US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins
reuters.com
reuters.com
My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them.
Which is exactly what this issue is about.
That's not to say we have compelling evidence that this was a lab virus, either. I think, for me, it's a, "we don't know, but I wouldn't be shocked at all if it was a lab virus".
"Lipsitch’s activists (calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group) sent around a strong statement on the perils of research with “Potential Pandemic Pathogens,” signed by more than a hundred scientists. The work might “trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control,” the signers said. Fauci reconsidered, and the White House in 2014 announced that there would be a “pause” in the funding of new influenza, SARS, and MERS gain-of-function research." [0]
In December 2017, the US began funding gain-of-function research on these deadly diseases again. This research creates deadly diseases that may not have existed otherwise.
This pandemic has been enough for me to strongly believe that there should be a global ban on gain-of-function experiments on deadly viruses and bacteria. I'd like to help prevent a future pandemic, and that's one clear way we can help.
[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
It is unenforceable from the start. All the major world powers would continue their research (perhaps slightly less openly) simply from a MAD angle (it is irresponsible to ignore the value of a pathogen that no one else has seen and you have the antibiotics for).
We are living in dark times in terms of our technological capability and the aggressiveness of state actors.
I would argue that the only chance we have is to reign in the behaviours of our states. Crazy and seemingly impossible, but stopping science/tech is far beyond reach.
This seems like a supremely bad idea.
Would you make the same argument for software vulnerability research? I think the arguments against both are the same, and with the same result: white-hat researchers will halt their work, leaving more of the field available to black-hat researcers.
A failed experiment? Maybe a bit more likely, but still I don't think so
Sars-Cov-2 looks like pretty much what it is: a zoonotic virus that "doesn't know what's going on"
Hence why only the recent mutations made its transmission more efficient.
Now, if it escaped unbeknownst from a research lab, that I would put on the plausible category. Would be more possible if it wouldn't have had a perfect virus breeding ground right next to it.
To me, the only constructive discussion that can be had at this point needs to be around actual evidence, and not the absence of it. The first documented cases, first traces of positive samples etc etc. It's clearly still in the early stages of discoveries so all theories are just theories. That said I don't expect this to remain a mystery forever. It will just take time, because eventually the natural origins will be pinned down and reasonable chain of events of first spread will be identified.
Great expression! I have the same strange feeling but couldn't put in correct words. Other than the topic of this thread, there's a meta topic which reflects some interesting human natures showing up more often among politicians and lawyers: Spread bias opinions without being caught misleading, disguise subjective speculations under objective delicately organized articulation.
Being constructive in discussion is extremely difficult. Sometime I watch the debate with fun on meta topics other than topics.
I don’t understand this point.
I am honestly laughing like this needs to be communicated to the HN folks, like it bares any insights, like it is not already the default political correctness for majority here.
The top comment is as useless as to say the OP would believe whatever he/she would love to believe whatever the evidence presented.
New Yorker puts it well:
"The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness"
When described as you (OP) put it, it seems that abstractly, the Chinese Communist party is just the state religion.
I'm not trying to play a game of whataboutism. I'm curious why these structures seem to rise, regardless of what we intend or call the them. What is it about the human experience that so often results in this.
I apologize if this is overtly stereotypical, naive, assuming, or disrespectful. It wasn't meant to offend or annoy. Just cautiously curious.
A Chinese friend once described to me the week he discovered YouTube after going to study in America, when for the first time he saw videos of Chinese leaders (2000-era) behaving very rudely toward reporters. He found that shocking, and over the next few weeks and more research, accepted that much of what he’d been taught about his history was fabrication. The experience was pretty traumatizing for him. He’s back living in China now, but with a very different perspective.
I was what you might call a fundamentalist Christian for most of my life, until I was exposed to enough of the counter-arguments that some of them finally stuck. The deprogramming process took a year and a half and was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.
In both cases, the in-group is well-protected from “improper information” (as the CCP calls it). In China they have the great firewall and the domestic censorship apparatus; in religion believers are inoculated against trusting information from “worldly” sources (though the motives of those involved in the actual suppression may differ). Neither system could survive in its current form if this information weren’t suppressed — that’s obvious by looking at what happens when individuals are exposed to alternate points of view and take them seriously.
Would you say “Microsoft is just a corporate religion”?
I think a religion is about more than just an entity that tries to avoid negative PR.
is that not the default mode for families? elementary/middle/highschool/universities? work? any communities you spend a lot of time in?
Why is it never brought up that it could just be an accident? It doesn't need to be a weapon. Just poor safety during research.
Then a small group favors their stories to happen because of malicious intent. Like saturday morning cartoon villain style of obvious evilness. And that is often mixed with a "them (evil) and us (good)" type of self-assertive tribe behavior as well as the bitching and bickering that stems from relating social status. (USA and China are not humans, they are nations, but people anthropomorphise them)
A story about poor standards and accidents is more about empathy and carefulness, and while a wise man might tell it to his children, it is not the thing people gossip about. Everyone agrees that bio-labs should have highest standards and that is it, there is little difference to "it happened randomly", and more importantly there is little blame and fame. Have you heard what <china> did? has another ring to it.
The human mind operates on stories, not on facts. Working with facts is hard and even the most pious intellectual can and will fall prey to nature. So it is no wonder that the most scandalous stories are the ones that get around a lot.
Certain actors have a narrative they would like to push.
I mean, name any other country that has a lot of biological weapons labs all over the world.
Obviously I wish they hadn't done this, but they didn't arbitrarily try to hide it.
If there was a 'coverup' it was by local municipal authorities which should not be conflated with central govt. Even if true, the actual reporting of first case was only delayed by 1 week with the genome sequenced shared w/WHO rest of world less 2wks later.
Are we talking about China or the Trump administration?
