1. Gain of function research primarily uses samples collected from nature, and seeks to stimulate their evolution in as natural a way as possible to learn how viruses evolve in nature. If such viruses were to escape the lab, they would appear "natural"
2. It's not xenophobic for people from the US to suggest the possibility of a lab leak, because the US was itself funding gain of function research on novel coronaviruses in the Wuhan BSL4 lab
3. Lab leaks happen more often than most people realize[1]
[1]https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/20/18260669/deadly...
Inherently? Of course not. But does xenophobia motivate a lot of this argument? It certainly seems to. Look at how quickly proponents of this nonsense jump from detached discussion about the possibilities to outraged condemnation of the PRC. Just read the discussion here in this thread.
If you only wanted to discuss the lab and the virus and try to put relative likelihoods on the natural evolution vs. Andromeda Strain theories, that would be one thing. But... that doesn't seem to be all you want.
There is, from my understanding, reasonable evidence to conclude the virus was not engineered from the perspective of "we took genes from one virus and moved them to this virus," but there's no evidence disproving the idea that it was the result of gain of function research.
My personal feeling is that these statements are true:
* The virus is unlikely to have been engineered (in the way I described above) and leaked.
* There is circumstantial evidence the virus was the result of gain of function research and it leaked.
* There is circumstantial evidence the virus was a natural research sample and it leaked.
* There is circumstantial evidence the virus was introduced by an animal/person who traveled to the wet market.
Some of these are more likely than others, and an individual's own calibration for what is likely or unlikely will probably come into play more than evidence in the short term and possibly long term as well. I can say the vast majority of us are not qualified to answer the question either way though.
All we need to do to take xenophobia out of this discussion is to not be xenophobic ourselves. The xenophobes may talk to themselves. But let's make sure we are talking about this problem instead of falling for the "guilty by association fallacy".
It's also worth noting that even the leading experts can get these things wrong, as was the case with the Sverdlovsk lab leak.
Soviet authorities covered it up by blaming local meat markets, and leading US experts concurred with them, only to reverse their conclusion 6 years later.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak#Acci...
WIV had recently published research on, and had an active grant to perform (at the time of the outbreak), chimeric Coronavirus research, and they were one of the two world leading labs in this. In that research, they were transplanting the spike gene from one virus to the "backbone" of another. You could call this "engineering" or "gain of function" depending on your perspective.
The thing that raised people's suspicions about this is that the spike RBD strongly resembles a virus sequence they released recently (Pangolin-CoV), and the backbone strongly resembles another virus they recently published (RaTG13). That suggests that there was some sort of recombination event. That recombination could have occurred in nature, in an animal that was simultaneously infected with two viruses, or it could have occurred in the lab.
Sometimes its wrong to present "both sides" like that. Like pretending the evidence against the moon landings is equal to the evidence for the moon landings. But if you're going to be wrong, this is probably the best kind of wrong.
For example, I have seen a lot of comments that the closest natural COVID reservoir is 500 miles away, that sounds like a lot! But the average tractor trailer can cover that in a day no problem, so our heuristic needs to include how many trucks are moving between those areas, how many have come in contact with wildlife or are transporting it, etc. Since it only takes one transmission the problem rapidly becomes too complex.
Fortunately the answer has no bearing on decisions being made in the here and now, so we can afford to wait and let experts do their jobs and hope we take the right steps long term if it was something that could have been avoided.
Read the section in the WHO report on COVID19 and listen to the reputable international scientist that actually went and visited the lab and interviewed the people who worked there.
https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the...
However; since the "leaked virus" narrative was mostly parroted by rightwing media, and promoted from an overtly racist and xenophobic administration and political party, (in the USA) - it very much muddies the waters. There's also some very strong, direct evidence, that political appointees discussed (over email) strategies for subverting messaging from actual scientific experts who had actual data and studies backing up alternative explanations.
It would be nice if such narratives arose organically from actual events, and could be discussed openly. But that's impossible in our present political environment, and that's one of many many hazards of far-right politics. Any questions? Just ask Galileo his opinion on the matter.
While racism and xenophobia is real, it has been and is being used very effectively, especially by China but others too, to deflect/blunt genuine criticisms and claims.
Just as an amusing example, we talk openly about UK variant, SA variant, Brazil variant - but never talk about original as Wuhan variant - it is simply coronavirus.
We shouldn't be using that terminology for variants either. While I understand that people largely use location names for the sake of convenience, it really doesn't feel good to be a person from one of those locations.
Of course as an Asian person, whatever people believe in will have a direct impact on me. I remember after 9/11, the amount of awful things that were said and done to the Sikh population in my city. It didn’t matter they had literally nothing to do with the attacks. People were angry and wanted someone to blame.
certainly xenophobia expresses itself acutely in mediopolitical contexts where power and money are on the line, but also in forums like this where such ego boosts are basically costless. it's not really about a distinction between the people and the government.
And in there, I describe exactly how wrong your point 1 is. And how misguided your point 3 is.
The post also won a "best of r/science 2020" award!
You can find it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
That's not a lens that can be used to usefully evaluate claims.
> Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar issued a decree to begin demilitarization of Compound 19 in 1992. However, the facility continued its work. Not a single journalist has been allowed onto the premises since 1992. About 200 soldiers with Rottweiler dogs still patrol the complex.
How would it be xenophobic to criticize a government? This conflation is so pervasive and toxic to the discourse.
The Chinese government does bear some of the responsibility here. The Chinese people do not. At a minimum, they actively tried to cover-up an investigation into a leak and leaned on the World Health Organization in order to do so.
This had two negative affects globally. First is the slowed response time from the rest of the World as they were assured this was mild and contained. Second is the rightfully degraded trust in the WHO which will impede ongoing and future efforts not only to stop Covid-19 but also future pandemics.
The reason right-wing media sources are the only ones talking about this is because they are the only ones with the freedom to do so. If we do not like that some of these source are implying that Chinese people as a group are to blame, then that is an invitation for more mainstream outlets to stop carrying water for the Chinese and American governments.
Be upfront, the WHO was compromised by the Chinese government. There could have been a leak, a hypothesis that is looking more likely with each passing week. If this was in fact a leak, then gain of function research could also be implicated. This produces a conflict of interest with experts in the field because their funding and research may utilize gain of function methods.
Done.
This was a known unknown over a year ago, but stifled due to political interests. The casting of xenophobic aspersions onto the right-leaning media sources who got this correct is an attempt at damage control for the same political interests.
I get it. Admitting those media sources were better when it really mattered means fewer people will get vaccinated and we may get a Trump 2.0. That is the political price of lying and getting caught. Jacketing all these conversations with underlying accusations of "well they were right but also racist" is not going to be a win. If you want to win you have to actually be better.
We can emphatically not expect the experts to do their job. Those cited as having the most expertise (virologists who undertake gain-of-function research, symbolically under the auspices of HHS’ toothless P3CO regulation framework) have the most to lose from a finding that the pandemic’s source was a lab leak. They lose all the grants and public financial support, not to mention endure unending public scorn that will haunt the their careers for the duration.
For evidence that the relevant, oft-cited scientists act precisely this way, one need no more than to look at @BlockedVirology’s retweets: https://twitter.com/blockedvirology
Scientists are human - I would highly recommend disabusing oneself of the notion that they might act contrary to overwhelming human incentives in as weighty a context as investigating the origins of the greatest pandemic in a century.
The only alternative in the face of this embedded conflict of interest in our (society’s) ability to credibly investigate the pandemic’s origins is for technically-minded individuals (who don’t run multimillion dollar virology labs) to avail themselves of the findings gathered to date on the origins (there’s lots! Just need to take a look, the contributors to the above feed are a good place to start), and advocate to their representatives for a credible & even-handed origins investigation.
Failing that, expect no origin beyond all reasonable doubt to be credibly identified in our lifetimes.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-01/covid-inf...
The level of arrogance necessary to believe that any "technically minded" individual can find where the virus originated is mind blowing to me. Logic isn't the end-all-be-all, for many fields you must also have knowledge. We should not ignore the blindspots that deep knowledge can introduce but to just dismiss it is absurd.
Just look at public health people, epidemiologists. Folks like Andrea Sant, Michael Osterholm, David Topham, etc.
These folks criticize GOF all the time, and are a big part of the group that helps write regulations to make Virology research safe.
But you know what these same virologists also don't believe? That SARS-COV-2 was cooked up in a lab.
That should tell you something.
Science is adversarial, and virology is no exception.
That's why when consensus exists about something, you should respect it. There is quite a large consensus about this one.
Because those mutation events in a small number of people still require a longer time to become "stable" in the overall population of viruses.
Generally speaking, the more virus "generations" you have, the more likely you are to generate a successful variant. But then it takes time for that variant to achieve dynamic equilibrium in the greater population of viruses. For it to take over.
And the initial SARS-CoV-2 had so little diversity for so long, that we can say it likely had been stable before passing into humans, or there would have been more initial diversity in it compared to its closest viral relatives.
It is a picture overall consistent with a random crossover event. Not ruling out a lab leak (because that's quite difficult if not impossible to do). The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
But we have just as much evidence to say the virus came from aliens who planted it in humans as we do to say it came from a human lab that has no trace of the virus anywhere in it.
The reason you will find extremely few people with actual credentials in the science we're discussing in these discussions is that working scientists don't have the time or will to get into these debates with people who wouldn't have the faintest idea how to actually conduct the research they're criticizing.
That post I linked took like dozens and dozens of man hours to write, workshop, source, and edit.
And I wrote it so I could link it in situations like this, and not repeat myself dozens or hundreds of times.
Personally, I'm studying for the biggest exam of my professional life at the moment, and I'm procrastinating here because I find these discussions so horrifying.
This entire thread could be a valuable case study in the Dunning Krueger effect.
Not saying it's not worth talking about, but rather that the amount of time and effort it takes to refute bullshit is several magnitudes more than the amount of effort it takes to create it.
In my case, that's 10+ years studying viruses so people on the internet with no credentials can tell me I'm wrong.
But you know what's interesting about that?
We know about the CoV-1 leak because /the chinese scientists told us about it./
They owned up to it and told the world and the biosafety community (the people with degrees in these things) helped china become more standard and respectable and safe.
And now 15 years later, with zero evidence, we're accusing them of covering up the same thing.
