zlacker

Assuming the chance of a lab leak is non-zero, it is worth considering how this will ever end.

- If there was any hard evidence actually proving they had SARS-CoV-2 in the lab before the pandemic, it will be long gone. Only an independent full access forensic level investigation would ever find any sign that evidence was destroyed, and that is never going to happen.

- It seems extremely unlikely to me that anyone from within China will A) blow the whistle or B) that we would hear about it.

- If a whistleblower were to escape the country, China would be able to claim they are lying, and it is a plot by the West to oppress the Chinese people etc. The chance that the whistleblower would be carrying irrefutable evidence of a lab leak is again almost zero.

We can keep shaking the tree, but I don't think anything truly satisfying is going to fall out. Consider that even if the USA for example had actual evidence of a lab leak, they would be better off using this as leverage over China secretly than releasing it publicly.

What actually can and should happen, is that some major change comes to virology research to absolutely minimise the chance of another lab origin pandemic. Wherever SARS-CoV-2 came from, we have had lab leaks before and we will have them again, that much is certain.

>>Gatsky+(OP)
>even if the USA for example had actual evidence of a lab leak, they would be better off using this as leverage over China secretly than releasing it publicly.

That seems unlikely to work.

>>Gatsky+(OP)
They did have samples of a 98% similar virus collected from the miners working in the bat cave who had died years earlier. The virus had a different name like ratg or something.

>>Gatsky+(OP)
Evidence could come from communications. Such a large scale coverup would have required quite a lot of exchanges. Even with China being somewhat opaque and inaccessible to foreign intelligence, there could be digital trails.

>>Gatsky+(OP)
Holding people from China accountable might be a tree we can’t bark at, but we can sure as hell hold everyone even marginally accountable in the US side if it’s clear they covered up their involvement in the unleashing of this plague.

>>rhodoz+Ua
It’s covered in the article and it’s called RaTG13 and no one can get a straight answer on where it was acquired or when. However independent researchers found it is identical to a virus previously known as RaBtCoV/4991 that made several miners ill in 2012.

It’s 96.2% similar not 98%. The issue is that coronaviruses in nature don’t mutate fast enough for that to be the missing link, and they have tested something like 80,000 animals since the outbreak without finding anything closer. One possibility is that the gap was closed through gain-of-function or serial passage research.

>>krrrh+ue
Where have you heard that CoVs don’t mutate fast enough in nature to close the missing 3.8% gap?

>>jeswin+Cb
You can't assume a coverup proves a crime, though. Is it bad? Yes. Do agents of totalitarian governments cover things up routinely because they assume something bad was done or they don't want to be blamed for it, even if no wrongdoing was behind it? Yes.

(i.e. politically punished by the west for covering up facts is fine but scientifically concluding this proves a leak is not.)

>>Gatsky+(OP)
> What actually can and should happen

Not to mention fixing all of the other failures that allowed COVID to kill millions worldwide. Everyone's pointing fingers but hardly anybody's talking about improving epidemiology and public health policy (which the US is long overdue for a reckoning on).

One of those failures, by the way, was the seeming assumption that whatever state a global health emergency started in would act in something resembling good faith. Regardless of how COVID came to be, China wasted precious time deflecting when it should have been diligently helping to sound the alarm and properly investigate.

And how many other countries might have prevaricated in the same fashion, if the pandemic had started within their borders? This is not a failure concerning China specifically. Indeed, there will come a point where blaming China for COVID, however cathartic that might be, will be counterproductive to preventing future catastrophes.

>>sevent+yi
It’s a claim that I’ve seen often referenced by people like Brett Weinstein and reporters who have been covering this story. I’m not sure where I first heard it, but here’s a quick reference published on a recent PLOS blog: [0]

> Clues to the transition from bat virus RaTG13 to human virus SARS-CoV-2 may lie within the 4% of the genome sequences that diverge. Evolutionary biologists estimate it would have taken at least 50 years for the bat virus to have mutated itself into SARS-CoV-2, considering known, natural mutation rates of viral genomes.

It goes on to say, that it’s possible this virus is just different.

