My question is, why? What does it matter whether the virus originated from a lab or from a wet market - it isn't any more dangerous if it came from a lab, nor does knowing the origin really help dealing with this crisis at all.
It is certainly interesting to know where it did originate, and that knowledge could inform a debate on the future of (respectively) wet markets and animal husbandry practices, or BSL facilities, but these don't strike me as particularly emotionally charged topics, and in any case the posts I'm referring to don't mention these debates...
Anybody care to explain why you would respond so strongly to claims of lab origin?
idk I'm just an outsider
If there was anything that showed it was in any way artificial it would have been detected by all mainstream experts by now and that information would have been publicised one way or another. Yet these claims and 'evidence' are only reported as coming from fringe people if not likely paid 'agents' (I'm thinking about that HK 'scientist' girl that fled and is in the US now, doing the rounds of all tabloids on the planet).
On the other hand, there are known virii extremely similar to it in the mild (90-95% similar and related).
I don't know if the hypothesis that it may be artificial is plausible to start with, but the facts seem to weigh heavily against it while the interests of some to create this "conspiracy theory" is pretty obvious as are the interests of some to expose China if they had actual evidence.
Really? I usually see a lot of plain disagreement based on reasonable lines of thinking, but only a very small proportion of "_extremely_ strong" wording. Are you sure you're not just interpreting a multitude of similar opinions as creating a feeling of that opinion being "extremely strong"? Or that you're not just thinking of the cases where people are responding to the overtly political conspiracy hyperbole that sometimes comes as a wrapper around the proposal?
This is a whole other ball game if it's malice/incompetence.
America destroyed Iraq on lies, but what has that liability cost them?
What are you talking about? Zoonotic origin is the source of the majority of viruses:
> Approximately 60% of the known infectious diseases and 75% of the new emerging or re-emerging diseases infecting humans came from animals. SARS-CoV-2 is the latest addition to the seven coronaviruses found in humans, and experts said that all of these viruses either came from bats, mice, or domestic animals.
> More so, bats are the source of the Ebola virus, rabies, Nipah ad Hendra virus infections, Marburg virus disease, and influenza A virus.
https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/26492/20200717/covid-1...
> An estimated 60% of known infectious diseases and up to 75% of new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic in origin (1,2). Globally, infectious diseases account for 15.8% of all deaths and 43.7% of deaths in low-resource countries (3,4). It is estimated that zoonoses are responsible for 2.5 billion cases of human illness and 2.7 million human deaths worldwide each year (5).
Someone mentioned in another comment that some on the left were tying criticism of China with racism, and I'd like to point out that those identity politics only benefit the right. I think this link is mostly coming from some of the US liberal class (financially well off, lives aren't directly affected by election outcomes, centrists, etc.) and not from The Left (socialists, left of Bernie types).
Blame a government, not its people. There is plenty of criticism to throw at China without being racist. But if anyone is claiming that blaming China is racist then they are just as misdirected as the people that use criticism of a county to be racist against its people.
Furthermore, we should talk about ethical disclosure responsibilities that all countries can agree on for outbreaks going forward as well as what will happen if those rules are not followed. For example, countries around the world should agree that if a country experiences a pandemic outbreak and they don't take certain measures to stop an international spread and disclose updates to the world, they will be liable for the extended outbreak. Allowing a virus like this to spread internationally while covering up details where now more than a million people have died is really grounds for war. Even if the virus was not created in a lab or intentional in any way, any limitation on communication and disclosure can have massive impact.
A paper in the lancet early in the year reported that the Wuhan Seafood market not only did not sell bats, but that many of the early patients reported never visiting the market.
At this point, it may be too late to ever discover the true origin of the virus.
This makes the hypothesis very plausible as a starting point, but afaik there is no confirmed reservoir for SARS-CoV-2, the pangolin and bat hypothesis have not been confirmed.