Scientists are not their government, and China's government is not a huge fan of it's scientists. Just look at the great leap forward. And how they're treating Shi Zhengli now that she is arguing the virus came from a zoonotic event in the provinces. China's party line no longer agrees, and she's been silenced.
Why would she lie for her government when they don't even agree?
1.1 Gain of function research primarily uses samples collected from nature
1.2 and seeks to stimulate their evolution in as natural a way as possible to learn how viruses evolve in nature.
1.3 If such viruses were to escape the lab, they would appear "natural"
> 3. Lab leaks happen more often than most people realize[1]
As I see it, there are two variables involved:
- how frequently lab leaks happen (total number of historic leaks - known + unknown)
- people's realization / awareness of how often they happen
> And now 15 years later, with zero evidence, we're accusing them of covering up the same thing.
Regardless of whether there is evidence or not (have they been perfectly transparent and enthusiastically encouraging of inspections?), a leak did happen, or it did not happen...and then on top of it, there is the problem of whether we have knowledge of it or not.
> Why would she lie for her government when they don't even agree?
Like many other things in life, it is not known.
And I linked to a literal mountain of evidence describing both my credentials on this topic and then an extremely detailed and heavily sourced set of arguments.
I'm not talking out of my ass, I'm sorry it sounds that way. After you have several hundred of these discussions and they keep popping up with zero new evidence, it tends to color your attitude.
Please accept my apologies
>We know about the CoV-1 leak because /the chinese scientists told us about it./
Sometimes humans tell the truth, sometimes humans don't.
Pointing to one group of people who told the truth, and asserting that means another group must be telling the truth is just silly.
Especially considering the former example was in regards to a small accident relative to potentially the greatest accident in human history.
I know I would be strongly inclined to lie if I was responsible for the accidental death of millions of people.
If a human being was not inclined to lie about their responsibility for greatest accident in human history, why would humans ever lie about any mistake?
You can't do it in the time we've been able to handle viruses like this or modify them in the ways we can. You'd have needed to start a few decades ago, have tools that we've only just invented, and a huge number of willing test subjects.
I cover this in extreme detail in the post I linked under Q2 and Q3.
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/-/fqpbt6o
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/-/fqpc7c8
One of the most compelling pieces of evidence is the synonymous/nonsynonomous ratio of the genome and it's mosaic mutations.
That's not something you can just cook up over night, it takes many millions of viral generations which require A) diverse hosts (like you find in a natural ecosystem), B) many millions of hosts, like you find in nature, and C) decades of time.
The chinese virology labs don't have the resources, time, or space to do something like that. And maybe it would be kind of possible today with CRISPR and many thousands of oligonucleotides printed off of a desktop printer, but that technology hasn't existed for more than a few years. The timelines just don't add up.
It was far from the worst accident in human history at that point, it looked like nothing and in America lots of people thought it would never affect us at all.
That's when it came up and when Zhengli had her lab searched and checked their freezers etc.
It's also important to think about the other BSL4 labs around the world they sent tons of samples to. If they were hiding SARS-CoV-2, why wouldn't it have slipped into any of these many thousands of inter-lab samples?
Releases aren't all that common but cross-contamination within and between secure sites actually is.
Why has no one found SARS-2 in any of the samples sent out of Wuhan to Australia, Singapore, Canada, or the US?
Indeed. There's another important bit that you seem to be missing.
Did you know that Peter Daszak, one of the "reputable international scientists" you speak of who helped investigate and author that report was himself the project lead for the US funded gain of function research at the WIV?
Who would be more inclined or in a better position to cover that up than him?
Good luck on your exam as well.
Her government, not so much.
I am definitely not a fan of the Chinese government. But the scientists I've met at conferences and the papers I've reviewed from their labs have been of a very high quality.
Not saying such people could not commit atrocities or coverups like this. But I do find it personally less likely.
That isn't the evidence I rely on most in my personal assessment, though. The epidemiology and molecular clock data points to a zoonotic origin outside of Wuhan. Check out here to see what I mean: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/-/fqpcfs2
Which makes the lab leak a whole lot less interesting of an idea since its' circumstantial evidence isn't actually the circumstance anymore.
Respecting a consensus is reasonable. That having been said, I would be interested to hear what the virologists to whom you refer think about Ralph Baric's work. Ralph Baric is a very well-known virologist specializing in corona virology. His group synthesized quite a few SARS-CoV variants, a number of years before SARS-CoV-2 made its appearance. While there's no proof that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab, there are quite a few studies describing the synthesis of different SARS-CoV variants, some quite dangerous.
From one of many papers on which he was a co-author (https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048.full):
"Using the SARS-CoV infectious clone as a template (7), we designed and synthesized a full-length infectious clone of WIV1-CoV consisting of six plasmids that could be enzymatically cut, ligated together, and electroporated into cells to rescue replication competent progeny virions (Fig. S1A). In addition to the full-length clone, we also produced WIV1-CoV chimeric virus that replaced the SARS spike with the WIV1 spike within the mouse-adapted backbone (WIV1-MA15, Fig. S1B)"
EDIT: jeduehr, given your background in virology, I would be interested in any technical critique you may have regarding the Yuri Deigin article referenced in my post below.
> it really doesn't feel good to be a person from one of those locations.
I am from one of these locations and could not care less.
Assuming everything you say is true, that still would not rule out a lab leak of a virus collected from nature, would it?
>You can't do it in the time we've been able to handle viruses like this or modify them in the ways we can. You'd have needed to start a few decades ago, have tools that we've only just invented, and a huge number of willing test subjects.
Does this imply that covid19 has been circulating among humans for a very long time?
Frankly, it would be irresponsible NOT to provacatively suggest this thing we have no evidence of, repeatedly.
Baric makes Chimeras. CoV-2 in comparison to the other closely related viruses in nature, is a mosaic. Lots of little changes all over the genome, not big copy and pastes.
See here for more detail on that distinction: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/-/fqpbagf
Generally speaking, I think the whole world would be better off if we aligned our perceptions of our knowledge more closely with its likely true quality: very often, we think we know things, but we are actually just estimating if not outright guessing, and then declaring it to be true. Unfortunately, very few people seem to be comfortable with this idea regardless of their political orientation or education level. But as I see it, it is simply applying the discipline and methodology of science to the real world, so it's kind of weird how unpopular it is with educated people who are otherwise enthusiastic promoters of Scientific Thinking.
Incidentally (or perhaps not?), there is some evidence that the furin-cleavage site is what makes the virus resistant to hydroxychloroquine, which can be countered by combining it with a TMPRSS2 inhibitor: https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
She's a geneticst or biochemist. She just uses some viruses in her research sometimes, like basically all biochemists.
Calling her qualified in virus biosafety is like saying someone with a PhD in Visual Arts is qualified as an expert in ballpoint pens because they've used them to draw. Sure they know some things about using ballpoint pens and which ones they prefer, but would you trust them to tell you how to design one from scratch? Or how to fix pens?
Not as much as some guy with a PhD in engineering and design at Mont Blanc, get what I'm saying?
I have also responded to her criticisms substance elsewhere, but she makes some big leaps in judgment that show she hasn't ever worked in a BSL4 lab before. Or studied the nitty gritty of virus genetics in nature before.
It's like "censorship is OK if a private company does it". This makes a bit of sense if you're attacking a Libertarian, but for left wingers to earnestly think that private companies should have the right to shut down discussion they don't like is very odd.
Sometimes I worry that large portions of online debate has been overrun by people making claims they don't really believe because they're a bad slippery slope take on the views of the people they disagree with; and sometimes people have even started to buy the deliberately bad arguments their side has created.
This is a straw man argument. No one is seriously claiming that this is a "cooked up" (artificially created) virus. It could be a natural virus that escaped the lab.
Who said the test subjects have to be willing? That's never stopped our government before.
But the epidemiological evidence points to covid-19 originating outside wuhan entirely, that's why I find that theory less likely, among other reasons. See here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/-/fqpcfs2
Also if they had collected it in nature, it would have been in their freezers, or likely that people involved in that research would have been patient zero etc. See here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/-/fqpcf33
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/-/fqpce2z
Wuhan institute of virology also aren't the labs I'm worried about. They were built and designed by very reputable people in the virology community. Not saying you should trust them, but at least recognize that the people who are most qualified to distrust them think it's unlikely.
See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/-/fqpccr1
>Does this imply covid-19 has been circulating in humans a long time?
No, it implies it was relatively stable passing amongst several species of bats (and other related mammals) before a single or a few crossover events into humans recently.
It's behaving exactly like we would expect a zoonotic transmission to behave. It's not very well adapted to bats, it's not very well adapted to humans. It's sort of "promiscuous" likely because it has infected several different species over several decades before arriving in humans.
The conspiracy becomes so immense it's absurd the many thousands of people who would have to keep quiet.
There are oddities in the whole timeline which stand out to me. The social media videos of people keeling over in streets and buildings in Wuhan from the virus, which doesn't appear to be a genuine phenomenon of its pathology and therefore looks planted for psyop purposes. The CDC behaving so incompetently around testing and acknowledging the threat of the virus that it beggars belief (see: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-cdc-re...). No one from the global ruling class succumbing to the virus even as it claims multiple Covid-skeptical leaders in Africa where its impact is otherwise quite muted. Cuomo, Newsom, and Whitmer implementing policies which grossly amplified nursing home deaths in the early stages of the pandemic. Various maneuvers of public consent management, e.g. "15 Days to Slow the Spread" to get people to start lockdowns, followed by "we have to keep going until we get the vaccines" alongside zero investment in new ICU capacity and even reductions in hospital staff. The obvious wealth transfers and consolidation of the economy away from the middle class and small businesses which has occurred, along with the accelerated adoption of surveillable tech platforms as the primary means of interpersonal communication. Doctors reduced to begging on Twitter for people to run trials on repurposed generic treatments while all the stops are pulled out for the vaccines (even the Washington Post has recently acknowledged that financial incentives and political considerations are preventing cheap drugs from getting a fair shake: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/04/08/ivermectin-...).
But yeah, certainly nothing I can point to as hard proof.
Which will always look suspicious, whether it was actually a completely natural virus or not.