To answer your question: If NYC had a virus lab that actively mutated bat coronaviruses so that they could become infectious in humans, and then one day a human-infecting virus with 96% similarity to a bat coronavirus started popping up in New York City with no known origin… Yes, people would start asking questions about that lab.
Check out this commentary from 2015. This type of research was being subcontracted out to the Wuhan lab, despite public concerns that safety wasn’t tight enough there.
https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...
I get that people don’t want to discriminate against China, but this is very clearly a hypothesis worth investigating further.
Yeah ok.
How about this China, find out what cave the market was getting their bats from. Go in there, confirm the bats have it, and release some data.
Do you believe the devil doesn't exist?
A -> CCP. OP -> a concerned citizen.
A -> Race/Color/Religion/Gender. OP -> Racist/Sexist.
A -> Trump. OP -> a concern citizen.
A -> Scientist. OP -> conspiracist.
But one thing that I am sure is that it'll never ever be constructive. Not mean to be disrespectful, but I do hope this type of comment won't ever get to the top of HN.
You can blame an individual, even sentence them to death, but you cannot ever criticise the system/party. Nor shine a light at any evidence that the system is wrong. This is a deadly sin.
For the party to admit, there's flaws in the system, would collapse their whole authority.
So are they or are they not mindless robots? It's not only ignorant but supremely arrogant and condescending to assume the 1.4B can't tell the difference between real and fake news and need to be restricted in what information they can consume. Qubit000 has the same username on reddit and twitter. He posts lots of pro-CCP garbage
Every Asia-focused analyst will tell you that the only aspect of China's state-reported numbers you can assume with a high degree of confidence is that they're heavily massaged for PR purposes.
> shocked at all if it was a lab virus
That's a useless statement. It's just a weak appeal to authority with no proof in any direction. I live in the US. Me saying that "I wouldn't be surprised" it came from the US wouldn't mean jack squat without evidence.
Seems this holds true for every government and party.
Having separate and distinct parties and competitive elections also puts parties in the position of doing this to each other using the levers of power available to them.
How is this different from any other country? Do you think that the United States government, or any other western government, would accept any damaging rumors that would cause embarrassment to them?
Just look at their hypocrisy when it comes to Assange or Snowden. But at least these two are still alive. For now. Too bad for the Australian guy that exposed Australia’s recent war crimes, he got pleasantly suicided. That’s the penalty for upsetting the western world order. Thanks for playing.
...Or has this logic changed since the election fraud controversy? (and no, it's not really a different situation if you think about it)
Japan's deputy prime minister calls the WHO the "Chinese Health Organization": https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/04/29/commentary/w...
> are we saying that the international group that entered china were some how in league with the CCP?
There may be reason to expect that they or their superiors are ... biased.
It MIGHT have been possible but Occam's Razor says it's more plausible it evolved naturally and just jumped species.
FAR FAR FAR more plausible.
A random virus, no. This one, we do.
We can't build a virus from scratch. But we can combine pieces of different viruses to build a new one. The same thing also happens naturally when an animal is sick with 2 viruses at once. If both get into the same cell, you get various mixes created and sometimes a mixture will turn out to be a better virus than either parent.
This virus looks like a combination of apparently unrelated viruses. See https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-origins-genome-analy... for confirmation. That happens to be something that can happen either naturally or artificially.
Where conspiracy theorists get going is that a few years ago there were papers from the lab near Wuhan suggesting that a combination much like COVID-19's actual combination should be particularly effective in humans. So this looks like an extension of a known line of research from a lab involved in military work. Combine that with the local coverup and you can see how people go down the rabbit hole.
Occam's Razor says the only (non-vet) BSL4 lab in China, studying bat coronaviruses, several miles from known first virus reports, that has had multiple previous virus leaks, with huge information shutdown by China for a year, is the more plausible culprit.
There's a rational reason to study this one, since SARS (1.0) was a big deal in the early 2000's, and anyway why wouldn't you study something you don't fully understand as a matter of course. It's not a stretch if it was found that it leaked from the lab by accident and a cover-up ensued.
E.g. "killer bees" are a product of human scientists trying to engineer a better bee - the release was accidental. It's not like we have the ability to genetically engineer a bee from the ground up. But as a species humans have been purposefully manipulating the traits of living things for thousands of years.
China has had multiple SARS escape accidents.
More likely than building the virus is studying it and accelerating it’s development.
Now I’m not saying that’s what happened here however without the cooperation of the CCP we’ll have no idea what the truth of the matter is
The general evidence is this is yet another reason why wet markets are terrible for humanity, not that it was made in a lab and got away. But you can build lots of things.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
It turns out we've been doing "serial passage" research for some time, which is where we leverage natural selection to do our genetic engineering for us, rather than manually editing genes. This is how we engineer viruses to jump species - on purpose.
> They did it using serial passaging: repeatedly dosing a mixed solution of mouse cells and hamster cells with mouse-hepatitis virus, while each time decreasing the number of mouse cells and upping the concentration of hamster cells. At first, predictably, the mouse-hepatitis virus couldn’t do much with the hamster cells, which were left almost free of infection, floating in their world of fetal-calf serum. But by the end of the experiment, after dozens of passages through cell cultures, the virus had mutated: It had mastered the trick of parasitizing an unfamiliar rodent.
In fact, "we" (meaning humanity) have even been experimenting with serial passage into humans.
> A few years later, in a further round of “interspecies transfer” experimentation, Baric’s scientists introduced their mouse coronavirus into flasks that held a suspension of African-green-monkey cells, human cells, and pig-testicle cells. Then, in 2002, they announced something even more impressive: They’d found a way to create a full-length infectious clone of the entire mouse-hepatitis genome. Their “infectious construct” replicated itself just like the real thing, they wrote.
The whole article is really worth a read.
If this was some sort of lab mistake, as the conspiracy angle suggests, IMO that's much less embarrassing. In the "real" explanation, thousands of mainlanders are regularly eating food contaminated with bat shit, with zero health standards. In the "conspiracy", they're a first-world country doing groundbreaking science, and an accident occurred.
