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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

"If the question is “are both hypotheses possible?” the answer is yes. Both are possible. If the question is “are they equally likely?” the answer is absolutely not. One hypothesis requires a colossal cover-up and the silent, unswerving, leak-proof compliance of a vast network of scientists, civilians, and government officials for over a year. The other requires only for biology to behave as it always has, for a family of viruses that have done this before to do it again. The zoonotic spillover hypothesis is simple and explains everything. It’s scientific malpractice to pretend that one idea is equally as meritorious as the other. The lab-leak hypothesis is a scientific deus ex machina, a narrative shortcut that points a finger at a specific set of bad actors. I would be embarrassed to stand up in front of a room of scientists, lay out both hypotheses, and then pretend that one isn’t clearly, obviously better than the other"

https://massivesci.com/articles/sars-cov-coronavirus-covid19...

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The cover up didn't need to be colossal, just for everyone to point to occams razor and call anyone with a hint of curiosity a racist.

The fact that the origin of the outbreak appears to be in the same vicinity as a lab that experiments on similar viruses alone is sufficient reason to want a thorough investigation.

Otherwise, the odds that nature produced such a virus, in such a location, make for a crazy coincidence, given that we havent been facing this problem every year for decades.

In other words, it couldn't have appeared somewhere far from a properly-equipped lab, because there would be no properly-equipped lab to detect it.

> Have you considered the possibility that it first appeared in the vicinity of a lab that experiments on similar viruses is because if it had appeared elsewhere, there would have been no sufficiently-equipped lab to isolate it?

You are essentially arguing for lab leak theory. Initially there was only one cluster of COVID and that was at Wuhan. That's why lab leak hypothesis is more plausible.

It was not the case that there were dozens of clusters all over the world and Wuhan lab was first able to identify the virus. Your argument would have _some_ validity if there are lot of clusters of outbreaks at the same time. But that was not the case. The initial cluster was only at Wuhan.

The initial cluster was found at Wuhan, because there's a lab there. We have no idea how many sub-pandemic clusters arose and fell before this particular mutation got into a population sufficiently dense and mobile to spread it.

Did you know that 1918 flu arose in Haskell County, Kansas, killed many, and then just .. died out? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/

> The initial cluster was found at Wuhan, because there's a lab there

Citation needed. This seems hand-wavy at best. As a matter of fact, people were uncertain about disease itself [1]. I havent seen any article yet that asserts the fact that Wuhan cluster was detected because of the lab. Furthermore, Wuhan lab is a research lab. It's not some diagnostic lab that people go there to get tested for new variant of SARS viruses.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025

Plenty of virii have their origins traced to initial outbreaks where there are not labs.

Using this as a justification to not investigate the possibility of a lab leak is wishful thinking at best.

SARS-CoV-2 came to the world's attention because so many people in Wuhan got sick that clinicians noticed the unexpectedly high volume of patients. No special skill in virology is required to detect that, and there's no indication that the WIV was involved in doing so; if you believe it was, please post a reference. The genome of SARS-CoV-2 was first published not by the WIV but by Professor Zhang Yongzhen at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3052966/chin...

Of course it's possible that the WIV had discovered the outbreak earlier by more sophisticated means, and the CCP has chosen to conceal this fact. I don't think it's even that unlikely, considering all the other early warnings they tried and failed to conceal (e.g., the reports from Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist unaffiliated with the WIV); but the question would then become why.

We had SARS-1 crop up in Guangdong in 2003 when the nearest known related virus has been found in Yunnan some ~700 miles away.

There just wasn't a lab there to leak from.

This time it popped up about ~700 miles away again, but where there was a lab.

The actual chances of that happening are probably about 1-in-10 / 1-in-20 if we understood the movement of people and animals within China that produced both outbreaks. That isn't actually that crazy of a coincidence.

It's not an impossible coincidence, but what prior estimate of the probability that an arbitrary pandemic is lab-origin are you applying that to? Of the ~dozen pandemics in the last fifty years, one (the 1977 flu pandemic[1], which killed ~700k people) was probably lab-origin. A 1/12 prior plus a 1/10 coincidence in favor of lab origin is pretty close to even odds, so what evidence takes it back down? You can't just say "because pandemics are usually natural", since that's what the 1/12 prior already captures.