I don't think more disclosures would have helped a lot of the countries. China locked what 10M people in January and lots of the world essentially went "huh". There were reports of welding people into their homes when UK rates were in double digits. We seem to have done little with the already very public information so what would have happened with more?
My next question would be “why”? What would be the CCP’s motives to study and modify the virus?
Is it to test whether different changes would make the virus more/less communicable?
Is it to prevent another MERS SARS?
Is it to tailor disease for certain ethnicities? CCP doesn’t appear to have qualms about getting rid of troublesome minority populations, as long as they have some amount of deniability to rely on.
Is it to stress test global medical science and institutions?
I’ll keep an open mind in that if (and it’s a large if) there are respected scientists who present evidence of it being a lab modified virus, then the motive must be understood and fast.
Edit: I will say that China isn’t helping its case by impeding research and publishing of any studies simply trying to establish whether COVID even crossed from local (wild) bat populations; and promoting only theories that claim COVID came from elsewhere.
That being said, I tend to agree with your assertion.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29246
> Why do these distinctions matter? If we find more concrete evidence of a “spill-over” event with SARS-CoV-2 passing directly from bat to human, then efforts to understand and manage the bat–human interface need to be significantly strengthened. But if SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab to cause the pandemic, it will become critical to understand the chain of events and prevent this from happening again.
Viruses used for gain of function research are selected for high rates of mutation and adaption. If we had known this from day one we would likely have made several changes to how to protect against it in the long term, especially with regards to cross-species transmission.
The link made it pretty clear that the vast majority of the world already refuses to fund the type of research that could have led to the virus.
Ironically one of these researchers, Daszak, was politically targeted for his connections to this Wuhan lab [1], even though he and Wuhan scientists have been trying to get the attention to this problem for some time. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02473-4
Again, I don’t think there was that much, let alone enough to swing the election, but we can’t even discuss any of it honestly.
For one thing, this is a classic example of correlation != causation. Let’s say you had a shark attack on some beach and there was a team researching shark attack located right in that area. Would you then conclude that the team engineered the shark attack? The simple reality is that the most likely reason the team studying shark attacks is located in that region is simply because that region either has a history of shark attacks or even if it doesn’t have a history, is likely to have shark attacks. That’s why a team studying shark attacks would decide to locate themselves there.
The same is true here. Wuhan hosts a bat virology research institute because bat viruses are a higher risk here than in most places.
The other factor is that there is probably an infinite number of things that could look suspicious if there is such a disaster. It could be the presence of a bat focused research institute. It could be a conference that was held out there in the past few months. It could be a scientist from that region predicting a bat virus a few weeks before. It could be a district updating its pandemic protection plans in the weeks before. Etc.
The odds of any specific one of them happening are extremely low and would rightly make one suspicious. But the odds of at least one of the infinite suspicious things being true is almost 100%. And that’s probably all there is to it here. The presence of the bat research is just the 1 of many suspicious things that just happens to be true.
That being said, I think the strongest explanation is that Wuhan was considered a likely source of bat virus infections and that’s why the research was focused there.
I’m a complete nobody, but the internet has a way of amplifying things.
Except the bat in question doesn't originate in Wuhan. I can't remember the cave exactly but the Wuhan researchers documented the capture thousands of miles from the lab, several years ago.
It seems the crux of the argument is to better react in the short term, but it looks to my untrained eyes that we already passed that level of investigation if we have effective means to prevent infection.
I also guess we’d still need to explore all other tracks anyway (we can’t just focus on lab spills for instance, if that was the root cause, and stop to care about the bat/human interface, nor should it be assumed that any other path will be less important in the future)
Throw some confirmation bias on top of it. The easiest group to blame for bad things is the group you already disliked. Traditionally this means foreigners, other races, and heretics. Blaming China both let's people have their imagined just world and vindicates whatever pre-existing hard-line stance they had on China. It's no secret that a lot of people already had a hard-lie stance on China for unrelated reasons (Eg the trade war).