I think they're probably telling the truth.
That's old information. The first cases of the virus had no connection with the wet market, and no connection could later be found other than it was the first major subsequent point of spreading for the virus. So it's much more likely that people spread it at the market, rather than that it came from there.
However, they are indeed disgusting third-world wet markets and the practice of consuming bush meat as well as having live wild animals of all different kinds together in a wet market is an experiment we shouldn't be conducting. The risk to reward ratio is way too high. Remember that HIV likely came from butchering and consuming contaminated chimpanzees in Africa. The world needs to put those kinds of practices behind us, it has cost us far more than it can ever be worth.
If the wet market is at fault, it can be blamed on the local party leadership, which was easy enough to do because they continued to screw up during the early stages of the pandemic. One memorable one is when they hosted a massive dinner for 20000 people in close proximity when it was starting to really heat up.
If it's the lab, that squarely falls on the national government, which in all things can and must do no wrong.
A poster above said it perfectly, when your authority comes from competency, you need to show your competent. The CCP has this precarious position in China where the people support it strongly because they've been doing a good job giving people better lives, at least from their perspective. If that turns badly in any way, it could break them.
The (theorized) problem was that wild-caught land-animals happened to be part of the selection.
Of course you are making some other argument, but I doubt it's the poor people in Wuhan that are eating pangolins.
https://project-evidence.github.io/
https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-origins-genome-analy...
Who was really behind this, and the whole history of it, is something surely we won't know for know.
"When war is declared, truth is the first casualty"
If you ask people from any developing countries, they would express the same attitude (as you do for CCP) towards their own government. The reason is that the officials and way of work is stuck behind current standard, and that's why it is called developing country.
Personally I don't care too much about if it was a lab virus or something else, it becomes all political. Could it be better? I don't think so. If it was developed in a bio-weapon lab, China would have handled it well because it would be prepared.
The 1977 Russian Flu pandemic was genetically near-identical to a strain from 1950, without the expected mutations that should have appeared after 27 years of undetected circulation among humans or animals. It's been widely suspected in mainstream literature to have escaped from a research or vaccine manufacturing accident, to the point that the NEJM casually wrote:
> The reemergence was probably an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0904322
But at the time, the WHO said:
> Laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bul...
And it's absolutely bizarre to me that people are asking why the origin even matters. After thousands of people died in Bhopal, did it matter whether better chemical safety standards could have prevented that? So with millions dead now, how could you possibly not wonder whether our current standards for the sampling and manipulation of poorly-understood pandemic-candidate viruses are adequate?
https://project-evidence.github.io/
Summary (IIRC): The most likely explanation of its origins is a person who collected bats for a lab in Wuhan contracted the disease in the cave where bats were collected.
Very interesting. Does that mean Covid was in Europe 3 months before the supposed patient zero in Wuhan (December 8?)
Wait are we looking to improve and make sure that this doesn’t happen again, or do we just want someone to blame so we can continue to do nothing?
For the most probable outcomes, it's about improving (whether it's a lab escape that requires tightening how labs work, or a natural origin that requires, well, something).
Of course, if theoretically this or another pathogen was discovered to be human-made / engineered on purpose (not a real scenario in this case! Purely a hypothetical), then obviously it might have "holding someone responsible" repercussions.
And there might be other scenarios I can't think of that would engender different reactions.
Bottom line, when investigating to discover the truth, I don't think it's valid to beforehand decide on the reason that you're seeking the truth.
They were even demanding reparations too! If the Chinese didn’t have ICBM nukes to defend themselves, then you can bet that the western nations would’ve mounted a multi-country alliance to attack China by now.
Read up Jack London’s The Unparalled Invasion from 1910. The Grand Master Plan is all laid out right there for you. It’s disgusting. You’ll want to throw up after you read it. But yet, this is how the white people of the western world sees China.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-ch...
The "argument" that "if you've got nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about" is is just as worthless when promoting encryption backdoors as it is now.
People are accusing them of building the virus in a lab with literally zero evidence. Give the US a bunch of raw data to spin and it just makes that easier.
Maybe with people like Trump in the world who would definitely capitalize on that type of thing to cast blame there is inherent risk, but at least amongst civilized educated people, its obvious a virus could show up anywhere and disseminating information shows a clear desire to fight the virus as a member of the world, rather than a desire to use it as a political tool or to gain an advantage because china can execute more draconian mitigation measures than a "free" country like America would be able to.
Where China is clearly to blame is the reduced amount of information clearly inhibited the fight against coronavirus, in the world's fight against this thing china defected rather than cooperated.
Before any whataboutism is mentioned, Trump also defected and made a mess out of a response, lying to the public, and hiding cases. That doesn't make either correct and neither one justifies the other's actions. Both countries are clearly very in the wrong for their COVID reactions.
I don't think there is a lot of evidence for malice, but there is definitely evidence worthy of contemplation:
https://project-evidence.github.io/
Here is a study from 2007: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/
> In this study, we investigated the receptor usage of the SL-CoV S by combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules of human, civet, or horseshoe bat.
That is literally building of viruses in a lab.
> Such raw data is known as “line listings”, he said, and would typically be anonymised but contain details such as what questions were asked of individual patients, their responses and how their responses were analysed.
> “That’s standard practice for an outbreak investigation,” he told Reuters on Saturday via video call from Sydney, where he is currently undergoing quarantine.
I can't claim to know much about what's standard practice for outbreak investigations, but I'm inclined to believe him on this more than - no offense - a random HN user.
Yet for some reason the West seemed intent on pursuing lockdowns, demonising countries like Sweden and Belarus which didn't.
