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Comment by Fomite | Hacker News Reader

I wrote this awhile ago on a previous thread about this:

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.

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Even in the wildlife spillover case don't you still blame it on people doing business with bat carcasses or was there some kind of obviously fine as an animal product intermediary between the bats and the people?

There's a greater burden of proof for spillover when there just happens to be a lab doing virus research near the epicenter of the outbreak.

There have been two other spillover events from coronaviruses in the last 30 years. One of those (SARS) was from Chinese wet markets.

Wuhan has a population of 13 million. It would be surprising if the city didn't have a lab doing virus research.

There are 42 BSL-4 facilities in the world. I'm too lazy to do the math, but I'm curious what percent of the world's population is near one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#List_of_BSL-4_...

One of these BSL4 had major incident on Sep 16 2019, just before start of epidemic.

If the work on coronaviruses that WIV was doing was at BSL-4, I'd be more skeptical of a lab leak origin. It was being done at BSL-2; see Ralph Baric's testimony covered in this Vanity Fair article:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-...

The WIV had the single largest collection of novel sarbecoviruses in the world. There's zero question that the UNC and WIV wished to engineer those sarbecoviruses to produce an enhanced virus broadly similar to SARS-CoV-2, in their unfunded DEFUSE proposal. An unconfirmed intelligence leak further claims that work was actually performed, at the WIV only.

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.

> There's no reason to shift to that broader category except willful obfuscation

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...

> 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.

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.

Edit: name checks out.

>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.

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