The SARS1 virus escaped from a lab many years after the original outbreak (via accidentally being put in a fridge reserved for inactive virus and being examined under electron microscope, infecting employee), and it wasn't engineered at all. It was 100% natural origin.
I have ZERO doubt in my mind that natural viruses have leaked from US labs in the past, and were covered up. Can't prove it of course. Superpowers don't admit to these kinds of things.
Belief that this wasn't leaked from a lab requires a dismissal of a huge chain of improbable coincidences, and it's much easier to believe when you are part of a community of scientists who will undoubtedly have funding up-ended when people figure out they were at fault. Not unlike what happened to the field of nuclear energy after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The international virology community knows this.
I also feel like if he's serious about it, he would produce something other than a tweet thread, at least a real blog post with links to papers he refers to. Otherwise it's hard for me to take them any more seriously than anyone else who handwaves about papers.
It would be nice to see something like that with good faith opportunities for people to respond and counterrespond but I'm skeptical about it happening.
There's also a sense that I have from reading stuff like that and others that we should treat the peer-reviewed academic paper trail as somehow the state of things, rather than looking at the evidence on its own terms. I don't mean anything conspiratorial about that, just that it's almost like they expect there to be some peer-reviewed paper out there from China that shows how they would have engineered it if they had, as if that's realistic at all.
That's not even getting into what you mention, which is the possibility nothing was engineered and there was a leak.
It's impossible to disprove but both SARS and Bird Flu crossed over from animals in Southern China so there's no reason it must have come from the lab, either. Right now we have zero evidence either way, just people speculating mostly based on their pre-existing opinions of the Chinese state.
We've seen lab leaks and this is supposedly different because it's not disclosed and numerous other reasons making it hard to prove. We know about lab made viruses which this is supposedly different because it somehow looks like a virus of zoonotic origin. We've seen the Chinese government cover up embarrassing situations but this is different because there was heavy involvement from American researchers and American public educational institutions and they are in on the cover up too for some reason. We've seen the US government dislose previously classified information but this is different because all of the government officials who say they saw classified information about a lab leak (and were in a position to declassify said information) did not accompany their accusations with gathered intelligence. At some point we should recognize that these necessary mental gymnastics put the theory well into crank territory.
It took 9 months to find the source of MERS (camels). It took 14 months to find the origin of SARS1 (bats).
What evidence do you have that this was transmitted from an animal carrier? What mammal in China (it's not like there are that many mammal species living in the Wuhan metropolitan area) has been identified that easily catches COVID? The answer is zero.
The most likely explanation for this, which fits with all the other circumstantial data, is that the zoonotic origin was a genetically engineered mouse with human ACE2 receptors lining it's lungs. Note that I'm saying the mouse was genetically engineered, not the virus itself. The virus could easily evolve to infect humans by repeatedly exposing the humanized mice to the original, completely natural origin bat viruses.
Calling out "mental gymnastics" when you are acting as if it's a pure coincidence that a bat virus pandemic originated in a city containing the world's leading bat-borne virus research facility is the height of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. And before you say that the lab is in Wuhan because that's where the viruses are, no, it's not. The viruses historically have emerged in Yunnan province, in remote caves 1000 KM away from Wuhan.
https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
It's right at the bottom of the summary.
"3. Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice."
But sure, it's fringe and unlikely that the virus leaked out of a lab where it was specifically stated by the scientists applying for the grant that the funding would be used for testing interspecies transmission of bat coronaviruses with humanized mice. The lab doing this being in Wuhan, where the pandemic originated is also totally fringe and unlikely, is totally unrelated, right?
Gain of function proponents are ignoring research that indicates it's not possible to generate a virus dangerous to humans without leaving specific telltales. While this study isn't necessarily conclusive or a door slam in the face of lab leak, it's pretty huge data point that makes it far less likely.
I also forgot to mention that he deliberately ignored the humanized mice being the location of the serial passage work, and straw manned a "petri dish". Completely misrepresenting the fact that was most crucial.
In the future, using a Twitter account with locked comments is inadvisable. He blocked comments for a reason.
His entire argument is very straightforward. Zoonotic origin is highly plausible, has caused previous SARS outbreaks, has no evidence against it. Lab leak is possible, though it has no precedent and there's evidence that makes it less likely. There's no conclusive evidence for either. The balance of evidence and history leans heavily to zoonotic. There is absolutely nothing anyone has said in this thread that he didn't directly address nor anything that weakens his argument. Anyone on the lab leak train right now is basing it purely on bias.
There was a lab leak of SARS1 in 2004 which infected a lab worker and the people he came in contact with. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.the-scientist.com/news-anal...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/the-sudden-...
The two scientists seemed to think that although a lab leak origin is possible the natural origin story is more likely.
