People get sick, especially in autumn. And they infect each other. Reporting that some people working at the lab were sick, without any knowledge about kind of sickness is only going to add fuel to the conspiracy theories.
I suspect I had COVID-19 in the US late December 2019, but as of yet, the CDC doesn't acknowledge that possibility, and I've had enough exposure since that time that there's no reasonable way to test the hypothesis.
At a certain point, some of the investigations stop being practical to investigate further.
I'm not trying to reject any hypothesis but I do reject the fervor. And then people come out of the woodwork and try to defend the Wuhan Lab as the source with a load of coincidences that trend to conspiratorial thoughts. Like how we only know of a related Covid strain in bat hundreds of miles away from Wuhan... but bats are not endemic to just Yunnan where the closest Covid-19 match was from. Does Wuhan not have bats?
The workers at the lab "were tested and there was no evidence found of Covid antibodies."
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/23/politics/us-intelligence-repo...
So theoretically it's possible that three workers at the lab were sick -- and hospitalized -- but with, say the seasonal flu. The original reports from the State Department about this even specified that the workers had been sick with symptoms "consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness."
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-report-of-illnesses-at...
>... is only going to add fuel to the conspiracy theories.
That's a bad thing only if the conspiracy theory is false. At this point, the theory that the Chinese Communistic Party conspired to cover up a lab leak is not implausible. There are multiple known occurrences of pathogens escaping from laboratories.
There are already variants and these vaccines will need booster shots to stay effective from what I was told. I'm not sure though. Is this true?
Covid has taught me a few things:
- Health is as important as wealth, living well is making time for both. It takes good health to build lasting wealth and to enjoy it. It takes at least some wealth to invest in good food, living space, life experiences.
- Living in Maui and working remotely is like semi-retiring in my 30s. I can make money and enjoy life at the same time without taking years off my life due to commutes and stress. Why didn't I do this in my 20s? I was learning the skills and figuring out what exactly I wanted in life. Now I know.
- I don't need a lot of people to be happy, just a handful of high-quality people. More than anything, I should give myself a lot of what I expect from others.
- Nature is more resilient than we know, Earth really be fine with or without humans. We can change if we want to but we can't agree on anything anymore. I'm hoping for the best but prepared for the worst.
This ACE2 binding is causing numerous issues, including damage to human heart, lung, kidney, and pancreatic cell death.
This is serious stuff. If anyone is looking at the "low" mortality rate, they are missing the big picture.
Role of angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) in COVID-19
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7356137/
The genetic structure of SARS‐CoV‐2 does not rule out a laboratory origin
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7744920/
SARS-CoV-2 infects human pancreatic β-cells and elicits β-cell impairment
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(21)...
> several researchers at the lab, a center for the study of coronaviruses and other pathogens, became sick in autumn 2019 “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-report-of-illnesses-at...
So 3 staff had gotten sick that flu season. Staff who work with infectious diseases and probably get every cough and cold checked out just in case. Seems pretty baseline average to me.
The disclosure of the number of researchers, the timing of their illnesses and their hospital visits come on the eve of a meeting of the World Health Organization’s decision-making body, which is expected to discuss the next phase of an investigation into COVID-19’s origins.
It is just me, or does it seem suspicious to anyone that this information existed, and wasn't reported in 2019 or 2020, or even in early 2021....but only just reached the press on the very evening of the WHO meeting.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-report-of-illnesses-at...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_synd...
Tested by whom and how? If a trustworthy disinterested party positively identified the workers, took their blood samples, and tested them via a procedure with a low false-negative rate, then the test results are meaningful. Otherwise, there is reason for doubt.
The interesting thing about that theory is: I don't know how to assess which of those two scenarios is more likely.
There's no discussion of how many people work at the lab, how many staff visited hospital the year before that, whether it is in fact common for those staff to visit hospital when they have seasonal flu, or any other factors that would put this in any sort of context at all.
What is "sought hospital care"? To get some Vitamin C or get some serious surgery? (In China people go to hospital more often I guess, as people tend to deal with ailments relying on doctors a lot, rather than letting it go by itself.)
Nothing told.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-report-of-illnesses-at...
This is a dangerous difference.
> SARS-CoV recognizes angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as its receptor, whereas MERS-CoV recognizes dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP4) as its receptor.
Not really. The original source was "a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report." It's quite plausible that the report had been on the shelf in 2019 or 2020, or only accessible to people who knew how to keep secrets, but then was more widely disseminated to prepare for this meeting, after which a leaker got hold of it.
Not disputing that. But it'd be nice to know who that partner was...
Further, the researchers were surely in the 18-49 age bracket. CDC’s estimates for the 2017-18 flu season in that age bracket were 58.8 per 100,000. That is 0.0588% per person per year.
And that’s the whole flu season. To have odds of being hospitalized in november you’d cut that in four at least.
And then the odds of three people in the same lab all needing hospitalization also needing hospital treatment? Even less likely.
Not impossible, but it’s not so simple as suggesting there was a bad flu season. There wasn’t in china then, and flu hospitalization is damned rare in non elderly.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm
(It is possible that the “hospital care” in the article doesn’t match “hospitalization” as cdc defines it, but any kind of hospital care for a young person from the flu is still rare)
That's what was being researched in Wuhan from what I've read in the media.
The ACE2 receptor affinity is not novel.
1. The testing showing no Covid-19 antibodies was fraudulent and faked.
2. That testing was not faked. The workers did not have Covid-19 antibodies; their illness was caused by some other illness.
3. The report of the lab workers' illness is faked. (It came from a conservative newspaper, from unnamed officials citing an unnamed international partner -- where somewhere along that chain, someone had the proper motivation.)
I'm not arguing for any one of these things. We just honestly do not know.
Anyway assuming it's at least not a lie, "sought hospital care" would mean it's not just a trivial cold. Again, I'll be waiting for more details, I just think Occam's razor is converging here, and there are more hurdles to dance around with the other explanations.
It would not be in the least surprising if this was a lab leak, and it is no more "harmful" to speculate that it was than to speculate that it was a wild virus.
Why do we need evidence of why a lab would do research in viruses that is a danger to people in the country? It's pretty self-explanatory. ACE2 isn't specific to SARS-CoV-2 as your own links says.
Do we still get to blame the lab for a leak?
But that’s not what this story is about. It’s just about being hospitalized, which means nothing, without any additional data. It’s like running a story that Obama visited Kenya, when birth conspiracy was rampant. It’s something you’d expect from CNN/Foxnews, but not from a reputable journalist organization.
For those that have run out of free articles.
Edit: Here's the WSJ article.
If you lay all the pieces of data out on a table, it's pretty easy to deduce this virus most likely originated from Wuhan.
The fact that China is not fully complying with releasing early COVID records and that the WHO is being sued says a lot...
Convinced how?
I don’t understand the reasoning. It’s not unusual for a virus to attack multiple systems or to have varying symptoms.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27184998 - May 2021 (235 comments)
More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27160898 - May 2021 (341 comments)
The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 - May 2021 (537 comments)
Edit: also these:
Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26750452 - April 2021 (618 comments)
Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540458 - March 2021 (985 comments)
The Lab Leak Hypothesis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25640323 - Jan 2021 (229 comments)
It took WHO over a year to be able to enter China. And what did they do? Release a memo denying laboratory theory without any evidence. No bat, nor intermediate has been found (not the case with SARS/MERS). Sure there is no evidence on lab theory either. The Chinese army has been running that lab since this started.
https://twitter.com/ZichenWanghere/status/139663272094448435...
