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.
> 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/...
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.
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.
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.
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”.
And I am not ready to dismiss the theory but I am always open to hearing evidence to exclude the theory.
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.
Would you say the signatories are being irresponsible or are not qualified to suggest the lab-leak theory is worth investigating?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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 couldn't find anything on Fox News.
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.
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":