Hospitals have never been overloaded (apart from places like New York where symptomatic patients were sent back into nursing homes - or Italy, with generally inadequate pandemic preparations) and in places like Sweden deaths in 2020 are up only single-digits against 2018:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
As soon as we realised we were over-intubating patients, and that proning and oxygen treatment were sufficient for serious admissions, and that Vitamin D and C (and other cheap and generic treatments) were enough for the general population, the potential for hospital overload (beyond what flu waves incur anyway) was also eliminated.
And yet we still persist with lockdowns despite them causing a greater amount of harm than the virus itself due to factors like interrupted education, mental damage, and interrupted regular medical treatment.
There were political games afoot in both China and the West in terms of this virus. The fact that the American economy was booming just before the re-election of a non-mainstream, anti-China president, and that pandemic responses justified mail-in voting on an unprecedent scale is too coincidental to ignore.
Earlier last year, Sweden was being highly praised for its approach, until they ended up with a much higher per-capita death rate than neighbours and comparable countries.
"Sweden deaths in 2020 are up only single-digits against 2018"
Sweden is a low population, sparsely populated country with a relatively wealthy, healthy and homogenous population and the highest percentage of people who live alone of any country.
While Sweden did not lock down like other countries, they issued instructions to reduce travel and work from home if possible, and - as Swedes have an atypically high level of trust in the government - they complied: if you look at Google mobility reports, you find that Sweden's non-mandatory lockdown had a similar real world effect as the various lockdowns in the US and Spain. Sweden was not entirely without lockdown rules either, which got more severe as criticism within the country and from neighbours intensified.
"Hospitals have never been overloaded [..] the potential for hospital overload (beyond what flu waves incur anyway) was also eliminated."
While the hospital system was not overloaded in the UK, individual hospitals were, and the system as a whole came very close to overload during the peaks. Were it not for the first lockdown, and using the time that bought us to massively increase the capacity, they absolutely would have been overloaded.
The hospital my girlfriend works at ran out of PPE, oxygen and staff (due to illness), and the conditions for staff were beyond awful, including multiple of her colleagues in their 40s and up being killed. This isn't just because the UK health system was poorly prepared, prior to the pandemic, we were considered the second most prepared country in the world for a pandemic.
I am not saying lockdown is the right approach -- I don't know, and indeed lockdown carries with it a huge number of economic and health harms. But to characterise this as just a normal flu-season and say that hospitals coped fine is clearly wrong. The only reason hospitals weren't overloaded was because of a combination of heroic efforts from staff and measures to limit the number of incoming patients. One reason the UK likely got so much closer to being overloaded and has a higher number of deaths (besides demographic differences and population density) was that we left it relatively late to lock down and our lock down was relatively tame compared to many in Europe.
Look at raw gdp growth data and that was without major tax cuts. Nothing proves that the previous US president did anything more than "ride the wave".
Also, debts were greatly increased even before covid and the current president will have to fix that, again...
Additionally, lockdowns have an additional reason, namely to not overload healthcare so the situation doesn't get out of control. While rural areas can play denial, that's not an option for bigger and more dense areas/cities. A lot of hospitals were running on the edge, where >90% of capacity was for covid and delaying all other ( even urgent) surgeries.
Ps. Sweden has a very low population density. Not everything there applies elsewhere.
They even admitted they were wrong with having no lockdowns.
https://www.biospace.com/article/1nih-awards-ecohealth-allia...
After a few different US lab leaks involving anthrax, smallpox, and avian flu in 2014 the Obama administration put a ban on the fuding of gain of function research.[2]
The ban was eventually overturned in 2018.[3]
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-wor...
[2]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-anthrax-labs-analysis...
[3]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
So, in other words, there is no evidence that GoF research is "here to protect us"?
- China intentionally manufactured the virus and released it (Proven false, virus wasn't engineered)
- China accidentally released the virus while collecting it (Possible, but unlikely given the virus has early evidence away from both collection point and Wuhan Lab)
- China has too many wet markets that allowed the virus to mutate enough for human jump (Current consensus working theory, but also unproven as intermediary animal has not been identified)
But all of these list China as the responsible party, so if you want to call it out as not Xenophobia or Anti-China sentiment then you'd have to show evidence the reporting showed "Joint Sino-American research lab causes..." kind of headlines. Otherwise, you point strengthens that this has at least an under current of anti-china sentiment, as the reporting has not mentioned US involvement at all.
WHO of course have a lot to answer for with regards to ignoring Taiwan because if BS geopolitics when they had the most reliable/believable/compelling evidence of the nature of SARS-Cov2
The most common lab leak hypothesis I've seen is that it was engineered during gain-of-function research and then accidentally leaked.
The fallacy is just that the only reason someone would engineer a virus would be to weaponize it. Gain-of-function research is regularly done to study and combat viruses. So just because it was engineered doesn't imply it was intentionally released.
Thank you. I'm curious ... how many virology labs, like this one, are extant in the world and how many study coronaviruses as they did ?
Is it tens of thousands of virology labs like this one and hundreds that study coronaviruses ?
Or is it hundreds of virology labs like this one and a handful study coronaviruses ?
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-nih-gain-of-functi...
Likely enough not in any meaningful way attached to either president, though.
What circumstantial evidence?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-needs-a-real-investig...
There's also been a string of academic preprints and articles, like
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2102/2102.03910.pdf
The authors tend to be kind of fringe, not surprisingly given the reputational cost (and given that if a lab origin is ever confirmed, many of the techniques that top researchers have spent their lives mastering will probably become illegal). A lot of very senior virologists are on the record as open to the possibility of a lab escape, though, for example:
> Baric said he still thought the virus came from bats in southern China, perhaps directly, or possibly via an intermediate host, although the smuggled pangolins, in his view, were a red herring. The disease evolved in humans over time without being noticed, he suspected, becoming gradually more infectious, and eventually a person carried it to Wuhan “and the pandemic took off.” Then he said, “Can you rule out a laboratory escape? The answer in this case is probably not.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
I don't recommend that article in general; the author uses his talents as a novelist to paint a more vivid picture than I believe the evidence justifies. I do trust him to faithfully print the quote, though.
