> There is no direct evidence for these zoonotic possibilities, just as there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap
But there is so much more opportunity for the zoonotic possibilities. In fact, this is the seventh time we've seen Betacoronavirus cross from bats, through another animal, and then into humans. SARS came via palm civets. MERS came via camels. Four more types cause a mild cold only and so they don't get sexy names or a deep investigation as to how humans became hosts.
So why would Covid-19 even need to come from a lab? We (humans) had wet markets filled with animals, including the very bats that carry the base virus. It's the perfect breeding ground to create a pandemic-level virus and probably a few thousand more viruses of lesser impact.
> A lab accident — a dropped flask, a needle prick, a mouse bite, an illegibly labeled bottle — is apolitical.
Oh, I disagree. If the root cause is Big Government meddling where they ought not to, that tells us one story. If the root cause is unregulated wet markets with viruses crossing species freely, that tells a very different story.
Smaller government solves one problem, and more regulations solves the other. There are a lot of people who want each story to be the truth.
> So why would Covid-19 even need to come from a lab? We (humans) had wet markets filled with animals, including the very bats that carry the base virus. It's the perfect breeding ground to create a pandemic-level virus and probably a few thousand more viruses of lesser impact.
The question of how it got to Wuhan all the way from Southern China remains unanswered. There weren't any bats sold on the wet markets, nor has any other host animal been identified.
The virologists working in Wuhan did travel all the way to Southern China to collect bat coronavirus samples and they did perform gain-of-function experiments. Viruses - even highly pathogenic ones - have escaped labs on numerous occasions. There is a plausible scenario here.
There is another plausible scenario, which is that "ground zero" for Sars-CoV-2 is actually Southern China, just like Sars-CoV-1. However, the virus wasn't discovered there first, because it didn't cause enough illness. The outbreak in Wuhan, the 9th largest city in China, would've been discovered by chance.
Good points, and I tend to think the 'escaped from a lab' case is at least as strong as the zoonotic one.
A small counterpoint though -- the market is the Huanan market, i.e. specialising in south china sourced or styled food. I would not be surprised if some exotic animals were there but never admitted to.
> The question of how it got to Wuhan all the way from Southern China remains unanswered.
It's also important to remember that the related virus we're talking about in southern China was identified in 2013. More than six years before the outbreak.
It didn't stay still. It hopped around, bat to bat, maybe to other animals. We don't have the history of the virus since then. It could have very well made the jump the humans or some other animal, years ago but only recently made the last few mutations to become the beast it is now.
Plus, it's a virus. It didn't take one path, it took all of them that it could. Each virus created a million more, repeat ad-infinitum.
So the idea that there's some mystery to how it traveled to Wuhan doesn't bother me. Viruses get around.
>>"The virologists working in Wuhan did travel all the way to Southern China to collect bat coronavirus samples and they did perform gain-of-function experiments. Viruses - even highly pathogenic ones - have escaped labs on numerous occasions. There is a plausible scenario here."
Another plausible scenario, in my opinion, is that the virus was brought to Wuhan by the virologists (in the virologist or their helpers) but never escaped from the lab itself.
If you have a bunch of people periodically going to interact with the bats, how improbable is that they get infected of something (unknowingly) on site?
Except this is not just a USA story. The reality is that China is shutting down any research into the origins of the virus - at least by doctors not loyal to the government. They are arresting journalists who don’t tell the story they want to tell.
In the vacuum of information, it’s fair to point out that the market not being the source means something else was - and - there was a lab that had the closest variant to the virus within the same city.
If smallpox broke out in Atlanta, so you think anyone on earth wouldn’t immediately come to the conclusion that the CDC had a accident with their BSl? And there are 14 in the USA. Just one in China - and it’s Wuhan.
Let’s not act like this is a story about American regulation or deregulation.
Never mind that the author is dealing with a country that is committing genocide right now simply because some Muslims believe in Allah and not the state.
SARS has leaked from Chinese labs multiple times. And the only lab in the world specializing in coronaviruses was ~1000 ft away from the first cases. The leaked US diplomatic cables urge the US to help China with this very lab because biosecurity there was so concerning to visiting scientists. It's also the only BSL4 lab in China. In addition the head of that lab has published numerous papers about generic engineering of coronaviruses. That lab also discovered the closest ancestor of COVID.