You present many reasonable arguments that natural origin is possible, and I agree that it is. That doesn't mean lab origin is impossible though, and it doesn't mean the possibility is negligible unless your prior is very heavily biased against it. Considering that a lab-origin pandemic has probably happened before (and has even been dismissed as clearly natural by the WHO[2], before the later scientific consensus corrected that!), I don't see where you're getting the confidence you've expressed in other comments that the origin of this one is certainly natural.

As to exact numbers, I agree that it's reasonable to consider only the urban population, since emergence would probably be in a city. There's no reason to limit the population to China, though--natural emergence elsewhere in SE Asia would also have been possible, and the WIV's research program is distinctive not just in China but in the world. It seems like our disagreement hinges mostly on that first prior (considering that a pandemic emerged, but no other information), though.

1. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0904322

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bul...

The 1977 flu pandemic was a known virus though which was released. It was highly plausible that the virus could have been in a lab.

This virus is literally unlike any other known virus. The closest known virus to it is RaTG13 which is only 96% homologous and the 4% differences across all its basepairs is very high. We have a closer relationship to apes than SARS-CoV-2 does to RATG13.

And we had SARS-1 in 2003 and H1N1 in 2009 and MERS in 2012, where there's no lab involvement at all. Not to mention Ebola, Zika. It estimated that some 30+ viruses have spilled over from animals to humans since the 1970s, and there's been one lab leak.

And we know that Yunnan province has bats with very similar viruses, with one virus having been identified which is almost certainly the precursor to SARS-CoV-1 and another virus which is the cousin of SARS-CoV-2, and we have a spillover event that happened in 2003 to Guangdong with SARS-CoV-1 showing that this can certainly occur without the involvement of any labs.

What remains that is objectionable about the spillover theory of SARS-CoV-2 is the "wild coincidence" of the WIV lab being in the same city as where the spillover happened. This time. But a large city is likely where it would have been identified first. Estimates from the genetic clock of the virus is that the spillover happened sometime as early as October. It would have been spreading in rural areas before it hit the nearest big city and caused a superspreading event and was noticed. To accurately determine the likelihood that the spillover was in Wuhan and not somewhere else you need to accurately know the distribution of the bats in China, the distribution of the sarbecoviruses in the bats, and the intermediate animals that might have been involved and their movement and the movement of humans. We know from SARS-CoV-2 that the virus jumping from bats in Yunnan to Guangdong can happen. We can expect it would be unlikely for the virus to leapfrog all the way to Beijing.

We don't have all that information, so it now becomes pulling numbers out of butts time. To me that feels more like rolling a natural 20 on 1d20. With SARS-CoV-1 we rolled a 6 and it turned up in Guangdong. If we rolled a 11 or 12 maybe it winds up in Congquing. But we have no idea what the intermediate species might be, which might make spillovers in Congquing unlikely if those animals aren't farmed near there. And we still have no idea of the mechanism by which SARS-CoV-2 wound up in Guangdong, but we know it did, and it didn't involve a lab.

It seems like you have a lot more confidence than I do that we know everything the WIV was working on? I agree that SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely to be derived (naturally, artificially, or otherwise) from any known virus, including RaTG13; but a distinctive characteristic of the WIV's research was their sampling of novel viruses from remote bat caves that no other humans routinely entered. That presents a pathway for emergence of novel, naturally-evolved pathogens beyond what normal agricultural etc. activity already risked, whether through a researcher infected in the field or through a literal lab accident back in Wuhan.

So specifically considering their group, the novelty of the pathogen doesn't seem to me like significant evidence against lab origin. The public focus on gain-of-function research actually seems excessive to me--while I do think it's possible that the origin of SARS-CoV-2 involves lab manipulation (e.g., genetic engineering or serial passage) of the virus, the WIV's library of novel natural viruses seems to me like at least as big a part of the danger. In any case, their database went offline on Sep 12 2019, around when that genetic clock suggests SARS-Cov-2 began spreading in humans:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349073738_An_invest...

That timing could be coincidence, and their flimsy explanation for its continued unavailability ("hacking attempts") could just be the reflexive secrecy of an authoritarian regime. It's a second weird coincidence, though. The WIV has claimed to have published everything they have to GenBank; but Deigin et al. were able to assemble a novel Merbecovirus from contamination of agricultural datasets from a team that shared sequencing equipment with the WIV:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533

That Merbecovirus obviously has nothing to do with SARS-CoV-2; but if they had one unpublished virus, it seems reasonable to wonder if they have more.