Inherently? Of course not. But in practice it tends to act as a good prior for detecting bullshit. How many of these people would really be making the same argument in this way had the virus appeared in Bonn or Montreal?
And again, to repeat: in this particular situation we have a very acceptable, very convincing, very obvious hypothesis for covid origins that simply does not require trafficking in badly-motivated argument.
At the end of the day there's no strong evidence, we all agree on that. So I choose to believe something obvious that fits the data and patterns previous events, and others... choose to believe that a (literal!) conspiracy is afoot acting to cover up wrongdoing by an evil foreign nation. And that's bad.
> The reason you will find extremely few people with actual credentials in the science we're discussing in these discussions is that working scientists don't have the time or will to get into these debates with people who wouldn't have the faintest idea how to actually conduct the research they're criticizing.
We have such a big problem with public perception of science. I think many people are willing to be educated, but internet forums tend to degenerate into arguments between people who think they know a lot more than they do (even in (especially?) places like HN).
Controversial idea: I think in the future we should pay researchers to spend x% of their time just interacting with people on internet forums answering questions and correcting misperceptions. The amount of disinformation out there is staggering.
(1) BSL-3 lab doing bat coronavirus research...
(2) on gain-of-function projects...
(3) one block away from the epicenter of a coronavirus pandemic with bat ties...
(4) that nobody's being allowed into...
(5) when they have a history of coronavirus lab escapes.
I'm not saying we know this is what happened. I'm saying it's not a far-fetched position and there's a lot of experts who agree. I hear there's even an MIT Technology Review write-up about it.
Wouldn't the Wuhan lab be able to disprove this really easily? How often do they sequence viruses? Couldn't they show categorically that COVID-19 is not a descendant of a virus they were working with/on?
Which you note by pointing out that this is the exact thing we'd expect from a natural event.
It's still 100% speculation. The question to ask is, would there be this level of suggestive speculation if it wasn't America's newest top rival?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vRbACWf90iBC35xNOwlI5bWcUq0... (Footnote 1)
Also, you can literally look around on this exact post and find people who believe that this virus was cooked up in a lab. There were also a lot of people on my original post who believed that.
As is often the case: never underestimate the intellectual overconfidence of people with little knowledge of the subject matter.
To draw a very clear distinction in the sand, I never said we can be 100% certain that this virus didn't originate in a lab. It's just really really unlikely. And there isn't any real evidence to support it. /Maybe/ some circumstantial evidence in the geographic proximity. But even that is probably irrelevant if the current epidemiological evidence is to be believed, which shows that the virus likely jumped into humans outside of Wuhan entirely. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
In order of likelihood, based on all available evidence and expert consensus:
zoonotic release >>> accidental lab release of a wildly collected virus >>>>>>> accidental lab release of a "cooked up" virus > intentional lab release of a "cooked up virus"
I think historians in a million years will snort from laughter when reading "The WHO that denies the existence of Taiwan determined that COVID19 did not originate from the bioweapons lab in Wuhan researching that very virus, only in the city".
The National Science Policy Network has a good Q&A site where credentialed scientists answer public questions about their subject area. I forget the URL but a google search should turn it up in a few pages.
There's a similar one called the Science Creative Exchange where scientists sign up to talk to writers in hollywood and work through scripts and make the science in fiction more accurate wherever possible.
I love both of these and have spent lots of time on them in my (ever dwindling) free time. But I'm also the guy who's commenting on a HN post when I should be studying for the biggest exam in my career (USMLE Step 1), so I'm not the best example.
And if they had such a central database, we'd have probably heard about it by now.
[0]: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/sante/maladie/coronavirus/corona...
[1]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...
That is such a straw man. I seriously doubt anyone, much less a signatory to the recent open letter (many with experience and knowledge far beyond yours) would have claimed they can take ANY virus and transform it to ANY OTHER virus. Your green handle just lost any respect I might have extended to it.
https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1373978645560229890?s=2...
Anyone under the thumb of communist party minders is by definition not in a position to freely act as a very reputable person. They may very well have a reputation, but they are not free to fulfill it well.
Military lab can do it. Virus can be cooked long enough in hosts with depressed immune system. Soviet Union did such experiments before.
There was also never a consensus about masks, the US government and a few US virologists just felt that way. Asia and a lot of Europe definitely did not feel that way. I would urge you to be as non-America-centric as possible because the consensus that the virus is very likely not a lab leak is also global in character.
I actually know Dr. Lipsitch and have met him at a conference or two before, and he's not wrong in a lot of ways, it should be investigated to the fullest extent possible, I would absolutely agree with that and have never disagreed on that. China should allow in international investigators from unbiased third-party institutions with expertise in the relevant areas.
The problem, of course, is that it will likely be impossible to prove it either way. The closest we could get is identifying an extremely close relative of SARS-2 in nature, in bats or w/e, in an area where we also find Human seropositivity (antibodies in the blood).
On the other side, we could find a sample of SARS-2 frozen and old in a chinese lab that shows they had it before the outbreak.
I detail which things I would want to see to at least reassess my position in this part of my original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
Zero evidence because independent third parties have not been given access.
An event of this magnitude requires a free and fair scientific investigation.
Absent that, one theory is as good as another.
Downvoted as always by the irrational.
I don't know how much clearer I can make a distinction between a people and their government in words. I do not consider myself responsible for the decisions of Dick Cheney and Obama. Nor would I consider a random Chinese person responsible for the actions of Tedros Adhanom or Xi Jinping.
I would find someone blaming a Chinese or Chinese-American person on a subway for the coronavirus misguided and wrong.
I would find someone critiquing the Chinese governments response to the virus very justifiable.
On the other hand, what I've said is (a) I have nothing against "foreigners" (b) there's a ton of circumstantial evidence and (c) China has a long track record of silencing opposition and criticism to prevent derogatory information from getting out. That's not xenophobia.
It's like if you have someone who's robbed 6 convenience stores, and your reaction is "hey I'm not sure they're a good fit for the world of cashiering." Or better yet, a 7th convenience store is robbed adjacent to the first 6 in the same exact way, and your reaction is "someone should see what Steve was up to that night." That's not bias, that's a substantiated track record.
It's inductive reasoning.
It's utterly unreasonable to call anyone who holds China's track record against them xenophobic or biased lol. They've earned that track record. When they show a different attitude they'll get treated differently.
> Plenty of bad track records to go around.
That right there is quintessential whataboutism.
How many of those rolls land next door to a lab researching these?
Is that so inconceivable? The Chinese government has historically obfuscated facts and runs one of the largest media control operations in modern history. The WHO is also an organization of questionable trustworthiness and with suspicious subservience to China[1]. But the WHO wouldn't necessarily had to have been complicit. This could've easily been covered up by Chinese authorities during the many months of blocking external researchers into the country[2]. The research in the report you linked to started in January 2021.
As for the report itself, I skimmed a few pages and noticed some issues. My understanding is limited in this area, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
0. First of all, the conflict of interest of it being reported by WHO and Chinese researchers should be a factor in judging the validity of any of its claims.
1. From the arguments in favour of the intermediate host scenario (p. 115):
> Although the closest related viruses have been found in bats, the
> evolutionary distance between these bat viruses and SARS-CoV-2 is estimated
> to be several decades, suggesting a missing link (either a missing progenitor
> virus, or evolution of a progenitor virus in an intermediate host).
2. From the arguments against the intermediate host scenario (p. 116):
> There was no genetic or serological evidence for SARS-CoV-2 in a wide
> range of domestic and wild animals tested to date.
> Screening of farmed wildlife was limited but did not provide conclusive
> evidence for the existence of circulation.
3. From the arguments against the laboratory incident scenario (p. 119):
> There is no record of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 in any
> laboratory before December 2019, or genomes that in combination could
> provide a SARS-CoV-2 genome.
The rest of the arguments that all labs complied with high safety standards, with no reports of illnesses or disruption are also coming from Chinese authorities, and should be taken with a grain of salt. Yet this is enough to consider this scenario "extremely unlikely".
4. China is praised multiple times for its "near-elimination of SARS-CoV-2", but the official data is comically suspicious[3]. A total of 4,851 deaths in a country of 1.4 billion people. That week of April 13, 2020 was rough.
Apologies if I sound inflammatory and conspiratorial, my disinformation senses are tingling.
Ugh and apologies for the formatting. HN please adopt Markdown.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM
[2]: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/05/china/china-blocks-who-te...
These days there is more interesting data in what is considered kosher on mainstream media and what is labelled a conspiracy theory, than the information itself.
1) Chimeric viruses (copy and paste) are what scientists make in the lab. They take a piece of one virus and paste it into the genome of another, en masse. This is very different from what SARS-2 is, which is more accurately described as a "mosaic" (lots of little changes all over the genome). This is much much more difficult (if not very close to impossible in the case of SARS-2) to make in the lab, at least not and have it be done and "cooked" by the time the pandemic started. See the part of my post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
2) He makes it sound like the techniques Shi Zhengli uses in the lab could create SARS-CoV-2. This is not true. For the reasons I describe above in point 1, and others, this is not really a likely possibility. Modern virology just does not have the tools to do this. Only mother nature with its many millions of hosts and diversity of hosts (in different mammals) could do this in the span of time molecular clock analysis says it took to take similar viruses like RaTG-13 and mutate them into SARS-CoV-2. I go into extreme detail about this in this part of my original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
3) He also says things like "Considering the heights of user friendliness and automation that genetic engineering tools have attained, creating a synthetic CoV2 via the above methodology would be in reach of even a grad student." Yeah, in 2020. Not in 2000 when they would have needed to start doing this. We did not have these tools back then. We did not understand enough about viruses, and this is /before/ we even discovered SARS-CoV-1!
The molecular clock + the synonymous/nonsynonymous criteria + the mosaic nature of the virus together put constraints on how this virus could have evolved. The first says it takes about 50-70 years to evolve a virus like this, evolving as fast as it does in nature. The second says it evolved in a fashion that wasn't putting more selective pressure on it than nature usually does. The third says it happened in a semi-random way, the way natural mutations occur. All of these together (plus other stuff) mean that it's unlikely that anyone /grew/ the virus in a lab intentionally.
I go into extreme detail about the synonymous nonsynonymous stuff in 3.1.1 of my post.
