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Comment by ivalm | Hacker News Reader

There is no evidence it is from lab, while it likely originated from bats, pangolins have very similar virus extant in the wild. The burden of proof is heavily on showing that it was released from the lab, Pinker wins by default.

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The US state department has said that they have intelligence that tells them that it originated in a lab, but do not believe the release was deliberate. Now, I take that with a grain of salt, state agencies are known to sometimes say what they need to to further their agenda. But it is worth noting.

I've seen a few interviews and articles by evolutionary microbiologists who have examined some of the genetic and behavioral traits and found several that indicate that it evolved under selective pressures of being in a controlled environment like a lab. I don't have links to them, but I'm sure they can be found with an internet search, once you wade through the mountains of bullshit that you're sure to pull up when you do. Two behavioral traits I noted were the significantly lower number of cases that are thought to have been spread outdoors and the propensity of the virus to move across different tissues, a trait that is deliberately selected for in lab testing of viruses because it enables ease of testing in different scenarios.

So there is evidence is came from a lab, but so far no proof that the public is privy too.

No, just fake news [0]. At any rate, there are pretty good actual genetic studies, honestly what you would expect from a natural virus [1, 2]

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/09/coronavir...

[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.24.391763v1....

[2] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9241

I can see the articles, but personally can’t help but be a little suspicious.

The coronavirus pandemic, which started from a coronavirus in bats swapping species, started in the same city that happened to be actively researching the ability of coronaviruses from bats to swap species.

This doesn’t mean it was “non-natural genetically”, but I don’t see how we can eliminate it happening in the lab as a possibility, particularly considering if it was true there would be a large incentive to perform a cover up.

I mean personally I believe it starting in the lab is the more obvious answer applying Occam’s Razor.

I agree with you, but I don't see Occam's Razor applying here. There really is no more likely point of origin with just a cursory look at the situation. There's a bio testing lab at the point of origin, but there are also numerous examples of viruses jumping species.

Looking at the behavior of the virus and the arguments of some evolutionary geneticists (and I'm not well versed in genetics so I'm trusting their credentials here) changes things a bit of course.

My logic for Occam's Razor is that if you see someone dead on the floor it's most likely they died of a heart attack. If you see someone dead on the floor and they are next to an open bottle of poison, they most likely died of a heart attack.

Now maybe statistically it's more likely that someone just happened to have a heart attack next to an open bottle of poison, but Occam's Razor isn't to select the most likely answer, it's to select the simplest answer. The simpler answer is that he ingested poison, rather than he had a heart attack near a bottle of open poison.

If a pandemic involving a bat-virus swapping species starts in a city then it was probably just a virus jumping species. If that city happens to be doing active research on how much bat-viruses can swap species, then I think Occam's Razor can apply.

Obviously there is no objective truth to Occam's Razor, and what I think is the simplest explanation may differ from what you think is the simplest explanation.

I understand where you’re coming from. However couldn’t the even simpler explanation be that viruses frequently travel from bats to other species, this lab is in this city because there are a lot of bats with viruses there, and the thing that they are there to study ended up happening?

I agree that’s a high possibility totally, I just don’t see how we can exclude the other possibility as confidently as everyone else seems to.

Also, I think doing active research on something that can jump species and is highly contagious in a city would massively increase your risk of it jumping species in that city. That risk is increased if the lab is known for poor controls and was flagged as a risk, as the one in Wuhan was in the us cables.

Additionally if a researcher did get infected, there is a high chance that they would be asymptomatic and wouldn’t even know it was them.

The only “proof” that it wasn’t from the lab is the dna analysis, but that only proves that the research wasn’t altering the genome / that there was bio-engineering, there is still loads of research you can do without playing with the genome.

Your [0] link mainly refutes one specific theory, of Li-Meng Yan, about intentional military engineering. It does not refute the wider range of possibilities where a lab escape was part of the path from nature to human circulation.

(When that article points out things like "Scientists have yet to find the direct parent of SARS-CoV-2 in feral beasts", or that with regard to some specific Chinese-military-catalogued viruses Yan fingered, "bat coronaviruses were circulating in wild bats and could have been discovered by anyone", it's saying things very consistent with the chance that this could be a wholly natural virus that was carried to Wuhan & then escaped into that urban environment via lab collection then escape. There were a lot of researchers carrying novel natural strains from caves back to labs!)

Your links [1] & [2] are interesting but seem to include no opinion or reasoning for or against a lab escape or lab-enhancement, either way.

The pangolin intermediate host theory, which has been heavily promoted by Chinese state media, has been invalidated.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7405773/

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200708/Research-sheds-do...

So far, the scientists say that the "escaped from lab" scenario cannot be dismissed :

https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-is-be...

I disagree. It’s easy to prove natural origin through a phylogenic tree, and that information is impossible to protect from the public. So now tell me what publicly-available evidence would guarantee to exist to prove lab origin.

Well we know it had some natural origin, nobody is claiming the virus is synthetic. The question is whether it was inadvertently spread to humans through the actions of scientists, rather than pure serendipity.

We also know that the Wuhan lab was studying samples of novel coronavirii found in wild bats.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/chinese-lab...

There is plenty of suggestive evidence the pandemic arose from a lab escape. Novel natural bat SARS-like coronaviruses have been found in caves hundred of miles from Wuhan... but are brought to Wuhan for study.

Here – https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1197631383470034951 – an expert on the topic & scientific collaborator with a Wuhan lab describes research he was proud of in November 2019:

> we’ve made great progress with bat SARS-related CoVs, ID’ing >50 novel strains, sequencing spike protein genes, ID’ing ones that bind to human cells, using recombinant viruses/humanized mice to see SARS-like signs, and showing some don’t respond to MAbs, vaccines...

Lab accidents leading to investigator infection & escape are distressingly common. So why should "wet market vendor" or "wildlife trader" or "farmer" be a more presumptive index-case than "researcher modifying bat coronaviruses searching for those that are most dangerous in humanized animal models"?

See sister reply, it’s all basically FUD.

Sister reply only seems to address the Yan report & malicious/military engineering - nothing about more generic lab escape.

In particular, your NatGeo link's description of constant natural discoveries, and continuing searches for natural origins, is totally consistent with the most trivial & non-malicious lab escape scenario:

(1) lab interested in this topic collects hundreds of novel natural strains that wouldn't normally cross from bats to human;

(2) lab accident infects researcher;

(3) researcher infects community.

Isn't Peter Daszak, author of the tweet I quoted, a domain expert?

We now know, from the pandemic, that a bat-related SARS-CoV2 virus that's highly transmissible in humans actually exists, somehow.

There are human-staffed error-prone labs that specifically search for those kinds of viruses in bulk – for example, sending people deep into rarely-visited bat caves, collecting strains, then replicating (& remixing!) those strains to test them against human (and 'humanized') tissue for pathogenecity & treatment-resistance.

Given those plain facts, what makes you think some other bat-human (pangolin-human?, something-else-human?) contact should be presumed a more likely route into humans than something involving a lab researcher? Until there's more evidence, why aren't they all live hypotheses?

While I agree it's unlikely it came from the lab, as the dreadful, disgusting wet markets have been known to be a risk for those pandemics for a long time and are more likely source, you can't just dismiss it out of hand. We certainly can't trust the communist dictatorship to clear up the issue with their aversion for openness and fondness for censorship.

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