It is an old story. Published earlier by Sputnik News last year. Got an official response. And the source is a mistranslated document (samples of sick human misread as sick employees).
Among these, viruses integrate quite closely with their host, so viruses that jump into a new species should normally infect less well, but sometimes they infect fine and just harm the host excessively. SARS, MERS, etc.
- 1st response to CoVID occurrence was certainly in Wuhan.
- The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan
- Wuhan had two institutes which, on record, did gain of function experiments on bat coronaviruses
- Beijing purposefully destroyed DNA evidence, and obliterated the team who first sequenced the CoVID genome
- Chinese authorities were scrambling, and suppressing reporting as early as November, seemingly with a very good idea what they are up to.
Do you realise that this is very easily true for any company or office at that time of the year?
Does the US government "have reason to believe that several teachers in a high school in Milan became sick in autumn 2015 with symptoms consistent with both Covid and seasonal flu"? Yes, it does! Good job, US government!
I was laid out in bed with the worst upper respiratory infection of my life for most of late December and then again for two more weeks in early January after a brief recovery.
A handful of our coworkers had been in Wuhan in the 3-4 weeks prior.
Either way, it's China's incompetence and reckless endangerment of the rest of the world that has caused this. So the more important question is what we will do about it?
So far the answer seems to be "nothing because the price of cheap plastic shit might go up 2p a tonne and that's more concerning than a global pandemic".
After seeing the response from Western countries, (delays, denialism, half measures, etc.) I really doubt we would have done any better. Probably worse.
> Here we show that SARS-CoV, but not HCoV-NL63, utilizes the enzymatic activity of the cysteine protease cathepsin L to infect ACE2-expressing cells.
The whole thing is sad that it is humanity at stake but we have a country so powerful it is in the way to prevent further study.
Sigh. Let us see.
It seemed like a reputed source article of interest to a lot of folks here, so I was surprised.
Dr Fauci recklessly claimed in May 2020 that it's "very, very strongly" impossible for this to have come from a lab. [1]
When will public officials actually be held to account for their flip flopping, often times leading to massive distrust from the population and killing people?
How many people are refusing vaccines because officials like Dr Fauci have lied repeatedly?
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/05/politics/fauci-trump-coro...
> Further, the researchers were surely in the 18-49 age bracket. CDC’s estimates for the 2017-18 flu season in that age bracket were 58.8 per 100,000. That is 0.0588% per person per year.
They're using CDC figure for the wrong year to say that younger people were not particularly affected. The 2019 flu season in Australia was
1) much rougher than the 2018 flu season in the US
2) much earlier than normal
Both of these mean that it could well have been an early, rough, flu season in Wuhan that hospitalised these people.
I understand that people really want this to be lab escape, but the way to show it's lab escape is to be honest when you're discounting everything else.
IIRC, public toilets due to fecal matter were a possible infection vector (I hope I am using the term correctly) [4], which suggests that there had been covid cases since December in Italy as the traces were in waste water [2,3].
Some hypothesise that covid had been circulating in humans long before the market outbreak [5], this hypothesis does seem to corroborate the hypothesis that the virus had long spread before the first 'official' outbreak in Wuhan.
[1] https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20210311-surprises-about-french...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53106444
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiegold/2020/06/18/new-scient...
[5] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/mar-27-covid-pandemic-origin...
Meanwhile the actual real people on the WHO team said they investigated and didn't find anything more than seasonal flu.
The thing is people doesn't trust WHO.
I think people have somewhat good reasons not to trust WHO blindly now.
I can't say however if this is a good or a bad thing.
It’s just a matter of time here. The question is mostly what to do with the information once it’s confirmed.
If you do not share even a small dose of doubt over WHO by now, well I guess we could label it as agree to disagree.
"Steven Quay, a physician-researcher, has applied statistical and bioinformatic tools to ingenious explorations of the virus’s origin, showing for instance how the hospitals receiving the early patients are clustered along the Wuhan №2 subway line which connects the Institute of Virology at one end with the international airport at the other, the perfect conveyor belt for distributing the virus from lab to globe."
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
(third to last paragraph)
There are multiple related claims that fall under the umbrella of lab leaks:
1. Did it escape from a lab?
2. Was that lab manipulating the RNA of the virus?
3. Was the lab doing so for nefarious/biowarfare related ends?
The CNN article is the usual manipulative bilge we might expect from them, because the headline is "Anthony Fauci just crushed Donald Trump's theory on the origins of the coronavirus", but Trump was claiming the virus escaped from a lab (claim 1) and then Fauci makes a counter-claim that it wasn't manipulated by a lab (claim 2).
The claim it escaped from a lab was always pretty strong given the long history of lab leaks and where it started. The claim the lab was manipulating it originally had to rely on RNA evidence, which is rather complex to understand, ambiguous and disputed. But recently people seem to have dug up documentary evidence that the US NIAID (led by Dr Fauci) was directing funding to the WIV specifically to manipulate bat coronaviruses, so claim (2) is starting to look pretty strong too.
Claim 3 looks very weak and is getting far less attention as a result. There's no evidence for it and COVID makes for an objectively very poor bio weapon. It's also not the most parsimonious explanation that works. Virology researchers had convinced themselves that GOF research was something important that they should be doing, and were able to work around US bans on it by doing it abroad and getting it approved by high level enough figures who could override the bans. They had clear incentives to do the work at low bio-safety levels, and appear to have done so (again from documentary evidence). As is often the case they thought they were doing something good for the world, and that the ends justified the means. They were wrong. No more complex explanation is necessary.
It didn't start at the market. They tested every animal there and found nothing, yet they found many infected people there and found the virus all over surfaces there. The market was an early superspreader event, not the origin.
Some of the evidence is not co-incidence based, for example, the documents that appear to show the US was funding GOF research on bat coronaviruses at the WIV.
However, the reaction of the Chinese authorities (destroy all the evidence, block any investigation) is pretty much the definition of a conspiracy. I'm not sure it merits the term theory anymore - when the authorities are very visibly covering up all the evidence related to a critical event, that's what a conspiracy is. The only question now is what is the conspiracy hiding? Well, there's only one obvious possibility, isn't there?
But the second part of the comment doesn't contain an iota of nationalistic element to it. It simply is a fact as reported by numerous newspapers and felt by many businesses here in Australia. The CCP is punishing Australian businesses as the Australian government is pushing for a proper investigation into a disease that originated in Wuhan and has killed (reportedly) close to a million people so far. In fact It's important to note that it's not a reflection on the people of China, rather the government. I'm happy to be downvoted, probably with nationalist intentions! But I haven't said anything wrong here.
It's starting to look like a lot of people took big steps to spread false information, perhaps for political purposes.
I'm not ignoring their first sentence. I'm explaining that their first sentence is wrong, and that isn't changed by looking at US figures for the year before.
China doesn't follow normal flu seasonal patterns. Instead of a single winter peak China sees flu all year with dual peaks in summer and winter - and the summer peak is higher. Flu starts in the south of China, and moves north over the year.
This particular type of flu was early, not just in Australia but world wide.
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/inf...
> The season has started slightly earlier than usual. It is too soon to predict how the season will develop in terms of peak week, severity and duration.
About severity: we can look at death. This flu season showed increased mortality. And we can look at hospitalisation. It had increased rates of hospitalisation. We can look at ages affected: some strains affected younger people.
