being a risky position to take.

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.

Lol people were getting called racist for suggesting it was anything less than the spawn of a bat and an asian water racoon.

It still isn't even acceptable to acknowledge the (blatant) possibility that Omnicron was intentionally leaked because of low vaccine effectiveness.

Let's be honest, if their is a global conspiracy to spread disease I think it's to kill off the masses due to AI replacing jobs and lowering the amount of green houses gasses people produce.

I got death threats for suggesting that mandatory vaccination for school kids wasn't well justified not from the people who wanted vaccination, but from the people who decided I wasn't sufficiently opposed to it.

That's obviously bad. Vaccination and COVID origins are different topics, though.

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.

“as an infectious disease epidemiologist”

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.

I base it on my evaluation of the arguments of those people as an epidemiologist. And their expertise - as I've said, my expertise focuses on a different aspect of outbreaks, with its own theories and methods, and I know enough to recognize that addressing this requires a good deal of specialized knowledge.

Well, that sounds more reasonable, but the prior comment seems to be relying mostly on reputation and political viewpoints rather than the arguments themselves.

Is Rasmussen really in favour of a GoF ban and destroying the academic value of the background of the majority of her professional friends in the field? Cause I can't really find her calling for a ban, quite the opposite really.

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?

Everyone is a Bayesian these days; it's become so fashionable to throw "priors" around like it means anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com