4) Also, it doesn't actually look like a virus that was grown in a petri dish or one that was grown in a single species of animals. It has O-linked glycans on it that cell culture wouldn't add. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
Also, if it were grown in a single species of animal, then the SARS-2 spike protein would bind most tightly to that receptor. That's not actually what it is. As best we can tell, the S from SARS-2 binds just ~okay~ to a lot of different ACE2 receptors, and it just happens to work to bind human ACE2 kinda well. It's not at all how anyone would have actually designed it if they wanted to make a virus that kills humans. If they were designing it that way, they were some really shitty super villains, let me tell you that. I go into some extreme detail about this in this part of my post: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
5) Yuri gets really hot and bothered about the furin cleavage site. But what he seems to misunderstand is that these cleavage sites have evolved in nature too. It's likely either A) a recombinatorial event between SARS-2 and similar viruses in nature or B) it mutated over a short period of time in a way similar to other "mutagenicity islands." We have actually seen this before in nature. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
He even says it has been shown to be disabled in a relatively short period of time in lab animals, so why wouldn't it be able to show up in nature in 50-70 years in millions of wild animals? It's really not that unlikely when you consider that certain areas of viral genomes mutate a lot faster than others in the wild.
6) He even points out that the only viruses in nature that share the cleavage site share only 40% of the rest of their genomes with SARS-2. But that just shows it's likely that SARS-2 and one of these other viruses happened to infect the same animal at the same time, and their genomes had a cross-over event. This happens ALL. THE. TIME. in viruses in nature. It's basically how flu pandemics occur. See:
-https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg2053 -https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/communicable-disea... -https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article-pdf/26/1/177/13640305/m...
Why is it not likely this sort of thing was involved in this coronavirus pandemic?
Honestly I can't keep going because I need to be studying for the most important exam of my career (USMLE Step 1) but I can tell you just from the first couple pages of this extremely long thing that Yuri is not a virologist and has never taken a formal viral genetics class. He is making fundamental mistakes in how viruses evolve and change over time. He clearly knows a lot about biochemistry and regular genetics, but viruses are a whole different ballgame.
The American experiment was all about splitting the governmental power among different entities, keeping the government small and letting the people preserve freedom and power - while still being protected by the government.
The constitution is a tool to prevent the government from overreaching - and it's been successful at that.
Unfortunately, this experiment also grew in the largest and most warmongering government in the world.
To me, the USA are the proof that minarchism doesn't work and that we need to try anarcho-capitalism.
The biological research community are obviously playing with some much riskier toys than everyone else.
Is this the main stream opinion now? Can you provide a link?
Or is this just your personal opinion?
See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
The Chinese authorities are not stupid. They know how bad it looks to not allow investigation. Which means they think the result of a free investigation would look even worse.
What an odd way of thinking. So if there actually was a lab leak, and the US wasn't doing this research we couldn't investigate it?
This really indicates you have idea about China. The CCP can easily make millions and tens of millions not only quiet, but enthusiastically deny what happened to them.
Obviously noone can prove a negative, there's a chance it came from that lab, but the odds are astronomical that it came about the same boring way as bird flu and SARS.
"with zero evidence"? The Chinese government told their labs destroy lab samples at the beginning of the pandemic. The Chinese government refuse to give raw data of early patients to the WHO investigation team. Not matter what the origin of the virus is, the "covering up" is strongly supported by evidence.
Humans responding to a crisis by blaming each other. Most predictable thing ever. HN commentariat talking with such authority about things which they know nought and can't even see beyond their bias to engage their rational faculty about. Me included
Double most predictable thing ever. Hn is a microcosm.
Each of us all prisoners of our bias pretending we hold the truth of the world in the palms of our hands. a shining pearl of truth is actually a musty bolus we've wrenched up from the bowels of our own experience.
If only we were all a little less sure. A little less strident. But it's not gonna happen. This is who we are. This is where we are. We are the truth!
So let's get back to fighting. It'll be dark soon... Still a lot of fight needs gettin done before the day's out.
Don't let me spoil yer fun, y'all.
As far as I know, the government may have tried, but the scientists themselves were not down with it.
This sort of culture of the openness of science is why the Chinese government distrusts scientists inherently. And also why Shi Zhengli has maintained an extremely consistent story with the pandemic despite the government's changing its story like 3 times. Also why they've since silenced her. They don't trust their own citizens, and definitely not their own scientists.
It's a common mistake to conflate the Gettysburg Address ("government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth") and the Preamble of the US Constitution ("We the people...")
In the US, all things are aligned with Team A vs Team B. Better to collect data and present next year.
Their government has more support from their people than ours does -- ours is capped at 50% approval.
So go whole hog or go home. Hair-splitting is for cowards. Either include the people or, if you'd like, you can start wondering why they think that, maybe they have more context and things are more subtle. But you can't think one is black-and-white evil without including the other.
Not for this one. There were several cases we know preceded the wet market cluster. This was known in January 2020.
But I hate the stupid racism and hate around it. COVID-19 attacked every country. With the exception of, like, New Zealand (but it affected them as well... had to shut down their borders, etc).
These viruses are a threat to all humanity. I just want us to fight them better and help everyone.
I think it's super important that we both simultaneously hold China accountable (rhetorically, in the social sphere at very least) for aggressive expansionary actions (i.e. vs Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines) and human rights abuses (Uighur, etc)...
...while simultaneously trying to help everyone do better, including the Chinese, to face common threats (like novel viruses, climate change, etc). And we must not start up a new Cold War with all its proxy conflicts, death, and unnecessary economic suffering and threat of annihilation.
All seem plausible because...
1) gain of function research is super risky and there have been lab escapes before. We need to do MUCH better about lab leaks. We should spend more on security and have greater transparency. We should also question whether it even makes sense to do that kind of research.
2) Same thing for natural research sample being leaked...
3) wet markets are probably a really bad idea. And we should probably keep a better eye on natural virus variants, HOWEVER... that's somewhat in conflict with the "maybe this research isn't worth it" line of thinking.
So we have some somewhat hard trade-offs, here, but there are aspects where we can just do better. Like, whenever we do do research on viruses, we should probably be a LOT more careful about how and when we do it.
And although it's very unlikely the virus was engineered, we should probably be careful with the technology that would let it be engineered. The technology that makes sequencing novel virus strains and developing novel vaccines using mRNA also makes it easier to engineer a virus. This is a tough one because if we had clamped down super hard on mRNA tech too early, we would've been perhaps unprepared to make a vaccine...
I read your post on Reddit back in the day. It was evasive and frankly condescending because you basically argue against something no-one familiar with the science is claiming: that COV is a chimeric virus that is the product of copy-and-paste genetic manipulation rather than directed evolution or gain-of-function research that has resulted in phylogenetic drift against something that was found in the wild -- most likely RaTG13.
And why should anyone take your writing seriously when you don't even talk about "gain of function" research or the various other techniques that have been used in the past decade to aerosolize viruses like H5N1? If you know about them and are deliberately omitting all mention and analysis you are just being dishonest. If you don't then you clearly aren't an expert.
There are also lots of on-topic scientific claims you could address that would let people evaluate your competence and also provide illumination -- what do statistical models say about how long it would take for RaTG13 to evolve into COV19 in the wild? What about in a lab? How likely or unlikely it is to find virii so far away from known ancestors? What are the chances of finding them once we start looking in the wild -- should we have expected to find a closer ancestor by now? And what about the claims made by the State Department about WIV, its closure in September (related: who in the West should be able to confirm/deny if this is the case)? I'd also personally be interested to hear how long it takes to develop research mice with ACE2 receptors since their existence by mid-2020 surely suggests a targeted research agenda that preceded the outbreak? Could scientists in Beijing really have done that in 2 months or whatever?
If you want to be taken seriously, you need to frame the top two or three most credible lab-escape scenarios that work with what is actually public knowledge. Then address the evidence for and against. Setting up strawmen argument, knocking them down and then virtue-signalling on racism isn't useful or on-topic.
But evil is evil. And theres a really bad and consistent track record.
The Chinese government is not at war. They are vastly less at-war than the US is. They have no rally-around-the-flag effect and yet their people still like them better than we like our government.
It’s important to split this in two: one thesis is that it was invented or created or synthesized at a lab in China. This I’m far less bullish on.
The other separate thesis is regardless of origin, man made or wild, it accidentally or intentionally found its way through the doors of a lab in China and into society. It’s this one we’re talking about. At least I am.
None of the bats they claim it came from were sold at the market. Meanwhile, they're tracking down every bat strain they can find and collecting them at the Wuhan lab.
Carelessness in handling would be the root cause whether the virus was manipulated or not. You provide zero evidence on the most important point.
Now, to the more conspiratorial point. UFO pyramid-shaped small drones hounded a US destroyer group for many hours. Any drone flyer would tell you that drones that shape are heavy and even stripped down ones don't fly for dozens of hours.
By the numbers, that requires a huge leap in material science and energy storage. This was not too far from a base that does classified research, so I doubt the cause was more than human.
The military really does keep a generation or two of technology to itself in every area it can. If they did make a breakthrough in quickly modifying viruses, would they publish it in a paper? No more so than the NSA would immediately publish their discovery of differential cryptanalysis. It became public in the late 80s. IBM kept it secret since the early 70s and the NSA knew about it long before that. That’s probably because the NSA employs the lion’s share of mathematicians in those areas (which also makes recruiting more top scientists easier).
Other countries do the same. If Chinese scientists discovered a faster and more natural looking method of manipulation, what incentive would they have to publish a paper? Their only incentive would be to hide it as much as possible and use it as a material advantage in the upcoming and growing conflict with the US.
I believe it was probably naturally discovered and leaked through carelessness, but assuming they couldn’t possibly have had a breakthrough when other countries obviously have in many other areas seems overly confident.
You can always respond to those if you want.
Sorry if I come off as condescending but when you have this argument several dozen or hundred times, it gets really really repetitive.
And it's difficult to avoid sounding like a dick. It's not my intent, I promise.
I think this is in large part a display of the power the media has to steer what a population thinks about. They clearly don't want the root cause investigated, or even thought about for that matter. We should go one step deeper and question why that is so, and who stands to benefit from that?
The military (in the US at least) has too much red tape and bureaucracy that gets in the way of that kind of fast-paced experimentation.