And as your first article details, the "lab accident" theory rests on some lab doing secret virus experiments. Even if you find a whole sea of the virus in some cave, someone will argue they could have gotten there after the first "accident". Good luck disproving that without letting US virologists snoop in every lab in China.
To me "open to the possibility" is a very strong reading of "can't rule it out".
Ralph Baric and 'batwoman' Shi Zhengli worked together on several coronavirus research projects spanning more than a decade.
It's like asking the fox if he knows where the hen went.
Presumably someone in the Chinese government ordered Google to lie about the institute's location. Why would the Chinese government do that if the institute was uninvolved?
Investigators ought to ask China who ordered it, and why. And ask Google the same thing.
I do feel a bit sorry for Google employees who'd be caught in the middle if this actually happens.
US government to Google: "Tell us about how China ordered Google Maps to help with the coverup. If you lie to the investigators, we'll send you to jail."
China government to Google: "When the US asks about the Google Maps coverup, lie. If you don't lie to the investigators, we'll send you to jail."
https://elifesciences.org/articles/31257
For the original SARS, it's palm civets, identified in less than a year. (The link to bats wasn't discovered until much later, by Shi Zhengli; but the intermediate host is enough to feel pretty confident it's natural-origin.)
For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting for that intermediate host. That's the significance of the early pangolin papers; but as Alina Chan and many others have noted, those papers have significant data quality issues, and even the Chinese have pretty much abandoned the pangolins.
https://mobile.twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/13605511085659...
https://mobile.twitter.com/TheaKFischer/status/1360590441817...
> Peter Daszak, is a zoologist and bat-virus sample collector and the head of a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance — a group that [...] has channeled money from the National Institutes of Health to Shi Zhengli’s laboratory in Wuhan, allowing the lab to carry on recombinant research into diseases of bats and humans.
> [...]
> Daszak, for his part, seems to have viewed his bat quests as part of an epic, quasi-religious death match. In a paper from 2008, Daszak and a co-author described Bruegel’s painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels and compared it to the contemporary human biological condition. The fallen angels could be seen as pathogenic organisms that had descended “through an evolutionary (not spiritual) pathway that takes them to a netherworld where they can feed only on our genes, our cells, our flesh,” Daszak wrote. “Will we succumb to the multitudinous horde? Are we to be cast downward into chthonic chaos represented here by the heaped up gibbering phantasmagory against which we rail and struggle?”
There's much more in there; it's clear that he's good friends and business partners with the WIV and it would be deeply his interest to suppress any consideration of the lab-escape hypothesis.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/resources/documents/article/othe...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/world-h...
There is practically nowhere on this planet one can hope to truly be unaffected by one or the other.
Better form a new org that is apolitical and concerns itself with promulgating health and disease prevention rather than some political agenda?
It is not a police, it has no coercive power. The reason is obvious if you think more than 10 seconds about how to get sovereign governments to cooperate on public health matters.
What would be your ideal organisation? One subservient to the American government? Or do you want it to be a world government above sovereign states? How do you think it would fly?
If anything they were cautious before February 2020.
"The scientific community applauded President Joe Biden's decision to rejoin the World Health Organization and other global efforts designed to stop and prevent COVID-19."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/01/22/scient...
A response of "Trump did thing, Biden undid thing" after a comment of "US should do thing" can be interpreted as support of Trump and criticism of Biden.
This is not a good thing to be true. Thus, it is downvoted.
The reality is that it was up to the member states to pressure China in early 2020 to release the information they should have shared. And as the only member state as large or larger than China, this was the US’s job. At the time, however, the Trump administration was entirely focused on closing a trade deal with China that Trump could use in his election campaign. Which is why the US said nothing which prevented the WHO from getting the support they needed to investigate the origins of the pandemic.
For the first few months the US, and especially Trump, was basically going on about how well Xi Jinping was handling everything.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-praises-xi-for-han...
It’s precisely the vacuum created by the US’s voluntary defanging of itself in multilateral institutions that has allowed China to resist these institutions and even take control of some of them. The answer to that isn’t to continue unilaterally reducing its own power.
It need not be "lab-created". Most samples are taken from the wild, and then has its evolution stimulated for research.
Does anyone know whether this story (including video and photos is credible?
The only article that I can find that actually tries to levy complaints of obstruction is this one from the NYT[0]. However, several of the WHO investigators quoted have gone on Twitter accusing the NYT of twisting their words[1]. Makes me pretty doubtful that there was any obstruction.
On one side we have a country with half a million cases that has since December been accusing China with "coverups" without materializing much evidence, despite document leaks and now an international investigation. On the other side we have a country with orders of magnitude fewer total and per capita cases, whose case demographics have matched up with numbers from other countries, and whose export numbers in neighboring countries has also been consistent with their reported numbers. At this point if there was some sort of obstruction or coverup the Whitehouse would have a smoking gun by now.
Other comments here talking about the "lab origin" theory pretty much hinge on theological logic. "Well it could come from a lab, and there's no proof yet that it didn't, so I have faith". It isn't Bayesian reasoning if you don't bring up rigorous statistics to prove your point.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/world/asia/china-world-he...
[1] https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/02/caught-in-the-act-new-...
Not to mention thousands of large social gatherings that happened way after the virus was already causing thousands of death.
If you can’t control other countries, maybe we should at least figure out how to improve our response?
What if some other virus comes out of nature next time when we have no one to blame?
https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1360551108565999619
https://twitter.com/TheaKFischer/status/1360590441817772034
https://twitter.com/LiuXininBeijing/status/13607416005072691...
And people wonder why I complain about propaganda in the western world :/
On the other hand zoonotic disease is known to exist.
Please do not allow dislike of a state party system to pollute your thinking. Your views about China do not inform what happened and in the end, this becomes repetitive.
