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.
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...
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.
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?
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...
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...
There is historical precedent of authorities blaming local meat markets to cover up a lab leak.
https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-did-not-start-at-wuhan-...
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...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200317175442.h...
https://www.amazon.com/Lab-257-Disturbing-Governments-Labora...
Warning: this book is non-fiction and is scary.
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...
" 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.
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
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.
https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...
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.
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.
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
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/...
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? ;-)
> 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.
- 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.
The 1936 Olympic Summer Games are a good starting point in my opinion.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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”.
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....
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.
Hidden camera investigation of Facebook moderators (ie fact checkers)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Would you say the signatories are being irresponsible or are not qualified to suggest the lab-leak theory is worth investigating?
"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.
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...
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...
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-...).
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/
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.
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.
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.
Example: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55998157
"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...
"Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...
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.
I couldn't find anything on Fox News.
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...
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.
> 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/
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.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets...
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.
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...
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...
https://twitter.com/mattwridley/status/1351198664950128641?s...
https://gillesdemaneuf.medium.com/the-good-the-bad-and-the-u...
[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...
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...
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...
> 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...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8163761/Chinese-mar...
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.
Recently (3 days ago)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210318185328.h...
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...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#Co...
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...
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...
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.
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...
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
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...
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?
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
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
IMO the CCP is evil because they have internment camps just like Nazi Germany. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/uighurs/
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.
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.
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...
> "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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-corruption_campaign_under...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/15/world-health-org...
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.
Unfortunately I'm nowhere near informed enough on virology to understand whether these claims are accurate or are some sort of sleight of hand.
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...
> 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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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...
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.
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?
