1. Direct-jump from bat population
2. Started in bats, came to humans through intermediate animal
3. Came from frozen food outside of China
4. Lab accident.
I used to think the lab accident theory was crazy, because it sounds like a science fiction movie. Not an impossible theory, just a crazy one.
But according to this article, despite a year of investigation, (1) is unlikely because we haven't found anyone that interacted with the nearest bat population hundred of miles away that didn't work in the virus lab in Wuhan and that caught the virus, (2) is unlikely because we would have found the intermediate animal by now, (3) is unlikely because the first case found was in China (and not somewhere else... if frozen food had the virus, the food would have had it before it was frozen, and someone else would have had it), and (4) is unlikely because a government famous for blocking information and is paranoid about how it is perceived domestically and internationally says "No, trust us on this one."
At some point, crazy theories become the most likely. Hopefully I'm wrong though, and they find an explanation that isn't "lab accident." It seems like we should be studying viruses and sharing that information with each other, and accidents like this will make it more likely that such research doesn't happen.
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...
Accidents happen. Even if it was a lab accident, it's not a reason to be outraged with the Chinese government.
I think in parallel to searching for the origin, they should also look into the reports that Chinese government tried to hid it under the carpet and only admitting that it couldn't control it after it was already spread all over the world.
That's the real crime of the Chinese government in regards to Covid and that's what people should be outraged about.
But yeah, good luck getting an unbiased report on that.
It just reinforces the idea that misinformation is fine as long as it gets people to behave the "right" way, and only bad if it could cause someone to do something wrong.
It took 4 years to find the immediate species in the case of SARS (2002->2006)
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.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...
https://www.businessinsider.com/former-cdc-director-redfield...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronav...
This is a generally informative and helpful comment, but I think there's a flaw in this argument. If WIV isolates viruses (from samples), there could be the possibility that a virus escapes before it is isolated and sequenced, or that the virus is not successfully isolated and sequenced but escapes and infects somebody. We do not need to suggest that they had preexisting records of SARS-CoV-2, which I would agree is clearly beyond reasonable speculation.
Not sure what said statements were, but as described, that is not at all a reason to ban someone. On the internet, legitimate criticism very frequently leads to harassment. That is not at all the fault of the critic, and as long as they didn't intend to cause harassment, it's no reason to ban them.
I really don't have any reason to believe or disbelieve it came from a lab. But that possibility certainly is not crazy.
https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Esc...
2) is also likely, for some viruses it took years and years, sometimes even more than a decade to find the actual intermediate animal.
4) is unlikely because further analysis cannot produce a likely scenario. If the virus was from an animal source known to the lab, we would know already, and if it was due to a gain-of-function experiment, it would be quite unlikely for the virus to take so much time to adapt to humans (it still hasn't fully done so), and there is still a lot of function to be gained. Besides, there is no obvious marker for genetic engineering (the furin cleavage sites are perfectly well described by both 1 and 2), and the fact the virus does not seem to be at a local optima yet indicates that it's probably not the result of engineering by repeated selection.
For the scenario in your second paragraph to play out, the WIV would have to have isolated the virus, then leaked it, but for nothing to published or communicated to collaborators about it for months. This is very unlikely.
Distance doesn't matter so much in today's world, when cities are connected by planes.
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"
Unless they started commanding to destroy samples, and sharing sequences of captured bats after the pandemic started.
> it would be quite unlikely for the virus to take so much time to adapt to humans
All experts agree that SARS-COV-2 is extremely adapted to human infection. Like it appeared out of nowhere, not the gradual result of a natural spill-over. To pose: "It could have been even more infectious" as an argument against gain-of-function is not very strong. And if we agree that China did not deliberately release a finished product, it would be weird to see optimal adaptivity.
> there is no obvious marker for genetic engineering
Gain-of-function does not create obvious marker. It is known possible to increase GoF of coronavirus using techniques that produce no markers at all. It is also tying it too closely to engineered bioweapons (vanilla SARS-COV is a bioweapon itself, even if collected from civet cats by terrorists), because the lab leak could also have been from a collected sample and accidental escape. There is no genetic engineering there at all.