I might add that I dislike many things about other economies just as much. I too indulge these "they musta dunnit" fantasies. But, I wake up to myself: wasting too much time on motive and belief is not helpful.
There is no strong evidence of lab caused leakage. The WHO scientists are competent. WHO politics are ugly, all UN politics are ugly. Read the science.
Personally, I think the idea of this being lab created by China is far fetched.
Would China really do top secret illegal bio-weapons research in a lab essentially open to the public?
If a country choose not to shut its airports doesn't mean your country has to accept incoming flights. If a country thinks people are coming in with a pandemic disease and don't shut the entry points (ports/airports) that's on that country's leadership.
I've heard this multiple times as a reasonable possibility, and yet it seems absurd if you think about it: are you trying to accuse someone of leaking into the environment a virus that actually comes from the environment? And how do you even prove something like that?
Similar to if we had a sudden large radiation hazard and it was unclear if it was some spontaneously emerging phenomenon with essentially no direct human cause, or a power plant/enrichment facility/warhead manufacturer/etc.
And beyond that, there are supposedly methods of (even purely scientifically motivated) research that would involve engineering a virus with certain properties that also happen to make it extraordinarily deadly.
Ethics committees determine all sorts of experiments to be prohibitively unethical, and a virus with particularly deadly design should certainly be held under such scrutiny.
I tend to think China is a danger to humanity at-large, but I could be wrong. These specific events have not surprised me (new virus, spread, etc) but the sheer amount of incredulity at the behavior of countries (China, US, etc) is disheartening.
Once a guy is dead, does it matter who killed him?
So... murder shouldn't be punished ?
If it was being developed as a biological weapon you would tend to assume there's likely progress on how to defend against it by those who created it so you could hope to leverage that work to get a head start on vaccines and so forth. No one could force China to hand that work over but they could certainly pressure them in full force, including some of their allies that may also be suffering.
Overall, there's really not much in terms of actionable information to follow through with. It might help states target spies to keep a closer eye on these scenarios and prompt a better global response in the future.
Just 2.4 millions as today. Not millions and millions. This is not 1918 flu levels (yet).
The public justification for the giant US nuclear arsenal was the entirely fictional "missile gap," thereby creating an actual missile gap in the other direction that the Soviets thought they had to close. I'm not saying that "If new coronaviruses are being cooked up in Wuhan, we'd be negligent if we weren't funding development of our own" thought processes will necessarily become ascendant, but "China is a existential threat to the world, and any expenditure is justified in order to defeat it" is absolutely common.
It's amazing so many people will just take CCP's narrative at face value, there are still many that think it came from the seafood market.
Nature has lied to protect the CCP before:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/world/asia/china-springer...
From the conclusion section
1. take a virus that is highly adapted to humans, and inject it in another animal (like a rabbit)
2. the virus will cause a very low-grade infection in the rabbit, since the virus is adapted to humans, not rabbits - but it will still be a non-zero level of effectiveness
3. at the peak level of the rabbit's low-grade infection, the mutants of the virus that are more effective against rabbits will be expressed more than any others, and replicate themselves more than any other mutant
4. capture these variants from the rabbit, and inject them into another rabbit.
5. step 3 and 4 repeat as the virus becomes less human-specific and more rabbit-specific
6. if all goes well, you will have transformed the human-effective virus into a rabbit-effective virus. But the virus still has enough of the same characteristics that it will provoke an immune response in humans that will also protect against the human-specific variant
I imagine if you wanted to do the opposite, and craft a virus that is more effective against humans instead of less, you would simply follow the steps in reverse.
Since these steps are so simple, and require no direct modification of the genetic material (you simply encourage it to drift in a certain direction) it seems like it would be hard to tell which viruses were manipulated in this way.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...
Edit: removed incorrect conclusion
Without Chinese data the origin will remain a mystery.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...
Kept searching for followups, didn’t see anything till this:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...
That’s from 21 January 2021 and says:
“So far unpublished data, analysing retained wastewater samples from Barcelona, Spain, taken in March 2019 showed positive RT-qPCR results for SARS-CoV-2 (Chavarria-Miró et al., 2020). The authors conclude that the virus was introduced to the Barcelona population due to global travel and remained undetected.”
So as of then, still unpublished.
Unfortunately this is not yet possible because, well, the WHO scientists are still working on it.
However making it a regulation to keep samples and publish sequences would probably make sense.
This is what gets me in politics: For all the well-deserved vilification Trump was subjected to, it seems that every day we are discovering some of the important policies and opinions they issued were right on point. The dichotomy, it seems, is one of vilification due to his often insolent and down-right ignorant public style and presence rather than anything I would characterize as substantive.
I have worked with people like that. People with sometimes deep personality and social issues who do great work and excel professionally. To take it in another direction, back when I was actively mentoring high school FRC teams we got all kinds of kids. There were kids on the Autism spectrum as well as Asperger's. I can say that every single one of them was superb in their team participation once I learned how to work with them and, above all, accept that they didn't sound or behave like the rest.
I am not making a parallel between Trump and these conditions. Just saying that it is sometimes important to focus on substance rather than theater.
Case in point:
I just got my second COVID vaccine yesterday. Shaking and feeling like crap as I type this (it will last a few hours).
When Trump said vaccines were coming by the end of the year everyone laughed at him. It was brutal. I remember watching CNN as they tore him to pieces for daring to "not use science" and raising our hopes in such ignorant ways.
Well, we are currently vaccinating at a rate of approximately 1.5 million people per day and this will go up.
