What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis? | Hacker News Reader

What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

unherd.com

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This is Alina Chan, one of the co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.

I’m going to answer some of the questions that have come up in the comments.

1. Are Chan and Ridley selling a book?

Yes, the updated paperback comes out in the US next week: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/viral-matt-ridleyalin...

The updated epilogue now discusses three significant new developments since the publication of the hardback that are being hotly debated in the comments here. The first was the discovery of a virus in a bat in Laos that is slightly more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than the virus studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology; but both are still not the progenitor of the pandemic. The second is detailed information about how prominent western virologists, who had privately thought the virus was likely manipulated in a laboratory, began to instead tell the public that no lab-based scenario was plausible. The third is a trio of conflicting studies about whether the Huanan seafood market was the site of a natural spillover of the virus from animals to people or just the site of a human superspreader event in December 2019.

As with the hardcover, half of our earnings from the book have gone/will go to charity.

2. Does the available evidence lean towards a market origin?

Some experts have asserted that there is dispositive evidence that the virus jumped from animals to people at the Wuhan Huanan market. However, their analysis failed to take into account the realities in the early days of the pandemic. Without access to the methodology and actual data collected by investigators in Wuhan, their interpretation unfortunately falls prey to ascertainment bias. Please see this thread for details: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1499794942012579843

At the moment, US intelligence, the WHO SAGO advisory group, and many top virologists and experts find both natural and lab origin hypotheses plausible and deserving of investigation. The evidence does not lean so strongly towards one hypothesis or the other that we can assume one as the default truth.

I personally think the available evidence points towards a lab origin but would not go as far as to say that there is dispositive evidence of it. Please see these 2 threads: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1524394197738049537 https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1539745736807616513

3. Can scientists manipulate and genetically engineer naturally found viruses without leaving a trace? In other words, can the genome of the virus tell us its recent history?

We describe the seamless genetic engineering capabilities developed in the years leading up to the pandemic in VIRAL. Due to advanced technologies, it is no longer always possible to use the genome of a virus to distinguish between a natural pathogen vs one that has spent time in a laboratory. Even top coronavirologists, including Ralph Baric who collaborated with the Wuhan scientists, have said that the only way to know is to look at the Wuhan lab records. You can also read my twitter thread: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1493733086089121794

Even the presence of the furin cleavage site insertion that is unique to the pandemic virus and is indeed what makes it a highly infectious pandemic virus is not “dispositive evidence” of either a natural or lab origin. Please see our peer-reviewed analysis here: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/39/1/msab327/6426085

4. Why does the lab leak hypothesis encompass so many different scenarios by which research activities could lead to the emergence of the pandemic virus?

A natural spillover hypothesis also encompasses several different scenarios, e.g., bat direct transmission to people in natural habitats, bat to people in markets, bat to farmed animals or wildlife to people in nature, at farms or market, etc.

This doesn’t mean that a natural or lab origin are insinuations. It just means we are lacking so much key evidence that it’s not possible to pin down an exact mechanism by which the virus emerged in the Wuhan human population.

5. Does finding close relatives of the pandemic virus in bats, e.g., in Laos, mean that its origin is natural?

No, because viruses that escape from labs were also ultimately derived from nature and we know that scientists in Wuhan had been collecting viruses from across 8 countries (China and SE Asia) where the closest relatives to the pandemic virus have been found. Please see the graphic in this tweet: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1522117270612451335

6. Is there anything to do about finding the origin of Covid-19 now? Isn’t it a dead end? And is that why interest is waning?

There is plenty to do to investigate the origin of Covid-19 using sources and data that exist outside of China. Please see a recent peer-reviewed letter in PNAS: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2202769119

And my thread on it: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1527381169729425410

It is very surprising to me that these feasible routes of inquiry have not been explored more than 2 years into the pandemic.

7. Have infected animals on sale at the Huanan market been found? Was there any evidence that SARS-like viruses were circulating in the Wuhan animal trading community before the emergence of Covid-19?

No. I recommend reading my medium post for more details: https://ayjchan.medium.com/a-response-to-the-origins-of-sars...

8. Regardless of the origin of Covid-19, shouldn’t the focus be on making sure there is more oversight and regulation of current and future pathogen research?

I agree and wish that we didn’t need to prove the origin of this pandemic to motivate scientific leaders to better regulate risky pathogen work. I have been dedicating efforts to this cause since last year and hope to be able to share some exciting news later this year.

Thank you for posting.

Regarding your answer to 8, how important is gain of function research in the virology eco-system, is there sufficient reason amongst the powers that be within the discipline (that is, well-known researchers, leaders of departments or labs, funders and program managers, etc) to be wary of a funding cut for this research that they might be biased in dismissing the idea of a lab leak?

My analogy is in particle physics, the idea of supersymmetry is incredibly popular amongst the super start researchers, heads of parts of CERN, funding agencies, etc, that very few in the field are willing to admit the lack of evidence for supersymmetry at the LHC is in fact a crisis for the field after how many billions have been spent on the supercollider. My question is, is gain of function that important or popular in the field of virology? Why can't they just admit it's dangerous and chuck it, will enough of them suffer if they were to do so?

The vast majority of virologists are not working on gain-of-function research or with potential pandemic pathogens, but this type of research has some very influential backers who control significant sources of funding in virology and infectious diseases. This makes it very awkward and professionally risky for virologists to say that the top leaders in their field advocated for research that might have caused this pandemic and taken millions of lives globally.

National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) has been reconvened this year to review US government policies on dual use research of concern (DURC) and research with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPP/P3CO). Their public meeting is available here: https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=44823 Please also see my thread on it: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1499035660627419139

There is another public engagement session next week. Details here: https://osp.od.nih.gov/event/virtual-stakeholder-engagement-...

Based on these sessions and the history of the NSABB, I'm not confident that they will recommend measures to make this type of research more transparent or even safer.

The elephant in the room, as far as support for GOFROC (gain of function research of concern) goes, is Fauci. Several leading biologists (Marc Lipsitch, David Relman and others) have argued for years that the risk/reward ratio for GOFROC is too high to justify it. But it had to go all the way to Obama for Fauci to change course. Obama imposed a 3-year moratorium from 2014-17, which was lifted soon after he left office. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-wor...

To me the fact that top officials in both the US and China have a likely interest in not investigating lab origins goes a long way to show why this hasn’t been done. And why no other country can get the ball rolling on it, these are the two most powerful countries in the world.

IMO it’s likely no one knows where this virus came from right now. but it could well be a lab, but anyone who could potentially investigate this theory absolutely does not want to in case it turns out it was.

It's even worse. If you look at that Lancet Letter scandal, you'll find for example Christian Drosten as a signatory, who was the expert with the most influence over the German government until recently.

Even after the Daszak conflict of interest was discovered, despite the declaration of no conflict of interest, none of them ever retracted it or even apologized. Even more, it was later revealed the letter had actually been authored by Daszak himself, as the pretend lead author Charles Calisher himself admitted. Calisher is a long retired professor born in 1936 who at this point may or may not understand what's going on. To his credit at least he told the truth when journalists questioned him. It looks like Daszak used his name to distract from his authorship. The strategy worked too, at first.

What's shocking is that none of them have faced any consequences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_(COVID-19)

Shocking and depressing. It was a gross abuse of the trust that society places in scientists. What is astonishing is that the conlicts of interest of the authors would have been clear with a simple Google search. Yet, no newspaper thought of doing that! More likely, they took a decision to not pursue that angle.

  I didn't know that Calisher is that old !

I agree. Australia was one of the few countries which called for an investigation of all possibilities and the reaction from China was swift and furious. For most countries, concerns about trade and geopolitics outweigh everything else.

The US (and I would add France, which built the BSL-4 lab in Wuhan) has additional reasons not to investigate, as you said.

Not long after Australia pointed the finger at China, it emerged that Australian Government Labs had been doing gain of function research on bats ...

If the bar for proof of guilt is "swift and furious reactions" then by the playground court rules; "whoever smelt it, dealt it" and "whoever said the rhyme did the crime"

This sounds exactly like the kind of disinformation the CCP would be creating and promoting.

Ah of course I am parotting disinformation from the CCP, not quoting from statements made by the Chief Executive of Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO.

Perhaps your aggressive rebuttal was a sign of your guilt and complicity in the global pandemic.

https://www.csiro.au/en/news/news-releases/2021/response-to-...

Though your link doesn't quite say that, there are strong advocates of GOFROC (Doherty, Subbarao and others) at the Peter Doherty Institute, Melbourne. Moreover, one of the leading Australian virologists, Eddie Holmes, is a long-term collaborator of WIV and other Chinese institutes. But these facts by themselves are not indicative of guilt or complicity. What has been missing is an independent investigation of both possibilities (lab related and zoonotic spillover). The baffling reluctance of the US and China to call for such an investigation is very disturbing. However, to talk about guilt is premature at this stage.

Is there any evidence of a link between sars-cov-2 to other previously known viruses that the Wuhan lab might have had in its possession? Could there be a plausible candidate virus that might have escaped from the lab? Was any of this data public prior to the pandemic?

We cover this quite extensively in our book. I also have a manuscript that will soon be in peer review describing the relationship between SARS-CoV-2 and other known viruses. None of the publicly disclosed viruses could have plausibly been the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.

However we now know that when news emerged of a novel SARSrCoV with a novel cleavage site causing an outbreak in Wuhan… scientists in Wuhan did not tell us that they were working with 9 of its closest relatives, linked to mysterious pneumonia cases, and that they had been collecting 1,000s of unpublished high-risk samples from animals & humans across 8 countries, with a clear roadmap for synthesizing consensus SARSrCoV genomes and inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARSrCoVs. Their database meant to inform pandemic prediction & response remains inaccessible.

Thanks for posting this here, and thanks for including some non-Twitter links.

Hey Alina, thanks for contributing so much to the discussion.

One thing that always made me balk was this interview on CCTV which shows researchers collecting bat samples (feces etc) while seemingly skimping on PPE and admitting to getting bit by the wild animals and having a clear skin reaction all the way back in 2017 [1] - Do you have any comment on that in particular? Supposedly these are researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology but all I have to go by on that notion is some news from Taiwan and the New York Post, since I don't speak Chinese this video is a little harder for me to personally verify...

[1] https://youtu.be/MNkyeUZHUoU

Hi Jamal, Yes, there is quite a bit of evidence (photos and interviews of the scientists) showing that the virus hunters in Wuhan did not always wear appropriate protective equipment while hunting for potential pandemic viruses in remote areas. We describe this and provide citations in VIRAL (will be on page 127 in the paperback). In any case, even with full PPE, you can get bitten or exposed to animals and their pathogens. Accidents happen, especially in an uncontrolled environment, e.g., a cave swarming with millions of live bats that you're trying to catch and sample.

Nice, I am a voracious book reader so I'll keep my eye out for your title.

I definitely support your push for getting gain of function research reconsidered, I can't imagine anything but nefarious ends to that kind of thing whether or not it is the culprit behind what we've all gone through over the past couple of years.

From the article, it seems that there's a general conspiracy to sabotage your book.

I really don't understand why.

Have you tried contacting Bill Gates and ask him to support you, and give your book more visibility?

I'm still an early career scientist so I do not have a way to contact Bill Gates.

If you've read Gates' own book on the pandemic, you'll see he would not be open to the contents of Viral.

Hey Alina,

thank you for doing the work that some others are seemingly afraid to touch! There are many fair-weather scientists, but researchers who consider all credible leads and data, no matter the popularity or political implications of the results, are much rarer.

I have two questions:

1. There were genome sequences removed from the 'Sequence Read Archive', at the request of Chinese scientists.¹ It was later portrayed by US authorities as something that commonly happens. As a layperson I'm curious if that's true and it's a regular occurrence that researchers in another country ask for data to be deleted from the archive. That seems odd.

2. In case you read Chinese, do you know about that Wuhan Institute of Virology job ad where they were looking for a researcher to study coronaviruses in bats, which was posted on their website a few weeks before the outbreak became known? I saw this myself in the very early days of the pandemic, possibly before people in the West were even aware that there was a serious outbreak in Wuhan. At the time I didn't think much of it, but then 2 or 3 days later they first deleted that ad, then the whole board and when I visited today I found their entire website has been completely reworked. Have you seen this and do you know if it was saved anywhere? Not that the job opening itself seemed suspicious and it's well known this sort of research was done there, but I just found it odd they would try to hide it.

¹ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01731-3

Hi,

Thank you for the support! :)

1. The deletion of published data is thankfully not something that commonly happens, but it is not against the rules of the NCBI database. Scientists who deposit their data into the database have the right to ask for that data to be taken down even if it has been published. That's why there is a concern that some scientists may have used this mechanism to delete original data with early Covid-19 sequences in it. Some scientists have called for NCBI to please allow them to search through deleted or suppressed data for these early Covid-19 sequences, but they have not been granted permission. Please see Vanity Fair's report on this: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...

2. I have seen an archived version of that job posting but, like you said, it didn't surprise me that they were looking for more coronavirologists - the Wuhan Institute of Virology does have one of the world's largest (if not the largest) bat coronavirus hunting programs. The website being revamped kind of goes into speculative territory - maybe it was just time to upgrade the site or maybe they did it to avoid negative attention. The more disturbing thing to me is that they did not share their pathogen database (taken offline in Sep 2019) despite a pandemic happening. The database was meant to help inform pandemic response, but when a real pandemic happened, the database could not be found anywhere. None of their collaborators, including in the US, have seemed to be able to provide a copy.

Hi. Re (1), did anything ever come of the story about the scientist who discovered some of the deleted genetic sequences on Google Cloud (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/science/coronavirus-seque...)?

> At the time I didn't think much of it, but then 2 or 3 days later they first deleted that ad, then the whole board and when I visited today I found their entire website has been completely reworked. Have you seen this and do you know if it was saved anywhere?

https://web.archive.org/web/20200615000000*/http://www.whiov...

> 1. Are Chan and Ridley selling a book?

Hej Alina! Thanks for being open with having an economic interest in this topic being dragged out into the open again.

> It is very surprising to me that these feasible routes of inquiry have not been explored more than 2 years into the pandemic.

It's not too surprising to me. International diplomacy works like this. With a more general picture in mind, specific topics often need to be swept under the rug. Otherwise international relations between any two countries would be constantly in shambles and we'd long have seen WW3, WW4 and WW5.

Note that I'm not advocating for any of this hush-hush. I'd also like to know what happened. But that's just not how international diplomacy works. In this particular case, if WHO wants continued support from China, then you need to carefully balance what and how you criticize. Nobody is helped if China leaves the WHO or next time doesn't even tell anybody that a pandemic is coming for fear of being bullied for this kind of thing. I'm sure the responsible bodies (lab people) will learn their lesson and be more careful going forward. That's the only thing we can hope for nonetheless. It's unrealistic to think China would be punished and all their labs shut down. This won't happen.

Hi, My perspective is that, if the pandemic started due to the virus hunting program which was a very international collaboration (US, China, several European, African, Asian, Middle Eastern countries), then it's not really a China-specific thing. It could just be that China is so much further along in their virus discovery and characterization pipeline (as the scientific literature points out) that unfortunately they were the first to leak one of these pandemic level viruses either found in the wild and sent to the lab or created in the lab during the process of characterization.

I don't think that a country should be singled out for punishment for having a lab accident (unless it can be demonstrated that they do not have proper biosafety protocols and accountability mechanisms in place; a case of reckless negligence). But I do think there should be new international agreements and penalties for suppressing information about an emerging outbreak, e.g., transmissibility of the virus, its genomic sequence, number of cases and geographic spread etc., and costing other countries time in preparing to respond to the outbreak.

Thanks, Alina. A well-balanced point of view.

"Nobody is helped if China leaves the WHO"

Are you sure? Is the goal of the WHO to generate accurate health advice, or to accumulate memberships?

My question has been the same, ( apology if this was already answered ) why do we accept Dec 19 as the starting date, when we have evidence that partial Wuhan lock down due to "lung disease" started in November when Wuhan blocked International ( but not national ) flight to Wuhan airport.

I am going to ignore the WeChat evidence for discussions on WuHan "lung disease" in October and prior since those could be fake. But surely flight schedule cant be made up?

For those with a bit more background in the sciences, there's an increasingly massive amount of evidence to support Zoonotic origin. Philipp Markolin has a good rundown:

https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g...

Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing (e.g. whether it's a natural virus that escaped or an engineered one, how different lineages showed up at the market, which lab it allegedly escaped from since the WIV campus is much further from the market compared to the CCDC, etc etc).

China is a bad actor and definitely contributed to the conspiracy madness around the virus by being so shut-down and performing such a half-assed investigation but unfortunately they would have done the same whether the virus came to be via the same animal trade that caused the last SARS outbreak or if there was some secret Wuhan project.

Thank you for posting this. WHO-China report found that COVID almost certainly came out of China and the market is just the amplifying venue. It's the racist and xenophobic groups that are trying to incite hatred against China by spreading propaganda.

You post this viewpoint all the time, I've seen you comment it before. Which report are you referring to exactly?

China gives its critics plenty to work with. And, no, critics of China are not automatically or even likely racist and xenophobic.

Guide to politics.

If you don’t support A. This means you are B,C,D…Z.

> And, no, critics of China are not automatically or even likely racist and xenophobic.

Especially since some people refuse to distinguish between people talking about the PRC and people talking about people of Chinese ethnicity. It's an obvious enough tactic once you're looking for it, but damn if it can't throw a smoke grenade into the discussion.

Hard to see lab-leak as intrinsically anti-China giving that it was NIH financing those GoF experiments which produced the coronavirus in Wuhan. That same story for example is pushed in Russia, who is making friends with China, as anti-American. So basically the story is interpreted as anti-something depending on your political orientation.

To be clear - the NIH never financed any GoF experiments in Wuhan. There was a proposal that was never funded, and even in that proposal, the GoF work would happen in Baric's North Carolina lab.

To be clear - during 2014-2019 NIH actually paid $3.6M to EcoHealth Alliance under the grants clearly specifying the coronavirus GoF experiments in Wuhan with the "Human subjects included" checked. EcoHealth naturally kept about 75% of it as "commission/management fee/whatever" because conducting those experiments at BSL2 in Wuhan was much cheaper than the original experiments in US at BSL3+ (in those original experiments they were able to increase virality of the deadly, yet low viral original SARS by inserting spike protein to allow for ACE2 based cell entry - the hallmark of the coronavirus - and after that the research was moved to Wuhan https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...).

It was the 2018 proposal for additional money - EcoHealth naturally trying to double dip - for those GoF experiments in Wuhan to insert very human specific gene sequences into the coronavirus which was rejected as "Hell no, that is too risky!" by .. wait for it ... DARPA. Well as DARPA rejected it was still funded after that by the Fauci's NIAID.

And the rest is history - in November 2019 the coronavirus magically "naturally" jumped onto humans supposedly in the Wuhan market a thousand kilometers from the natural habitat of its closest natural siblings. We are all free to choose our Morpheus' pill, blue or red :)

Aside from he rest of the weird conspiracy insinuation I've come to expect - you should probably know that horseshoe bats are endemic to the caves around Wuhan and were studied by virologists in the hills above the biggest animal trade in Hubei.. So it's probably best if you stop making the silly claim about them being 1,000km away if you want to bolster your case.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7824899/

If you didn't notice you're pushing the 2021 work by that same Wuhan institute. It is as trustworthy in that matter as that EcoHealth Aliance's owner/PI Daszak's conclusion that the coronavirus wasn't of their making.

Yes, the WIV does indeed study the bats that we're questioning. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make? The claim you're questioning is "There are horseshoe bats near Wuhan".

Do you think they just invented the bats? I mean... they're on video...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovnUyTRMERI&t=185s

>The claim you're questioning is "There are horseshoe bats near Wuhan".

That again is a strawman argument. I didn't say anything about bats. I was talking about the natural siblings of COVID-19, ie. the coronaviruses using ACE2 (like for example WIV1). Those viruses were found in Yunnan (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711), a 1000km from the Wuhan, and weren't found in Wuhan. Given that Yunnan people there have incomparably higher chances to get exposed to those viruses, there are no chances that one of such viruses was brought on a bat/civet from Yunnan to the market in Wuhan and jumped on human for the first time there without such a virus independently infecting significant number of people in Yunnan. On top of that that supposed natural COVID-19 virus supposedly did such a first jump on human in Wuhan market at exactly the same time when the Wuhan lab produced in BSL2 environment (hardly can be called "biosafety" at all, especially for an airborne virus) a chimeric virus by all accounts indistinguishable from COVID-19. It isn't a conspiracy theory. It is probability theory.

If we imagine that an event of such vanishingly small probability did happen, then it would be a crown achievement of human science worth 10 Nobels - just think about it - creating the same virus at the same place at the same time as the supposedly "natural" beginning of the pandemic. EcoHealth and WIV would be doing non-stops victory laps, and we would be putting bronze statues of Daszak on every corner of every public street. Instead all the participants - the WIV, EcoHealth, NIH and China government went total denial and "5th amendment" and started that huge PR campaign to spread that nonsense that thinking that an airborne virus can escape BSL2 makes you a racists conspiracy theorist.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12250-018-0012-7

“In October 2015, we collected serum samples from 218 residents in four villages in Jinning County, Yunnan province, China (Fig. 1A), located 1.1–6.0 km from two caves (Yanzi and Shitou). We have been conducting longitudinal molecular surveillance of bats for CoVs in these caves since 2011 and have found that they are inhabited by large numbers of bats including Rhinolophus spp., a major reservoir of SARSr-CoVs. […] As a control, we also collected 240 serum samples from random blood donors in 2015 in Wuhan, Hubei Province more than 1000 km away from Jinning (Fig. 1A) and where inhabitants have a much lower likelihood of contact with bats due to its urban setting.”

> during 2014-2019 NIH actually paid $3.6M to EcoHealth Alliance under the grants clearly specifying the coronavirus GoF experiments in Wuhan with the "Human subjects included" checked.

Is this is the grant you're referring to? https://reporter.nih.gov/search/me9X23pZWEigATS-4XTBfA/proje...

From your comment it was unclear to me what the human subjects component was. It appears to have been population surveillance using PCR and antibody testing, with the intent to detect prior infection by previously unrecognized coronaviruses. Which is low-risk.

From the public project details, it is not clear that the scope of the work as described to the NIH included gain of function experiments. Perhaps you were referring to a different project description? And of course EcoHealth Alliance may have done gain of function experiments that were not described in their proposal.

I don't have the link right now to that 2014 EcoHealth grant. That link though describes it pretty good:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...

" Baric had developed a way around that problem—a technique for “reverse genetics” in coronaviruses. Not only did it allow him to bring an actual virus to life from its genetic code, but he could mix and match parts of multiple viruses. He wanted to take the “spike” gene from SHC014 and move it into a genetic copy of the SARS virus he already had in his lab. The spike molecule is what lets a coronavirus open a cell and get inside it. The resulting chimera would demonstrate whether the spike of SHC014 would attach to human cells.

...

In 2014, the NIH awarded a five-year, $3.75 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance to study the risk that more bat-borne coronaviruses would emerge in China, using the same kind of techniques Baric had pioneered. Some of that work was to be subcontracted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

...

In 2017, Daszak and Shi followed with another study, also at BSL-2, that one-upped Baric’s work in North Carolina. The WIV had continued to unearth dozens of new SARS-like coronaviruses in bat caves, and it reported making chimeras with eight of them by fusing the spikes of the new viruses to the chassis of WIV1. Two of them replicated well in human cells. They were, for all intents and purposes, brand-new pathogens.

Yep, acknowledgments in the 2017 paper linked by the MIT article check out as referencing the grant I linked, and the paper does describe work with chimeric viruses.

I feel like Unherd's article is actually misstating things. For example, "no infected animal on sale in the market or elsewhere in China has been found..." In fact, Bloomberg reported:

"Disease detectives arriving from Beijing on the first day of 2020 ordered environmental samples to be collected from drains and other surfaces at the market. Some 585 specimens were tested, of which 33 turned out to be positive for SARS-CoV-2... All but two of the positive specimens came from a cavernous and poorly-ventilated section of the market's western wing, where many shops sold animals."

The Unherd article also claims: "There is no evidence of exposure to SARS-like viruses among Wuhan market traders prior to the Covid outbreak." But CNN reported:

Research helped [Michael] Worobey come up with a map of the earliest cases that clusters them all around the market. "That so many of the more than 100 COVID-19 cases from December with no identified epidemiologic link to Huanan Market nonetheless lived in its direct vicinity is notable and provides compelling evidence that community transmission started at the market," he wrote.... "The virus didn't come from some other part of Wuhan and then get to Huanan market. The evidence speaks really quite strongly to the virus starting at the market and then leaking into the neighborhoods around the market.... So many of the early cases were tied to this one Home Depot-sized building in a city of 11 million people, when there are thousands of other places where it would be more likely for early cases to be linked to if the virus had not started there.""

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/18/health/covid-origins-market-t...

Interestingly Worobey actually signed a letter demanding the lab leak theory be investigated. But he now believes there's -- in his words -- "a big red flashing arrow pointing at Huanan Market as the most likely place the pandemic started."

The unherd article just advertising for the author's book. This is a cry for attention.

Yep. Ridley and Chan wrote their book when the lab leak idea was vaguely more plausible, but even then it really overstated the evidence. It's aged very poorly.

I don't think anybody doubts that the first superspreader event happened at the Hunan market. The question is whether the first human/animal crossover happened there. With a high k disease like Covid-19 you might very well have a chain of transmission many links long before it starts going exponential as in, for example, what contact tracers uncovered about how the virus first got into France.

Unfortunately, tons of people dispute it still. There's prominent people insisting Covid was in Italy in mid 2019 among other ridiculous things. Unfortunately they're common travelers with the more intellectually honest lab leak folks so it's hard to separate them.

They seem to me to be a totally separate group. They’re more fellow travellers with the “Bill Gates’s Plandemic” crowd.

These are simply not contradictions. To restate what you’ve posted:

-Unherd says no infected animal has been found on sale in China.

vs.

-Disease detectives found Covid positive environmental samples at the animal market

————

-Unherd says no market traders were found to have been exposed to Covid

-A researcher found 100 Covid cases from the same month in the vicinity of the market.

———-

Animals vs environmental samples. Infected animal traders vs infected people living near the market. It’s apples and oranges and does not support the claim that the Unherd piece misstated the things you quoted.

Hmmm, Bloomberg... Can anyone comment on what that tiny chip could be in the following article?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

> China is a bad actor and definitely contributed to the conspiracy madness around the virus by being so shut-down and performing such a half-assed investigation

It definitely seems that the default reaction of any authoritaian/police-state environment like mainland China is to clamp down on things and restrict information whether or not it's necessary.

One needs to only look at the many examples of various scandals/disasters that have gone very briefly viral on Chinese language social media before the censors get to them (often within 8-12 hours of the breaking news) before everything gets deleted.

>whether or not it's necessary

The thing is they've studied the revolutions of 89 and the more recent ones too. They know they don't know what will be the thing that will finally get people out in the streets so they clamp down on everything. Who could know before hand that Mohamed Bouazizi setting himself on fire would trigger the Tunisian revolution, and that that would help trigger the Arab Spring? China is very worried about potential Mohamed Bouazizis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi

> It definitely seems that the default reaction of any authoritaian/police-state environment like mainland China is to clamp down on things and restrict information whether or not it's necessary.

That tactic loses them the benefit of the doubt across the board. As long as their default reaction is to suppress everything, my default assumption is that they're guilty of every accusation they suppress.

That's fair but doesn't help us find out what happened though.

Most of the "evidence" against lab-leak is just weird insinuation.

Speculation about how the virus wasn't created wholly synthetically: nobody is seriously arguing it was, or it wouldn't be SARS-family.

Arguments that the spike protein binding domain wasn't synthetically engineered: it didn't have to be. It could have been serial passage in humanized mice, considering that's what Daszak and co had literally proposed years before the outbreak.

Arguments that because the original SARS-CoV-2 wasn't perfectly optimized to bind to ACE2, it obviously didn't come from a lab: Obvious nonsense. Why would you expect serial passage through a small number of humanized mice be as effective at optimizing binding to ACE2 as an epidemic sweeping through tens, then hundreds of millions of humans?

The Laos expedition is interesting, but having only just skimmed it I'm not yet convinced it means anything. Any samples with very similar spike proteins collected AFTER SARS-CoV-2 became an epidemic could indicate that SARS-CoV-2 had recombined with existing bat coronaviruses, rather than being a zoonotic source of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.

The sloppiness and drumbeat nature of these anti-lab-leak essays makes me not trust them. The lab-leak argument is speculative, sure, but we've sent people to prison for murder based on speculative inferences from circumstantial evidence; meanwhile, none of the arguments against lab-leak are solid.

Very well put. One thing I’d add, is that this entire debate regarding the lab leak hypothesis is entirely politicized, and I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth. Either theory is perfectly viable given the evidence we currently have.

That doesn't mean each are equally likely.. hence the huge section in the article I linked about bayesian priors.

I sort of lost faith in the article's willingness to take lab leak seriously when they threw this map up[0] and inexplicably did not label where the Wuhan Institute of Virology is on it. For reference[1].

[0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market,+Fazha...

It's not at all far-fetched to think the virus piggybacked 10 miles before finding a nice home for itself at a wet market, after which it went gangbusters and infected lots of people. Obviously the virus proliferated in the market, but that doesn't necessarily make the market the origin. The two bottom 'Weibo data' maps from the first link show clusters on both sides of the rivers and also very close to the lab.

That's just the most obvious bit of bias, but I'm confident that article isn't being as fair-handed as it's pretending to be.

You do realize that your two points are in direct contradiction?

You're mad at the author for not pointing out the WIV (Which had 0 confirmed cases anywhere near it until much later in the pandemic which is what the two bottom charts are referring to) but then you also grant that it looks like the market was the center of spread?