If it did come from this research, which is being done openly with the help of many international collaborators, I don't understand how this could have happened without the virus being known to many more people, especially given the amount of time that passed from the first human infection to detection (which was enough for it even reach Europe!). It would be very surprising for no one else to know about it whereas normally such results are shared quite rapidly.
This is why the very person you quoted, and other people that were involved in such research that live outside of China, find the theory of a lab escape from this kind of research exceedingly unlikely.
Which is exactly what they started doing back in February (2020). The two labs in Wuhan were ordered to destroy all samples they had. So even if the theory were to turn out to be the most likely origin, we'd have no way to find out for sure.
The pandemic started months after first escape, and the WIV shares research findings internationally. By the time the pandemic was detected, it was way too late to destroy samples, months already went by. And that's assuming the escape happened as soon as the samples reached the WIV, which is very generous.
>All experts agree that SARS-COV-2 is extremely adapted to human infection. Like it appeared out of nowhere, not the gradual result of a natural spill-over. To pose: "It could have been even more infectious" as an argument against gain-of-function is not very strong. And if we agree that China did not deliberately release a finished product, it would be weird to see optimal adaptivity.
It is now, but it wasn't at first zoonosis. It took months for the virus to ramp up to an epidemic, whereas clearly the current iteration of the virus can do so much faster especially in dirty environments. Besides, the virus is still, one year in, nowhere near maximum adaptivity, with significantly more infectious variants still appearing. It's not that it could have been more infectious, is that it now is significantly more infections. As far as "deliberately releasing a finished product", there is no reason for it to matter - the last iteration of a given strain will be subject to experimentation for a long time.
Moreso, SARS-CoV-2 clearly has an insanely high potential for zoonosis, as we've seen it infect an incredibly large cross section of animals. This is not what you would expect from a virus that previously was only ever in one species and that was engineered to be specifically adapted to humans only.
>Gain-of-function does not create obvious marker. It is known possible to increase GoF of coronavirus using techniques that produce no markers at all. It is also tying it too closely to engineered bioweapons (vanilla SARS-COV is a bioweapon itself, even if collected from civet cats by terrorists), because the lab leak could also have been from a collected sample and accidental escape. There is no genetic engineering there at all.
You're stretching the definition of bioweapon way beyond any reasonable definition. Both SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 make really poor bioweapons, many naturally occuring viruses are far superior. If the lab leak was from a collected sample that accidentally escaped, you would again expect it to be of known origin - China could point to a specific source and say "Hey, we found it, it comes from here!", and likely collaborators would know about it. Additonally, if it came from GoF, you would expect it to find and expend single-base-pair mutations with a high impact on pathogenicity already, yet we still had many crop up.
The WIV simply doesn't hide samples for long enough for this to be a likely scenario.
By the way, it's estimated there's multiple hundred infections by novel coronavirus pathogens in China every year. So why would the much lower number of viral escapes be considered beyond it when we have the additional constrait of the sample not having been shared with anyone, whereas normally this is done?
Often heard this, including from experts in bioscience (I am not one, you sound more like it).
So early on I did a search on Google Scholar for things like: SARS bioweapon to see what I could come up with. Turns out there is a lot of biosecurity and biowarfare literature from before the outbreak, which have entire chapters for SARS coronavirus as a weapon.
I really think if you tried to give some reasons for coronavirus being a poor bioweapon, it would expose either an inflated sense of expertise, or those reasons are precisely the reason coronaviruses are seen as attractive (and relatively cheaply available) bioweapon.
In a: don't do what I say, do what I do-manner: US military is warned not to use DNA tests from companies that offer cheap tests due to Chinese government funding. It may leave them open to "identification" and "attack". How poor would a gene-targeted coronavirus actually be?
The rest of your posts seems to gather support for other hypothesis, not as much attacking the lab leak theory as highly unlikely.
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.
There is biosecurity and biowarfare literature on pretty much every single virus you can imagine - generally it's about how it might be modified to be used as a bioweapon. And really, coronaviruses are quite good platforms for making debilitating airborne weapons.
SARS-CoV itself as a bioweapon is simply not infectious enough, it was sucessfully contained dozens of times. It's also not that lethal to military-age men, for 20-29 year olds CFR is around 1% and for 30-39 year olds it's around 3% (taking data from infections in the PRC and in HK as there is the least low-detection bias). But it definitely has a lot of potential if you engineer it. For reference, the average age of a soldier in WW2 was 26.
