While I agree that it’s extremely unlikely that a lab developed this virus, it’s far more plausible for one to have manufactured it.
> “It was very unlikely that anything could escape from such a place,” Ben Embarek said during the Feb. 9 WHO press conference, citing the team’s discussions with Wuhan lab officials about their safety protocols and audits. “If you look at the history of lab accidents, these are extremely rare events.”
> Yet lab accidents aren’t rare.
> What’s rare are accidents causing documented outbreaks. But those have happened, including in 2004 when two researchers at a lab in Beijing unknowingly became infected with another type of SARS coronavirus, sparking a small outbreak that killed one person.
> In the weeks since leaving Wuhan, the WHO’s team has been questioned about its independence and depth, including by the Biden administration, amid media reports that China denied the team access to raw data on possible COVID-19 cases that were identified during the earliest part of the outbreak.
> “We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement last month. “It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government.”
Why is the distinction between development and manufacturing relevant here? Have you read the article?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
For example, the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) escaped from the lab twice, both in 2003 and 2004.
I think the Wuhan/COVID/Coronavirus can be compared to the Soviet government's response to Chernobyl. Great efforts were made to keep a lid on that disaster from the people, and the world, until it was too great to ignore. Granted, a long time ago, but it's an example of what a totalitarian government (like China) might do in the face of such catastrophe.
If you trace back the spread of Lyme disease in time, you get two points. One in Connecticut, and one on Long Island, where workers got on the boats to Plum Island.
The lab was studying diseases similar to Lyme disease at the time.
All those are facts.
The conspiracy theory is that Lyme disease was accidentally released by that lab.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_257#Discredited_consp...
I think that it is at least somewhat likely that it was the result of the lab's activities, but your assertion here has a huge dose of selection bias.
If the virology labs studying coronaviruses were placed randomly around the world, you'd be correct - but they're not. They're placed near locations where novel coronaviruses have crossed the species barrier in the past, and where they are likely to do so in the future.
It would be equivalent to say that lighthouses cause ships to run aground, because many teams when ships run aground it's near a lighthouse.
Are they? I'm not aware of this trend, or of any other major species barrier crossings in Hubei. (If you're thinking of the original SARS, that started in Guangdong, two provinces to the south.)
I assumed it was the gardener, in the dining room, with the hatchet..
Its almost as if the whole human species could not be trusted with dangerous tools and regularly drops the ball.
These wet-market are such a medieval relic and all just because of superstitious nonsense about refrigerated food being bad for your chi.
Homeopathy, TMC and how those shamanistic practices are all called wherever by whomever kill. 2.7 million so far...
Even worser, when you think about all those other "tech" miracles enlightenment zealots insist humanity can be entrusted. We blow a nuclear power plant every ten years, drop the vials like they are hot, but hey more power into each pocket.
Cant wait for the first long-range flying car, getting hacked and used in a remote attack. That surely will be the day, someone will admit that tech is limited,not by what can be done, but by who gets to wield it.
Makes one wonder though, that day i entrusted that vital system for millions, to that upstream repo.. was i the janitor that day..
Everything on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html is derived from (a) HN's core value of intellectual curiosity, which is the sole thing we're optimizing for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), and (b) well over 10 years of experience operating this place.
Not only that, but they're garbage-collected periodically, meaning that if there's any rule there which isn't 'paying' for the space it consumes on that page, we take it out. It's like a codebase that way: complexity is the enemy, less is more, and deleting is at least as important as adding.
If anyone has a cogent case for deleting one of the guidelines, that would be most helpful. If anyone can think of one that should be added, and can't be derived from what's already there, that would also be helpful.
Nobody would sell lab animals from a virology lab to markets to eat. The consequences are obvious, animals would be accounted for, the risk would be extremely high to the persons future, and the profits small.
It's the kind of ideas you find on racist conspiracy theory blogs and you shouldn't share it here.
The hypothesized bat in question, if it was really a wet-market outbreak, was imported from hundreds of miles away.
CDC and other US government officials, on the other hand, must ratchet up their criticism of China as well as WHO. I agree with you there. It's alarming that there are so few PR ramifications for China. From the looks of it, either their unsanitary bushmeat consumption got the world sick, or their irresponsible laboratory containment procedures did. Both are a reflection of China's culture, and were only exacerbated by authoritarian crackdown upon the early warnings issued by Chinese medical professionals. The US government shouldn't defend bad practices and systemic problems in the name of multilateral cooperation. That variety of ethical blindness forgives bad faith from our counterparts and damages our hegemony.
role of furin cleavage site in covid:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-020-0184-0
"In fact, no influenza virus with a furin cleavage site has ever been found in nature,"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7435492/
Where did this mutation come from?
I just haven't seen any evidence of it that I think 'proves' it.
In this case, that the lab was not responsible.
> Although they only emerge under artificial conditions in influenza viruses, these furin cleavage sites are found within several branches of the coronavirus family tree. However SARS‐CoV‐2 is the only lineage B coronavirus found with one, and the only other coronaviruses known to have them are only at most 60% identical to this novel coronavirus.
> Additionally, Lyme disease was never a topic of research at Plum Island, according to the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Agriculture.
These are facts, too, in your link. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Note Facebook has previously explicitly banned posts "falsely claiming the virus is man-made". Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/02/08/965390755/facebook-widens-ban...
Being culpable for a disaster on this scale would be unprecedented in the economic reparations, so much so that we'll likely never find the origins.
I better be careful, since I'm only allowed to make 4 comments an hour I have to be very selective of the opinions I share.
If it came from somewhere else, why wasn’t the outbreak noticed there first, is the million dollar question. It requires some serious mental gymnastics at this point to believe it didn’t originate in that lab. The only real question is if it was released deliberately.
Why not? Wuhan is the 43rd largest city in the world. Meanwhile, the earliest cases of CoVid were all connected to the same wet market. Doesn't that have a higher probability being the origin?
[0] natural insofar as humans intruding onto wildlife is natural
I duno if that would ever really happen. I think much like a lot of things, concerns about Uyghurs it would just dissolve into the diplomatic and economic seas.
The world’s foremost institute for tropical medicine is in London, England. So that debunks that idea.
Those in favour of the lab leak hypothesis point out that the virus showed up on the scene with all the evolutionary capability to spread amongst humans i.e with batteries included.
With previous Sars viruses my understanding is that each zoonotic jump was traceable with examples of previous forms in prior animal hosts to corroborate the lineage.
What makes Covid-19 interesting is that these zoonotic jumps or the gain of functions can be accelerated in the lab with the purpose of preparing us ahead of time for a dangerous forms of Sars style viruses. It looks like covid-19 may be that type of strain, not man made, but given the lab conditions for it to gain the capability. It may have escaped.
It's worth exploring the lab leak hypothesis but I would say that it's not politically expedient for any of the scientists or parties involved. We will never really know the truth and that is something we need to grow comfortable with.
It's like people just depend on nobody following the links they post.
True. And not just economic reparations, you can imagine diplomatic relations and all would be severely impacted.
One common cold coronavirus that circulates around had a common ancestor in 1890. Suspiciously timed with the Russian “Flu” pandemic of 1890-1891[1]
(Not that we can just discount the Wuhan lab theory, but a naturally occurring pandemic like this not that weird historically)
1 - https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-the-coronavir...
Sure, China has way more public health capacity than it used to, but we know that COVID can spread silently in a community for a month without anyone noticing, even when we are looking. It happened in California and Seattle in January 2020. Why wouldn't that have happened in, say, rural China in October?
What evidence is informing this belief? i.e. what is your model for assigning "P>0.5" to the probability here? For example do you think the SARS outbreak circa 2002 was also a lab escape?
There is historical precedent of authorities blaming local meat markets to cover up a lab leak.
It's unusual even for coronavirus.
As long as people believe that evidence is covered up, then they can believe anything.
https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-did-not-start-at-wuhan-...
And people making the really odd responses below. They're, not saying it, but insinuating that the lab would be where there is lots of bat coronavirus? The lab is in the city of Wuhan. A city with a population of 11 million people. This isn't some rural town.
There was a lab that studied this type of coronavirus, had published papers on it. And in a country the size of the USA had an outbreak within just a few miles from that lab. Then the govt came and refused to let anyone outside investigate.
To me that leads pretty strongly that it was an accidental lab leak. And they weren't able to control the spread.
My hopeful opinion is that this leads to more stringent worldwide rules for reporting leaks, and checking of safety practices to avoid this happening again
https://asiatimes.com/2020/04/why-us-outsourced-bat-virus-re...
Surely they’ve been receiving reports on progress, if so I’m sure there could be a match.
Similarly, I believe there were scientists in India who determined the capsule which deploys the virus into cells looks exactly the same as the HIV mechanism.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Scientists-slam-Ind...
This kinda matches people testing positive for HIV in an Australian vaccine trial:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/world/australia/uq-corona...
If it was through natural selection, then it was likely such virus was going to cause a pandemic whether it was leaked by the lab or not, since presumably there's a natural reservoir of the virus.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200317175442.h...
Which scientific community are you referring to? There are countless scientists who have been arguing against the risks of gain of function research for many years. Why are pro-gain of function scientists deathly silent now about the supposed benefits of their research?
The US relies on Chinese manufacturing. If trade ends, the West will suffer. Consumer and industrial goods can't be built, which could incredibly damage the economy.
Manufacturing is shifting to other countries - Vietnam, India, etc. It's been driven by rising costs in China, but we're seeing an acceleration to de-risk the supply chain. TSM is being asked to build fabs in the US. Slowly, the most strategic pieces are being maneuvered.
China is building up its navy to protect itself. If they lose the South China Sea, they could be blockaded and starved of energy, resources, and food. They're building to reach parity with the US Navy or even outgun it, and they're trying to stall long enough that they can win should there be an encounter.
The US and its allies are ramping up criticism of China, and you can see it in diplomatic activity, news, and social media. The rhetoric will grow until they're ready to shift from soft negotiations to taking a hard line.
The game is being played right now.
> Although they only emerge under artificial conditions in influenza viruses, these furin cleavage sites are found within several branches of the coronavirus family tree.
Even the original quote, "In fact, no influenza virus with a furin cleavage site has ever been found in nature" leaves out something important:
> the fact remains that every highly pathogenic avian influenza virus, defined by having a furin cleavage site, has either been found on commercial poultry farms that create the pseudo‐natural conditions necessary for serial passage, or created in laboratories with gain‐of‐function serial passage experiments.
That is, the authors are defining "in nature" not to include commercial poultry farms.
I also don't understand why they even had the slighest faith in a reliable investigation. After all these months of pushing back on researching accessing the site, they still bowed to their whims. How does this help the argument that it's better to just suck it up?
One thing I am really interested in to read more on is a historians analysis of the parallels one can draw from the period rising up to World War 2, and more importantly, how the rest of the world acted back then. When Germany was dissolving all their democratic processes, and started labellling jews, what did the rest of the world do? What did their neighbours do? Did they just happily keep on conducting business?
I have read slightly into it, but placing the responses of the countries at that time in the right context really requires some solid knowledge of history. If anyone knows interesting articles to read about the responses of the world during that time: I'm very interested.
Yeah, because people prefer to hold their pet conspiracy theories.
https://www.amazon.com/Lab-257-Disturbing-Governments-Labora...
Warning: this book is non-fiction and is scary.
Funny, we have thousands of people in certain countries in three letters organizations who can keep secrets just fine.
This claim has less weight if China does not share the raw data.
[1] https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/who-experts-want-more-data-f...
A leak that results in 2.7 million worldwide deaths will not result in "more stringent worldwide rules for reporting leaks". It would result in economic reparations and possibly war.
Leak or not, it's in China's interest to prevent the blame from falling on them. The narrative here is an incredibly powerful geopolitical tool.
It's further evidence that these things get sited sensibly, not randomly.
" Claims that it was created by an individual, government, or country
Excluding claims that it was studied in, came from, or leaked from a lab without specifically calling it man-made"
"The goal of this policy is to remove common viral hoaxes that have been repeatedly debunked by independent fact-checkers."This is no way exonerates the Wuhan government from possible culpability—indeed government officials did deliberately suppress information—but this investigative opinion doesn’t pass scientific muster. Misinformation.
It may be scary, but it's not non-fiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_257#Discredited_consp...
> A discredited 2004 book entitled Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory fueled the conspiracy theories. Archived specimens show that Lyme disease was endemic well before the establishment of Plum Island laboratory. Additionally, Lyme disease was never a topic of research at Plum Island, according to the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Agriculture.
I've worked in several labs, created several viruses (non-pathogenic) myself. People are careless, did you read the article?
Smallpox is also naturally originating virus. That doesn't prohibit it from leaking from a lab.
Either can be equally believable yet impossible to prove.
> is-ought 34 minutes ago [dead] [–]
> Can you link to something that proves this is the criteria used for lab placement?
How is this even dead? It's only asking for a reference.
Also it refused fiercely to let foreign experts in to investigate, which is also hard to explain other than something MUST be hidden at all costs.
(1) Let's address the glass windows in our own house first and tighten the US policies and culture. Secrecy is not a good idea here. Without even reflecting on Covid, it is clear the author has been dealing with this a while, and the US needs to improve. I am reminded of discussions on the old '50s/'60s nuclear culture...
(2) A year later, it may not be possible for the most honest, the most painstaking, the most independent reconstruction of the Wuhan lab events to properly track what occurred. Nor would it be per se politically doable. It might, however, be feasible for the Chinese official position to commit to an enhanced tightening of policies and culture around lab handling of specimens, in light of current events and looking forward.
(3) To a first approximation (the same one where Pi = 3), I don't care if Covid comes from a lab, a bat, a pig, or a chicken. I care that there are dead people, and that there was massive dysfunction globally & in a multipartisan way in the response, leading to more dead and disabled people...
But the Wuhan lab did receive samples in 2019 from miners who died in 2012 from an infection of a novel coronavirus that resulted in symptoms very similar to COVID-19.
https://nypost.com/2020/08/15/covid-19-first-appeared-in-chi...
That’s a complete coincidence though and you’re bigoted for thinking there could possibly be a connection! /s
I am curious to know if this guideline applies only when responding to HN comments, or if it should be applied to source material in article links as well. I've noticed a lot more conspiracy-theorizing comments lately and it's hard to engage when the whole premise of a given comment is accusing someone else of misrepresenting facts.
Thanks for all your hard work, regardless!
Lab Leak: A Scientific Debate Mired in Politics — and Unresolved [March 22, 2021]
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/947620
https://www.outline.com/XCTFJJ (registration-wall bypass)
I found this to be an extremely engaging read and compelling story.
TLDR; The likelihood of it being lab related is high. The likelihood of it being directly malicious low.
My Take form reading it: The lab in question needed to collect bats for research. A person who collected the bats did so with insufficient safety and is likely patient 0.
I’m a bioscientist. It’s frustrating to respond with evidence and in good faith, and be downvoted by those who simply disagree. But sadly it appears that the loudest voice prevails over reason.
2. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We should also acknowledge that an investigation much earlier on could have happened if it were not for Chinese government obstructionism and cover-ups.
3. Why do you not care about where it came from? The allegation at hand is that China's irresponsible scientific experimentation "created" this virus (intentional oversimplification) and allowed it to leak. If the truth never comes out, and China is never held accountable, the same thing could happen again. Why is your sole interest the global response to the pandemic as opposed to the missteps that caused the pandemic in the first place?
If false, then it's yet another viral mutation / species cross over which have happened all the time throughout history.
When I hear hoofbeats I think "horses" not "zebras"...
That reads as reasonable to me, but raises a subsequent question: if these lapses are so common and so many countries possess the capacity for serious mistakes, why don't we see more regular outbreaks (if not full-blown pandemics) caused by labs? In other words, what makes COVID special? I didn't find a satisfactory answer to the latter question in the article.
It's my (uninformed, uneducated) opinion that the severity of the author's claims don't correspond to the reality of the last few national and international disease crises (AIDS, Ebola, Zika, COVID). Which isn't to say that we should absolutely dismiss the possibility that COVID originated in a lab, only that claims that it did amount to currently unsubstantiated claims about COVID's special status among other recent pandemics.
My understanding is that A) is very much possible because it has happened before (SARS), but we have no evidence yet (and might never acquire).
For B) however, from my limited understanding, there is no strong evidence. We only know about a fraction of existing coronaviruses out there and given we observe one, that has caused a pandemic, the (conditional!) probability that it is well adapted is extremely high (survivorship bias).
If you have a credible source that claims B) please share it.
"Let me be clear: Labs in Wuhan might not have played any role in the origin of the pandemic. But a year later, no source has been found, and the world deserves a thorough, unbiased investigation of all plausible theories that is conducted without fear or favor."
Okay. So basically this author has no evidence other than the fact that it's very difficult, maybe impossible to identify the site of first transmission. I don't know what progress would look like, but maybe sampling animals in the wild to find a carrier with a genetic signature that looks like an early version?
This is just speculative nonsense to try to hype the government's pivot to China. That's why its in the opinion section, the worst part of the newspaper.
But it might be more like: "Yet another hurricane cause by weather." Not really a story, since they all have been. The opposite, though, that'd be a real story: "Hurricane not caused by weather!"
Might have something to do with the fact that the leader of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom, was hand picked by the Chinese communist party and won the position over the US and EU's favored choice.
The bats this disease come from we’re not being sold in the market at this time. They’re out of season. So already the theory is assuming a multi-animal hop (some other wild animal got in contact with a bat and got infected, then captured and moved a thousand kilometers to the wet market and killed).
Meanwhile the bio lab in Wuhan received a sample of infectious coronavirus just months prior to the earliest known case. Within a few weeks of the outbreak while China was still downplaying the disease, the central government passed a rushed emergency safety rules update for these labs, starts pushing back on requests for access, and using state media to throw out a bunch of crazy theories about external origin.
Anyone with half a brain can connect the dots.
If you take an unknown diseases with an R of 2-3, what you will see is a number of smaller clusters, some dying off, before you get the one cluster that becomes the pandemic.
China has absolutely no chance to meet head-to-head against a US Carrier Strike Group on neutral territory. Absolutely none, and the US has TEN Carrier Strike Groups.
Ex: If China + US decides that we need to fight over in Antartica, the US will win in nearly every feasible encounter.
-------
China's plan isn't to win or even challenge the Navy on the high seas. Instead, China's plan is to assert military strength with the seas it is close to: asserting military might against Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Korea, and other local minor powers.
Furthermore: Chinese air-forces can launch from Mainland China to support any hypothetical naval operations.
-------
EX: Its not trying to beat US in a fair fight. China is likely aiming to beat the US in an "unfair fight": any fight close to China's territories + air force + cruise missile range might stand a chance against a US Carrier Strike Group.
A few powerful Chinese ships under the protective cover of cruise-missiles + Chinese airforce is probably the plan. It only will be effective when close to the Chinese coast, but that's all China really cares about.
https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...
So, its not quite as simple as a collection mistake.
And the virus being man-made is not a possibility?
https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
The official cover-up initially was blaming the outbreak on contaminated meat from a wet market.
2. I only think a thorough investigation is not possible because the Chinese government is not going to allow that such a honest investigation to occur.
3. If a flowerpot fell from a balcony and killed your loved one, you wouldn't care if it was intentionally thrown, negligently left there, or simply a freak act of god? I think almost everyone cares about the cause of this event. If not for reasons of closure and blame, for reasons of understanding and improving out future actions.
Which is not a dismissal at all. What scientists are saying is that both zoonotic transfer and lab leak are plausible, but that we don't have evidence for the latter (yet!) and the former is more likely.
In many media articles this simplifies to 'scientists say virus origins are zoonotic'.
From what I've heard on Chinese social media, there are a bunch of plausible sounding theories.
For a lot of jobs in China, it's expected that there's moderate incompetence or grift.