> A(H3N2) is typically associated with serious health impact in older age groups.Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, are already seeing increased rates of influenza hospitalisation. There is no evidence of significant excess mortality at this early stage, however experience during past seasons suggests a significant mortality impact on the elderly during A(H3N2) dominated seasons.
> B virus circulation might be associated with a higher burden on younger age groups, as already observed in Portugal.
I know flu strains differ year to year - that's the point. The world pays attention to the flu in Australia because that tends to predict the strains in flu seasons elsewhere. This is part of the flu surveillance work to develop seasonal flu vaccines. This flu surveillance recommended that the vaccination included Australia strains:
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/who-recommendation...
> On 18–20 February 2019 in Beijing, China, the World Health Organization (WHO) agreed on the recommended composition of the quadrivalent influenza vaccine for the northern hemisphere 2019–2020 influenza season: an A/Brisbane/02/2018 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus, a B/Colorado/06/2017-like virus (B/Victoria/2/87 lineage), a B/Phuket/3073/2013-like virus (B/Yamagata/16/88 lineage) and an A(H3N2) virus component to be announced on 21 March 2019. The recommendation for the A(H3N2) component was postponed in light of recent changes in the proportions of genetically and antigenically diverse A(H3N2) viruses to allow more time for the selection of the appropriate virus strain. It is recommended that the influenza B virus component of trivalent vaccines for use in the 2019–2020 northern hemisphere influenza season be a B/Colorado/06/2017-like virus of B/Victoria/2/87-lineage.
My point is that there was a severe flu strain in Australia in 2019; this strain started making its way around the world; it would be unsurprising to see it in China at the time the article talks about; and that talking about the US stats for 2018 mean nothing because that was a different flu season with different flu strains.
Edit: reference for cave samples
If the lab leak theory was easy to confirm, it would have been done already. Maybe someday it will be confirmed or ruled out and I’ll happily upvote that story. This isn’t it, though, even if it is the WSJ.
> The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan
That's weak evidence to claim that the lab hypothesis is more likely or even just to claim that the virus in humans originates from Wuhan.
Wuhan is a transport hub within China. In relation to dates it might be worth taking into account that hundreds of millions of Chinese travel around the country in early October and that the outbreak in Wuhan was detected in November/December. Coincidence? maybe, maybe not.
Additionally, we can also look at SARS (i.e. SARS-Cov-1, while Covid-19 is SARS-Cov-2): That epidemic started with an outbreak in Guangdong province in November 2002 (again, note the relative proximity with early October). Since then the origin of the virus has been traced to a colony of bats in Yunnan province [1] (perhaps also worth noting that this took 15 years). If you look at the map that is quite far away (1000+ km) and domestic transport networks have vastly improved since then.
Based on this, I don't see why the exact same scenario as the beginning of SARS would not be the more likely explanation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
This feels so much like the Iraq "weapons of mass destruction" fiasco. Any time news outlets are credulously repeating the words of "government officials," you need to seriously devalue the reporting. Reporting isn't just being a mouthpiece for the state, and these outlets fail us when they express such a high degree of certainty before there's any independent verification of the facts.
Of course, everything you describe is still "circumstantial," and it's wise to remain skeptical. However, even if we somehow eventually confirm this was not a lab escape, there's absolutely no excuse for the certainty expressed by the NYT et al in their early reporting (which is true for so much of the other COVID-19 media coverage - the media did a terrible job of expressing uncertainty with very incomplete information throughout the entire affair).
For all of China, in November 2019, it looks like less than 2000 positive test swabs. The number of hospitalizations would be lower.
What are the odds that three hospitalizations would come from a single lab in healthy people? Not impossible, but not probable. Flu hospitalizations are very much clustered in the elderly and very young.
How about those several million minks in Denmark?
https://www.who.int/csr/don/03-december-2020-mink-associated...
Everything listed by GP was known a year ago, which is why it was so frustrating to get dismissed as conspiracy theory.
In general, my trust for the media has fallen through the floor in the last decade. I used to think that the media was mostly trustworthy, but that they would cater to the establishment on certain issues (e.g., WMDs and the general Iraq/Afghanistan war effort) but apart from those obvious high-profile issues they were mostly trustworthy. Now I can't tell if I was wrong the whole time and I've just wisened up recently or if the quality of the media has plummeted (especially with respect to ideological issues) or both. I strongly suspect that the media has become considerably more ideological (abandoning aspirations for neutrality and objectivity in favor of activism and proselytizing, at least to a degree), but I've probably (and hopefully) wisened up a bit as well.
What changed? Mostly the party in power. At the time it was politically expedient to say that Trump was being racist or xenophobic against China, so it was deemed necessary to paint comments by him or his supporters as xenophobic conspiracy theories. Then when he states something reasonable like the lab leak hypothesis they can portray him and his supporters as conspiracy nuts. And if it could influence the election even 0.1%, that would be bonus points for some people, although I would call that a dishonest influence.
Now that he isn’t in power, they’ve decided it’s no longer necessary to avoid telling the truth.
Problem with that assertion is that knowing what we know today about the virus, this should have generated superspreader event situations along the travel path, which would have transported the virus to other locations in china.
Instead the opposite happened, and china tried to contain the virus to wuhan.
Many people, including in the media, would have preferred that theory was actively censored.
If a zoonotic event in the wild with SARS-COV2 was easy to confirm, it would have been done already.
Either hypothesis has circunstancial evidence. But there isn't an equal effort of investigate both candidate theories.
Nevertheless, the gain of function research with coronaviruses has been documented in the peer-reviewed literature.
The lack of new information from the Wuhan Institute, despite its longstanding research activities, is probably the most compelling evidence in support of the lab escape hypothesis.
If the evidence pointed elsewhere, it would be released. The most likely explanation is that the Institute's fingerprints are all over this thing.
The second most compelling evidence is that to date the reservoir species has not been found.
I have seen this claim made recently, but as I remember the 'disregarded' conspiracy theory was actually that the virus was genetically engineered (ie codon sequence edited) in a lab. The virus' genetic code seems to discount engineering, but not serial passaging/hybridization.
Depends what you mean by government officials. Trump was in power and his statements on this were called conspiracy theories. So the media wasn’t exactly taking the government side on this, they were dismissing statements by the government as conspiracy.
Whether right or wrong, it’s extremely embarrassing for the media. They are slowly politicizing themselves into untrustable entities.
It's not obvious to me that superspreading events should have happened along the way.
In part, presumably, because Ebola appearing in Atlanta would be extraordinarily unusual. East Asia has a history of novel respiratory diseases, the same way that other parts of the world have a history of mosquito-borne blood diseases.
Put another way: everything we know so far is circumstantial, and some pieces of circumstantial evidence are (or would be) stronger than others. An Ebola outbreak next to a BSL 4 lab in the United States would be a significantly stronger piece of circumstantial evidence than a coronavirus outbreak in a transportation hub city in East Asia.
But the media dismissed it before that was proved. Because trump said it.
Now imagine a hypothetical scenario where it actually worked. Just because trump was using it, the media would have potentially killed people just because they can’t agree with a single thing trump says.
This is not journalism. It’s not objective reporting in the slightest. And it was by media outlets who claim to be doing real journalism and claim they are objective. At least fox doesn’t claim to be objective. It’s shameful propaganda.
Well that depends on your objective. If it's to push a certain narrative, then it's bad if it contradicts that narrative; whether or not it's true is secondary.