Source: I was about an inch away from working at the Defense Intelligence Agency after grad school, but this is why I turned them down. After talking to all the people on the hiring team, this was the consensus. They did it because they loved their country, despite those challenges. And this is what my friends at USAMRIID tell me (US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases). If they want to present anything or publish it, they have months of red tape to go through first. They can't collaborate as easily either.
Also you can read books like The Hot Zone (sensationalized, but shows they weren't doing anything that wasn't happening at the same time in academia) or Ken Alibek's BioHazard, both of which describe the past history of bioweapons research and how it wasn't 10 years ahead of anyone else (in the USSR or the US). It was about where everyone else was, but applying it maybe 2 or 3 years ahead of the game.
Easier to just assume I won't respond and then they'll look more "right."
They left that behind a long time ago in favor of "The US did it."
I actually provided several links filled with sources above.
here is the main one you're referencing again: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
Thanks
https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
This absolutely shouldn't be China vs. USA, and it's deeply unfortunate that the Trump administration's early, characteristically unsupported rhetoric made it so. The WIV's safety was probably below American standards, but probably closer than a wet market is to American agricultural standards. So it's ridiculous to think a lab vs. natural origin makes it "more China's fault". If the CCP is currently covering up a lab accident, then they're probably quite unhappy that they've been "forced" to do so, and wishing in retrospect they'd instead decided a year ago to publicly blame the rogue, American-funded researcher.
Long before the pandemic, this was an obscure academic debate, between virologists who wanted to perform certain risky experiments and others who thought they presented an unacceptable risk:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097416/
With the possibility (absolutely not proven; but not disproven either) that such an experiment has just killed 2.9M people, that debate takes on a terrible new significance.
-http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid-19_did...
-http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid-19_did...
I also address the statistical models you describe, here:
-https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
I go into detail about petri dish vs lab animals vs accelerated evolution and how implausible it is.
Re: sampling viruses in the wild this isn't necessarily my area of expertise, I'm a lab guy. But I do know a lil bit about it, re: ebola in bats mostly. Only that it actually takes much longer than you think, and it has to do with our sampling methods. RNA is really really really short lived outside the host, and our sampling methods aren't that good at finding it inside animal secretions, they're optimized for humans and humans want to be sampled. you don't need to squeeze a human to get them to pee in a cup, or spit in one, or hold still to swab them like you do bats. So sampling is much more difficult. And since it's out in the field, the RNA decays more quickly too. Some advances have been made in this but it still is quite difficult.
To give you an idea, here is a paper all about the vastly MASSIVE amount of estimated undiscovered viruses out there (figure 3 in particular): https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22975
I address the state department stuff also: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
Re: research mice, the mouse germination time from IVF to F1 (the first useful generation of mice) is about 12-16 weeks. Not that long on the global timescale, but really long in science. You can see a source for this here: http://ko.cwru.edu/info/breeding_strategies_manual.pdf
And that's from Case Western in Ohio, not a Chinese source. It really is that fast.
I'm sorry I'm not framing my arguments in precisely the way you want them, I framed them how I received the arguments out there having discussions in the real world with real skeptics. I then constructed the post to respond to those arguments I had been asked about.
I'm sorry, but that's just the way it is. Take it or leave it.
RaTG13 was such a virus (collected 2013, published post-pandemic), but it's very unlikely to be the ancestor for the reasons that you note. No one outside the WIV (and thus, no one beyond the physical control of the Chinese government) knows what other viruses they had in their freezer or database. Deigin has recently published an article claiming to have discovered a novel coronavirus in contamination of agricultural samples sequenced at the same facility:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533
To be clear, the new virus that he "discovered" absolutely is not an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, and he absolutely isn't claiming that is; but it's (more) evidence that the WIV had unpublished coronaviruses.
The WIV took their database of viruses down from public access in September 2019. They say this was due to repeated hacking attempts. They haven't restored access, or provided their database in another format (e.g., a dump on a flash drive) that obviously presents no information security risk. Do you believe their claimed reason for taking it down? If not, why do you think they're lying?
There was a lot of controversy around the P4 lab in Wuhan when it was built, as this was seen an unnecessary risk. There has been breaches of security protocols several times in the past.
The fact that a new virus would first appear in that city would have been quite a coincidence that could not be ruled out, but the accidental lab release should always have been an hypothesis.
Look, if the point here is blame, have at it. It started in China, blame China, feel great about that and don't worry about our government's performance or theirs.
But if the point is truth, it probably came from agriculture->society. Labs are not necessary for that story, and China was blindsided anyways.
As someone who lives in New Zealand, we were still "attacked" by covid all the same. The only difference arguably is the coordinated response from our government compared to others. Some of that is presumably culture too (we don't have a document held to a pseudo-religious standard ie the constitution for example) although being too laid back can have its consequences too if emergency health laws were to be abused in order to infringe on personal freedoms for example
People here generally aren't blaming China because that's where COVID-19 originated. That would be stupid.
No, they're blaming the CCP for covering it up in the early days, which allowed it to spread and become the global pandemic which it became. Big difference.
It's not China's fault that COVID originated there (lab leak or otherwise). It is their fault for covering up the scale of the problem and thereby helping it spread.
I don't see how their opinion matters, since they're misinformed and orchestrated by the CCP.
The Hainan incident was caused by a Chinese fighter pilot running into a US surveillance plane. The former is agile, the latter is not, so that's the fault of the fighter.
Also, a plane in distress doesn't need permission to land. For the CCP to make a big deal out of that when there's no other runway available shows their true nature - evil and authoritarian.
The CCP has been at war with the US since the 1950s over ideology. If the US was not their enemy, the CCP would just pick another country.
I've noticed that otherwise intelligent people seem to place significance in "man in the street" conversations with people who live in totalitarian countries and have no power.
There's a phrase for that, useful idiot:
Once the pandemic emerged, the CCP's response was certainly terrible in many well-known ways (e.g., their attempt to suppress Yan Limeng's initial alarm, and the disappearance of multiple citizen journalists from Wuhan), though it's impossible to know whether a better response could have suppressed its worldwide spread. That's a separate question from those earliest origins, though.
Today they are all being harrassed by anonymous internet users because their conclusion didn't follow some conspiratorial paranoid anti-China story. What does that tell you?
There are people out there who happily make up stuff to fit a certain story. And people who will happily repeat it.
You can bury your head in ignorance and let yourself be manipulated by the likes of Steve Bannon or you can choose to listen to people, who actually have qualifications in the field and who have a meaningful reputation to loose.
I just don't think the anti-CCP sentiment is unjustified, though.
Whether it was a lab leak is important but a misdirection.
Their cover-up of the true scale of the problem (lab leak or not) made it hard for politicians in other countries to lock down quickly. It helped it spread intentionally to multiple countries and by then it was too late.
If they were blasting their sirens early in 2021 instead of covering it up we might have had swifter border closures etc.
What is most astonishingly stupid about this particular racism is that while the CCP doesn’t come off looking great in significant ways, Taiwan comes away looking spectacular! Japan, Korea and Vietnam also have a lot to be commended for major aspects of their responses! Asians in the United States have on average done an excellent job of staying safe and therefore keeping our communities safer! The rest of us should be studying their policies and behaviors with a mind to adapt and emulate not having racist delusions.
If the latter, I don't think you have any evidence to say the pandemic didn't begin as a result of an accidental release from a lab in the literal epicenter of the pandemic. It's not possible to prove a negative in general, although in this case, it would have been pretty easy to prove by allowing international inspectors into the facility and turning over records.
Of course labs are not necessary. However, there's a precedent for labs causing outbreaks.
Were it indeed a totally spontaneous wild situation that occurred, why would I blame China? Diseases start all over the place, there's no fault for that. Any more than I blame the Congo for Ebola (named after the Ebola River) or America for Lyme disease (named after Old Lyme, CT). Even if it was an accidental release from a lab, I don't think China as an entity bears responsibility for that.
If it was an accidental release from a lab (an if), then they bear the responsibility for the coverup that led to insufficient efforts towards containment.
America has done a dreadful job to be sure, but that's more whataboutism.
I will say DDOS attacks on scientific databases are not that uncommon. This is the same reason that a lot of scientific publication data are now hosted by the publisher and not the scientist.
It's rarely actually a malicious "hacker," though. Usually it's some grad student somewhere pulling a really crappily made wget script out and accidentally using all the bandwidth.
Scientists aren't actually that great of programmers, yours truly included. Have I done this before with an independently hosted database? I can neither confirm not deny. Lol.
But seriously I have no idea. I get why you find this suspicious, but to me it is extremely circumstantial and I can think of a lot of mundane reasons for it.
For one, I don't know that the translation of DDOS and hacker or idiot script kiddie is nuanced enough between Mandarin and English.
It is not feasible to do this probably. The WIV even claims to have completely consumed all biosamples related to RaTG13, which is the most-closely-related known virus to SARS-CoV-2. Supporting such an investigation is completely counter to their interests (speaking both of the institute and the CCP).
The overwhelming evidence is that SARS-CoV-2 emerged completely adapted to humans. This has been confirmed by the amazing lack of initial adaptation to the new human host. We only saw major changes in the spike resulting in a change in phenotype later in 2020. The proximal origins of the spike protein suggest a primate or human host. For this to happen, a natural origin in another species is astronomically improbable. It's the strongest evidence that we'll ever have as to the origins of the virus, and to this biologist it is completely indicative of what happened. We will only know the full truth if people speak out.
Perhaps I could believe that a small group of virologists would have trouble keeping a website running, and that just by chance they gave up right around when a pandemic likely first entered humans, of the same type of virus that they studied in the same town--coincidences do happen. But now that this is a matter of international importance, do you really believe that no one in China has the technology to make this information available in any form? That seems impossible to me; so why don't they want to?
I appreciate the opportunity to discuss, and I do believe that you're sincerely convinced that the chance that virological research could result in such an accident is negligibly small. With respect, I'd suggest that your attitude seems typical of the profession, and that that's exactly when the worst accidents happen. Engineers are constantly taught that their work may bring catastrophe, and that it's their job to consider and manage every conceivable way that it could. I get the feeling that virologists aren't, perhaps because there are fewer past disasters to point to; though with the 1977 flu pandemic as a warning, that's not a great excuse.