It would be human nature for those who were involved in lobbying for gain-of-function research to continue are now unwilling to entertain the idea that something as devastating as COVID was a result of such research. If that is true, it means that they were disasterously wrong in their earlier stance and it means that there will be no appetite to continue funding their field of expertise.
I'm tired of being told not to believe what's clearly in front of me -- a coordinated campaign in China to cover up any inquiry in to the origins of the virus accompanied by very suspicious behavior in China in the months before they were supposed to have been aware of the outbreak.
Whether COVID-19 itself is exactly a product of research at the WIV funded by EcoHealth Alliance and the NIAID, I don't know, but I can read those grant requests myself and see that they clearly refer to manipulating coronaviruses so that they better infect humanized mice cells. This is a study that Fauci insists is not gain of function research, but I'm unclear as to the distinction. I suspect that they played with language in these requests so as to be able to avoid triggering the legally-required review.
Fauci, and others, are potentially aware that the pandemic could have stemmed from research that they themselves fast-tracked around the legally mandated review process, making them partially culpable in millions of deaths worldwide -- it would be incredibly difficult in that situation to start looking critically at the possibility that it's true.
We should be very careful about trusting experts with a lot at stake in the answer to the question.
It would be human nature for those who were involved in lobbying for 1+1=2 to continue are now unwilling to entertain the idea that something as devastating as 42 was a result of such a calculation.
Nobody is saying this virus was engineered in this thread.
It appears to me to be a deliberate psychological trick of lumping people who claim the virus leaked from a lab (by far the most probable cause) with people who say the virus was an engineered bioweapon (insane, nonsensical crazy talk). The entire virology community is dependent on government funding, and they have massive conflicts of interest. I work with academics all day every day, and far too many gradually turn into mealy-mouthed bureaucrats, doing and saying whatever it takes to chase their next juicy grant, abusing and exploiting graduate students all along the way.
There's the chance that it was a naturally occurring virus that wasd being stored in a lab (like RaTG13, it's closest known cousin). Then, there's the chance that it was manipulated in lab experiments by well-meaning scientists hoping to learn more about coronavirus transmission to humans (which I think is most likely, considering the behavior of the WIV, but far from certain). Finally, there's the chance that it was deliberately leaked as a bioweapon (doesn't make sense to me).
I totally agree that there are massive conflicts of interest, including the implication of being blacklisted from Chinese data sources for one's career and the chance that there simply won't be any funding in the future if the public believes that the research field itself is to blame.
What direct evidence of natural origins is he referring to? Kristian Andersen's argument in his oft-cited paper seems to be that the spike proteins are effective at infecting humans in a novel way, and that if he were engineering an infections coronavirus he would have designed it differently, therefore it's unlikely that it was bioengineered. Beyond that, they tend to point out that "there is no evidence" of a lab leak -- ignoring many pieces of evidence along the way, even if they are circumstantial, including the workers at the WIV contracting a dangerous disease w/ COVID-like symptoms in Fall 2019, the sudden disappearance of the WIV genome sequence database before the first publicly known cases, and the suspicious renaming of the RaTG13 virus sample (the closest known to COVID-19 genetically) in WIV literature. I feel perpetually gaslit but some of these scientists. The argument seems to go as follows: it is most reasonable to suspect a zoonotic transfer, even without direct evidence, because a community of scientists with clear conflicts of interest tell us so -- but we are supposed to dismiss the circumstantial evidence of a lab leak because the only satisfactory evidence would be if a smoking gun were found in the WIV records (and everyone knows that they won't be). The idea that it has natural origins stems from recent experience with SARS and MERS, but of course that doesn't mean much of anything at all -- those experience inform both theories. One should also consider the 1977 flu pandemic which was confirmed to have been related to a live vaccine trial done by the Chinese military -- information which was suppressed at the time by the WHO for fear of losing cooperation with China and Russia.
Origins aside, it is not disupted that the NIH through the NIAID and EcoHealth alliance were funding research into coronaviruses that was being done at the WIV, and that the data related to that research used to be readily available but now is suppressed by the Chinese government, exactly at the same time that we are experiencing a pandemic that the research was hoping to forestall. Isn't that alone troubling? Are the scientists in this community expressing any trouble with that fact, or are we meant to believe that we are conspiratorial nuts if we bring up China's behavior in any context?
This is not either/or at all!
It can be both completely natural AND also have escaped from a lab. Pretending that lab == bio-engineered is a disingenuous distraction. For the given purpose of that lab them having a lot of naturally occurring viruses is to be expected, since that is the basis of what they are supposed to research.
A lot of people have pointed that out, why do you keep touting that distraction that paints anyone serious about the lab leak question as a conspiracy nut unwilling to look at the evidence? Natural origin is accepted and does not contradict the lab escape hypothesis at all.