I believe there's a logical fallacy for that:
I have edited my comment to reflect that.
> Motivation affects how we react to a theory with no evidence, when coming from Tom Cotton vs. a former CDC director.
There's another fallacy for that:
Understandably, there are few researchers who would like their scientific speculation to become part the often colourful narratives Donald Trump and his followers tell each others.
Edit: edited to reduce snarkiness and polemic phrases
[1] For an example of Trump trying to find "material" that he can use for the stories he tells his following, see this transcript of Trumps call to the Georgia election official at the bottom of the page: https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-tr...
You must've missed out on previous HN discussions. I remember these guys in particular being paraded around:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBQplOe8-LE
I did find their tone quite dismissive, and the verdict in the title leaves little room for interpretation.
> What was dangerous was pointing the finger at China and saying “this is all their fault!” without any evidence.
True, but that's irrelevant to the plausibility of the hypothesis.
> There STILL is not evidence, but that doesn’t mean it should not be investigated as a source.
Arguably, it's still dangerous to do exactly that.
Assigning weights to these circumstances can be done arbitrarily, to the point where the lab escape hypothesis becomes the most plausible one:
https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV...
There was at least one paper calling it "natural selection", and some folks who read it agreed that it ruled out laboratory accidents:
"The high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
https://twitter.com/ehundman/status/1246597925288816640
https://www.newsweek.com/claim-that-coronavirus-came-lab-chi...
> Hoaxes, lies and collective delusions aren’t new, but the extent to which millions of Americans have embraced them may be. Thirty percent of Republicans have a favorable view of QAnon, according to a recent YouGov poll. According to other polls, more than 70 percent of Republicans believe Mr. Trump legitimately won the election, and 40 percent of Americans — including plenty of Democrats — believe the baseless theory that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/technology/biden-reality-...
https://stratechery.com/2021/mistakes-memes-and-foreign-grou...
> The poll gave people a sort of test to see if they could spot misinformation like the coronavirus was created in a lab or that voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.
> 40% of poll respondents believe one of the biggest conspiracy theories that's out there about the virus, that it was made in a lab in China. There is no evidence for this. And scientists say that the virus was transmitted to humans from another species. But I talked to people all over the country who responded to our poll and they still believe this.
Did you just reply to the sentence I quoted or did you click the links? The tweets are very obviously not limited to that: https://twitter.com/ehundman/status/1246598376377831425
And honestly, it's hard to go from "this happened via natural selection" to "nobody dismissed this coming from a lab". Even if it's technically possible, surely you can understand why readers' message from this is not "this could have come from a lab".
expanded abilities of law enforcement to surveil, including by tapping domestic and international phones;
eased interagency communication to allow federal agencies to more effectively use all available resources in counterterrorism efforts; and
increased penalties for terrorism crimes and an expanded list of activities which would qualify someone to be charged with terrorism.[1]
This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note these:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
$TOPIC -> Trump -> Hitler is a textbook example of what that last guideline is asking you not to do. We're trying for an end state other than default internet hell.
> Nor have the labs been entirely forthcoming about what viruses they do know about. The Wuhan Institute of Virology possesses gene information about similar viruses that it has not released publicly. Other information disappeared from view when the institute took a database offline in late 2019, just before the outbreak started.
That's... one hell of a coincidence (in timing). It continues:
> One problem with the lab leak theory is that it presumes the Chinese are lying or hiding facts, a position incompatible with a joint scientific effort. This may have been why the WHO team, for instance, never asked to see the offline database.
There are a number of problems here:
1. "... lying or hiding facts". My suspicion is that it's most likely no one knows but, more importantly, no one wants to find out. Think about it: what's the upside of turning over those particular rocks?
This sort of thing happens all the time. Here's an example from the Columbia shuttle disaster [1]:
> Several people within NASA pushed to get pictures of the breached wing in orbit. The Department of Defense was reportedly prepared to use its orbital spy cameras to get a closer look. However, NASA officials in charge declined the offer, according to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) and "Comm Check," a 2008 book by space journalists Michael Cabbage and William Harwood, about the disaster. The landing proceeded without further inspection.
A certain breed of manager will just not want certain questions asked.
2. As for a "joint scientific effort", that means something different in the West vs China. In China, everything from companies to sports to "scientific efforts" is an extension of the state. There simply is no independence to the same degree we'd expect.
