https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the...
Origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus
And unlike the arrticle here, this report is based upon interviews with employees at the lab and various form of documentation provided by the lab. Including health records of the employees.
For more from one of the WHO people:
https://theconversation.com/i-was-the-australian-doctor-on-t...
I was the Australian doctor on the WHO’s COVID-19 mission to China. Here’s what we found about the origins of the coronavirus
> We visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is an impressive research facility, and looks to be run well, with due regard to staff health. We spoke to the scientists there. We heard that scientists’ blood samples, which are routinely taken and stored, were tested for signs they had been infected. No evidence of antibodies to the coronavirus was found. We looked at their biosecurity audits. No evidence.
So this is what they were told, but did they actually test the samples, and confirm that they belonged to the right people and originated from the given date? Apparently no.
> We looked at the closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 they were working on — the virus RaTG13 — which had been detected in caves in southern China where some miners had died seven years previously. But all the scientists had was a genetic sequence for this virus. They hadn’t managed to grow it in culture.
This is probably the most convincing argument: if they actually had worked on viruses similar enough to plausible be modified into SARS-CoV-2, this would have left evidence in scientific papers etc.
> While viruses certainly do escape from laboratories, this is rare. So, we concluded it was extremely unlikely this had happened in Wuhan.
This is incredibly weak: "lab escapes are rare, so it's extremely unlikely" is not much of an argument.
If I remember correctly, wasn't there no evidence in scientific papers etc that the virus RaTG13, which is the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2, actually existed until after the Covid pandemic started and they suddenly published information about it?
It seems that proponents of the lab leak theory wants to turn the burden of proof upside down: I am claiming conspiracy starting with Anthony Fauci and ending up in a Chinese lab. It is up to you to provide hard evidence on why it is not so.
Sure you can do that as in freedom of thought and speech. But honestly; this is not really a constructive way to go about things.
> The prior probability of a lab escape is low
but the prior probability of "a pandemic from natural causes envelops the world" is also low, say below 1% a year. But now, given that "a pandemic does envelop the world", the posterior probability of lab escape and natural cause of course rises dramatically... and then saying "we didn't see much evidence for it" on a superficial tour organised by those responsible for the lab does not strike me as a very powerful rebuttal.
It's akin to "the prior probability of labour camps is low", and "on our tour of North Korea (accompanied by several North Korean tour guides showing us just those places they wanted to show us when they wanted to show us) we didn't see any labour camps, therefore we conclude that the probability of labour camps in North Korea is low".
While we're invoking statistics: Take the null H_0 = "the virus emerged naturally in any large Chinese city with > 1m inhabitants". In 2017, there were 102 of those. Thus, the probability under H_0 that the virus emerged in the one city in China with a level 4 biolab has p < 0.01.
There is an investegative group from the WHO interviewing the Wuhan lab people and looking at various form of documentation.
The lab leak proponents claim that they are all lying and all the documents are fraudulent.
The lab leak proponents have the burden of proof and IMHO kinda should shut up until they can carry that burden.
Possibly also worth to consider that there are very high incentives to publishing in China, as far as I understand authors can often get rewarded for publications
It is akin to saying "Pliny the Younger didn't die in Pompeii overtaken by a volcano because there is so many other cities he could have died in and other causes of death." Statistically, that would have been true, up until we learned that it happened. Then the low probability ceases to matter, since it becomes an observation.
Statistically, this is due to both priors rising, proportional to their original values, such that now the sum P(lab escape)+P(natural cause) == 1 and their average is a coin-toss (50-50). So without outside information, the prior statistical probability isn't low: it is exactly neutral between the options.
We've also seen viruses arise in small villages. This is even more unlikely to be predictable in advance which village with p << 0.0001.
However, the evidence is pretty clear that this was found and published earlier. It was originally described as "BtCoV/4991" and it was described and published as far as I can find as far back as 2016. (The name was changed to RaTG13 to describe that it was collected in 2013 in Tongguan).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/983856042 <-- partial RaTG13 sequence in 2016
Saying there is no benefit is like saying there is no benefit for people people who switch jobs just so they get paid more.
Exactly, that's what I was getting at - the prior for lab escape is low, but given that the pandemic happened, it the posterior for lab escape is 1 - posterior for natural.
And we had about as many examples for lab escapes as for natural epidemics in the last few decades, it seems to me.
It's the media's job to investigate conflicts of interest, so the fact that they didn't looked into that, and that they took Daszak's original so-called debunking at face value, is bad optics on another level. It has left a credibility vacuum, so it's unsurprising that articles like the current one are coming in from the margins.