SARS-CoV-2 is complete trash as a bioweapon, an entire carrier was infected and no one died. Debilitation was minimal. It's infectious enough, but it's very bad at actually killing military aged people.
But certainly, they could be engineered to be suitable. That's not the claim I was replying to - the claim I was replying to was that in it's natural form it was a bioweapon.
>The rest of your posts seems to gather support for other hypothesis, not as much attacking the lab leak theory as highly unlikely.
Likelihoods are relative. Everyone agrees that likelihood for a lab escape is fairly low - those are relatively rare. The argument is that the normal process for viruses to reach humans - which was the case for literally every single other pandemic ever - is unlikely thus making lab escape more likely relatively.
I did, however, add a few points that go against the likelihood of an undetected lab escape - which is that the existence of the sample would almost certaintly be known.
4-6 weeks is lower than what we've seen abroad - in Italy between the likely patient zero in September 2019 and the first official case in late february, 5 months had gone.
No known treatment or vaccine. Targets the decision makers (presidents and ministers and military generals are older, and a virus is easier to reach them, than a bullet is). SARS-CoV has super-spreader events, and asymptomatic spread, making it very difficult to contain. It spreads incredibly easily (near-airborne), in confined spaces such as airplanes, but even the toilet plumbing, or shared airco. It offers plausible deniability, by pointing to a natural spill-over event or unsanitary meat markets. It causes enormous economic damage (the economy, not the cannon fodder, being the subject of modern warfare) and cultural damage (tracking and containment is costly and invasive as it damages trust in a free society). It is most readily available to small states and terrorist groups by extracting from live civet cats. Military-aged terrorists spreading SARS-CoV by simply boarding airplanes and visiting hot spots, and not even dying themselves, so they can do it all over again. SARS-CoV in first stages has vague symptoms, similar to other, more common viruses, which would give a pandemic a head start. Pandemics are good PR for fear-based terrorism. The strain on the hospitals is enormous, and military-aged men are too worried to reserve a bed for their elderly parents or their recovery.
More in the vast literature.
> SARS-CoV-2 is complete trash as a bioweapon.
If complete trash, I would not be afraid of Iran being able to press a button and release SARS-CoV-3 for a 2020 repeat. Even if looking at viral bioweapons from the comical anthrax perspective: SARS-CoV-2 killed over 2 million people.
> that the existence of the sample would almost certaintly be known.
Yes. It would make sense that it would be known. And if it would be known, that would probably sufficiently proof the lab leak hypothesis and end this quarrel. We wouldn't need to talk about probabilities much anymore. But that same argument kinda also works against the zoonotic origin hypothesis. It would make a lot of sense that after a year, we found the intermediate host, or patient 0. If there was a clear epidemiological explanation for a zoonotic origin, it would almost certainly be known. Maybe there really isn't.
Not true - there are basically known vaccines to SARS-CoV, they just never got to human efficacy trials because the disease went extinct. But, given their efficacy when repurposed as SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, they were probably quite effective.
As for super-spreading events, this is a double edged sword. It makes it very infectious when nothing is being done to try and stop it, but it means that if there are even cursory measures the chances of the infection stalling are much higher as you're relying on a low number of people actually spreading it.
SARS-CoV may have vague symptoms in the early stages - but it has symptoms. You want a virus that can spread asymptomatically for it to be a major burden, so that makes it less useful.
If your goal is to strain hospitals and create fear, by far the best tools would be humanized avian flu, or a vaccine resistant strain of measles.
>Yes. It would make sense that it would be known. And if it would be known, that would probably sufficiently proof the lab leak hypothesis and end this quarrel. We wouldn't need to talk about probabilities much anymore. But that same argument kinda also works against the zoonotic origin hypothesis. It would make a lot of sense that after a year, we found the intermediate host, or patient 0. If there was a clear epidemiological explanation for a zoonotic origin, it would almost certainly be known. Maybe there really isn't.
I think you're missing the point. If there was a lab escape, the likelihood for the sample to be known is very high. This means that given priors of no known samples, the likelihood for a lab escape is lower.