In conclusion the human logical apparatus is bugged, no one is releasing any patches, and the whole issue is emotional because who you blame is tribal signaling dressed up as rational interest.
Maybe this is pedantic, but the introduction to humans could have happened in a wet market whether the virus itself originated in a lab (where bats could have escaped or been smuggled out and sold, etc.) or zoonotically.
"Wet market" just distinguishes from "dry market" where durable goods like electronics are sold.
China never banned wet markets, which makes about as much sense as saying someone has "banned supermarkets". They banned the sale of certain items at wet markets.
(I live in Asia and shop at a wet market multiple times a week.)
The media is more than happy to report on early detections out of China, and let suggestions that the vape lung (now linked to vit. E cutting agent) is COVID run free.
We left the realm of rationality long ago, when the government did a tribalism on behalf of all of us.
(Nationalism is a hell of a drug. The govt still funds crackpots to argue against Chinese people originating in africa, to call greco-roman and egyptian history faked, and don't even get me started on their insistence on 5k years.)
EDIT: I misspoke slightly by referring to "bioweapons," so I decided to post the full quote here:
> It turned out that the Soviets were conducting vaccine studies using live, attenuated H1N1 influenza viruses in the very area where the new H1N1 was first detected. During our research, we uncovered a letter from the Soviets to the US government requesting that we share with them the 1976 Fort Dix strain of H1N1 for their vaccine studies. I have little doubt that the appearance of the 1977 H1N1 virus and its rapid global transmission in just several months was the result of a release of the virus in the course of the Soviet vaccine studies. We don’t know exactly what they were doing with the virus. What we do know is that it got out, either accidentally or on purpose, causing a local outbreak in lab workers that subsequently spread around the world. Either way, the powerful lesson here is that if an influenza virus accidentally escapes or is intentionally released, expect that it will spread around the world in short order. This is the proverbial single match being able to light a global forest fire. The possibility for a DURC research study using a potentially dangerous influenza virus should scare the hell out of everyone.
I believe I originally saw it here on HN.
This is not just me being salty about reactions to my own comments, I've personally never made a comment on the origin of the covid on Reddit, as I don't feel like I have anything of value to add yet. It's just something I've witnessed over and over again.
Like the GP of this thread I've never understood why such a relatively harmless claim would be so contentious. I've always assumed it was something political that as a non-American I simply don't know the context of. It reminds me of the drama around hydroxychloroquine, where mentioning it on Reddit would get you tarred-and-feathered as a loony Trumpist, even though it seemed like a non-issue to me. Obviously HCQ doesn't really work, but believing it does never seemed to deserve such harsh treatment, which I'm again assuming has roots in a political context I don't fully understand.
Will we ever learn the truth about China and the pandemic?
Two inquiries are 'cloaked in secrecy'
WHO lets Beijing vet investigators and it
appoints British scientist with links to Wuhan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug
here is an essay written by his guest:
https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
Factory farming of eg, chickens and pigs has previously led to avian and swine flu outbreaks, so there's strict monitoring of viruses around those farm monocultures. But in the wet markets of Asia there's often multiple species together that would rarely encounter each other in the wild.
Traditional Chinese Medicine uses bat feces, pangolin scales and other exotic products, with an emphasis on live animals. Bats and pangolins are a vector for virus and cross-species virus transmission.
Moving wet markets indoors into sanitary conditions, and banning the sale of live produce would go a long way to preventing future outbreaks.
No one who lives in Asia around wet markets uses it that way.
Regardless, it doesn't change my point that China never banned wet markets, not even for one day.
Basically I see it as preparing to win the last war.
Wait what? The Chinese government does this? Who do they claim faked Greco-Roman and Egyptian history, and to what end? And what is 5k years supposed to be? The age of the earth or something?