Did Biden do this? Look, I am in manufacturing. Have been my entire life. You don't produce 1.5 million per day of anything, distribute and administer it with some sort of a "then a miracle occurs" approach. Biden has only been in office a few days. There is absolutely no way he could have any material impact on vaccine delivery and administration during that time. These things have to be planned and well-executed for months. Which means I got my vaccine (and 1.5 million people are getting their vaccines) because of the organization and planning the Trump administration created and drove, likely back to March/April of last year. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone --WITH MANUFACTURING EXPERIENCE-- who thinks you can instantly go from 100K per day to 1.5 million per day just because there's a new boss in town. I mean, remember that we couldn't even produce masks and PPE at scale in this country (or nearly any other country). In this sense this should have been a massive wakeup call to the world, not just the US.
This means that Biden's "100 million in 100 days" will be achieved and exceeded --by Trump-- so long as people go get vaccinated. And, without a doubt, Biden will take credit for 100% of it. This is what I hate about politics.
There are other issues for which he was vilified that will turn out to have been right non point. I won't dive into the details here. Some of these include:
- The Paris climate accord (seriously, google the document, read it and tell me how it will save the world...it's nonsense...expensive nonsense)
- Tariffs on steel and aluminum. I am doing an aircraft design project right now. I can buy US-made aluminum for roughly 25% less than the cost of steel. That has never been the case in my life. Of course, everyone in the metals industry wants Biden to keep the tariffs in place. May I remind you Trump was called "racist" and all kinds of other things for enacting this?
- The pipeline. Aside from the fact that tens of thousands of jobs will be lost (a good friend of mine lost his and is facing having to sell his house to survive). Everything around you requires oil. It doesn't matter if it is made from plastics or not. You don't think aluminum and steel require oil for manufacturing and more? Do some research. The US achieved net exporter status during Trump's years. That will surely go away. Also, cost of goods (not just gasoline) was kept under check because we controlled oil. Not any more. A friend in Arizona tells me gasoline prices have doubled there. I regularly ship large aerospace components in the thousands of pounds. Freight prices are being impacted by this (my opinion) stupid move. Yes, we all want everything clean. However, there's a fine line between wishing something and being delusional about how and when it can be achieved.
Anyhow, I'll stop here. There's more, but I need to go to the couch and shake-off the vaccine side effects for a few hours. If you disagree with the above, be honest enough to do the research before forming an opinion. Above all, if you do not have operational experience running a business, you need to understand that you are not equipped to understand the many dynamics at play here.
Simple example: If gas prices explode companies are going to have to raise pay for their workers. Sounds good until you understand at least two things. First, the worker doesn't get to use that raise, it goes towards paying for oil. Second, that money could have been used to hire more people and create jobs. In fact, higher oil prices could destroy jobs in areas one might not suspect.
No, everyone isn't going to go buy electric cars and trucks. Get over it. This will take a long time. The infrastructure isn't ready.
FYI: Fixing climate change by 2030/2050/2100? Delusional. We can't do it. And yet we are going to burn resources promoting pure bullshit instead of talking about how to adapt.
Politics sucks. I want honest exchange of ideas judged by their merit, not through a political lens.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
Authoritarians, their unchecked ambition, unrestrained by laws replace life with nothing. To them, a place with plagues and murder is a good place. Billions of people are something to be processed, to be mined for hollow celebrity and ambitious license unrestrained by laws. A genetic weapon released from a communist military lab??? Everyone is very lucky they're still breathing. This could have easily killed the world. And for what? A 1% margin on soy bean prices? Americans, people we trusted with power and money rushed to defend their precious marxism like some teenage girl catfished by jihadis in 2014.
Since everyone gets to what they want, I'm going to emit a matter wave into the center of the sun. The sub orbits a black hole. I make it so the surface of that black hole is a faster, easier path than completing an orbit around it. I expand that to the surface of the Earth for gravity applications, coherent control of pair production. All observable celestial bodies are thermal effects of what's here on Earth.
It's one thing to mine an asteroid with fuel cells and drones. It's another thing to microwave it out of the sky, as if I command the weather around us, the clouds above, and even the great heavenly bodies themselves!!!
The US should use its own primary sources in future to evaluate disease spread. China will lie to the WHO and the WHO will protect it.
But to know the truth, we should use our modern equivalents of Key Hole. There is no truth but that which you have examined yourself.
The WHO is a forum to coordinate strategy and exchange information. Obviously, this requires a minimum of good faith, which seems to be difficult for some countries (yes, particularly dictatorships). But even then, it is better to have them within, collaborating on their terms, than to leave them outside, in which case it would be even harder to get any information out of them.
So yes, China will lie, which will make life worse for epidemiologists and governments across the globe, but not as worse as it could be with China being entirely uncooperative.
It is not the world police, and it won’t come anywhere and do anything against the local government’s wishes. Otherwise the screams world be even louder, and justifiably so.
I tend to agree with this sentiment, however I'm always on the fence as to if acting on no new information is better than acting on false or misleading information. If you can't trust the source the data is almost worthless. Anyways, that's for self reported information. Getting any direct access to gather independent information I'd say is nearly always valuable unless it's also targeted with disinformation campaigns.
Before the pandemic, I thought the WHO was a relatively capable organization. But from what I witnessed they just seem like a prestige farm used as a stepping stone to more lucrative careers.
Thus, we have the WHO. You wanna replace it, it's gonna take a decade to get to another agreement if one even is made. Then it will have its own set of issues. During a pandemic, seems better to me to work with and hold accountable the one we have... kinda like the WH is doing today.
However, now we know the adversary is truly an adversary. China will suppress information on pandemics started within its borders.
The game has changed. You don't listen to China about whether China is sick. You listen to Keyhole and your guys on the ground.
Unfortunately this particular topic is heavily politically-loaded and CCP’s track record of handling the virus leads the common person to believe the WHO won’t receive the full information.
In this case the WHO’s hands seem tied. How are they supposed to fix that? (Genuine question, I would like the WHO to be able to fulfill its role well and serve the global public good)
Do you have any reason to believe that this is true?
I remember thinking that the WHO wasn’t what it seemed. Just one small example of course.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-pled...