In any case, they directly address this;

> Importantly, even pneumonia cases that had no association whatsoever with the market (no work, travel, visits, or contacts there) still centered around the Huanan market and could not have been subject to ascertainment bias. The market was the only place in Wuhan where early cases had a clear association. There are no other epidemiological links to any other place in the city, other clusters only started forming later in Jan-Feb (Weibo data, shown above) and became more representative of the city’s population density.

> It is worth mentioning here that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (the alleged ‘escape’ laboratory working on CoVs, not shown in map) is located on the other side of the Yangtze River, South West of the Dong Hu lake, more than 16km away from the Huanan market, and no sickness clusters of cases were shown anywhere close in December 2019.

As for:

> It's not at all far-fetched to think the virus piggybacked 10 miles before finding a nice home for itself at a wet market, after which it went gangbusters and infected lots of people.

You still need to explain how there are two distinct lineages at the market among the first cases!

Picking and choosing one data point to be skeptical of is useless, the totality of the evidence needs to be weighed.

Two lineages does not preclude a lab leak. And only B was centered at the market. The market hypothesis is lacking.

> You're mad at the author for not pointing out the WIV

Yes, an article comparing two possible originating locations should obviously show both on that graphic (especially when both places are well-within the frame of the image); I can't see any good reason for the author to have omitted that.

> but then you also grant that it looks like the market was the center of spread

Yes. And that's not contradictory to the lab leak idea, because people aren't trees and they go places after work. I think it's entirely reasonable to hypothesize that the virus escaped from the lab on a person and ended up successfully taking root in a less-than-sanitary wet market just across the river. If two-headed turtles started showing up at a Popeye's 20 minutes away from the Turtle Experiment Laboratory, would you say that Popeye's was the source of the two-headed turtles?

> You still need to explain how there are two distinct lineages at the market among the first cases!

Again, there's no reason both theories can't be true here. The caged, dirty animals definitely seemed to be the virus' first stronghold, but that doesn't mean that the new bat virus couldn't have come from the New Bat Virus Laboratory 20 minutes away from the wet market.

> Picking and choosing one data point to be skeptical of is useless, the totality of the evidence needs to be weighed.

My point is that it made the bias of the author nakedly apparent. It's an pro-wet-market argument piece, not an objective look.

A bunch of equipment was moved from WIV to the spot next to the market a few days before the outbreak. That is the lab leak hypothesis.

There are two key problems with this analysis. The first is that the data to which we have access has been subject to gatekeeping by the Chinese authorities. (Is this a conspiracy theory? Yes, very much so, and rationally so given the way the PRC operates.) The second is that workers at the WIV aren't going to leave work and then hang around on the street outside, infecting passers-by in the immediate vicinity, causing a cluster that radiates around the WIV itself. They're going to get on transit and head home, mainly westwards.

> You still need to explain how there are two distinct lineages at the market among the first cases!

Actually, YOU do. You need to explain how a virus made two separate rare hops to humans in the same place, at the same time, in two different forms. This is possible, but statistically unlikely. The (vastly) more likely hypothesis is that it made only a single cross-species hop, which then spread and mutated later.

There's another interesting point that seems to have flown under the radar: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market,+Fazha...

Dunno if that point is just offices or whatever though.

No, there's a lab in there. This was the lab originally called out by Chinese whistleblowers.

Also you have the wrong address, put in the Chinese name on Baidu and you'll find it's in walking distance to the market. Like literally just across the street.

武汉市疾病预防控制中心

That's the Wuhan CDC. It's across the street from the market and has a virus lab. Google Maps will not show you the correct location but you can put the address (湖北省武汉市江汉区马场路288号) and it's close enough. Or use Baidu Ditu and find it's right in the middle of the clusters in your first link, ~300m south of the market.

Is each theory equal in terms of probability based on the evidence? That's much more important than stating that both could be true

> I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth. Either theory is perfectly viable given the evidence we currently have.

This has been extensively investigated by scientists - it’d be a career making move if you could prove something that juicy! - but the problem is that the conclusions aren’t completely certain but rather comparing probability & the limited evidence to conclude that the lab leak hypothesis is increasingly unlikely. That doesn’t make the news and it especially won’t convince conspiracy theorists when there’s a raging political battle.

Scientists aren't going to prove lab leak one way or the other because the evidence isn't going to be in the virus itself.

The for or against lies with the lab and the staff working there and the PRC is not going to allow an open and honest investigation to either prove or discount it.

So unless it can be proven to have come from somewhere else, you are likely never going to settle whether it was lab leak.

But we've pretty much established that it was a virus of natural origin - all of our molecular techniques leave signs, so an honest discussion would foreclose that possibility. That doesn't eliminate the possibility that it was a natural virus which had been collected and subsequently escaped due to bad lab technique but the former is too attractive a conspiracy theory to let go..

This is not true. Ralph Baric developed (and patented) a seamless technique to assemble coronaviruses in 2002 [1]. Baric was a close collaborator of the Coronavirus group at WIV.

Since then there has been even more progress. Since 2015 or so it's been possible to "print" DNA of any sequence.

In fact as COVID started to spread in China and the sequence was released, a Swiss lab used this technology to print the genome of SARS2, inject it into some yeast cells, and voila, you have the virus. They wrote this up in Nature [2].

If you wanted to change a naturally sampled virus using this technique, say, to insert a Furin site, swap out an RBD, whatever, you can literally do it with a text editor and copy and paste.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7279327B2/en

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2294-9

> insert a Furin site, swap out an RBD, whatever, you can literally do it with a text editor and copy and paste.

Saved a lot of money this year making Covid-19 at home using the SARS viruses I already have. Takes like 2 seconds

Now we need someone to implement an LLVM backend to emit RNA.

And a Rust frontend! That way the viruses can't leak.

Yes, Seamless Ligation ("No See'm" technology) has been written about since at least 2006 for its potential to be used in creating biological agents that lack signs of laboratory manipulation.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/39652

Suffice it to say, this has been a very active area of research (and DoD/NIH/NIAID funding) for many years.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7120940/

In light of this, people that are confidently dismissing or playing down the possibility of a lab l̶e̶a̶k̶ origin at this point seem to be exhibiting some kind of ideological commitment.

Modern molecular techniques don't really have to leave signs. Indeed scientists synthesised a copy of sars-cov-2 from the sequence data a few months after the sequence was published:

"it is possible for researchers to reconstruct the virus in a lab, using either fragments of virus from patients, or fragments of DNA that are synthesised chemically by biotech companies. " https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/19172

It seems you can basically type any sequence you want and have it made up.

> That doesn't eliminate the possibility that it was a natural virus which had been collected and subsequently escaped due to bad lab technique but the former is too attractive a conspiracy theory to let go..

For some reason most discussions claiming that the lab leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory focus 90% of their effort arguing against being a bioengineered weapon and little time arguing against the actual strongest lab leak hypothesis: a zoonotic virus was collected and brought to a virology lab, where it was passed through humanized mice, a worker contracted it, and accidentally spread it in the city the virology lab was based.

The fact that people can pick out whackadoodles in Congress who argue for stupid theories doesn't make the strong theory weaker.

What I will tell you is a thing that I have read, and I hold close:

Forgive one another, and you will be forgiven.

In order to forgive, we must have the truth. Without it, we are in a fog of blind judgement and accusation.

Clarity of the source of this misfortune allows us to forgive.

I cannot say that I hold the full pantheon of the origin of these words to be true, but the four books that imparted this teaching to me have left an indelible imprint, and I cannot escape their mercy, justice, and hope.

I have read many other books, of course, and I believe in compassion. Though great calamity has befallen us, we might find any who have acted wrongly to be worthy of forgiveness.

When we grow beyond apprehension of recrimination, blind to fear of punishment for a cataclysm caused by ourselves and others, and only seek to salve our unwilling harm, perhaps then we will be able to say "move!" to a mountain, and it will move.

Yes, I have loved these books. Sometimes, they are my only solace.

For what it's worth, I neither think the lab leak hypothesis is definitely proven nor that the scientists involved are worthy of some kind of punishment. It's a matter of increasing security at scientific research facilities and banning certain lines of research altogether as too risky.

I agree, forgive before corrective action.

What books are you cryptically referring about?

The USA just launched a major assault on the human rights of 55% of its population (women and homosexuals), after a yearlong assault on the foundation of our democratic government, all under the guise of four books of "mercy, justice, and hope".

Forgiveness is not on the political table.

Perhaps you will find them someday.

A zoonotic jump that happened to occur inside of a wildlife research facility due to bad lab technique is not that scary. If it's proven true, it's pretty likely that the lab operators will fix it. Could you imagine being the guy who caused the COVID-19 pandemic by forgetting to sanitize some tool? I bet whoever did it would be the single most careful and clean research scientist in the entire world after that kind of episode.

The bioweapon theory, however, is politically useful. If you want to start a war, or at least trade sanctions, a villain is a good place to start. Someone violating international law and gene splicing themselves a pandemic in a bottle is exactly the right kind of comic book supervillainy, without being technically impossible.

> The bioweapon theory, however, is politically useful. If you want to start a war, or at least trade sanctions, a villain is a good place to start.

This is precisely Nature's gambit. She carefully engineered SARS-CoV-2 in a matter of weeks (to conceal the evidence, which was eaten), all naturally of course, but carefully, subtly made it appear like it might have been designed by mere mortals... and for this very purpose. Armageddon. When there's an imbalance, Nature corrects. And no one would deny there is an imbalance in the Earth regarding our species alone totally messing it up for all living things.

>I bet whoever did it would be the single most careful and clean research scientist in the entire world after that kind of episode.

"Fire you? I just spent a million lives training you up!"

(For those who don't get the reference, https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/thomas_j_watson_209882 )

"not that scary..."

What an utterly extraordinary thing to say!

No we haven't. At all.

>But we've pretty much established that it was a virus of natural origin

You keep repeating this sentiment even though there are other comments that provide evidence to the contrary, that we haven't established that at all.

Do you have any sources to support this claim other than what are effectively op-ed essays?

Serial passaging is effectively all “natural” (but intentional) infection. That wouldn’t leave signs of molecular techniques since none would be involved.

Anyone claiming to disprove the lab leak hypothesis by making a claim against solely molecular engineering is either hilariously uninformed or intentionally misleading you.

>But we've pretty much established that it was a virus of natural origin - all of our molecular techniques leave signs, so an honest discussion would foreclose that possibility.

I've only heard crack pots claim it was man made up to this point. I think repeatedly bringing it up or acting as if that's what lab leak means to most is disingenuous at this point.

>That doesn't eliminate the possibility that it was a natural virus which had been collected and subsequently escaped due to bad lab technique

That's what everyone is actually talking about. The man made conspiracy theory is a red herring that only serves to strawman and shut down legitimate discussion.

They’re not going to have a video of it jumping, no, but they can look as probabilities as they’ve done. This has ruled out the bioweapon theory which got a lot of chatter a couple years ago, and it’s shown that zoonotic origin is heavily favored as the likely candidate. That doesn’t rule out something like a natural virus infecting a worker who made a lab safety error but it hasn’t made that look extremely likely, either.

For anyone honest, the big question here is how we prevent this from happening again. The conclusions seem pretty solid: be careful about pushing humans into wild animal populations, better surveillance for emerging diseases, and continue pouring money into research on things like rapid test and vaccine development so response times can shrink.

We know in science that sometimes scientific results for analyses based largely on suppositions regress toward the mean, and this effect is stronger when prestige or politics are on the line. This is called "ideological hegemony" and it reproduces itself in the halls of power because those who occupy those halls are all funneled through the same conditioning programs.

I'm not sure what to say further other than "I guess we're going to have to find a way to be comfortable never knowing". The analyses are compromised because the topic is too charged now. Too much is at stake based on one or another direction to trust any conclusions.

Too much is at stake based on one or another direction to trust any conclusions.

One could still say "My god! This virus could have been even worse, more deadly! Lab leak or not, the entire planet should double check conditions at all labs, ensure proper containment and processes exist!"

>the limited evidence to conclude that the lab leak hypothesis is increasingly unlikely.

Any citations to share? I've only seen peer-reviewed evidence shared in this comments section that contradicts this claim.

"it’d be a career making move if you could prove something that juicy!"

That's absurd. We know the grant that funded the WIV lab work was signed off by Fauci during a time when GoF research was banned in the USA. If you proved the virus came from a lab funded by the guy who literally funds your colleagues you would never work in the field ever again.

> and I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth

Not to be glib, but what would be a legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth?

That this plausibly could have been of natural origin would seem to override any value in discerning where it actually came from.

If it was a lab leak, "Oops." We hastened it occuring naturally by some amount of time. Lots of people died, but that would have happened in an inevitable spillover event anyway, albeit farther in the future.

If it wasn't a lab leak, well there we are.

Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? Increase biocontainment protocols? Okay, so we've made human-origin less likely. We still have to deal with naturally-occurring in the future.

You raise good points, but note that not everyone is rational here. Covid has in fact shown irrational so many people are, even in the 21st century.

If it were discovered to be a lab leak from something previously discovered in the wild, especially from a NIH funded lab, hell would break lose and it would hurt many aspects of biological and medical research.

If authorities decide based on political considerations to not investigate a mistake that led to millions of deaths and tens of millions more lives destroyed, they lose an enormous amount of credibility in the eyes of the public.

Full integrity is the only chance we have of having a healthy political atmosphere where the public can trust the establishment.

You underestimate the time value of not having a pandemic today, as opposed to perhaps hundreds of years in the future. Serial passage through humanized mice is not exactly something that happens in nature.

That is a substantial value, to be sure.

But I also look at it the other way: COVID was perhaps the smallest scale event that could produce fundamental change in the way we (as in, humans) approach biodefense and disease control.

If we needed a wakeup call, better to have it now than ~2100, when we're estimated to reach peak population + continued concentration in cities.

Peak population => we didn't figure out population control, so we need a virus to help out.

This is what I've been saying all along. COVID-19 is just about the gentlest possible practice run for a seriously nasty pandemic. From what we've seen so far, if we did encounter something more deadly, we would not do well.

Simple: We don't have infinite funds to guard against both. It helps us decide where to focus our time and money.

Perhaps we could hold those responsible accountable? Especially if it came from research Fauci said wasn’t happening but actually was? Specifically gain of function. Look at how BP got hammered for an oil spill. Why wouldn’t China proportional penalties given that if it were a lab leak it lead to a global economic and health disaster. That it was coincidence that the virus happening near a research facility where they were researching similar viruses is beyond belief. The mental gymnastics being used to discredit the lab leak (or intentional release) theory is astounding. People have been sent to prison for life on far weaker circumstantial evidence.

What would we do differently? We put people like Fauci in prison for funding dangerous research that was specifically prohibited by the Obama admin —- then lying about it. We’d defund and disband the WHO for lying to our face while carrying water for China. Even the name “Covid” was made up to protect the Chinese. The WHO didn’t rename MERS, Zika, Ebola or any number of dangerous diseases with a regional connection. But for Covid? They bent over backwards to obfuscate Chinese responsibility. And Fauci? Lying to the American people and Congress over and over again while knowing good and well he helped fund it. And note the NIH and other US federal agencies aren’t required to disclose royalty payments from scientists in their employ. People making decisions about this virus literally got paid from the very corporations creating the treatments. If any scientist that had any influence got paid a single dollar from a company benefiting from their decisions — that’s a conflict of interest of extraordinary proportions. If an Army general gets paid a royalty from a defense contractor that general would be thrown in prison. Rick Marcinko went to federal prison for allegedly doing when happens all the time in our national health agencies.

The world should be outraged and Fauci should be in prison. What would we do differently? Not fund Chinese research. Demand full and absolute transparency from our public health agencies especially when it comes to research funding and financial ties to those who profited immensely from this.

Rand Paul’s questioning of Fauci was spot on. But people are too blinded by political parties to open their eyes.

And if we did all of that, how much would it decrease our future risk of zoonotic spillover?

The comment you are responding to, talks about alleged malfeasance, and morally bankrupt acts.

Your response is, oh well?

In terms of spillover, there is zero guarantee it would happen naturally. For any virus, it could, it may, and for some it has.

But for any specific virus, it is absolutely not guaranteed.

And purposefully training for human compatibility in a lab, clearly makes that maybe, a certainty, and if insufficient precautions are taken, that is a crime against humanity.

This whole thing is absurd. We go after corps for spying on people, governments for bias, but if the truth is a lab leak killed 100s of millions, "Oh well".

Come on!

What's the goal here? Is this some weird US political "my guy vs your guy" thing?

No, my response was not "Oh well."

It was "And if we did all of that, how much would it decrease our future risk of zoonotic spillover?"

And if we banned thalidomide, how much would that help pregnant women with morning sickness? The fact that you're trying to prevent one kind of harm (morning sickness, natural-origin pandemics) doesn't excuse causing unlimited amounts of a different kind of harm (birth defects, research-origin pandemics).

The non-absurd version of this argument is that risky virological research will provide a public benefit offsetting the possible harm. None of its advocates seem able to articulate significant examples of that benefit yet, though, and even a small probability of millions of deaths is quite a lot of harm.

I haven't said it excuses it: I've just said that I don't see blame as productive. Something can be morally wrong and also less important to pursue.

The non-absurd version of this argument is that we can't police everything, everywhere, especially across national borders with sovereign, independent governments in power.

So taking that into account, there's always going to be a fog over truth in certain places.

We can spend substantial amount of effort trying to pierce that, probably fruitlessly, or we can focus that effort on things we can actually change and improve.

>>The non-absurd version of this argument is that we can't police everything, everywhere, especially across national borders with sovereign, independent governments in power.

By that logic, why bother trying to stop human CO2 emissions, or nuclear profileration. Afterall, controlling them requires policing phenomena that occur across international borders under the jurisdiction of numerous independent governments.

It would not, but it would sure as hell reduce the risk of a lab leak. The whole idea of GoF research was to preempt evolution on bad viruses. If instead, the research is causing the evolution of bad viruses, it should be shut down.

It wasn't "Chinese" research. It was Chinese-American research.

Same as how the toxic trash USA sent to China for fake recycling was USA trash, and same as how the outsourced manufacturing of "American" products to American specs is Chinese-American manufacturing.

That would depend on the facts, and who made what decisions, and who had what control when.

at this point, all of that has been scrubbed for good, and nothing factual will ever come out.

Hard to not conclude that in the US with our complete disinterest in finding out what happened.

The whole thing is so strange. I think back to the odd videos from China at the very start of people collapsing in the street. Only the first videos the world seen of the pandemic and they had nothing to do with reality but no one cares. No big deal.

>what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? Increase biocontainment protocols?

Ban gain of function research.

There are many virologists who make compelling arguments that the hypothetical benefits of the research (which have yet to materialize) pale in comparison to the risks.

Every day that goes by that GoF research fails to materialize any of its hypothetical benefits makes the case against it ever stronger.

> Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a lab leak?

If the virus is a laboratory construct (e.g., a recombinant of two novel natural viruses with a human-chosen FCS; we can argue about how likely that was, but no genomic evidence can exclude that), then it would near-certainly never have existed without that laboratory manipulation. The pandemic could near-certainly have been permanently avoided simply by not constructing it. This was a matter of controversy long before the pandemic; such work was banned in 2014, but the ban expired in 2017:

https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-lifts-3-year-ban...

If the virus is naturally-evolved but sampled and released accidentally by scientists, then it might otherwise later have been released accidentally by infected non-scientists. It wouldn't have been necessarily though, especially since WIV researchers sampled remote bat caves that no other humans routinely entered. Sampling of sites with significant existing human traffic (farms, markets, tourism sites, etc.) seems like a clear benefit, a negligible increase in the existing risk of natural spillover. Sampling of remote sites without such traffic seems much less clear.

There's something weird about public attitude to biological risks. When the government did a controlled burn in New Mexico that got out of control and destroyed hundreds of houses, everyone involved recognized that they'd screwed up, even though fires also occur naturally, and even though controlled burns are a valuable tool in controlling natural fires. It seems that intuition doesn't hold for lab-origin pandemics. The 1977 flu originated from scientific research (although the exact nature of that research--whether it was a failed vaccine, or a vaccine challenge trial, or an experiment at the bench--is disputed), and it killed about 700k people. No one seems to care, and I don't really understand why.

I'd argue should be doing more to ensure lab biohazard safety regardless of the origin of COVID-19, which is one reason I don't think knowing the answer has a lot of practical significance.

If you'd like to see greater regulation of biological research, then I'm pretty sure strong evidence that it killed millions of people would help with political support for that? So I'm not sure why we wouldn't look, especially when many obvious paths (e.g. subpoenas for all data potentially containing early viral genomes as contamination, like from Illumina's cloud services) remain unexplored.

I think practically it would be used to generate hostile sentiment between countries and wouldn’t drive good regulations. But maybe I’m just a pessimist!

Hostile sentiment between which countries? The WIV was on Chinese soil, but received American funds and had many American collaborators; so I don't think either country is in a great position to blame the other. On the other hand that gives China and the USA a shared interest in discouraging investigation of the cause, as seems to have occurred.

That's really sad about the 1977 flu. Was there evidence that it was human-caused, and that proper procedures weren't followed? Could local prosecutors have pursued a case based on something like manslaughter or criminal negligence? Would it even be possible to still build such a case? (i.e. maybe the statute of limitations didn't expire yet?)

There's very little question that the 1977 flu pandemic was human-caused. Even Gigi Gronvall opens her paper with:

> The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event, [...]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/

She goes on to say it wasn't a "laboratory accident", because it was probably a vaccine accident, either an incompletely attenuated vaccine or a trial in which vaccine recipients were deliberately challenged with live virus to test their immunity. That distinction seems like a legalistic game to me, intended to distract from the lesson that pandemic may teach us about this one; but I believe her historical background is good.

I don't know any mechanism by which those responsible would be punished, even if the exact truth came out, and even if they're still alive. I'm not even sure they should be--virology was still in its infancy then, and the escape presumably really was an honest mistake. Of course the more times this happens, the harder it gets to accept such an excuse, especially when deliberate efforts are made to minimize and distract from the lessons of the past.

Game theory effects on future lab technicians, administrators and security personnel. We punish crime and criminal negligence to deter it in the future by public knowledge that it will be punished.

>Not to be glib, but what would be a legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth?

Meaning, someone who didn’t walk in with a bias and look around the room for things that support said bias. This debate is packed with armchair experts who seem to have a larger interest in the politics than the science.

>If it was a lab leak, "Oops." …

Oops?!

>Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? Increase biocontainment protocols?

If you’re like most of us on HN, at work, when we make big mistakes that cost our companies money and users, we have thorough retrospectives, learn from our mistakes, identify root causes, build for redundancy and high availability, and prevent the same incident from ever happening twice. That’s what I’d expect to see if the lab leak (which you strangely keep calling human origin, as if a naturally occurring virus can’t leak from a lab) were proven.

> Okay, so we've made human-origin less likely. We still have to deal with naturally-occurring in the future.

We have naturally-occurring forest fires, yet as a society, we sure seem to put a lot of effort into stopping “human-origin” fires. This sounds a bit “fuck it, why bother trying to make anything better, something bad will always happen”.

> we sure seem to put a lot of effort into stopping “human-origin” fires

Do we?

After they start, but we are terrible at pretty much every type of prevention.

See: built to burn

> This sounds a bit “fuck it, why bother trying to make anything better, something bad will always happen”.

I agree.

> If you’re like most of us on HN, at work, when we make big mistakes that cost our companies money and users, we have thorough retrospectives, learn from our mistakes, identify root causes, build for redundancy and high availability, and prevent the same incident from ever happening twice.

Depends on the process. If the retrospective process is a big PITA that goes nowhere, and management is only going to support changes that it wanted before the incident, regardless of any knowledge uncovered by the evidence, then minimize the reporting and hide under a rock for a while, try not to get management attention again.

Which scenario seems more applicable to a government lab in Wuhan?

I don't think we're going to get the straight information from the lab, because the incentives aren't there. If they admit they did it, everybody is mad, and CCP has to take action to save face, and the lab team doesn't want to face that. If they admit they didn't do it, nobody believes them.

Outside of finding some lucky samples, like a good match from outside the area in say October or November, I don't think we're going to get anything definitive from forensic analysis of virus DNA. I'm not an expert in the field, but the same sequence gets interpreted different ways by different experts; and usually with some wishy-washyness.

The data quality for the early pandemic isn't getting any better or more independent from the same officials we don't trust.

If we can't get a story we trust from the horse's mouth, and we can't figure it out through forensic analysis, the best way forward is to figure out what interventions would be reasonable if we assume lab origin and what would be reasonable if we assume natural origin and do the practical interventions.

A lab leak would have enormous impact on the way we fund virology research, that's what would change.

There is no way to say if there would have been spillover, or it coming from nature. This feels a bit like the way people have said "every new variant is less dangerous." There are no guarantees on that one, there is equal possibility that COVID turns into something worse. COVID doesn't have to kill you, it just has to copy better.

If it turns out it was a lab leak, from using SCID mice or other human analogues, we might get new systems to prevent such a thing from happening again. Maybe researchers have to work in a diving bell system, who knows. We get to decide! We can create whatever we think we need. The system is not fixed. Look at animal research support systems like IACUC, created in the 80s, and now a useful fixture in biomedical research. In the lab, we lament IACUC sometimes, but they are a good check in the system. Why couldn't someone like IACUC raise the bar?

I agree with you that knowing it was a lab leak does not fix the past, and can increase the blame game near term. On the longer arc, it is important to know.

You don't understand biology. It is possible to date the divergence of genomes using a genetic clock. So they know if those spike proteins had been recombinated.

Serial passage in mice can't be ruled out but is quite out there. Lots of theories can't be completely ruled out, but wild speculation like that is not very productive.

For the lab-leak theory to be true, a "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) has to somehow make it into a lab undetected. Additionally and alternatively scientists have to undergo something like this "serial mice passage". Which is not proven that it could work. And then they would need to somehow let the virus escape through an accident even though they knew it could be dangerous. And it would have to accidentally be able to infect Humans extremely well (which is a tall ask still). It's just... highly improbable.

What does "date divergence of genomes using a genetic clock"? I am curious to learn about such a tecnology. If you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_clock that is highly non-quantitative.

It is quite quantitative, just not very precise. Good enough to tell you if a Virus emerged more than a couple of years ago or not.

Can you give me a link to a good example of that (ideally, non-covid)? my understanding is that it's only good for relative rates over evolutionary time so I'd like to see a counterexample.

It's a completely common technique - the same way we're tracing the current Monkeypox outbreak.

https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/epidemiological-up...

And is useful from an anthropological perspective on older outbreaks, also for Monkeypox;

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92315-8

The rate of mutations, especially for a virus as transmissible as Covid is a very strong signal.

Thanks- personally, based on my experience in functional genomics, they have far too many assumptions to be trusted as "clocks", even relative ones.

Here's the second paper's methods: a molecular clock signal was estimated on the ML tree using TempEst v1.532. BEAST v1.10.433 was used for Bayesian MCMC analysis to estimate temporal nodes. As recommended in Patrono et al., we selected the simplest model: strict clock and constant population size with a HKY substitution model and four Gamma categories7. An MCMC model was run with 50,000,000 generations and a burn-in of 25,000 sampled trees. All other parameters were by default. BEAST executions were completed checking chain convergence and sufficient sampling of the posterior space (ESS > 200) with Tracer v1.7.1. The final chronogram was generated using TreeAnnotator v1.10.433.

I'd call these "time-scaled trees", not molecular clocks.

Their accuracy is completely subject to stable mutation rate and frequency of sample -- with that second paper, they were working with ~10 samples from 15 years ago vs. thousands of samples with hourly granularity and entirely traceable transmission chains in the early days of Covid. Completely different capabilities arise with Covid-level specificity.

Thanks, I'll have to give this some deep thought, it's news to me that having that much more data gives you high resolution in real time.

It's more a matter of decreasing the error bars on the rate of substitution, to have extremely specific dates for the oldest infections in each clade and the ability to run real-time backtesting to make sure your assumptions are solid. The rate of spread of Covid was a curse but was important to this type of work -- when we were looking at contact tracing and trying to assess the rate of substitution on mutations, it was useful to know that e.g. on Jan 1st there was no Covid in NYC and on Feb 1st there was.

My point is that if you find multiple samples with the same protein sequence, and those samples have independently diverged, you can easily assume those viruses did not originate by recombination from the Wuhan strain.

> "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) has to somehow make it into a lab undetected.

This is the opposite of what I understood the lab-leak theory to be: that an initially-zoonotic virus was identified and bred in a lab until someone working at that lab with lax security standards accidentally brought it out of the quarantine. This is plausible at face value.

I think a lot of the really extreme vitriolic reactions to lab-leak theory are conflating it with the accusations that a secret cabal purposefully engineered and released this virus to sow harm and discord. But that's not at all the connotation of "leak" IMO -- leak implies a lack of intention.

There's a spectrum... The zoonotic virus would need to have some rare "talent" to start with. Then there is the ominous "breeding" part, which many people describe as reckless or evil. In any case this isn't done in Humans but rather some kind of humanized model (and it's not clear that could work at all). Which is why it is quite a coincidence or accident that this process would end with a virus so well adapted to Humans that it is able to cause a pandemic. It's like winning a chess tournament after training for a Marathon.

It's only plausible if you know very little about biology. Very few people who know a lot about viruses believe that this is possible and even those usually say the zoonosis hypothesis is more likely.

> It's only plausible if you know very little about biology.

Not trolling, series question: what would these same ppl say about the monkey pox outbreaks? Why now? Why so random?

As far as I know the experts say they don't know all that much. Also the awareness of such issues has shifted a lot...

> Gain-of-function research is medical research that genetically alters an organism in a way that may enhance the biological functions of gene products. This may include an altered pathogenesis, transmissibility, or host range.