3. The WHO team not asking to see the offline database is... mind-blowing. There are a lot of problems with the WHO's response to the coronavirus. In the early days of the pandemic, the WHO went out of their way to accept and spread China's versions of events with little scrutiny [2]. It's one reason this article uses the term "patsy".
Again, I'm not claiming the lab theory is accurate or even likely but... due diligence would mean you try to independently verify anything that's told to you no? I imagine it was a political deal for the WHO to not, for example, examine the offline database but... really?
The other problematic part of this is how long it took for this investigation to start. It's also interesting (although not necessarily damning) about how China came down hard on Australia for asking for an inquiry [3]. Like.. that's just not a good look.
But again it's not necessarily guilt. I imagine China just doesn't want to set the precedent that it's accountable to any outside authority and will punish anyone for trying to make that happen. Still... that doesn't help your case if you're trying to disprove the theory that one of your labs was responsible for the leak.
[1]: https://www.space.com/19436-columbia-disaster.html
[2]: https://www.who.int/news/item/29-06-2020-covidtimeline
[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/29/trade-war-with-china-austral...
Typical Western hypocrisy would be at play and China has no motivation whatsoever to subject itself to that.
Also, SARS-1 escaped twice, in Singapore and Beijing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
The first to point this out, in February 2020, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology:
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12250-020-002...
This strange furin cleave site allows the virus to bind to human ACE2 receptors. An interesting scientific reading on this, which does not rule out genetic manipulation in a lab:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bies.2020002...
CBS News, yesterday:
Kristian G. Andersen, director of the infectious disease genomics, translational research institute at Scripps Research, noted that "We know that the first epidemiologically linked cluster of cases came from the Hunan market and we know the virus was found in environmental samples — including animal cages — at the market," he said. "Any 'lab leak' theory would have to account for that scenario — which it simply can't, without invoking a major conspiracy and cover up by Chinese scientists and authorities."
This is simply untrue. People work and live in close proximity to bats throughout much of China and Southeast Asia, including in Yunnan province. The mine workers who got sick in Mojiang in 2012 (where RaTG13 was discovered) were literally cleaning out massive mounds of bat poop.[1] There is research that shows that a non-negligible fraction (up to a few percent) of the population in some areas of Yunnan province have antibodies to novel SARS-related coronaviruses.[2,3] Interestingly, it is not known how the people in these studies were infected, and before they were randomly tested for these studies, they were not aware that they had ever been infected.
> is unlikely because we would have found the intermediate animal by now
There's no reason to expect we'd have found the intermediate species by now. Finding intermediate hosts can be very difficult. For example, it took four decades to identify the likely host species of Ebola, and even so, there's still a huge amount of uncertainty about whether there are multiple host species, and how spillover occurs.[4]
> (3) is unlikely because the first case found was in China
The frozen food hypothesis that the WHO is looking at is that animals that were raised or caught in Yunnan province, slaughtered and frozen, and sent to Wuhan might have been carrying the virus.
Option 4 is unlikely because nobody knew about this virus before it appeared in December 2019. The researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology work closely with international scientists (including in the US, Australia, France and Singapore). They regularly publish identifying RNA fragments of the viruses they discover. The viruses that they have isolated and cultured in the lab are well known, because they've published on them extensively, and because they collaborate with international researchers. They have only isolated three SARS-related coronaviruses (the vast majority of the viruses they discover are only detected as RNA fragments, not "live" virus particles), and those viruses are all much more closely related to the original SARS than they are to SARS-CoV-2. The reason for this is that before this pandemic, researchers focused their attention on viruses that were close to the original SARS (such as WIV-1[5,6]). SARS-CoV-2 and its closely related viruses would have been far less interesting to them. The lab leak theory really is a conspiracy theory, because it requires the scientists at WIV to have discovered a virus that they didn't tell anyone about, including their close collaborators abroad, for them to have secretly isolated it, for it to have escaped from a highly secure laboratory, and then for them to have covered it up. You can assert that all these things happened, but there's precisely zero evidence for it.
The alternative is that one of the millions of people who regularly interact with animals that harbor SARS-related coronaviruses got infected, and that as is usually the case, it takes time and painstaking work to determine how, when and where that happened.
1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2951-z
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259005361...
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4014719/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/health/WHO-covid-daszak-c...