Also, you clearly don’t understand what the WHO does and how critical it has been in the reduction and even eradication of disease spread across the world over decades.
Further, the WHO, much like most multilateral organizations is dependent on its member states for strength. When the most powerful member state voluntarily and unilaterally chose to disengage over the past half decade, it shouldn’t be surprised that the 2nd most powerful member state is calling the shots.
Yeah, I'm sure as a multilateral platform for cooperation on things that everyone wants done they're good.
But as an information source for novel epidemics, clearly we should use our spy sats.
If the Western world would have done what the WHO advised at the time, we all more or less would have a COVID stuation like the Chinese have for some time.
To be clear, these scenarios are entirely and spontaneously made up, but they're also entirely possible, and we've fallen into the trap of believing any old bullshit about China simply because it's possible, and reconciling our spreading it and our obvious ignorance with racist "inscrutable Chinese" tropes.
The reason we don't know more about China is not because they're quiet, the reason we don't know about China is because we ban and censor media coming from China (just as they do to us, but moreso.) Somehow it's become mainstream to believe that the public shouldn't know what the Chinese government thinks (or the Russian government, or the Iranian government) and that it's better to rely on rumor and retired generals.
The truth probably is that they know it originated (from animals) in China, and don't want the WHO to officially reach that conclusion. That's not particularly damaging to most countries, but in a communist country with tightly controlled information flow, the citizenry isn't shown a government making mistakes.
> Dwyer says that the team didn’t see anything during its visits to suggest a lab accident. “Now, whether we were shown everything? You can never know. The group wasn’t designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practice.”
From https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/world/asia/china-who-wuha...
> Even in the best of circumstances, a full inquiry could take months, if not longer. The team must also navigate attempts by China to politicize the inquiry.
And yet a few days ago the WHO pushed out a hasty judgment that it was very unlikely the virus leaked from the lab. And in the last day they’ve already started backtracking after intense skepticism from the world - see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-12/who-backs... titled “ WHO Backs Away From Outright Rejection of Virus Lab-Leak Theory”.
It also seems that now the virus may have been reported even earlier than we thought. From https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/world/asia/china-world-he...:
> The Chinese scientists also acknowledged they had discovered that 92 people were hospitalized in Wuhan as early as October 2019 with symptoms such as fever and coughing. The Chinese experts said they had found no trace of Covid-19 in those people, but the tests were incomplete. The W.H.O. team members said more research was needed.
Between the CCP’s early suppression of journalism and social media reporting on the virus, the fact that Taiwan was the first to warn the world, China’s repeated denials and delays in letting an outside team to visit the site, and their purge of all the coronavirus studies originating from this lab (https://www.the-sun.com/news/2113876/covid-cover-up-china-wu...), there is very little reason to trust the claim that a lab leak can be ruled out. If anything it only seems more likely that a massive coverup is in progress, and the WHO is the willing mouthpiece for it.
That the Chinese eat bats? Or that this was a lab leak?
Because it obviously cannot be both!
But yet, all the racist white people of the world, and yes, they were all white people, were accusing the Chinese of being disgusting and eating bats.
The western world claims that they are multicultural, and not racist, but yet, this one thing caused them to show their true racist colors.
Surprisingly, no normal white people, came to the defense and shouted down the racists among them. Thus validating the fact, that their silence meant that they supported all the racist vitriol that came out from their fellow brethren.
The truth hurts. I know. I expect that my comment will be flagged and censored.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...
North Korea seems a more trustworthy source of news than US nowdays.
To me this is like a magician distracting the audiences attention from the gold penny - you are all looking in the wrong place while the real issue is being forgotten.
As a general rule, I don't take this kind of analysis via repeated repeated repeated repeated repeated repeated repeated application of Bayes' Rule with somewhat-to-completely arbitrary probabilities at each step very seriously. At all.
It's a kind of gish gallop [1] with additional window dressing purporting to wrap it all up into one easy number. From a probabilistic point of view it ignores any dependency between observed facts, which is a serious issue but not necessarily the most damning one.
This particular case is even worse than usual. According to a quick Ctrl-F-aided skim of the document, the author doesn't identify a single fact that increases the probability of zoonotic origin, which is extremely suspicious. If every single available fact in a complicated issue points to the same conclusion that's probably because you are messing with your facts, not because that's how things actually are.
After noticing the one-sided-ness of the Bayesian updates I rolled my eyes and closed the tab.
The PCR Pandemic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LToSnpz8A4
Fuck these lone doctors and fuck Youtube for spreading their unfounded theories through the general population, putting millions of lives at risk.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...
Caution: Potentially Misleading Contents
Substantial peer feedback has been received that this record does not follow the norms of scientific rigour or balance, and thus the main claims may not stand the test of scientific scrutiny.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
Now maybe the virus mutated from those initial 174 cases but that's unlikely.
China does have a narrative that covid19 reinfections are coming from imported frozen foods though so I'm not sure why they are pushing that angle. It's probably an economic one and to save face. But maybe it's real.. if it is we are screwed.
- Virus infects human ACE2 suboptimally, therefore it's not lab grown. Why? Because a virus engineer is always going for maximizing spread rate? Seems plausible that less-than-ideal infection rates of humans could be a feature rather than a bug.
- A polybasic clevage site was not seen in SARS-CoV... but it's function is not known. Okay?
- The virus backbone was "0day" and not previously known to researchers. Seems like a feature that a covert bio warfare lab would desire.
The rest of the speculation seems to ride on the assumption that the virus originated in China (despite evidence showing otherwise[1][2]), and their discovery seems biased toward any data to support that conclusion.
1. https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...
2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2
You are correct. There is both gain of function and loss of function happening in these types of experiments.
That China blocked the Who's efforts and the WHO disclosed this is more relevant to future health policy than where this particular outbreak started. (Do we really want the public health system to tune to this specific scenario?)
Whether this is motivation is true or not has nothing to do with whether the WHO report reflects reality.