Isn't the goal to end up with an infectious agent? I don't understand why it seems so implausible that they would succeed? Why would someone give a lab money for a truly impossible task?

A virus that is optimized for mice or bats doesn't normally work well in Humans. If a bat virus somehow evolves in a lab into a pandemic in Humans, without essentially breeding the virus in Human subjects, that would be somewhat of an accidental development because the viral particles aren't specifically selected for that reason.

Something tells me those scientists were more interested in the effects on humans than on mice, and do their best to modify their analogues (ie "humanize" them) to achieve comparable results.

Something tells me you know virtually nothing about biology, medicine or the experiments involved.

It's really not that simple.

> For the lab-leak theory to be true, a "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) has to somehow make it into a lab undetected.

That's not a necessary condition and it's ridiculous to think that's the only hinge by which the hypothesis stands. Another far more plausible idea is that a mistake occurred somewhere and it was covered up. This has occurred before in authoritarian regimes before.

An input to a molecular clock is a mutation rate, which I imagine would be hard to quantify given the unknown source and the possibility of gain of function research.

Of course it is a necessary condition. In order to leak from the lab, the virus has to be collected and be propagated in the lab. And all the rest isn't plausible if they knew the bat virus they had in their vials had the potential to cause a pandemic. But it must have had some rare "talent" that was as yet undiscovered. Otherwise nothing of the "lab leak" hypothesis makes sense. You can't "gain-of-function" just any virus and end up with a killer pandemic.

You can interpret a molecular clock or a phylogenetic tree qualitatively, and you would expect to see multiple samples with the protein in question, but which have individually acquired so many mutations that they must have diverged before the dynamic. That would mean the protein sequence in question predates the pandemic by a long shot, unless you think the Wuhan lab tested the Virus in Laos...

I guess the disagreement is around the word "undetected". It's possible some failure was covered up and I trust the Chinese government to be capable enough to do that.

> virus has to be collected and be propagated in the lab

That's a weaker statement than the one I replied to. I'm referring to the how it's necessary that it needs to a "pandemicable" virus that enters a lab "undetected" and I guess leaves the lab "undetected". There's several possible ways the virus could have made it into Wuhan:

- Improper handling occurs somewhere in transporting the samples from bat caves (w/e) to the lab.

- Improper handling of samples in the lab.

- Improper disposal of samples in the lab.

- Entering a more speculative area; bat samples are used in experiments and improper handling or disposal occurs.

- Deeper into speculation: Improper handling/disposal of viruses used in gain of function research.

And when any of the above occurs, use the state's staggering power to cover it up.

> You can interpret a molecular clock or a phylogenetic tree qualitatively

I'm sure that could work but I imagine the error bars are quite wide as otherwise that's definitive proof and we wouldn't be discussing this online.

> unless you think the Wuhan lab tested the Virus in Laos

Nice attempt at absurd rhetoric. Strengthens the argument doesn't it?

The whole point is that the virus that was collected would already need to have some properties that predispose it to become a dangerous pandemic. Which is unlikely because those Viruses are pretty rare.

And the rest of your comment just tells me you know nothing about biology.

So the crux of your argument is that it's more likely that a virus with that type of predisposition occured in nature in a specific area around the Wuhan market as opposed to being sampled from one of many areas, potentially modified, and then leaked into said area? Seems unlikely considering the rarity as you pointed out.

>And the rest of your comment just tells me you know nothing about biology.

No need to resort to ad-hominems ; all it achieves is tainting your future responses on the topic with a lingering question of whether they are being made in good faith.

It's not ad-hominem if it's true. I really don't have the energy to debunk every "argument" that is borne out of misunderstandings about basic biology.

The alternative hypothesis is not that a very dangerous zoonotic virus emerges in a specific area around Wuhan (which also isn't really the agreed upon origin anyway), but rather that it emerges anywhere and causes a pandemic. Your argument here is a basic misunderstanding about how random processes work. Our observation that Wuhan was the first epicenter of this pandemic already preconditions us to assume a pandemic-capable Virus emerged there in some form or another.

Such viruses are indeed rarities. But they exist and every once in a while they come into contact with Humans and cause a pandemic. However this is not the same likelihood as with the lab leak hypothesis, because collecting viruses for labs is an event that happens multiple orders of magnitude less often than contacts between animals and Humans. So while it is a rare coincidence that a lab would collect a killer virus when randomly collecting bat viruses, it is not so strange that every once in a while a novel pandemic virus makes the jump from animals to Humans somewhere in the world.

Non sequitor. That's not the statement I'm referring to. It's certainly the case a virus emerged from nature with all or most of the properties we saw in the original. Unless it was engineered in Loas lol

Good job defending your point. If the error bars weren't so wide on the biological clock idea why we would we be having this discussion? Does the west supress that, and you're one of the few smart ones who have the truth?

Wait, wait...does this whole debate hinge around the idea that you think the WIV staff are reliable, honest agents? The very idea is hilarious. They operate within an authoritarian regime that restricts their freedom of speech and makes threats against them and their families for non-compliance. It is irrational to trust anything they report as being true.

It's even more irrational to just assume the opposite or whatever you want to be true.

Well, that's an interesting question. If the public health dept wants to inspect a restaurant to make sure its hygiene standards are adequate, and the restaurant goes out of its way to try to delay or block such an inspection, should we lean towards: a) The restaurant has something to hide and is therefore likely to have poor standards or b) It is irrational to hold ANY position on the hygiene standards of the restaurant, given the lack of dispositive data

I completely reject he analogy between health inspections of a restaurant and blaming a country for a pandemic using a highly speculative theory. It feels so ridiculous I don't know where to start.

> covered up. This has occurred before in authoritarian regimes before.

To be fair, cover ups aren't exclusive to authoritarian regimes.

Futhermore, in this case, The West seems to be willingly and shamelessly towing the Communist Party line. Can we add conspiracy to the smell being given off?

Science should be obcessed with truth. Geez. Looks like science isn't immune to cover ups and conspiracy either.

"What is the source?" will take a place next to "Who killed JFK?".

p.s. Slightly off topic, but off the media sources mentioned (e.g., CNN) how much of their revenue comes from Big Pharma or Big X that wouldn't fare well if lab leak could be supported?

You know we know exactly who killed JFK and it's not controversial by anyone who seriously looks into it right?

You missed the point. It not about what you think you know. It's about what everyone else believes.

Truth is a function of trust.

That's worth repeating: Truth is a function of trust.

Given the actions of all the Covid-related actors, only a fool would be rolling out the trust red carpet.

You know we know this, right?

JFK was an obvious government coverup not sure why you would choose to group the two.

Obvious?

I like that the two sibling comments above are "Obviously, everyone knows {polar opposites}."

To be totally honest I don't even believe in my comment but it felt like the right retort, I have literally know clue what OP is saying. Can you flag balderdash?

Magic Bullet Theory was an obvious consequence of a coverup at multiple levels, which most elementary school children understand.

I truly didn't think this was controversial. I would suggest talking to some pre->highschool kids shrug

Less probable than such a coronavirus originating in Wuhan of all places?

The WIV was in Wuhan due to the proximity of coronaviruses and other bat-borne diseases like rhabdovirusus.. this line of logic is akin to blaming shark research centers in South Africa for nearby attacks.

I don't think so? The bats are generally from Southern China, Laos, Cambodia, ..

Nowhere near Wuhan.

There are tons of horseshoe bats in Hubei, that particular misunderstanding needs to go away.

Too late to edit, but here's an article from 2018 following a group of scientists into a cave 60 miles from Wuhan to study horseshoe bats:

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002326/how-chinas-bat-caves-...

Unfortunately for us, tons of bats carry viruses of all types and some of them are literally found on the campus of the WIV:

18.5% of Japanese housebats sampled in one study had beta coronaviruses: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FQ9ScdVXsAIZntp?format=png&name=...

Those bats are regularly collected for study at the same academic complex that hosts the WIV:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FQ9U624XoAAvQol?format=png&name=...

There are bats almost everywhere in the world, including Wuhan. The question isn't bats, but bats carrying sarbecoviruses related to SARS-CoV-2, not just betacoronaviruses. Dr. Shi herself has stated that she didn't expect such bats anywhere near Wuhan:

> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201206204844/https://www.scien...

I've responded to you with this link before, and you didn't reply. It begins to feel like you are willfully disregarding all evidence contrary to your predetermined view, which is unfortunate.

The WIV was not set up in Wuhan to study bats in Hubei. That is a total misconception. It was set up in 1956 with no connection whatsoever to bat-borne sarbecoviruses. That specialization arose later, but studies were made principally in Yunnan province. There is no connection between the bat specialization of the WIV and its location in Hubei.

It was not. This is a widespread misconception. The local bat populations in Wuhan were negligible and their viruses were not being studied. Indeed, the local human population in Wuhan was used as a control in the WIV's studies because of their lack of any significant encounters with bats and their diseases.

Shi Zhengli, the "bat woman" who conducted most of her research 1000 miles south, in Yunnan province, had this immediate reaction to an epidemic of bat-borne sarbecoviruses starting in Wuhan: “I wondered if the municipal health authority got it wrong. I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.”

Her first panicked thought was that the outbreak might have started as a leak from her lab. Which is kind of curious, don't you think? She reported being relieved later when she found no evidence of this, but...why was that her initial thought?

There is no proof that the Virus was passed directly from bats. And as far as I recall there was evidence for at least one intermediate host. Which makes the bat-hunting rather pointless.

> has to somehow make it into a lab undetected

Undetected? The lab was specifically searching for and storing pandemic-capable viruses, and had applied for grant money to insert furin cleavage sites into them!

Nope. It was looking for bat viruses. There is no way to tell if such a virus is even able to infect Humans, without testing it out on Humans.

The grant application is not proof that they either performed such experiments at all, that they did it on that particular virus nor that it worked. And there's still a long distance between a random bat virus with a "furin cleavage site" and something that is good at infecting Humans. All this theory is so far is wild speculation.

Don't fall into the trap of taking the opposite stance of bad arguments.

> Most of the "evidence" against lab-leak is just weird insinuation.

Trying to refute evidence rejecting a theory is not equivalent to proving a theory, though. It's just broken reasoning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_conclusion_from_a_...

I'm sorry, this is totally tangential to the topic, but... between all those versions optimised to bind to this and recombined with that - how do you manage all those changes? Do you have something resembling commits and branches?

That's the problem with lab-leak theory that it's basically unfalsifiable. No matter how strong evidence you gather against it you can always dismiss it with ease.

Ditto for zoonosis. The problem is that people treat the zoonotic transfer hypothesis as some kind of default, the incumbent to which we must defer in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary. This is a mistake, given the proximity to the WIV and the nature of the work being done there. If the pandemic had started in some remote village nowhere near a lab this line of argument would be far more compelling.

To disprove zoonotic origin it would be sufficient for one person to step out and say "I made covid" and present a sample very similar to originally discovered covid strain and maybe some documentation regarding his experiments. It would immediately disprove theory of zoonotic origin of covid.

Nothing like that is possible for lab-leak theory. Even catching animal that has a virus very close to original form of covid wouldn't disprove lab-leak theory because lab-leakers would just say that the animal just got covid from humans.

As for validity of zoonotic origin hypothesis it's a default because every virus ever that troubled us came to us from other species of animals without any additional technological assistance from us. Unless you count hunting, cooking or husbandry a technological assistance.

It's now very well known that coronaviruses have huge variability, are able to mutate quicly and cross barriers of species so it's overwhelmingly more likely that sars-cov-2 came to us without any technological intervention.

We have no idea where the pandemic started. Only where it was noticed. Vast majority of covid cases give only flu-like symptoms. First cases might have happened in some village that had too few people to notice any spike in severe cases. Only when a person from the village visited market of a densely populated city and thousands of people got infected so that tens of them started landing in the city hospital the whole thing had a chance of getting noticed.

A standard serology chain through animal populations showing a plausible path to Wuhan would make the lab leak hypothesis unlikely, or at the very least redundant.

We do know that the pandemic started in Wuhan, or certainly that that’s the first major population centre it hit. Had it started elsewhere that’s where all the early hospitalizations would have been.

People have various definition what they found plausible. Majority of researchers think path leading from bats through civets is plausible enough given the evidence.

As you said, Wuhan was only the first major population centre. First human patient or even first hundred patients could be from a small village that don't even have hospital nearby to have a hospitalisation and one or two elderly village dwellers dying because of "flu" wouldn't make anyone curious or cautious.

This virus could have evolved a lot in those first few patients because there selection pressure for improving human to human transmission was the strongest and there was a lot of low hanging fruit for the virus.

> Majority of researchers think path leading from bats through civets is plausible enough given the evidence.

Are you thinking of SARS-1 here? There's reasonably strong evidence that SARS-1 entered humans from bats via civet cats, since infected civet cats were found in the markets. For MERS we have very strong evidence of zoonosis, since many infected camels have been found and the phylogenetic tree shows evidence of repeated introductions.

No animals infected with SARS-CoV-2 have been found, except those infected by humans. Various researchers have proposed various natural zoonotic paths, but I don't think civets are a leading contender. It's hard to say what a majority of researchers believe, since most have stayed prudently quiet.

You are right I mixed up exotic species. I meant pangolins.

And as you say the path for this particular coronavirus is still debated:

https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/717941/fpubh-09-7...

Pangolins were proposed very early in the pandemic, but have been pretty much abandoned. It eventually came to light that all the pangolin papers were based on the same one batch of smuggled pangolins. This makes it more likely that those pangolins were infected by a smuggler (in the same way that housecats or mink have been infected by people), and not the other way around:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2

Nature eventually published an extensive correction to their pangolin paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x#change-his...

Lately I've seen proposals that raccoon dogs were the intermediate host, or that bats directly infected humans. All of these are speculative, since no infected animal (except animals probably infected by humans) has been found. The absence of infected animals isn't proof of unnatural origin, but it's different from SARS-1 and MERS, despite a much greater effort to search.

All of this post is pure speculation with zero evidence to support it.

The biggest single reason against the lab leak is this:

Its really fucking hard to reliably grow human virus. Yes, the Wuhan lab does it, but for like ~10 strains. It takes years of planning, and lots of money. Its not like you can easily hide that kinda shit.

Its not like you can dump the virus into a Petri dish, shove it in a incubator and have done with it. You need hosts and proxies. And guess what? something that replicates well in hosts doesn't replicate in humans. Not only that, there is a strong chance you have to modify the hosts to better accept the virus.

Also, its not like SARS-like virus is rare. MERS is relatively recent. MERS didn't catch on because you are very symptomatic.

>Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing

No it's pretty easy to see that they're pointing towards GoF research performed at Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab very proximal to the origin of the outbreak.

The intercept has done a great job FOIA'ing chains of emails showing real concerns with the veracity of a lab leak.

https://theintercept.com/2022/01/12/covid-origins-fauci-reda...

You do realize that in opposition to my point about it being weird insinuation, you posted a bunch of weird insinuation promoted by some of the dimmest people in congress? There was a legitimate debate in 2020 about the origin of the virus, which the emails "released" by the House adequately demonstrate. Now nearly all of the people in those emails have updated their priors to favor zoonosis, which is given as evidence of conspiracy instead of just people learning more about a novel virus.

> all of the people in those emails have updated their priors to favor zoonosis,

According the to released FOIA'ed emails, these scientists changed their mind within 1-2 days from "wow, could really be a lab leak" to "lab leak is a conspiracy theory" - why that?

None of them can explain what made them change their mind on this short time frame in spring 2020. Was there new knowledge? A break thru experiment? They refuse to say.

So, more weird insinuation.

Got it.

You are downvoted, but it appears to me that you are accurate in your assessment. I haven't followed this debate much, but every time I look I to it I see weird insinuations, misrepresentations, and "obvious" assertions that are not in any way obvious. It seems like a gigantic waste of time, like debating creationists. I'll wait for my scientific peers to blow the whistle if any of the claims have credibility.

> None of them can explain what made them change their mind on this short time frame in spring 2020. Was there new knowledge? A break thru experiment? They refuse to say.

Again, this isn't true. Plenty of them have explained it. Just not up to the standards of the conspiracy theorists. This goes beyond the "lab leak vs. natural origin" debate and is now, what, including American scientists in covering up the lab leak to aid the Chinese?

Spell out specifically what you are implying here.

Could you share any interview links for those interested but not familiar enough to find the info on Google?

A lot of them thought that no sarbecoviruses had a furin cleavage site and when they were first exposed to the issue by the headlines they assigned an overly high estimate to the FCS as being evidence of human tampering.

Then other experts pointed out that isn't uncommon at all, and they all adjusted their thinking.

"Woah, that's a million to one odds, that can't be by chance!"

"No, it's actually really common, here's a pile of similar viruses with an FCS."

"Oh, nevermind."

Experts can leap to conclusions and run their mouths off just like everyone else, doesn't take some radical world-wide conspiracy that "got" to them (other than the radical conspiracy theory of "well-informed truthful information").

I don't think that there are any Sarbecoronaviruses other than SARS2 that have an FCS. This paper from 2021 supports that conclusion [1]. There are other Coronaviruses that have an FCS, but not Sarbecoronaviruses, and none of them use PRRA. Those twelve amino acids have essentially come out of nowhere.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/

None of the FCS in that paper are the same: RRAR, RTAR, RSVR, RVRR, RSGR, RRSRR, RRSR, RAKR, RAHR, RRKRR. There's clearly an awful lot of functional sequences that we know of that produce an FCS and uniqueness there isn't special.

You're right that I wrote sarbecoviruses when I meant beta-coronaviruses. We still don't know of any sarbecoviruses with an FCS, but MERS has an FCS and the bat beta-coronaviruses HKU4 and HKU5 have an FCS.

There of no known lineage B sarbecoviruses that have a furin cleavage site, at least not prior to SARS-COV-2. This polybasic furin cleavage site is found in various proteins from many viruses, including Betacoronavirus Embecoviruses, and the Merbecovirus. However, within the betacoronaviruses of the sarbecovirus lineage B, this type of site is unique to SARS-CoV-2. It's never been seen before.

> None of them can explain what made them change their mind on this short time frame in spring 2020.

Really? Can you point to interviews with these people that have no answer when asked why they change their mind?

It's quite a strong statement to say what you said, and it would surprise me to see an entire group of people refuse to answer a question. That would be quite something.

But I suspect a more likely description of the scenario is that you just don't want to accept their judgements, and replace their actual answer with "no answer." I'd love to have my suspicions proven to be wrong! Show the evidence.

You're basically asking someone to prove a negative as it could always be claimed that they'd explained themselves elsewhere. Wouldn't it be easier to provide interviews where they do explain their reasons?

Can you link to the time these scientists "refuse to say"

What's your explanation for the fact that Moderna patented the very specific 19-nucleotide sequence that codes Sars-COV-2 furin cleavage site in 2018?

Uhhh do you think it MIGHT have something to do with the fact that Sars-COV-1 had already caused an outbreak and the WHO already had already placed these viruses on their watchlist of viruses with the most potential to cause a pandemic...

EDIT:

> The SARS-related coronavirus was one of several viruses identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2016 as a likely cause of a future epidemic in a new plan developed after the Ebola epidemic for urgent research and development before and during an epidemic towards diagnostic tests, vaccines and medicines. This prediction came to pass with the COVID-19 pandemic.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/after-ebola-...

EDIT2:

The research effort to predict future outbreaks evolved into some really cool stuff like this:

https://spillover.global/ranking-comparison/

Inevitably one of these will result in another outbreak and inevitably there will have been a lab trying to study it in preparation and inevitably another big-brain is gonna find some patent or paper that predates the outbreak and use it as "evidence" for their conspiracy

Just think about what you're claiming here with this silly question. You honestly think Moderna patented a sequence multiple years ago, and then what, shared their research with the Chinese to unleash a virus and create demand for a vaccine they hadn't invented yet? Why in the world would they patent it before that?

It's literally the dumbest nonsense.

A more direct refutation though is that the authors were extremely out of their depth and didn't remotely understand the results from their BLASTing. The moderna sequence is the reverse complement and doesn't even encode proteins. In the DNA repair context for which Moderna the patent covers, it codes for a specific (Non FCS protein) and can even be found in birds. Did Moderna invent birds too?

https://twitter.com/emmecola/status/1468569894245572612

https://twitter.com/MGerdol/status/1496130768854212624

Yes, Chinese academia and business has no history of IP theft!

To be clear I agree with the rest of your sentiment. I think the nucleotide sequence as evidence is very weak. It’s the same amount of randomness as a 42 bit sequence assuming independence in both

> Did Moderna invent birds too?

Maybe they did...

https://birdsarentreal.com/

No. This is how you end up with flat earthers.

...The entire point of patents is the spread of knowledge. What, you think researchers, people that are by definition expected to be well acquainted with the cutting edge state of the art, aren't trolling patent streams for inspiration?

I'm not even that much a cutting edge guy (I try to bring yesterday's innovation that no one noticed to people not even aware they should be looking at it) and I dig through the odd patent that catches my interest.

Thanks for a sensible counterargument!

Patent, by definition, is shared and public knowledge (but not a public ownership)

Also: Even the founders of Moderna would have had their lives made worse overall by SARS-COV-2. Money and utility are different things. They and their families now live in a shittier world. Even a (rational) psychopath would not gain overall from unleashing COVID on the world. Nobody wins.

You realize COVID-19 is the second major SARS coronavirus outbreak the world has seen, right?

Much of the research on the spike protein for COVID-19 came directly from SARS 1 research a decade ago. The fact we were able to have vaccines ready in 12 months is because of this research on SARS 1 and the spike protein.

The answer is that the Sars-COV-2 cleavage site, while novel for a coronavirus, is not novel biologically. It's seen elsewhere and corresponds to the inverse of the human protein MSH3, which plays a role in certain cancers.

It is not, as some people here are alleging, related to SARS-Cov-1.

This is garbage appeal to authority designed to make people embarrassed to hold an opposite view. I learned nothing from your comment and was simply told to trust this source you hid any arguments behind. It’s not fostering discussion and it’s strawmanning those you disagree with.

The fundamental premise here is that most people who are arguing about COVID origins simply don't understand enough about known factual biology to make informed arguments. The appeal to authority is important because, in the case where we're not particularly knowledgeable, we should use authorities as guidance on how to reason.

I agree with what the parent said although I wouldn't say the evidence is "overwhelming". The important point is: China's government is so secretive we can't tell if they were intentionally covering something up, or just destroying all the evidence without any knowledge of what it said, to avoid people speculating from the documents.

Another important fact. China has everything to lose from cooperation and nothing to gain. An unfortunate reality in geopolitics is to give no control to other countries of your own fate. If they were to grant access and attempt to be completely forthcoming, how are they to know that some group wouldn't attempt to fabricate evidence or muddy the waters further.

There's also a bias in the other direction that people have a natural inclination to desire something to blame for misfortune. Covid being a natural disaster is so distasteful and unsettling because it means there's nothing we can do about it. It's the same rationale people use to try to blame the president for high gas prices or personal tragedy on god's will. It's comforting to have an explanation. China already has a bad reputation for safety and honesty that they are an easy target.

A layman can have explained the pieces at play and how they should work together, that allows the layman to point out logical inconsistencies while taking for granted they do not understand all the low level bits and pieces.

Not in medical biology. It doesn't work that way.

In anything that is true, if you can't describe it to funders what you are hoping to accomplish in laymans terms then you will not get funded. Funders understand that particle physics searches for new particles no need to understand the nitty gritty, they can even ask interesting questions "can a new particle cause us any sort of worry that we might destroy ourselves?" etc. You apparently argue that we can't even string together high level concepts into causal sequences when we enter the realm of medical biology. How is that even a science?

I don't want to argue with you; you can choose to ignore what I said. but the funders who pay for molecular biology typically are scientists who understand, or wealthy people who hire people who understand, that medical biology, while scientific, is not like the highly quantitative physical sciences, nor is it easily appreciated by novices.

Everything about causation in biology works differently than in other sciences.

Unfortunately I must resort to novice assertions to get any understanding. I'm not really sure I understand how causation in biology is fundamentally different. Apart from that you can certainly encapsulate biological events into some sort of locality and apply normal causative analysis to rule out specific scenarios, really that is what I am talking about here. I think we can agree that there are infectious molecules tumbling through space and time and work from there or is that not how molecular biology works?

The molecules are not infectious, but specific assemblies of them are. But more importantly, here's a great example: the molecules which form an assembly do so spontaneously. It's like putting all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in a bag, shaking it, and every time, the puzzle comes out completely solved, even if the chances of that happening randomly are unbelievably small. We only observe the statistical average of enormous numbers of these things, which are all happening simultaneously, with complex effects.

Many biological papers don't work with mechanisms at all- they just deal with statistical associations between entities- and treat them as complex black boxes.

Here's another exmaple. Why do people grow to the heights they do? Well, originally people thought there were maybe 1-2 genes, with a few specific mutations, and the results all sort of added up linearly. Nope! Instead, we've learned that about 50% of total height variation is explained by genetics, and even then, there are hundreds of different genes that contribute to height, with all sorts of different variations in and between genes causing nonlinear effects (typically ignored in genetics, but considered strongly in evo-devo) that are extremely hard to explain in a detailed causal way.

In short: biology is highly nonlinear with huge numbers of variables, along with active feedback mechanisms and other complex systems that work to maintain homeostasis against entropy and protection against constantly evolving infectious agents. The basic concepts of causality, like "entity A causes event B which leads to outcome C" really do apply, but they're fully probabilistic and massively tensorial.

This is garbage appeal to ignorance designed to make people embarrassed to hold an opposite view. I learned nothing from your comment and was simply told to ignore expert opinion. It’s not fostering discussion and it’s strawmanning those you disagree with.

What makes you put on evidence in quotes?

The deletion of the bat coronavirus database at Wuhan institute of virology prior to the pandemic is an undisputed and central fact. Your quotation marks do nothing to diminish this fact alone's inherent demand that Occam's razor be inverted.

Sure, but Occam’s is a logical shortcut, not a method of scientific conclusion. I personally suspect a lab leak origin, but I can’t say I have conclusive evidence. I just find it extremely likely based on a myriad of circumstantial evidence, and a lack of any conclusive evidence of natural origin.

I find it extremely unlikely given what I know about biology and how viruses and epidemiology works.

Lack of transparency in China is no proof, it's standard operating procedure. They'll try to CYA even if they didn't do anything wrong, maybe especially then.

The simplest and most probable way the pandemic started really is the way pandemics usually start: by a pathogen jumping from an animal species to Humans, without passing through a lab whatsoever.

Like rzz3, I am suspicious of a lab leak (but reserve judgement). You say the lab leak is unlikely, but do you know better than the WHO? From the article:

> In this we are in line with the US government, the G7, the World Health Organisation and the general public, all of whom are on record as saying that they think a leak from a Wuhan virology lab is a strong possibility that deserves to be investigated. The latest WHO report two weeks ago confirms this, saying that it is important “to evaluate the possibility of the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into the human population through a laboratory incident”.

China's behavior is suspicious, but as you point out there could be any number of reasons for this. However, that's hardly a basis for exoneration. In either case, China's behavior is surely a confounding factor in understanding what actually happened.

it is really not extremely unlikely. mainly because it happened multiple times previously in china with sars epidemic. there is a precedent

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/

Just so we're clear -- your evidence for lab leak is based on the way samples were handled after the last big zoonotic pandemic in China.

Odd that you think this is some sort of gotcha given that the best predictor of future behavior is, in fact, past behavior.

There's a wild leap of faith between saying someone handled samples badly in the past to saying they are responsible for the current pandemic.

There's also a difference between leaking a novel virus and one that has been circulating. Also the accusation of "gain of function" experiments making the virus more dangerous.

Of course it is not extremely unlikely that a virus escapes from a lab. To me it seems very unlikely that this particular virus first escaped from this lab and especially that it wasn't a threat before being collected.

> Also the accusation of "gain of function" experiments making the virus more dangerous.

Is that a complete sentence? What are you saying? Are you dismissing out of hand the possibility that gain of function research was being done at the time of the first discovery of SARS-COV-2 on the same type of viruses?

You don't need to "dismiss the possibility" to say it's unlikely. There's really zero evidence this kind of research has been done a) at all in this lab b) on this Virus c) the virus leaked. Nor is it even clear the virus originated in Wuhan at all.

"Lab leak hypothesis" sometimes includes the "gain of function" theme and sometimes it doesn't. I find neither very likely, neither has any evidence to back it up. I still think the zoonotic hypothesis is the most likely truth, if not for the fact that we know this has happened so often in history. Any other hypothesis needs extraordinarily good evidence to convince me otherwise.

It does sound like you have a framework which may admit the possibility of lab-leak if specific evidence is found, in this case probably contemporaneous documentation of exactly that happening. I actually think we are largely in agreement then, I think though that it is very difficult to apply statistics here to gauge the likelihood of one or another event being true in the absence of much stronger evidence in certain directions. I'm only wedging my toes in the door of a not closed case, making no claim either way.

From my perspective there is a large weight on the case that the "lab leak hypothesis" is not true. To present it as equally likely is very misleading.

The main reason to suspect that gain of function research on bat-borne sarbecoviruses was taking place at the WIV is that we know that gain of function research on bat-borne sarbecoviruses was taking place at the WIV.

This is exactly what I mean about insinuation.

Spell out specifically what you think a deleted database proves and the sequence of events that would lead to it being deleted.

The timeline of this stuff is extremely important to disproving some of the sillier claims. This database that's a "Central Fact" was deleted several months before the first case of a virus with an unmitigated R0 of >5.

They would have to know there was a novel coronavirus spreading for months before the rest of the world. Aside from the rest of the obvious ways everyone else would know, DNA phylogeny of all known cases disproves this.

The conceit falls apart immediately.

It was taken offline in Sept 2019, and "undetected patient zero" estimations go back to Oct 2019. Not that far off.