For example, say the lab has a bunch of extra animal samples (mice, bats, w/e). Someone in the cleaning staff could make a few extra $ by selling those samples to a wholesaler at the local wetmarket (to be turned into dogfood, etc.); maybe they only meant to sell the clean samples, but got things mixed up.
And this sounds like a reasonable possibility to be explored. Accidents happen. Lapses in procedures happen.
The problem is that early on, and still in some circles, lab related equates to malicious bio-weapon and/or China purposely attempting to destroy the world. It's important to separate the two, and hopefully this is a cautionary tale for all labs to review their policies and procedures.
Perhaps it is not special. One might as well ask what was special about a coin that lands heads three times in a row in its first three flips.
Basically: "Oh, someone else can play the same game we've played for a century with UN, WHO, IMF, etc. - how dare they?"
Now I was aware of some reports (nothing official or confirmed) that the Wuham lab was broken into in the summer of 2019.
Interestingly enough their was a lot of political tension at that time involving Hong Kong.
I'm also mindful how China has been rather good at sweeping things under carpets.
So I could speculate how things played out in a way that fits events, but without any smoking gun - it would be just speculation and joining dots that may or may not of been there.
Though even if it was something along the lines of what I'm thinking happened (animal activists with HK connections being politically motivated/manipulated and possibly no idea what type of lab it was beyond they may be hurting animals), the lab was researching virus's from the wild - seeing how they mutate and progress in an effort to see what lays ahead.
So lab event or no lab event - this virus was already in existence in some form and was not a case of if, but when.
One thing I do know, it sure did shine a spotlight upon how connected the World is and also how fragile many supply lines are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#History
> The 2010 autopsy of Ötzi the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old mummy, revealed the presence of the DNA sequence of Borrelia burgdorferi making him the earliest known human with Lyme disease.
Unless it's got conclusive evidence of a functional time machine, it's gonna struggle to explain how a town in Connecticut predates a prehistoric mummy.
What I'm claiming is that the volume of attributed escapes indicates that the average escape has relatively local consequences. In other words: historically, when everything goes wrong, it hasn't resulted in a global pandemic. What, then, made or makes COVID special?
Maybe the answer is raw numbers, and that it was bound to happen eventually. But "one of these incidents was bound to cause a global pandemic" is the exact same reasoning as the (original, still mainstream?) "wet market" theory. What I'd personally like to know is why I should believe one over the other, apart from human propensity to believe conspiratorial claims.
Right now. But take a look at the shipbuilding output they've achieved. In ten to twenty years, China could easily rival the US Navy.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296...
I mean, yeah, five out of 6 cited experts have ties to EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has funding ties to one of the two virology labs in Wuhan, but that's, like, just a coincidence. If it wasn't, I'm sure NPR would mention it.
And then Peter Daszak himself went to Wuhan with WHO team to investigate and didn't find anything conclusive. Peter fucking Daszak. You're not going to tell me that someone who was interviewed and cited on this subject by NPR, CNN, CBS, Slate, Democracy Now, Washing Post and The Guardian could be full of shit, right?
/s
You reason about WHO as an institution, while disregarding the principal-agent problem. The leaders of WHO are very strongly influenced by China, and as a result the institution is working to please China, rather than working to fulfill its nominal mission. Its leaders will see ample rewards for corrupting the institution.
is that true though? Aren't a lot of diseases being worked on in labs without the means to cure them yet
Is this actually true? It is certainly not true for HIV, and of course is not relevant to diseases like Zika that are transmitted by mosquitos.
Edit: I found the answer to my own question: https://www.kff.org/infographic/ebola-characteristics-and-co... (see second bullet point). Given that this lists Hep C, HIV, Influenza, Malaria, Polio, and Tuberculosis as possible to transmit while asymptomatic, I'd say "COVID-19 is one of the few serious diseases that can transmit when the carrier is asymptomatic." is most definitely false.
> I’m a bioscientist.
And I'm a Bayesian analyst. Surely your position is that it is a coincidence that:
- the virus appeared to originate in Wuhan
- genome sequences from patients were 96% or 89% identical to the Bat CoV ZC45 coronavirus originally found in Rhinolophus affinis
- The bats carrying CoV ZC45 were originally found in Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which are more than 900 kilometers away Wuhan
- 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
- Wuhan is home to two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus
- Within ~280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC). WHCDC hosted animals in laboratories for research purposes. In one of their studies, 155 bats including Rhinolophus affinis were captured in Hubei province, and other 450 bats were captured in Zhejiang province
- one of the researchers described that he was once by attacked by bats and the blood of a bat shot on his skin. In another accident, bats peed on him. He was once thrilled for capturing a bat carrying a live tick
Not conclusive by any means, but I have yet to hear reasoning by which we should exclude the lab-leak theory, besides that the virus evolved naturally, which does not contradict the lab-leak theory whatsoever.
Also, from your article:
> As a team of researchers from the WHO
This WHO? [0][1] Doesn't instill much confidence in me, to be sure.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM
[1] https://www.voanews.com/science-health/coronavirus-outbreak/...
Well that's the problem with reducing every argument to absurd extremes.
It's part of why modern political discourse is fundamentally broken.
We counter discourse out of fear of what the extreme form of that accusation will be - not based on what the argument is actually saying.
Did you know the CCP arrested the first doctor sounding the alarm about COVID? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382
Did you know viruses have escaped from labs before? It is a known risk.
You can say the evidence is not conclusive and you would be right. But it's far from "speculative nonsense."
One wonders if you would be similarly skeptical of claims relating to COVID's cause being something much more speculative and vague... say, global anthropogenic climate change, for example. I'm sure you'd be pumping the brakes just as hard on any speculation to that effect, right? ;-)
WHY there are a bunch of people voting that down I leave to others to speculate. But I'm going to vote up any verifiable factual statements that have been voted down.
HN will normally answer questions in good faith, even controversial ones.
The US media has made an art out of turning speculation into exciting narratives that large fractions of the population believe that turned out to be completely fabricated but retain adherents for years or generations after.
not buying it.
In a bizarre world where you were presumed guilty, could you do anything? If you submitted evidence that you were on another continent at the time of the crime, doesn't that prove you didn't do it? (Assuming the crime is something you must be physically present to do)
Officials sent two warnings to Washington about the lab. The column says the officials were worried about safety and management weaknesses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and called for more help." ... "What kinds of security failures were the cables describing?
The short answer is we don't know from the information provided in the Washington Post. But, generally speaking, there are multiple ways that safety measures can be breached at labs dealing with biological agents.
According to Dr Lentzos, these include: "Who has access to the lab, the training and refresher-training of scientists and technicians, procedures for record-keeping, signage, inventory lists of pathogens, accident notification practices, emergency procedures.""
In other words, all the information is non-public and coming from the entirely unreliable US Intelligence services whose job is to lie and make the US government look good. If these reports had been published (meaning in public documents) prior to the pandemic OR there was an admission by the Chinese government, this would be far more credible.
That's what the comment sounded like to me, and why I downvoted it. It does not come across to me as a good-faith request for a reference, and more like an attempt to DOS the conversation, similar to a Gish gallop. For example, it's asking for a specific link that constitutes proof of a general observation of tendency. That doesn't scream "reasonable request."
A rational actor would take the opportunity to do this regardless of whether or not the source was known at the time. If it were even a possibility, you would hope they would use the outbreak as a reminder to take containment practices as seriously as possible.
Whether or not to allow foreign investigators is a political decision. Maybe they calculated it would appear as an admission of guilt or incompetence.
> What's more, Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists have for the past five years been engaged in so-called "gain of function" (GOF) research, which is designed to enhance certain properties of viruses for the purpose of anticipating future pandemics. Gain-of-function techniques have been used to turn viruses into human pathogens capable of causing a global pandemic.
> This is no nefarious secret program in an underground military bunker. The Wuhan lab received funding, mostly for virus discovery, in part from a ten-year, $200 million international program called PREDICT, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and other countries.
But if a lighthouse manufactured coral reefs, and the coral reefs on which ships were running aground displayed features of those that a given lighthouse manufactured, it might be more accurate.
1. Warn the world, lock your borders down, suffer economic damage whilst the rest of the world will prevent your citizens from entering their countries and can prepare for a proper response. Experience a setback on the stage of geopolitics and a loss of soft power.
2. Don't warn the world, suppress free flow of information, impose internal travel bans to stop the virus from spreading within your country, let your citizens carry the virus to the rest of the world, be the party with asymmetrical information advantage, exploit the situation to further strengthen your position on the global chessboard of geopolitics and expand your soft power.
What people in the West tend to forget is that Chinese strategic thinking is older than most Western civilisations. Chinese rulers study Chinese philosophy deeply, whereas Western rulers have little philosophical education. Chinese rulers think fundamentally different from Western rulers and have asymmetrical information advantage in politics as well: hardly anyone in the West really understands Chinese philosophy as it requires you to learn the language to grasp it fully; but it is easy to understand what motivates Western politics.
This situation reminds me of one of the Thirty-Six Stratagems.
Disturb the water and catch a fish (渾水摸魚／混水摸魚)
Create confusion and exploit it to further one's own goals.
- https://archive.vn/TG8zN#selection-999.29-999.84
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...
- https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-conspiracy-theories/
- https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/483354-sen-cotton-repeat...
- https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/republican-senat...
- https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/18/politics/tom-cotton-coronavir...
- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tom-cotton-coronavirus-china_...
- https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/baseless-conspiracy-theori...
Here is a direct link to some gain of function research being done at the lab for anyone interested: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/
Relevant line in abstract:
> In this study, we investigated the receptor usage of the SL-CoV S by combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules of human, civet, or horseshoe bat.
Make no mistake, I am super well aware that I lack all the grounding to understand the explanation.
But can you point me in the right direction? The context surrounding what you are saying must be learnable. At least to some level.
I had been reading every journal article I could get my hands on about the virus since February, but of course how could my interpretation be trustworthy? I'm no expert, or anything. If something I read in a journal article contradicted something on the news, the latter always seemed to "win".
After all that, now that the lab thing is on the mainstream news, I'm afraid to even bring it up with my friends. They can figure it out for themselves.
For one people actually believe Chinese's numbers, something no Chinese national will ever do.
China is a totalitarian country, they have the monopoly of the press. That means official numbers are not real numbers because if you go against the official numbers you just dissapear. You can not compare numbers given in a free press country against numbers being given by a totalitarian country.
That happened for decades with Soviet Russia, while Lenin and Stalin made tens of millions of people die of starvation, their official numbers were fantastic. They even exported grain.
There is no evidence because China made impossible for scientists to study the origin of COVID for almost a year. They closed their laboratories and removed all possible evidence with bleach.
The 1936 Olympic Summer Games are a good starting point in my opinion.
There are a lot of bats in Wuhan. There are a lot of bats carrying coronaviruses. Coronaviruses have triggered past epidemics. Ergo, there’s an institute for virology in Wuhan.
Listen starting at 6:30 in the podcast I posted from Nature. There is indeed strong correlation but no causal relationship established.
(For the record I wrote something about things that happen frequently not being news)
Exactly that. The first paper which discredited the lab leak theory published in The Lancet early last year by a number of scientists was later found out to have been organized behind the scenes by EcoHealth, which also asked for it's name not to appear on the paper.
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/ecohealth-allian...
Seems like the only consensus is that the origin was (lab-leak || zoonotic). Given the unlikelihood of ever knowing the true origin story, future epidemic mitigation efforts should just assume both causes. History is rich with examples of both.
It's a bit annoying that so many adults continue to mix up speculation with real evidence, and make up their minds based on gut feelings. That is not to say governments shouldn't put pressure on China to be more transparent, of course they should. But judging from the actual information available, the virus most likely jumped from an animal to humans due to the bad conditions of wet markets in China.
While China is to blame for such markets, people need to bear in mind that the same can happen in many other places where animals are farmed closely together with humans. Even if it was true, the Wuhan lab theory would unfortunately distract from this real problem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/health/WHO-covid-daszak-c...
Historically, SARS-CoV-1 is suspected of being transmitted from bats to civets: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291347/
In Feb 2020, China shut down its wildlife farming industry and sent out directions on how to kill and dispose of the animals: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00677-0
http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/c30834/202002/c56b129850aa42acb584...
https://multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/news/china/article/...
Wildlife farming was a $70B industry that employed around 2% of China's workforce. There was a short-lived ban in 2003 in response to SARS-CoV-1, which was later rescinded.
Should we care a lot about the safety and security of places where dangerous infectious diseases are studied? sure!
I think we should care A LOT MORE about our [apparent total lack of] ability to quickly deploy effective public health responses to new infectious diseases (regardless of their source).
Maybe it was an accident at a sloppy lab, ok, so labs on the other side of the planet in sovereign countries we do not control might make mistakes. We should get better at responding fast to save lives.
Maybe it was a sinister bio-terrorism plot. We should get better at responding fast to save lives. Bio-terror/warfare plan looks a whole lot like a good public health plan IMO.
Maybe gasp it really was from bats or something. We should get better at responding fast to save lives. This stuff DOES happen.
Maybe s/.*/I don't care where it came from/g. We should get better at responding fast and saving lives (my opinion).
You can catch flu from an asymptomatic person, but Covid has a much higher reproduction factor. During the winter lockdown in England, regular flu was completely eradicated - literally not a single case was detected in entire England [0]. At the same time, Covid was still spreading happily. The measures that stopped flu in its tracks only slightly inconvenienced SARS-Cov-2.
Covid is simply too good at spreading, compared to other similar diseases.
(As an analogy: I can swim, Michael Phelps can swim, we can both call ourselves swimmers, but we are not really comparable.)
[0]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/flu-cases-covid-en...
In a typical city the size of Wuhan, what are the odds it has some sort of viral research lab? If this happened in (picking a city at random...) Chicago, you could work backwards, find a viral research lab in say, University of Illinois, and make the same claim. "No link to animal transmission has been found, and the original epicenter was known to have a viral research lab. QED."
Covid is asymptomatic and mild enough in enough people that masks get political
Except everything I've read indicates the bats carrying the most closely related virus are not in Wuhan, not even close:
> The SARS-CoV-2 virus is most closely related to coronaviruses found in certain populations of horseshoe bats that live about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away in Yunnan province, China. [0]
[0] https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-complicate...
So why would the virus so strongly appear to originate in Wuhan, and not in another city, closer to the bats' native regions? Appears quite statistically unlikely.
I don't think anyone suggests the CCP unleashed the virus onto its own city on purpose.
Their manufacturing economy does not benefit from being locked down on a regular basis
What I'm saying is that we don't have strong (any?) evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of gain of function research. It is entirely possible but the majority of the scientists who do gain of function research say it's unlikely (given what we know today, which might change).
Again, a credible source saying the opposite is appreciated.
[1] https://ge.usembassy.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-in...
If most of the discussion on an idea is about how people dismiss it or how any evidence is being covered up the idea might not be that strong.
Talk about that will you?
People said this 20 years ago. We've already started to see the CCP losing ground (see HK), and I'm quite bearish on the Party going forward. Jinping is 67, and I expect to see a major power struggle which will leave the Chinese Communist Party crippled when he dies.
Let’s remember this is China we’re talking about. Before you hand wave that away, consider the emphasis that China places on keeping-up-appearances at practically any cost
This is all circumstantial, of course. But, that combined with the fact that COVID originated in Wuhan, thousands of kilometers away from the bat caves of Yunnan province, yet in the same city as the only BSL-4 laboratory in China, that's hard to ignore.
I thought UV resistant organisms were usually referred to as extremophiles because it's so infrequent
And no, the vast majority of cities do not have viral research labs.
Is this likelihood differential being calculated using data, or is it just a hypothesis?
This is an earnest question, not a blind "I don't care". I think this is interesting, and I can see some amount of merit in these claims, but at the end of the day it doesn't feel like it matters to me which one it was. It seems like the only change would be "China gets more bad PR" and maybe American racists use this as an excuse to be more racist.
If the whole pandemic could’ve been avoided, that’s part of getting better at this.
The problem I have is that China isn't interested in investigating the start of the pandemic. They've thrown away their wastewater samples, there's some evidence WHO found of SARS-CoV-2 spreading locally prior to December 2019, but no backtesting of any samples. Nobody seems to be looking at the bats in Hubei for sarbecoviruses.
By blocking study of the zoonotic origin of the pandemic, they can use the theory it was imported in food for domestic propaganda. For external propaganda they're happy to have conspiracy theories flying about this lab leak theory creating a "firehose of falsehoods" and distractions. They can rely on American scientists to get engaged with the conspiracy theory and debunk it, wasting their efforts and then they can use that also for domestic propaganda.
Meanwhile nobody gets fucking outraged that China isn't properly investigating the origin of the virus and isn't aggressively looking at the bats in Hubei and any animal farms in the surrounding area. My suspicion is that animal farms (like minks) functioned as a bioreactor that had many opportunities to spillover from bats and then the close contact allowed it to spread well and mutate to optimize it for a more human-like ACE2 receptor, then the mink contact with humans allowed multiple spillover events until it started to spread epidemically in humans.
Google “covid 19 origin evidence”, look for academic publications or scientific journalism that is well-cited & from reputable sources, eg
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01205-5 [2] https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-05-09/was-the-cor... [3] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/05/scientis... [4] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/coronavir...
We really need to do better with scientific communication. As scientists we are evaluated too much on our communication with other scientists (ie paper publishing), while communication with the public is not weighed much for career advancement. I wish this structural problem would be discussed more so it can be addressed.
But not all of this is on the scientists. The public must do better. We can’t just blindly trust what a senator says on Fox News for political expedience, or “trust our gut”.
I think you're wrestling with a strawman here, no one's arguing the inverse. But in any investigation (arson, murder, etc.) the details do matter -- where, how, what weapon, when, and so on.
If a bio research lab is accidentally allowing the public to come in contact with anything it is studying, this is something we need to
1. investigate
2. identify
3. prevent
Saying "it's possible this could have happened anyway" is not meaningful. I would prefer we identify how it did happen. If a lab leaked it, this would inform future discussions on what lab practices and research projects have acceptable risk/reward.
Ignoring the possibility this leaked from a lab until you have bulletproof evidence is nonsensical, particularly when investigator access is restricted. This, more than anything, is the point the article is making. Lab containment failures have a well documented history.
I wasn't trying to be confrontational about it, just trying to understand why that's your opinion. In particular I was curious about your "very likely", because my priors are that most infectious diseases are not caused by lab leaks, and that there's no particular evidence of a lab leak here (though as you say plenty of reason to believe such evidence would be suppressed). But it's not my field so I'm not strongly attached to those priors.
I'd certainly agree with the article's premise that the lab theory should not be dismissed out of hand, but I think that's a different conclusion than saying "it's very likely to have originated in a lab leak". My takeaway from the article is "it's possible, but still not very likely", though I suppose I'd give a higher % of probability now than before reading the article.
Then we shouldn't be doing _gain of function_ research on the types of viruses that can cause these outbreaks.
> Maybe it was an accident at a sloppy lab, ok, so labs on the other side of the planet in sovereign countries we do not control might make mistakes. We should get better at responding fast to save lives.
What's the cost-benefit analysis for running the lab in the first place? Was any of it's research used in producing the vaccine? If it's all about saving lives, can't we be mad at both the lacking response and the laboratory at the same time?
> I don't care where it came from [...] We should get better at responding fast and saving lives (my opinion).
Those two goals seem in conflict with each other. Good offense is something we should aspire too.. but that doesn't mean we should entirely ignore defense as well.
The lies about masks may have helped with shortages in the short term. The result is now that people rightfully distrust everything their governments say.
If your goal is not good governance, but getting re-elected by your base, that is not something you need to optimize for.
All that said I think it is really unlikely and a pointless effort as government bureaucracies wouldn’t be able to even formulate a reaction to an intentional or even accidental release so I think we will not try too hard to imply that for political reasons.