I’m not saying this isn’t bad - just that it’s pretty easy to understand why people would downregulate the lab leak hypothesis without anything special going on.
or it's just china being 100% opaque about an accident that has already damaged their international reputation, and they're controlling the narrative hard at this point. you know, like they do.
There’s no reason to think it’s more likely for China to screw up like this than the US, Russia, or the scores of other nations with similar programs.
My general position is that if something is reported by a mainstream media outlet, there's a good chance that the opposite is true.
I work with infectious disease lab workers, and this isn't correct. None of them get every cold checked out just in case. Labs have no procedure for that. If anything, it's the opposite as they are confident of their immune system.
That would be unusual. Given the proximity to the covid19 outbreak, there's a high probability that's the first known cases of covid19 - if confirmed.
Edit: it is factually true to say Trump lied in manipulative ways constantly, and easy to confirm. This is not a partisan statement, it’s a fact that can be checked. Here are 5276 examples: https://projects.thestar.com/donald-trump-fact-check/
...but even still, 3 admitted to hospital for flu symptoms in that demographic is very high, statistically - even if literally ALL employees caught the seasonal flu at the same time.
In civil trials there is the principle of “adverse inference”. When the defendant has either destroyed evidence or else has not produced evidence they would have been reasonably expected to have, the jury is instructed to assume they are what the plaintiff characterizes them to be.
I think this principle holds in this case. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence for the Wuhan lab leak theory. The Chinese government has destroyed a lot of evidence and host gone to great lengths to keep documents and people away from investigators.
Based on all this, I think the preponderance of evidence is in favor of it being a lab leak.
Our "intellectual elites" have a bad problem now with moral/intellectual fashions, which are constantly changing. Social media has considerably exacerbated this problem.
Fox lawyers even argued that the Tucker show is not "news", and should not be treated as such.
So, no, he was not right about this either. He just peddled the idea that the only credible broadcasts were the ones praising him.
Because it was a conspiracy theory.
Newly surfaced evidence may point in the direction of the conspiracy hypothesis, but that would be just a coincidence.
Yes, most definitely. Over many generations. They're the same species as wild minks, but domesticated (just as dogs are same species as wolves, but domesticated).
And the scientific community agrees. For example, see this paper: https://bioone.org/journals/wildlife-biology/volume-15/issue...
It's true that they've not been domesticated as long as dogs, for example, but there are clear morphological differences between the two.
Most importantly for our conversation, infectious diseases can behave very differently in wild and domestic populations, for reasons of population density, immune status, etc.
A good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_d...
The gist is that in the 80s nuclear winter was portrayed as apocalyptic by Carl Sagan and others using shoddy models in order to advance an arms control agenda. More recent work depicts far more modest climactic effects that are highly variable based on the season the nuclear war would occur in (worst in the summer, very modest to non-existent in the winter). The issue seems to be not so much the bombs themselves; but how cities burn, how much soot would be produced, and how it would move through the atmosphere.
This is also worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in.... Sagan's nuclear-winter modeling team predicted in 1990 that 100 oil well fires would produce a small-scale global nuclear winter. In 1991 Iraq started 800 oil well fires, which caused no such thing. The only effects were localized and stopped soon after the fires were put out.
Here's the US Dept of State "Fact Sheet" for Jan 15, 2021, which (previously disclosed) states much of the same info that WSJ is now just getting to 4+ months later and reporting it as "news": https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan...
So I have to pipe in here as I recall this vividly. What crystalized this for me was of all things an op-ed piece by a conservative (not neocon) writer that essentially came down to this (paraphrased):
> There are essentially two possibilities here:
> 1. Iraq has no WMD. In this case the invasion is unjustified; or
> 2. Iraq has WMD. In which case, why wouldn't they give them up to avoid a US invasion?
This was such a simple and undeniable logical fallacy in the Iraq WMD invasion narrative it blew my mind.
I've been skeptical about the lab leak theory. But you can be skeptical about the theory and still recognize that the WHO just hasn't pursued enough leads to debunk the theory to a sufficient degree. Examples include:
1. China had an online database of coronaviruses. This was taken offline in late 2019 and hasn't been online since. The WHO investigation team has not examined it nor sought to do so. While the timing is certainly curious, it's not necessarily damning. But it warrants investigation (IMHO); and
2. Chinese labs have been less than forthcoming about what coronaviruses they have.
Chinese authorities have been less than fully cooperative here. Again, that's not damning. I consider it much more likely that Chinese authorities simply don't know if Covid leaked from a Wuhan lab but there's literally zero upside in finding out if that's the case.
Would you want to be a member of the CCP that released information that allowed the WHO to establish that Covid-19 came from a Wuhan lab allowing critics of China to "blame" China for this?
Nope, I wouldn't either. So why cooperate?
There was zero evidence, at the time, that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab. There is still zero evidence that the virus was created in a lab, or that its purpose is to be a biological weapon.
At least with fox and oann you know they are fully partisan.
Coming to conclusions either way without evidence, when it suits certain anti government narratives, is partisanship.
But that means you have to ignore his advice, not take it as an indicator of something bad. From what I can tell, there was plenty of activity trying out anything that seemed plausible, including Hydroxychloroquine. And it went through the usual medical science news cycle of study showing it totally works, study showing it might work, study showing it actually doesn't do a whole lot, with a pretty quick progression.
About the only thing the negative media coverage may have done is discourage people from actively soliciting for a mostly untested experimental treatment. But then again, probably not by much; or maybe they asked for other malaria drugs instead.
It may be very hard to determine if people sick in 2019 had COVID-19 or something else at this time.
I don't know exactly what information you would want. Every single paper about virology research from the institute was published with western authors. Had there been something wrong in the raw data or safety logs those authors would have said so.
Instead they say that everything is normal.
There is a weird double standard here of ignoring data that goes against this hypothesis and interpreting things that happened for every single other zoonosis in the world to be indicative of a lab escape. Such as, for example, three people out of six hundred presenting with symptoms of seasonal illnesses in the appropriate season.
thus, the mainstream media, however mistrusted, is still the arbiter of widespread "truth." they still control the Overton Window. if they say a thought is unacceptable, most people won't accept it, until they say it's acceptable once again.
absolutely fascinating to watch
If you are making decisions not based on evidence but on personalities, you are going to make huge mistakes.
Not only is this old, as it was first released earlier this year, but it fuels the conspiracy theory by being sufficiently vague to let people hypothesize about a "biological weapon".
For all we know, these workers could have been affected by the H1N1 flu strain, the main one at the time. I guess that is not worth mentioning.
People in China routinely go to hospitals for colds. It's cheap, and it makes you feel better, so why not.
Its already incredibly common for average Chinese people to go to a hospital for a cold, and I'd expect someone working in a virology lab would be even more likely to do so.
And no its not a couple hundred. 600 people work at that lab. So 3 people with seasonal illness out of 600 at one time is incredibly unremarkable.
> DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project will examine the risk of future coronavirus (CoV) emergence from wildlife using in-depth field investigations across the human-wildlife interface in China, molecular characterization of novel CoVs and host receptor binding domain genes, mathematical models of transmission and evolution, and in vitro and in vivo laboratory studies of host range. Zoonotic CoVs are a significant threat to global health, as demonstrated with the emergence of pandemic severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in China in 2002, and the recent and ongoing emergence of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV). Bats appear to be the natural reservoir of these viruses, and hundreds of novel bat-CoVs have been discovered in the last two decades. Bats, and other wildlife species, are hunted, traded, butchered and consumed across Asia, creating a large scale human-wildlife interface, and high risk of future emergence of novel CoVs. This project aims to understand what factors increase the risk of the next CoV emerging in people by studying CoV diversity in a critical zoonotic reservoir (bats), at sites of high risk for emergence (wildlife markets) in an emerging disease hotspot (China).