Consider for a moment the propaganda value of being able to say, "we visited their labs and witnessed first-hand their failure to {do some sanitization procedure} correctly! Oh how they clearly don't value human lives!"
I know the news reports you're referring to, but they're a good example of sensationalist reporting on China.
Very early on, when several patients in Wuhan had pneumonia of unknown cause, doctors sent samples from the patients across the country for testing. When it turned out that they had a novel coronavirus, that triggered rules about dealing with dangerous pathogens. You can't just have something like SARS-CoV-2 sitting around in any diagnostic lab. Labs with lower standards of biosecurity were required to either transfer their samples to labs with better biosecurity or to destroy them.
These sorts of rules are not unique to China. The US has very similar rules. However, in the hands of the news media, this story has been misrepresented.
> The Chinese government refuse to give raw data of early patients to the WHO investigation team.
Good luck getting any government to allow you to take 75000 de-anonymized patient records out of the country.
I have pursued most of what OP posted on reddit, I am not qualified to judge the finer points, but it doesn't mesh up with what I have seen presented by other independent expert sources or common sense. So I discounted it for that reason not the one you gave.
At least for now, the powers at be seem content just continuing the existing one.
Of course no country’s government has the full support of its citizens, but to say Chinese people are wholly distinct from the CCP is disingenuous.
There is no ruling ethnicity, just a more unified single party system. People can choose to participate in politics, they just have to do it within the party.
Likely, unlikely, it's not really possible to attach probabilities to events that already happened. Also history is told chronologically, when told anti-chronologically we tend to make causal connections where there are none.
I don't want to dismiss the lab theory completely but consider this:
These kinds of labs are all over the world, in China, in the Netherlands, in the US and so on. They are mostly being built in metropole regions because that's where large science clusters tend to be. Coincidentally city centers are traditionally built around markets. These tend to be the densest areas of cities. Densest areas are where infection clusters are most likely to build up and get noticed.
And now we find a case where all these 3 coincide. Really, that doesn't say much. Also there have been quite some hints about Covid19 cases before December 2019, outside of China even. [1] Statistics is a highly counter-intuitive discipline. If it wasn't maybe the virus would be already under control anyway.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-01/covid-inf...
I don’t think that’s how legal system or science works(at least in statistics). We can assume that null hypothesis is that there was no leak/engineering of the virus, i.e. defendant isn’t guilty. Then it’s up to a prosecutor/someone with the evidence to reject that hypothesis. But you don’t start proving the alternative hypothesis when doing science, since it’s much more complicated. And again, the defendant doesn’t have to prove his innocence.
SARS-CoV-2, by contrast, is not among any of the sequences published by the WIV over the years.
An RBMK reactor cannot explode.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.5815...
Your comments on mutation rates confirm that RaTG13 is not closely related to COV (we knew that) and imply we should expect to find a closer relative. Yet we haven't. And the paper you share argues (again) against your conclusions by pointing out that neither Yunnan nor Wuhan are expected hotspots for missing zoonoses to emerge. We've also now spent more than a year hunting there and elsewhere in SEAsia and haven't discovered anything remotely related. But China won't let anyone look at or sample Tongguan mineshaft.
Your comments on the State Department factsheet don't say anything except express a vague chummy solidarity that would lead a reasonable person to believe that SOMEONE in your group of international scientists should be able to confirm or deny allegations the WIV was in fact shutdown for a week in September. If no-one cannot confirm or deny this direct and very specific allegation how can anyone take seriously your claim that international civilian researchers would have any clue who was doing what kind of research in the facility or with its materials elsewhere? And if your mouse answer is correct surely it should take significantly longer than 4 months to bootstrap a program that can do practical experiments on mice with human ACE2 receptors, if only because IVF is hardly the start of the process.
None of these things support your argument. They just raise further questions that you seem to have zero interest in flagging or asking, despite having a very keen interest in the conclusions that you want people to draw. Science does not work that way.
How should one tell the difference?
> think that private companies should have the right to shut down discussion they don't like
That's a perverse take on supporting 1st amendment rights. Do you believe that right-wingers in turn believe that private companies should be forced to serve users and content they don't want to?
I disagree. The actions from a lot of countries were absolutely lacking, even when they could see how bad it was given both China's data, and Italy, Israel's initial incidents.
China locked down super hard towards late February/mid-March.
During this time there was countless reports about the "ridiculous" and "draconian" lockdowns that occurred in China. The West basically pointed fingers, laughed, and said we'd be fine. And yet they're still not.
> If they were blasting their sirens early in 2021 instead of covering it up we might have had swifter border closures etc.
I agree that even earlier warning would have been good. I just don't see it changing anything. Countries only started to take it seriously when it really started to affect them. They didn't want to risk a political/ financial hit on taking the measures that were needed, and they paid for it.
* There is no evidence that the virus originated with imported frozen seafood.
* There is no evidence that the virus originated with US Army personnel who were present for the Military World Games.
* There is no evidence for the "multiple origins theory" that the Chinese government is currently promoting.
The wet market origin theory would be more plausible to me if not for the fact that SARS-CoV-2 was found all over surfaces there but not in a single live or dead animal. That seems to indicate that it was merely the location of an early superspreader event and not the true origin.
It would be more accurate to say: these viruses are a threat to the current socioeconomic and sociopolitical status quo.
Take air travel for instance. It was key to spreading this and other pandemic viruses. Yet no one is questioning air travel. Note: I'm not suggesting it should be shut down, only that the idea of international flights being normalized should be revisited.
Looking at Forbes latest list to the richest people in the world tells us 2020 was a great year for wealth redistribution (from the bottom to the top). It was a great year for the status quo, for the globalists. As for the rest of us? 2020 was not so good.
Ultimately, the virus is a symptom.
It's really funny you mention that because when I presented this paper in my departmental journal club, that was the #1 criticism levied. This model over-enriches for South America and under-enriches for East Asia.
Mostly it has to do with (in my opinion) their under-reliance on host-specificity and over-reliance on overall biological diversity. The Pacific Northwest is a hotbed of ecological and biological diversity in rodents among other things, but we haven't had any major outbreaks out of that area yet (knock on wood).
Papers can be wrong or whatever. Or underappreciate things. Lots of other scientists think there's a massive underappreciated reservoir of bat-related viruses in Asia. Peter Daszak is the obvious one, but also Heinz Feldmann, Christian Drosten, Peter Daniels, basically anyone who has ever studied bat viruses or influenza viruses believes there's a lot left undiscovered in Asia. That's also why several of the most recent hemorrhagic fever virus meetings from Keystone was in Hong Kong. SARS-1 is a big memory there, and not a very long ago one.
>SOMEONE in your group of international scientists should be able to confirm or deny allegations the WIV was in fact shutdown for a week in September. If no-one cannot confirm or deny this direct and very specific allegation how can anyone take seriously your claim that international civilian researchers would have any clue who was doing what kind of research in the facility or with its materials elsewhere?
My BSL3/4 was shut down all the time. For maintenance or whatever. They're facilities that go down for maintenance often because of how important it is to make them safe. Anytime an autoclave broke, or a fan broke, you had to take it down because it no longer met the biosafety standards set forth in the protocols.
I personally have no idea if it was shut down for a week in September, that's a very specific thing. Do you know exactly when a company in your line of work started doing work from home? Or when it was shut down for an internet outage? etc. etc. That's a very specific thing.
Sure I could ask around and probably figure that out. But I also don't want to, because I'm not interested in fueling your conspiracy theory when I have no idea what relevance that would have to the likelihood of a lab leak. Given how often these facilities shut down. They do it yearly as a rule, and often 4-5 times per year due to other maintenance reasons. And yes that includes brand new facilities. I cannot tell you how many times people at the BSL4 in Montana here in the US told me about facility shutdowns as reasons they couldn't conduct my experiments! It delayed my PhD a bit!
IVF is actually ALMOST the start of the process since we already had the ACE2 gene sequence. I suppose you would have to clone it and that might take a month. So altogether probably 3-4 months. Especially since it was TOP priority, like drop everything else and do this.
I'll give you an example. In my work, we had to clone Stat1 and Stat2 knockout mice, these are a model for Zika and for testing ebola vaccines and creating anti-Ebola antibodies, I published a paper all about it you can look it up in my gscholar linked elsewhere here.
Anyway, to go from idea to first generation of mouse (I didn't actually do the work, just watched someone else do it this was really early in my PhD)... it took about 6 months. And that's with a zillion other things on our plates. If it was the ONLY thing we were doing? Yeah it probably could have been done in 4 months. Probably 3 if you gave us unlimited funding and perfect facilities.
Science doesn't work the way you want it to work either, btw. It's not about wild hypotheses and conspiracies about people hiding stuff from the public. It's not about supposition and theoretical thought experiments. We rely on concrete data to make very small conclusions based on probability, and then test them.
Unfortunately, this really isn't a testable hypothesis either way. That's why the occam's razor factor matters so much here. It really is a probabilistic argument.
I never said it was impossible that this was a lab leak, only really unlikely.
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
But this event doesn't look anything like those other lab release events.
See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
All we can do is make probabilistic arguments. Inferences. Inductive reasoning.
And that sort of analysis, occam's razor based on the least new assumptions necessary to conclude the mechanism, I think the zoonotic theory is more likely.
The lab theory isn't impossible, it just requires a lot more untested and unknown assumptions.
Zoonosis is just a lot more likely.
It's more correct to think of e.g. Carlos or Elon as leading efforts to bake lots and lots more pie, and then keeping a lot of the pie for themselves. The dominant theme is that they're creating value that didn't exist before, not taking a larger proportion of already-existing value.
It's not super likely, because we don't have the epidemiological data (increased deaths from non-influenza pneumonia at a large scale) to support that, to my knowledge.
It's certainly possible. And it is true that our methods of detection of viruses are ill-equipped so you can assume we're almost always behind the curve a bit.
But there also isn't much more than anecdote to support this. Lots of people get influenza-based pneumonia in the winter. Could you consider the possibility that your recollection is now tainted? And that you are primed to notice those events more? It was also already a very bad flu season. See here:
-https://time.com/5758953/flu-season-2019-2020/
-https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/924728
Another kind of issue is that early reports of "SARS-2 positive serum!" were overblown, which colored a lot of news reports on this. They basically made the tests too "promiscuous" so they also detected antibodies against common cold coronaviruses. That was a big problem. If you're curious about how tests like this work, you can check out this other post I wrote on that! Antibody tests are actually my specialty!
https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/g1ty3g/are_immuni...