Why? Because it seems like US institutions and people (right up to Fauci) were involved in this research and may not want the domestic blowback.
Conveniently the CCP don't want a paper trail either.
I'd be pretty sure the various scenarios have already been gamed out in both countries.
Edit: Not sure why this is being downvoted, but just in case it’s a reflex because I mentioned Fauci: yes, he was head of NIAID, and yes, the NIH did fund this type of research at the WIV. The grants are public information.
When China locks 35 million people in their homes, and this makes the New York Times, and we don't do anything to respond for another month, and we don't do anything meaningful for a month and half... What we have is a domestic, not a foreign problem.
These articles made the news on January 8th, January 23rd, and February 7th. The first travel ban, that only covered China was on... January 30th. The first travel ban on Europe was on March 11th (At this point, Europe had ten times the active COVID cases that China did at the end of January. Why did we wait so long to stop travel from it?)
The first state lockdown was in New York State, on March 22nd.
Exactly how much advance warning did we need to deal with this pandemic? Three months? Three years? Do you think that a president who would constantly deny reality, to the point of claiming that there would be zero cases in the US by April would have handled this crisis any better, regardless of how much lead time he was given?
I'll also eat my shoe if the CIA and/or the NSA weren't at least as aware as the NYT of the seriousness of the situation in China (It can't be hard, my co-workers with relatives in China were all aware of it from, you know, talking to folks back phone. On the phone.) And if they weren't - why on Earth are we wasting billions of dollars on their cloak-and-dagger budgets, when I can get a better take on current events by having lunch with my team?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-pneumonia-ou...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/world/asia/china-coronavi...
[3] https://time.com/5779678/li-wenliang-coronavirus-china-docto....
And I am not ready to dismiss the theory but I am always open to hearing evidence to exclude the theory.
It's not a crazy theory by any means, but, if it happened, then there's evidence. So, where is the evidence? Literally, where is there any actual evidence it happened?
For example, there were cases as early as December 2019 that did not come from Wuhan. Wuhan was no doubt a key early hotspot.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market...
There has been rigorous scholarship done on this question. I recommend reading it given your interest in the subject.
Regardless of what happened inside a lab, or how it got out, it's how we responded to it that ultimately matters. What did we learn from it? How are we prepared to deal with another outbreak in the future? ARE we prepared to deal with another outbreak in the future? If so, how long are we prepared to do so before we let our guards down?
The people who are most interested in where it came from instead of how we handled it are those who are politically motivated to disregard safety in general. They need a boogeyman to deflect blame onto for their ridiculous dereliction of duty.
I refuse to allow them to do so.
Compensation for damage inflicted, for one thing? If a country is inept at handling deadly viruses, tries to handle them anyway and in result causes millions of deaths and trillions of dollars worth of financial loss, they should be liable for the damage they've done?
Someone who broke into a Wuhan coronavirus research lab in summer 2019 and broke containment of our hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 precursor virus samples would have been infected too early for our timeline.
Hidden camera investigation of Facebook moderators (ie fact checkers)
And maybe if it was a leak and the world had been warned of the dangers then they would have locked down movement to and from the origin before it began to spread internationally.
However, smaller ships aren't going to do jack-diddly squat against a Carrier Strike Group in a neutral situation (ie: both sides meet in Antarctica). F-18s have an effective strike range of over 1000-miles.
Submarines might have some theoretical advantages, but the 110,000 ton Ford-class Carriers moves faster than pretty much every submarine on the planet, so Submarines literally cannot speed up fast enough to engage.
----------
Those smaller Chinese Ships are going to rely upon a lot of Air support + Cruise Missile support from the mainland if they ever wish to actually engage with a US Carrier Strike Group.
Staying within the protective cover of SAM (against air threats), Cruise Missiles (against the CSG themselves)... and providing a launch platform for various missiles, Chinese Destroyers probably can do a job in a hypothetical fight vs US Navy within the confines of the South China Sea.
But once they leave the protective cover of China's mainland... its all over. Swarms of F18s will just launch missiles at all the Destroyers, while the Carrier Strike Group sits back a thousand miles away.
--------
That's why the question isn't about those small Chinese ships (even though China is making a lot of them). The big question is about the performance of those Chinese Carriers. At 70,000 tons or so, they're much lighter than the 110,000 ton Ford-class carriers.
https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1292819714935271424
I'm not a virologist but every TWiV episode I listened to, there was convincing talk about natural reservoirs being the most likely source of the virus.
AFAIR they also expect similar events to happen increasingly all over the world due to side effects of the climate crisis and global heating.
How? Following your line of reasoning, it makes the US response look even worse. No enemy of the US would have imagined that US citizens will turn wearing a mask into a political statement. Before the pandemic, the US was rated #1 in epidemic preparedness. No one had imagined that it will become societal consensus to sacrifice 500k American lives.
Yet we've just spent the last year proving that biological warfare will be potentially more deadly than chemical or even nuclear warfare.
Decades ago we banned research into those other weapons and implemented international treaties and inspection regimes.
Even the possibility that this could have been a lab leak should scare the whole world and motivate a massive reform of these labs and the experiments people are conducting.
I hope the people in power don't share your complacency.
Respectfully, this just simply isn't supported by the data and the dozens upon dozens of polls available[1]. Sure, there's a bunch of QAnon weirdos out there or staunch Alex Jones acolytes, but most regular folks have been taking it more or less seriously: social distancing and mask-wearing has been almost universally adopted. Last year in April and May, the percentage of people that "weren't worried" about Covid-19 was in the single digits. And there is some mistrust out there, but it's been well-earned: 15 days to flatten the curve has turned into 365 days of economic and social limbo.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/308222/coronavirus-pandemic.asp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#Biosafety_leve...
Listen to him talk about how easy is to modify coronaviruses in labs and how they are actually doing this, mixing and matching viruses at 29:50:
> Well, coronaviruses are pretty good... you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot what happens in a coronavirus. Zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can bulid a protein, and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this, insert into the backbone of another virus, and do some work in the lab, so you can get more predictive, when you find a sequence.
Really? Why would there be evidence TODAY? Those bats have likely been destroyed, and all records of sequences taken from them have likely long since been shredded and burned.
There's not that much evidence involved here.
If China knows and is hiding it, I'm still not clear what that changes. They'll still know to improve their safety practices
Given that the US government's response was basically to do nothing until it was too late, and then to do nothing except hinder the states' abilities to respond, it's hard to imagine that an extra six months' time would have made any difference, other than giving them six more months to downplay and dismiss the problem.
So yeah, we can care about whether the Chinese government was trying to save face, but in the end does it matter whether that's the case or not? The only thing we can change is our own countries' responses to pandemics like this.
Why not? Seriously, this is the "let's just stop developing nukes" argument... someone will and whether we're prepared or not is on us.
In particular, if true that it 'leaked' ... it's not like other nations are leaking pathogens which kill millions and cause 5 Trillion in destruction. It would literally change the geostrategic equation overnight and be seminal, defining world event certainly bigger than 9/11. On the scale of a WW.
If it was quasi-intentional (this is definitely not true, but since you speculated...) then it would be an act of war and the most damaging attack on the US (and other nations) ever. The US and the world would have to go to war with China over this. (Again this surely is not the case).
All while the US/EU/Rest of Word 'get better' at the above.
It's purposely evolving diseases to spread faster or be more dangerous, for the sake of research. As I understand, it's at least a bit controversial. So maybe there's not as much of it going on as other research? If so, there probably wouldn't be as much opportunity for it to escape. But now that it has (per the hypothesis), it's ready to be very contagious right out of the gate. Thus, pandemic.
How is violating the Sino-British Joint Declaration and getting away with it "losing ground"? The Hong Kong protests failed and Hongkongers now have less freedom than before.
I believe in many conspiracy theories that have substantive evidence for them (e.g. the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was faked), so I don't dismiss the idea of a conspiracy as impossible, they happen every day. However, there is no substantive evidence presented here other than the mere possibility that someone might have done something bad.
The fact is that even ignoring government response, all of our medical institutions seemed to presume that this was yet another [avian, swine, bird, ...] flu outbreak and it would be about as minimally impactful for the west as the rest have been. Which indicates that doctors and hospital administration were either not reading the literature coming out of China as early as last january 2020, or they simply disregarded it as sensationalist and/or sloppy. And, to be fair, given the state of crisis that our research institutions are in globally, I can't entirely blame them, though I still think it was irresponsible that no one seemed to make any preparations for months after the outbreak was apparent. It's as if everyone sat on their hands waiting for the government to tell them it was serious.
The chair of the WHO (Tedros Adhanom) [1] was a communist rebel (Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front) fighter in north africa and his career has been sponsored and guided by China for this reason.
They won't suppress findings made internally because it would be too hard to cover up - but they will 'do the least' with respect to finding answers.
Only the US has enough power and wherewithal to even try to do something, but they'll be kept out direct, so it boils down to how sophisticated the US clandestine efforts are in China.
My completely speculative guess is that US operating ability in China is 'really bad' and that they've already barked up that tree and found nothing conclusive.
No! We should worry about the cause and also concern ourselves with managing the effect.
If we can prevent this, we should try. And, if our (American) politicians can be held to account for mishandling the situation, the WHO and China should be scrutinized on the international stage.
It did NOT say the virus was definitely released from a lab. It did NOT present any evidence it was. All the article said was that given the author's experience with labs like this, she thinks the chances the virus escaped are not as remote as the scientists investigating it claim it is. That's all! Your theory might be correct, but as of now, you have no reason to think you've been vindicated.
EDIT: author is a woman, so fixed pronoun.
You should care about knowing where it came from if you want to save lives.
We should also remember that there were past lab leaks in China of SARS, including ones that led to smaller outbreaks and deaths: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20040423/china-sars-death
from the article you linked to:
> Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
You're the one spreading FUD, intentionally misinterpreting the original article and making up a fake argument that "lab leak" hypothesis somehow contradicts "natural origin" and implies that the virus was "designed". (If I understand the article correctly, "purposefully manipulated" means "genetically manipulated", not "gain of function".) Flagged.
Are you asking me to believe a theory for which all the evidence was either not uncovered or destroyed? Why is that more plausible than origin from outside the lab?
I would expect such a case to make the headlines, but it's quite possible it would be quietly swept under the carpet. How well known was Reston back when it happened? If that didn't make the news, would a lab-originated outbreak?
With COVID, a worker could get infected, hide the exposure out of fear/shame, never show any symptoms... and yet start a pandemic.
With a low-probability high-impact event like a global pandemic, near misses are the only indicator you have until the one time it does go catastrophically wrong.
Would you say the signatories are being irresponsible or are not qualified to suggest the lab-leak theory is worth investigating?
Clearly the virus is only a major issue for elderly and infirm patients, where the vast majority of people under the age of 30-40 present mildly or asymptomatically. And if that's indeed the case, then perhaps forcing the entire population to shelter in place for more than a year makes less sense than, say, recommending protective measures primarily for the vulnerable.
I think you are referring to an event in Ukraine where some of the peasantry burned crops, but some exports were still bound for the cities. In the Irish potato famine, the UK exported food from Ireland even as people starved to death. In the US, farmers burned crops and poured out milk in the great depression as people starved.
Juxtaposed, there is little reason to treat foreign governments as inherently worse than our own and much reason hold them to similar evidentiary standards. My hope is that the standard would be high for both domestic and foreign stories.
"In 2014, after a series of accidents involving mishandled pathogens at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the NIH announced that it would stop funding gain-of-function research into certain viruses — including influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) — that have the potential to unleash a pandemic or epidemic if they escaped from the lab. Some researchers said the broad ban threatened necessary flu-surveillance and vaccine research."
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00210-5
p.s. The US NIH did ultimately stop funding that research locally, but continued funding it in Wuhan. Including the exact type of virus we're dealing with now.
Before the pandemic, the US was actually rated #1 for endemic preparedness. No one had imagined that wearing a piece of cloth to protect others would become a political statement. No one was dreaming of the loss of half a million (!) American lives being remotely acceptable.
I would even go so far as to argue that from a psychological perspective the situation is similar to losing a war. US society will have to come to terms with what happened and how to prevent it in the future, and that's at the heart of parent's post.
No, they are "inadvertently" misclassified [1] or kept secret because of bioterrorism laws [2].
> and they have also never caused a deadly global pandemic.
Neither has a Chinese lab, to the best of our knowledge. Doesn't rule it out, but let's not jump to conclusions.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/06/23/undisclosed-c... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/17/report...
If we can establish that a lab leak lead to a worldwide pandemic, we'd place much more importance on lab security and better handling procedures.
If it was naturally spread then we'd look at the feasibility of reducing the chances of this happening again, like improving sanitation of wet markets, implementing regulations, or even banning them entirely.
Frankly the notion of it not mattering to someone how covid came to be is absurd.
If you don't want something to happen again, you first need to understand the circumstances that lead to it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00599-7
Edit: wanted to highlight that, while the Lancet and other publications have highlighted the mainstream views that “lab leak” is a conspiracy theory, that there is a prominent minority of scientists that disagree: https://undark.org/2021/03/17/lab-leak-science-lost-in-polit...
My understanding is most other countries don't have wet markets like China does. Even if a virus escapes, it may not have access to the hosts it needs truly become problematic.
Chiefly, it says that there is evidence that not only did the virus NOT originate from an animal source in the seafood market, but they suggest that Chinese officials knew that it did NOT originate in the Market, yet they issued statements saying that it did anyway.
Furthermore, the WHO's own team admitted recently that they were simply not equipped to do any kind of forensic investigation of the lab (https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/world-health-organizat...):
> [Dominic Dwyer, a medical virologist at New South Wales Health Pathology in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the WHO team] says that the team didn’t see anything during its visits to suggest a lab accident. “Now, whether we were shown everything? You can never know. The group wasn’t designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practice.”
Even if they were appropriately equipped for such an investigation, what's the use when China had blocked their visits until a year later, when they've had ample time to cover any evidence. The whole situation is highly suspicious, from the initial suppression of news reports of the virus, to delaying international lab visits, to the deletion of studies from that Wuhan lab (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13701168/covid-cover-up-china-...).
No.
This isn't deducible from the article YOU linked!
Not having a link to the seafood marketplace in Wuhan != originating from outside Wuhan.
> The paper, written by a large group of Chinese researchers
> Their data also show that, in total, 13 of the 41 cases had no link to the marketplace.
> the virus possibly spread silently between people in Wuhan—and perhaps elsewhere—before the cluster of cases from the city’s now-infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was discovered in late December.
This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world. We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.resea...
He's also published a blog post titled "Origins of SARS-CoV-2" on his Web site: https://jamiemetzl.com/origins-of-sars-cov-2/
That also makes the biological warfare scenario less likely — armies like to control where the bomb goes.
The other factor to discount this conjecture is that if you hear about covid as a biological weapon, it’s less likely to be true as it would potentially expose research in other places. If China is doing this, the US, Russia and others are too.
Domain expert scientists on the lab leak hypothesis: https://thebulletin.org/2020/06/did-the-sars-cov-2-virus-ari...
The evidence is with the intelligence agencies of Western nations. Trump and Pompeo (Pompeo was sanctioned by China hours after new President took office) did not make up their "China Virus" as some racist dog whistle. They were informed.
The WHO, when pressured by the UK for China not sharing information, nor allowing access to a team for investigation, said: Now is not the time to point fingers. We need China cooperation for now. The UK replied that it then has to assume the worst possible and prepare for a pandemic. It did.
Actual tangible evidence is rare, but it is pretty damning that: China blocks Australian-led world-wide investigation into the origins of COVID -- re-sentencing Australian prisoners to death penalty and messing with trade relations to hurt Australia's economy. They'd do that for a natural zoonotic-base virus that was out of their control? Phone location records show containment procedures around Wuhan lab around October 2019. Former military analysts in Israel pose the lab leak hypothesis as plausible, betting their reputation on it.
It is not too fair to ask actual tangible evidence, if evidence could mean a hot war or severely strained relations during a pandemic where people need to work together. And what is your tangible evidence for the popular zoonotic hypothesis? Just some experts saying that zoonotic base is most likely when interviewed for a popular news outlet? The most likely hypothesis should be the easiest to find actual support for. Why not?
I think a lot of criticism on the drastic measures to contain a relatively low CFR virus would be dispelled if the general public knew what the decision-makers then knew: a strange novel virus which seems extremely adapted to infect humans, and shows more similarities to the lab viruses worked with in biowarfare, than with captured and documented cave bats. Similar to the "airborne COVID" -- first publicized by the head of the WHO -- we seem to be managing the factual information flow to avoid panic, geopolitics, and xenophobia. It is right now not important that the general public knows it is dealing with an engineered virus or lab leak. Or at least... other things are more important right now.
From what I've read Ebola has killed many healthcare professionals because they infected themselves when disposing off PPE. As a result a disproportionally large portion of deaths were healthcare workers.
> With COVID, a worker could get infected, hide the exposure out of fear/shame, never show any symptoms... and yet start a pandemic.
In many countries workers are actually incentivised to come to work sick and infect others.
The so-called "Spanish Flu" of 1918 had origins in a migratory bird route over large tracts of pig stockyards, and the workers and nearby army base residents were subsequently infected and subsequently brought it over to Europe at the end of WW1.
Given both points above, shame on USATODAY for giving the time of day to such dangerous speculation while much of the planet chafes under lockdown and is irritable and hating on China anyway... shameful demagoguery. Dismissed.
It can well be a cover-up, which is a daily life in places like China. In USSR, every technological, radiologic or biological disaster was covered up, surfacing only when it was impossible to conceal.
But here's the kicker. Let's say this was a lab leak and as a reporter (which I'm not) I thought the evidence was good enough to warrant reporting. I'm not sure I would share it. The previous occupant of the white house did a great disservice in giving this whole thing a racially charged tone. I'm genuinely scared by the increased acts of violence against southeast Asians in the US and worry that stories like this will make it worse. I'm hoping that the new US government is secretly taking steps to help prevent what may have happened in that lab -- in addition to the large effort needed elsewhere to improve our handling after things had begun to spread.
Anyway, main point is that this was the first time in a long time (ever?) where I really wondered whether, given the circumstances, if it was good to share "the whole truth" (as best we know it) given that we don't know what happened and the potential real-life implications to many people in the US.
I read the article, but it only states that the first case from December was not linked to the seafood market ("wet market"), but not that it occurred outside of Wuhan. Did I misread something?
By the way, early on I believed that the virus jumped to humans at the seafood market, which was the prevailing theory at the time, it seemed. But as evidence like the above article came out - noting that many early cases had no link to the seafood market, while still being in Wuhan - it raised suspicions, and lent credence to the lab-leak theory.
> There has been rigorous scholarship done on this question. I recommend reading it given your interest in the subject.
I do, but I'm not convinced. A lot of reporting either relies on appeal to authority ("I'm a PhD, and this couldn't possibly happen, so don't question it"), or is purposely obtuse, confusing lab-leak with lab-synthesized, and by dodging the point, hardly alleviates suspicion.
You must understandably excuse me for being a sceptic. I started wearing masks back in February or March, against the advice of the CDC who was telling me masks increase the rate of spread. At the same time I believed that borders should be closed to limit the rate of spread, while the WHO was telling me that closing borders would do no such thing.
So I am not going to believe something just because an expert tells me to, nor do I find it at all scientific to dismiss politically inconvenient possibilities.
All of this contributes to the history and scientific corpus of what not to do, and lessons to learn from in the future that we can point to as what can happen in lab leak scenarios.
It's hard to accept in good faith the proposition that not knowing the truth of what happened is preferable to knowing the truth.
RNA mutations mimicking proteins are precisely how a non-living entity can, like a bike-thief trying combinations randomly, unlock the lipid or protein sheaths on animal cells and gain direct access to the inputs of a genetic reproduction machine inside the cell.