Their story for why they took it offline has also changed over time.

And at least as of the beginning of this year, it's still not been made available to other researchers.

Overfocusing on the market cluster is an error. First, because viruses travel easily – so even if 100% of early cases were around the market, it could have reached the market via a lab worker. And second, early overemphasis on the market cluster caused authorities to search for every case there, and ignore cases elsewhere – just as in the US, authorities missed early community spread because they didn't even consider/test people who hadn't recently returned from China.

If the crossover was zoonotic, and didn't involve EcoHealth/WIV/etc institutional actions, it should've been possible to find intermediate hosts, or viruses, in an earnest search.

Instead of finding those - in any of the hypothesized animals, anywhere from bat caves to Wuhan – we've instead found yet another bat virus that's closer-to-SARS-CoV-2 (BANAL) in exactly the Laotian caves where EcoHealth was collecting hundreds of viruses to bring to Wuhan (& elsewhere) for study and gain-of-function-enhancement. Researchers were routinely making such viruses more human-adapted, and researchers had specifically had sought money to add the same 'furin cleavage' functionality that a BANAL-like virus needed to become SARS-CoV-2.

It's not just China that was suspiciously half-assed in the early days, when the evidence either way for lab-leak or zoonosis could have been clearer. Fauci & Collins at the NIH were suspiciously half-assed too, & sent a clear message to everyone dependent on US federal research funding: "don't entertain this speculation if you want to be on our team".

Fauci was energetic in sending that message even when he was still downplaying the risk & saying masks couldn't help. That is: they were prioritizing narrative control over either investigation or pandemic control. Very fishy!

Both of your points are directly and conclusively addressed in the post..

> First, because viruses travel easily – so even if 100% of early cases were around the market, it could have reached the market via a lab worker

There were two distinct lineages at the market with a cluster of positive environmental samples in the wild animal section. I would love to hear a plausible theory on how two unrelated lineages came to be present there after human-human transmission.

> And second, early overemphasis on the market cluster caused authorities to search for every case there, and ignore cases elsewhere – just as in the US, authorities missed early community spread because they didn't even consider/test people who hadn't recently returned from China.

Not remotely true. I'd encourage you to read this paper: https://zenodo.org/record/6299600#.YjSWqDUxmUk

The prior linked post is a gish-gallop of overconfident motivated reasoning.

"Two lineages" in rapid-succession is weird - but no better explained by two zoonoses (that left no hints in any animal population) than two lab-leaks.

Worobey et al's analysis is at the mercy of Chinese data sources, and even if all early cases were exclusively in the market, and even the live-animal section, that doesn't disprove lab origin.

It might slant things slightly against it - but when no other animals, anywhere from Laos to Wuhan, have revealed any of these supposed intermediate forms – that somehow zoonosed twice, only after reaching Wuhan, with a dangerous new viral feature Wuhan researchers had proposed splicing into bat viruses?!? – the slant remains very much in the other direction.

But you don't have to trust me; even the WHO now wants a better investigation of the prematurely-suppressed lab-origin possibility: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/09/who-sago-cov...

There's a field-wide omerta about gain-of-function risks – who wants to ruin their relationship with the NIH, & admit research that's pretty typical across many leaky labs worldwide, may have killed 20 million people (and counting)?

> "Two lineages" in rapid-succession is weird - but no better explained by two zoonoses (that left no hints in any animal population) than two lab-leaks.

I mean, everyone can stop reading here... This is patently false. Multiple Spillover is a readily reproducible phenomenon that perfectly explains the dual lineages.

Again, spell out specifically the route how two distinct lineages would be present at the market under the lab leak scenario.

> It might slant things slightly against it - but when no other animals, anywhere from Laos to Wuhan, have revealed any of these supposed intermediate forms – that somehow zoonosed twice, only after reaching Wuhan

You literally only need one animal shedding virus - it's how literally every other pandemic started. The market was shut down weeks after it was clear that a pandemic was underway and only after that did the authorities start looking for infected animals. Absence of evidence here isn't remotely a substitution for evidence of the absence.

> with a dangerous new viral feature Wuhan researchers had proposed splicing into bat viruses?!? – the slant remains very much in the other direction.

This part is just false and belies your lack of understanding of the science and the direction of causality. The reason scientists proposed studying the FCS is because it was identified a decade+ ago as both dangerous for zoonosis and readily possible with natural mutation.

All of these virologists studying coronaviruses weren't doing it out of the blue, but because everyone knew that it was the single greatest zoonotic risk we faced.

A lab worker who was careless (if not depressed/malicious) could just as easily carry out two variants as one.

One animal shedded... two variants of virus? How did the animal get it, when no other nearby wild or market animals in the (lackluster) investigation around Wuhan, or since elsewhere, have shown candidate SARS-CoV2/precursor viruses?

They proposed adding the FCS to existing viruses where FCS hadn't been seen before – and yes, the motivation was because that was considered a potential natural risk. But that doesn't mean it was a natural inevitability. Isn't the proximity of the proposal, "add FCS to a bat coronavirus to see how much worse it makes it", to the appearance of SARS-CoV2 at least a little suspicious?

They & others have published lots of work that specifically made existing viruses more transmissable, or more severe – often in labs with a history of leaks. This can be done via evolutionary pressures – serial passage forced-evolution – or via explicit engineering of new chimeric viruses.

Coronavirus crossover was theorized to be a major risk, after SARS/MERS. That didn't mean that actually outracing nature to make the hypothesized worse viruses in accelerated lab processes was a good risk-reducing idea!

> One animal shedded... two variants of virus

Maybe, but more likely two different ones out of the many millions of poorly documented animals in the East Asia animal trade. Certainly more plausible than a single lab engineering two very distinct linages for no good reason.

> That didn't mean that actually outracing nature to make the hypothesized worse viruses in accelerated lab processes was a good risk-reducing idea!

Presumably you can link to the papers published about how they did just such work, or evidence it in some other authoritative way since you make the assertion so boldly?

How would two different non-bat animals shed two different (but closely-related) bat viruses, in a market with no bats, and far away from the bat caves where related viruses are documented? And further, manage this with no evidence of any other animals infected with related viruses in that region, nor along the trade routes any such animals/viruses must have followed?

Those were the two luckiest bat-viruses ever!

On the other hand, the research lab across town had collected hundreds of such bat viruses from far away - suspiciously never fully catalogued.

EcoHealth belatedly reported in late 2021 to the NIH, its funder that it had already, prior to May 2019:

• created a new, chimeric SHC014-WIV1 virus that was more virulent in human tissue than the (relatively benign) natural WIV1 virus

• took a natural virus that was already highly deadly, MERS, & added new binding sites

You can read an overview from The Intercept at <https://theintercept.com/2021/10/21/virus-mers-wuhan-experim...>, or a (partially-redacted) suspiciously-late EcoHealth report to the NIH at <https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21089573-priority-gr...> which describes these experiments.

Note also that per The Intercept, an EcoHealth spokesman had previously denied any such MERS gain-of-function experimentation had occurred - claiming instead it was only "suggested as an alternative and was not undertaken".

So: EcoHealth lied.

What if someone's secret budget, or pre-grant investigational work, had helped WIV do exactly the FCS addition they'd already asked for funding to do? That'd be a sufficient, and straightforward, way to get a SARS-CoV2-like virus from less-human-adapted viruses in nature.

And while this route isn't proven – perhaps because those involved have been suspiciously uncooperative – this hypothetical origin has more supporting evidence than "luckiest bat viruses ever snuck to Wuhan from a thousand miles away, zoonosed in Wuhan twice in rapid succession, leaving no sick animals or people anywhere else, despite a giant search".

Uh, are you aware that many different species have confirmed infections of Covid-19? The US department of agriculture has a list of different species where the virus was found: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/dashboards/tableau/sars-das... So evidently the virus has many options for intermediary hosts, there's no reason to require that there must be a bat nest directly on top of the market.

Further, note that we've found very similar Covid viruses in bats that are from caves around ~1000 km apart (RshSTT182 and RmYN02) while the individuals of the species have never been observed to move more than 200 km. Clearly virus strains can get very far even if they aren't literally carried all the way there by a single individual.

But of course, you also had your own evidence: the allegedly highly suspicious fact that a group of academics hadn't finished all their old projects before starting new ones. Oh yes, how unsurprising.

Yes, COVID has since spread back to many animals, & viruses can travel far. But they still haven't found the precursors of the Wuhan outbreak's original strains.

It is suspicious that EcoHealth lied about what research they had performed. It is suspicious that some very-dangerous, previously-undisclosed pre-May-2019 experiments were only revealed in a belated report.

> There's a field-wide omerta about gain-of-function risks – who wants to ruin their relationship with the NIH, & admit research that's pretty typical across many leaky labs worldwide, may have killed 20 million people (and counting)?

Claims like this, without evidence, reallt detract from any other point you want to make. Because it seems that your thumb is pretty heavy in the scale, without any evidence.

No heavier than your thumb on the zoonosis scale.

Where have I put my thumb on the zoonosis scale?

When there are massive institutional incentives to proclaim X, it is only wise to discount, somewhat, proclamations of X.

In Vanity Fair's lab-leak theory story, there was an illustrative detail:

*> Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO ["Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight"] framework was largely met with shrugs and eye rolls, said a longtime agency official: “If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research anyway.”

A whole field wants certain research to happen, with minimal limits. They don't want to admit, or even let themselves believe, that their peers' accident killed 20 million people. It's a hard pill to swallow!

That's reading an awful lot into an unattributed quote, which includes a direct refutation attributed quotes right above it.

It's clear that there have been moratoriums on GoF without stopping "all of virology," so whatever was meant by this "wink wink nudge nudge" is really unclear.

Also, in the prior paragraph, the reporter talks about "details of proposed experiments being secret" but that's just standard practice for literally all government funding of science. As if they shouldn't be secret for some reason in this case.

If this the sort of weak sauce, I mean, come on.

Just a bunch of weird insinuations, and having read more, saying there's "omerta" on this seems even less likely.

How about at least a little bit of real meat?

> There were two distinct lineages at the market

No there were two distinct lineages in two separate crossover events, the market was just one of them.

Which is even worse for the lab-leak hypothesis.

They're literally just two SNPs apart, per my reply to the grandparent and link to Jesse Bloom's Twitter. What do you think excludes the possibility that those arose during human-to-human transmission, whether at the market or during cryptic spread before that?

No, we don’t know there were two separate crossover events. The two lineages are more likely to be the result of a minor mutation having occurred during human-human transmission, i.e. subsequent to the initial (single) crossover event.

Two lineages do not preclude lab origin.

And the data collection was absolutely biased to the market.

These "two distinct lineages" are separated by exactly two single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). For comparison, omicron differs from the original Wuhan virus by more than fifty SNPs. SARS-CoV-2 averages something around a third of an SNP per human-to-human transition.

https://mobile.twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/153463060722071...

It's overwhelmingly likely that something around two months of cryptic spread occurred before the market super-spreader event, regardless of whether the origin was natural or research-related. That's plenty of time for these "two distinct lineages" to develop. They could also have developed at the market, either in a single transmission with two mutations, or in two transmissions with an intermediate lineage that died out before it could be sampled.

Were you previously aware that the two lineages were just two SNPs apart? It's bizarre to me that the "two lineages" have received so much press as evidence of natural zoonosis, when they could have arisen so easily in human-to-human transmission.

> Were you previously aware.

Yes, of course.

> It's overwhelmingly likely that something around two months of cryptic spread occurred before the market super-spreader event, regardless of whether the origin was natural or research-related. That's plenty of time for these "two distinct lineages" to develop. They could also have developed at the market, either in a single transmission with two mutations, or in two transmissions with an intermediate lineage that died out before it could be sampled.

Two points - if there were months of cryptic spread, that essentially rules out 95% of the lab leak hypotheses and further reduces the importance of the WIV proximity.

Secondly, Twitter is an obnoxious interface but Pekar who wrote the paper highlighting the divergent sequences has a good thread explaining why it’s such an important data point:

https://mobile.twitter.com/jepekar/status/149984326950040780...

Since the multiple lineages were present in the very first patients as compared to say January 2020, it narrows the dates and source of the first virus considerably.

The very first identified cases had two distinct viruses and were all present at the market. That’s not at all what you would see if the virus had been spreading for a longer period (we’d have intermediate samples) or if someone from the WIV went to the market and infected people (they’d all show the common lineage that all other transmission chains show).

I've seen the paper, and I don't understand its reasoning. Maybe that's my lack of domain knowledge; but Jesse Bloom is impeccably credentialed and he seems to disagree too.

I believe it's possible that:

1. The mutations that separate Lineages A and B occurred in non-human animals, and were introduced to humans in two zoonotic jumps. This is Pekar's argument.

2. Or, the mutations that separate Lineages A and B occurred in humans during cryptic spread, at the market or elsewhere.

If the two lineages were separated by a large number of mutations, then option (2) would be very unlikely--the virus couldn't spread in humans for long enough to accumulate that many SNPs without exploding into a large enough cluster with enough sickness and mortality that emergence would have been discovered earlier (and we'd have found evidence of that spread retrospectively in sero-surveillance of stored samples, etc.).

But it's just two SNPs--as Jesse Bloom notes, 5-10% of single human-to-human transmissions show at least that much difference, as will many two-transmission chains for which the intermediate never got sampled (or longer chains for which many intermediates never got sampled; the over-dispersed "superspreader" nature of SARS-CoV-2's transmission means almost all chains die out, while a few explode). So what excludes (2)?

ETA: I've never found anyone able to explain in their own words why "two lineages" definitely implies two zoonoses despite the tiny genetic distance between them. I strongly suspect that most people making that claim are simply repeating it, and aren't able to understand the paper, and that the reason none of us can understand is that it's nonsense. If anyone believes otherwise then I'd love to hear, though.

> I've never found anyone able to explain in their own words why "two lineages" definitely implies two zoonoses despite the tiny genetic distance between them. I strongly suspect that most people making that claim are simply repeating it, and aren't able to understand the paper, and that the reason none of us can understand is that it's nonsense. If anyone believes otherwise then I'd love to hear, though.

Plenty of us understand - even Bloom, who I generally respect (aside from some sloppy work at the beginning of the pandemic) understands but thinks it's slightly less likely than the theory you're implying. I (and many others!) disagree.

Pekar does a lot of complicated testing and statistics to shore up his case, but "in my own words", it all comes down to timing. We know in which direction the genetic drift of SC2 occurs, which lets us know that Lineage A is the closer than Lineage B to the ancestral bat coronavirus. So Lineage A could mutate into Lineage B, but the opposite is very unlikely.

However, the very first cases reported to the Chinese government - e.g. the very first patients actually were infected with Lineage B. It was several days later until patients began showing up with Lineage A infections. They've reconstructed the phylo trees to the extent possible with the genomes from those first patients and they just don't leave any real possibility that B came from A. The timing just doesn't work. Pekar estimates that Lineage B infections precede Lineage A ones by ~7 days.

This is further buoyed by the rate of divergence in both Lineages being almost exactly the same even though the basic characteristics of each virus are identical. For that to be true, Lineage A. would've had to quietly spread without being IDed, would need to quickly mutate to Lineage B in order for the first sicknesses to be IDed as Lineage B, and then greatly slow down the rate of mutation to maintain the same divergence as B.

This doesn't "disprove" that a single infection could have sparked both lineages - though it's extremely unlikely to have caused two viable viruses and left no trail whatsoever before them in the genetics. It's all a matter or probabilities and IMO, this shows it's far more likely to have had two jumps (similar to how SARS1 and MERS spread) than some hidden ancestor that was extremely similar to SC2 but wasn't noticeably pathogenic.

At very least, this greatly narrows the timeframe and the location of the very first infection. If various vendors at the market were infected with viruses of different lineage within a handful of days of each other, it's completely obvious that this was the site of the first spread. That may seem like an anodyne observation but unfortunately there are still a lot of people who dispute even that much.

I think Bloom is missing something here that would further change his odds in favor of the multiple zoonosis;

https://mobile.twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/153466370506077...

> Agreed & one scenario under "not seeded by lineage B at market" is seeded by lineage A at market which then evolved into lineage B in humans. Alternatively could have been seeded by lineage A elsewhere & superspreading of derived lineage B at market.

Guo found environmental samples of both Lineage A and Lineage B at the market -- so both were present there -- his second hypothetical would then be highly unlikely.

I follow the steps; I just don't understand why they're treated as dispositive evidence of zoonosis. I also don't think you're correctly describing Bloom's position here. On Twitter, he writes:

> But the first sequences reported by Chinese government are lineage B from seafood market. So either outbreak was not seeded by lineage B at market, or something very complicated happened. I suggest the former, Pekar et al suggest the latter.

https://mobile.twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/153463283456805...

I'm taking this as a statement that he disagrees with Pekar, and believes SARS-CoV-2 probably originated from a single introduction (natural or otherwise) into humans. That seems well beyond "slightly less likely". Am I mistaken?

Pekar's theory makes sense if we believe that sampling in humans has been almost perfectly good, capturing every important lineage. But why would we assume that? Such confidence in the human sampling is particularly odd when Pekar's theory also requires us to believe that sampling in animals has been perfectly bad, since we've still found no animals infected (except those infected by humans).

Assuming that Lineage A evolved into Lineage B in humans, the hidden ancestors don't need to be less pathogenic than SARS-CoV-2; the IFR is relatively low already, and people die of similar respiratory diseases every day. The novel virus wasn't discovered until mortality became alarmingly high, leaving lots of room for undiagnosed deaths from cryptic spread before that.

> Guo found environmental samples of both Lineage A and Lineage B at the market -- so both were present there -- his second hypothetical would then be highly unlikely.

Why does that make his second hypothetical highly unlikely? I don't understand why two zoonotic introductions into the market are more likely than two human introductions into the market. Perhaps you'd expect to see other sparks thrown off from the cryptic human spread; but almost all chains of transmission die out, with highly stochastic spread until enough people get infected for the central limit theorem to take over. So the absence of intermediate lineages doesn't seem too significant to me, especially when the "missing link" (if it even exists; I'll again note the lineages could have formed in a single human-to-human transmission) is literally just a single SNP from either lineage.

I would be much more fascinated to know how two separate lineages both made their first leap to humans at the same market. The odds on THAT occurring are much, MUCH smaller than those of two lineages that had already made the leap to humans (or two branches descended from the first human leap) being found at the same market during the first few months of an epidemic.

Lab-leak was a sensational "whodunnit" and the entire purpose of promoting it (true or not) was to distract from the far more important "what should we do about the pandemic." The people pushing for this distraction A. wanted to do nothing (economy in an election year) and B. once they realized that doing nothing was unwise, needed to cover for having pushed A too hard, with too many "aged like milk" statements and actions. It was the public health policy equivalent of shouting "look, a squirrel!" Re-focusing the narrative away from the squirrel and back onto the pandemic wasn't only not sinister, it was a gigantic face-palm that it had to be done in the first place.

That's also why interest evaporated: the two real reasons to push the story both expired in 2020. Now all that remains is idle curiosity. As far as I'm concerned: indulge. Go nuts. Now that you aren't worsening a public health crisis by pushing an election agenda, it really is just a fun little detective story, and I'm as curious as the next guy.

Of course it is zoonotic in origin. Otherwise it wouldn't have been novel. Viruses don't appear from thin air.

That's a very well researched article you link to, but assumptions are tricky things:

> The fact that there were two distinct lineages early on is of critical importance, as this could imply a hidden community transmission for months (lineage A could’ve evolved into lineage B) before the outbreak at the Huanan market. Alternatively, the two lineages could have evolved in an animal reservoir from a shared MRCA before separately jumping into humans at the market. Option one is compatible with a lab leak scenario, option two is not.

Option two assumes that the lab had only one lineage of the virus - but it collected samples out in the wild and could easily have collected both together, mixed and stored them, and leaked them together. So the wonderfully detailed analysis rests on this assumption.

> Option two assumes that the lab had only one lineage of the virus - but it collected samples out in the wild and could easily have collected both together, mixed and stored them, and leaked them together. So the wonderfully detailed analysis rests on this assumption.

They were two lineages of the same virus, commonly seen in repeated spillover transmission. Explain specifically how you think they would "leak" both of them together - because the theory in your comment eliminates the option of an infected worker spreading the lab virus.

No it doesn't. There is a single leak, which mutates into a second strain through community transmission over a period of a few months. That's it.

The two lineages were both present in some of the first infections at the Market in early December 2019 and in environmental samples taken at the market in mid December.

They couldn't have circulated for “a few months” because in that time, literally tens of thousands of cases would have been reported.

So you’d have to have a two SNP mutation from one of the first infected people in the world that would go on to infect basically everyone else in the world since Lineage B was reported first but soon died out. It’s not impossible (nothing really is) but would be extremely unlikely.

Doesn't the article have a table of contents?

What happened to plain HTML documents with a table of contents at the top that enables to get an idea of the structure of the document and jump back and forth between the sections?

And saying that China would have an interest in spreading the virus seems fishy to me too, they almost decapitated the Communist Party by having a giant dinner at the onset of the pandemic.

Two things are clear:

1) If it was a lab leak, it was from a well-documented collaboration between American and Chinese biological weapons researchers.

2) It's extremely likely a leak like this will occur in the future, since these sorts of weapons programs are common.

I don't see why most people should care if it was a leak or not. It doesn't have any impact on (2) moving forward.

> It doesn't have any impact on (2) moving forward.

Of course it does. If we know how the leak happened, we can increase safety measures to avoid it happening again in the same way. How is this not obvious?

A peculiar thing about humans is that we can learn from our mistakes. That doesn't happen if we try to pretend there was no mistake to begin with.

What happened to zoonotic hypothesis? Any updates? Was culprit identified by means other than Bayesian reasoning?

Definitely not true. There is lots of circumstantial evidence for research-related origin but no dispositive evidence for zoonotic or research related Orion. And Markolin… well… not worth your time

Since you don’t even mention Daszak, while regurgitating the position he established years ago, you are per definition arguing in bad faith.

Please, for the love of us all, stop attacking humanity..

Here is a hypothesis that fits the data perfectly (but that could have a somewhat low prior):

- A poor studen has discovered that there is a demand in the wet market for bats.

- The student works at a lab that either has an in-house breeding area for presumably healthy bats, or that buy such bats from an external vendor.

- The student sees the opportunity for some extra income by selling some of those bats to the local wet market

- By some accident, one or more of the bats sold have been infected with some of the virusues being studied at the labratory.

Edit: A variation of the above idea would be if some bat-specialist (someone with skills for catching, keeping or transporting bats were working both the for virology institute AND for the wet market). This person could have, in some way, facilitated transfer of a virus from the institute to the wet market.

There is probably a number of such possible ways to associate the lab with the wet market, simply based on the two having a shared interest in bats.

I've heard it from someone who was in China after the pandemic emerged. Apparently some Chinese people believe exactly that. Some of the lab animals were sold to the wet market. And that's how the virus jumped from animal to host. Although evidence is scant. Then again it's China.

Now, IF this is true, it would also explain why it seems that the government is trying to cover up what happened at the institute. If this hypothesis were to be true, it might cause China/the CCP to lose face more than many other alternatives, as such corruption could be seen as a weakness of the current system.

The prior might be higher than you think

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/47531/did-a-chi...

Thats an opinion piece in a tabloid, without a shred of supporting proof for that claim.

The discussion in there links court documents where they establish that he was selling lab animals.

https://wenshu.court.gov.cn/website/wenshu/181107ANFZ0BXSK4/...

The WHO called for further investigation into the lab leak theory which means they have not dismissed it and believe it deserves a proper investigation.

It's hardly relevant what the WHO says or does in this discussion. They've shown themselves to be biased and untrustworthy on more than one occasion.

Two reviews of Markolins work are worth reading before you take it seriously:

https://twitter.com/EmaNymton90/status/1540235304854032385?s...

https://twitter.com/gdemaneuf/status/1507092599945166849?s=2...

Ah yes, reviews written by the eminently qualified "Not my name" spelled backwards and a data analyst for a bank... I'll pass.

One thing I would point out here: Shi Zhengli is the principal bat-borne sarbecovirus researcher at the WIV. When the pandemic first came to light, the first thought Shi Zhengli had was, "Oh my goodness! That might have have come from our lab! Let's investigate! I wonder if the municipal health authority has got it wrong. I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China."

Zhengli goes on to report that she was apparently enormously relieved to discover that so far as she could tell, the outbreak had not come from her lab.

All well and good, but... When she was told about the nature of the epidemic, and the kind of virus it was, why was Shi Zhengli's first instinct that it might have leaked from her lab? Don't you think this is curious? What does she know that made her turn to that possibility immediately? Why didn't she simply assume, like most others, that it was some new natural pathogen arising from zoonotic transfer?

You'd have to ask her -- but all of the initial reasons that everyone was unsure also apply to her. There was a novel bat coronavirus pandemic near where her lab studies bat coronaviruses - why wouldn't that be your first thought?

She’s a scientist and a bat virus expert. One would expect her mind to gravitate towards what she saw as being the most plausible explanation. If a zoonotic jump had been overwhelmingly probable, why would the news have triggered the kind of reaction she later reported having?

Bear in mind that your analysis is predicated on the falsehood that the WIV had been set up in Wuhan because that was a bat virus hotspot. So you’ll need to revisit that line of reasoning.

> "I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China"

Which in itself is an extremely odd statement, to the point I think it might have been taken out of context or mistranslated.

If it was going to happen anywhere, Wuhan was one of the most likely candidates - to the point they built the lab there to do the research.

If I could Snopes-whack just one persistent myth in this debate, it would be that one. It’s completely untrue. And the WIV used the human population of Wuhan as a control in their experiments because there was so little exposure to zoonotic viruses within that population.

I’m not entirely sure where this pernicious myth started. I do remember Maggie Koerth pushing that line on Twitter with some kind of smug joke at some point, and it getting lots of enthusiastic upvotes. When it was later pointed out that Koerth had got it wrong, she pretended that by claiming the WIV had been built in the area to study bat coronaviruses, the area she had in mind was “China”. This is like arguing that it makes perfect sense to set up a lab in New York to study rattlesnakes. (Of COURSE you would; the USA is where the rattlesnakes are!)

So Shi Zhengli’s comment makes perfect sense, and was not taken out of context. The WIV was not studying bat-borne sarbecoviruses in Hubei, and had not been set up there to do so. All the interesting viruses were down in Yunnan, a thousand miles away. She meant exactly what she said.

In terms of a natural (non-engineered) virus leaking from inside a lab (zoonotic transmission can happen either side of a wall), how is the current evidence pointing in one direction?

Not sure where the "weird insinuation" is?

That is an excellent article and, as the authors say in the first paragraph, lengthy and informative.

The combination of Chinese secrecy and Trump demanding that they pay reparations have poisoned a lot of discussions.

But come on, a novel bat virus exploding from the world's main research facility about bat viruses that was first reported by a doctor from a hospital in the same city with symptoms from the wife of a researcher at the Wuhan facility?

That's a lot of coincidences. And Jethro Gibbs doesn't believe in coincidences ;)

>symptoms from the wife of a researcher at the Wuhan facility

I'm interested to confirm this, do you know what their name is/was or where I could find more information on this?

https://nypost.com/2021/05/27/state-dept-investigator-ridicu...

And not Shi Zhengli, that is not the wet market worker, but people are blaming her for just questioning official narrative.

More and more, I find that lableak (which started with genuine scientific uncertainty) is not driven by genuine curiosity or scientific inquiry, but by the strength of it's emotional narrative.

Lableakers like Alina Chan started as maybe genuine, maybe opportunistic scientific dissidents who got boosted into the spotlight by conspiratorial-thinking prone rightwing networks. They build and got caught up in echo chambers that for years now created their own self-sealing reality.

However, we know today that the scientific evidence turned out to be entirely one-sided for a natural spillover event and not a lableak, which is why the 'cover ups' have to get bigger and bigger, include independent scientists all over the world, and the establishment, and mainstream journalists etc. and the actual evidence is not much talked about anymore in lableak conspiracy land.

Their problem lies entirely with the evidence already available, and no amount of evidence that is 'missing' can remedy that fact. We can happily grant a 100% leak rate from the WIV, and it would not move the needle on zoonotic origin any more. We can grant perfect cover-ups and secret viruses, and it would not suddenly make the available evidence square with a lableak scenario.

That is the reality. And all lableak proponents have been doing is to distract from it.

Thank you for showing how you started with zero genuine curiosity or scientific inquiry, instead opting for a total dismissal and refusal to actually consider the possibility.

It is not that you had any reason to believe she was wrong. There is far more evidence for it than what Alina has shown.

Have you read the WSJ's constant updates on this story? They have singlehandedly pressured China and the WHO into re-looking into the situation--the only reason nothing has come of it (yet) is they are stalling for any final answers (again).

The "lableak cannot be real" proponets are the least scientific people around. I almost put you in the same group as a Flat Earther, a Young Earth Creationist, and a Scientologist. You're a little better, maybe.

I think understanding the origin is important, but I also understand why it wasn't a media fixation during the pandemic itself.

1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic

2) Unlike the nuclear analogy in the article, pandemic virus outbreaks happen naturally, and fairly frequently. Combined with the huge increase in global travel, when one does happen it can be around the world in every airport before anyone has even identified it.

So in the big picture this type of outbreak seems inevitable, not anomalous or inherently preventable.

Understanding the origin, either by cross-species origination or a laboratory containment breach, is indeed important and significant and should be pursued, but I also understand why the search for that answer isn't at the top of the 24-hour news cycle.

Concerning number 1) that is doesn’t change the Consequence I agree, but the response I thoroughly disagree unless you means strictly short term.

Came or not from a lab, SynBio and gain of functions experiments have the potential of re-doing this of way worse.

So basically the only truly important response that is not damage containment is to prevent this from happening (or happen again).