See "Infectious diseases emerging from Chinese wet-markets: zoonotic origins of severe respiratory viral infections" [2006]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16940861/
> The bats carrying CoV ZC45 were originally found in Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which were more than 900 kilometers away from the seafood market. Bats were normally found to live in caves and trees. But the seafood market is in a densely-populated district of Wuhan, a metropolitan of ~15 million people. The probability was very low for the bats to fly to the market. According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the market.
Source: https://archive.is/r4Yac
Now, I don't suggest that the virus was created in the lab, or deliberately leaked. But it had to be brought into Wuhan somehow. I just don't consider it dismissible, yet, that an inadvertent leak from the lab could have been the cause. I look forward to all new evidence that may emerge.
If the market was indeed the cause, then in the interests of global safety, wild animal markets of this nature should be prohibited.
If it turns out the party to blame is a geopolitical frenemy, all the better for the people who thirst for vengence.
I believe it's the claim that China has 5,000 years of written history. I'm not knowledgeable on this however, so this is a vague memory semi-confirmed by a cursory internet search.
Internally they are heavily pushing the preposterous claim that the virus is of foreign origin, possibly imported via frozen food.
Objectively lab origin seems likely. The virus started in the city housing the only P4 laboratory in China. This laboratory is known for its lax security (see the 2018 American embassy cables and the declarations of multiple sources in France who participated in its construction) and research on bat coronavirus transmission to humans were conducted there. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder if an accident didn't happen especially considering that we still can't find the missing link which would firmly establish a zoonotic origin.
Of course, as China is extremely uncooperative on this question, we will probably never know.
The concentration of early cases in Wuhan, hundreds of kilometers of away, would imply that the asymptomatic traveler(s) only traveled to one city, and didn't infect any other people along the way.
It's possible, but you have to consider the probability of all these events, hence the Bayesian analysis performed here.
In my "bat-shit insane" worldview, wars (including recent ones such as Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) are fought for power and control over resources and global policies. They are not fought for the reasons given such as deposing dictators because they are dictators.
So in this "insane" worldview, the activities of some states take on a less altruistic character and more a brutal practicality. In this worldview, the operating paradigm is not essentially civil. It is "might makes right".
Now if you go further and put the deployment of nuclear weapons into that context, you will have an even more "extreme" worldview.
So in this paradigm, China may, like other countries before it, seek to improve it's access to resources and general power. And like other countries before it, it would be operating in the "brutally practical" paradigm.
So if one was brave and "crazy" then one could speculate that the Covid-19 event may have been the Hiroshima of the bioweapon age. And even if it wasn't intentional, it could be said to serve that purpose.
Even "crazy" people hope that isn't truly part of the paradigm now. But some of the braver "crazies" might still be able to admit some slight possibility.
That’s why both conspiracy theories about this being a man-made conspiracy of the USA/China stem from the populist camps (ie Trump and Xi).
However, labeling the perspectives in heroic terms does a disservice to your ability to more accurately predict the future. Most people with crazy theories end up being crackpots.
The only action China could do would be to start a world war 3 in response.
It probably just is my quirk, does anyone else share this gut feeling?
The problem with this argument is that Covid is not tailored to avoid people of Chinese ethnicity. Indeed, in the UK, they have been especially vulnerable. Asian countries have done better because they have better policies in place.
It is and always has, since the beginning of conflict. That's the only rule that can't be broken.
>Hiroshima of the bioweapon age.
It's not crazy, it's certainly plausible. I've heard theories that China would suffer the outbreak better because they would be better at locking down the population than the West and therefore suffer less economic damage. Such a thing could destroy the Western economy, particularly the US economy (no safety nets) so China could recover more ground or possibly take the economic lead.
It's the, "lets both take poison but I have built up an immunity," strategy as seen on The Princess Bride. Total lockdowns being the immunity.
Having said that, if it did come from a lab, I suspect the lab was designed to counter outbreaks (China has been wearing masks for several years now due to various outbreaks), and an accident happened. Due to the contagiousness during the incubation period and lack of serious symptoms in much of the infected, it had spread and already taken hold of the population before the government could effectively react.