So, aside from the fact that these folks only have some circumstantial evidence and woo to suggest a lab hypothesis, (not EVEN a theory, not EVEN a hypothesis, nay, mere speculation with a vested political axe to grind, hello) and that fact that all factual evidence of how all previous cross-species virus hops occurred point to this being a relatively common occurence (1918 avian-porcine-human connection occurred in Kansas by the way, not "Spanish")
umm sure
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/18/1021030/coronavi...
not that outbreak. US stopped doing that GoF research and funded it in those Wuhan labs instead - basically like any other outsourcing of environmentally dangerous manufacturing/etc. to China. My pet conspiracy theory is that as part of that GoF the virus was tested on humans there - say some prisoners happily volunteering for a couple weeks break from hard labor to spend it in a nice hospital with a "flu".
And if the virus had totally natural - accidental freak of Nature - origin, why would you give 4 year prison to a journalist who was covering the beginning of the pandemic in Wuhan?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/12/28/china-h...
The suppression of any information is totally in-line with some deep f&ck-up and/or government potentially looking very bad if real picture sees the light of day. Even Chernobyl wasn't suppressed to that degree.
I don't think at this point it is credible to assign probabilities to either hypothesis (which are assumed to be exclusive here).
The defense is NOT to stop the virus (unrealistic defense solution) - it's to make sure we can withstand/resist it so things like vaccines can be put into place so we can go back to some sort of normal (e.g. New Zealand)
The USA (only major western country without healthcare) was unique in how many deaths we had. 90% of those were unnecessary.
In no way whatsoever does that detract from a potential lab leak. The vast majority of viruses used in gain of function research are taken from natural reservoirs.
Example: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55998157
Why should they be interested? We know how SARS type viruses can spread to humans, we know what other species are vulnerable, and we know what things make it more or less likely. A new outbreak was not a surprising result. What benefit is there to aggressively investigating the exact transmission method?
If your mink idea was found to be accurate, would you advocate closing mink farms? It being the source this time doesn't make it likely to cause the next transferrable virus.
My genuine apologies if I am crossing a line. I know this is a potentially touchy subject. Hate crime is serious and has many negative externalities that other crimes and accidents don't carry. They have also been on the rise, and could continue to grow more significant. It just feels very strange to me that 70 additional crimes in a year that saw thousands of additional murders has been such a common talking point for months now.
"Did the coronavirus leak from a lab? These scientists say we shouldn’t rule it out."
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/18/1021030/coronavi...
Right now, there is no question that say, the US military has samples of Coronavirus. Not for nefarious reasons mind you, but of course it's of military importance to study a global virus if only to work on vaccines and such.
Even if Coronavirus originated in nature, going forward if there is ever a new outbreak, you technically can't prove it wasn't the US military accidentally messing up can you?
You don't know the characteristics of the strain they're holding, and if it originated in nature then any study of it will show it came from nature.
Likewise you can't prove it wasn't the lab. They could have had samples of it from before, how can you prove the negative of that? It's hard to prove you didn't have access to a given thing.
>The Lancet paper’s data also raise questions about the accuracy of the initial information China provided, Lucey says.
If anything, this source strengthens the possibility of lab leak hypothesis.
"Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...
What does an unstable person do with that info? It seems like calling it the "Chinese virus" is relatively benign by comparison.
Does censoring do anything here?
Then you ought to know that seeing more circumstantial evidence for A than B does not imply that A is more likely. What would imply that A is more likely is if you find more circumstantial evidence for A than whatever amount you would expect to find if A didn't happen.
That's why good Bayesians place so little weight on circumstantial evidence: because it's difficult or impossible to predict the expected amount of circumstantial evidence for something that didn't happen. It would involve answering questions like, "When a novel coronavirus moves from the animal population to humans without a lab accident, what are the odds that it will happen within X miles of a lab studying such viruses?" That's pretty difficult to answer, given that we don't know a lot about how or why that happens yet.
And it shouldn't even need to be said that this all goes double when the thing being argued over is political (because, even if you personally are unbiased, the people gathering and publishing the evidence you rely on may not be) and treble when the evidence is technical and outside your area of expertise.
I would say you're supposed to engage the same way everyone had been engaging with the entire thread up to that point. But if you do want to transition to a more evidence-based approach to the subject — which I could get behind — I don't think the right way to go about it is to suddenly demand proof from the first person whose opinion you don't like.
I'd say that the release of a highly transmissible and moderately lethal pathogen was the primary issue.
- the lab escape theory has been thoroughly debunked by science
- the WHO investigation put the final nails in the coffin of this theory
- therefore, lab escape continues to be a fringe conspiracy theory at best
- coverage of the lab escape theory is politically motivated rather than scientifically motivated
- continued coverage is largely a combination of irresponsible journalism, disinformation and anti-China political propaganda
Does the USA Today article indicate a shift in this perspective, or is it just an outlier? Has something changed, for example new information coming to light?
I think that's true, but it ignores the possibility that the WIV was working with new viruses with unpublished genomes. The WIV routinely organized expeditions to remote bat caves to collect samples. There's naturally some delay between sampling, sequencing, and publishing, no conspiracy required. For example, RaTG13, the closest known animal virus to SARS-CoV-2, was collected by the WIV in 2013 but published only after the start of the pandemic.
The WIV had a private database of viral genomes; but they took it offline in September 2019, they say due to hacking attempts. They haven't brought it back up, and the WHO has declined to ask for a copy.
SARS-CoV-2 certainly could be a naturally-evolved virus first transmitted from an animal to a non-scientist human. It could also be a naturally-evolved virus collected and accidentally released by the WIV, or a recombinant of multiple such viruses, or the descendant of such a virus after serial passaging. Nothing in Andersen's argument distinguishes any of these possibilities.
But don't trust me; check out Marc Lipsitch's Twitter feed today, or David Relman's article:
> Some 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 (3). 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/content/117/47/29246
This isn't a conspiracy theory, and it's not even a fringe viewpoint anymore. It's just a reasonable step in investigating the yet-unknown origin of what could be the worst industrial accident in human history.
And only 2 years later we have an outbreak
I couldn't find anything on Fox News.
Someone please explain to me how the Chinese were able to identify that that had a new virus.
I’ve done pandemic drills with homeland security. They said they way you know you’ve got a new virus floating around is either new symptoms; significantly more “flu like” cases; significantly more cases escalating to pneumonia; increased deaths.
Covid presents like the flu, so much so you need a test, but early on a test was not available. So the symptoms are not unique.
Early on there was not a spike in cases, so that would not have sparked an interest.
Early on there was not a significant uptick in flu cases turning to to pneumonia, so that would not have sparked interest.
Early on there was not a spike in deaths, so that would not have e sparked an interest.
In fact when the Chinese discovered covid, there was absolutely no evidence that anything out of the ordinary was taking place.
But somehow the Chinese knew that they had a very contagious, bat based virus circulating, based on no information.
Everyone is focused on the wrong thing, I want to know how they discovered it with no information?
I’ve always believed this was an lab accident by a technician that needed their job so they covered it up until they and too many family members got sick and it was obvious something was wrong.
They knew about the virus because it was being studied, and that’s the only answer that makes any sense.
1. An increase in violence targeted specifically at Asian people that is in excess of the already-documented rise of violence in general experienced across all groups in 2020.
2. An attribution that this imaginary excess violence is "white supremacist" in nature and intent.
3. A direct causal connection between this imaginary and poorly-attributed violence stemming specifically from the origin of the virus.
It's easier to defend freedom to hypothesize when you realize that the people advocating against said freedom are, themselves, simply making shit up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
While I have you: could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...
No source of covid-19 has been found.
Similar lab leaks happen frequently.
BUT.. you're not allowed to discuss it with the undertones that you're a bad person. If you say china virus you could be accused of being a racist. But if you say South African or British variant it's okay. The mental acrobats are insane. If you suggest people aren't thinking critically about it you will be accused of flamebaiting or trolling. If you call out people who are trying to silence your comments you'll be accused of "making boring reading".
I think it should be discussed, debated and seriously considered. There is a suggestion in here to assume both the animal farm and the lab were the cause and to respond appropriately. With lack of further evidence I think this is the best idea.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v1....
Because of this, Nature has placed an editor's note on their pangolin paper:
> 11 November 2020 Editor's Note: Readers are alerted that concerns have been raised about the identity of the pangolin samples reported in this paper and their relationship to previously published pangolin samples. Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x
No one is seriously proposing pangolins anymore, not even Daszak and the Chinese. The proximal host for MERS (camels) was identified in a little over a year, and for the original SARS (palm civets) in a little less. For SARS-CoV-2, despite the much greater effort, we're still waiting.
Each side is utterly convinced that the other side dominates the site and is sinisterly manipulating/astroturfing the community. None of these feelings is based on any reality that I've ever been able to observe. It's all imagination driven by emotion. When it comes to this topic, the main impression I gets from trying to keep this place in some semblance of guidelines-respecting order is one of mass-psychological, tribally motivated insanity.
> Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future.
China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I think it’s silly to presume CCP engineered a virus as part of some warfare strategy, or even to vilify/sanction them for a lab leak if it indeed was the cause (mistakes happen). However, CCP’s resistance to a proper thorough study of the origins of COVID is IMO not exactly appropriate.
Active research was taking place in the vicinity of suspected ground zero. Lab escapes happen—there are well-documented cases of the original SARS virus leaking from a lab in Beijing in 2004 (killing at least one person). Why was this time such a scenario discarded as so ridiculously impossible at first, and is still considered “extremely unlikely”? Is it politics?
[0] https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-...
Please don't take HN threads on these lame meta tangents. They never go anywhere interesting, and people invariably just imagine scenarios that confirm whatever they already believe and get even more upset about it.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544490.
This is absolutely not true. Lab invented was debunked, lab escaped was not.
Have a read: https://project-evidence.github.io/
However in my opinion, chinese governments (esp. lower levels) like to lower the severity of any issue / risks and they like to repress / solve the issue with local power until it is solved or gets too big. The central gov that like to hide wrongdoings aren't helping either.
In case of covid, they either underrate the severity or tried to suppress the outbreak locally, which they failed and it already spread too wide enough to be contained.
If covid outbreak happened in europe or us, I believe it'll spread almost the same, albeit slower and you'll knew faster since it'll be in news faster.
SARS-COV are classed Category C pathogen by CDC, in line with Hanta virus. SARS-COV is documented as a viable bioweapon, precisely for the things we have seen in the last year, and studied as such by all capable militaries around the world.
The hypothesis is that this lab (and labs in Iran, China and Iran share biowarfare research) was conducting gene-targeted coronavirus research. Using proxy DNA-testing companies serving Western populace to get their data. A good weaponized coronavirus would have an extremely high R. It would look similar to the flu in the first stages. Then at a later stage (after two weeks) it would deliver a "payload" in the brains of the targeted populace, stopping breathing or causing haemorrhage. The non-targeted races would just have a flu and contribute to the spread. Other engineered viruses focus on plausible deniability, straining the hospitals with patients with vague symptoms, hard enough to visit the hospital and contribute to the strain on public services, soft enough not to actually kill them. It would throw the targeted country into chaos and unprepared for a war.
I now think the lab leak hypothesis is worth considering, and regret labeling as a conspiracy theory, although I maintain the characterization that the lab leak hypothesis is frequently found alongside other conspiracy theories.
I also would maintain that the current consensus is that SARS-COV-2 came from natural spillover, and the leak hypothesis is a minority opinion, but one held by credible scientists with well-thought arguments and therefore worth considering. I wish the original article would cite this work.
There is analysis that suggests that SARS-CoV-2 wasn't engineered. However, if you were intentionally giving it to a bunch of animals in batches with some interspecies mixing, you wouldn't really expect it to look any different than a natural jump.
The thing is that whether this came from a lab or not is of limited relevance. Viruses have been hopping from animal hosts from humans for a while and if anything this one was late and long expected. Either way the kind of preparations we need to make for future events are the same.
Wasn't this happening well after they knew the virus existed? From my understanding, they knew the virus existed very early on. Much early than when people were dropping dead in the streets or getting dragged out of their apartments.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets...
Really drove me nuts how early on everyone, everyone was working overtime to try and dismiss the possibility that this was some sort of lab leak. I’m sorry but the way China went absolutely DEFCON 1 (welding people into their apartments, blocking the roads out of town, nightly fumigations of public spaces) within a short period of time strongly suggests that they had a “oh crap, _that thing we were working on got out_” moment. Never understood why people were so eager to dismiss this possibility.
It's not mental acrobatics. It's pragmatism and empathy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-...
It's less what new information has come to light, and more what hasn't. For MERS and for the original SARS, the proximal animal hosts were identified within about a year. For SARS-CoV-2, we haven't found that yet. (See my comment history if you're thinking pangolins; they're pretty much abandoned.)
So a year later, despite the considerable effort spent looking for evidence of natural zoonotic origin, we still have nothing. We also have no evidence of lab origin, but that investigation has been thoroughly obstructed--for example, the WIV's private database of viruses went offline in September 2019, and any reporter who approaches the mine where SARS-CoV-2's nearest known relative (RaTG13) was discovered gets turned away by Chinese police.
Military-funded scientific biowarfare research should be different (use different, more advanced, tools) than run-of-the-mill bioinformatics research which US scientists work with. So if the scientist is not working on military research, their guess is as good as: "it was not engineered using common industry-standard known methods". It is misattributing authority, like quoting bio science experts saying "COVID can't be a weapon because the mortality is too low". No, you have zero idea about the military applications of biowarfare. If the scientist really was a military researcher, then they won't disclose signs of tampering to a news outlet or academic journal.
Another is that, for obvious reasons, military research would like to obfuscate its engineering. So it is unlikely they use easily detectable methods for that. It is perfectly possible to breed viruses in a lab, inside natural hosts. Then you won't see any biological markers of tampering, but the virus was still engineered by cross-breeding captured fruit bats or manually creating a zoonotic transmission chain to humans. So even without biological signs of tampering, the lab leak remains plausible.
This is because you don't know how pathology works and what technologies (specifically sequencing) are available to identify pathogens of unknown origin.
You don't just lock up a city full of 11 million people because they have the sniffles.
The western world really dropped the ball with this one.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/05/coronavir...
I'll give you that Nature is steadfastly on the zoonotic side of things. But even Nature News journo has retweeted the USAtoday article:
https://twitter.com/NidhiSubs/status/1374002441780391940?s=2...
China got caught with their pants down on pandemic prevention given their past research into bat virus and their own initial warning in 20127. That does not mean that combine that with politics about the CCP to jump to a lab accident conclusion.
Even the US Defense Intelligence structure has jumped to such a conclusion.
I really wouldn't attach that much meaning to the prison sentence handed out. It is entirely in line with the CCP's behavior in the past. They strongly repress any information or people they perceive as causing them to lose face or look bad.
My understanding on this was that doctors local to Wuhan noticed a surprising and sudden uptick in pneumonia that did not respond to antibiotics. The Chinese government managed this badly[1]. Your timeline doesn't reflect how things happened at the time - there was a "slowly" (over two months?) growing problem in Wuhan that locals noticed and authorities suppressed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_2019%E2%80...
Yes. You are supposed to believe the administration of a president when they claim: The virus came from China. Whether deliberate or accidental, it likely originated in a laboratory. If you don't, I reckon you have bigger problems than a pandemic. If you can't trust your government on such critical matters, if you really believe the US government would stand for the secretary of State spreading lies, then you should probably flee to China and ask asylum there.
> Sorry, but that's just not good enough.
But experts saying: "Virus is likely zoonotic, but we have no idea" is good enough? Again, demanding others to proof that a teacup is orbiting Venus is reasonable. But not when you can't even show the existence of teacups or Venus yourself.
> Actual evidence in the zoonotic origin column greatly surpasses that in the lab leak column.
There is no actual evidence. Actual evidence of zoonotic origin would establish the transmission chain and identify patient 0. There is none. You have "Bats can be the original carrier". So your hypothesis could be true. It is circumstantial. Any actual evidence would instantly kill one of the hypothesis. So you share some responsibility there.
For an example of how to turn the BBC article into circumstantial evidence for a lab leak, is to study the franticness that went on with sequencing and publishing. Wuhan lab published the sequencing of bats captured in 2017 in 2020. It was complete PR management campaign, with scientists blaming "Mother Nature" not their research, information black-outs, and sharing of "secret" sequences years after the fact in support of zoonotic chain, while blocking any outside investigation into the origin which would support/not support the zoonotic origin.
Now, an unintentional leak would be theoretically possible with these initial intentions but then wouldn’t China still have a leg up on developing treatments? If so, wouldn’t we have seen that in their vaccine development?
Of course you this is all uneducated speculation. Quite possible that engineering a deadly and very infectious virus is easier than creating a cure or a vaccine by orders of magnitude.
Connecting dots == You believe because you want to
Unless someone came with causal evidence that someone gets infected from the lab, it is only your belief and there is no way to prove it.
You can believe whatever you like, so do the others.
Which is also weird because we all know Covid doesn't make people suddenly drop dead in the street.
https://twitter.com/mattwridley/status/1351198664950128641?s...
https://gillesdemaneuf.medium.com/the-good-the-bad-and-the-u...
The hypocrisy is strong with this one, Luke.
Then why hide information and prevent world-wide collaboration then?
perhaps. I mean having the leader of the free world spout conspiracy theories and give credence to them certainly hurts.
in the past you'd have crackpot conspiracy theorists spouting off their "knowledge" at the bar to anyone that would listen but most would shy away from the crazy person. now you have a mainstream leader saying crazy stuff and have a huge following of people spouting that off because you can get misinformation and half truths at the speed of sound. yeah some vetting of information should be there.
a lot of the "proof" I've seen have been from being ignorant of what scientific terms mean, deliberate mis/disinformation, and wholly not understanding cause and effect. the other thing that lets these propagate is the downright innumeracy of our societies.
my brother has gone down a dark path of this shit to the point that I am very disgusted by the "truthers" poisoning the minds of people. he used to be a decently intelligent man but he's gotten hit with the gish gallop of disinformation and lies.
It’s rather simple to do the so called ’gain of function’, you let the virus have it’s run with bat cells and add lots of human cells in petri with them. Because there is no immune system, the virus have not much to stop it. Slowly it adapt to human cells, you can change the type of cells so it can adapt to other receptors and so on. Those articles where published before the whole crisis erupted.
To show my point, even if we aggressively investigate the source and discover it did not originate in a lab, nobody would then argue that it's alright to lower security on such biolabs.
[1] - https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statem...
[2] - https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statem...
"Moderna designed its coronavirus vaccine in 2 days" was a headline I saw. And it's been approved by the FDA. So that seems demonstrably false.
Multiple companies have come up with a vaccine by now, too.
No acrobatics necessary.
Definitely not a super villain at least I hope/highly doubt the intention was a weapon (you could surely create a better weapon?).
I'm not judging the value of that research, it does sound valuable but maybe not more so than the (small?) risk of an accident.
There is also reporting WIV was doing top secret research for CCP military.
So bad guys depends on your worldview.
https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-experiments...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...
Anything can be said or used with ill intent, because intent matters and is separate from actual language. That's why we have tone in speaking and writing to help distinguish this. Our nonverbal cues say a lot more than the words themselves.
A rise in violence against Spaniards cannot sloppily be attributed to the use of "Spanish Flu" to describe a virus that some believed to either come from Spain, or affected Spain the worst.
It's morbidly irresponsible to assume negative intent when people are trying to name and classify a virus based on its best known origins, and attribute "racism" towards a people group of that same origin as being caused by the naming of a virus.
This is a fine example of: correlation does not imply causation.
A person who cannot separate the two concepts cleanly is the person who needs deep understanding for why they are wrong, especially when there is no credible data to support that assumption.