Honestly beside fringe groups I don’t see any initiatives happening, if it was up to me I’d kick gain of function experiments into the same realm as chemical weapons.

There are a variety of natural phenomena and human activities that are liable to create new dangerous viruses and/or bring humans into contact with them. Gain of function research presumably belongs in this category; so do certain food and livestock handling practices, development at the wildland-urban interface, climate change, and a host of other things.

The question is how much incremental risk do these activities expose us to, what is the cost/benefit of curtailing them, and what can we feasibly curtail. The risks are what they are, and while we might be misjudging them, knowing the origin of a single event is not especially helpful in recalibrating.

Nature breeds extremely serious viruses all by herself; a depressing possibility here is that humans just don't have that much influence over the risk of another pandemic no matter what we do.

> The question is how much incremental risk do these activities expose us to, what is the cost/benefit of curtailing them, and what can we feasibly curtail. The risks are what they are, and while we might be misjudging them, knowing the origin of a single event is not especially helpful in recalibrating.

If only we had responded this way to the virus.

I meant how we were dealing with COVID-19 as it spread, not future consequences which I agree do matter.

Once we identified and sequenced the virus, knowing the origin wasn't going to change how many people were on ventilators in hospitals.

I guess I'm more cynical, maybe even conspiratorial. My theory is that NIH was possibly, even if indirectly, contributing funding to the research that caused the outbreak, and that the major corporate media networks are there to shill for the establishment forces in the government and hushed this story as not to humiliate Fauci and the NIH.

I've seen Rand Paul credibly grilling Fauci on this issue a number of times and each time, the propaganda machine on reddit came out to damage control for Fauci.

The larger problem, beyond whether we funded this or not, whether or not it was a bat, is that the media and leaders in the government have repeatedly shown themselves to be completely undeserving of trust and so you're left guessing what the truth is with whatever limited information you have access to.

Rand Paul isn’t credible on nearly any topic, but especially not SARS-CoV-2. We are talking about a man who proposed banning masks on public transit, knew he had COVID but didn’t inform anyone but instead spread COVID amongst a bunch of elderly Senators, and spent time railing against vaccines for children.

The man is a non-practicing eye doctor who pretends to medical knowledge he doesn’t have.

Especially when you look into how he got his license. IIRC, something about a layman/self-appointed board, or something similar (allegedly!)

When you're an MD for eyes or anything else, you can criticize his medical knowledge. Who cares if he specialized in eyes? He spent 2 decades as a surgeon. He obviously has more medical knowledge than most of Congress.

He's very credible on the discussions I referred to. Fauci basically sat there squirming and splitting hairs and playing semantic games to weasel his way out of admitting the NIH's involvement in the research going on at the Wuhan lab. My guess is you have some ideological axe to grind against Rand Paul or the right, that's just a guess, I could be wrong.

Yes, Rand Paul claims COVID came from China. But WHO-China investigation has found that COVID couldn't have come from China. Many scientists support Chinese scientists' fuindings [1].

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

> I also understand why it wasn't a media fixation during the pandemic itself.

You list some reasons, and I have in my mind a different reason.

There was a media blackout on the lab leak hypothesis because China put the kibosh on it, and since the US is dependent on Chinese exports for healthcare, PPE, defense and other critical supply lines, we did not want to piss them off.

Direction to the media for this blackout came from the US State Dept, and Mike Pompeo confirmed as much in semi-public comments that I will link if I ever find them again.

edit: this isn't the source I was thinking of, and it fingers the IC not State. I will keep looking https://www.newsweek.com/mike-pompeo-intel-officials-wuhan-l...

Wasn't SARS-1 stopped largely with contact tracing? You're saying that understanding the origin of the virus does not help the production of a vaccine in any way?

Big difference between the two: with SARS-1 you first got symptoms then become contagious, with COVID-19 it was the other way around. Obviously the second one is much harder to control, and if that had not been the case there is a fair chance that the pandemic would have been stopped in the initial phase.

Knowing where the virus is, how it spreads, and its genetic sequence are of course important. But I don't think CNN running segments about whether it came from a lab or a bat in 2020-2021 would have helped with any of those points.

> 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic

I have the opposite opinion.

If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread. That could have saved millions of lives.

We spent the first several months of the pandemic under the belief that it wasn't airborne. This ended up being false.

If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe and continuing without appropriate safeguards puts us at great risk.

> That could have saved millions of lives

But that still doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic. That's coulda-woulda-shoulda reasoning.

Of course it does. It will impact other countries relationships with china. And it would impact the kind and level of scrutiny over this kind of research.

> It will impact other countries relationships with china. And it would impact the kind and level of scrutiny over this kind of research.

I think the point is that neither of those would have had an effect on the pandemic. By the time it was major news in the US, it was too late for any of that to matter in terms of what to do about this pandemic. Not the next one, or our future relations with China, but with this pandemic.

A) I guess I interpreted "consequences" more generally to also include the consequences beyond the disease itself.

B) I still believe that it would have been important. If it escaped from a lab, then those working in the lab could potentially have important information to share with the world about it. E.g. is it airborne, how much does it mutate, etc. They would have been studying it for a reason.

The fact that information never saw the light of day should be obvious evidence it didn't come out of a lab.

Based on what implicit assumption? That a government would allow that information to be published? Look at how cagey and not forthcoming the Chinese government was under the current conditions.

Try to extrapolate to what they would act like if it did leak from a lab.

I'm going to be blunt here. No one with medical training thought this wasn't airborne.

Funny then how for the first few months of the pandemic the emphasis and public guidance was on desinfecting hands and surfaces and endless debates about how if masks actually help.

That was deliberate disinformation in order to save masks for the "frontline workers". Fauci has stated that in one of the hearings.

It wasn't disinformation. It was no secret that one of the reasons masks weren't recommended for general public use was that hospitals and clinics should be supplied as a priority.

If you got a different impression than this message, blame wherever you get your news from.

What, the US Surgeon General? https://archive.ph/KgfXW

> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!

> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!

It's hard to get more direct than that. It wasn't just about preserving supply for healthcare workers, high-level government officials were explicitly stating that masks were not effective for the general public.

Fortunately we have archives of all this stuff, as many statements (like this one) were later deleted.

That sounds 100% compatible with what I wrote.

You will also note that in the early pandemic, it was completely unclear that non-N95 masks, such as surgical masks (let alone cotton masks) would have a positive benefit. That changed later on, of course.

That statement reflected the best information available at the time, but it was designed to be as simple and actionable as possible, not to communicate highly-technical nuance.

Seriously. I can find social media posts of friends in April of 2020 sewing cloth masks to donate to hospitals/medical clinics to help them backfill their mask shortages.

Multiple sources in USA claimed masks were not needed for people without the disease. Heavily implying it was useless.

I of course knew that was BS from the get-go. But nonetheless they did say it.

https://time.com/5794729/coronavirus-face-masks/

Yes, we used to think non-N95 masks (let alone cotton masks) wouldn't help, and then when we got more data to the contrary, we had to update this belief. That's unfortunate, but normal.

Wait, people change their beliefs in response to new data? That's unpossible!

That was the worst strategy the administration could have used.

I'm not sure that is correct. In a subsequently FOIA'd email, Fauci told a colleague on February 5, 2020.

> Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.

That's a well known fact about how masks work in general, yes. They have a large effect on transmission from the wearer and a comparatively small effect in preventing transmission to the wearer.

However, when you have a limited supply of masks, it's impossible to give them out to every potentially-infected person, so saving them for high-risk people (like healthcare professionals, who also have the highest risk of becoming infected themselves) is still rational.

Only with droplet spread. Once we're in the realm of aerosol spread, as with SARS-CoV-2, you need N95 filters or better to stop them. The virus just goes around or through the cloth masks everyone was wearing.

I distinctly recall a virologist on public television early in the pandemic saying the hands and surface disinfection rituals were for psychology. He was not recommending masks either because there weren't enough to go around for everyone.

The debates about masks in the west, even after production ramped up, were a consequence of the initial confusing messages from officials. I've never seen it debated in Asia where they had masks available from the start.

As a resident of Asia I can tell you that people were wearing masks in late-January 2020, as soon as the outbreak was apparent in Wuhan.

This wasn't the first rodeo for SE Asia, scars of past pandemics has made the response here much more automatic, orderly and effective.

I think also supplies of masks etc were much more robust here because they were already worn in daily life due to pollution, normal sickness, etc and a massive medical tourism industry that was about to be shutdown and have their supplies made available.

No one competent has debated that masks help.

The German authority's namely RKI said they do not help for a long time. Until they flipped 180

> “Seriously people - STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus“

- Jerome Adams, former US Surgeon General, M.D.

Correct.

The communication at the beginning was that it was only spread through respiratory droplets, so therefore the combination of social distancing and cloth/surgical masks would be sufficient.

Airborne/aerosol transmission was only acknowledged by the WHO and CDC in May of 2021, over a year after the pandemic was declared. And taking that long to acknowledge it makes me think it wasn't just a strategic lie to preserve the supply of respirators for medical staff.

That was debunked here on HN right from the start though. And this is hardly a specialist medical community. I think the parent is right in asserting that the medical community knew this all along. Probably they didn't know for absolute certain, but it was considered highly likely. And that then got spun into a confusing message by the media. The WHO and the CDC were useless, but plenty of medical bodies around the world did much better than them.

CDC updated its site in Oct 2020 to acknowledge airborne spread. There is still something of an argument in the scientific/medical community about what "airborne" means. A lot of folks lived through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Philadelphia_Legionnaires... which is scary because if there's just another infected person in the building, they can infect people far away!

and when the initial scientific articles about COVID air spreading (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article) came out, many policy makers were truly terrified of making announcements that would cause worldwide panic.

July 10, 2020:

The new coronavirus is likely spreading through the air to some degree, the top U.S. infectious disease official said on Friday, one day after the World Health Organization urged further studies on the ways the virus is transmitted.

“Still some question about aerosol but likely some degree of aerosol,” Anthony Fauci, the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said by video during a panel session at a COVID-19 conference organized by the International AIDS Society.

Fauci on Thursday had said it was a “reasonable assumption” that airborne transmission was occurring even though there was not a lot of solid evidence behind it. The WHO urged more studies on the issue.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-meetin...

What...literally everyone knew there was AT LEAST airbone risk of infection. Not sure where you got your pandemic information?

Airborne was always known; debate was droplet vs aerosol (particle size and thus dwell time/radius). Not really a binary distinction anyway; a matter of degree.

A fair large degree though. However, as I understand it, it wasn't a misconception unique this particular coronavirus. But that the entire medical field just had a longstanding, bad understanding of dynamics. So its not like the Wuhan lab was sitting on some crucial information, they almost certainly had the same misunderstanding.

I agree it's not binary -- and the SARS CoV2 debate, in particular, became a theater of the absurd -- but the categorical distinction is not entirely crazy: some viruses are much more sensitive to drying out or exposure to the environment and simply cannot transmit efficiently in tiny aerosols.

Tons of work has gone into weaponizing smallpox, for example. It's a non-trivial thing, even though smallpox is technically already a virus that transmits via aerosol. Many viruses will exist in saliva, and will happily transmit through direct contact, but won't transmit well via the air (mononucleosis comes to mind).

> Airborne was always known

In the early days China even claimed even that this thing is NOT contagious - and yet they already started isolating patients at this time.

> the World Health Organization said that there is not sufficient evidence to suggest that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00974-w

Ah yeah, you are right, airborne is defined as "aerosol" but "through the air in droplets" is not.

It seemed pretty obvious it was aerosol but not proven early on/suppressed for reasons.

I think it’s a textbook example of poor science communication. The words of science do not mean to the public what they mean to scientists. Further, it’s safest to assume the worst in a situation like that. I think they should have erred on the side of “assume it’s airborne.”

Unfortunately, special interests (hospitals and other medical groups) had an incentive (security of their own access to masks) to mis-state the facts.

In the first few months the focus was heavily on spread via fomites. The value of masks was dismissed.

I really have to ask. Did we really not have any idea how corona viruses spread before? If so, what other virus families we are unaware now and why aren't we spending lot of money to prepare for all of them?

> If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe

Even if it wasn’t a lab leak, it could have been. So whether it was or was not should not change your opinion about the danger of this type of research.

This pandemic was raging inside China for months before it reached the US. What the Chinese government did by not allowing international observers and researchers and preventing the spread of information DID result in millions of lives lost. We could have had the vaccine available MONTHS in advance.

> If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread. That could have saved millions of lives.

The lesson here is not “we need to prove it was a lab leak,” the lesson is “we need better visibility inside China.” Which is also true for viruses that arise naturally inside China.

Do you think that if you could prove with total certainty that it was a lab leak in 2019, that would change China’s approach to secrecy in the future?

> If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe and continuing without appropriate safeguards puts us at great risk.

Do you think we can stop secret viral research in China if they want to do it?

One of my frustrations with the “lab leak theory” is that it seems to cause fuzzy thinking about future preparedness.

We can’t control other nations and we can’t stop natural viral evolution. Future preparedness is the same as past preparedness: detect and respond. We just did a bad job of it with COVID-19. The lesson is: do a better job.

> The lesson here is not “we need to prove it was a lab leak,” the lesson is “we need better visibility inside China.” Which is also true for viruses that arise naturally inside China.

The WIV was conducting research with US financial and technical support. The lab in question regarding a potential leak was funded in part to look for early signs of outbreaks.

If there was a lab leak and it was inadvertently caused by this lab, would you suggest that we continue to fund and provide support with no changes?

> One of my frustrations with the “lab leak theory” is that it seems to cause fuzzy thinking about future preparedness.

I can't speak to what you've seen elsewhere, but future preparedness should involve more transparency, safeguards that samples are being tested with the right safety levels and actual independent oversight.

It seems crazy to continue funding a bad faith actor without those conditions.

> We can’t control other nations

Really? Is diplomacy dead? I guess you can probably say "we can't absolutely control other nations" but nations don't even absolutely control themselves.

Exactly, there is no way to reliably prevent work with dangerous infectious agents across the entire globe.

> Do you think we can stop secret viral research in China if they want to do it?

We could probably start by not funding exactly that, not sending our scientists there, not openly exchanging these processes and techniques with them… if they aren’t going to be reliable and upstanding stewards.

I meant the consequences and response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021.

Of course there are longer term and big-picture consequences if it was a lab leak. Which is why I said it was important to research and understand the origin. I just get why it wasn't top priority during the actual pandemic response.

Edit: And of course there are geopolitical implications. I think the same point applies, at the time the focus was on the response and avoiding inciting a political battle over something that wouldn't have a near-term benefit.

> If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread.

You're assuming that the lab "designed" it like a new vehicle engine complete with horsepower and torque specs.

Even given it was produced in a lab through chimeras and serial passage then they still wouldn't have known what they had. They wouldn't have known its characteristics in a human population. They wouldn't have known how long its incubation period was, or when peak symptoms and peak transmissibility happened, they wouldn't have known its virulence, or its R0 in a human population or pretty much anything. They'd might have receptor binding assays against the human ACE-2 receptor. That knowledge and $4.25 will buy you a latte, but it won't predict the trajectory of a pandemic.

And why aren't you annoyed at the coverup that China is doing of its zoonotic origins and that China isn't cleaning up all of the trafficking in live animals like palm civets and racoon dogs? We know SARS-CoV-1 happened, and there was no BSL4 lab to blame it on, so it was definitely zoonotic, yet still fairly unexplained, and nothing serious was done to prevent it from happening again. Now the US is blaming the WIV lab and China is feeding its domestic population propaganda about how the US did it, and still nothing is being done to address the mechanism that we know created SARS-CoV-1. There's still a known virological time bomb there that nobody is doing anything about.

And the reason why China wants to cover up the zoonotic origins and kick the can down the road is that it can use the lab leak theory to push the domestic propaganda that the US did, along with avoiding the political costs of clamping down on the animal trade. And there will be a political cost to doing that. Imagine if in 2009 that the H1N1 pandemic happened in a US pig farm and was 100 times worse, and then Obama tried to ban bacon to prevent a future pandemic.

Your "no priority" stance doesn't hold ground if the article is to be believed. The lab leak theory wasn't just low on the agenda, it was actively avoid altogether.

I don't even think it's that different from nuclear. The fact that Iraq had no WMDs (and I have doubts that anybody in the intelligence community really thought they did) got swept under the rug too, after a ton of civilian deaths there and military deaths on both sides. People just make stuff up and then it's too late.

We already had intense media speculation about the source of the virus at the start of the pandemic because _people wanted to know_. It would have been nice to have a proper investigation at the start of the pandemic as they may have caught evidence before it could have been destroyed.

This proper investigation would never have happened. China started a trade war with Australia for promoting an independent international investigation. I think the fact that China is willing to go to bat (pun intended) over this is a great argument for international sanctions no matter the origin, but I'm just a nobody on the internet.

> 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic

What??? I honestly expect more from HN readers than blatant china-apologists.

OF COURSE it changes the consequences! We tell China to hand over all research and distribute it to scientists around the world so that research doesn’t start from ground 0. If it could have accelerated understanding of the virus by several months, imagine how many lives could have been saved!

Instead China deleted all their files and kept quiet. They literally don’t care about millions of deaths.

My understanding is that we did not start from ground zero, already had a large scientific understanding of similar coronaviruses, had the virus sequenced very quickly, and then proceeded to get a vaccine tested and to market in a historic record-breaking amount of time.

Of course we should research the origin and, if a research lab was the source, take action to prevent it happening again. I'm not saying there should be no consequences, just countering the article which comes off as "why isn't this the number one priority??"

Thank you for posting this. We know that COVID couldn't have come from China. It came to China through frozen meat packages. WHO-China report already stated that fact. Dr. Fauci also believes that.

The only reason we can't find evidence because other countries wouldn't collaborate, for obvious reasons. Racists are trying to blame China because of lack of competence of their leaders.

> Racists

There's the exact reason "why it wasn't a media fixation": people calling anyone a racist for thinking bad of China.

> WHO-China report already stated that fact.

"China said so, so it must be true."

Excellent satire. Please post more.

My comment says nothing about whether or not China or a lab leak was the source.

I think the important point is not whether this outbreak was in fact a lab leak, but that it is entirely plausible due to gain-of-function research.

Even if this one wasn’t a lab leak, the next one very well could be. The risk/reward profile of that sort of research is insanely unfavorable.

This is the conversation we need to have, on an international level.

When Australia proposed an international investigation into the origins, in direct response, China started cyber attacks, resentencing Australian prisoners to death, and used economic warfare.

This seems like a conversation we can not have, if China has any say in it. And for a natural origin spillover event, it sure wants to have its say...

If your claims are true, then the fact that I (and others) didn't know this is seriously disturbing. I think a lot of people would have doubled down and pushed for alot more pressure and investigation into all of China's dealings across the board, if they had known.

At the very least it's an indictment on our media which should be pointing out these curious coincidences. Instead I think they have other motives.

I don't know about the other two but Australian coal was put under sanction by china in the wake of their call for an investigation. This, ironically, was quite bad for china since it indirectly led to power cuts in some provinces because they couldn't use the lower grade of coal otherwise available.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/03/australia-finds-new-markets-...

Power cuts later that fall: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58733193

Doubly ironically is that this was probably the single most effective action Morrison took to limit climate change emissions!

Fun fact, Covid did leak from a Chinese lab, but it was in December 2021:

>A lab worker was bitten and infected by a mouse infected with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant at a high-biosecurity facility in Taipei.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

Taipei, the capitol of Taiwan, is not a Chinese entity. This is a lab leak from a Taiwanese lab.

That would be a fun conflation by a Chinese advocate.

I know what you mean, but Taipei is the capital of the Republic of China.

Most people are referring to PRC (AKA mainland China, nominally communist) not ROC (AKA Taiwan, a republic) when they say China (at least in the west), so your statement is true but not particularly helpful in this context.

Taiwan is Chinese, but they're not communist Chinese. They are the Republic of China, not the People's Republic of China.

Most Taiwanese do not see themselves as Chinese.

> Republic of China

Most Taiwanese would love to change that name, but China is threating war if they do.

From the Wikipedia link: "A lab worker was bitten and infected by a mouse infected with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant at a high-biosecurity facility in Taipei [Taiwan in December of 2021]".

From there, news articles speculate that "this will add credibility to the lab leak theory [if confirmed]" and this "gives legs to Wuhan lab leak theory," which is hardly conclusive.

I don't see how this incident would indicate that SARS-CoV-2 initially came out of a lab. It demonstrates a possible vector out of a lab, but I'm guessing that's already a well-known vector when dealing with lab animals, and it doesn't provide any evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was actually developed in a lab or initially spread from one.

Whatever toy gain of function research someone is doing in a lab vastly pales in comparison to the enormous gain of function 'experiment' we are right now performing worldwide with the continued high transmission rate of COVID-19.

Look at what variants like Omicron BA.5 and BA.4 have evolved into, they are quite possibly the most infectious and dangerous air spread pathogens known to man. These didn't come from a lab, we cooked them up by dropping all mitigations and pretending the pandemic was over instead of quashing this virus for good.

The only alternative to this experiment is China's currently policy. There isn't much of a middle ground because anything short of aggressive testing, lockdowns, and quarantine won't be enough to stop the spread.

No, we literally just need to mandate N95 masks in public settings and get the effective R value down near 1 again. Contact tracing and government support for paid sick leave, etc. would control it even further. At no point do harsh lockdowns have to happen.

> No, we literally just need to mandate N95 masks in public settings and get the effective R value down near 1 again.

But as soon as people take off masks, it starts spreading again. It's also getting less politically viable when ~70% of Americans have had covid (the CDC estimated 60% in late April).

> It's also getting less politically viable when ~70% of Americans have had covid (the CDC estimated 60% in late April)

This means nothing. The virus reinfects people with existing immunity. For example Senator Wicker from MS is on his _third_ infection: https://www.magnoliastatelive.com/2022/06/13/senator-roger-w... Two of those infections have been in the last four months alone!

We have to use NPIs like masking to stop the virus from spreading in order to stop new variants from evolving. There is no herd immunity. There is no natural immunity.

> He said in February that he is fully vaccinated against the virus.

It's looking more and more likely that this is why most people are getting reinfected. Last month OAS made the news, just not by name: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/328102

> Vaccines against the coronavirus may impair the body’s ability to produce a key type of antibody, thus potentially limiting the immune system’s defenses against mutated strains of the virus, a new study suggests.

> The study draws upon data collected during Moderna’s randomized control trial for its mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, from July 2020 through March 2021.

> we cooked them up

When you say “we”, who do you mean exactly? How did they cook them?

Can you explain why you believe the pandemic is not over?

> When you say “we”, who do you mean exactly? How did they cook them?

The entire population of the western world. Every time COVID-19 infects a person and replicates it has the chance to mutate or introduce errors. If those errors in replication increase the fitness of the virus it will evolve to become a more powerful variant (i.e. gain of function). By continuing to allow hundreds of thousands of new cases and infections to occur daily we are increasing the chance of variants evolving. The _only_ way to stop variants is to stop transmission, period.

> Can you explain why you believe the pandemic is not over?

We are still averaging over 100k new cases a day in the US. And that's with almost all of the population using rapid tests that aren't counted in that measurement.

Ah yes, is this the old "let's lock down the planet forever" solution?

Source please? Everything I've read about latest Omicrons suggests that they are more transmissible, more likely to evade immunity, and substantially _less_ severe in terms of hospitalization and deaths. By and large, this is what you'd expect to happen at the end of a pandemic, regardless of our response.

You admit it yourself, I will quote you:

"they are more transmissible, more likely to evade immunity"

Intrinsic severity of the virus doesn't change the fact it is the most transmissible virus we have ever seen in the world.

Even if it is intrinsically less severe than previous variants, because we are allowing it to spread to EVERYONE in the world we are seeing a much worse impact. Did you miss that in the US alone we've had over 160k deaths from COVID-19 just in the last 6 months of this year? No other virus has had this level of death in the same timeframe.

> the most transmissible virus we have ever seen in the world

It's not. Measles, for example, is more transmissible.

> No other virus has had this level of death in the same timeframe.

Not true. Spanish Flu, for example, killed more both in raw numbers and proportionally in a similar time frame.

Here's a helpful infographic: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-of-pandemics-deadli...

With, not from. That distinction is still barely ever made.

> quashing this virus for good.

This is impossible. You'd kill the host together with the virus.

We can eradicate viruses. Polio and small pox as an example

Ok, how do you plan to eradicate Covid? I mean, a polio vaccine is one shot and you're set for life, pretty much. It's incomparable.

China has eradicated omicron. Shanghai had _zero_ cases of omicron reported on June 24th. A couple months ago they were seeing 25k+ cases a day. This is a city of 25 million people, the third largest and most dense city in the world. And yet somehow with a collective attitude and government support they beat back the virus and have fully reopened and returned to normal.

Contrast this with the United States where we have so far had over _one million deaths_ from COVID-19. In the same timespan China has seen just a few thousand deaths.

If China can do it, why can't the US?

As someone in tech, what bothers me is all the attention AI gets for possible ethical problems, while biologists are doing some pretty scary experiments with potentially large-scale negative consequences, and they've gotten relatively little attention.

It's also very weird that the same type of people who normally talk about corporations/governments covering up pollutants do not talk about how many people could die from a potential lab leak.

Every single pandemic before SC2 was of natural origin. You have to make a much more persuasive case than "people could die from a lab leak" to ban research that could plausibly reduce the death toll from the next pandemic.

Are you not familiar with the 1977 flu pandemic? About 700k people died. You can argue about whether that was a "lab leak" or (as Gronvall prefers) a mere "vaccine accident", but either is unnatural.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu

Even in the 'steelman' case of a lab leak in the '77 H1N1 - it was a natural virus that later escaped and caused the pandemic. Even if it was some accident involving the 1950's H1N1, that means the natural 1950s H1N1 was capable of causing a pandemic...

We really need to come to terms with the fact that whether we research them or not, there are going to be increasing numbers of pandemic-capable viruses spreading in human populations.

If I tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 and then visited a nursing home without a mask, exhaling the natural virus all over the home's vulnerable residents, then I'm pretty sure you'd say I'd done something terrible. I think you'd be right. It's obvious to most people in most circumstances that even if a pathogen exists in nature and naturally causes some degree of death and sickness, a human who enables that pathogen to cause a greater degree of death and sickness is doing something bad. This is especially true if they're doing so maliciously (e.g., in biological warfare), but still true even if they're merely reckless (e.g. my nursing home visitor, or that flu shot nurse who reused the syringes).

So why does this intuition fail when the virus passes through a lab? The 1946-1957 flu virus was indeed natural, but the 1977 pandemic of that same virus was near-certainly not--without the activities of the scientists involved, the virus would probably have stayed safely in the freezer forever. The scientists also had the option not to put it in the freezer in the first place, in which case it would have probably just gone extinct. That scientific activity almost certainly caused those deaths.

Maybe it's just that one death is a tragedy, and 700k deaths are a statistic? When the last smallpox death (so far, at least) occurred following a lab accident in the UK, the director of the lab in question killed himself out of guilt, even though that lab was basically in compliance with the standards of the time. Perhaps he just had an unusually sensitive conscience; but I wonder if the scale of death in the 1977 flu pandemic (or this pandemic now, if it turns out to be unnatural) is simply so great that people can't engage with it, and their usual moral mechanisms just shut down.

In engineering school, we're taught from the first week that our work has the potential to kill people, and that it's our fault if it does. If a structural engineer responded to a building collapse simply by explaining that buildings are very important for society and that many people would die of exposure without them, then his colleagues would be mystified, and perhaps concerned for his mental health. We're expected to study and learn from our failures, in order not to repeat them. The argument that "X has benefits, therefore we can ignore its costs completely" is so ridiculous that I've never heard it spoken.

Yet a vocal subset of virologists are somehow able to make just that argument for their discipline, shrugging off the deaths they cause as a "natural" cost of doing business, unworthy of study or thought--and a significant fraction of the public accepts it! I find this strange, and terrifying. Don't you?

Biologists have well developed frameworks for judging the ethics of experiments that has been built up over a century of horrifying missteps.

AI is at the "hire and fire until they get a sycophant" stage in the development of proper ethical review methods.

Not chinese biologists . Or Mexican biologists for all that matters (I'm from Mexico). I mean, there's a lot of countries capable of playing with viruses which dont have real practical controls.

Chinese biologists have ethics committees too, as do Mexican researchers.

Here's neurobiology at UNAM: http://www.inb.unam.mx/index.php/comite-de-etica-en-la-inves... and here's a bioethics committee in the university of Guadalajara: http://www.cusur.udg.mx/es/investigacion/comite-de-etica-en-... and here's a Ethics committee for the Shanghai Clinical Research Center: http://www.scrcnet.org/iec_en.asp

You might argue that these achieve little in practice, and due to corruption amount to nothing more than fig leafs. But that doesn't invalidate the argument because AI researchers don't even wear that much!

There's no proof of "gain of function" experiments at all or specifically linked to Sars-Cov-2. It is heavily unlikely that such an experiment would switch a virus from un-pandemic-able to pandemic-able. The mechanisms to do that are entirely theoretical.

So it's not clear at all that gain of function would have been able to create a Virus like Sars-Cov-2 out of a hypothetical bat virus. And there is no evidence any such research has been going on. Nor is there any evidence the virus has passed through the Wuhan lab in question at all.

It’s because there was a series of scientific papers that pointed very strongly to a zoonotic origin: https://mobile.twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1499406148...

The Proximal paper was used by Chinese disinformation bots to skelch any debate about a lab leak. I take that as a Streisand effect. Same when Fauci strongly and publically rebuked the Indian bioinformatics pre-print paper talking of the GP-120 HIV inserts. That is how I came to know about those inserts and their interesting history.

So strangely, the grossly unscientific propaganda effort that was the Proximal Origins paper may have had the reverse effects, at least, it had on me.

