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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

I have family that have worked on developing NBC equipment for the military. The first thing they said when covid was spreading was that it was most likely from a lab. That was before anyone in the news was saying that. So an independent first-look assessment by someone with experience, followed by later finding out that there was in fact a lab there, has me heavily leaning towards it being true. But it doesn't really change anything unless there's hard proof. Even with hard proof, do you think China would pay for anything? I don't think so.

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You should realize experience in a tangentially related field and there being a lab somewhere in the area is not the same as insight and evidence. That’s like saying that if a new flu came out of Atlanta, the fact the CDC is there proves it came from a lab, and must be true because someone’s janitor cousin who worked there one summer said it was true.

“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.

If something very like smallpox, thought eradicated, suddenly showed up in some random town, it might be surmised that maybe some animal reservoir for it somehow slipped through the gaps. But if that random town happened to be Atlanta, home of the CDC, known to have some of the few samples of smallpox to still exist, then the relative chance of a lab leak must be thought higher. That's basic Bayesian reasoning. It doesn't prove anything but pretending the proximity to a relevant lab doesn't shift the odds at all is absurd.

Smallpox, yes. But another SARS variant (even a somewhat more aggressive one)...

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.

> That’s like saying that if a new flu came out of Atlanta, the fact the CDC is there proves it came from a lab, and must be true because someone’s janitor cousin who worked there one summer said it was true.

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.

Actually, my first though would be that there were other outbreaks, but we only documented the one in Atlanta because the CDC happened to be there.

We should expect that the first outbreaks documented are those that happen to be close to facilities capable of identifying and documenting them.

wiv was not documenting them. Hospitals were documenting flu like cases increasing at exponential rages. And there are hospitals everywhere

Coordinating medical information is notoriously hard, particularly when the government doesn't want to acknowledge something. Let's take Florida as an example.

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.

The pandemic was discovered by ordinary doctors in Wuhan who noticed the unusually high volume of sick and dying patients. Only then were specialists engaged to identify the cause, and the viral genome was first published by Zhang Yong-Zhen in Shanghai. The WIV isn't known to have played any role in this.

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.

Actually, it's more difficult to prove a wild origin than a lab origin, because labs have papertrails and witnesses.

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.

>because labs have papertrails and witnesses

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.

Chinese lab paper trails are as trustworthy as Trump’s toilet paper roll trails if we are being honest.

There's a paper from 2014 that tried to estimate the annual chance of a pandemic from a lab leak. They estimated it at 2%.

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.

To me it barely moves the needle, specifically because as you have said we have found other remarkably similar viruses in the past.

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.

You're not saying it, but you're obviously starting with a very different bayseian prior than my 50/50.

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.

Its origin is at a huge meat market full of both hunted and farmed produce and animals both live and dead from all over the country and attended by thousands of people daily. I find that far more convincing than the fact that there was a virology center in an urban area, there are virology centers in tons of large cities and all of them hold samples of many corona viruses because they are incredibly common. The fact that the one that potentially escaped just happens to be incredibly dangerous would seem like an astronomical coincidence if it wasn't released on purpose, and there are many problems with that idea. But the fact that a market full of both live and fresh slaughtered animal products ends up being the origination point of a dangerous virus does not seem coincidental at all, just a mere matter of time.

A Bayesian prior of 50/50 seems high to me. It assumes that 50% of new disease variants come from lab leaks.

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.

Maybe bio weapons could be tested on organ-on-a-chip/body-on-a-chip systems?

Not that it will fit a western centric ideology but there is zero mystery with people going into hospitals in Nov. It would be surprising if it weren’t so.

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.

I'm actually aware of the cultural differences there. Going to the hospital is not usually the same thing as being "hospitalized" though, and it would be relevant for us to make that distinction to determine how much that tidbit pushes us one way or the other. I had originally read "hospitalized" some time ago, but i just checked the intelligence briefing and it definitely does not indicate actual hospitalization.

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.

If one were either the director or a senior leader of a more-or-less covert biolab doing research that is definitely supposed not to be discovered, would you have done your job if you had not established a procedure for medical treatment of sick or infected employees using local and probably covert resources? - And likely including local isolation of infected or potentially infected people? Whether or not people from this supposed type of biolab turns up at public hospitals does not seem to indicate much.

> Now add in the fact that the outbreak occurred right next to a BSL lab.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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:

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 think the usual theory for SARS-1 is spillover from bats to other non-human animals outside Guangzhou. The virus was then brought to Guangzhou by wildlife traffickers, like in the live infected civet cats found in markets there. A similar conduit is possible for SARS-CoV-2, but we still haven't found that proximal host.

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.

You're not clarify anything I said or telling me anything I don't already know.

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'm aware that you already know everything I've written here. I agree that spillover from bats in Wuhan is not impossible (nature is big and mysterious), but your implication that proximity to such bats affected Dr. Shi's choice of working location just isn't correct. She can be wrong about a lot of things, but she can't be wrong about her own intentions.

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.

In fact, if a new flu came out from Atlanta I would immediately suspect an Emory grad student working in the CDC labs.

(Not to knock Emory students, I love them, but Emory has a relationship with the CDC and grad students can be cavalier)

there's a 19 bp sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade). 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)

> there's a 19 bp sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent

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?

No. The patent in question: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9587003B2/en

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.

no screen necessary. you create a bunch of dnas by robot building from scratch every FCS known to man. the "screen" is "this is the guy that hapoened jump out of the test tube and cause a pandemic". more of a selection than a screen i guess

If SARS-Cov-2 was from a lab, what about the original SARS?

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.

> If SARS-Cov-2 was from a lab, what about the original SARS?

And MERS. It’s not like coronaviruses causing epidemics were very surprising at the time.

SARS-1 was found in wild animals, had a long period in which it adapted to human hosts instead of being immediately well adapted, didn't have any weird artificial looking RNA sequences, and didn't emerge right next to a lab experimenting on coronaviruses.

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.

If I said I had cousins that were bankers, I am not sure that it would make me more credible to talk about finance. I mean - to the people who care about expertise.

>That was before anyone in the news was saying that.

May be in the west? It was certainly well publicised in other regions.

I had a Chinese colleague in January of '20 saying it was obviously a leak. I hadn't even heard of Wuhan before, and he told me there is a bio lab there.

And what does that tell you? I could probably find 10 people in every country on earth that claim COVID-19 originated in a lab there. I don’t think being Chinese is a good qualification for determining where COVID-19 came from.

You're right of course.

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.

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