If you're going to extend the field of zoonoses to include events that didn't become major pandemics, then it seems like you should extend the field of lab leaks too? But let's say negligible probability of lab origin is p < 1/1000, which in an expected value sense is still roughly a 9/11 worth of deaths. Then even taking a prior of p = 1/30 that an arbitrary pandemic is lab-origin and considering the emergence in Wuhan, I don't see how you get to negligible unless the novelty of the pathogen decreases that by a factor of >100 (which per above I don't see).

If the CCP didn't have such a startling surveillance system and tight grip over any international narrative, I'd be inclined to agree with you.

But they have done themselves no favors in their handling of the situation.

I'm not sure the coverup would require a vast network of people. Maybe 1-2 dozen in a lab, max, (depending on who knew which experiments were being done) and a bunch of CCP members who I would not be surprised are tight lipped.

The counter questions are equally as troubling.

- Why haven't we found the host species? Typically it takes a few months, but we're going on 1.5 years. You'd think the CCP would have it very high on their priority list to find.

- How did this virus mutate a series of genetic sequences, none of which are found in other corona viruses? The series of mutations in SARS-COV2 seems very unlikely to have been a natural fluke.

There's a lot of questions here on both sides.

For me, I'd still put it at 50-50. I will not be surprised if a smoking gun is found one way or the other.

> If the CCP didn't have such a startling surveillance system and tight grip over any international narrative

and yet not so startling and tight that we don't have leaks and we don't know they have a surveillance system and don't like leaks.

Why does it require a cover-up so vast? All you need to keep the secret is blocking access from international investigators and the silence of the very few people originally involved. There's tons of precedent of harsh and inhumane penalties for saying things the government doesn't want you to from within China. And international investigation is quite simple to decline, you just say no. I don't think it's as complicated as you're trying to make it sound.

You vastly underestimate the number of people who would have to be silent or silenced. People are terrible at keeping secrets.

> People are terrible at keeping secrets.

Not unless their lives are at risk. You do understand that we are talking about CCP?

Maybe people are terrible at keeping secrets, but also everyone who spills the secret is immediately branded a conspiracy theorist and deplatformed, the end result is the same...

I mean, citations please. If it really was a lab leak, who is to say it wasn't from a small specialized research team, maybe some academics who were aware of the science but not the implementation, and a couple people in management? The project does not need to have been a huge, nefarious, x-files program. That sounds like the conspiracy theory to me.

I think you might be vastly overestimating how many people would even have been knowledgeable about it in the first place.

People keep conflating 'lab leak' with 'made in a lab'.

Think about this: If it was a natural virus that escaped from a lab, China wouldn't necessarily even know about the escape for sure. We could imagine a scenario where maybe China started to suspect that might be what happened around Jan/Feb 2020. So then you don't need a collosal cover up, because hardly anyone knows for sure anyway - you just need to obstruct anyone asking questions that lead in that direction, and obfuscate any clues (publications from the lab saying what they were working on, reports of staff illness etc)

This is the entire reason the media took actions like banning the very topic from being discussed. Someone else mentioned it higher up in the thread but there was a huge overlap between people claiming to simply sincerely investigate the possibility of a lab leak, and the group of people who believed that the virus was a bioengineered weapon released on purpose by China to disrupt other nations.

> silent, unswerving, leak-proof compliance of a vast network of scientists, civilians, and government officials for over a year

I was watching translated videos early last year made by chinese scientists trying to get the word out, at the risk of their lives. Compliance is simple: you talk, you "disappear".

The Great Firewall blocks in both directions, and is very good. Additionally, the West had already decided that it was politically expedient to ignore lab leak possibility. That meant the primary avenue for such leaks were more underground sources, like 4chan.

> I was watching translated videos early last year made by chinese scientists trying to get the word out

So you're saying the Great Firewall is porous and leak happen, but also saying that in this case, the information containment is 100% successful.

> Additionally, the West had already decided that it was politically expedient to ignore lab leak possibility. That meant the primary avenue for such leaks were more underground sources, like 4chan.