Anyone contributing to this virology conspiracy (why they were put in charge to lead the investigation and theory building, and not the way more qualified biosecurity experts?), including voluntarily, like Angie Rasmussen, has Chinese propaganda tainted blood on their hands.

What’s your scientific criticism of the paper?

Also, it's not either/or. COVID could have come from nature, captured and studied in a lab, then escaped.

Indeed. It could also have come from nature and while it was being studied in the lab, a similar strain made a jump to humans.

Did you click on the link and read the thread?

Yes but in that case, why would it emerge in Wuhan, hundreds of miles away from Southern China, where Coronaviruses actually exist in nature ?

Vehicular transportation is quite fast these days.

I'm not sure where people developed this idea that coronaviruses don't exist near Wuhan. I've corrected it like a dozen times in this thread, but there are absolutely horseshoe bats in Hubei and there are absolutely coronaviruses in those bats -- including some close ancestors to SarsCov2.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711/figures/1

See the RF1 and RM1 in the bottom chart? Sars-like bat coronaviruses from Hubei Province!

Thanks for the correction. So some coronaviruses have been found in nature in Hubei, but surely in rural areas correct? Why would the center of a dense city like Wuhan be the epicenter for an outbreak (according to the official story a wet market that contained no bats walking distance from the Wuhan laboratory), and not an area where bats exist?

You were mistaken to say just "coronaviruses" instead of "the greatest diversity of sarbecoviruses", but your comment was otherwise in line with the pre-pandemic consensus--no one expected spillover in Wuhan. Dr. Zhengli Shi, whose research is at the heart of this controversy, wrote in an interview:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201206204844/https://www.scien...

That said, it's no surprise that SARS-CoV-2 first emerged in a city, since it spreads most effectively in dense crowds. Even if spillover occurred in a small village, it's unlikely that enough people would die for anyone to notice until the virus reached a dense city--the virus's IFR isn't that high, and people die of other respiratory diseases every day. There's just no specific reason to expect that city would be Wuhan.

SARS-1 also emerged in a city far from the bat caves; but in that case, infected animals sold in markets there were identified, and the supply chain for those animals led back to likely bat spillover regions. For SARS-CoV-2, no such evidence has yet been found, despite much greater effort to search. That's not proof of unnatural origin, and there are other viruses for which the proximal host isn't known (e.g. Ebola); but that's different from both SARS-1 and MERS.

Doesn't that mean COVID19 occurring naturally in Hubei is highly unlikely ?

No one expected spillover of a SARS-like virus from bats anywhere in Hubei. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, since the scientific consensus is sometimes wrong; but no significant new evidence has yet emerged to make that more likely. The closest bat viruses in nature (BANAL-20) were discovered post-pandemic in Laos.

Most people who believe SARS-CoV-2 arose by natural zoonosis propose something similar to SARS-1's wildlife trafficking conduit. It's also possible that a human was infected elsewhere, and then traveled to Wuhan and seeded the pandemic--the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is highly stochastic until the case count gets big, so they wouldn't necessarily have seeded other clusters along the way. It's all pretty mysterious though, much more so than the emergence of the two previous coronavirus human pathogens (SARS-1 and MERS).

What do you make of reporting that claims a virus almost identical to COVID19 was previously identified and studied at the Wuhan lab as early as 2012?

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

> Since the middle of last year, Li's postgraduate thesis has been circulated online as purported evidence that a coronavirus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 could have been infecting humans as early as 2012.

> Some also believe the paper provides circumstantial evidence for broader allegations that WIV had captured, studied and conducted "gain of function" experiments on viruses found in the mine, including RaTG13.

> First identified in 2016, RaTG13 shares 96.2% of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, according to a paper released by Shi and other researchers early in February 2020, just weeks after the first COVID-19 cases had been identified in Wuhan.

That's correct but out of date. RaTG13 used to be the closest known bat virus to SARS-CoV-2, but (a) it's far enough that there's no simple path to derive SARS-CoV-2 from it in the lab, and (b) it's not anymore, with the discovery of BANAL-20. The WIV was also sampling in Laos near where BANAL-20 were found, but hasn't published any closer genomes.

For the conspiracy-minded, I'd note that the WIV had published a subset of RaTG13's genome pre-pandemic, enough for others to identify the similarity. So they pretty much had to publish the rest of the genome post-pandemic, since it was obvious they had something interesting. The WIV used to have a public database of viral genomes, but it went offline around Sep 2019. They cite "hacking attempts" as the reason, but still haven't reinstated it in any form.

I'd personally guess that the Chinese government doesn't know whether SARS-CoV-2 arose naturally or unnaturally, and doesn't want to know--their preferred story (imported into China on frozen food) is near-certainly false, so no truth can benefit them. It's very hard to say though, all pretty mysterious. There are significant unexplored paths for investigation within reach of American subpoena though, e.g. in any cloud services used by the WIV for genomic data.

Considering this literally happened before at the Wuhan lab (among a group of sample collectors), this is, I think, the most likely scenario.

I agree. What is the previous case you mentioned, do you have a citation ?

Ah, of course! I was thinking of this incident specifically, though it seems I remembered the details wrong; the miners who died seemingly did so before the WIV got involved:

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

> From 2012 to 2015, WIV researchers identified as many as 293 coronaviruses in and around the mine. (...) The institute in November 2020 disclosed the existence of eight other "SARS-type" coronavirus samples taken from the site.

Wow, thank you I haven't seen this before. If true, that's smoking gun stuff.

not for wuhan but lab workers got infected with coronaviruses in the past...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/

Would that exclude a mishap during a specimen-gathering field trip?

Did you read the thread?

Let’s not forget that talking about the lab leak hypothesis last year resulted in censorship among social media platforms and YouTube

This is why free speech is important, it is impossible to rely on “fact checkers”.

The lab leak hypothesis was also pretty tightly coupled with the bioweapon/intentional release theory which is part of why it received so much push back.

Also I don't recall the specific fact check messages but if they were in line with "there's no hard evidence of a lab leak" I'd say that's still pretty accurate.

It was tightly coupled to that stuff by fact checkers and other opponents to silence any questions.

Despite being made of flimsy material, some of these straw men are actually quite effective, it seems.

A lot of what I saw were channels pushing both at the same time. An accidental leak of an attempted bioweapon or something like that was pretty popular in some circles.

That’s not a justification. You’re just saying that some speech you approve of was tied to some speech you disapprove of, so both should be censored.

No speech should be censored.

The owner of a service has no requirement or duty to carry anyone's speech. A person's freedom of speech doesn't override anyone else's freedom of association. So a private company can censor or reject any speech using their service unless otherwise mandated by law (common carrier etc).

ok, so what's the impetus for censoring it then

It's inflammatory, outright disinformation, outright misinformation, or just something the service owner doesn't want to carry. Discussion a lab leak hypothesis is not the same as claiming COVID leaked from a bioweapon laboratory or was intentionally leaked for <reasons>.

That being said, social media sites flagging posts is very different from outright censorship. It's not uncommon for someone to actually get censored/removed from a site claiming its censorship over discussing some topic when really it was a history of dipshit behavior and flagrant TOS violations.

> It's inflammatory, outright disinformation, outright misinformation

so, the vast majority of social media then? what makes this issue so special? why did all of the major social media networks censor/"flag" anyone publicly speculating only certain speculations about this issue?

Practically everybody knows this already and yet this comment shows up every time freedom of speech is discussed.

Censorship is bad even when legally permissible. And we should still fight corporations acting unethically even when the law is on their side.

What is unethical about not wanting to carry speech you don't agree with, is inflammatory, or outright misinformation?

Large platforms (twitter, YouTube, etc) banning views that they don’t agree with gives them power to truly shape society by controlling acceptable discourse.

What they deem outright information may in fact be true. And even allowing clear misinformation (1+1=3) is important. We need people to learn to process information not protect them from it. Using 1+1=3 analogy, wouldn’t you want people to rally around tooling people to learn math?

> We need people to learn to process information not protect them from it.

Flagging misinformation is attempting to educate people.

> The lab leak hypothesis was also pretty tightly coupled with the bioweapon/intentional release theory which is part of why it received so much push back.

No it wasn't. The media often takes the most extreme case in order to denigrate the whole side that they don't like.

No, that was some intentional conflation bordering on propaganda.

Let's not forget that the lab leak hypothesis was championed by political figures who were embarrassed that they were woefully clueless about how to implement pandemic response plans, even though their agencies already had those plans in place for years, and that their aligned media pushed these conspiracies without evidence.

Why is that a justification for heavy-handed censorship of a topic? Do you think that's right?

Well, let's see.

First, reporters are incapable of discovering this information on their own. They just don't have the tools. Investigatory bodies do, and reporters would have to wait.

Secondly, there were multiple plausible ideas about what could have happened. The drum was beaten on only one of them. Trump got caught with his pants down because as with everything else he's ever been a part of, he was woefully unprepared and out of his depth.

Third, and tying in with the first point, the more important story to virtually everyone was not how the first people were infected, but what the response and fallout of the infections were.

So again, you had a bunch of clueless, embarrassed political partisans who got caught with their pants down, and their base ate up the blame-shifting because of their xenophobic tendencies.

That isn't justification for the censorship. Reporters do report on things they don't understand all the time. The point was to make it possible for qualified people to investigate, but that wasn't politically popular at the time.

Should the scientific community rally to the opposition of the current unpopular president? That doesn't seem like a good idea.

And this last point is a fascinating common non sequitor. That's not even what happened; we had the media clamoring that it came from that market and any talk of the lab is racist and/or xenophobic. Do you think any investigation of the lab would have jeopardized the public? Worse than the visceral eating bats (i.e. selling bats for consumption)?

Reporters aren't going to report on what ifs for years. That's what talking heads do. How often are they reporting on the wet market hypothesis again? Oh right, they aren't. They got the information that they could find, reported on it, and there's nothing else to report. That isn't censorship, that's due diligence. Maybe you could learn the difference.

Just a reminder that the predecessor of COVID-19, SARS-CoV-1 leaked from the lab 4 (yes, four) times. The Wikipedia page lists 3 of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

Biosecurity incidents are shockingly common.

Just a reminder that the predecessor of Covid-19 was a pandemic of zoonotic origin that had multiple spillovers from animal hosts into humans. That virus was eventually studied and some lab workers were indeed infected but the origin was unquestionably natural.

Just a reminder that the origin being zoonotic and lab leaks occurring are not mutually exclusive.

A lab specialized in investigating Coronaviruses in the city where the first outbreak was, is at least suspicious imo. The fact that the Chinese authorities weren't exactly helpful (to my knowledge) in debunking the lab-leak hypothesis is extra suspicious. But then again, if they really would have wanted to cover it up, they might have looked for another city to point to as the source of the outbreak, I don't know how feasible that would have been though.

It is a little suspicious, but also not too far fetched: Where would you put a lab researching Coronaviruses? Somewhere near where it exists in the wild.

No. It’s not where they exist in the wild. The closest related virus (RATG-13) to n-cov-2 come from northern china (Yunnan), where they were imported to the Wuhan virology lab to study. What a coincidence!

Firstly, Yunnan is in the southwest of China.

Secondly, other Coronaviruses have appeared in southern China -- notably the original SARS' first known case was in November of 2002 in Guangdong.[1] Wuhan is well-placed (relatively centrally) to do that kind of research.

Thirdly, RaTG13 likely isn't the closest related known virus anymore.[2][3]

[1]: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20030411/sars-timeline-of-ou...

[2]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2

[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/science/bat-coronaviruses...

Quality comment. That person is confused about a couple things, but the main point that Wuhan is 1-2000km from the most likely places to find such a virus in the wild.

It could have been brought to Wuhan in a human, in an animal to eat, in an animal to study, or in a culture. I don't see how newer evidence eliminates any of those possibilities.

It's also confused about that - there are tons of horseshoe bats in Hubei Province including in caves 60 miles from Wuhan[1] and there are absolutely sars-like coronaviruses in the horseshoe bats in Hubei.

RM1 and RF1 in this paper are sars-like bat coronaviruses isolated from horseshoe bats in Hubei:

https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/docserver/fulltext/jgv/...

The horseshoe bat's range spans from Japan to Portugal. That doesn't change the fact that all the closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 we've discovered have been found in the far south of China and Cambodia, 1-2k miles away, nor does the presence of more distantly related SARS-like coronaviruses.

If we find a closer relative near Wuhan, that will change the hypothesis. But we haven't.

That’s not especially convincing to me because the closest relatives we’ve found aren’t actually very close relatives. Ratg13 is decades removed from the SC2 lineage, so knowing that it was found closer to Laos is a very weak signal in my opinion about the origins of SC2.

As one of the parent comments has already noted, RaTG13 is no longer the closest known bat virus. BANAL-20-52's spike is only 16 AA substitutions away from SARS-CoV-2, and that was found in Laos.

https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1440309655087902720?la...

No one expected spillover in Wuhan, including Dr. Shi, per the quote from her that I've replied with elsewhere. Even those very confident in natural zoonotic origin are typically proposing something like SARS-1's wildlife trafficking conduit, not spillover in Wuhan.

Well, the level of coincidence also depends on the number of coronavirus research facilities, and the number of cities. If there aren't very many coronavirus research facilities, and there are many cities, it becomes an unlikely coincidence.

>Where would you put a lab researching Coronaviruses?

Antarctica perhaps? Not in the middle of a freaking city.

There is an episode of Lex Fridman's Podcast with Jamie Metzl on the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K78jqx9fx2I Metzl is highly confident of a lab-leak. However, lab-leak doesn't require that the virus has been tampered with and I somewhat agree that is important to know if the virus escaped due to inadequate lab safety.

Exactly. People yelling "censorship" forget that the lab leak theory was mostly about how COVID was engineered as a bioweapon, which still remains a conspiracy.

On the other hand, existence of this conspiracy has been used to shut down perfectly reasonable discussion around a less outlandish lab leak for months.

Even in this post opponents of the lab leak theory are still bringing up this bioweapons conspiracy - but I can't see a single lab leak proponent suggesting it's an engineered bioweapon.

The issue is the existence of this outlandish fringe theory was used to censor all reasonable discussion on the lab leak.

Unfortunately amongst the general public the outlandish fringe theory is more common than reasonable theories.

Source: my extended family

Thank you, apparently raising this simple distinction is enough to get downvoted out of circulation. The problem wasn't that people questioned the status quo, it's that people went too far in ascribing cartoonish-like evil to actors that simply were trying to cover up something embarrassing.

> but I can't see a single lab leak proponent suggesting it's an engineered bioweapon.

Interesting perspective. On the other hand, just like the comment below, I never saw a single person raise the lab leak theory as an alternative explanation to a naturally occurring disaster. It was always in the context of "COVID is a weapon to control and kill us".

The unfortunate fact is that the only plausible consequence of a public acceptance (by government officials) of the lab-leak hypothesis, is that funding for research into viruses would get a lot more restrictive. Maybe not less funding, but it would go to far fewer labs, which have the highest levels of containment.

The profession which knows enough to settle this question, thus has a massive conflict of interest. We cannot expect bankers to say that the response to the GFC should be to break up banks. We cannot expect generals after a war to say that they screwed up. We cannot expect intelligence agencies to say that they should have less power and more oversight. Scientists are human, they want to keep their job and not have to move to another city to do it.

What is actually going to happen, is nothing, until and unless a second lab leak kills a lot of people.

It's not that the origin story is not important, it's not that people don't care, it's that it is a distraction.

It doesn't help solve the crisis.

The article makes the comparison with a nuclear bomb. This is a bad comparison. If we were attacked by a sentient creature, we could reason with it and mitigate further damage or escalation.

In the case of a virus, it's good to know to prevent future pandemics maybe, and there is an academic interests, but it doesn't help with the current situation.

Finding the root cause of an unprecedented disaster might not reverse the history of that disaster, but it would help prevent future similar disasters. Now we are clearly aware of the costs. It isn't a distraction to look into the cause of a disaster as we are able as a society to work on many different problems at the same time.

It does help with our current situation of being very vulnerable to highly contagious respiratory diseases. COVID is probably never going away. To have another one join if this could have been prevented would be far worse for us.

The origin story is paramount to preventing future outbreaks and to the loss of, and disruption to, our way of life. The US took the same position on combating terrorism when it rooted out Al-Qaeda. To stop future loss of life, the root cause needs to be identified and dealt with. I vehemently disagree with the assessment that the origin is not instrumental to the defense of future outbreaks.

No it is not, because it is undisputed that viruses can evolve to infect humans.

If we had 100% solid proof SARS-COV-2 originated in a lab, it would not change our approach to detecting or mitigating future outbreaks. We always have to prepare for either.

It’s not like it never occurred to anyone before that dangerous infectious agents could escape a lab. It was a well-known possibility and was incorporated into U.S. federal pandemic preparedness planning since at least the George W Bush administration.

An accidental leak from a lab must still be detected, and once detected, public health measures initiated. The procedures are the same as for a natural origin.

The fundamental lesson from COVID-19 is that we cannot let our guard down. The Trump administration did in many ways, and so were not able to detect or respond fast enough.

> The Trump administration

It was Trump’s fault!! /s

So what you’re saying is we should be more concerned with defense and accept that viruses will be engineered. I don’t disagree with this line of thinking but I also believe we must be on the offensive too. We can’t just accept that labs will build viruses.

Rubbish. The response would not be to increase surveillance near labs. It would be to float a moratorium on GoF research and to increase biosafety at labs. Much of the work being done at the WIV was carried out at BSL-2, which is absolutely shocking.

It seems like you are using the US War on Terror as a good example? It didn’t stop the loss of life, it just changed the arena. Orders of magnitudes more people died as a result of that than from the attack that spawned it.

I think this is correct. I also think the point being made is that we SHOULD spend more time learning lessons and applying them to try and prevent some of the future pandemics. Imagine if we can prevent just one out of the next 10 pandemics through investment here. That would be millions of lives saved!

Part of the problem with the covid pandemic is how much we let our guard down. For example, the Global Health Security and Biodefense unit — responsible for pandemic preparedness — was established in 2015 by Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice [0].

This was then disbanded under Trump and its head Timothy Ziemer, top White House official in the NSC for leading U.S. response against a pandemic, left the administration [1].

Jon Oliver has a good segment on why we need to focus on preventing future pandemics [2].

[0]: https://time.com/5806558/administration-officials-fight-crit...

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v-U3K1sw9U

If this is true, it seems like science trying to have it both ways.

Usually, there's desire for media to share scientific evidence in ways that are engaging to the public to recognize our best scientific conclusions.

What I'm taking from your portrayal is scientists know best what ~"helps the current situation."

Despite the origin being important, and that the public wants to know about it science doesn't want evidence on this matter and doesn't want it covered by the media or for it to influence the thinking of the public.

These seem like political behaviors, not scientific ones.

Hiding the cause also prevents anyone from fixing the cause.

> it is a distraction. It doesn't help solve the crisis.

This is extremely naive. Do you really believe it won’t happen all over again?

The real crisis is not Covid. It’s how easy something even worse than Covid could be started today.

> It doesn't help solve the crisis.

It doesn't help solve the crisis and it doesn't change attitudes toward gain-of-function research. The pandemic itself, regardless of origin, highlighted the possible consequences. Even without a connection to research - and even more so with the mere possibility - it heightened concern about lab safety, and made the risk/reward calculations around GoF research even less favorable than they already had been. The community of people capable of performing or funding such research was already on top of it - again, regardless of origin. Public finger-pointing is only likely to rile up nationalist sentiments which would interfere with establishing better procedures and protocols governing virological research.

The lawyers and diplomats have some work to do, but (especially in light of today's news) I suggest that the rest of us including the media have some higher priorities for how to spend our time/energy.

Based on what China's reaction to the source-chasing-efforts, I have no doubt it is where this is originated.

Wuhan is a huge city with the only lab on earth that works with SARS, virus-leak is not uncommon in China over the years(including SARS-1 that was leaked a few times but was contained quickly), after COVID China issued lots of new policies including stricter lab management, and new leadership from military to be in charge of Wuhan lab, and hide the initial samples of COVID, and started a diplomatic propaganda to paint USA as the virus maker.

Lack of transparency in China proves nothing. CYA is standard operating procedure there, regardless if there is any guilt or not. Up and down the chain they will cover for each other, if not for the simple reason they themselves don't know what shit their superiors or underlings are up to...

And it is entirely rational, even when they believe that there hasn't been a lab leak, to shut down any investigations into it, because all such work or information would just add fuel to the fire, regardless the "objective" outcome.

The biggest evidence for lab leak is that no one can find a wild reservoir of covid 19. The Chinese government and the rest of the world has a ton incentive to find a reservoir and havnt.

That's a very weak argument.

How so?

Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

Do I really need to point out to you how many animal species and potential reservoir populations there are? It's impossible to sample all of them, or even enough to be sure there is no such reservoir.

One potential explanation could be a commercial mink farm somewhere in China. The virus is very affine to mink, mink can infect Humans and Humans can infect mink. If they were the intermediate host or "reservoir" there is no way of ever proving it, because those mink are all dead now and I doubt there will be enough samples left to detect the Virus somehow.

Not really.

The lab-leak hypothesis is meta-scientific. When it was first tossed around, the lab leak hypothesis generated two predictions:

1. We would find evidence that someone was doing experiments on furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses.

2. We would find that the furin cleavage site matched a known sequence.

We did not find 2, which should have been easy to find. Eventually, we found 1, since a rejected DARPA grant proposal affiliated with the lab in Wuhan emerged.

Then, we found 2!! with a plausible explanation of why no one had found it earlier -- you had to turn on "patented sequence search" on NCBI blast, which is turned off by default. An easy mistake to make. As a professional biochemist for a decade I had no idea that blast had a patent sequence search, much less that it was turned off by default (which, btw is a sensible setting).

The scientific method says given a model it should make independent predictions (ideally unlikely) which are later verified. The evidence for a lab leak should be considered relatively strong.

Someone should contact the patent holder and let them know they're being infringed upon. ;)

That would be, ironically, moderna. Will the patent court award them negative damages?

On a more serious note, to stave off conspiratorial thinking, it should be "not crazy" that a moderna furin sequence appear. If I told a biochemist to go and insert a furin cleavage site into a virus, that grad student would do an NCBI blast search and get a list of all sequences. Maybe they are more knowledgeable than me and did know that patent search was enabled (or maybe they were used to ripping off parents :| -- I'm anti-patent myself so this is not an indictment of the general process). Then that library of say a few hundred sequences is applied. Then the grad student, say, drops the 96-well plate with the virus samples, and gets infected -- It should not be surprising that the moderna sequence is the winner in the competition amongst the viruses in that grad students body because moderna has engineered that site to be a very effective site, and we know that having the furin cleavage site is correlated to virulence, so "natural selection" kicks in.

Is the founder of Moderna meta-scientific for claiming that COVID leaked from a laboratory? Or would that be too ironic?

> On a more serious note, to stave off conspiratorial thinking, it should be "not crazy" that a moderna furin sequence appear. If I told a biochemist to go and insert a furin cleavage site into a virus, that grad student would do an NCBI blast search and get a list of all sequences.

The weird part is, prior to 2020, a BLAST search only results in Moderna patents. There wasn't anything there for them to copy from.

https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/how-to-blast-your-way-to-the...

I presume moderna had a small army of DNA synthesizing robots to cover and optimize the shit out of that sequence from whole cloth.

Back up a bit. What the fuck is "meta-scientific"?

It's a polite way of saying that it was nonsense.

But the comment seems to go on to say it's not nonsense.

It means pseudo-scientific bullshit

It’s literally a hypothesis. It’s in the name.

I'm using it to refer to applying the scientific method to the process of science itself.

You are intellectually and scientifically dishonest by presenting the lab leak like this.

Take your own theory and argument for it. You could only stare at a honest list of for and against regarding the lab leak, and conclude that lab leak is meta-scientific.

When you call for evidence, remember the information blackouts and destruction of samples ordered by the Chinese. Chinese citizens and scientists were dissapeared for following the science and doing proper journalism. To conclude their legacy as meta-scientific is ugly. That is not my science, but maybe that is your job here...

Are you replying to the right comment string?

Metascientific means a scientific investigation into the practice of science. There is no value judgement there, it's a description of how the investigation is being conducted.

Your comments have been breaking the site guidelines. We ban accounts that do that. Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? That means no name-calling, no personal attacks, and generally avoiding the flamewar style.

That seemed to be an unnecessary label in the context of your post, especially since it’s also just a normal scientific hypothesis.

It’s like metadata. If metadata is data about data, metasci is science about science.

It could be that "Meta" the company is nothing about nothing?

From June 9:

> Over two years after the coronavirus was first detected in China, and after at least 6.3 million deaths have been counted worldwide from the pandemic, the World Health Organization is recommending in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe is required into whether a lab accident may be to blame.

> That stance marks a sharp reversal of the U.N. health agency’s initial assessment of the pandemic’s origins, and comes after many critics accused WHO of being too quick to dismiss or underplay a lab-leak theory that put Chinese officials on the defensive.

[0]: https://www.wivb.com/news/world/who-covid-origins-unclear-bu...

Can you tell more about 1 and 2, maybe with some sources added? this is pretty big

2: https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/how-to-blast-your-way-to-the...

Search for "moderna" then scroll up a bit.

"Using BLAST is easy". Yes, it's very easy to use BLAST to convince yourself of something that is not correct. It's a power tool being used by idiots most of the time, no wonder fingers get cut off.

Before implying it's not correct, do the math yourself. Calculate the relative drift among natural sequences and see if the moderna sequence is an outlier. How many single point mutations would it take to get from a known sequence to the moderna one.

Do what math now? I spent 10 years as an academic doing bioinformatics, with deep expertise in BLAST (I helped demonstrate that BLAST E-values accurately represent homology).

If you look, he shows some pages with resuults where the E-value is 282. Normally, an evalue should be 1e-2 or better (ideally 1e-6) before you start making ANY claims.

I've seen hundreds of examples where a person did the math, convinced everybody they were right, and either subtle errors or mistaken assumptions meant the work was useless. These days, if somebody starts with "Here, I'll show you how to use blast to demonstrate that the lab leak hypothesis is true", my priors say "most likely just garbage".

But this is not a homology exercise with natural selection. I can show you where I did a blast search, panned for "select amino acid substitutions of interest" and from the library out popped out a more efficient enzyme.

Sure, show us.

The amount of people that use BLAST every day and cannot define E-values (despite being explained in its FAQ! [1]) is baffling.

[1]: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Web&PAGE_TYPE=B...

Yep! In my work we had a golden labelled set of known-homologous proteins, as well as sets of unknown-relationship and known-not-to-be-homologous (based on superfamily). We blasted all-vs-all and after dealing with a number of BLAST issues finally demonstrated that the searches produce false positives at the expected rates. I gained a lot of respect for the folks who implemented the statistical framework behind blast E-values.

I had another advisor who thought they were good at homology, so they'd take protein matches with an E-value of 10 (almost certainly random chance) and munge the data to make up a story. Most of my work was about using very stringent blast searches to make profiles, but all that work is superseded by HMMER now.

Please dont spread misinformation.

The HIV paper has been withdrawn and was total bunk.

See comments on the paper:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1?...

Can you link some sources here? Call me skeptical, but if the evidence is as convincing as you make it sound, then it implies a pretty widespread conspiracy among experts (of many countries and affiliations) who would understand the implications yet are deliberately mis-communicating via their podcasts, news appearances, papers in famous journals, etc. Are there any papers published on this or is it just in the book that the authors of this article are selling? I'm not sure if I'm confusing this author with a Matt Ridley who seems to be an eccentric but minor British noble who writes about fringe climate change ideas?

Edit: Ok I figured out the source of the claims, it's the Alina Chen (I didn't realize she was co author) stuff. And it is indeed the Viscount Matt Ridley himself!

You can find the primary source for the DARPA leak on hn; if you care to verify that the sequence comes from a patent yourself directly from primary sources, you can find instructions on how to do that on hn too. I've done the search myself, it's real.

I can't provide direct sources for the fact that these predictions preceded the discoveries, but I can tell you they ran through my head, and others I talked to, and the lack of a sequence match bothered me. If you want to get meta-meta-scientific I would not be surprised if there was at least a blog post by someone out there saying "if it was a lab leak, where's the sequence match?" Out there that preceded the sleuth who found it hidden in plain site (behind an NCBI search option)

Edit: I have not read the ridley/chen book, I know most of the stuff from when they were emergent reports by reading this site and applying my intuition as a former biochemist (and some of my actively working biochemist friends) ti judge relative merits of hypotheses.

If you've done it could you link to or provide instructions on how we may reproduce your findings rather than just saying "the truth is out there"?

Yeah, sorry, here it is:

https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/how-to-blast-your-way-to-the...

I assume the DARPA leak is this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28644428

~700pts, ~450 comments, with the source published 23. September 2021.

man I forgot all about this. so much has happened in the past couple years it's been impossible to keep it all straight.

2020 and 2021 were each at least five years long.

Fortunately, 2022 has been pretty quiet and uneventful.

This article from Vanity Fair does a good job collection the circumstantial evidence surrounding the lab leak theory: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...

The tl;dr is that there is a group called EcoHealth Alliance that was working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) making novel coronaviruses by modifying the furin cleavage site of coronaviruses taken from bats. The WIV (along with EcoHealth Alliance and also potentially the Chinese military) was also making chimeric viruses from the viruses responsible for SARS and MERS. They were then using these viruses to infect "humanized" mice (mice with human lung tissue). The head of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, was one of the first to denounce the possibility of a lab leak (without disclosing the work he was doing at WIV of course). Daszak was later kicked off the Lancet’s COVID-19 commission because he refused to share old progress reports on the work he was funding at WIV.

All of this evidence is circumstantial, but it's really a bit suspicious that this outbreak started just a few kilometers where this exact type of virus was being created.