Apparently China's disease-control center had done a great deal of investigating of the Wuhan market, a WHO team member told the New York Times:
They'd actually done over 900 swabs in the end, a huge amount of work. They had been through the sewage system. They'd been into the air ventilation shaft to look for bats. They'd caught animals around the market. They'd caught cats, stray cats, rats, they even caught one weasel. They'd sampled snakes. People had live snakes at the market, live turtles, live frogs. Rabbits were there, rabbit carcasses... Animals were coming into that market that could have carried the coronavirus. They could have been infected by bats somewhere else in China and brought it in. So that's clue No. 1... Some of these are coming from places where we know the nearest relatives of the virus are found. So there's the real red flag...
There were other markets. And we do know that some of the patients had links to other markets.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...
That isn't proof of anything but all of this makes for interesting reading.
https://www.businessinsider.com/former-cdc-director-redfield...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronav...
https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Esc...
Part (6) in the cable specifically warns with regard to WIV scientists studying SARS viruses that interact with human ACE2 receptors.
The cable is here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-state-depart...
Researchers at the same lab published a study in 2017 where they tested the infectivity of 8 artificial coronaviruses (having been edited with 8 different spike proteins) on primate and human cell lines [2].
[1] https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1197631383470034951?s...
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... "Rescue of bat SARSr-CoVs and virus infectivity experiments"
>On 11 January, Edward C. Holmes contacted Zhang for permission to publish the virus's genome. Zhang granted permission, and Holmes published the genome on virological.org that day.[1][3] The Chinese government had prohibited labs from publishing information about the new coronavirus, though Zhang later said he did not know about the prohibition.[3] The next day, the Shanghai Health Commission ordered Zhang's laboratory to close temporarily for "rectification".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Yongzhen#COVID-19_pandem...
They found 2.7% seropositivity simply for people living near bat colonies.
There is also this event in mine workers that handled bats and bat dropping : https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.5815...
All in all, antibodies to bat coronaviruses to people in contact with bats are quite common.
https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/contentious-hunt-for-co...
Scientists tracing the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic believe they’ve identified a possible transmission source: China’s thriving wildlife trade... The most plausible theory, say experts involved in the mission, concerns China’s wildlife trade for food, furs and traditional medicine, a business worth about 520 billion yuan ($80 billion) in 2016. Live animals susceptible to coronavirus infection were present at the Huanan food market in downtown Wuhan, the city where the first major Covid-19 outbreak was detected. It’s possible they acted as conduits for the virus, carrying it from bats -- likely the primary source, says a zoologist who was part of the joint research effort... "The main conclusion from this stage of the work -- and it’s not over yet of course -- is that the exact same pathway by which SARS emerged was alive and well for the emergence of Covid...."
Farmed and wild-caught civets, a small, nocturnal mammal consumed in China, were blamed for spreading the SARS virus in a market in the southern province of Guangdong in 2003. Scientists later found the infection originated in horseshoe bats, a natural reservoir of coronaviruses.
The two species likely collided in markets where live animals are caged in crowded conditions, potentially allowing the bat-borne virus to adapt and amplify before it spilled over to humans, initially among workers and those handling the animals. Scientists working on the origin hunt say a similar scenario may have played out with Covid-19. A study of the first 99 patients treated at an infectious diseases hospital in Wuhan found half were linked to the Huanan seafood market, which also reportedly sold live animals, some illegally captured in the wild and slaughtered in front of customers.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-UK1 both have them and they've likely evolved several times over in parallel evolution (or as the result of multiple infection and recombination maybe?)
The known RaTG13 sample came from caves 900km away and was 96% similar.
That viruses existence does not preclude the existence of a 99% similar sarbecovirus in the bats in Hubei.
Sarbecoviruses do exist in Rhinolophus bats in Hubei:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
Coincidentally, the local Communist Party also placed the blame on meat from the local farmers' market.
Evidence SARS-CoV-2 Emerged From a Biological Laboratory in Wuhan, China. Available at: https://project-evidence.github.io/
https://www.axios.com/timeline-the-early-days-of-chinas-coro...
[1] https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/scientists-outraged-pe...
Former CDC chief says "most likely" cause of coronavirus is that it "escaped" from a lab:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-lab-theory-robert-redfiel...
SARS escaped Beijing lab twice
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7096887/
The diplomats and scientists were worried about the safety of the lab's research on coronaviruses in animals like bats as early as January 2018.
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-officials-raised-alarms-a...
We are living in a strange world where a very plausible theory is considered as conspiracy.