Both this and the originally linked article are long on politics and conspiracies and short on science, which is why the responses end up being political. The interesting questions here are not about CCP secrecy but about mutation rates in different environments and how effectively scientists can engineer mutations versus evolving them. It would be much more convincing evidence of lab leaks if examples of effective gain of function mutations being injected by scientists (or some kind of accelerated evolution by manipulating lab conditions) could be discussed and explained.

There won’t be a scientific conclusion based on an analysis of what media leaked what when.

The zoonotic spillover doesn't seem to address geography. Why would the virus first appear in a city near a virology institute instead of out in the country near bat habitats? The speculation from scientists like Dr. Daszak is that someone ate an infected live bat from "southern China."

I've seen the studies about air flows in restaurants and buffets and none seem to indicate that Covid is food borne. So we have someone in the wet market about to bite into some delicious live bat and they give it a big sniff right as the bat expels some of its last little virus contaminated breaths. "Squee, squee" says the bat. "Hmm-mm finger licking good" says the world's unluckiest connoisseur of things that flutter in the night.

Alternatively, someone was careless in a lab studying the same family of bats and viruses. In the sense that one need not attribute to malice that which is explained by incompetence, the leaked virus need not have been some "biowarfare" effort, maybe just something a bit entrepreneurial or a side experiment to see if something could work.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/who-report-says-covid-orig...

> Why would the virus first appear in a city near a virology institute instead of out in the country near bat habitats?

Have you considered the possibility that it first appeared in the vicinity of a lab that experiments on similar viruses is because if it had appeared elsewhere, there would have been no sufficiently-equipped lab to isolate it? This is the streetlight effect: you find things where you (are able to) look for them. In other words, it couldn't have appeared somewhere far from a properly-equipped lab, because there would be no properly-equipped lab to detect it.

Pretty sure this doesn't make sense at all. If I remember rightly, the way Covid-19 was originally identified was that two or three different private sector labs which don't normally work with this kind of virus at all managed to sequence it well enough to identify what it was - it had nothing to do with the virology institute. Not only that, the fact that they weren't officially meant to be handling this kind of virus was used to shut them up and get them to destroy the virus sequences they'd found.

Rootclaim has some fairly compelling analysis which suggests the lab leak scenario is more likely: https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV...

Yeah except that is a really bad analysis:

- There's still no evidence that WIV was doing GOF research there. The SARS-1 GOF research was done in the USA.

- There are horseshoe bats with sarbecoviruses in Hubei province, their range is large.

- Similar to this virus, for SARS-1 there closest known virus in bats is in Yunnan, but SARS-1 emerged in Guangdong, about the same distance away from Yunnan as Wuhan is.

- Calling it a "Chimera" is not accurate and is a loaded term. It is not a Chimera of RaTG13. You can't get from RaTG13 to SARS-2 by splicing some other backbone and then shipping it through a couple dozen generations of mice. RatG13 is also a few decades of evolution away from SARS-2.

- A furin cleavage site has emerged spontaneously in coronaviruses at least 6 times now (not including SARS-2) in both circulating human coronaviruses and in MERS. It has also now been found in sarbecoviruses in Thailand, so we know that nature produces furin cleavage sites in this kind of virus.

- Efforts by China to suppress information sound like an authoritarian government acting like an authoritarian government. This is completely unsurprising.

- Efforts by WIV to do political damage control after the pandemic broke also sound like a lab under an authoritarian government reacting to protect itself and by its people reacting to protect themselves (there may have been relatively banal stuff like financial embezzlement going on in the lab which is being suppressed). This is also completely unsurprising.

- There's no evidence that WIV had live RaTG13 virus either, they took samples from the mine in Yunnan and sequenced it, but that isn't cultured, viable infectious virus.

> vast network of scientists, civilians, and government officials

Few corrections:

* CCP government officials, who have every single incentive to participate in cover-up

* I am not sure how much cover-ups needed by any civillian, let alone vast network of civillians. An average civillian is probably not aware of lab leak to begin with, unless they were informed by media.

* again, not vast network of scientists is needed for cover-up. Mostly researchers and officials in Wuhan Lab. Like CCP officials, who have every single incentive to participate in cover-up

The reality of this quote doesn’t justify censorship

The author is making the "vast network of scientists, govt. officials, and civillians" argument, which doesn't even pass the BS test. Few dozens researchers in Wuhan lab and CCP officials are more than enough to accomplish the cover up.

Threat of death is also a major deterrent

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