COVID is also interestingly contagious among minks and ferrets, common lab animals used for serial passage. It's also undergone remarkably little generic drift since the pandemic began. Since the moment it was released it was already human adapted. Extremely suspicious for a brand new virus.
For SARS, MERS, etc we were able to find a 99.9% identical virus in nature. The closest one we have to COVID is 96%, quite distant genetically.
The last time we couldn't find the virus in nature was the 1976 flu pandemic. 20 years later scientists began admitting that it was triggered by a lab leak. When genetic engineering became advanced enough it was obvious that the strain was identical to a pandemic flu strain from the 50's.
In reality, the scientist new from the beginning that the 1976 pandemic was a lab leak but the information was thoroughly suppressed so that the soviet union would cooperate with monitoring. This is exactly what happened with China early in the pandemic. Nobody wanted to criticize people being welded into their homes because China was providing data on the virus. I am completely convinced that this is why the lab leak hypothesis for COVID is being "debunked"
To me there is overwhelming evidence that COVID is a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. IMO the only reason everybody is denying it is the severe political repercussions for China essentially killing more people than WWII. US researchers are co-authors on many of the institutes papers on coronavirus genetic manipulation. The US was funding some of their research, presumably because gain of function research is banned in the states.
Are you referring to the 1976 or 1977 influenza? There is evidence of a lab leak or other human origin for the 1977 strain but the original source was never definitively identified.
> SARS has leaked from Chinese labs multiple times. And the only lab in the world specializing in coronaviruses was ~1000 ft away from the first cases. The leaked US diplomatic cables urge the US to help China with this very lab because biosecurity there was so concerning to visiting scientists. It's also the only BSL4 lab in China. In addition the head of that lab has published numerous papers about generic engineering of coronaviruses. That lab also discovered the closest ancestor of COVID.
Can you kindly cite literally every sentence of this? I googled, but my Google-fu is weak.
The main point here is that the lab escape hypothesis has been hitherto dismissed out of hand when it ought not to be.
I agree that the natural zoonotic contamination hypothesis is more plausible to begin with, but since it has not been confirmed (as in: no natural reservoir has been identified), the less plausible but nonetheless not implausible lab escape hypothesis should still be on the table.
Yes but the jumps typically flame out. This virus has an extremely well adapted human furin site well outside of typical Bat Corona virus. This is more in line with gain of function research.
There are thousands of wet markets in China, but very few virus labs. Out of all the wet markets in China, the virus just happened to originate at the one right next to the virus lab? That alone is enough evidence to make the lab escape theory the most likely origin. Though it's far from certain.
The virus likely didn't originate at the wildlife market, because many of the early patients had no connection to it.
There is a building of the Wuhan CDC (not the WIV) near the wildlife market, but the Wuhan CDC has numerous buildings and this particular one doesn't seem to be implicated in coronavirus research.
There are thousands of wet markets in China, but very few provincial capital cities (Wuhan is one). Out of all the wet markets in China, the virus just happened to originate at the one next to the provincial administrative office? That alone is enough evidence to make the provincial administrative office the most likely origin of the virus, right?
There is circumstantial evidence to indicate that the OC43 beta coronavirus crossed from animals in 1889 and killed about a million people worldwide. It can still be fatal to elderly or immunocompromised patients. The only reason it doesn't kill many people today is that most of us are infected as children and build up a level of immunity, so subsequent reinfections tend to have mild symptoms. Just like SARS-CoV-2.
Perhaps paradoxically the fact that other betacoronaviruses have made the jump to humans naturally, would increase the probability that this was a lab accident: scientists want to study the most likely candidates for a pandemic.
Look up the definition of what a wet market is. for example, most markets in the UK can be classed as wet, as well as many large supermarkets with a meat or fish counter
Also an MIT alum, and in July I was considering the bayesian priors of the situation:
Roll a dice representing all the possible bat-human interaction sites in the world.
How often do you get a result so incredibly close to one of the few sites in the world that intentionally collects these things?
I have worked in clean room environments for years. Everyone eventually has an off day (lack of sleep, usually) where you experience a near miss... (glad I don’t work in bio).
Well, is there anywhere else in China other than Wuhan that could/would identify a new virus like this before it goes mega-exponential?
AIDS, for example, only got flagged because a normally extremely healthy group started appearing with diseases associated with the very old and failing immune systems. And, even then, it took quite a while to figure out that it was a virus.