It's also completely unrealistic to expect to find the host or patient zero after a year for a zoonosis. It took 40 years to find the intermediate host for Ebola, and four years to find it for SARS. For some epidemics, we never found a solid intermediate host. Patient zeros are basically never found, either, unless the disease is incredibly pathogenic and virulent - which SARS-CoV-2 isn't. If you look towards past epidemics that originated from zoonosis with a similar disease profile, you will find that it takes years to decades to conclusively find an intermediate host, and that patient zero is basically never found with any degree of certainty, meaning that the current scenario is perfectly congruent with expectations.
I think the Chinese's response was very good considering they had no warning. And western countries did far worse when they had 4-6 weeks of warning.
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.
When you think about how common the basic symptoms are, I think it could take quite a while before someone wondered whether it was different from the common cold and went testing.
IMO Its a perfectly reasonable theory that it was spreading slowly through China for months, from some distant province, and it wasn't recognised as a new virus until it arrived somewhere there was the expertise to look at it in the right way.
That would mean that the reason it was found in Wuhan and not anywhere else is just because Wuhan was the first place with people who had the expertise and the interest to investigate and figure out it was new.
Whatever the truth is, that is just as good a theory as any other, and it explains the apparent evidence for the virus appearing a few months earlier in some countries.
Evidence SARS-CoV-2 Emerged From a Biological Laboratory in Wuhan, China. Available at: https://project-evidence.github.io/
Oh, yes it is.
It would be 'manslaughter' on a mass scale.
The largest ever seen.
If this were due to their negligence, then millions of dead, 10's of millions out of work, Trillions in lost productivity is unavoidably consequential.
It would be the worst 'accident' in human history and the responsibility would be squarely on their shoulders.
If you're experimenting with bombs and you blow up all your neighbours homes by accident - that's manslaughter, a very serious crime.
The geopolitical fallout would be unimaginable.
Almost all pandemics started in China in the history, apperantly habitat is suitable for that. You knew that but still play with deadly viruses there, then accidently it spreads and you try to cover up and make it worse and cause millions of deaths. Fair mistake, it is an accident!
If it is originated from a lab, I think people should not find out this. I’m not sure. It will trigger some feelings against China, hopefully it won’t turn into something racist.
Wait and be killed.
I doubt there is some legal paragraph which would work here, even in International Law.
> But according to this article, despite a year of investigation
One year of investigation is not long, especially if you have a party who has a significant interesst to hinder your investigation into certain directions.
Agreed! Whatever did cause COVID-19, the outbreak was made worse by a lack of transparency by the CCP. It seems like no matter what, the WHO report is unlikely to discuss that much. Which is a shame, because with more transparency into what happened we would be better able to stop the next COVID-19 from happening.
https://www.axios.com/timeline-the-early-days-of-chinas-coro...
If the US was directly involved in establishing safety procedures, then yes, that would be something.
But by and large, this is a China problem.
I doubt we will never know the answer.
If Trump had any kind of material evidence, he would have used it. Team Biden would be super strategic about it, I have no idea how they would communicate the intelligence. They would be wary of the populist consequences.
In a weird way, it might be better if we never found out that was true.
"Shouldn't they be held liable?"
There's a lot of accidents that happened in the West, specifically the US. Some known, some not.
The West just got lucky but would never admit it either.
It really is though. If you're going to experiment with viruses that can be lethal to humans, you'd better have a damn good set of safety protocols so they don't get out. If you can't do that, don't experiment on the viruses. Given the infectiousness, there are even theories they were experimenting with making it more virulent.
There are almost 3,000,000 deaths globally. That's equivalent to launching a Little Boy at a city the size of Hiroshima every day for 42 days. It's a third of the number of soldiers who died in WW1.
There is no conceivable way that this could be declared an "oopsie" moment. This is a colossal fuck up, even by international scales.
It has nothing to do with it specifically being China. If it was the EU, I'd be pissed at them too. Lab leaks aren't particularly uncommon, which is a problem basically everywhere. I'm concerned that Russia is allegedly messing around with anthrax, but at least they seem to be able to keep it in their labs. I would prefer that no-one in the world was working on biological weapons, but I think that's a pipedream.
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.