Why would this support either hypothesis? The cleavage site clearly has nothing to do with RATG-13 and it is probably one of the main drivers of SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis. See here:
-https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03237-4
-https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7457603/
But before you say "See! Gotcha! That means that the cleavage site is the smoking gun!"
It also looks, from a molecular perspective, like a natural recombination event. See here:
-https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2020.0078...
I'm in Germany and the whole situation is a joke. Incompetence in any way possible, everywhere. Half heated "soft lockdowns" whenever things get worse, reopen everything as soon as it gets a little better, then be all surprised that incidents are on a rise again, rinse and repeat. Obviously every state does this without any coordination with neighboring ones.
And it's not surprising. Do you think any politician is even remotely qualified for the position they have? Usually you get your position as minister of health, or defense, or whatever, but because everything in Germany just goes its way and nothing is wrong, you do your four years, pass a few meaningless bills, and that's it. Now that we have a pandemic at our hands and the minister of health would have to actually do something for the first time in several decades, the whole spiel falls apart.
Here's the thing: in my mind, anyone who wants to claim the virus escaped the lab as a result of an accident needs to show how someone could have gotten infected with it while working with it in a lab using BSL-3 precautions. We're all just walking around wearing plain old surgical masks, and sometimes not even that level of protection, but literally a piece of cloth is enough to reduce transmission of this virus significantly. Now, tell me how someone wearing full body PPE gets infected with it.
Even at BSL-2, any procedures that would create aerosols are done inside a containment vessel, so, I can't honestly see it happening there, either. And, it certainly wouldn't have been at BSL-1, as that's reserved for known non-pathogenic organisms. Basically, the criterion for a BSL-1 lab is "we grow bugs here, on purpose." Clearly, any of the bat coronaviruses they would handle at WIV would greatly exceed that level of precaution.
With that in mind, IMO, the real interesting bit this article had to offer was to suggest the possibility that the virus snuck into the lab. Given the virus's relative inability to spread via surface contact and necessity of aerosolized droplet spread, you still have to answer the question of how it got out, but, it's at least an intriguing origin story.
So, in summary, yes, the only correct answer we can really say for sure is "we don't know exactly where it came from, if it leaked out of a lab, and what might have been done with it while it was in the lab." But, I'm having a really hard time believing a virus that gets largely stopped by a simple mask could sneak out of a BSL-2+ lab.
Sorry. :(
I don't have the time or bandwidth to re-write it at the moment. But a lot of her arguments are similar to Dr. Degerin's and also Dr. Ebright over at Rutgers. They are a small minority, like the OP says.
I tend to rely on expert consensus when it makes mechanistic sense like this one does.
Nothing, no evidence we have, makes either possibility impossible. The lab leak just requires a lot more cloak and dagger and new assumptions. Occam's razer tells me to favor the hypothesis with the least new assumptions. Hence zoonotic release is more likely in my opinion. That's truly the crux of it, the rest of it is arguing over the number of angels on the head of a pin.
All new assumptions that make this theory less likely.
At this point, with their market cap and increased moderation, probably less likely than the two I listed.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26654122/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30806904/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16940861/ (this one says wet markets, which probably are an issue, but not as big as initially thought, and probably not the origin of CoV-2)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27726088/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27426214/
If we had shut down air travel early on globally (not just China...) and pursued a vigorous in-country test and trace program, we would’ve had a chance.
{Actually, done prior probably say the moon doesn't even exist, but I think this makes the point - there's a plausible reason for a reflector being there that doesn't require a manned moon-landing.
Just saying that for the sake of argument.
Though I did see a program as a teenager that presented some convincing 'evidence' that NASA/USA Government were lying to the public. Then it comes down to whether you trust the USAG who you know have lied access manipulated public perceptions on a grand scale, or trust random program makers who you don't yet know to be liars.}
As far as finding frozen samples, you'd also need verifiable documentation, presumably, otherwise we wouldn't know if it were a zoonotic sample ... so we wouldn't know if it were a wild origin, or a lab-captured origin?
If it were a lab-release, was it accidental or the actions of some other nation wanting to harm China.
It seems to me that conclusion people want is quite possibly not out there.
We don't know how many nukes Russia has, even though that's knowledge shared by thousands of people. There has only been a single point of information about Israel's nuclear weapons program, Mordechai Vanunu, and we still barely know anything. Heck, we don't even know if and when the Nintendo Switch 2 will be released, even though again thousands of people must be privy to that information.
I don't see what people find so unrealistic about conspiracy theories in general, especially when massive nationstates are involved.
The problem with having expertise is the ability to see how wrong, not-even-wrong, or sideways everyone else sounds when chatting about the subject.
The problem with a phd is making sure everyone knows how little you think of them.
>4. China is praised multiple times for its "near-elimination of SARS-CoV-2", but the official data is comically suspicious[3]. A total of 4,851 deaths in a country of 1.4 billion people. That week of April 13, 2020 was rough.
Indeed, the same day China decided to censor all covid death counts was the same day Chinese activists who were reporting on covid deaths using Github were dissappeared.
https://github.com/Terminus2049/Terminus2049.github.io
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/07/22/silenced-china-archivist...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bul...
And nothing requires accidents to happen the same way each time. If SARS-CoV-2 was a lab accident, then it's probably an accident involving a novel bat-origin coronavirus collected from nature. The WIV probably had the biggest program sampling such viruses in the world, and that's the database they made unavailable.
Why do you think that database is unavailable now? The WIV's stated reason could possibly explain why they took it down in the first place (though it would be a spectacular coincidence), but it doesn't explain why they can't bring it back up.
Note that I asked this in my previous comment, and you chose to ignore it, instead responding to the less substantive comment from another user. You likewise ignored my original question about the database until I asked it twice. You didn't discuss the possibility of an accident involving a novel, unpublished virus (which you consider the most likely lab accident scenario, I believe correctly) until others brought it up.
I don't think that's malicious, but that's not a comforting pattern. Virologists are supposed to be the experts, so they should be the ones presenting (and refuting where applicable) the strongest and most likely scenarios for a lab accident. Instead, they (and you) seem entirely focused on defending the profession, refuting easy and wrong arguments, and waiting to see how long it takes adjacent non-specialists to learn enough to discover the harder ones. You then dismiss their arguments, because they (David Relman, Alina Chan, Richard Ebright, I assume Marc Lipsitch too; the list is getting long) are mere molecular biologists or epidemiologists or whatever, and not specialist virologists.
Regardless of what we eventually learn about the origin of this pandemic, that's not the behavior of a profession that can be trusted to regulate itself, and I believe the world is realizing that now. It would be unfortunate if important virological research gets banned because the regulations are drafted by half-informed outsiders; but if virologists themselves don't seriously engage with the possibility that their work just killed 2.9M people, that's what will happen.
Of course that's not all virologists. Étienne Decroly has been pushing quite openly for an investigation of a possible lab accident, though mostly in French-language media and perhaps you'll find something wrong with his resume too.
And just so you don't miss it: Why do you think that database is unavailable now? Please feel free to ignore everything I've written except that question.
Maybe per capita but not per se. The US had 241 million international air passengers in 2019[1]. The UK had >160 million[2]. The US has two land borders with significant traffic and the UK had 21.5 million Chunnel passengers in 2019[3]. The volume of passenger shipping is also vastly higher in both countries. NZ also has almost no illegal border crossings.
NZ has a much smaller risk profile than these and many other countries. And this is born out by events. By the time the world became aware of what was happening the virus had already been spreading in Europe and the US for months. While it had been introduced to NZ it was still in much earlier stages.
[1] https://www.bts.gov/newsroom/final-full-year-2019-traffic-da...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/303654/number-of-arrivin...
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/304968/number-of-passeng...
China's low death count is exactly what you'd expect for a country that had a severe lockdown early on, and which has not had significant community transmission since.
Beginning in late January 2020, there was a strict lockdown throughout China. In Hubei, people were essentially told not to leave their homes, food was delivered door-to-door, local volunteers went around checking people's temperatures at home and sending sick people to hospital or quarantine, in order to prevent even family members from infecting one another. The virus was starved of hosts and driven to near extinction in the country.
When China opened up again, there were sporadic cases in some cities, which were finally dealt with through mass testing campaigns. In Wuhan, for example, the government tested nearly all residents (about 10 million people) over the course of a few days in June 2020.
There have been a few outbreaks since. China has very strict quarantine rules, but the virus somehow finds a way in every few months. Most recently, someone who was infected walked over the border from Myanmar, without being tested or sent into quarantine. When these outbreaks occur, the government tests nearly every person in the affected region (the newest twist is now that there are vaccines, the government is vaccinating every person in the affected border town - in previous outbreaks, they would have just done PCR tests on everyone). When you have the resources of a massive country to throw at a small, localized outbreak, you can actually contain it.
So the basic situation is that China had one major outbreak in Hubei province early on, but that the virus has been nearly completely absent from the country for more than a year now. China's death toll is exactly what you'd expect for an outbreak in one province that infected <5% of the population of that province before it was stamped out.
I'm absolutely not saying the origin doesn't matter for anything--if 2.9M people died due to a particular class of research, then that absolutely should affect our judgment as to whether that research should be funded or permitted (though that cost/benefit tradeoff seems grossly unfavorable to me regardless). The link between that question and China's perceived culpability just seems bizarrely overstated to me, divorced from the reality that the USA was entirely supportive of that research pre-pandemic.
So a lab leak, if true, would indeed significantly increase the number of lies being told.
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202005.0322/v2
Of course that's not evidence of anything malicious; the renaming and failure to reference might have just been inadvertent. But it's still a bit weird, and it unquestionably shows at least a 2.5 year delay between sampling and publishing even a fragment of the genome.
That delay isn't evidence of anything malicious either. Research takes time, and any group in any discipline has a backlog of unpublished work. The WIV didn't stop sampling in 2013 though, and no one outside China's physical control knows what else might be in their collection.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1181292.shtml (USA, misidentified as vape lung)
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1183658.shtml (something with Fort Detrick)
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202101/1214376.shtml (not the Huanan market, maybe imported seafood)
I guess you could try counting up and comparing the total lies implied by each origin, but the volume is so high that seems pointless to me. Their strategy seems more like a general fog of confusion to me than a particular story intended to be believed.