In the middle of flu season, COVID probably wouldn't flag until your hospitals suddenly fill up for no reason. And even then most people would just write it off as a nasty flu. Otherwise, COVID is just a fairly invisible bump in your mortality rates for people with comorbidities and age. Do you really think China is gonna look too hard into a few extra old and/or sick people dying for some reason?
Given that a full hospital is likely to be the first point where someone will start looking for cause, that really has no relation to origin point.
And, I would argue, China is worse than that. A local party leader in China will absolutely not bump something like COVID up the chain until absolutely forced to. It is quite possible that there were other flare ups that were covered up and the Wuhan one was simply large enough to be uncontainable, close enough to a virology lab to get flagged, and occurred right before Chinese New Year which forced a government response.
I do not have a strong opinion on lab origin vs zoonotic, but I think the idea that the virus didn't originate in Wuhan, or at least very near to Wuhan, is unlikely. China successfully contained COVID — enough to prevent their own population from getting much of it, at least — by implementing draconian lockdown measures for the Hubei province (of which Wuhan is the capital). I know people who had family trapped in Hubei: the highways were shut down and blockaded by government forces. Guards patrolled people entering and leaving their houses and apartments. In some cases, apartment buildings had their doors welded shut to prevent residents from leaving at all.
That didn't happen in Beijing, or Shanghai, or Guangzhou or anywhere else in China, because it didn't need to. The outbreak started somewhere in Hubei. The most likely place of anywhere in Hubei for it to have started is Wuhan, just statistically; it's the largest city, with the most people living in it (not to mention it had the first recorded outbreak). But if it wasn't Wuhan, it was somewhere nearby.
> Well, is there anywhere else in China other than Wuhan that could/would identify a new virus like this before it goes mega-exponential?
As far as I know, the WIV wasn't involved in identifying the virus. That happened in Beijing after weeks of doctors sounding alarm bells about a new disease in Wuhan.
Otherwise, COVID is just a fairly invisible bump in your mortality rates for people with comorbidities and age.
What does the age distribution look like for the Wuhan region? I think I read somewhere that the percentage of old (70+) people is a lot smaller than in e.g. Europe, which might be another data point why this wasn't flagged earlier.
> How often do you get a result so incredibly close to one of the few sites in the world that intentionally collects these things?
Very often for organizations like that who have labs and offices over much of the country. Take a look at the CDC locations for instance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_for_Disease_Control_an...) , if an outbreak were to start anywhere in the US there would be a "suspicious" CDC office nearby.
Even higher when you consider these things tend to be near major cities and that's where a new virus is most likely to be discovered and grow exponentially. It could have been spreading among rural areas for months with no one noticing, until one contagious person travels to a large city.
Except China has only 2 BSL4 labs and though both are in big cities by Western standards, neither are near the costal population centers in which the majority of China actually resides.
This is the geographic dimension, but there is also the time one. The time dimension can seem to link the outbreak to the start of gain-of-function research in labs around the world.
Roll a dice representing all the possible years of bat-human interaction.
How often do you get a result so incredibly close to the start of related gain-of-function research?
Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance researching the origins of pandemics, pointed out in April that nearly 3% of the population in China's rural farming regions near wild animals already had antibodies to coronaviruses similar to SARS. "We're finding 1 to 7 million people exposed to these viruses every year in Southeast Asia; that's the pathway. It's just so obvious to all of us working in the field..."
Daszak and EcoHealth have been working with Shi Zhengli for over 15 years[0]. He is not a neutral observer on this particular issue. And this year he has made a number of statements (like the one you quote) which do nothing to refute the lab leak hypothesis, and which only serve to direct attention elsewhere.
Weren't there antibody studies of people in the US around that same time frame that claimed 30%+ (somewhere in that range if I recall) of the American public already had covid-19? There was some sort of issue with cross-reactivity that later came out. Did the above link take that into account?
Being similar to SARS is not meaningful evidence to draw a conclusion about COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2 virus). His data is from 2015 and cannot possibly indicate that anyone had been afflicted with COVID-19 at that time.
What he is saying is that animal-to-human coronavirus transmission is common - which most people agree upon. ...and possibly implying that there may be cross-immunity protection - also as many suspect.
...but for COVID-19 specifically, there is no evidence that it circulated in rural China prior to entering Wuhan.
...and sadly China is blocking the collection of samples for exactly that sort of serology/antibody analysis.
This is a good, balanced article. I've been of a similar mind for over a year now.