For a novel coronavirus to emerge in the part of the world containing the institute is not sufficient to implicate them. They are set up to do research in that part of the world, because such viruses are known emerge in such places. And yes, their research involved a lot of testing and categorization that requires some proximity to the wildlife and markets.
> The three specific aims of this project are to: 1. Assess CoV spillover potential at high risk human-wildlife interfaces in China. This will include quantifying he nature and frequency of contact people have with bats and other wildlife; serological and molecular screening of people working in wet markets and highly exposed to wildlife; screening wild-caught and market sampled bats from 30+ species for CoVs using molecular assays; and genomic characterization and isolation of novel CoVs.
And Daszak's role as part of the WHO investigation is similarly plausible. If you (unwisely, but just as a thought experiment) assume for a moment that it is impossible for the source to be a lab leak, he would be a perfect choice -- he is connected to some of the most relevant and nearby research!
I am supportive of further/proper investigation into the lab leak hypothesis, and do think some degree of public and political pressure is required.
But the tenor of the "lab leak" conversation I have with friends and that I see online (including here) is more like that of Russiagate (a mostly unsubstantiated, years long, liberal media conspiracy theory). Alternatively, it's like the idea that Iraq had WMD (some plausible concern, but info published from unnamed intelligence sources, using tiny amounts of raw and unverified intelligence data, taken from the least trustworthy informants imaginable, all to satisfy a pre-existing conservative grudge). I have seen people say the lab leak story reminds them of the doubts about WMD in Iraq, which is ironic, because again, I see it as more like the invention of WMD in Iraq.
[1] https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
It was a conspiracy theory, and it may still be, because the WSJ only mentions that lab workers were "ill" and presented symptoms similar to those caused by COVID-19, which could be... really anything. The main strain of the flu in 2019 was H1N1. It could have been that. It may not have been. We don't know yet.
I don't think there is anything wrong about "mocking" people for peddling conspiracy theories with zero evidence. Let's be honest, even if some of their ideas end up being true, it would have been just a coincidence. It's like arriving to the correct solution to a math problem, but through a completely wrong process.
Other approaches involve literally trying to change the codon sequence in a supercomputer to see what happens in the folding and conformation changes, but it is very esoteric since bio is so complicated.
NYT may be partisan, yes, but, qualitatively speaking, it's laughable to compare NYT and OANN or NewsMax. They are not even in the same business.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27254877
>> [Damore] argued that biological differences and not a lack of opportunity explained the shortage of women in upper-tier positions.
> This is an unfortunate way of characterizing Damore’s argument. It’s technically true in that Damore IIRC was arguing that there was more variation among men than women (more men at the top and at the bottom but fewer in the middle, but Google hires from the top hence more men). So yeah, technically biological differences, but when the average person hears that they’re going to assume he was arguing that women in general are dumber than men in general or some such. That said, this also represents much more earnest coverage of Damore considering the initial coverage overtly lied on many accounts (calling it an anti diversity screed, claiming he sent it as a memo to the company, etc).
The disregarded conspiracy theory, as I understood it, was that Chinese researchers were doing the former, NOT the latter. It is also my understanding that the virus' genetic code does not show any evidence of the former (editing codon sequence).
Still doesn’t seem like the right thing to do though, especially if we consider ourselves an advanced scientific civilization.
That would have been a coincidente. Are you willing to gamble your wellbeing on a lucky hunch?
I still don't understand this logic process. Asserting something with no evidence is arguably worse, than pointing out the absurdity of it.
The 2004 SARS was suspected to be lab leak. (I'm not sure if this conclusion has been revised since.)
I'm going to need a source for that, because that's definitely not how science works. At all.
Again, making random assertions with no evidence does not make them right. And of that, there are uncountable examples out there.
Then even Biden and the democrats eroding the trust in vaccines saying they won't get vaccinated if Trump rushes the antivirus. Well, what do you know, the next week after the election we discovered that the antivirus is effective and all adults should vaccinate.
How many anti-vaxxers did Biden create with that irresponsible political statement?
> satellite network of reactionary right wing outlets that are about as bad
Predictably, as is custom at this point, our respective appraisals of the other side depend on the side we're on. Fine - but that's beside the point. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, et. all are, most charitably, factories of lies by omission. It's been clear to a lot of us that COVID was born of a colossal mistake by CCP scientists doing GoF research since February or March of 2020. The mainstream so-called news knew just as long - they're not stupid, they're manipulating you along an undisclosed agenda.
Just because you can point to someone else you believe to mislead in a more egregious fashion doesn't somehow alleviate the fact that we have exactly zero credible news sources.
Galileo, Semmelweis, Heisenberg. Women’s right, abolishing slavery.
But even the current mRNA vaccine developers were dismissed for 15-20 years as unimportant.
There are no discovered bat populations in the Wuhan region with a SARS-COV2 ancestor, that's more likely.
That the only source of bats infected with a SARS-COV2 relative is in the Yunnan province, that's pretty unlikely.
1. We don't (yet) inherit antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 from our mothers.
2. SARS-CoV-2 has not been forced to make evolutionary sacrifices to evolve to escape immunity.
The virus has the freedom to become optimally bad and our immune systems were optimally naive.
Over time the warfare between our immune system and the virus should cause SARS-CoV-2 to look a lot more like HCoV-NL63.
That's a sufficient explanation of the differences in disease severity without having to troll through medical articles.
Interestingly, the inverse happened here. Most of the initial claims of a lab-origin for Covid were being disputed by mainstream media in no small part because the Trump administration was echoing them. A lot of them pointed to scientists claiming that there was no evidence of lab manipulation or gene editing as proof that it was conspiratorial thinking, despite the fact that that was not the same thing as a lab-leak. Very little of the evidence we have to support a lab-leak hypothesis wasn't available and known a year ago. But literally within a couple weeks of the Biden administration taking office, mainstream outlets like the Washington Post started publishing pieces supporting the credibility of lab-origins of the virus.
I am no Trump-fan by any means, but I've found this whole saga, and much of the last 4 years, to be a very mask-off period for the media, to the point where its hard to take much of anything being said too seriously.
Both are just as bad as each other.
What you call "dismissive", is just reactionary traditionalism.
Also, all of these provide evidence to support their claims.
> But even the current mRNA vaccine developers were dismissed for 15-20 years as unimportant.
This. This is the problem, right here.
You believe that mainstream media works like science, and it does not. So when big headlines hit the public opinion with things like "this woman was mocked and now her work on mRNA is the basis of the new vaccines", you take that the academic world actually dismissed those novel ideas.
Science does not work like that. And the media like hyperbole. And that hyperbole is what stucks the most in the public memory.
The fact that a group of people believe certain lies, doesn't make those lies acceptable, either.
I couldn't care less about what republicans think of NYT versus OANN. Yes, they may think that OANN is a better source. Still, they would be wrong.
This couldn't be further from the truth.
An assertion without evidente is a lie. Pointing out that someone is making assertions without evidente is not a lie.
If Trump were to say that the sky is actually orange, and provided no evidence, would you take on the media for reporting that what he said had no foundation on reality?
That's nuts.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/new-killer-virus-chi...
Yes. These medical researchers are very good and very persistent so I trust them to do their detective work. They have always been my heroes.