The media outlets reporting hate crimes caused by the naming of a virus are, in effect, assuming that all or most Americans are too stupid to act reasonably and understand these two very different concepts, so they declare the correlation however they see fit and expect their viewers to latch on and make the same poor and irresponsible assumptions blindly.
We are so much smarter than this. Pay close attention to the way journalists mold and shape the narrative based on assumptions and opinions to get you to believe their take. Also pay attention to the fact that CNN and others called this virus "the Chinese virus" well before our 45th President used the phrasing.
How does a media outlet get to blame behavior they created without first examining themselves?
What happened politically should be straightforward to anyone who's worked in a corporation: Wuhan mayor and Hubei governor tried to keep a lid on it, counterproductively, so their reports upstairs wouldn't look bad. They couldn't, higher authorities noticed, blew up the visibility on it, instituted nationwide programs to counter it, and fired the afore-mentioned mayor and governor.
In December there were reports of an uptick of people dying of pneumonia. When they did CT scans, they saw that their lungs had glassy nodules which was not normal. This was the way that they identified something new was spreading.
Which wouldn't that be in China's interest?
I don't get why the 'cover up' (maybe i'm too biased with that term, utter lack of cooperation) beyond just the top down controlling nature of the CCP.
Their actions don't lend us any trust so we do have to ask why..
https://www.wsj.com/articles/possible-early-covid-19-cases-i...
https://usrtk.org/biohazards/origins-of-sars-cov-2-risks-of-...
As you can see, besides WaPo, WSJ editorials & op-eds also figure prominently among those calling for investigation inclusive of lab-associated pathways. New York Magazine, Politico.
Then you can see Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists right in there.
Even an nytimes piece that didn't make that list: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/health/covid-virus-origin...
Want to add that I highly recommend the frontline doc it has so much great reporting that gives the background needed here.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets...
I don't think they got away with much. Even if foreign investment rebounds in HK, Western complacency toward China will not find its voice again for many decades, and in that time, every Chinese treaty negotiation will be viewed as a bad-faith caricature of real diplomacy.
[0] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/wir2020_en...
Knowing whether it was a lab leak or zoonotic would be a massive hint in the direction to invest in. N=1, but it's a big 1 that would have massive public support.
> 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://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli...
There is also the matter of biosafety levels. Something like smallpox is studied at biosafety level 4, which is very intrusive and difficult. The alleged gain of function research would have been BSL 3 or even 2, meaning a lot fewer precautions are taken, and a leak is correspondingly more likely.
What better place to put a lab studying bat viruses than near a place where they originate?
That's a pretty frequent occurrence.
They do if they don't get treatment. Usual course for deadly covid is, high fevers, feeling terrible, then there's an improvement in symptoms for a couple of days, then blood oxygen levels drop and the person drops dead
Very similar things happened with hydrochloroquine. HCQ was known effective for SARS-1, and prelim research showed it also was effective for SARS-2 (less grave symptoms developed) in the middle of February. Just did not help when the patient was already severely sick, so was not a cure, as touted by trigger-happy Trump months later. But then all of HCQ was discredited as being useless snake oil, and responsible for killing Americans when they drank aquarium cleaner. It was a political hit job on science, to punish Trump playing lose and politics. None the wiser or the healthier.
Finally. When the virus was not yet a pandemic (but clearly on the way there), the right prepper movement started talking about masks, self-treatment in case of hospital crisis, and food and vitamins (vitamin D and selenium were chosen for their effects against other viruses) to keep immune system healthy. Meanwhile in the US, progressive politicians held mask-less photo opportunities at China Town restaurants to signal their support and that fear is unreasonable. Democrat politicians, former presidents, and public health officials were stating to not buy N95 masks for these were not effective and wearing them would signal you were ill. Then Trump went muh-freedom-america on masks, and the progressive-left opposition to not mask wearing grew overnight.
On all these flip-flops, the US held conflicting positions, and any science was an afterthought. I classify your objection to the official US position on lab leak as lies as part of this politics game. It makes you think of your entire government as a single "bad" figure, blatantly lying or skipping over their intelligence agencies and geopolitics experts, because their irrational hatred for China feels deserving of a big lie. Trump and Pompeo fabricating the lab leak hypothesis seems like a bigger story than the Trump-Ukraine scandal. If you have any actual evidence for that (or strong circumstantial evidence beyond Trump playing loose with facts) then it is your duty to inform the American public of that radical conspiracy.
It’s obvious in hindsight that what you say is likely true, but there is no feasible political route for the CCP to take blame, as their lives would be at stake due to unrest.
It is, in fact, highly suspect. I’m not at all positive that it indeed leaked from a lab in Wuhan, but the fact they won’t let an independent investigation anywhere near it makes me lean more strongly towards that as a possibility.
The description of the last investigation into the origins of the virus felt more like a ‘guided tour’.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8163761/Chinese-mar...
There is nothing in china's outbreak response that suggests guilt.
Some people drop the N-bomb without ill intent either. There's plenty of precedent for agreeing that certain words and phrases just can't be used anymore in good faith.
When was Science about prescribing blame?
1. It was human made or found. Human made is common QAnon fodder. I don't believe anyone serious finds that idea credible. Nature is probably far better at concocting new viruses than humans are. And if it was found, where did it come from? I'm honestly surprised DNA sequencing hasn't been more effective in answering this question thus far;
2. Whether it was deliberately released or accidentally leaked. Note that a deliberate release doesn't have to be state-sponsored. It could be a rogue employee like the Anthrax letters from ~20 years ago; and
3. Whether the lab knew what they had or they didn't. Coronaviruses are studied by Chinese labs. They could have hundreds of samples without realizing that one in particular can infect humans and be transmissible effectively and asymptomatically. I suspect that in any version of the lab origin theory that it's more likely they didn't know what they had. That would take human testing.
What does seem clear is that the CCP isn't particularly interested in getting to the bottom of this. I wouldn't take that as evidence of them having more knowledge of this than we do. I suspect they simply don't want to know. More to the point, I think the CCP sees efforts to find out as a direct attack on China.
Ok sure. What did you win? Have you now advanced science and solved all unknown problems in virology? Was the progress of mankind so impeded by the inability to call COVID-19 the Chinese variant? Seriously ask yourself why you are so hung up on being able to call it the China virus. Are doctors around the world completely unable to sequence this virus because they can’t say the word “China virus”, or does it just make you feel better to be able to prescribe blame to a group of people?
I think we can agree there’s open mystery about the origin of the virus without getting caught up in culture war trite. British people aren’t being murdered because of some loose connection to a virus, the very least you could do is show some tact and try not to insert your bias at every opportunity.
(In the first case, the market may be expected to be just another case in a wider spread pattern with a gravitational center involving typical contacts and residential areas of lab workers, in the second one, we may expect to observe an initial spread around the market and the living quarters of those, who work there.)
Even without a patient zero, there should be some indications regarding clusters in early observations.
It's a pure mapping problem. There are thousands of known viruses that affect humans. But most viruses don't have thousands of vaccines.
Additionally, there are constraints. The only contraint on a virus is that is needs to reproduce, and cause harm. Any kind of harm will do, and any kind of spreading is fine. But the vaccine needs to not hurt the person (at least, don't hurt them worse than the virus would).
Even if both processes involved similar techniques, the constraints on virus production are more favorable to the researcher than vaccine production.
To get back to whether China or any nation would intentionally create a biological weapon, however...: most industrialized countries realized a long time ago that bioweapons tends to be a bad strategy. Most western countries stopped their bioweapons programs back in the 70s for the simple reason that there was no reasonable use-case for a bioweapon that isn't done better by simply bombing something (or more recently-hacking their infrastructure). Bioweapons are strategically useful for small nations, and terrorist groups.
Tell me about that lab in the Congo again.
If a nation actually did that (release a bioweapon and pre-immunize their own citizens)... well World War is probably overselling it, but I could certainly imagine contained conflicts, sinking of cargo vessels, shooting down of planes, targeted assassinations... etc. It's very likely that every nation would have highly vested interests in making sure that whoever authorized that weapon was removed from this planet.
And that, more than anything else, is why we should be suspicious of "exotic" theories like human intervention. It's an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary proof. You seem to be arguing the opposite, when Occam is clear that we should be betting on natural evolution.
I genuinely don't understand what you are talking about.
Now am I being offensive or breaking some rules I am not aware of?
They are acting without any concern for the outside world - not for how they are perceived, not for any consequences. They are acting with pure self-determination. This works because they know they can be self sufficient and have a long term plan to get there.
Controlling the information/narrative domestically is the only variable they need to manipulate that matters. So as an outsider, it all seems quite inexplicable, but if you see it as a way to achieve long term political and infrastructure goals while maintaining social harmony locally - most of their actions make sense, even if they may not be morally justifiable to some/many/all people in some/many/all situations :)
Does that make sense?
Maybe if the US didn't have a very large number of people who are willing to harass people of visibly different races we wouldn't have to have these discussions and worry so much about our language. But we do, and we have a track record of specific races being attacked when nations that have a majority of that race become embroiled in international issues.
The issue isn't how long an account has been on HN or the good posts it makes—it's the bad posts. This shouldn't be hard to understand; it's the same principle by which people who always stop at red lights and are nice to supermarket cashiers still don't get to rob banks.
I realize it's annoying to be rate limited, but it's one of the few (crude) software tools we have to try to put off the descent of the forum into flamewar, so dropping the mechanism isn't really an option.
Researchers have gone to a particular region of China and otherwise gone to great effort to find these particular bat viruses. I agree it is possible that they could be ignorant of the fact that the virus is in their own backyard. But it must a lower probability event that people got infected by such city bats given that we already know for certain the labs were transporting the bat viruses directly. Additionally, I would be surprised if they have not been testing nearby bats for such viruses since the outbreak happened. If they got a match it would be highly publicized.
Recently (3 days ago)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210318185328.h...
So we should be aggressively researching all the known possible future causes, not wasting time trying to figure out what the exact cause this time was.
>Knowing whether it was a lab leak or zoonotic would be a massive hint in the direction to invest
We know both are possible causes, investing in just the one that caused this leaves us open to the other.
2. Review CCTV of their movements for the 14 days prior.
3. Find the commonality.
If there's genuine interest in where it came from, I think the answer is certainly findable.
However the fact that all of the Chinese supporting votes showed up at once, and then the others show up slowly is supportive of a group of people working together.
But it would still result in heads rolling and a constant stream of embarrassing revelations. Consider the Fukushima investigation. Every revelation of bad process and ignored warnings is another news cycle with everyone outraged at them. "Bad luck" is something you are not forgiven for if there's any negligence to point at.
"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity (or accident)".
Not sure how to square this with the fact you're saying HN collectively gets it wrong. Either you can't even determine what it is they're getting wrong or you're exceptionally good at gauging what the HN opinion is. Because of your quote, I'll assume you're not accurately gauging what HN's majority opinion is on issues, because it's "very hard." I spend a lot of time here and don't think it's difficult at all. While there's a lot of debate and disagreement, most issues have fairly clear >2/3 majorities.
Classically liberal, anti-trumpism, climate change urgently needs addressing, anti-BigTech, static typing, Rust/Go > Java/C#, anti-CCP, anti-surveillance, pro-encryption / pro-privacy, pro-fasting, pro-lifting, decriminalize drug use, pro-rationalist, crypto mostly snake oil, more Twitter use/discussion than IG/Snap/TikTok though it's less popular, etc.
In general, yes. In this case, no so much.
The feart that it could happen here is why the USA restricted gain of function research in 2014. And only reopened it in 2017 with stricter safety controls.
If China had made the same policy decisions, would COVID-19 have become much less likely? That's an important question to answer. Whether or not it DID happen that way, as a planet we need a more consistent way to evaluate such risks.
Wouldn't everything you described happen gradually? as in people wouldn't be able to walk normally before reaching the point where they drop dead from oxygen levels low enough to be immediately lethal? From my own experience and based on what I've read, covid can cause a quick deterioration in respiratory function but across at least hours or days.
The videos also pictured people that weren't really showing any trouble breathing, it felt more like the plague than any respiratory illness. But maybe the videos were meant as "PSA's" for local consumption to get people to treat the disease more seriously? Because they were really over the top
The theory that there must be intermediate hosts is attempting to fit the natural origin theory to the evidence, not the other way around. It is perfectly capable of jumping straight to humans, but there is no way for it to make that jump in Wuhan at that time so therefore it must have come through another species. That’s the logic.
Any investigations will have the goal not of finding the truth, but of minimising damage to the political powers that control it.
This is a government that bans talking about multiple periods of the country's history.
I don't mean to pick on you personally! Everyone does this.
We're at 500,000 now with the virus, I think?
That's more Americans than have been killed in all the 20th Century wars combined [1].
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...
But China knew about the virus in 2019 and kept it quiet. They silenced scientists. China is complicit in this pandemic and should pay reparations.
People underappreciate just how complicated and time-consuming this is.
Immune systems are terrifying things, on trigger alert (they have to be!), and you have to tickle it just right without making everything explode.
So, except for the fact that you must believe WIV did all these experiments in total secrecy (so that nobody outside heard of it while visiting, etc) and now won't admit to having done them, it's not a conspiracy theory.
People really need to stop and think, because next time that lab could be in your country. With icebergs and permafrost melting, you can bet there's going to be more pandemics in the pipeline. This really isn't a time for people's crass and nihilistic takes on foreign governments, science, or even your own government. When you leave room for people and systems to screw up, then things get better; if you're hypercritical then all you incentivise is the burying of evidence and lies.
If leaks are a problem, then certifications should be better enforced.
Burying our head in the sand and waiting for nature to kill us is a losing move.
I honestly don’t see what difference it makes from it coming from a lab in China vs someone eating something they weren’t supposed to be vs a bat, etc.
I’m honestly curious to why it matters - not to say that we shouldn’t pursue the truth but it seems like it doesn’t matter.
These theories without conclusive evidence seems to just blame China - which unfortunately drive anti Sino sentiment.
Human psychology deals with numbers strangely. There are many who seem to think 500,000+ deaths (many preventable) from Covid are not something to be overly concerned about. Some of these same people are deeply worried about "Extremist Muslim terrorism" that has had very few victims.
So, yeah, from what I understand about growing anti-Asian crime, I do think it makes sense to be concerned. In particular, because this increase seems to be a (predictable) response to actions by many over the past year to demonize China, which any sane person knew would create a generalized animosity toward Asian-Americans. It's not like things like this have never happened before. They have, and they're quite predictable.
My issue with the theory is it lights a fuel under people for more racism against asians in general. Until there's solid evidence, everyone should dismiss it as just that - a theory.
Let me explain that i'm not trying to push any agenda, or that i ever normally believe such things but i think this event hasn't had enough coverage https://thebulletin.org/2019/11/what-happened-after-an-explo...
Conclude what you will. I personally don't know enough so i'm not sure whether a link can be drawn, yet the timing is curious.
The latter is highly likely, the former is ludicrous.
Regardless, the CCP were clearly hiding something.
This isn't a theory, unfortunately, but since it requires self reflection it will never be a popular story in the US media. I admit I have seen it discussed in print several times.
If a child insists you have cooties (the fictitious ones, not lice) do you fight them to the bitter end?
You can never prove definitively that you don't since, of course they're not real, and the child gets to define the criteria for having them "oh you can't see cooties with a microscope, only I can!"
It's not about implying the Wuhan lab did release the vaccine, but it's about realizing chasing a conclusion that is not falsible is never going to give you a scientific conclusion.
-
Most of the current lab leak theories revolve around:
> But it’s also possible that SARS-CoV-2 evolved naturally in the wild before it was brought into a lab to be studied, only to subsequently escape.
At the end of the day you're saying the one thing you can freely observe indicates it was not man-made, but due to factors you can never observe (with an extremely closed country with a government structure that strongly discourages a mistake like this ever being properly attributed even if there wasn't immense pressure to not have this come out as the case)
Well when it comes to pinning blame on a country for releasing a virus that leads to a pandemic, "if it quacks like a duck" doesn't pass does it?
-
Why not spend energy looking at how we went from a virus shutting down a city in mainland China to 500k deaths in the US and all the mistakes made along the way there rather than chasing the equivalent of saying another kid gave us cooties on purpose...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#Co...
The Bayesian probability suggests the odds that it would evolve by chance AND first become an issue right next to one of the top three bat virus research centers in the world are pretty slim.
It would be like a new mosquito disease first being an issue in human population next the CDC headquarters in Atlanta instead of somewhere in Africa of South America. Sure - there are mosquitos everywhere - but the chance that a new disease would start in Atlanta are very slim.
Instead, the media often attempts to disprove the lab leak by pointing out that COVID-19 differs from the viruses that were being worked on in the Wuhan Lab. But that in itself implies that China is being transparent. To the contrary, we know that China would take every measure to obfuscate the lab leak if they believed it was the origin of the virus.
But your point is still a good one
China stonewalls pretty much every attempt by the international community to interfere with their internal control.
So this is more "business as usual" than "Clouseau found the smoking gun."
And just for domestic propaganda reasons. If it came from China they could be blamed for it, and they want to deny/deny/deny and defect blame. Serves their propaganda purposes to have people believe it was imported and generates an us-vs-them bunker narrative where the rest of the world is unfairly blaming them. That leaves their citizens questioning the rest of the world and not their own government.
flu cases year to year have a very wide variety. In the U.S. the low number of cases one year was 16M two years later it was 68 Million cases.
That's what China would be expected to do:
(1) if it knew the Wuhan lab leak theory was correct,
(2) if it knew zoonotic transmission was correct.
(3) if it had no idea what was going on.
(4) if it wasn't a lab leak but a deliberate biological weapons test that went wrong, and they has engineered both their overt argument and the lab leaks story as layers of cover.
So, no, their behavior here tells us nothing.
Or China can start to be more honest if it does not want to be demonized.
Having been in Hong Kong for just under a decade, I've seen several cases of bureaucrats making tone-deaf statements partly because they aren't used to dealing with a free(-ish) press. I have journalist friends, and I wish the relationship with the press were different, but bullying the press is less a sign of a cover-up when officials aren't used to dealing with a free press.
Lots of mammals are capable of this, and we can determine which ones are even if we don't isolate the cause of thie pandemic.
Its an example of bait and switch. This virus is not something that should have gained this much attention.
A bayesian inference shows that death when looking at a age stratification chart, who died compared with how many were expected to die in this cohort vs how many where expected to die were it a average flu outbreak in that same population.
I was building a model for local hospitals, with information back in march 2020. I grew disheartened when I realised that this killer virus was hardly more deadly than a bad flu year.
That brings up the excess deaths, why is it so high? Its hard to find good numbers in this, especially when you apply related increase in violent crime in 2020. Murders increases by 40% in NYC for example. More needs to be done to look into these numbers.
The death rate in all countries is died with, nor from. For example the UK lists all deaths who died within 30 days if a positive reading as a covid death. So to get the true numbers you need to apply a bayes model to see what we should have seen in a normal year.
A person over 70 has a 10% change if dying each year.
So if a virus that had no affect but turned your hair green killed 10% of people in an aged care home this would be branded as a deadly virus. Because of collerlation.
Now this virus kills much more than 10%, flu outbreaks have been reported to kill 12-16% of people in aged care homes. Covid is still more however.
I am now rambling, I have not squared the circle just yet. I still don't understand the hysteria, but it reminds me of post 9/11. Where people were acting crazy and full of anger.
I don't know what comes next, but I can tell you it won't be logical.
The specific bats that host the ancestor of COVID-19 are quite a bit far away from those labs. The disease was first noticed near the labs.
Looking at the mechanics of the thing¹, I'd put a lab leak on similar odds of some village near the bats being infected and spreading it from there.
1 - I know nothing of their policy and competence to judge those.
And again, RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, was sampled by the WIV in 2013 and published only post-pandemic. So it's unquestionable that they had at least one unpublished virus similar to SARS-CoV-2 in their collection; the only question is how many others.