The chances of the CCP releasing a self-harming bioweapon in order to harm the US seems silly. But an accident involving a well-intentioned gain-of-function experiment seems quite possible and was something that the US was concerned about with its own gain-of-function research.
In any case, this, like so much of this other nonsense around Covid [lockdowns in Contra Costa County when the major hospitals were empty-ish; no gradual escalation of lockdown given mid-January knowledge of Covid], seems pretty amenable to a calm, clear analysis...
Hypothesis | Evidence | Likelihood
------------------------------+----------------------------------------+-----------------
CCP Virus | [That'd be 360 degree dumb of the CCP] | *low*
Gain of function lab accident | [Existing concerns and experience] | *moderate*
Zoonotic transfer | [No likely vector for extant virus] | *moderate-low*
The "likely vector" would be the millions of peasants living near bat caves in rural China (who actually have already been shown to have antibodies to bat viruses). And some of whom traveled to the market.
So I would upgrade that quite a bit from "moderate-low." (One of the researchers in this NPR article seems to rate it as an obvious suspect, so I'd call that "high likelihood.")
Those millions of peasants living near bat caves would have traveled to thousands of markets all over China, but the virus originated at the one market in China that is basically across the street from a virus lab? It's not impossible, but my money is on the lab.
According to the article, the bat caves are nearly a thousand miles away. It seems unlikely peasants were traveling a thousand miles for the purpose of visting the market.
It also presents some reasons why bat viruses on their own were unlikely to become as contagious as COVID, citing the example of RaTG13's discovery.
So the "zoonotic transfer from bats" theory requires an extraordinary new strain (possible!) to travel a thousand miles before spreading enough to be detected.
Many people over estimate our capabilities regarding manipulation of biological systems. A gain function is extremely difficult to get right. It is more likely that zoonotic transfer occurred. Either within a wet market or people operating in that industry or a lab worker accidentally exposing him/herself.
Sequence analysis show a unique mutation that increased receptor binding affinity that was not predicted by previous models. It just shows, nature knows best.
I find this debate extremely stupid. We always known that as natural habitats are being encroached upon, the more likely diseases like this will emerge. By focusing on our human conspiracies, I am afraid we will ignore Nature's conspiracy to get us.
Yet another hypothesis being pushed by the CCP party-state is the seafood imports hypothesis. Although the motivation behind CCP's push is questionable, this hypothesis shall be treated seriously, given that in the early investigation before the ban, signs of the virus were detected at stores selling seafood instead of stores selling illegal games.
The third most common death from firearms in the USA is accidental discharge. This is where people have firearms, are trained in using them, but some circumstance led to the firearm being discharged without intent and injuring or killing someone.
There’s every reason to believe that a country attempting to develop bio weapons may accidentally release that bio weapon against its own people for the same reason: mistakes were made.
It may also be the case that the bio weapon was successfully deployed in the USA months before some unsuspecting American went on their tour of China thinking they will get over that mild flu in the clean air of Wuhan.
The USA health care system is basically designed to ensure that a pandemic will spread as quickly as possible, since the expense of medical care means people will actively avoid seeing a doctor unless they are literally dying.
So engineer a virus that affects wet membranes, limit its symptoms to “mild flu” and you will get maximal transmission even without propaganda suggesting that no action needs to be taken to control the disease because it’s not really that bad.
So in this hypothetical scenario it is not “360 dumb of the CCP” at all. They know how dangerous it is and how to contain it when it inevitably arrives on their shores. They have a vaccine but they won’t use it until a believable amount of time has passed. The future of warfare isn’t drones circling in the skies with guns pointed at the people on the ground.
COVID is a terrible bioweapon. It's fragile, with an outer lipid membrane that has to be preserved. It's not very lethal to people of military age, and spreads readily between people making collateral damage inevitable.
Many of the "accidental discharge" deaths are actually intentional suicides or homicides but the investigators just couldn't prove what happened. And unfortunately it's common for people with no real training to possess firearms.
Not disagreeing with your Likelihoods but I'm not sure your evidence really makes sense. It does not really follow that a self-harm would always be avoided, the game of chess is all about sacrifice. Perhaps China thinks the West is short-sighted and would be politically bound to act against its long term interest, so why not? Maybe there are other reasons why you think the "CCP Virus" hypothesis is 360 stupid besides "self-harm"?