For example, a recent claim is that they have found the earliest case of AIDS/HIV in humans. An excerpt:
"^By DANIEL Q. HANEY, AP Medical Editor, CHICAGO (AP)
Scientists have pinpointed what is believed to be the earliest known case of AIDS an African man who died in 1959 and say the discovery suggests the virus first infected people in the 1940s or early '50s...
The virus in the sample had degraded, but the scientists were able to isolate four small fragments of two viral genes. One gene holds instructions for assembling the outer coat of the virus, while the other is code for one of the proteins the virus needs to reproduce...
HIV mutates quickly. About 1 percent of its genetic material changes each year. So the scientists compared the genes from the 39-year-old sample of HIV with those carried by current versions of HIV."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-earliest-aids-case/
Take time to read the (short) article. It is a credit to our medical/biomedical scientific researchers and explorers and a glowing tribute to what good science can do.
Even that I'm not so sure about. This is a collection of all the HCQ studies: https://c19hcq.com/
Early treatment at lower dosages (lower compared to the "negative results" studies) seems to show positive results pretty consistently.
For the better part of a year now, the lab leak theory and the genetic engineering theory have been lumped in together by those trying to discredit them as conspiracies. The issue is that every time someone would point at circumstantial evidence of a potential lab leak, people would point at the scientists saying there was loads of evidence it wasn't genetically engineered, when those two things aren't remotely the same thing.
The issue here is that, as journalists, their job is to look at facts and weight evidence independently, rather than simply base judgements on the person making the statements. There has been ample evidence to at least consider a lab-leak theory very plausible, or even likely, but those were largely ignored. Instead, the media seemed content to report that Trump is claiming this thing, and Trump sucks, so this thing must also suck. Not exactly inspiring behavior from the "fourth estate".
I guess it refers to the Deep State. Which also officially doesn't exist, and is also just a conspiracy theory.
Maybe you're right, let's see how it plays out.
In any case, I can tell you that there was a definite narrative in the media that the lab escape scenario was not only very unlikely, but "xenophobic" and "conspiratorial".
Perhaps the most telling example of all my links below is this one, which is very open to the possibility of a lab escape. The latter half of the article is full of example of the efforts of the media and scientific establishment (for whatever reason, mostly political) to quash the lab escape hypothesis. One key quote:
"Antonio Regalado, biomedicine editor of MIT Technology Review, put it more bluntly. If it turned out COVID-19 came from a lab, he tweeted, 'it would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom.'"
Article:
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-br...
And here is a handful of links, of many:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/could-covid-19...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/31/health/lab-leak-coronavirus-t...
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/politics/coronavirus-intellig...
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/17/politics/mike-pompeo-coronavi...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-much-more-lik...
The genii is out of the bottle so ending biological weapons research will never happen. If we aren't hit by a nation-state using biological warfare then we'll be hit by someone who does biochem in his garage for fun.
The best strategy is to advance the research while taking such steps as creating super-vaccines to make this type of biowarfare obsolete:
https://weather.com/en-IN/india/coronavirus/news/2021-04-21-...
But that also moves us one step closer to the "grey goo" scenario:
Not the exact term itself, but the significancy of it. The "lying press" is a pejorative used since at least the XIX century [1].
Are we looking for 100% reliability here? Then, yes, we could call the NYT or the WP "fake news". But that is just hyperbole, directed at creating doubt and uncertainty where it does not exist. Once Trump followers had a excuse to label the NYT as "partisan" or "fake", it was easy for Trump to steer the narrative any way he wanted.
Yes, but these were three staff who work with infectious diseases and so would not be expected to use hospital resources frivolously. In fact, they would be considered shirkers to do so for a cold. If a doctor at a hospital needs an aspirin he merely takes it - he doesn't check into the hospital, take a bed, etc.
So the evidence is still not there, and this is a poor exercise of journalism.
So lets change the example sense you will fixate on Ebola as being rare. Bird flu was a big thing people were freaking out about a few years ago and it even made a real appearance in Georgia.
I stand by what I said if a new bird flu variant showed up in Atlanta, the media would be showing alot more skepticism and be looking at a lab leak far more seriously by the CDC just based on the geography. If we found out a few CDC workers had bird flu symptoms before the outbreak started, that the government started destroying evidence and blocking investigations, and a few researchers just "vanished", we would be looking at bare minimum a cultural understanding that there was a Jeffrey Epstein level of corruption and conspiracy in front of us.
Lets rewrite what you wrote.
"An Coronavirus outbreak next to a BSL 4 lab in China would be a significantly stronger piece of circumstantial evidence than a bird flu outbreak in a transportation hub city in the Southeast United States".
Unfortunately at this point its become political, the "its a lab leak" is a point that favors conservatives/Republicans/Trump, so a large amount of the population would refuse to believe it no matter what at this point even if proof was uncovered, and at best are heavily biased to disbelieve it.
"Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...
I can't find the article/post now ... I recall it was written just as initial international investigation happened and released statement that "It's highly unlikely Covid-19 originated from Wuhan research center".
Guy mentioned things like lab technician carrying box with vials (with faded labels made using type writer) from one building to another and some of vials breaking (luckily not the one containing smallpox).
And there was also something about specific room/lab (I think in CDC) in new/rebuilt building where door didn't quite have a good seal - being fixed by duct tape.
And we'll the gist of it is - there's a long history even within USA/CDC to downplay/hide such accidents.
Yes, but these were three staff who work with infectious diseases and so would not be expected to use hospital resources frivolously. In fact, they would be considered shirkers to do so for a cold. If a doctor at a hospital needs an aspirin he merely takes it - he doesn't check into the hospital, take a bed, etc.
While one might say that the same thing was happening in the market via natural gene replication and disease transmission, don't you think that someone intentionally altering parts of genes with the sole purpose of "gain-of-function" (making a more deadly virus) would be more likely to generate something like Covid-19 than a fishmonger who slaps another tilapia onto the ice?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gain+of+function
""Gain-of-function" is the euphemism for biological research aimed at increasing the virulence and lethality of pathogens and viruses. GoF research is government funded; its focus is on enhancing the pathogens' ability to infect different species and to increase their deadly impact as airborne pathogens and viruses.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gain+of+function&t=opera&ia=web&ia..."
Again, I don't think you understand the context. There is no claim they took a bed or took any resources beyond going to see a someone, not even necessarily a doctor, and then leaving, perhaps for as little as 30 minutes.
I don't see that they're necessarily using any resources in a detrimental way, I'd expect that if they were this practice would be curbed. It is China after all.
As for the cultural attitudes over doing this in Chinese virology labs, neither of us has any data for it to be any different from the general population. Personally if I had such a job and I was in a country where such a thing was normal I would do it.
Don't forget, for example, social pressure from friends and family.
Consider thalidomide:
https://helix.northwestern.edu/article/thalidomide-tragedy-l...
She was denied tenure.
But looking at the sibling comment, you'd have to be right about it being ordinary not for general citizens but for experts in infectious disease - which is unlikely. Those kinds of people don't seek treatment for a virus unless it's serious. They already know there is no treatment. I even know that and don't seek treatment, and I'm no expert.
I do know that, unless you want to advocate nuking China (the official US government response to biowarfare) or you think they have a secret cure, it's meaningless.
And, yes, I'm glad that it got ignored while Trump was in power. I think the odds that he would decided to launch nukes in response was unacceptably high (as in, not zero.)