I don't have time to address the rest of your comment I'm sorry, I have already sunk so much time into this post that I should have spent studying. This is the exam I have in 3 weeks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USMLE_Step_1 Pay particular attention to the section marked "effect on matching residency." I never should have responded or brought myself into this post in the first place.
Sorry, but I need to exit now. I hope you find the certainty you're looking for, either way. I hope you find the solace in "holding virologists to account" that you are looking for, although I'm not sure it will happen the way you are suggesting.
It is true that in absolute terms NZ has small trade and travel relative to the UK and US, but those factors are far from being the only reasons that NZ has suffered less death and destruction. It’s more that the UK and US have done poorly.
> The WIV didn't stop sampling in 2013 though, and no one outside China's physical control knows what else might be in their collection.
They upload sequences to Genbank (just like they did with RaTG13, years before the pandemic), they have international collaborators, and they give talks at conferences. Tons of people know what they work on and what they have in their collection.
If that's true, then why has the WIV removed public access from their database? It serves only to remove a valuable scientific resource, and to cast suspicion on China; so why would they do such a thing? Do you genuinely believe that even with the international importance of the topic, no one in China can figure out how to keep a simple database-backed website up?
And again, Deigin et al. report assembly of the genome of a novel coronavirus from contamination in other published reads sequenced in the same facility:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533
As far as I can tell, this virus wasn't previously known outside the WIV. Am I mistaken? I emphasize again that their novel virus is relevant not because it's an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 (it's not), but because if the WIV had one unpublished virus, it gets harder to claim it's ridiculous that they might have had others.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-did-the-world-shut-...
One of the first things done by the Trump administration was close borders with China, but it was not enough.
Then you can see if they have the reasoning skills to convince themselves the moon isn’t a projection.
Yes, hence my "per capita" comment. The risk of infection getting into a country is more of a function of how much total traffic it gets rather than the per-capita traffic.
> And those figures are for the country, not a city.
Auckland Airport represents the vast majority of all international traffic into New Zealand, and not just flights.
> The point made that Auckland has a lot of travellers.
Not by absolute number which is what matters most for how easy it is for a virus to find its way in and get established domestically.
> It’s more that the UK and US have done poorly.
This is an important point and I do not belittle it at all. My point isn't to defend the USA and the UK but to point out that the difficulty of NZ's response was enormously easier both absolutely and relatively given the nature of NZ's geography and the fact that the local epidemic had barely started by the lockdowns. NZ has a lot to be proud of in its response, but no reason to be smug.
In any case, I certainly have work that I should be doing too, though lower-stakes than your exam. I'm not looking for solace or blame here; I just don't want another pandemic. Certainly this one might have been caused by exotic wildlife trading, or guano collection by farmers, or other nonscientific activity, and those activities should be restricted. But unless and until the WIV's collection and lab manipulation of novel potential pandemic pathogens can be confidently excluded as the cause, I don't see why anyone would permit that work either.
I'd privately guess that the Chinese government has already imposed such restrictions, and that while Shi's group may still publish occasionally for the sake of appearances their volume of risky research will fall sharply--the CCP doesn't want to lose face, but they don't want another pandemic either. Of course there's no way to confirm or refute that prediction but to wait and see.
Final note, I see that you wrote your "CoVID-19 did not come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology" post about a year ago. At the time, I would have mostly agreed with you; but since then no proximal animal host has been found, and quite a lot of Chinese-government obstruction has been. It's uncomfortable to adjust a position when you've previously made a strong statement; but that's a lot better than getting locked in to a position that you adopted based on less evidence than is available today.
Anyways, good luck on your exam. I'll continue to do everything I can to ensure that my group's designs don't explode or catch fire, and I hope you'll do the same with the risk that your (prospective) group starts a pandemic.
This is the worst idea I've ever heard. [1]
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
In any case, the point I think is important, and which I wanted to make, is "more pie, not dividing up the same pie" which works with both our stories.
Edit: oh, and I think it's probably not true that the people at the bottom are having a "harder and harder time". It of course would depend on which metrics you pick, but I generally understand that sort of sentiment as popular in the media but wrong in a Better-Angels-of-our-Nature kind of way. I could believe that people at the bottom are getting a smaller share percentage-wise, but the actual amount of pie they're getting is growing. People are living longer, healthier lives, there's less food insecurity, etc.
The DoD and specific branches of the armed forces just hand out money. It is those labs and the companies that staff them that are ahead of the current state of the art, but they're unable to commercialize them until after other applications are evaluated.
There is an increasing trend for the military to rely on CoTS hardware, but I know with some certainty there are still fields, like metallurgy (for jet engines), that are still leading anything else by a wide margin.
Yes - and that is a hell of a lot for a small place. It’s comparable to something like SFO, but at the far end of the planet. But yes, the scale is small by international standards.
> the difficulty of NZ's response was enormously easier both absolutely and relatively given the nature of NZ's geography
This helped, but there are a lot more islands that have done poorly. I’m not sure that it was enormously easier, but the few week we got were key. In terms of getting governments to move fast, NZs government moved far faster than one would have expected, and the advantage gained by the short delay due to geography undoubtedly saved us a lot of deaths. We were on a vicious exponential growth.
> NZ has a lot to be proud of in its response, but no reason to be smug.
Absolutely. My view is more one of horror at the considerable reliance placed on gut feeling, belief systems and hope rather than science and cooperation.
> The reemergence was probably an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0904322
About 700k people died worldwide. That's more than a typical flu season but not grossly so, and it's impossible to say with certainty what kind of flu season would have occurred naturally without the escape.
https://nouvelles.umontreal.ca/en/article/2018/01/19/you-re-...
SARS-CoV-2 is certainly worse. The 1977 flu pandemic is still a lot of deaths, though, and surprisingly little-known.
Correction, NZ had its first cases of swine flu connected directly with travel to Mexico, the epicenter of the pandemic, 10 days after the USA identified its first cases which were community spread. In other words the virus had been circulating for some time in the United States already and just happened to be observed then. Case in point. The US/Mexico border is the most crossed border in the world with 350 million documented crossings annually and undocumented crossings in the 6 figures annually. Each crossing is another chance that the virus gets in and starts spreading domestically which is why the first case was community spread and not associated with travel to Mexico.
> Covid19 reached New Zealand before Berlin.
Maybe the first detected case but considering that Germany had its first detected case in late January in Bavaria a full month before NZ's first case, again directly associated with international travel, the virus very well had opportunity to have already gotten to Berlin and elsewhere undetected.
> Even back in 1918 the flu pandemic reached NZ in months at a time when that journey by ship wasn't much faster!
This was the massive demobilization from WWI with a rush of repatriation from the epicenter of the pandemic which had been active in Europe for some time, Spain was just the first country to admit it had an epidemic. Again, my case in point, NZ was infected long after most of the rest of world because NZ is out of the way. Thank goodness it is.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349073738_An_invest...
I disagree, and think small island nations do have much better chances. Otherwise we'd probably have great success stories in places like Andorra, Armenia, and Vatican City. I'm sure island countries to be more self reliant, with fewer major transport hubs that can be locked down.
I think from what we've seen, you need to be a small island nation AND have a strong policy response to have a chance at averting this crisis.
Who is we? Who is pressuring the US to do anything?
DPRC is a sovereign state and can do as they damn well please just like the US.
Get off your high horse.
America has made a lot of enemies and inflicted a lot of damage and terror for what seems as both good and bad reasons. After all the one-sided "interventions", I find it hard to disagree that America (not the Americans affected) deserved something in return.
So why did you bring it up? The observation doesn't support zoonotic hypothesis at all, although it could support lab leak if we assume GOF was done on a natural or modified virus with a higher IFR rate, such as the ones known to be present in Tongguan where WIV sampled RaTG13.
Similarly -- it isn't clear why you are talking about the cleavage site. You appear to think it argues against some sort of hypothesis. But you haven't stated what you think the most credible lab-leak scenario is and why. It isn't even clear that COV came from RaTG13.
Here is fresh evidence (< 1 wk ago) that labs in Wuhan have worked on unpublished coronaviruses:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533
The above findings are replicable by any bioinformatician operating on published sources. This preprint was reviewed by one of the authors of the Human Genome Project’s landmark 2001 paper having served as an HGP sequencing team leader at the Whitehead Institute:
https://twitter.com/kevin_mckernan/status/137939900576396083...
The findings critically undermine Western zoonotic scientists’ (Daszak of the WHO-convened study particularly) claim that they knew what viruses WIV researchers were working on.
I'm quite familiar with my own industry and could easily fact-check claims of this specificity or follow-up with people who would know. If I could not do this, I would not be making appeals to authority in public.
> Sure I could ask around and probably figure that out. But I also don't want to, because I'm not interested in fueling your conspiracy theory when I have no idea what relevance that would have to the likelihood of a lab leak.
Conspiracy theory? This is a claim by the US Government. And you're clearly interested in "debunking" it given the amount you have written on the topic and your holding proactive AMAs. So - yeah - this leaves anyone reading your comments wondering (1) why you are rebutting strawmen arguments, (2) why you don't appear familiar with the facts [i.e. pushed the wet market hypothesis long after we knew it wasn't the origin], and (3) why you still aren't addressing basic, specific and addressable claims from sources with assumed credibility who take a different position.
> Science doesn't work the way you want it to work
The sad thing is that it does. You figure out what the most viable hypotheses are and then evaluate the evidence. Update your priors based on what you find and repeat the process. That's how you end up being able to make statements about Occam's Razor. Quite different from building strawmen, knocking them down and calling anyone who asks questions you a conspiracy theorist.
afaict the strongest evidence against lab-origin is the claim that COV was circulating in Italy in early autumn 2019, although I've read lately that the tests claiming this are now apparently suspect. go figure.
Taiwan had high mask usage early on. That would’ve helped a lot in the US.
Testing was very successful, actually, in places like Singapore. Didn’t help that there was official discouragement of wearing masks followed by culture-war mask avoidance in the US.
So either you're trolling me and pretending geopolitical hierachy doesn't exist or you may think my question is stupid. Either way...