But in many social groups such as HN you do have to be kind of brave to suggest it might have been a bioweapon. People who say things like that are often ostracized in many places online. Or at the very least you get called a crackpot.
I'm not a virologist, but the stories about reinfection are weird too.
I don't believe in those theories, I just think "what if?".
It is perfectly possible and sensible to state that finding the origin of this virus is important, like it is important for all new viral diseases, without engaging in conjectures, especially wild ones.
Judging by the comments on HN many people (even more educated than average) are not able the see through this, are not able to distinguish facts from fiction and baseless conjectures. FUD works and is dangerous.
Please don't spread nonsense.
But without question their internal propaganda is about it is super questionable.
The reason is that if you have a less widely accepted opinion and someone states it and you can add additional info to it which makes it "stronger" you are likely to do so.
Which still doesn't mean I believe it. As far as I know the scientific majority believe is that the virus doesn't show any indication of potential human manipulation and is very unlikely to be human made assuming China isn't years ahead wrt. virus manipulation (which doesn't mean it doesn't escaped from a lab, btw.).
But as I'm not to much involved in this I would need hours to collect sources and trace them back to their original source to provide any useful links. So no credibility to this post.
The lab was publishing research for many years. We know they grew bat viruses in HeLa cells that had been modified to have bat features. One would expect, as a simple matter of evolution, that the viruses would adapt to replicate without reliance on the bat features. It's breeding.
Now, is that zoonotic or engineered? Reasonable people could argue either way. Does the term we use matter so much? William Shakespeare wrote that "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
Either way, that is some seriously hazardous research with an obvious potential for permanent worldwide consequences. Somebody needed to say "NO".
There is also no need to ban such markets, but to further regulate what and how things can be sold is reasonable.
One problem often ignored is that because of differences in general wealth it's e.g. not always/every where feasible to require selling only pre-processed (cut apart) meat (and other body parts) as the necessary fridge infrastructure doesn't exist and would be to expansive.
There is never absence of evidence for zoonosis, because by association all other viruses came to be via zoonosis. So, before you do any further investigation, it's the default. And then, when you do, zoonosis is already the null hypothesis as it was the most likely before you being your further investigation.
"The online and print cultural materials of the Confucius Institute present a vision of[1] https://www.dw.com/en/why-is-the-us-targeting-chinas-confuci... [2] http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/27901/1/The_Confucius_Institut...
"'Sinicization' - the thesis that all of the non-Han peoples who have entered the Chinese realm have eventually been assimilated into the Chinese culture--is a twentieth-century Han nationalist interpretation of China's past."In the other link I posted from professor Evelyn Rawski of U of Pittsburg, she explained that the last Chinese dynasty was the Qing who were ethnically Manchu. The Qing saw themselves as ruling five peoples, of which China was the most important. The Qing ruled China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Uighurs, and Tibet. When the Qing collapsed, Chinese nationalists, although they detested the Qing who were foreign conquerors, wanted to lay claim to all the territory the Qing ruled. I would do the same thing. But they used this strange construction of "Han Nationalism" and claimed that all the territory was really Han because the Qing was really Han. This is where the 5000 years of unbroken history propaganda comes from. Professor Rawski explains if you read the official Qing records which is in written in Manchu, the Qing did not "sinicize" or adopt Han culture. The Chinese liked to think they did but that is simply not true.
An interesting side note is that this bizarre cultural legitimacy argument cuts both ways. A few years ago, a Korean professor made the argument if you follow this line of thinking... you can argue that China really belongs to Korea. The founder of the Liao dynasty which once ruled Northern China was ethnically Khitan or "Qi Dan" in mandarin. The Khitan lands bordered Korea. There is some obscure record that conflates or can be construed that Yelu Abaoji is Korean... therefore China is really Korean. Bizarre. I don't remember the Korean professor's name but it caused a ruckus at the time.