HN's front page is mostly determined by a tug of war between upvotes and flags [1]. It's common, indeed typical, for a sensational story to get a lot of initial upvotes, make the front page, and then provoke a "WTF why is this on HN" reaction from others, who flag it. With enough of the latter, the story falls off the front page, leading to a wave of "WTF why is HN censoring this story" from the first crowd. This is the cycle of life on HN. Recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27240048.
We do sometimes intervene to switch off flags, but only when a story is intellectually interesting and contains enough significant new information (SNI) to create conditions for a substantive discussion [2]. I considered doing that in this case but decided not to, because (a) it's not obvious that this is SNI, and (b) there have been several lab-leak threads recently. The most important thing to understand is that interestingness decays under repetition [3, 4].
If there hadn't been major threads on the topic recently, would we have turned off flags on this one? Well, the odds of that would be higher—but I still think probably not, because the new information in the story probably isn't enough to support a substantive discussion. If you look at those past discussions, you'll notice that in nearly all the cases, the articles themselves were among the most substantive ones that exist on the topic, and in most cases included SNI.
My GP comment had two purposes: it points people to interesting relevant discussions, but it also pre-empts the objection "WTF why is HN censoring this story". Users who post the latter have usually not yet learned to use the search box at the bottom of every page: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
"In 1990 she was offered a tenure track position at the University of Pennsylvania. Around this time, a different group of researchers developed a technique for injecting mice with RNA in such a way that those mice started to produce the proteins encoded by the RNA. [...] After six years of work at the University of Pennsylvania, due in part to a lack of interest from funding agencies in supporting her work, Karikó was demoted from her tenure track position. This type of demotion generally leads to the end of a scientific career. In the same year, she was treated for cancer and her husband encountered a visa problem, leaving him temporarily stuck in Hungary."
https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/pioneers-in-science-kata...
- Our SOP should be better to analyze the information.
- Given the magnitude of the problem, more eyes should be on it
- tools and technologies should be better
It may still take longer, but all things being equal, we should not justify anything based on the past track record.
Your other point is valid though: if 3 people showed up in 1, 2 or 3 hospitals with severe flu, I would not think much of it, no one would.
The main peer reviewed gain of function research cited is https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 done in 2015 in the US with one of the researchers being Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan lab.
I'm not sure there are any papers on gain of function research done in Wuhan?
Or, they thought then that the precautions were sufficient and the risks were acceptable, and they were wrong, and now would like to just look ahead and move on.
> Beijing purposefully destroyed DNA evidence, and obliterated the team who first sequenced the CoVID genome
You have a reliable source for this, of course. Would you be so kind as to share it?
Not sure how you reached that conclusion. Collaborators from different institutions collaborate on research papers all the time while having no access to each others' 'safety logs'. Why would that be shared?
>Instead they say that everything is normal.
Which they obviously have no way of knowing, given that they are not on site, the research institute is in a secretive authoritarian country, and the implications for being 'responsible' for such a lab leak are monumental for such a regime.
>There is a weird double standard here of ignoring data that goes against this hypothesis and interpreting things that happened for every single other zoonosis in the world to be indicative of a lab escape. Such as, for example, three people out of six hundred presenting with symptoms of seasonal illnesses in the appropriate season.
The double standard is the exact opposite - flippantly dismissing the lab leak hypothesis without examination, on one side; a call to treat it on par with the purely zoonotic hypothesis and a recognition that neither hypothesis is close to being definitively proven, on the other.
Instead, nothing. In their perfect moment of glory and justification, they prefer you didn't notice their work.
You might be interested to know, that Trump was already informed about the seriousness of the outbreak in Wuhan in early January. However at that time he chose not to act on it because it might harm the ongoing negotiations over a trade deal with China. So if you want to blame Trump for something, it would actually make more sense to blame him for closing the flights from China too late.
“Fair and balanced” I believe the slogan is.
Nonetheless, you are correct.
Fox/Sky are shameless hard right propagandists.
Sadly, CNN/Nbc are hard left propagandists. I don’t know enough of the history to say that was always the case as it is for Fox/Sky, but it certainly is today.
It’s disheartening to think that even once respected papers like the Guardian have become so departed from objective journalism. I can’t help but think that journalistic freedom of speech is ultimately on borrowed time if the situation becomes much worse.
I’ve taken to following Reuters for news now, but even then I don’t know if what I’m watching is well sourced or it just happens to agree with my own biases more often than not.
You might want to check that. Afaik, it is 4 months .
(read comments below, I may or may not be correct. Sars1 has been found in Civets, bats and humans. We do not yet know the order of transmission and if civets were indeed the intermediate source.)
It took less than 4 months (feb 2003 -> May 2003) from identifying SARS1 as a novel virus to finding the intermediate animal (civet cats) [1] . It took 10 months to identify that for MERS. (Sept 2012 -> August 2013)
Given that we know it originated in Wuhan, have dedicated order of magnitude more funding to it and all the usual suspects have come up as a negative, the lab escape hypothesis does look increasingly more likely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_syndro...
You might want to check THAT out.
They found other species could be infected with SARS-CoV-1 after 4 months and hypothesized that civet cats were the intermediate species, but that still hasn't been proven yet.
After the discovery of SARS-like WIV1 in bats in Yunnan in 2013 it was determined in 2016 that WIV1 or a very closely related virus may have jumped directly to humans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_SARS-like_coronavirus_WIV1
And specifically reference 4:
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048
"Both full-length and chimeric WIV1-CoV readily replicated efficiently in human airway cultures and in vivo, suggesting capability of direct transmission to humans."
So we STILL don't quite understand the origin of SARS1 and if it used an intermediate species or not.
There's still a very similar mystery as to how the closest animal coronavirus is found in a bat in Yunnan, but it showed up in humans in Guangdong roughly 700 miles away (but since it was in 2003 and there's no biological lab in Guangdong there's no competing lab-leak hypothesis over SARS1, even though the observation is exactly the same).
https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2014/8/2/this-keller...
I also agree with you that if this is the outcome we're headed for, then we haven't gotten near any of the big icebergs yet. How's it going to play out and what will the real-world consequences be? I hope that the Biden people will be smart enough to approach this multilaterally and not make it the US vs. China spectacle that you-know-who would have. The fact that they're quietly confirming the facts that have been coming out, but otherwise not yet making a big deal out of it, gives me some hope that they're not idiots.
This is all silly-level speculative and it's possible that nothing will come of it, but I'd place a (small) bet otherwise. The way in which, one by one, the dominos are flipping is truly fascinating. Fauci has flipped, Daszak has flipped. Every few days there's another small but notable change.
Researchers from WIV collaborated with UNC Chapel Hill in 2015 to do that kind of research on SARS-1-related viruses, and that happened in the US.
That gain of function experiment in mice was also to gain function in mice, it would reduce its ability to infect humans.
And if you took RaTG13 and spliced in the surface protein of SARS-1 so it bound to ACE and then ran it through mice you'd still not wind up with SARS-CoV-2. The original virus is too far distant (only 96% homology) and running it through mice would produce a virus that was poorly adapted to humans. And the spike protein would look more like SARS-CoV-1.
So if I understand right. While SARS1 was found in civets within 4 months of it being discovered, we have recently (2017) also found it in Bats. Current Phylogenetic studies indicate that the Bats are more likely to have been the original reservoir.
So doesn't this imply it was Tom Cotton himself who was initially conflating an engineered origin with a lab leak (which could be wild type or engineered virus)?