Thank you for the write up. I’ll add a funny line from Jon Stewart: if an outbreak of chocolate goodness happens outside Hershey, Pennsylvania you don’t need to search for the bat that ate the cocoa bean. It’s the factory, stupid.

"We do know that the insertion of such FCS sequences into SARS-like viruses was a specific goal of work proposed by the EHA-WIV-UNC partnership within a 2018 grant proposal (“DEFUSE”) that was submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (25). The 2018 proposal to DARPA was not funded, but we do not know whether some of the proposed work was subsequently carried out in 2018 or 2019, perhaps using another source of funding.

"We also know that that this research team would be familiar with several previous experiments involving the successful insertion of an FCS sequence into SARS-CoV-1 (26) and other coronaviruses, and they had a lot of experience in construction of chimeric SARS-like viruses (27–29). In addition, the research team would also have some familiarity with the FCS sequence and the FCS-dependent activation mechanism of human ENaC α (19), which was extensively characterized at UNC (17, 18). For a research team assessing the pandemic potential of SARS-related coronaviruses, the FCS of human ENaC—an FCS known to be efficiently cleaved by host furin present in the target location (epithelial cells) of an important target organ (lung), of the target organism (human)—might be a rational, if not obvious, choice of FCS to introduce into a virus to alter its infectivity, in line with other work performed previously."

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2202769119

A loose conspiracy of a bunch of social media scientists/journalists? Wouldn't the overall size and diversity of the field mean that there would be at least a few dissenters presenting more factual alternatives?

You should just read the book. It's not very convincing. The most likely explanation for the lack of interest in identifying the origins is primarly a lack of data. Speculating about conspiracies does not help the discussion, either.

That's, like, just your opinion, man.

Meanwhile the natural sources hypothesis has made one prediction not found yet (animal zero) and the lab leak has made two. Unfortunately, judgements about this are made difficult because "relative believability" is inherently subjective, so we can endlessly argue about the relative merits of competing hypotheses it is while the biggest suspect is under suspicion of having destroyed key data -- because they did suppress information in the early stages (and are refusing credible audits now). Meanwhile, entropy is happening making further revelations from bioinformatics progressively unlikely. Shrug.

> at least a few dissenters presenting more factual alternatives?

Are there not?

There are dissenters, but it's definitely unclear their claims are more factual.

My point is that it's really impossible to run a loosely organized large-scale conspiracy. There are too many ways for the conspiracy to fall apart.

No conspiracy, most people will be easily pressured when their livelihoods/job/grant is on the line. Most countries politicians want to be favorable to China, the experts sadly just toe the line.

Few scientist are the learned aristocrats of before who did not depend on grant money to live comfortable lives.

I don't find any arguments around the furin cleavage site convincing. This kind of cleavage site is pretty small and the number of variations that have good efficiency is limited. The presence of a specific furin cleavage site is not clear evidence of genetic manipulation.

Evidence comes with context. We're asserting that something like this would be found. Then we found it! After not finding it initially, even. The inability to find it initially should tell you something about the general evolutionary drift around these sites to begin with.

I haven’t been fixated on this by any means but I remember reading an article months back that looked at the timeline and locations of the early cases and compared them against the locations of the market and the research facility. I came away thinking that the animal market hypothesis seemed much more likely than the lab leak.

Yep - there are a ton of such points of evidence. The strict "lab leak" proponents have essentially made an unfalsifiable hypothesis akin to the intelligent design people's "God of the Gaps" where each time there's new research that disproves a core assumption, that just means the conspiracy goes deeper.

I linked it above, but aside from the fact that every other pandemic we've seen came about the same way, there's a ton of specific evidence from this pandemic:

https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g...

Including the timeline/locations of the earliest cases:

https://zenodo.org/record/6299600#.YjSWqDUxmUk

One thing the lab leak crew haven't been able to answer is how there could possibly be two different lineages at the market -- which you'd 100% expect from multiple spillover but is essentially impossible if your working theory is that an infected lab worker brought it to the market.

Brought what to the market? Themselves or animals from a lab?

> Infected worker

To be honest, I hadn't even encountered the idea that lab employees were what, selling infected animals at the market? Is this a real thing people are arguing? Who even comes up with this stuff.

That's been my pet hypothesis for a few years, but I wouldn't argue for it. I just base it on some of the disgusting, unethical things I saw while living in China.

Certainly there is a culture within China of taking dangerous short cuts to save money. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/26/opinion/beware-of-chinas-...

It doesn't necessarily need to be a lab employee, it could be someone reponsible for disposing of dead animals choosing to make a quick buck

Hmm, but have there been any other pandemics that started close to a lab researching the kind of pathogen involved in the pandemic? Funny you should ask. There was this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu

By “came about the same way”, I’m assuming you mean “by zoonotic transfer”. But the 1977 Russian flu pandemic is now widely believed to have been a lab leak, or a vaccine trial that went wrong.

So your claim is false.

There is also allegedly a Wuhan CDC facility meters away from the market where disposal of lab animals happened (I cannot confirm this myself), so if that's true, that's certainly another possibility.

Sorry but the post above is unscientific sophistry. Science is about weighing competing theories by examining the relative strength of evidence. The evidence is strongly in favor of zoonotic origin. What's posted here is an exercise in confirmation bias, not rigorous scientific thinking.

Given that I used to believe the zoonotic hypothesis the assertion of confirmation bias is a bit surprising to me.

The comment this is a reply to is what's known as rhetoric. The goal of rhetoric is to persuade the audience in the absence of logic or evidence.

The comment is offering "testimony of conversion" which is not scientific.

Not really. The poster is saying they used to believe X but was persuaded subsequently that ~X was more likely. This seems to indicate at least a recent pattern of avoiding confirmation bias.

If you find "I changed my mind" to be the message, then you agree with me that it is rhetoric. It is testimony of conversion.

Aren’t you assuming that you’re being shown all the evidence?

I'm very clearly and obviously doing the exact opposite

You’d need to clarify what specifically is entailed by zoonotic origin (and what would count as not-zoonotic-origin) in order for your claim to be evaluated.

Rather than just saying "we found..." and expecting people to take it at that, provide sources. If I went and looked up everything anyone claimed, that's all I'd ever do.

You can BLAST that furin cleavage sequence and find matches in other non-patented sequences, though. Here’s one from 2011 (bases 286 to 304, reverse complement): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleotide/DN616748.1

We did not "find" 1 from any rejected DARPA grant proposal, that's nonsense and completely unsupported by the actual grant proposal. You cannot presume one leads to the other, that'd be like trying to cite a patent on a perpetual motion machine as conclusive proof perpetual motion machines exist.

I would argue that continuing to state what you have here qualifies as disinformation, and think HN should remove it immediately, lest HN become yet another breeding ground of this kind of anti-intellectual memetic drivel.

>> The lab-leak hypothesis is meta-scientific. When it was first tossed around, the lab leak hypothesis generated two predictions:

When and where were those two predictions published? Can you give a link?

>We co-authored a book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, on this topic in 2021 and it proved to be an odd experience. Eschewing speculation and sticking to what we could prove, we delved deep into the evidence and wove together the threads that linked bat viruses from southern China or Southeast Asia with an outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019. We concluded that it was impossible to be sure yet, but two theories were plausible: spillover from an animal to a person at a market, or an accident in a laboratory or during a research field trip.

> Our book received praise from readers: we received letters and emails from senior scientists, politicians, businessmen, journalists, and others commending it as a non-fiction whodunnit.

>All that was gratifying. But it stood in marked contrast to the reaction in much of the media. CNN invited us on to discuss the book then cancelled at the last minute — at the behest of their health editor. The BBC simply ignored the book altogether, as did the other mainstream US and UK networks.

The mainstream media is the enemy

If you want to be taken seriously on scientific matters, then co-authoring a book with Matt Ridley, a well known climate-change sceptic, is a strange choice.

If the lab leak hypothesis is proven beyond all doubt, then it embarrasses China.

Embarrassing one of the world's superpowers is broadly seen as an undesirable thing to do.

Ergo, scientists producing findings backing up the hypothesis will find plenty of opponents whose first and only job is to discredit them in any way possible, from denying their papers publication (looking at you, ResearchGate) to publicly attacking them on social media (Dr. Malone).

Lab leak theory is never going to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. For that to happen, Chinese government would need to cooperate. And it is almost an axiom that they won’t, if it has a slight chance of making them look bad.

> Reviews were mostly bad — in both senses of the word. That is to say, they were highly critical and inaccurate. In some cases, the authors said things that made clear they had not read the book but had made up their minds to dislike it. Not one but two virologists told us on Twitter that the book was full of lies — and that they had not read it. An odd thing for anybody to admit to, especially a scientist.

If you call yourself a "scientist" you have an ethical duty to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Perhaps not in the formal sense of a doctor's Hippocratic oath, but in the tradition of Galileo and Copernicus.

Jon Stewart's classic lab-leak rant on Colbert's show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8&t=178s

Thank you for this. I hadn't seen it.

Jon Stewart has a rare talent of imparting both logic and comedy simultaneously. Ridiculously awesome guy.

I dig it because it's like a summary of half of the Marvel movies, where the protagonists spend the entire adventure solving a problem they caused themselves.

Like, without the Thanos thingy, iron man is not a bloody hero, he is a villain. He is responsible for so much death and destruction it's not even funny. Black Mamba, killer. Black panther ? Maintains in place a political system that clearly allows any psychopath to access absolute power. Hulk, a time bomb. Thor ? He let his genocidal brother of the hook as soon as he is nice for 2 minutes. Spiderman ? Give an deadly bot swarm to the first father figure that smiles at him. Dr Strange ? Accept the request to GHB the planet and almost destroys it because a kid ask for it for 30 seconds.

It's a well known trope in sups stories, but for some reasons a lot of viewers really believes they are heroes. Even as a kid I though Batman was stupid for spending times fighting one criminal at a time with all his money.

Now, we are seeing a lot of this in today's IRL world.

Progress is saving you by giving you drugs for all the diseases it increases: diabetes, cancer, obesity, hormonal dysfunctions, etc. It's giving you a car so that you can you can go work in a remote place you would never have to work to without progress. It gives you software to organize your day to fit all the thing you would not have to do without progress.

Ok, it's tongue in cheek. I love progress.

But still.

It is common for popular fiction to replicate themes and situations that people observe in life but cannot freely discuss.

There's all these tornado research facilities in the same place we keep getting tornados!

Unlike a virus, you can't just grab a tornado and move it somewhere else to study it. If you want to study tornadoes, you have to be where tornadoes occur.

Wuhan is quite far from where most bats life in China. It's like having a tornado research facility in New York.

The WIV was not set up in Wuhan to study bat-borne coronaviruses in the surrounding area. This is a widespread myth, one popularized by Maggie Koerth on Twitter.

The lab-leak hypothesis has been suppressed because it is a politically unauthorized thought.

If the hypothesis is investigated and proven true, powerful people stand to face justice, which is of course unacceptable to these very people, and so the idea has been banned by way of media silence and by way of association with other unauthorized politics, i.e. with those who are right of center.

Not to mention you’d see a rise in anti-Asian hate crime as disturbed people take out their frustrations.

That doesn't make sense. How is that any worse than the dominant at the time explanation of bats being sold at a seafood market to be eaten. That's way more visceral than a lab accident.

lol jet fuel melt zoonotic origin beams right

One thing I've noticed as a result of the pandemic: there are many people who think that Listening to Experts is the same thing as Doing Science. Everyone who has strong feelings about the lab leak hypothesis (in either direction) would do well to remember the Litany of Tarski:

    If SARS-COV-2 escaped from the WIV,
    I desire to believe that SARS-COV-2 escaped from the WIV;
    If SARS-COV-2 did not escape from the WIV,
    I desire to believe that SARS-COV-2 did not escape from the WIV;
    Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.

Just because the CDC or some other experts say it didn't happen doesn't mean it didn't. Just because Fox or some other conspiracy theorist says it did happen doesn't mean it did.

With the lack of any really strong unequivocal data supporting any real hypothesis, I think people got tired of arguing about it and recognized that throwing around huge claims with massive implications was probably irresponsible.

That won't stop a number of them from trying to warm it up again every now and then.

If a claim has massive implications, then it would be even more irresponsible to not recognize that possibility. The world can't learn from the past if we're not able to even consider what might have happened in the past.

I initially dismissed the lab leak hypothesis because surely nobody would be stupid enough to make new SARS virus strains on purpose. They’re worthless as biological weapons, and the risks are insane.

Then it turns out that that is precisely the type of research the Wuhan lab does regularly.

And then when our prime minister merely suggested an investigation, China put punitive tariffs on billions of dollars of our exports to them.

Because clearly, that’s how innocent governments with nothing to hide act.

Immediate, massive retaliation for merely suggesting that someone should look into things.

But everybody should believe the Chinese government! They told you: it came from a pangolin in the market. Why would they lie?

They lied about the reason for the punitive tariffs, sure, making up some insane story about centrally orchestrated “dumping”.

Okay, so they lied. But not about Wuhan! That would be unethical…

I think the more likely case is Hanlon’s Razor — Chinese government officials figure it could have leaked due to their lax safety standards, and just don’t want to look into it for fear of someone conclusively proving this.

This seems probable to me as well: they don’t know that a lab leak occurred, but believe it’s a plausible explanation, and one whose investigation needs to be suppressed because of the potential for embarrassment and retaliation. They might even have sought to destroy as much evidence as possible rather than trying to uncover the truth internally: if nobody knows the truth, the truth can never leak out.

Even if it wasn't the lab leak this time, it seems like an awfully dangerous practice for limited scientific value.

> ...because surely nobody would be stupid enough to make new SARS virus strains on purpose. They’re worthless as biological weapons, and the risks are insane.

If we wait until the next pandemic hits, we will be months or years behind the curve, trying to understand it and develop treatments. Millions more people will die because we'll have been caught on our back foot.

Lucky for the human race, viruses are statistically more likely to mutate, over time, in particular ways. So it's possible to make pretty good guesses about where future would mutations might occur. So if we deliberately create those mutants in a laboratory, we can study which strains look particularly virulent and/or dangerous.

Yes, there ARE risks to this strategy, in terms of lab leaks. But the vast majority of virologists and epidemiologists have known for decades that deadly worldwide pandemics of novel Coronaviruses are an inevitably in the 21st century... It's just a matter of time. We will definitely see several more pandemics, at least as damaging as COVID-19, befor the century is out.

So even without a lab leak, we would only save ourselves a couple more years before nature did the job, itself... And it will keep happening, over and over with new Coronaviruses, for the foreseeable future. The human race can do very little to slow it, let alone stop it.

This kind of logic seems sane until you stop and think about it for a while.

First off -- and this should be enough by itself -- the research the Wuhan lab did hasn't appeared to have helped in a material way to fight the COVID pandemic. So they gambled, lost, and there is nothing to show for it.

But that's not the insane bit. The truly insane bit is that over 20 million people died for this little "experiment" of theirs.

I'll try to come up with an analogy of how truly bonkers this is:

Imagine one day, a nuke unexpectedly blows up New York, and millions upon millions of people die. It's an ICBM of some sort, but not launched from an expected enemy launch site. Everyone assumes it must be a terrorist attack, which is then "confirmed" when rocket booster fragments are found near the launch site -- in the United States -- discovered to be two different models of rockets jury-rigged together. Clearly terrorists got their hand on a bomb and did whatever they could do to launch it! Problem solved.

... and then it turns out that the DHS has a program where they would build random combinations of boosters and upper stages together with mis-matched warheads, and launch them for "testing" to so that they could "learn what terrorists might do".

Clearly it wasn't terrorists, one of the DHS experiments went horribly wrong.

... and then instead of being horrified, people would justify this by saying: "If the DHS hadn't done these kinds of experiments, then we wouldn't be prepared for when terrorists launched a makeshift rocket! How would we know how to shoot one down? We need to learn these things before we are attacked!"

Meanwhile, millions are dead from the experiment -- not the terrorists. The DHS experiments of course did not lead to better missile defence. The rocket wasn't shot down. Not to mention that that's not what terrorists generally do. Or they may not even be able to do this kind of thing anyway.

But this is precisely the type of thing Wuhan was doing. They were playing with the biological equivalent of global nuclear armageddon, and they weren't even doing it in a BSL 4 lab! It's the equivalent of the DHS rocket experiments building nuclear-tipped rockets out in the open with random local contractors in the same way SpaceX is building their star ship. They were doing experiments to combine SARS and flu-like viruses in ways that might never happen in the wild. They weren't just accelerating natural processes to find out what might happen, they were doing entirely novel things that's only possible in a lab.

Precisely so.

> First off -- and this should be enough by itself -- the research the Wuhan lab did hasn't appeared to have helped in a material way to fight the COVID pandemic. So they gambled, lost, and there is nothing to show for it.

You can't possibly claim that without being a qualified expert in the field. I'm not, but I have asked friends who are--and they're quite firm that this type of experimental research (1) did help speed up our COVID-19 response, and save lives, and (2) is critical to prevent future outbreaks from becoming much, much worse.

I'm not asking for journal cites or anything, but I am curious: What's the source of your conclusion that gain-of-function research didn't help prevent the COVID-19 pandemic from becoming even worse?

Advocates of such high-risk research have reached to find some minor alleged benefits in this pandemic, like in:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02903-x

But if you look at the actual examples they provide, they're incredibly weak. Remdesivir wasn't discovered due to GoF research, and wasn't tested in humans solely due to any result from GoF research; but GoF research did provide some of the early evidence that prompted the first human trials. Unfortunately remdesivir also shows little evidence of efficacy in humans:

https://www.science.org/content/article/very-very-bad-look-r...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-recommends-against-use-of-g...

They also cite minor contributions to some novel vaccine candidates that as far as I can tell haven't progressed to humans. And these examples are from Ralph Baric's lab; while he may have been reckless, his research was less controversial than the WIV's, working at higher BSL and with fewer novel pathogens. The WIV took significantly greater risks, and so far has literally zero practical benefit to show for it.

Virology in aggregate has clearly provided a benefit to humanity, in this pandemic and elsewhere. That's not the question, though. The deliberate search for enhanced potential human pandemic pathogens--including both laboratory gain-of-function on such pathogens, and sampling missions to remote sites to find new natural pathogens in areas that no other humans routinely visited, and thus that presented no obvious risk of natural spillover--is a tiny subset of virology.

We could ban that tiny subset, and we'd still have all our same vaccines, same anti-viral drugs, same tests, etc. If anyone tells you otherwise, then ask them for the evidence.

They lied, and it's been documented - but that cuts both ways. They also lied about wild animals being sold at their market.

From Bloomberg:

When an international group of experts organized by the World Health Organization traveled to Wuhan, China, earlier this year to research the origins of the coronavirus that sparked the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, they visited the Baishazhou market, which is larger, but perhaps less well-known (internationally, at least) than the Huanan market, where many people initially believed the virus first jumped from wild animals to humans.

The research team was told only frozen foods, ingredients, and kitchenware were sold there. But a recently released study that had previously languished in publishing limbo showed, thanks to data meticulously collected over 30 months, that at least two vendors there regularly sold live wild animals, Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg also notes that one of the earliest recorded COVID-19 clusters in Wuhan [December 19th] involved a Huanan stall employee who traded goods back and forth between the two markets."

It seems likely to Goldstein that some authorities didn't want the presence of a thriving wildlife trade to become public knowledge. "It seems to me, at a minimum, that local or regional authorities kept that information quiet deliberately. It's incredible to me that people theorize about one type of cover-up," he said, likely referring to the hypothesis that the virus actually leaked from a nearby government-run lab, "but an obvious cover-up is staring them right in the face."

https://news.yahoo.com/virologist-suggests-coronavirus-origi...

I am all for looking into things, but this all sounds really familiar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discredited_HIV/AIDS_origins...

I think there is something in human psychology that gains some kind of comfort thinking everything is controlled by humans. Like accepting that we live in a chaotic universe we have no control over is scarier than some imagined Dr. Evil character that we can blame events on.

Not saying it’s not worth looking into, just that a lot of these same people think there is a laser satellite starting forest fires.

Given the evidence, it's easier for me to believe a covered up mishap at the lab than anything else. If anyone is going to chabuduo something like this, try to cover it up, then blame the US and everyone else, it's China.

There are obviously some conspiracy theory versions of this but the main origin of a more sane lab leak theory is by exclusion, which is to say that it existed because no other theory had definitive proof.

The most obvious alternative candidate is zoonotic origin. To many this is still the leading theory and it's likely the most plausible. But the smoking gun for zoonotic origin is finding the wildlife population of origin. This hasn't happened yet. Given the attention, that's a little weird but it's not that weird. Sometimes it takes years.

The most plausible form of the lab leak theory is that this was an accidental leak of a strain they had. Even that raises questions. If it's a strain they had, where did it come from? You run into the same issue as zoonotic origin. Could it be the result of gaint of function or similar research that would've modified a wild virus? That's possible too.

The only evidence here is circumstancial. China had, for example, not cooperated with WHO early on in investigations. Any investigations have been limited in their terms of reference. There was a DNA database of coronavirus strains that was taken down in 2019. Kind of weird timing but no tdamning. When I last looked into it this hadn't been examined by third parties. Maybe that's changed now?

So what's happened? Nothing. Because there hasn't been significant movement here on this or any other theory.

Lot of discussion here on the 'dispositive proof' by Worobey et al. and the lack of intermediate lineage between lineage A & B (after intermediate genomes were ruled out without having access to the raw data to properly QC). A recent paper casts some doubts on at least extent of animal zoonosis (it any occurred at all) - indicating at least several of the early market cases were due to human to human transmission.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512...

What seems to get lost on people is that no animals in the market tested positive for a SARS-2-related virus.

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1370392/v1

Whatsmore the early lineage A virus was only found in one environmental sample, all other env samples were B and all human infections were B.

Both points cast serious doubt as to whether the market was really the origin - or just a superspreader location.

Using a different method than Pekar et al., Caraballo-Ortiz et al. estimate a lat Sept/E Oct ancestral virus emergence in Wuhan. If correct, we can probably discount the Hunan seafood market as the origin, and need to look esewhere in Wuhan

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34931186/

While I 100% am most invested in the idea it was from some type of wild animal (probably a bat - scientists have been warning us for YEARS that when we encroach and destroy habitats of animals we are pushing our luck for exposing new diseases) I did/do have a pretty niche theory that I saw almost nowhere else. So to be clear - obviously - I do not actually think this is likely:

September 2019 there was a large explosion at one of Russia's top viral research labs (supposedly also bioweapons) in Siberia due to large natural fires in Siberia - link below

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49727101

Officials then declare the explosion and lab not to be an issue and everyone moves on.

Is it not possible that something was accidentally leaked from this lab? I am not implying intent here - just that we could be dealing with an accident caused by the huge, huge fires. This is the same lab that later develops the Russian COVID vaccine.

At the time the only other reference I could find to this was a joke made by a comedian in Russia which they very quickly cracked down on:

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/04/07/russia-opens-crimi...

I posted about this once before on Hacker News and got a TON of downvotes. Not trying to spread misinformation or something here at all.

Your Russia theory is on par with the one from the Chinese government saying the virus came to Wuhan from the US via some frozen food.

We need some sort of international protocol on how to do gain of function research. Something like putting these labs in remote places with strict quarantine protocols. This whole business of doing stuff like this in city centers is absolutely insane

What I really want to know is "so what?" I mean, it would be great to learn about the origin and then take steps to reduce the chance of the same thing happening in the future.

But it appears most people just want to point the finger and that no change would result.

In fact one could imagine potential improvements for either case, some of which might be worth doing regardless of the actual origin.

The change is that western countries could put a halt on transferring incredibly dangerous technology to mainland China, since they have developed a track record of carelessness and coverups.

(Wish I didn't have to say this, but this is not a racial comment-- BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs in the US are filled with ethnically Chinese people and have much stronger safety records.)

I think this article is a very good example of the sort of pseudo-compelling argument. It's like one step along the road between 4chan conspiracy to Tucker Carlson. It's lots of stuff that sound like reasonable arguments, but are actually not. It starts by couching itself in the actual concensus - other people concluding that's a possibility! - Yes, that's true, but what they're concluding as a possibility out of a cautious appraoch, you're pushing as actually being true. Then they start marking their own homework - we published our book and everyone reasonable and smart said it was great, and everyone who disagreed clearly didn't read it. Now we go to the greatest hits - the big bad mainstream media.

Now we start mis-representing our opponents. All we want is an open scientific debate! But it's too controversial! That might not at all be true, but we're going to say it anyway. It might be that the actual scientists decided that there weren't merits to your argument to justify inviting you to debate it, but who cares - let's just say they're afraid of controversy.

People are threatened by our work. We're not extremists! We're moderates! We're perfectly reasonable people who are just going to slip in this laundered conspiracy theory that Fauci funded the Wuhan lab. But don't worry, let me quote this anonymous scientist to back up every worst accusation you could make of scientists.

Everyone is covering this up because of vested interests you see! If you look up the author you'll see that he comes from this as a complete neutral outsider making cold-eyed judgements of the evidence. He's definitely not from the exact far right nutter idealogue ecosystem that you'd expect him to be from.

There's a nugget of truth in the article - the lab leak is possible as an explanation, and that China isn't to be trusted to investigate. There's nothing in this article that actually advances any evidence beyond that. The rest of it though is just the same thinly veiled conspiracy theories that have been going around since Trump going on about "The Chinese Virus".

Do you realize how ridiculous this sounds to someone who isn't partisan and doesn't watch mainstream media? Besides the blatant lies like saying Fauci didn't fund the wuhan lab you use political terms like labeling people right wingers because they don't agree with you. That's the same strategy as the mainstream media you are defending. Then you mock people for wanting an actual debate. You need to get out of your bubble. Stop mindlessly believing everything you see on CNN without question.

The guy writes an article accusing everyone who disagree with him of being corrupt and you take offence to me calling him right wing? Bizarre.

Here’s the problem- you accuse me of mindlessly believing CNN (no idea what that had to do with anything, both I and the author are British) but the truth is that I’m just applying the same level of scrutiny to the author as you would have me apply to CNN.

Note this also:

>> Imagine if the accidental launch of a nuclear missile had killed 21 million people. It’s hard to believe the world would shrug and say: let’s not bother finding out how it happened.

In other words, somebody did this and we have to find out who it was!

So much about just asking questions, I guess.

Here are two "damning" articles about the lab leak theory, for some reason these articles were not widely seen but highly recommend them if you are searching for the truth around the origin of covid:

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...

and:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...

Its pretty much alive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/health/germs-fort-detrick...

Considering the history of 'budget cuts to cut government spending' combined with 'innovation' causing many environmental and social disasters in the US, I see a lab leak from the US Army's lab in Maryland much more credible than anywhere else. Budgets get cut by 75% by Trump Admn. The Army labs 'get creative' in cutting costs and the rest follows.

The lab seems to have started having 'problems with its sanitation and security'. Upon which the US government tried to get the army shut it down. Army refused. The government had to get a court order to shut the lab down around June 2019. At this point, a 'pneumonia' outbreak was reported in the retirement communities around Maryland. Also, the army team that went to military games to China, Wuhan were trained here before leaving for China.

Note this kind of thing probably happened before, and it will happen again: Loosely regulated private and state GMO research is a MAJOR risk for entire humanity - just one lab screws up due to budget cuts or while trying to 'innovate', and you can never take back what gets out of that lab.

Imagine if this was coupled with the “publish or perish” academic culture. Do any universities have similar labs?

The format of relationships in between private, public institutions and universities and research organizations is extremely convoluted. Anyone may have a hand in anyone's pocket and anyone may be working with anyone. So, you could say that 'publish or perish' could also be a factor in such incidents.

Ding! Had to really dig through the comments to find a mention of this...

Pre-pandemic blood samples were later tested and found positive in europe

Which makes the wuhan-zoonotic vs wuhan-leak a false dichotomy.

I blame, the uneducated about viruses, wuhan-institute-janitor with the dead animals, on the food market, instead of expensive cremating them, making a little money in a side hustle.

Cluedo its fun for the whole family.

But it provides nothing tangible regarding responsiblity.

The janitor is clueless on the danger(the government does not properly educate its citizens, which have medieval concepts of medicine), a culture of side hustles & "stealing from the man that steals" is normal in all post-sovjet countries.

The problem here is that the risk is systemic. Meaning, the societal characteristics to be found in all post-sovjet totalitarian societities, will produce this again and again, against all promises of reform. Which makes outsourcing exponentially dangerous endavours to these places a crime.

I do not blame ccp-china there. That potemkin village of a working society is very obvious for anyone willing to watch and able to look past "brute" reality-i-command-you-so sovjet style propaganda.

I blame those who thought they could perform already irresponsible endavours for cheap without oversight there.

Yes, medieval concepts of medicine. Why do you think those life animal markets still exist? Because frozzen food is considered "bad" for your chi. Now, im going to pretend that outrage at outrageous behaviour could have consequences.

So basically authorities were peddling lies, then after getting caught red-handed, they doubled-down on the lies and tried to gaslight the public and label doubters as conspiracy theorists. How can the government rebuild trust after such behavior? It would be hard to rebuild trust after the lies on their own, but the actual gaslighting is just insane... Governments have been acting like literal psychopaths. Everyone knows you can't trust a psychopath.

For those of you complaining about conspiracy theories: this is why there are conspiracy theories. Supernatural theories will fill in the gaps. People cannot live without a cohesive worldview.

The origin of Covid, the biggest cataclysm in 100 years or more, will be understood either rationally or irrationally.

Investigating the origin of covid goes beyond the utility of preventing a recurrence or finding justice, both of which are also critical.

> But what has disappeared is any real or urgent interest from the media

How do we determine this? Isn't that just normal?

So many stories are just unseen until someone can prove something. If they haven't been able to then there you go, it's not much of a story.

Yeah there's lots of speculation in the media but it comes and goes and no surprise that something so far unproven faded from view.

