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Comment by fsh | Hacker News Reader

There is zero evidence for this theory. On the other hand, we know that dangeous viruses emerge from farms every couple of decades (see above). I find it prudent to focus on the known risk, rather than speculate on a hypothetical one.

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There is quite a lot of evidence, it's a lie to say otherwise. I don't think there's a smoking gun, but there is a tremendous amount of circumstantial evidence.

Some of it was outlined nicely here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid...

(Although you're not wrong about the disease risks of factory farming.)

I can't find a single piece of evidence in the article. These Gish gallops of utter bullshit have really poisoned the public debate.

Okay, now you're just being disingenuous. There is plenty of actual evidence and a timeline of events in the linked article, and that's not what "Gish gallop" means.

Amusing to see the NY Times, which hysterically screamed about misinformation and its dangers for several years during a certain pandemic and a certain presidency, now doing a neat 180-degree turn on the lab leak theory from its previous and blatantly political stance. The same paper, by the way, that also lovingly supported the WMD claims against Iraq during the Bush administration. I personally believe the lab leak theory extremely plausible, but the general and persistent mendacity and hypocrisy of this particular newspaper are staggeringly massive enough to form their own gravitational field..

The narrative grifters posing as reporters and editors at the NY Times robustly deserve every ounce of scorn that can be dumped upon them.

I'm still on the fence about the origins of COVID, but I generally disregard an opinion when a comment attacks a publication rather than facts, uses phrases like "hysterically screamed".

One can agree with the plausibility of a publication's argument in one articule (as I actually do in this case) and still make a general point about the nature and tendencies of the wider publication/media organization behind it. This is an obvious thing, and nitpicking about it is ridiculous. The NY Times has indeed performed many internally, centrally guided ideological contortions to suit its own cynical motives (like many other media sources do) and absolutely deserves being called out on its bullshittery.

This is not a NYT article, it is an opinion piece written by a third-party author. The NYT editors often don't apply very strict journalistic standards to opinion pieces. This is an (in my opinion somewhat misguided) attempt to be "neutral".

Really? So it's not an article written for the New York Times despite being an article posted on the website of the New York Times? Are opinion pieces, which indeed do get vetted too, somehow categorized as things that randomly form into existence within their own rules of causation, as if they were like sinkholes or lightning strikes?

Also, to clarify better, I guess, I don't disagree with the plausibility of the arguments in this particular piece. My main point was about the NY Times in general and its past actions.

> there is a tremendous amount of circumstantial evidence.

In other words, there's literally no scientific evidence that SARS-CoV2 and the pandemic emerged as the result of lab-based activity, either malicious or accidental. This is despite huge efforts to prove so.

There is, however, a wealth of scientific evidence that SARS-CoV2 is the result of zoonotic transmission, as has been seen for similar viruses in the past (SARS, MERS), as well as for hundreds of other pathogens throughout history.

> wealth of scientific evidence that SARS-CoV2 is the result of zoonotic transmission

No there isn't. Just speculation, so in the same category with the lab-leak theory.

The host animal has not been found. Nor patient zero.

Isn't it interesting, that in 5 years China could put out a detailed timeline of what happened, who got infected where?

You're correct that the immediate host animal hasn't been found. But that problem also applies to the lab leak hypothesis, since there's no evidence in the genome of SARS-CoV2 that it is an artificial virus. It is in fact over 95% similar to similar viruses isolated in the wild.

The first patients were all associated with the market, and genetic evidence shows that the virus was circulating there for weeks (at least) before the first recognized case of covid. That is consistent with what we now know, i.e. that most SARS-CoV2 infections do not lead to severe disease.

This is a lie. There is plenty of evidence. What has no evidence is that it transferred from an animal. There is zero evidence for that. It’s been over 4 years and they haven’t found the source yet which has never happened before.

It’s weird you are religiously and piously pushing a line of thinking that is essentially dead among not only scientists except Fauci and Dasak but every class of political belief as well.