It's likely that the only people who know the answer are under the physical control of the Chinese government. Even if they're sometimes briefly abroad, they likely have loved ones behind. So it doesn't take any voluntary conspiracy to keep them quiet, just a direction from a government that has amply demonstrated e.g. in Xinjiang its willingness and ability to punish anyone who discloses its secrets.
As I mentioned earlier, a proximal animal host would greatly increase my confidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated from natural zoonosis. Is there any evidence short of a direct admission from the WIV that would decrease yours?
Finally, Marc Lipsitch and David Relman are Harvard epidemiology and Stanford microbiology profs respectively. I'd rather people engaged seriously with the evidence than just relied on credentials; but are you saying they're conspiracy theorists too?
There are some indications that it might have been spreading possibly as early as September but the coverage I’ve seen was preliminary and researchers were cautious about concluding anything without more comprehensive tests to rule out things like cross-reactivity with other coronaviruses. The generally accepted patient 0 for the outbreak must have been infected in November to be symptomatic in early December but I haven’t seen any credible claims that anyone in China had identified this as a new disease until late December.
August 2019 - "Vape flu" appears in the US.
October 2019 - World Military Games in Wuhan, 300 US military men and women attend.
November 2019 - SAR-COV2 appears in Wuhan.
Let's not discount this sequence of events as well.
imagine another lab-virus just as contagious but one with higher infant mortality, we'd be extinct!!
The other source is a nature news article [1] which has by now following disclaimer:
> Editors’ note, March 2020: We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.
It also states at the end:
> Without the experiments, says Baric, the SHC014 virus would still be seen as not a threat. Previously, scientists had believed, on the basis of molecular modelling and other studies, that it should not be able to infect human cells. The latest work shows that the virus has already overcome critical barriers, such as being able to latch onto human receptors and efficiently infect human airway cells, he says. “I don't think you can ignore that.” He plans to do further studies with the virus in non-human primates, which may yield data more relevant to humans.
So it might just as well be that these experiments warned us about that potential, and now that it actually happened, some people interpret the original warning as the cause.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/
[1] https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...
You know... as happened only a few months earlier to people who wrote similar articles and discussed similar theories with very similar hypotheses, but who were NOT writing for a certain publication of a certain leaning.
I also look forward to being down voted and told why "it's totally different now".
There have been examples of bats excrement contaminating fruits on fields as a transmission chain. Accounting for these, often undiscovered, interactions is extremely difficult in terms of probability.
> we already know for certain the labs were transporting the bat viruses directly
In research from 5+ years ago, research which warned exactly about the fact how the virus already had overcome critical barriers to infect human cells [0]. A very plausible interpretation here can also be that said research was a warning about things to come, and is now mistaken as the original cause for it.
[0] https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...
I don't think generalizations like these are useful or productive because they contradict themselves when you apply any other context to them. It's double-think in its most overt form.
This is wildly misstating the science. That bat virus is a relative, not an "ancestor". And it's not known to be limited to those "specific, far away" bats, that's merely where it was documented. Believe it or not we don't routinely test every animal species for an exhaustive catalogue of virus variants. It's just shotgun science.
And as it happens there was a close relative to covid found on the same continent in a species group that exists in a broad continuum basically everywhere. A bat-to-bat transmission to Wuhan is a bleedingly obvious hypothesis.
And yet we have to talk about all this Andromeda Strain nonsense anyway, based largely on jingoist US politics.
The reality is that epidemiology is not a straight forward nor simple field of research, finding concrete and solid answers is usually way more difficult than most people assume when they want answers to point fingers.
"We have a researcher who was removed by the RCMP from the highest security laboratory that Canada has for reasons that government is unwilling to disclose. The intelligence remains secret. But what we know is that before she was removed, she sent one of the deadliest viruses on Earth, and multiple varieties of it to maximize the genetic diversity and maximize what experimenters in China could do with it, to a laboratory in China that does dangerous gain of function experiments. And that has links to the Chinese military."
i doubt their narrative because they where not transparent and kept making up conspiracy theories that it came from the US, then it was Italy, frozen fish etc etc all the while preventing any international investigations.. We also know labs do leak and even China had many leaks in the past including SARS and other viruses so its not unbelievable to think it was just a accident and if they where doing gain of function we need to know and we need to figure out a plan and have better systems in place to prevent leaks.
Who suffered consequences for getting Iraq wrong, or the financial crisis? Fortune passes everywhere.
Nice study.
But it didn't show where these people were from looks like hospital inpatients in the first Wuhan cluster.
Also I would like to see their results compared to non covid positive of the same age.
A member of my family got swine flu in 2009/10 they had very adverse health affects for three years after. So its not uncommon to have long term affects from flu like illnesses
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I'm not condoning or advocating conspiracy theories, but where they are wrong, they should be penalised.
One of the keys there is that's not uniquely Chinese as a problem. Those researchers were talking about American labs.
"Has this been causing small, stochastically limited outbreaks for some time before we picked it up?" is a question that has dogged several recent outbreaks.
Also, the alternative is not burying our head in the sand. It's monitoring and studying nature, instead of forcing the issue in a lab, and investing in infrastructure and capacity that work against a broad range of pathogen threats.
Another example of this happening is the corporate press conflating "lab created" with "gene editing" instead of using the broader interpretation which would include things like "gain of function research" (much more likely). This allowed China and the WHO to explicitly claim they did not create the virus (by gene editing) while cautiously never really addressing whether it was created via gain of function research.
So the answer to "What makes COVID special?" is possibly "We failed our pandemic save."
I did some research during the early stages of the West African Ebola epidemic, when a lot of people were asking why, instead of the usual sporadic, self-limiting outbreaks of the past, we were seeing something larger and different. As it turns out, if you use the parameters people estimated from the older, smaller outbreaks, there's a small but not breathtakingly so probability of a very large epidemic. It's sort of the null hypothesis for pandemics.
It's not exceptional in many of the ways viruses can be. It's not as deadly as Ebola. Or as durable as Norovirus. Or as transmissible as Measles. It's just...really good at its job.
The lack of fomite transmission for SARS-CoV-2 has saved a lot of healthcare workers.
I think that people can easily develop a misplaced sense of humanitarian responsibility where they are under the impression that they are called to serve a higher purpose and that they feel as though they are beholden to use their power and influence to prioritise (for instance) pacifism and internationalism above the public search for knowledge, where these have the potential to conflict. There can also be a sense in which the scientific establishment pursues its own independent, technocratic public policy. We have seen the huge amount of political power and influence wielded by high-ranking members of the scientific establishment, and no doubt the stakes were raised for this by the fact that it was an election year.
The article of this post talks a lot about how we do have inspections in the US, and that the inspectors are often the same department as the lab!
To be better it seems like we need some damn strong consequences & a regulatory power that can't be overruled.
None of the people most qualified to speak on this issue want their funding cut or the research to stop.
The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
A coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan China miles away from a Virology Lab that studies coronavirus and has in the past exercised gain of function research on cornoviruses specifically with novel lung ACE2 bind may have had a lab accident and a live virus broke out if the lab.
The problem is the media labeling common sense as conspiracy and conflating the two.
I beg to differ. How many pandemic causing viruses have their ground zero right outside an instition that for the last decade has been cranking out study after study derived from GoF research? A place that also was receiving information from American university researchers on how to develop chimeric mutations? Which just happened to share genetic material with strains known to have been researched for bioweapon applications? All at the same time as an uptick in censorship of academic papers.
There's coincidence, and then there's coincidence. I don't think anyone was out to make the darn thing, or intentionally release it. When I see a bunch of virology going on, and a pandemic starts up next door, I'm not looking 1000 miles away for the source.
Wasn't this discovered to be due to contaminated vape fluid, not anything contagious?
Transportation by lab personnel is the only way that RaTG13 is known to have come to Wuhan. Any animal transport is possible but only speculative. This entirely flips what should be the assumed scenario vis a vis Occam's razor.
So I wonder if, even if trying to be clear about any virus escape probably having been an accident, maybe somewhat many people still would have interpreted it differently (as if it was intentional), and that type of "news" gets more attention, spreads faster, right.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
It has plenty of relevance. If lab leaks are the source of the virus, any serious solution will need to include improvements to lab containment and practices. Knowing what happened in a hypothetical lab leak could also help identify the original animal to study. Understanding how viruses hop & adapt from animal hosts to humans begins by studying specific cases of it.
For example, past US lab virus leaks including SARS have led the Obama administration to temporarily suspend and investigate the risks of Gain of Function research in 2014. At least one of the Wuhan labs were conducting Gain of Function research at the time of the outbreak.
I agree that the US response to the threat of terrorism was also very much an overreaction, so at least you can say I'm consistent.
From what I understand, the total number of hate crimes decreased in 2020. I haven't been able to find the data and if, for example, this is because the number of hate crimes against whites dropped, the following is false. But in my mind this fits a model where X people are going to attack minorities in a given year, and this year, for obvious and insane reasons, they typically targeted Asians.
I understand the frustration and pain and cause for pushback. I say this because the next part will come across as cold. From a utilitarian perspective, there is not any material difference between worlds where different minorities are victimized. Changing the targets doesn't solve anything.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/285644/percentage-americans-rec...
People often stir up fears of foreign influence but in the last few years it really has seemed like the biggest sources of inorganic influence and “propaganda” has been domestic.
Its far from settled that the benefits of gain of function research outweigh the benefits. This is a debate that has raged among the scientific community for years (a debate which would over if it was discovered that COVID came from a lab involved in gain of function research).
Meanwhile in the US, hysterical partisans attacked Trump for correctly naming the virus along with its origin. This resulted in a societal unwillingness to direct blame at the Chinese government for all their numerous missteps, starting with suppression of early reports of a new pneumonia like illness in late 2019. How many deaths could have been avoided with just the most basic level of transparency and responsibility?
I have certainly been puzzled by this, for example in a Washington Post article. By conflating the two, lab escape became a "fringe conspiracy theory" rather than a hypothesis that should be investigated.
It seemed like sloppy journalism at best.
It's lack of motivation for us to boycott the China. They are too far away from our live. We may take it serious until the nuclear submarine appearing offshore.
We don't know the New Appeasement would come out with real peace or WWIII. The deaths caused by CoVid are already more than the number of American killed in WWII.
The discussion is good, but we are not ready to face the issues come up with China. It's helpful for the labs in other countries to have new SOP. However, the problem is still there.
Btw, I don't think we can ever find out the truth. It's been over a year, and China has all the time to clean up and conceal every piece of evidence. The WHO scientific team's visit to Wuhan is no difference to investigating a murder scene a year after the event, with the murderer living in it all that time. Nothing but a joke.
Whether it is deliberated it is harder. But if it is an accident.
And let Wu Han people to fly away to the world ...
It's all circumstantial evidence of course, but that's really all you're going to get with a country like China. We can be damn well sure that they would never admit to the virus originating from a lab leak. To me, this is the clearest and most likely source of the outbreak.
lol care to share those numbers
Ive no axe to grind politically, simply think its interesting to explore and understand what indicators/benchmarks there would be etc. One of the claimants to human manufactured was a Nobel prize winner, which doesnt mean he is correct but to me seems to add weight to its worth discussing.
I did not see any real 'lets talk about the science' discussion anywhere. And on my post on /r/askscience I could see my post in new list logged in but not when I went in via a new browser... so not sure if a glitch/timing/etc or they have some ninja ban system but it triggered my interest for sure.
While I have no idea what the truth is this kind of thing and not trying to push views down any path, this lack of discussion and that maybe ninja removal really pushes me to more consider something is being actively obscured and therefore why. Ultimately, I suspect we'll never know the truth.
I remember seeing these videos in January 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. Young, healthy-looking people, too. I'm very surprised that there were not similar instances outside of China.
They had a choice to make: country-wide lockdown and travel ban or lie about it and make it spread worldwide. The former would leave their economy in a disadvantaged state while the latter would level the playing field for the rest of the world and give China opportunity to even earn some dough in the process (PTE sales). Now, this may be a cynical view but so are China's leaders. If you're someone who strongly believes this scenario could not have transpired, you're just naive.
When looking at some German Epidemiologist blog I found something like: "Next thing on the list is to proof that government measures worked"
I would have expected something like: "I'm looking at data - and want to find out what helps"
The original I read had such helpful statements as ‘the chinese government insisted that every outside researcher was accompanies by a chinese partner’, ‘the government took days to procure the data, and when they finally did, a lot was missing’ and ‘a visit to x was denied for unclear reasons’.
I’m sorry, I’m vaguely remembering these, so they may not be 100% accurate.
Then the western researchers made one gloriously ambiguous statement while still in China, and turned about after they left the country.
I'm sorry, but in this case, China is the country who told the rest of the world what to do and the west, with its superiority mentality over the east, ignored it and got a while year economy down the drain.
In my book, conspiracies will always make their way to those who want to believe them.
Unfortunately, SARS-CoV-2 is a very contagious virus, so it's hard to contain. A lot of ink has been spilled about the Wuhan BSL-4 lab, but these viruses were only considered to be a BSL-3 pathogen, and were handled in Baric's lab at UNC in their BSL-3. I would assume that they would also have been handled at the WIV's BSL-3. There had been reports of biocontainment lapses at the WIV, and there have been a number of lab escapes of various pathogens including SARS at other Chinese labs.
Social scoring, mass surveillance, the Great Firewall, forced labor, harvesting organs from healthy people, Uyghur genocide, Falun gong murders, Tiananmen square massacre...
And actively trying to cover up every crisis, torturing and murdering anyone who speaks up. From environmental disasters to COVID-19 to party corruption.
This seems sufficient to explain why China wouldn't be interested in a foreign investigation into their labs.
Yes, but in a vastly different degree, China goes to an extreme of making it political and look good.
In US, most leaks don't look good. Sure, US tries to make some problems look good, but they don't try very hard (or there's more balance in how an issue is investigated with multiple different parties).
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/28/8839000...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/world/asia/china-coronavi...
etc.
Also waste water samples from Spain and Italy show COVID-19 much earlier than reported in Wuhan.
Spain, March 2019, 1 sample https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...
Italy, 18. December 2019 https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL8N2DW1YK
So there are only two alternatives, and we just need to compare which sounds more likely? Or could it be that you exclude about a million other alternatives here, while also ignoring that just a little bit more information about context often makes unlikely scenarios more likely and vice versa?
Not arguing any of the theories here, just looking at the approach. The first task might not be to make assumptions, but to understand the situation better.
SARS-CoV-2 also spreads exceptionally well on mink farms. Out of a total of 128 mink farms in the Netherlands, at least 69[0] had an outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, with more suspected cases. On at least two farms, there were confirmed transmissions from the animals to farm workers. It is likely mink would form a natural reservoir SARS-CoV-2 if allowed to spread in the wild.
Mink farming has subsequently been banned since early 2021 in the Netherlands.
[0]: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/coronavirus-covid-1... (Dutch)
The second was a more nebulous investigation into the yet unsolved 2001 anthrax attacks.
He spent months doing nothing in preparation, and denying there was an issue then when it turned out there was an actual problem decided it was all China's fault ... even though they had it largely under control by that point. That's why people were "hysterical" - he saw it coming, did nothing and refused to take any responsibility, but blamed someone else. He wasn't trying to accurately identify the source of the virus, he was trying to save his own skin.
Sure it's frustrating that we only found out in (I think) December that it was spreading human-to-human, and it'd be good to see some actual investigation from China. But Trump's finger-pointing was all just desperate attempt to save face and deflect from his own poor management and nothing more. Your question should be rephrased "How many deaths could have been avoided with just the most basic level of competency?" and directed at Donald Trump and his administration.
Also there may well be areas of China where the virus never reached. I gather internal travel isn't massively widespread, and the severity of the lockdowns they imposed exceeded anything seen in the US or UK.
Also beware that there are reports of China having started vaccinations long before safety and efficacy results.
The flipside of exponential growth is exponential fall: In the best case if you can eliminate all social contact for 5-14 days the virus is essentially gone. But very few Western democracies are able to agree on super strict lockdowns, and if they do, they need their neighbouring countries to follow.
And you are making a claim about them lying, this comes unavoidably from saying that the VIW is the origin of SARS-CoV-2 as the VIW themselves are publicly claiming they have nothing closer than RaTG13.
It certainly is an interesting coincidence that the only lab in China that can deal with it happens to be in Wuhan. The question is, how big of a coincidence. If the disease hit a random person randomly uniformly anywhere in China, the probability that it would have happened in Wuhan is a bit less than 1% (as there are about 10+m people in Wuhan, and 1400+m people in China).
If you think it might have struck randomly any city above a million people in China uniformly, it’s also roundabout 1% (as there are about 100 of those).
So this is by no means proof that something fishy happened, but it is significant enough to warrant investigation.
If you assume that this could only have happened in a city with, say, more than 5m people, Wuhan is one of about 15 to 20 of those (so we're just above the "usual" 5% significance threshold).
Still, an independent investigation of that lab seems warranted. Of course it’s China, so unlikely to happen...
(I must say that I think the comment has stood the test of time, so far.)
I'm afraid we'll never know the truth though, China would never admit it was a lab leak.
Maybe it‘s just me, but I do not have enough trust in humans that they will say „hey shit happens, do just better next time“. I mean, we are pretty good today in blaming others just so someone gets blamed.
Individuals who don't care exist everywhere, but in China government can force them to do the right thing. In the West it can't do that easily. I guess it's the price of individual freedoms.
As far as I know, those labs always study coronaviruses in bats -- it's a large part of what they do. That makes it less of a suspicious coincidence than your way of putting it implies.
By which I don't mean it didn't happen. There's just not enough information one way or the other.
Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), with the more highly classified work, is 14 km away, but linked to the PLA Hospital, WHCDC and seafood market on Line 2 of the Wuhan metro:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-and-the-laboratorie... (contains link to google maps)
https://zenodo.org/record/4119263
https://zenodo.org/record/4119263/files/COVID%20Pandemic%20B...
I make no comment about the content of the video linked in GGP's post.
That being said, the following is publicly known (but unverified by me) and quite apt to affect impartiality (whether under his control or not, whether consciously or not):
1. He was persecuted in China by the authorities and barely escaped with the posessions on his body.
2. He is currently under attack by brigades and agents of the persons he is critical of. The attacks follow standard psychological warfare patterns, including death threats to himself and the family.
Additionally, some speculation from me:
3. He has no journalistic training, both his business partner and his peers in the wider YT/Patreon business don't have either, and to me it seems both content producer and audience have come to a shared understanding that the shows are primarily entertainment and should not be held to the same rigour of journalistic integrity one would expect from e.g. a traditional print periodical. Adv Media's income entirely depends on YT/Patreon, and employing sensationalism – which results in uneven amplification of the reported reality – brings in more money. I haven't seen a completely sober/dry video.
The idea that this thing sprang out of the wild, in Wuhan of all places, perfectly adapted to infect human beings, is fucking laughable.
That being said, I don't know how the origin would help us right now. We have working vaccines. So the solution is to push vaccinations as fast as possible. The origin of the virus isn't that important right now.
What they'd most likely output is a "report" with "findings" that "point to" or "suggest" certain things like bad protocols or insecure procedures or disconnected safety sensors etc. Hardly evidence, and not really actionable even if they were allowed to get there and eventually publish it.
This is the same kind of crap as with the "election" report in the US. They couldn't find hard-evidence because despite this being 2020, camera's aren't everywhere, evidence isn't readily available, and not everyone is keep ridiculous-level audit logs and collating as much info as we want. All they eventually put in their report were discrepancies, not-installed windows updates, internet-connected machines, etc. No smoking gun, and understandably so because even if it did happen, there is no easy and straightforward way to prove it.
Probably from known civilian gain-of-function research.
Probably not from a classified military biowarfare program.