The whole world is tired of COVID. We all just want to move on.

Besides, what are we going to do when we do confirm it was a lab leak? We can hardly make these lvl 3/4 facilities any more secure than they already are, and it’s not as if China will ever actually take any form of blame (nor would the US, if it leaked there).

Not have those labs? That’s one solution. Is the study of virology worth all the loss and suffering caused by a pandemic?

That this specific pandemic may have came from a lab -- but every other one didn't should perhaps give a clue to the stakes of "the study of virology". It's not some high-minded philosophical pursuit -- we know that pandemics regularly kill substantial percentages of the world population, the study of virology is the study of reducing the impact of pandemics.

High-risk research of the type performed by the WIV (including both laboratory gain-of-function to enhance potential pandemic pathogen lethality or transmissibility, and sampling of novel pathogens from remote natural sites) is a tiny fraction of virology. There is no evidence that it's ever provided any significant public benefit--without it, we'd still have our same basic knowledge, our same vaccines, our same small-molecule antiviral drugs, etc.

I think you're aware of that, too. So why the conflation? Perhaps you're afraid the backlash to strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a research accident would lead to unreasonably broad regulation; but the failure of specialists who understand these distinctions to seriously engage with the risk makes that more likely, not less.

You clearly have domain knowledge here. You are using it not to enhance public knowledge, but to distract and shut down people making reasonable points in not quite the right terms. I don't think this will end well for your discipline--a majority of Americans (including a majority of Democrats) already believe SARS-CoV-2 is probably of unnatural origin. If virologists are unable to draft reasonable regulations for themselves, then the public will step in to do it for them, probably on worse terms for all involved.

There's also very scant evidence that the WIV was doing anything along the lines of GoF. They worked a ton with Baric's group in NC and other "western" scientists who did all of the genetic engineering that I'm aware of. The purpose of this engineering is to develop vaccines and treatments for the most likely natural viruses before they exist in nature and have a chance to infect humans. Even if they were doing more pseudo-GoF than I'm aware, I'm a bit nonplussed.

The source I linked at the top with Markolin's analysis on why he thinks it was a zoonotic event is titled, "Nature’s neglected GoF laboratory" for a reason. Viruses are going to mix/match, they're going to produce chimeras, they are going to undergo directed evolution by the trillions, all completely naturally. As we encroach further into the urban/wildlife interface, zoonotic events are going to keep happening, and likely going to get worse. MERS and SARS1 were both "near miss" pandemics that we were fortunate to have avoided a SC2-like global nightmare. Wuhan was a 'control' for latent coronavirus sampling not because of the lack of bats or coronaviruses in Hubei, but because it was an urban environment. Millions of people in China live near bats and domesticated animals capable of acting as intermediate hosts. We can't just hope that every coronavirus they're naturally infected with is mild or burns out before the wrong person takes a fateful bus trip.

I'm not 100% certain GoF experiments are worth it, but they're highly mischaracterized by most of the people who are accusing scientists of all sorts of malfeasance. The vast majority of this work takes place in strains that couldn't possibly infect humans and with animal models that also have no potential for spillover. Skim this paper from 2018 and tell me it wouldn't be worth knowing more about in the lead-up to SC2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6132729/

> and sampling of novel pathogens from remote natural sites) is a tiny fraction of virology

This is absolutely crazy to me. So far most of the evidence for a lab leak is "we don't have any close relatives" and "we've never seen the RBD or FCS like this before".

Of course we haven't! We've barely sampled any viruses!

We know a ton about how viruses enter cells and we know a ton about how spillovers happen, but we don't know very much about the potential "problem space" due to very limited understanding of the diversity of viruses out there.

> You clearly have domain knowledge here. You are using it not to enhance public knowledge, but to distract and shut down people making reasonable points in not quite the right terms.

No offense to anyone I've 'shut down' but this is akin to me wading into a discussion on cryptography with very strong opinions about quantum computing based on having read some Neal Stephenson books. I'd love to spend more time enhancing public knowledge, but it's near impossible unless people have some baseline level of understanding of the underlying science and the ability to figure out when they're being mislead.

I think Alina Chan is mostly well-intentioned but leans into the 'controversy' a bit much in order to sell books -- but her coauthor is a complete hack who knows exactly what he's doing. Ridley has no background in virology whatsoever, his claim to fame before this was being a prominent climate change denier who owns and operates a literal coal mine.

So sure, I'll continue to hope to educate people about what they've been mislead about but there's British Aristocracy with millions of dollars in book sales on the line working to gaslight everyone so here we are.

GoF on pathogens that couldn't possibly cause a human pandemic (including viruses that don't infect humans, or anything replication-incompetent) seems much less risky to me, and I believe that was excluded from the 2014 restrictions. It may still present some risk, to the extent it would guide later practitioners working in replication-competent human pathogens, with or without malicious intent. I generally dislike the framing of the debate in terms of a "GoF ban", which is why I chose the phrase "high-risk research" and qualified GoF to potential pandemic pathogens. I'm aware that very few people are going to understand this nuance; but that's the reason why practitioners need to competently regulate themselves, instead of leaving this to an uninformed mob.

That said, there's zero question that DEFUSE proposed to collect and enhance replication-competent potential human pandemic pathogens. That proposal wasn't funded, and that proposal indeed anticipated that the GoF work would be done at UNC; but the WIV seems clearly capable of that work too. We don't know what happened next, and I believe we should do everything in our power to find out. If possible, that would occur with China's cooperation; but since that seems impossible for now, it should proceed without. For example, large amounts of raw sequencer reads exist on the servers of American and European research groups and their service providers. Those should be subpoenaed, and searched for evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 genomes as contamination, similar to that found in the Antarctic soil samples. Do you disagree?

I also dislike the framing in terms of "GoF ban" because I agree fully that nature may present a greater risk than anything we could make in a lab. It seems entirely plausible to me that right now, there are viruses deep inside some cave that could end human life as we know it, but that we've simply been lucky enough that the virus has never left the cave. But how could that possibly be a reason to send some grad student into the cave? From pictures and videos of WIV sampling trips, they were sending researchers in with no protection beyond a surgical mask and nitrile gloves. That seems insane to me. If humans will be entering an area regardless--for agriculture, or tourism, or whatever else--then I agree we should be sampling it. But why should we go looking for trouble in areas that no other human is likely to approach?

You keep saying that virology brings potential benefits, and that's obviously true. It also brings potential detriments though, including research-origin pandemics, and it's done so at least once in the past. I see no evidence that you're making anything like a cost/benefit tradeoff here; you're simply disregarding all the costs, somehow classifying deaths quite directly caused by research activities as "natural" and thus unimportant. That's not how anything else in life works--if I'm careless with my campsite, then the resulting wildfire may be indistinguishable from one set by lightning, but the ranger is still going to say it's my fault.

I have no special affection for Ridley, though I still prefer him to the author of the article you linked, who called Alina Chan a "moronic psychopath"[1]. In any case, the messenger shouldn't matter. As to the narrow question of investigating the origin of SARS-CoV-2, I believe Ridley is right and you're dangerously wrong. You've correctly shut down some genuine nonsense here (e.g., Moderna patents on the sequence). You've also posted at least two unequivocal falsehoods yourself though (WIV situated based on diversity of nearby relevant viruses, no prior unnatural pandemic), and presented other evidence in much stronger terms than any scientific consensus (e.g., the two lineages; George Gao[2] thinks they probably evolved in humans, and I presume you're not going to call him a lab leak conspiracist). I don't see how that enhances public knowledge.

1. https://twitter.com/PhilippMarkolin/status/15208575112969994...

2. https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1497627179965845506?la...

Gao's work on the location of samples was greatly helpful - his other work...eh... in that paper you linked, he actually references papers speculating that Covid was in Brazil in 2019 and to a paper that takes seriously the idea that Covid was in Barcelona in March 2019 (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...). I don't think he's a lab leak conspiracist but I do think he's got as much of a motive to shift blame elsewhere -- namely outside of China -- as anyone in the world, and acknowledging that the animal trade caused yet another pandemic would be politically damaging.

WIV was established before the concept of of bat coronaviruses could exist - so technically they are in Wuhan because some cutting edge communist insect research was there -- but in the support for the lab post-SARS, they were repeatedly promoted (mainly by the Chinese government so take with a grain of salt) due to their expertise, familiarity and proximity to bat populations. Hubei is consistently listed in the lists of areas with needs for increased viral surveillance alongside Yunnan and Guangong -- the earliest post-SARS work all shows this. As recently as 2019, scientists from the WIV were researching Hubei bat populations... people are acting like it would be completely impossible for betacoronaviruses to show up in Wuhan but it's a misconception that dishonest people are happy to promote. There are tons of coronaviruses in China, and tons of them in Hubei/Henan/Shaanxi area, it's clearly more likely that a new strain comes out of the Laos/Yunnan area since that's where SARS1 came from and they seem better adapted to human crossover, but with migration patterns and the history of virus collection there, it's not that unlikely for a Hubei-centered virus to exist and it only takes a single strain to cause a pandemic.

The fire analogy is a good one -- of course it's your fault if your campsite causes a wildfire -- but now we're talking about the nuts and bolts of forest management to prevent any fire from turning into a wildfire. Loosely, much GoF work is akin to controlled burns, or maybe closer to studying fire dynamics by burning overgrown areas. Potentially dangerous but likely useful when "the real thing" happens.

In any case, this thread is a bit stale, but I'm sure it'll just be a few weeks before some new conspiracy theory has started and all of the same tired tropes get to be knocked down again.

> I don't think he's a lab leak conspiracist but I do think he's got as much of a motive to shift blame elsewhere -- namely outside of China -- as anyone in the world, [...]

George Gao is clearly beholden to the CCP's official story that SARS-CoV-2 originated outside China. I don't see why that would require him to disregard strong genomic evidence for two introductions into the market, though--he could simply propose two packages of frozen fish, or two of whatever other story they're claiming now.

In my own limited judgment, I don't see what in the genomic evidence excludes evolution of the two lineages in humans--it seems entirely possible to me that sampling of human cases simply wasn't thorough enough to pick up all intermediates (if they even exist). None of your responses address that question of sampling coverage. I also see many highly-credentialed experts who consider evolution in humans to be possible. This makes me believe that you, Worobey, and quite a lot of media headlines are greatly over-representing the significance of two lineages separated by two SNPs.

> As recently as 2019, scientists from the WIV were researching Hubei bat populations... people are acting like it would be completely impossible for betacoronaviruses to show up in Wuhan but it's a misconception that dishonest people are happy to promote.

Non-specialists often use sloppy language, but the important question is clearly one of probabilities, not of possibility vs. impossibility. The greatest diversity of SARS-like viruses lies in SW China and SE Asia, including BANAL-20-52 with its extremely close spike, closer than omicron is to the original Wuhan virus.

That SARS-CoV-2 spilled over in Wuhan certainly isn't dispositive evidence of unnatural origin, but it's not what anyone expected. It would be nice if you could make that clear when you correct people.

> Loosely, much GoF work is akin to controlled burns,

I used that analogy in another comment here--when a recent controlled burn in New Mexico got out of control and destroyed hundreds of homes, everyone involved realized they'd screwed up. They're forming committees to understand what went wrong, and to compensate the victims, and to change their practices so this doesn't happen again.

If a disastrous controlled burn somehow killed 700k people, then I'm not sure the practice would ever be re-attempted. And yet the 1977 flu pandemic did just that, and no one really noticed or cared. Don't you find that remarkable?

Man, it's really strange that you're spending days late-replying to anyone that voices any idea outside your narrow and unsubstantiated narrative of the pandemic.

I'm not going to continue to argue (here or to your replies to my comments) about the science at this point, but I'll say this. There is no question whatsoever that there has been a conspiracy within the Chinese government and institutions to prevent public exposure of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 (whatever that may be). They've destroyed data, halted investigations, literally blocked roads to prevent it from being discovered. So slinging mud around calling hypotheses that involve no additional conspiracy beyond the one we know to exist "conspiracy theories" is completely ridiculous and out of touch with reality. If you actually want to have constructive conversations, start by throwing that garbage out of your replies.

That’s a great solution until we have to deal with something like the black plague and find that we have nobody that ever researched anything similar to it.

Then instead of 1% of the world population we lose 30%.

I am surprised at how little publicity Jeffrey Sachs comments on this issue has garnered.

There is a good interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZa5k87ByOk

> If we don’t investigate, what signal does that send to bioterrorists?

Have there actually been any bioterrorists?

I remember that after September 11th 2000, there was a scare regarding envelopes with supposed Anthrax in them, and that fizzled out as a false alarm (AFAICR).

Now, there's plenty of other kinds of terrorism - private and state-run; and there are chemical weapons of course. And in ancient times, I read that dead bodies would be catapulted into besieged cities.

But have there actually been groups of people over the past, say, 100 years who tried to release a malevolent virus into a civilian population anywhere?

Virus is of zoonotic origin, not from some weird gain of function experiment that leaked. Period. The real problem is that the Chinese government (who I don't like very much) have such an ingrained culture of secrecy and censorship that prevented vital information from getting out that was the cause of the pandemic. Had we known by November 2019 it could spread through the air we might have stopped this in its track much earlier and saved millions of lives.

I have tried to get a biologist / someone with more scientific knowledge than me to either help peer review, confirm or debunk this paper by Steven Quay:

https://zenodo.org/record/4642956

It seems so scientific and created a buzz when it came out, it has been the most thorough explanation of the lab leak theory, but I never saw a decent discussion that either helped confirm or debunk the ideas within.

I think it's kind of rubbish but 140 pages long and most serious scientist have better things to do than going through all that.

But at a glance he seems to be using bayesian analysis in a not very valid way.

Plenty of people have been through and debunked it. Quay is an unqualified kook (eat broccoli and brush your teeth to avoid Covid!) who was specifically chosen to make the argument for lab leak. It's no way to do science and it's as useful as you'd expect for a physician performing their first bayesian analysis on a topic that they aren't familiar with.

They claimed they can investigate without Chinese cooperation, then complained in the end that Chinese obfuscation prevented them from getting their conclusion?

There is only one reason I would hope it is a lab leak. A lab leak is a mistake that theoretical can be controlled via more stringent systems. It is something that has a limited footprint in terms of initial infection vector.

If something like this did arise from zoonotic sources via a market - this will be the 1st of many such cases that we will endure going forwards. Controlling something like that is nearing impossible.

>Controlling something like that is nearing impossible.

Why is preventing or reducing the probability nearing impossible?

There are two sources that most people talk about:

1. The Wuhan Institute of Virology

2. A particular market in Wuhan.

However, all we really know is that Wuhan is the first city with a lot of cases. It is entirely possible that the virus, or a virus precursor was active in a small population somewhere else. Also, there are a lot of labs in Wuhan besides the WIV.

I suppose it's possible, but is it likely? Given the virality of Covid if it was present in another city before hand that city would have been the first to get a lot of cases.

It spreads a bit more slowly in rural areas, and there could have been a mutation that increased fitness and spread in humans. There is very little that we can say MUST be true about the origin of Sars-Cov-2

"Covid cases are rising again. In the UK, they have broken through the 200,000 infections-a-day threshold for the first time since April. " -> where are they getting this data? All data online is showing about 18K cases per day.

We're in a post-truth society. Whether something is true or not is irrelevant.

Recently (6/20/2022) our boy Tedros, head of WHO, stated that Lab Leak is the most like explanation for the COVID pandemic.

https://www.indiatvnews.com/news/world/covid-virus-likely-le...

So there's that.

Plus the obviousness of the circumstantial evidence combined with utter lack of evidence for counter-theories, for this going back to 2020.

And finally the evidence that ALL of those who purported the counter-theories were DEEPLY involved in funding Wuhan for exactly this kind of "Gain of Function of Bat Coronavirus" research. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck .... it's a duck.

Why do we ignore history and not consider the possibility that COVID was intentional - by a rogue government or corporate cell, or a individual such as Dr. Bruce Ivins (Amerithrax, Ft. Detrick)?

Okay, but cui bono?

Why do we ignore history and not consider the possibility that COVID was intentional - by a rogue government or corporate cell, or a individual such as Dr. Bruce Ivins (Ft. Detrick)?

The gang’s all here.

But don't worry the 'scientific hive mind of the internet' will now come to correct this, except it's no longer a pointlessly political topic. It's fairly set in stone the blame lies with the chinese state.

Also it's extremely unlikely to kill you if you're under 50 to the point of being not a statistically significant cause of death (unlike guns). But we still need to acrew so much national debt that we might as well have put humans in a space colony as a species...

The people who lied and censored the people who talked about the theory realized that there was just about nothing in this world that showed that it was false, or really true. https://thehill.com/policy/3517712-who-report-on-covid-19-or...

A hypothesis is something that can be disproven. Lab leak was never a hypothesis. It was never more than a talking point. Even just looking at the inconclusive evidence, there was zero indication it was true (the genetic changes between covid 19 and it's natural cousins were random for instance, not targeted as they would be for a man made pathogen).

Lab leak does not require that the pathogen is man made.

It's amazing that ppl still consider China a "bad actor" when they fairly promptly (a little delay but still months of lead time) warned the world and completely stopped the virus within their borders to this very day. The bad actors are the western governments with millions of dead on their hands trying to point the finger anywhere else.

If your post was meant as sarcasm, you should probably call that out.

If it wasn't... wow.

“What happened to it” - as far as I can tell it has passed into common acknowledgement.

It's on the trash heap of nutter conspiracy theories that didn't pan out.

Cloud observations render Giant Watering Can theory obsolete.

Wait the article says there's 200k cases in the U.K everyday now? Why is google reporting way lower? [1]

[1]https://i.imgur.com/u6KABa5.png

Presumably it's based on the ONS estimates.

I guess it is because the UK stopped doing as much testing. Presumably Google is reporting the number of positive tests (or something) and many people with covid don't bother getting tested any more.

The ONS is still doing random sampling and extrapolating to say how many people in the country are infected. "Around 1.7m people in the UK had coronavirus in the week ending 18 June" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51768274

You are misquoting, its estimated infections not cases. Not everyone who has an active infection gets a test and reports it, in fact its a small fraction.

> But what has disappeared is any real or urgent interest from the media and the scientific establishment in finding out how it started.

It is the biological weapon that cant be proved it is a biological weapon.

Its symptoms are particularly nasty in a low humidity environment, like air conditioned vehicles, buildings and desert environments.

Too good to be truth. People will always blame others, even animals, never themselves.

Who are you talking to?

I was full of holes.

> As you may have guessed from our strange spelling, UnHerd aims to do two things: to push back against the herd mentality with new and bold thinking, and to provide a platform for otherwise unheard ideas, people and places.

Ahh yes, definitely the mission statement of a reputable source.

UnHerd has a following among conspiracy theorists, but its journalism is pretty good! E.g. here's an interview with Sajid Javid (UK minister for health) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7yZZKlg-m8

This isn't journalism by contributors to Unherd - it's an (unconvincing) OpEd published on Unherd by two people who are promoting their book.

When the first sentence is factually incorrect, it's tough to read on. The UK doesn't have 200k cases a day, it's less than a tenth of that.

Estimated infection != cases.

The figure is based on this study, which currently puts it at 241K cases per day: https://health-study.joinzoe.com/data

Their source links to https://health-study.joinzoe.com/post/covid-incidence-uk

Which says:

> According to the latest COVID Symptom Study app figures, there are currently 1,472 daily new cases of COVID in the UK on average over the two weeks up to 04 July 2020 (excluding care homes) [*]. The data suggests no decline from last week (1,445 cases). The latest figures were based on the data from almost 3 million users, 11,639 swab tests done between 21 June to 04 July (a full regional breakdown can be found here).

The 241K number is total gibberish. The 7-day average of new cases in the UK topped out at about 214K at the beginning of January, at the top of their Omicron wave, and has been nowhere near that since. It's around 13K right now.

How is that link relevant? We're not in 2020.

It's the source for GP's source. Ask them.

GP didn’t send a link to that particular outdated section within that site.

  July 9, 2020
  This article has not been updated recently

You did. Why?

How are your link and quote related to the « 200k+ cases per day in June 2022 » claim?

If you don’t know yourself, asking GP won’t help.

On the page they link to, in the section the 241k came from, is a link that says "More detail on the analysis". It goes to my link.

I still don't get how that is related to the "The 241K number is total gibberish." statement that follows.

Is it because they should have removed the "More detail on the analysis" link to a no-longer-updated analysis and not removing the link invalidates the latest results somehow?

Or is there anything in that analysis of the results as of two years ago that discredits also everything that came later?

It's the source they're giving for the number, and there's nothing there that indicates it's valid. From every other source unrelated to that one, the UK's numbers have never been as high as they're claiming. Therefore, it's gibberish.

From every other source?

The "Official estimates of incidence of new PCR-positive cases" published by the Office for National Statistics in the latest release of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey [1] add up to 160k per day in the UK for the week from 28 May to 3 June.

The official estimate of people testing positive for COVID-19 has increased strongly since then - almost doubling from 900k for the week 27 May to 2 June to 1740k for the week 11 to 18 June.

A 50% increase in the number of daily new infections in three weeks doesn't seem so implausible and when the official estimate of daily new cases for this week gets published it may not be exactly 241k but it won't be much less. Definitely not an order of magnitude less!

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

Edit: by the way, the official estimate of incidence (daily new cases) from the ONS was over 650k for the week 13 to 19 March.

That's an estimation of unreported cases rather than actual counts. Actual counts are what the rest of us are talking about.

TFA says “Covid cases are rising again. In the UK, they have broken through the 200,000 infections-a-day threshold for the first time since April.”

You can choose to talk about whatever you want but given the 200k figure and April reference it’s quite obvious that they are talking about the total number of infections in the UK - not just the laboratory-confirmed count.

Is it?

I assume it's based on the official surveys:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/24/covid-infectio...

"Overall, it is estimated 1.7 million people in private households across the UK had the virus last week – the highest figure since the end of April."

With less than 20k cases per day you would need to accumulate them for 3 months to get 1.7 million cases.

I will just say this:

Interest in developing and deploying nuclear power dramatically declined after Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl incidents. This lead to an increased reliance on carbon-based energy sources like Coal and Natural Gas, likely killing hundreds of thousands over the years.

I think skittish virologists rightly concluded that a lab-leak mea culpa would have a similar effect on virology and perhaps broader medical research. The author disagrees, but history has shown us what happens.

If Three Mile Island and Chernobyl had been covered up and left to conspiracies the earth would be several degrees cooler right now.

Excuse me, but scientists are not public policy makers. Their job is to follow the evidence, not publish based on what they think will happen if they do.

Scientists are members of society too. They are not automatons.

If scientists do not publish their unbiased results and instead bend their results to fit personal or public expectation, their credentials should be revoked in the name of science itself. There is no greater crime against humanity that to conceal or compromise scientific truth.

Let us know when you have an "unambiguous truth detector" so we can start to revoke credentials. In the meantime, let's understand that scientists frequently allow their personal biases to leak into their papers.

I’m not talking about absolute truth. I am pointing my finger at those “scientists” that falsify or cherry-pick data sets, do not publish results that contradict their organization’s agenda, and similarly commit flagrant acts of dishonesty.

Ah, well, the best you can do is read RetractionWatch and see that a subset of those scientists have been identified, and fired.

And typically scientists are part of the portion of commettes that are unelected that help determine policy designs in the US.

They have one job. It's called "science." They go to school for that.

Other people, including the voting public, have the job of determining policy based on what they find.

If they follow this particular line of evidence (which requires them excepting their own gross negligence) then not only would they be out of a job but may find themselves in jail.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

Total nonsense. Chernobyl was covered up by the most brutal and inhumane regime ever. It's this exact cover up and lack of responsibility that disgusted a lot people and lead to the hatred and fear nuclear energy is drowning in.

There will always be cavemen that will fear what's beyond the cave exit, but they are powerless, albeit vocal, and are not responsible for the stagnation of nuclear research.

Well, I for one am a firm believer in the Labrador-Leak hypothesis. Anyone who disagrees surely is not a TRUE scientist. Just look at the numbers. More labradors than ever before. Statistics never lie. Everybody knows that Labradors are dogs.

What are attempting to communicate with this comment?

If I don’t see health authorities taking lab safety seriously by thoroughly and publicly investigating, why should I believe they take vaccine safety seriously? The framing damages credibility.

Why should you believe they take food safety seriously? Why should you believe they take water quality and treatment seriously? Or the authorities who oversee the safety of aerospace or airbags or what your bank is allowed to do with your savings? Vaccine safety is an awfully specific thing to double down on considering the overwhelmingly broad set of things that you rely on public servants for (specifically ones who regulate health), the very small number of times you need to get a vaccine in your life, and the sheer numbers and public nature of trials around vaccine testing.

Because Western authorities have no power to investigate the Chinese?

What happened is that they are clearly lying to us, and they hold all the evidence. What do you want us to do?

Either they're lying to cover up a lab leak, or they're lying up to but not including about lab leak.

Multiple near-nuclear events happened during the cold war, averted several times only by a single Soviet soldier using his common sense. We didn't find out about that until much much later.

Give it a few decades, and we can hope to find out.

Gulf on Tonkin, anyone?

It's not that I don't care, it's that it's not a fight I believe can be won this decade.

9/11 cost us ~ 3000 lives? And we spent 20 years fighting wars, killing 100s of 1000s of people, bombing the shit out of entire countries, and trillions of dollars in trying to exact revenge.

COVID kills 1,000,000 people (and counting...), which is 333X the death toll from 9/11; and we just shrug and do nothing?

Just doesn't compute.

One is an intentional act by a group of people. The other is, at worst, an accident where the main actor is a molecule.

Where the main actor is a scientific institution funded by public and private money from multiple countries.

How can you ascribe motives if you don't even know the facts? Even if it was an accident, it would be gross negligence and worthy of intense investigation.

My point is that we spent so much effort in response to 9/11, but when COVID happened, we didn't even care to look into what caused the death of 1M Americans, and just took China's word for it.

The bigger problem there is the response to 9/11, not the response to Covid.

Discussion of the "lab leak hypothesis" isn't helpful and has on the contrary done a lot of harm. The problem is that a "lab leak" is understood as something evil, intentional or reckless. The research into bat viruses however is vital. There is also no evidence that Sars-Cov-2 even originated in a bat, much less passed through a laboratory.

> intentional or reckless.

Yes, that would cover all lab leak possibilities, wouldn't it? If we assume the premise of a lab leak, then logically they either they did it on purpose or it was an accident. The union of intentional and reckless gives 100% coverage. You might as well say "the grain silo blew up intentionally or due to recklessness." No shit.

> The research into bat viruses however is vital.

Grain silos are vital to society, but if one blows up accidentally then wouldn't you say it's important to recognize the accident and enact measures to make similar accidents less likely in the future? The importance of grain silos to society is not an argument against investigating the role of negligence in grain silo accidents. If this research killed millions of people by accident, then figuring that out matters so new security measures can be enacted.

Two years and I have yet to read an explanation of what this hypothesis is. Were they careless with a natural virus? Did they modify viruses? Did they release a nature virus on purpose? Did they accidentally release a modified virus? What's modified even mean here, studying random mutation? Engineering things?

It's Schrodinger's Argument. It's all of them and none of them and it always shifts depending on who you're talking to. So I've concluded it's the largest, dumbest motte-and-bailey argument there is.

But at least we can all agree, whatever it is, there's no practical lessons to be taken from it.

> at least we can all agree...

No, we can't all agree. On anything.

Given that the Chinese have shut down investigation, how would you expect anyone to tell you exactly how it happened?

The article tries to define it:

> an accident in a laboratory or during a research field trip

Which, yes, is incredibly vague. I give them credit for at least ruling out the "Evil Chinese Scientists intentionally create and release deadly virus!" bullsh*t.

One plausible "lab" scenario: A baggage-hauling laborer caught the proto-COVID-19 virus in a bat-filled cave during a routine "collect samples of germs from bats" expedition, then unknowingly spread it back in Wuhan.

My opinion: For useful-fact-oriented folks, the Lab Hypothesis is mostly a tedious waste of time. For those motivated by hot-button emotions, attention-seeking, etc., the most lurid and cartoonish versions of the Lab Hypothesis are by far the best. If they can conjure such images in the minds of their audience - withOUT having to spell them out, for reality-checkers to attack - then all the better. Hence the remarkable scarcity of Lab Hypothesis explanations.

Thing is, isn't "during a field trip" actually the zoonotic theory? Ie, if there's a super contagious virus circulating around in bats, and a researcher was in a cave, then went to the market... that's the same as a tourist visiting a cave (as I have done) or a worker harvesting Bird's Next from cave, then selling at the market.

Objectively? Yes. But the moment you involve the lab - even if the only "lab involvement" was some grunt laborer, who harvests guano for fertilizer from the exact same cave on the other 29 days of the month, to feed his family - a whole lot of people's emotions and imaginations go "BOOM!".

The WIV sent workers into remote caves that no other humans routinely entered; you can find many pictures and videos from their expeditions on the Internet. I think their baggage-hauling laborers were mostly grad students, but I agree that an infection of such a laborer is a quite plausible origin for this pandemic--a visit to a remote cave specifically chosen for its diversity of novel viruses is obviously a much higher risk than a cave chosen at random, though it's hard to quantify by how much.

In this scenario, if the WIV's worker had never entered the cave, then the virus would quite possibly never have left the cave. Even if it would have been released later by an infected non-scientist, I'd always rather die later than sooner. (I've seen people arguing sooner is better, because it encourages pandemic preparedness; I guess that's true, in the same sense that reckless drivers encouraged development of automotive airbags. I've never seen a driver make that argument to the judge, though.)

So given the above, do you still think the WIV should have sent the worker into the cave? We're not talking about the whole of virology here, just a tiny subset of high-risk research that so far has provided no significant public benefit.

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