This paper states 20-50 years an an estimate. [1]

> Bats belong to the usual suspects for zoonosis, and indeed, a bat virus that shared 96% sequence identity with SARS-CoV-2 was isolated in Yunnan /China in 2013. However, a 4% sequence difference (>1000 bp) would indicate 20 to 50 years of separation from SARS-CoV-2, making this bat isolate an unlikely direct source for the nascent epidemic. Chinese researchers explored tissue and faecal samples from 227 bats representing 20 species living in China, collected between May and October 2019 and analysed them by metagenome sequencing. This investigation found that the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 in this sample set shared 93.3% sequence identity over the entire genome, less than the bat coronavirus isolated in 2013 from the same province, Yunnan (Zhou et al., 2020).

I’m not a virologist, just trying to keep up with this story. It seems like a consensus that 3.8% is a large chasm to cross in that time frame, but there could be things we don’t know or possibly viruses that are closer to SARS-CoV2 that we haven’t sequenced yet. I think the most important thing to note is that there hasn’t been enough evidence to rule out a gain-of-function lab leak hypothesis given what we know today about viruses and there wasn’t a year ago either.

[0] https://dnascience.plos.org/2021/04/15/3-possible-origins-of...

[1] https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/175...

>>sevent+yi
I believe the furin cleavage site has been quoted to be an exceptionally rare mutation. It is extremely unlikely for this particular mutation to exist without being accompanied by other less-rare mutations in a natural-spread scenario. For this particular mutation, a gap of greater than 3.8% would be expected. It may (I'm not an expert) may be unlikely for a 3.8% drift, but is less likely for only a 3.8% drift given the rarity of the ACE2 spike.

>>gary_0+sm
My takeaway was the huge denial most of the rest of the world put itself into.

When it was still only Wuhan, everyone assumed it would go down like sars again, it's just "a Chinese thing" and could never happen in the developed world. We feasted on the images of overcrowded hospitals, people collapsing in waiting rooms, and felt good about or country.

Then when it became clear that China messed up containing the spread and it would not only hit other cities in China but the rest of the world too, we did.... Nothing. Like a toddler we tried solving the problem by ignoring it. Forgotten were the images of chaos and death from Wuhan, politicians would assure us "that it's under control and go away soon". Just how can you suddenly pull such a 180 as soon as it arrives at your country? Then the first cases popped up and "we did contact tracing and stopped the chain". Great, but hoe does it prevent new cases from entering the country?

I came from beijing back to germany on Feb 26, 2020. Getting out of the plane there was... nothing. No temperature checks, no masks, no form to fill in, no "hey please stay at home for two weeks". It went from sitting in a plane for 8 hours with a mask to just randomly boarding a train across germany with nobody giving a shit. It was unreal.

But then, when it eventually got real bad in the West, we pulled yet another 180 and stopped ignoring covid and started going "well China should have prevented it", when we got a head start of about a month where we could perfectly see what this virus does, yet didn't take any measures on our side whatsoever and just let it happen. I know, it's always easier to blame someone else across the planet, but I'm most surprised and disappointed by my own government. I'm wondering how things would have gone if this had originated in Germany.

>>Gatsky+(OP)
>- It seems extremely unlikely to me that anyone from within China will A) blow the whistle or B) that we would hear about it.

You might hear about it, depending on where you get your news. You might also hear social media fact checkers dismissing it as conspiracy nuttery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Meng_Yan

https://nypost.com/2020/09/16/twitter-suspends-virologist-wh...

>>Gatsky+(OP)
I agree with you. I am not sure what driving around the WHO delegation in wuhan 1 year after the facts was ever going to achieve.

At the end of the day the only people who most likely know whether it was a lab leak or not are the chinese authorities. So we will likely know in 50 or 60 years if those archives are made public (like for the Katyn massacre). The CIA/NSA can possibly get its hand on incriminating communications, but who is going to trust those guys?

Also I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the chinese authorities got all covid lab samples destroyed without being analysed. The best way to not leak that you may be responsible is to ensure no one, even yourself, can ever know whether you were responsible.

>>iforgo+Sz
Exactly the same. Things would be the same. There are just as many shitty liars (by proportion at least) in Germany as there are in China. Covering your mistakes is a natural human behavior, if not the nicest thing to do.

>>krrrh+nn
Thanks much!