Eventually, computational biological modeling is going to be good enough for mutation exploration purposes. From the papers I've seen during this pandemic, it largely already is.
At that point, it becomes straightforward (not easy, but not unknown) to share and realize those modeled organisms.
But at some point, we don't know what we don't know. And putting strains into biological models is important.
Investing in infrastructure and capability against a broad range of threats is important too. mRNA-based rapid vaccine platforms (and especially lipid encapsulation) will probably win a Nobel in a few years, and thank god we've spent the last 30+ years working on them.
RaTG13 is the closest virus found in the wild to SARS-CoV-2. Samples of it were shipped to the Wuhan lab, which does so-called "gain of function research"--AKA experimenting with artificially sped up mutation rates. Not very long thereafter, SARS-CoV-2 shows up in the surrounding metropolitan area with a very, very similar genome. They're the nearest siblings on the phylogenetic tree.
It's only politics which keep people from calling this the smoking gun it really is.
> We sign this statement in solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China who continue to save lives and protect global health during the challenge of the COVID-19 outbreak. We are all in this together, with our Chinese counterparts in the forefront, against this new viral threat. The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339367143_Statement...
Scary piece of propaganda, considering it was China who started rumours and misinformation, and tying the lab leak hypothesis to not supporting health professionals. All-in-all, a grave conflict of interest for a supposed objective investigation into the origins.
But of course there are many reports about the virus circulating long before the Wuhan cluster was exposed. Maybe the lab was responsible for that cluster but not the actual first outbreak?
Before the BLS4 facility in Wuhan was established in 2017, there was a lot of SARS / Coronavirus research going on at UNC (alongside people from Wuhan's Institute of Virology).
This included 'gain of function' research which attempts to create the means to 'deliver' pathogens via aerosol.
I'm not saying UNC had anything to do with Wuhan itself, but I do notice many articles avoid mentioning that very similar work goes on in other parts of the World.
(I was also amazed that the distance from the Wuhan lab to the fish market is startlingly close).
I'm not sure that's terribly extraordinary and exotic.
What changed for me is how much circumstantial evidences exists and probably a stronger signal: there hasn’t been another plausible starting point. When something smells this fishy there’s likely a reason. It’s starting to feel like, Occam’s razor - ie that a lab leak is the simplest explanation.
Many such examples exist. China did not lead by example, at all. What a strange take.
A one party state means that there is no pressure from political opponents (political battles inside the party will never trump the party itself). And there is no pressure from journalists - China has the worst score for press freedom [1] (bar Eritreaa, Turkmenistan and North Korea) with a downward trend over the last decade. If there's no one to hold your feet to the fire, there's little incentive to self-incriminate.
No, the conflating was done by the media and this is exactly how I know it’s actually the most probable theory. The same thing happened for other few big "accidents", where the media/government were prompt to demonize a particular option and push a less convincing one.
China is actively engaging in genocide and nobody wants to even speak up about it because "cultural differences". I think we should much rather be scared of running even more cover for them, than less cover for them. They already have enough people white knighting for them.
Western companies are demonizing the west for profit, and running cover for china for profit, just another example of how capitalism always wins.
All of this is sickening and it needs to stop now.
The fundamentals remain unchanged from when the WHO did their work, nothing said here is adding new evidence, its just the volume of agreement making people feel sure.
>However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.
The fact that covid's features are found in nature seems a weak argument to disprove lab involvement.
On the other hand covid seems well adapted to humans which could have come about by serial passage in a lab. Perhaps they were doing something like in vivo characterisation of spillover risk as mentioned in Daszak's grant application for the WIV?
Or something like:
>We performed in vivo experiments in transgenic (human ACE2 expressing) mice and civets in 2018 and 2019 in the Institute’s biosafety laboratory. The viruses we used were bat SARSr-CoV close to SARS-CoV. (Shi Zhengli)
?
IMO the CCP is evil because they have internment camps just like Nazi Germany. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/uighurs/
The rest of us could have done what Taiwan did, and almost entirely avoided becoming infected. Or we could have done what China did -- clamp down hard for three weeks and then go back to normal.
I don't think it would have mattered. We had documentaries such as The Lockdown [1] in the end of February 2020, yet still most Western countries spent much of March 2020 still debating whether they should react somehow or not.
China ended 2019 in a huge crisis and 2020 as the number one world economy. Quite a dramatic change for a year, no?
At this juncture maliciousness or negligence is just splitting hairs. How they handled the negligence might as well have been malicious.
Both sides cant be taken at face value.
We could have double the death rate and I still wouldn't concede this. And I wear a mask, wife and I wfh. Kid is still at home.
Even if thats the case its still the shitty response in the west, ignoring any chinese advice, that made this a global thing.
https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6...
https://www.ocacnews.net/overseascommunity/article/article_s...
> In the wee hours of Dec. 31, 2019, CDC deputy chief Lo Yi-chun could not sleep and was scrolling his phone when an online post shared in a CDC chat group caught his attention.
> Quoting information from Chinese websites, the post that appeared on PTT, one of Taiwan's largest internet bulletin board systems (BBS), warned about the potential danger of a SARS-like disease that was spreading in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
> "The post came out (on PTT) at 2 a.m., and at 3 a.m., I saw it being shared on a chat group by another sleepless CDC doctor," Lo said at a press conference Thursday.
> Lo said the post immediately caught his eye because unlike other unsubstantiated online messages this one included a chest CT scan, a hospital test result and what appeared to be a screenshot of messages sent by a doctor to his colleagues, warning them of a highly contagious virus.
Post-hoc analysis of waste water and patient samples in Europe shows that it was circulating in Europe by mid-late 2019, way before the patient 0 in Wuhan.
So the leak hypothesis, while feasible, would have to address why the virus was seemingly abroad before it became a problem in Wuhan itself.
Of course it's a reasonable hypothesis, but putting it as number 1 is kind of reframing the whole picture.
All they did was try to downplay it and cover it up, until it had spread not only throughout China, but the rest of the world. That's despite having systems in place for exactly the purpose of catching viruses like covid-19 early and quickly.
It's a great example of why ineffective bureaucracy, combined with a bad system of governance and a culture where saving face is hugely important, is harmful to humanity.
Part 1, from 2014-2019, for 3.7M:
https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8674931
Part 2, from 2019 until it was cancelled in April 2020:
https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9819304
Both led by Peter Daszak who is now also the lead WHO investigator. The same person who decided the WHO didn’t need to see the deleted virus databases, and the same person who co-ordinated the Lancet statement which minimised the lab leak theory early on (and let to it being considered a conspiracy theory).
Here he is on This Week In Virology, describing this sort of work. It’s worth watching the whole thing, but gets most interesting from minute 27 onward:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYDL_RK--w
For example he confirms it’s easy to modify these viruses in the lab, and mentions collaborating with Ralph Baric at UNC. Baric invented Remdesivir (with Gilead) - the “cure” that turned out not to work very well. His lab was doing gain of function experiments before the ban. Shi Zhengli (“bat woman” from Wuhan) worked very closely with Baric and Daszak.
https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan...
tl;dr: mNGS [1]
Longer answer as I think you may need to be mansplained because you wrote a long post which could be answered by a simple Google search and Wikipedia article:
Step 1: Doctor wonder why their patients were so sick, looks like infection but no pathogens identified, this is actually not that rare as there are many obscure pathogens even for experienced doctors.
Step 2: Patients agrees to pay for mNGS. Nurse draw their blood, send to lab.
Step 3: mNGS matches every DNA "pieces" from the patients' blood against a database. One of those pieces matched the original SARS with about 90% similarity.
Step 4: Chaos in the lab, the hospital and the government.
Step 5: "We've detected a new virus"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_metagenomic_sequencin...
Wealth doesn’t necessarily translate to organizational agility.
Of course, all this allows the media to disclaim the party’s responsibility for basically everything.
Also, yeah; they view China as a self-determined empire stretching back 5000 years. The Chinese generally view Americans as arrogant children and not that smart. I suggest any white person who doesn’t understand racism go to China — they don’t give a fuck that you’re white and in many places will actively disdain you. If you tried to date a Chinese woman outside the large coastal cities you’d likely be literally run out of town. They are reaching the point where they don’t really need us; their own internal consumption is overtaking their exports to the US.
> "Decades" worth of mutations can happen in a single immune-compromised host in a matter of weeks.
SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating for a year now. The number of mutations it has undergone is a tiny fraction of the number of mutations separating RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2.
> fwiw I'd love a source for that "decades" claim.
A paper in Nature Microbiology estimates the most recent common ancestor of RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 to be in the 1960s. The latest possible time of divergence is 2000.[1]
> RaTG13 is the closest virus found in the wild to SARS-CoV-2. Samples of it were shipped to the Wuhan lab, which does so-called "gain of function research"--AKA experimenting with artificially sped up mutation rates.
First of all, gain-of-function does not mean "artificially sped-up mutation rates." It normally refers to specific, targeted changes to the genome, done in order to test a particular hypothesis. What you're describing is a type of experiment never done before: passaging a virus thousands of times in order to generate a massively different virus. This would be an massively time- and labor-intensive experiment, with no apparent motivation.
Second of all, RaTG13 has never been isolated. It exists as fragments of RNA in a fecal swab. Its genome has been reconstructed from sequences of RNA samples, but actually extracting a replicating virus from a fecal swab is a major undertaking. To date, the WIV has only isolated three SARS-related coronaviruses, all of them much closer to the original SARS than to SARS-CoV-2. Before 2020, nobody cared much about viruses that are 20% different from the original SARS. If you read papers from the WIV before 2020, they're all about viruses like WIV-1, which is closely related to the original SARS.
And if no evidence is good enough is it really a theory?
How does it fit the detection of the virus in the material collected months before officual discovery in places far away from the place of official discovery?
Sanction the CPC for non-transparency and their constant lies to their and the world's population. Demand liability.
I've seen my supposedly smart and well-read friends dismiss the lab-leak theory out of hand; rejecting all discussion and labelling me with the right-wing conspiracist label despite the fact I'm heartily left-leaning.
And, I have a lot of experience with political posts on Reddit being "ninja-banned"; appearing in New but not in the main feed; disappearing even from new for an hour and then re-appearing, comments ninja-removed without trace, even from their OP's direct comment feed.
Poor Aaron Swartz :/
The first announcement from the Chinese government came on 30 December 2019, one day before the events described in your second article. ProMED-Mail sent out an alert on 30 December 2019,[1] and the next day, the outbreak was even reported on CCTV.[2] Social media posts gave additional information, but the existence of an outbreak of likely viral pneumonia was publicly declared before those posts, and people who follow emerging infectious diseases were following the story.
1. https://promedmail.org/promed-post/?id=6864153
2. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-pneumonia-id...
Not the first not the last pandemic that originated in China: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/140123-...
Some time ago I shared here on HN a US research on "The debate on potential pandemic pathogen creation" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OaTwPAQ3v0
Interesting research on bio weaponry.
It's been treated as an irrefutable endpoint at best and as a spell at worst. I find it a convenient false authority for lazy thinking.
Consider a statement like: "an expressive programming language is necessary to manage a resource distribution system such as a food production, processing, and delivery system." One could quote Occam and say "nah let's hunt and gather," but how is that consistent with our values? Ergo, Occam's quote is a selectively applied false authority. We need to use our heads and put it to bed!
It wasn't the ccp, it was Peter Daszak and co.
https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-pra...
“In recent years, several new human infectious diseases have emerged. The use of names such as ‘swine flu’ and ‘Middle East Respiratory Syndrome’ has had unintended negative impacts by stigmatizing certain communities or economic sectors,” says Dr Keiji Fukuda, Assistant Director-General for Health Security, WHO. “This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected. We’ve seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals. This can have serious consequences for peoples’ lives and livelihoods.”
Diseases are often given common names by people outside of the scientific community. Once disease names are established in common usage through the Internet and social media, they are difficult to change, even if an inappropriate name is being used. Therefore, it is important that whoever first reports on a newly identified human disease uses an appropriate name that is scientifically sound and socially acceptable.
The best practices state that a disease name should consist of generic descriptive terms, based on the symptoms that the disease causes (e.g. respiratory disease, neurologic syndrome, watery diarrhoea) and more specific descriptive terms when robust information is available on how the disease manifests, who it affects, its severity or seasonality (e.g. progressive, juvenile, severe, winter). If the pathogen that causes the disease is known, it should be part of the disease name (e.g. coronavirus, influenza virus, salmonella).
Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations (e.g. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish Flu, Rift Valley fever), people’s names (e.g. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Chagas disease), species of animal or food (e.g. swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox), cultural, population, industry or occupational references (e.g. legionnaires), and terms that incite undue fear (e.g. unknown, fatal, epidemic).
WHO developed the best practices for naming new human infectious diseases in close collaboration with the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and in consultation with experts leading the International Classification of Diseases (ICD).
I think it was western scientists like Peter Daszak who suppressed lab leak theory in fear that their research will be demonized forever.
It wasn't CCP who called everyone consipiracy theorists it was Peter Daszak and co [1]. I don't understand how he can be the WHO investigator of his own lab [2].
1. RaTG13 came from the copper mine in Mojiang in 2013. (The TG in RaTG13 refers to TongGuan, a township in Mojiang, all per Shi Zhengli's accounting of the sequence's provenance).
2. Prior to which and also in 2013, six miners in this same Mojiang mine came down deftly ill with a respiratory illness. Three of them died from their illness.
3. One report on their cases says they had IgM antibodies to SARS. Another report says they had IgG.
4. There's been no data to support Shi Zhengli's assertion that they died of a fungal infection. (That said, independent of her account, there is a background precedent that there have been examples of people who have had strong fungal infections from exposure to bat guano in certain caves).
5. Shi Zhengli's team returned to the same Mojiang cave again and again to sample for viruses from the mine's bats and rodents. (Goal for this and the broad purpose of her teams' research is to demonstrate for pandemic prevention purposes which viruses are evolutionarily close enough to be able to hop to humans).
https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1279755695382986757?s=20 (Starting-point source for the above: Broad Institute genomics postdoc Alina Chan)
Multiple coronaviruses gathered from this mine remain unpublished, despite a year into the pandemic and an entire WHO-convened study group to Wuhan. https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1372383456081027076?s=... (source: Bloom Lab of Fred Hutch Institute)
If you're interested in learning more, I would highly recommend following members of the Washington Post-cited DRASTIC team.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/05/coronavir...
The DRASTIC folks, some of them postdocs themselves, have been at this for a year, gathering & archiving evidence like the case reports described above (that unsurprisingly typically become scrubbed from the source after getting brought to light).
The twitter hashtag #DRASTIC is a reasonable place to start.
Of course I still don't know and my ideas regarding the latter have changed because of this article but I'm now pretty sure that I don't have enough information to invoke Occam's Razor in any kind of insightful or effective way.
In practice, Xi went on an 'anti-corruption campaign' that purged all his political enemies from power as his first initiative. The exact opposite of what your theory predicts, and actually a stronger cyclical purge than our typical repubs->dems->repubs one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-corruption_campaign_under...
The WHO team wasn't even allowed near the labs, much less enter it. They got a very curated tour of Wuhan (which isn't surprising).
Second of all, what country has ever prevented its own citizens from leaving the country because of an outbreak? The Hubei lockdown was already the most dramatic response by a government in modern history to an outbreak. A province with 60 million people was put strict lockdown. Almost nobody was let out of the province, and people were told to stay in their homes.
I agree that conclusions should not be drawn without evidence - but by the same token, you cannot rule this out as a possibility because no effort was put into investigating it.
Wuhan is like Chicago in China. It's not some random small town. If an outbreak occurred in some rural area (which it might have previously), it's possible that it just fizzled out.
Wuhan is a great place for a virus to spread.
As far as which culture has more healthy accountability.. plenty of corruption to go around on all sides, the comparison would be pretty nuanced.
I'd say that China has a lot more low-level corruption, as a bigger % of their economy, what with large swaths of the country being pretty third-world, but also more accountability for senior people who fuck up badly. They executed a baby food exec who poisoned kids, while nobody saw a day in jail for poisoning the city of Flint. Rick Snyder probably has a nice lobbyist job.
Or, look at Covid -- the mayor of Wuhan and governor of Hubei were sacked over their poor initial handling. Is NY gonna elect a Republican over it? TX elect a Democrat? No way in either case. Maybe we have less accountability in some ways specifically due to the 2-party system's polarization. Arguably Trump lost over it, but the guy literally got covid, right before the election, after downplaying it for 6 months and still got the 2nd most votes in history.
Undoubtedly after looking at the sequences of that paper, there were some alignments, but how they were structured doesn't point to being engineered, but rather of co-infection, which did not match the conclusions of the paper.
What they do actually indicate might even be more politically inflammatory. That the virus evolved out of a recombination event in an HIV infected person infected with a SARS-like virus, and repackaged as a new SARS-CoV-2 virus.
That said - it doesn't yet change my priors about the likely source of outbreak which seems most plausibly at WIV.
Of course, they don't allow a thorough investigation and thus are trying to hide something.
HK they won easily. Western countries like UK and especially Europe are completely useless. Only the US can coordinate and shore up a coordinated response against China.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/15/world-health-org...
Yes, governments tend to avoid releasing embarrassing info. Witness the way the US government failed to prepare for the virus and pretended everything would be fine and then only made changes when they couldn't possibly do anything else which probably is responsible for killing 500,000 people.
If not, what does it take to earn a permaban?
The lab in question was sent tissue samples extracted from the miners who died of RaTG13. These presumably would have live virus on them.
So I think it's entirely possible e.g. that China has confidently determined the non-lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, but that it's from an agricultural practice so reckless that they've decided it's better for their reputation to leave everything shrouded in doubt. It's much more obvious to me that China is concealing something than what they're concealing. (Of course, that's usually how concealing stuff works.)
That said, I still think zoonosis near Wuhan is unlikely. In a pre-pandemic publication with no incentive to lie, the WIV studied antibodies to SARS-like viruses in the blood of people living near bats in Yunnan province. They used blood from people living in Wuhan as a negative control:
> As a control, we also collected 240 serum samples from random blood donors in 2015 in Wuhan, Hubei Province more than 1000 km away from Jinning (Fig. 1A) and where inhabitants have a much lower likelihood of contact with bats due to its urban setting.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/
So while it's possible that natural zoonosis did occur in Wuhan, I believe that would require the WIV staff to be genuinely mistaken.
Their experiences living in China line up with mine. I haven't seen an instance of them compromising their integrity.
I'm not sure why you bring the American COVID response into this: its ineptitude was never even close to a secret, and the role of 45th administration in it is hardly disputed. If this is a kind of a "no u" response, well am not an American anyway.
I noted above that the WIV had a database of viral genomes. Public access to that database was removed in September 2019. They say this was due to repeated hacking attempts. They've taken no steps to restore access, or to make the database available in another format (e.g., a dump on a flash drive) that would clearly present zero information security risk. Do you believe their explanation?
And for emphasis, I don't think it's certain that they're lying (about RaTG13 being the closest known relative, at least; I can't see how anyone with the slightest domain knowledge would believe the "hacking" claim), just as I don't think it's certain that a company is lying about their financials when I want to see audited results. The point is that I don't know, and it's normal for people making an important claim to actively want transparency, to build confidence so people don't have to trust them. The WIV's behavior here is the opposite of that.
Authoritarian lockdowns are effective at suppressing Covid. I won’t deny that. They’re also a complete non-starter in most countries in the world.
Unfortunately I'm nowhere near informed enough on virology to understand whether these claims are accurate or are some sort of sleight of hand.
Besides, why at all trying to blame anyone on this? It's a natural disaster that could happen to anyone anywhere. The real culprit is, that as long as the wealthy don't try to vaccinate everyone in this world as quickly as possible, the virus still has potential to mutate to sth. where current vaccines don't protect against ..
now this is what's called a conspiracy theory.