The fact is, you need to hear the story from somebody credible before it becomes worth investigating, otherwise we would still have journalists trying to uncover the alleged thousands of murders by immigrants kept secret by bizarre conspiracies (which, again, lacks evidence) - the claims have to come from somebody capable of basic truth telling.
And we found it in civets but that doesn't prove that humans caught it from civets, it could be the other way around, just like SARS-CoV-2 and the minks in Denmark.
The fact that WIV1 seems to infect humans also doesn't rule out the possibility that there might still be an intermediate animal like civets. It is suggestive that there's no need for an intermediate animal, but that doesn't prove anything either way.
So we found a similar virus in civets in 2003 and jumped to a conclusion very fast. We have also found that SARS-CoV-2 infects all kinds of other animals and have found it in them, but we assume most of them caught SARS-CoV-2 from humans due to the massive pandemic going on this time. The few viruses we found in e.g. pangolins don't seem to be similar enough to have passed from pangolins to humans or vice versa. The bat coronavirus we already knew about (RaTG13) is somewhat close but would have needed a decade or two to mutate into SARS-CoV-2.
So we can't say that much for certain about either SARS-1 or SARS-2 at this point, even though we're 18 years or so past SARS-1 we still don't have all the answers.
As an uninformed reader, some possibilities I can come up with are the following:
1. Despite zoonotic origin, China feels its stature in the world is much greater than in 2002-2003, so it no longer feels obliged to allow international investigation into origins of the pandemic in spite of political pressure. For example, Wikipedia says: "After intense pressure, Chinese officials allowed international officials to investigate the situation there."
2. Despite zoonotic origin, COVID-19 has much higher death toll so CPC wants to save face by either hiding evidence or preventing investigations into a potential reservoir species. OTOH, SARS had lower death toll, so they didn't have reason to hide anything.
3. Despite zoonotic origin, Xi Jinping's regime is less transparent than that of Hu Jintao which was in power for SARS, so this time they want to either hide evidence or prevent investigations into a potential reservoir species.
4. Despite zoonotic origin and best efforts of Chinese scientists, a reservoir species has not been identified yet. Is it possible that it may take longer this time around?
5. Lab leak hypothesis: there is no natural, reservoir species to be found.
Personally, I think Reasons 1, 2 and 3 are strongest, because CPC feels like it has to play to its domestic audience and letting international investigators in may feel like a loss of face. However, this doesn't add up, because they already let WHO investigator in, albeit with very stringent limits and not letting them access raw data. I'd be much obliged if a learned person in this topic could tell me what kind of prior they'd put on each of these possible explanations.
[1] First human case of SARS was in Nov 2002, and scientists were able to isolate SARS in civets in late May 2003, so a reservoir species was identified in 6 months. It took 10 months to identify that for MERS (Sept 2012 -> August 2013).
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/23/politics/us-intelligence-repo...
It just seems weird to me that that's not a part of the media's discussion of this.
Those are exactly the things a Chinese hospital will administer.
If you were presenting to a hospital with Covid beyond what you might feel for a flu, you would be reporting difficulty breathing or loss of smell and taste.
However, they had symptoms consistent with seasonal illness.
So it's pretty obvious that the typical Chinese reaction is the best fit.
SARS was a very big deal in China and the Chinese government allocated a lot of resources to research. As far as points one and two, that means no real improvement, as it was already in the diminishing return phase.
Because of this I don't actually see why it would be any faster. SARS wasn't the first virus where finding a reservoir was tried, far from it, and the limiting factor in the search for the source is still the same. Because of this I don't expect it should be much easier this time than last time.
I don't think this situation has changed in essence. Media outlets may now filter first on party affiliation, but they haven't replaced their dependence on official sources with better independent investigative reporting, for instance.
> On the contrary, the media has had little except harsh criticism for the government in this time frame
Or glowing, fawning reverence. It depends on the media outlet and the official (really the official's party) in question. The screw turned for Cuomo, but I imagine for every Cuomo, there are more darlings that go unchallenged.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
Don't confuse that with having an ideology or a commitment to certain ideas.
You can be partisan (or have an ideology) and still be trustworthy, but the trouble with that is, you actually have to be trustworthy.
I'd rather compare the NYT with The Economist on this point.
His hypothesis is that what was once an information trickle has become a virtual tsunami with the internet + cell phones + satellite television, etc. Governments have no control over the flow of information, which they had at least a semblance of pre-2000. This wave of information has not only exposed the worst excesses of the elites, but has also exposed the enormous gap between their authoritative promises and the actual results they produce.
This has pissed off a lot of very entitled people, who don't take the fact that the gap has always existed into consideration, who for historical reasons place very high expectations on government, and as a result attribute bad intentions to the previously mentioned poor results.
Not only is the media courting those people, they are made up of those people. So you get a media that just heaps negation on even the smallest failure of government. It's not just for clicks -- they are true believers in that they think they're doing the right thing.
> With over 100 species recognised, China has one of the richest bat faunas in the Palaearctic.
You need to prove a negative. You need to prove the bats in Wuhan don't have Covid. More and more bats in Yunnan doesn't do that.
She was on the tenure track, and didn't get tenure.
That's denial of tenure.
Funding agencies provide funding based on grant reviews by... academics. So yeah, academics dismissed her novel ideas.
HN feels like the same kind of echo chamber that would have attacked me for saying not to invade Iraq in the early 2000s... Anything our historically dishonest intelligence agencies imply about foreign countries is eaten up like gospel truth without any skepticism.
You can assume they were seriously sick with COVID beyond anything a flu or cold is likely to do. We know that this means either anosmia, difficulty breathing, and low blood oxygenation, with viral pneumonia visible on X-Ray.
None of these symptoms that characterize COVID serious enough to require medical attention, more than what one would expect from a bad flu or a bad cold, are compatible with the report citing symptoms consistent with seasonal illness.
There are two other possibilities.
One is that they had seasonal illnesses that were serious enough to require some medical attention, but not COVID. This is consistent with the report, and not implausible. This is just as possible whether they have similar attitudes towards medical attention for seasonal illness as other staff.
The other is that they had seasonal illnesses that were not very serious, but sought medical attention anyways. This is expected to happen if virology staff have similar attitudes towards the issue as the rest of Chinese society.
No matter which way you slice it, there is no indication they had COVID. Even if you remain ambivalent on their behaviour.
The reason why the Hydroxychloroquine suggestions were dismissed is simple: science involves an empirical epistemology and that means undemonstrated hypotheses are not treated as true.
Trying to quantify harms and seize assets makes the pandemic seem like a unary problem rather than the result of profound ideological weaknesses.
He suggested that the virus may have come from the Wuhan lab.
NYT slammed him for this "fringe theory" in February 2020:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...
One way you can do that is by putting evolutive selection pressure on the micro-organisms. For instance, submit a colony of bacteria to something they are vulnerable to. Stop when 90% of the colony is dead. Cultivate the colony back to a full size, then repeat the protocol until you get bacteria that are fully resistant.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27089774
Washington Examiner does not have the pedigree of a NYT but the writer discussed in that piece wrote for NYT and Science. I think it is a topic is noxious hence I will flag it thing. :shrug:
I recall a time where evaluation of this was forbidden, with well-coordinated charges of racism. Talking points are a real thing, intense coordination happens intentionally and not among US media. Orthogonal messages, particularly those viewed as adversarial, are suppressed and discouraged. In China government coordination is explicit and acknowledged. The US and UK simply get the same thing through the corporate-government looking glass.