I find it difficult to understand how you’re still propagating the “Wet Market Theory”. Please further explain why you don’t believe that COVID-19 did not emerge from a laboratory.

During the first month of the covid-19 outbreak, there were no cases within a 15 mile radius of the WIV lab south of the river. Zero. All the people infected had been within 200 meters of the wet market north of the river.

We know that farm-raised animals in China pick up coronavirus infections from wild animals such as rodents. The 2002 SARS epidemic started from natural animal-to-human transmission, in an animal-handling complex, with a naturally occurring coronavirus. If there had been a second outbreak of the same SARS virus in Wuhan in 2019, at the Wuhan wet market, would you decide that the sars-cov-1 came from natural transmission from animals?

When a milkmaid picks up a cowpox infection, do we run around screaming that there's no proof the cows had cowpox? When a person who works with animals develops rabies, do we assume that he was not bitten?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid...

https://archive.is/pyJaF

The comment was about evidence, you've linked one opinion of Dr. Alina Chan who has also written about how it was not a lab leak origin - she literally made cases early on for either side of a possibilty.

To this day the lab leak theory is plausible (literally "low confidence" probability in the DoE report) with no real evidence and the weight of opinion on the wet market origin side.

Consider that if there was any actual solid irrefutable evidence that COVID did come from a lab leak then Saar Wilf would not have lost $100,000.

He was convinced it was true, put money in escrow, organised a debate, set the rules, and then .. lost.

https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses...

What is the non-zero evidence that SARS-COV-2 originated from a farm? What is that farm? What were they farming?

There is no direct evidence. Due to the experience with SARS-CoV-1 and fear of repercussions, farmers in China mass-culled susceptible animals before any testing could take place. However, SARS-CoV-1 was traced to palm civets, and both -1 and -2 seem to be very well adapted to small carnivores. So a fur/meat farm with civets, raccoon dogs, minks, or something like that is probably a good guess for the origin.

But not the laboratories doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in the exact vicinity of the virus’s origin? Even considering that several workers of this laboratory got sick with COVID in 2019, right before the outbreak? C’mon, it’s been 4 years already, this is becoming ridiculous.

I don't find this convincing at all.

Pandemics need high population densities to start, so it is very likely to have the origin in a large city. Even if a virus did emerge in a smaller city, it would probably fizzle out without raising alarm and being detected. At the same time, large cities in industrialized countries usually have at least one virology lab. I could easily find one in each of the top-10 most populous Chinese cities (which includes Wuhan). SARS is relatively new and hit China pretty hard, so it is also not surprising to have a lot of research in the country. Overall, it would probably be more surprising not to have a SARS research group close to the origin of a pandemic.

The lab worker story is bunk. According to the institute itself, no COVID antibodies were found in a serology study of the workers (see page 119 in https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/final-j...).

You’re linking a study from early 2021, which is before the admissions began to start. The WHO was dishonest throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, at this point in time this is well-known.

The Wuhan Virology Institute is in the heart of the city, and a quick Google search shows a population of 11 million in 2018. Is this not a large city?

I find it seriously troubling that people still believe the nonsense spewed about COVID-19 and it’s origins in 2020-21.

The WIV is 17 miles away from the wet market outbreak and they are on opposite sides of the river. The WIV did not do any gain of function experiments during 2019. Within a 15 mile radius of the WIV there were no covid cases during 2019. If lab workers had been the origin, the outbreak would have started near the lab, but it did not start near the lab.

So you accuse me of presenting a theory with zero hard evidence (lab leak), only to immediately admit that your theory (zoonotic origin) also has zero hard evidence.

And then you shift the discussion to SARS-CoV-1.

I like how you operate.

It's 2024, you obviously missed the Ministry of Truth updating the status of the lab leak hypothese from "conspiracy theory" to "that's what happened (PS: China bad)".

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