However, the miners' story shows you why virologists consider natural zoonosis overwhelmingly likely. Miners, people who raise livestock, butchers, and millions of other people throughout China are in close contact with possibly infected animals every day. Spillover events are probably not uncommon: it's estimated that most (about 95%, in the countryside) spillover events of SARS-CoV-2-like viruses do not cause sustained outbreaks.[2] A few people get sick, and then the virus dead-ends. The virus' best chance is if someone who's infected travels to a major population center, where the virus has a higher chance of spreading. The virus' chance of survival is estimated to increase to about 30%, in that case.
1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2951-z
2. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/03/17/scie...
(Also nice touch to question the credibility by associating it with anti vaxxers)
That’s by no means the only study though. Here’s a meta-analysis of 54 studies (link to paper is in article)
https://alachuachronicle.com/university-of-florida-researche...
It could be that a precursor was already spreading prior to the major outbreak but only detected when it hit Wuhan because so many coronavirus experts were concentrated in that area.
> Have you seen their older videos?
I am subscribed since late 2016.
> Their experiences living in China line up with mine.
same
> They had sought wastewater samples from central China to check if the virus could be detected in sewage from late 2019, but were told those had been discarded, per standard policy, after a month, said Dr. Koopmans.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-refuses-to-give-who-raw-d...
So while it's very likely that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating in Italy back in October, it's entirely possible (and likely, I believe) that it was circulating yet earlier in Wuhan; but the evidence to confirm or refute was destroyed.
I mean, whoever they replace the mayor of Wuhan and governor of Hubei with will certainly still be members of the Chinese Communist Party. NY and TX might not flip their governing parties, but I'd be much more willing to assure you that the process of choosing their replacements will be more transparent than that for Wuhan and Hubei.
Chernobyl is a great example of this with deadly consequences. COVID is far worse sadly.
I don't think we could have contained it within China if they had a best response it was already out - well maybe 99.99% chance a not that educated guess - but we could probably have given ourselves a good amount more time. And hard shut down borders quickly if we knew the true vast numbers & death rates in early Wuhan. Then put out the 'embers' locally.
Gives at least some countries a chance of keeping it under control within their borders. Though I don't have faith our (US) CDC would have been up to the task...
It is fucked up and not but governments are reflexively secretive so I don't think it says much about China. A superpower or nation-with-delusion-of-superpowerdom would refuse to disclose something like that regardless unless forced by internal political pressure - meaning there isn't anything to read in. They would likely rationalize resistance as "going transparent because enough of the world thinks this opens up rumormongering as a form of intelligence!".
I was pretty clear, and so was the original study you linked from nature.com. If you can't follow the reasoning of something that simple, should anyone take your claims to be coming from someone who knows what they're talking about?
From the second meta-study you linked:
> We found significantly higher secondary attack rates from symptomatic index cases than asymptomatic or presymptomatic index cases, although less data were available on the latter. The lack of substantial transmission from observed asymptomatic index cases is notable. However, presymptomatic transmission does occur, with some studies reporting the timing of peak infectiousness at approximately the period of symptom onset.
They state very clearly that though their analysis showed a lower secondary attack rate from asymptomatic index cases (0.7-4.9%), they have limited data from which to draw that conclusion, and that presymptomatic transmission does occur. Which means, you can catch SARS-CoV-2 from someone who doesn't know that they're sick.
That's according to the study you linked, and it's far from the claim you made that asymptomatic spread is "actually highly unlikely".
Someone did note a shift in WP's coverage, which is interesting to me.
Due to the timing, the general consensus is that the husbands contacted the disease from one male (close hugging or extended talking) and then gave it to their wives that night.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
It is plausible that the virus was spread before recognized and treated as a global pandemic. Few flights were banned for months. Chinese tourists were in Italy up until the lockdowns.
But very often this "appeared outside China" is deflection and falsely invoked. Mind you that Reuters write: "it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought". Not: It came from Italy to China, and only became problematic in Wuhan. Every time China is reluctantly forced to move back the timeline on its patient 0, it starts pushing a narrative of COVID outside of China just a few months before their patient 0. It is a tiring use of an obvious and plausible bait-and-switch.
We already knew that Western expats and their relations in Wuhan got viral pneumonia in November 2019, while by January 2020, China did not consider it wise to inform the world of human-to-human transmission.
It seems plausible that infection stats from deep country are not faithfully reported or even collected. That said, what they did do is really complicate domestic travel, which means infections stay contained as a result.
We now know about viral pneumonia in November 2019, but hindsight is a very comfortable position to judge from.
Going from that to establishing that by January 2020 China should know everything about the virus and disease is reaching quite a bit.
That whole argument reminds me way too much of that propaganda narrative by Fox citing a WHO tweet [0] about one preliminary Chinese investigation not finding evidence for H2H, in that particular investigation, to turn that around into: "WHO and China say there is no H2H!".
But a lack of evidence in one particular investigation is not the same as claiming there's no H2H.
H2H isn't just some binary thing, it's a spectrum of vectors that take time and effort to properly establish, that's why all the official recommendations from the WHO at the time was to treat this as very H2H.
[0] https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?lang=en
eg https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/job-ad-experts-bats...
Like most people I haven't looked into any of this much before the last year so I'm far from knowledgeable here but:
.5 is a surprising number without any additional explanation because it suggests you think this is about as likely as a zoonotic origin (or at least not specifically the result of an accident). Does that probably extend to other viral outbreaks or is it specific to something? My baseline probability would be significantly lower (although non zero because I'm not denying the possibility; the article makes the case that lab safety is a concern worldwide) based on my, admittedly limited, understanding of past outbreaks. Is it the case that you think about as many viral outbreaks were due to lab accidents as not? or maybe this is more specific to coronaviruses or this specific virus? I'm curious how you'd model this, even if informal.
Let's backtrack a bit.
First patient in France confirmed to be in late December 2019[0].
Retrospective wastewater analysis in Brazil shows the virus was present from November 2019 onwards, 3 months before their first reported case.[1]
Further down the line we have SARS-CoV-2's RdRP specific antibodies found during retrospective testing of samples of 111 (of 959) healthy volunteers of a lung cancer study in Italy[1]; samples taken in October 2019, meaning they got infected at least at some point in September 2019, 4-5 months before the first detected case. These antibodies also target RaTG13's RdRP, given that this protein is identical in both.
Even further down the line, and widely interpretable, we have the Barcelona case:
> "Coronavirus traces found in March 2019 sewage sample, Spanish study shows. The discovery of virus genome presence so early in Spain, if confirmed, would imply the disease may have appeared much earlier than the scientific community thought." [2]
The paper is here [3]. The fact that IP2/IP4 fragments of the RdRP gene are perfect match means that at least a virus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 (and RaTG13, its closest relative) was present in Spain back in March 2019.
It's not conclusive, as other markers tested negative, but it's also true that these other markers tend to degrade faster (for example, N1 marker wasn't detectable in May 25 2020, despite the pandemic ongoing). But this fact also rules out a case of sample contamination, because then N1 would have been detectable. It's also remarkable that the positive sample is from 2 weeks after the World Mobile Congress, leading to a self-contained outbreak hypothesis.
Now take all that information and combine it with the fact that no trace of SARS-CoV-2 has been found on any sample from Wuhan before December 1st, 2019.
While there's high probability that SARS-CoV-2 appeared within Chinese borders, mainly because the closest viral relatives have been known to live there (or Japan and South East Asia, if you ignore RaTG13), it's still highly speculative.
What is clear is that everything points in the direction of Wuhan, and the Huanan Seafood Market in particular, being just the first detected superspreading event, and the WIV was the reason why it was detected first, rather than the source of the virus itself.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-france...
[1] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200701/SARS-CoV-2-circul...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...
[4] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...
Sure, things aren't black and white and I never said they were. But Facebook will ban you for suggesting that it's possible that the virus is man-made, right? So they're the 'extremists' here.
In my mind, it can not be excused that China either: did not know about H2H, when the West, as an outsider, was well aware of the raging crisis. Or worse, it did know, but tried to stall. I am not giving China the benefit of incompetence, so in my mind, it is worse.
I did not say: China claimed there is no H2H. I said: China did not thought it was wise to inform of H2H. I agree that these are different, and that Fox pushed a narrative there.
It takes time to establish patient 0, and find epidemiological explanations. But they had doctors falling severely sick at start of December! That should ring a bell about H2H!
> official recommendations from the WHO at the time was to treat this as very H2H
No, WHO sat in China's lap, and tweeted out your quote tweet: No strong evidence for H2H. We had to trust that China could keep this internal, without outside help, but they completely botched one of the basic things to figure out. WHO official messaging was: Do not wear masks, only wear one if you are ill, when China was already buying up protective equipment en masse.
Words and labels have become a very difficult thing for people to handle rationally. Within a span of just 5-10 years, a big handful of them went from being tools to bond people to being a dangerous virus that haphazardly assumes each and every person is immeasurably fragile.
It's a clear sign when there is a dramatic shift in how comedians are treated and responded to, that our society in general is more quick to jump to ill conclusions than they're ready to use insults and slurs to poke fun at each other and walk away unscathed, laughing with an eye-roll to top it off.
I miss those days when the majority (around me) were more light-hearted and understood that these moments of fun weren't used to harm others, but to build camaraderie by jesting about our differences and unique cultural idioms.
I worked with a very diverse team in the restaurant industry, and the majority of our jokes were racial stereotypes of one another, and it's safe to say, we all went home feeling seen, appreciated, and laughing our asses off.
It was fun that other people knew a few quirks about my origins that I was secure enough to laugh at, instead of feeling threatened by them. Many friendships were formed with light insults (and yes, often racial) used to break the ice.
Again, none of this is conclusive. It's all speculation. maybe maybe maybe. There are lots of potential ways for this to have happened natually.
My ability to pressure the Chinese government is remarkably limited compared to my ability to pressure my Senator, which is also not large - on a good day.
China isn't a transparent society - on a good day, either. That's facts.
There is also what might be called diplomatic pragmatism, a realpolitik. So, let's fix what we can fix, and make a point of not being a fricking embarrassment if we ask other governments to come clean.
edit: The problem here is several-fold. (1) There's opacity that is over Wuhan, and time does not help this; the Chinese government (at some levels) tried to cover it up. There may not be evidence any more of what happened. Ordinary time shuffling may have removed it. Period. The author is experienced at observing the open society's sloppiness with these sorts of accidents, and thinks there's at least a plausible case that it may have been released.
(2) The open society's ability to pressure China into being fully cooperative is partially conditioned on its reputation and soft power at demonstrating how good things can be. Which, it has not been.
(3) I am really really not in a meaningful position to call for changes to happen outside of a very limited location. That is because I am a citizen of the USA, resident in WA state. So. I would like to see the USA clean up its act; I would particularly like WA to clean it up. I can most effectively contact officials, etc, and attend meetings & interest groups in relation to this sort of event. This is not whataboutism, this is dealing with the parts of the world I can affect.
(4) If Covid was released from a military/research lab because someone goofed on a security protocol, what does that matter to me, compared to someone who got sneezed on by an animal? Seriously. I don't think it matters in the wash. Health systems have to be resilient to novel pathogens, regardless of the etiology of patient zero.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345753939_Outlines_...
https://zenodo.org/record/4477081
I don't fully agree with either analysis, but it shows the evidence and basic form of the argument. Most human pandemics historically have originated from natural zoonosis, but the 1977 flu pandemic was very likely a lab accident. So my prior knowing that a pandemic has occurred but nothing else would be small but not zero, perhaps a few percent.
That the pandemic occurred in a city that (a) lies far from expected natural spillover regions for SARS-like viruses, and (b) contains the lab with the world's biggest collection of SARS-like viruses increases that probability. That the lab staff say they weren't working with any viruses close to SARS-CoV-2 decreases it, but the obstruction of any attempt to verify that independently increases it back again.
The absence of a proximal host also increases that probability. China has every opportunity and motivation to find that, and so far they've failed. I guess it's possible that they found it and they're lying, because they seem determined now to show that the virus originated outside China; but the lab leak has become a sufficiently established part of (politicized and largely science-free) anti-China rhetoric that I'd guess they'd welcome the chance to prove it false.
Of course that could just mean the pandemic originated from a very rare but natural event. But that then raises the possibility of a naturally-evolved virus released by WIV staff, whether by way of the lab or just from a researcher who gets infected on a sampling trip--WIV collection activity is a small fraction of total human activity in spillover areas, but a large fraction of human activity travelling from the most remote virus-rich regions back to Wuhan.
If you're interested in this, I'd suggest Alina Chan's Twitter feed. She's taken a tremendous reputational risk here, and quite a lot of abuse both from virologists who find it unthinkable that their work could lead to such a catastrophe, and from genuine conspiracy theorists disappointed when what they thought was their ally debunks their science-free claims.
But, what if there was a person in your group that was actually offended? And couldn't say so because they'd be out of the group? Does it matter? (To me, yes). Does it matter enough to change the group's behavior? (Maybe). Does it matter enough to change the entire world's behavior?
But there's lots of other distant cities in China too, and none of them have virology institutes with the world's biggest collection of novel SARS-like viruses. So whatever your prior was for lab accident vs. natural, I do believe the location in Wuhan should significantly increase that. Certainly far from conclusive, but a possibility that requires serious investigation.
Do you have anything concrete on that? Because right now I'm drawing a blank what you are even trying to allude to.
But for additional context I should point out that in November 2019 China also recorded an outbreak of the pneumonic plague [0], something that gets conflated a lot with the COVID-19 narrative.
> I said: China did not thought it was wise to inform of H2H. I agree that these are different, and that Fox pushed a narrative there.
How is it different when you are pretty much exactly pushing the Fox narrative there? You stipulate that China knew about H2H in January and allegedly had it well established but didn't share it with the rest of the world, where is your actual evidence for that?
Sounds a lot like that whole Taiwan e-mail to WHO mess where Taiwan claimed to have warned the WHO about H2H, when the actual e-mail didn't say anything like that.
> But they had doctors falling severely sick at start of December! That should ring a bell about H2H!
"Ringing bells" is not the same as having solid and established H2H vectors. Which, as I mentioned before, is not something that's binary. Something isn't just "H2H or not", there are different vectors and different gradients, establishing them is not easy, that's why even one year after the fact we still struggle to fully map out transmission routes and vectors.
You can't hand-wave such a complicated problem away when it persists to this day.
> No, WHO sat in China's lap, and tweeted out your quote tweet: No strong evidence for H2H.
This is 100% the Fox news interpretation. The WHO tweet was about that one particular Chinese investigation, all it said how that particular investigation didn't yield evidence.
Which is not the same as saying "there is no H2H", interpreting it like that is misinterpreting very concise language on purpose while ignoring literally every other release from the WHO at the time. Case in point: Here are the WHO interim guidance for laboratory testing of human suspect cases of NCoV infection from 10 January 2020 [1].
Read trough them and you will realize that the WHO was and is very vocal about respiratory transmission and how to best prevent it. That's only one out of the many WHO releases at the time that warn about the very real, but yet having to be established with actual evidence, H2H nature of the virus.
> Do not wear masks, only wear one if you are ill, when China was already buying up protective equipment en masse.
This is once again completely wrong, WHO messaging was to prioritize masks for at risk groups and HCWs due to the massive mask shortages at the time. Case in point: Here are the WHO's interim guidance on use of masks from 29 January 2020 [2]
It's astounding that over one year after the fact this kind of misinformation is still circulated, out of all the places here on HN.
The reality is that the WHO was a bit slow to react for one simple reason: They have become way more reluctant about "crying wolf" after the 2009 pandemic didn't turn into the deadly thing they feared it would. Which back then resulted in wide-spread criticism of the WHO for allegedly being "alarmist" when the multi-million death toll didn't actually materialize.
Trying to turn this into "WHO in pocket of China!" is just trying to tie this whole narrative into the current US foreign policy context of antagonizing China. That's also why US officials were among the first [3] to globally spread conspiracy theories about this being an engineered Chinese bio-weapon escaped from a lab.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/18/china-records-...
[1] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/330374/WHO-...
[2] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/documents/advice-on-...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...
I’ve also seen plenty of valid conversations about this on various web forums where it didn’t come to name calling.
I’ve also seen plenty of aggressive and disingenuous arguments by angry people, who proclaim their suspicions are true facts instead of probability assessments, and then perch their discussions on the assumed truth of those suspicions.
It's through these that we may move away from disproportionate responses to what feels uncomfortable and find common understanding with each other, but alas, never perfectly.
A tale of two billboards:
https://i.redd.it/uv1iz4w4sgk41.jpg
https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/28ce46391425d4b406fe55a2...
> bit slow to react for one simple reason: They have become way more reluctant about "crying wolf" after the 2009 pandemic didn't turn into the deadly thing they feared it would.
That is not the simple reason you think it is. It is the WHO, who should prioritize world health above all, not worry about "crying wolf" when every graph with heavily underreported numbers showed that COVID was going to crash Swine Flu and leave it as nothing but a memory. But they were slow to react, due to politics.
When the CDC was confronted with an outbreak of Hantavirus in 1993, they found some relations to Indian tribes, and news media picked up on that. This lead to panic and fear of Indian tribes. They learned lessons there that they now implementing.
> This is 100% the Fox news interpretation
Just because US media is ugly, showtime, broken, and partisan, does not give you the right to beat down anything when it happens to align with one of your hated "news" channels. But perhaps CNBC is more to your liking: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/02/china-delayed-releasing-coro...
Yes, there is a logical difference between: "China knew masks would help. China communicated that masks would not help, but started hoarding protective equipment" and "China knew masks would help. China communicated nothing about that to the WHO or the world, but started hoarded protective equipment."
We saw that unwillingness to communicate with masks and H2H. (The doctors who treated the doctors who fell ill in start of December, treating pneumonia patients, started falling ill mid-end December, can you not hear the bell toll?). We saw blatant lying when China was fighting interdomestic flight of 5 million people from Wuhan, threatening to nail them on the pillars of shame for eternity, while actively instructing the WHO to say there was zero reason to ban flights from China. This was repeated every meeting, alongside the "decreasing window to act", up until having to call a pandemic (all technical qualifications were already there, this was not WHO acting rapidly and decisively). Mike Ryan was far from happy with the pressures applied on the WHO.
Not talking about the expats, as I realized there are some things too dangerous to speculate about. You can ignore that.
> A tale of two billboards:
And? Many countries had the progression of "only health workers" to "only health workers and people with symptoms" to "everyone" according to the available supply, even though many others skipped the mid step.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9410163/US-State-De...
There are a few much more substantive sites with analysis into the genetics and circumstances around the virus, which emerged since the April 2020 which your Nature article cites as its primary source.
Here's a direct debunk of that article: https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/03/19/china-owns-natur...
That author has written a more extensive article with much more information around the lab itself: https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-t...
And here is an analysis of RaTG13, the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2, as a "smoking gun":
https://retractionwatch.com/2021/03/24/paper-claiming-presen...
This sort of bias, or propaganda, or narrative massaging, under the guise of reasonableness, and non-demoization is pernicious.
These sentiments are like, we can frame our China-blaming as reasonable, via pretending the assumption[0], so under the guise of "not demonizing China", "giving credit were due but still holding to account" we can hold onto our excuse to blame China, we can pretend the assumption that China is unequivocally to blame.
Bullshit. Unhelpful, bs. If you want to pretend that you are doing this under the guise of actually discovering the cause, you can to satisfy your own need to pretend that, but it's dishonest, and not actually helpful to discovering the cause.
Blaming the enemy of the day for the pestilence of the season is as old as the hills, and makes boring, and biased, history. And makes you all propagating such cant, useful idiots, manipulated puppets.
Also, how is everyone forgetting the childhood lesson that the one so eager to point the finger of blame is often the one with something to hide, so desperate to deflect suspicion away from themselves?