Wouldn't it be way easier and more logical to start the infection on a foreign soil? All the previous similar epidemics were successfully contained before reaching Europe, and if there was not for quite serious fuck ups in the beginning (Italian dude not even showing up on the meetings, etc.) perhaps even this one could have been stopped early on. So if it was China wanting to hurt US, then they'd have to be seriously stupid to first infect themselves and hope it will somehow reach US over Europe. It'd be like a terrorist who sends a bomb to their own address in hope that it will somehow eventually reach their enemies. It makes zero sense.
This is not my literal belief; it is only a logical extension of the discussion so . . .
If covid mostly kills old or otherwise compromised individuals then a socialist country could see it in their interest to release a virus that eliminates the least productive part of the population. It would not be as much self harm as an exercise to increase the strength of the whole.
]] Dr. Paabo said the DNA segment may account in part for why people of Bangladeshi descent are dying at a high rate of Covid-19 in the United Kingdom.
Back in March or so, I wrote a comment about this [1], citing some even earlier (January 2020-ish) HN commentary.
My conclusion: Lab leak's not inconsistent with the evidence, but there's no smoking gun.
China's behavior is highly suggestive of guilt -- the moving location on Google Maps, destroying records, and not permitting any outside investigation.
However, China could actually be completely innocent and just doing things that make them look guilty, because "we need to do something to get people to stop talking about this" may be a strong motive of their government.
For the record, personally I'm a little cheesed off that our politicians aren't making a bigger deal out of this. (E.g. give China a binary choice: Pick one, either (a) provide us a complete explanation of why you did the things that make you look guilty and let us see some evidence to back up that explanation, or (b) we'll assume it was negligence, and try to recover the costs of the virus by putting a ton of tariffs on your goods.) I don't even think Trump's said the words "Chinese virus" for months.
But who knows, maybe world powers have some secret agreements about how to handle bioweapon accidents? Maybe China's people and our people got together back in March or April, they privately admitted it was an accident and privately made some concessions, on the condition we don't publicly blame them, keep everything they said super classified for at least 70 years, and they don't publicly criticize US bioweapons programs if we don't criticize theirs? I'm just guessing here, but it seems plausible.
The one new argument I've heard only today is the argument "But how did it get all the way from where wild bats are to Wuhan?" (From two different sources, OP is one of them, I believe the other one was from CBS News on Youtube.)
> Maybe China's people and our people got together back in March or April, they privately admitted it was an accident and privately made some concessions, on the condition we don't publicly blame them, keep everything they said super classified for at least 70 years, and they don't publicly criticize US bioweapons programs if we don't criticize theirs?
Not true. State friendly media and even state media here in China regularly push the narrative of foreign origin. They even claimed this a US bioweapon during height of their bullsh*t. And yes, a non-insignificant amount of people buy into this (data point of two: my parents).
Note that China intentionally fudges all locations, apparently you can see that in HK (where Maps is available), locations across the border are completely wrong (in the sea, etc)
Western countries (and particularly the US) have been conducting similar research for years. Despite imposing bans and other restrictions on their own soil, they may want the option to continue doing this in less regulated places, e.g. China. In the same way and for the same reasons that our manufacturers have outsourced hazardous production processes to less regulated countries. Personally I think it needs to be banned everywhere, urgently, and an inspection regime imposed.
The US may also have been complicit in this particular experiment. There was a lot of collaboration with Chinese researchers working in US labs and the US sponsoring the WIV, etc.
I would implore those who are skeptical of a lab leak hypothesis to listen to the evolutionary biologist Bret Weinsteins Darkhorse Podcast with Yuri Deigin on the subject:
The podcast is a much easier listen then the deep dive that is in the article. All in all, the facts do not rule out lab leak, and there are definitely mysteries to explain.
Deigin conflates RNA samples with viral isolates that can be used to infect lab animals. Weinstein seems to be stuck on bat respiratory disease that spreads in roosting caves. He does not consider gastrointestinal infections spread by bat guano at night in their feeding range which is shared by nocturnal/arboreal pangolins and palm civets. Bat to human direct infection is also just as plausible near the horseshoe bat’s natural habitat.
The Barker article is confused about a 7-hour train ride not being compatible with a 4.5 day average incubation period.
I see no mysteries to explain just the hard work of animal surveillance required to connect the dots.
And the well adapted to humans furin site is just plain luck? Its not like this has not happen before, SARS like virus's have crossed species within modern history that we have detected, and they all flame out eventually. I'm no virologist, but I believe its typically because of selection pressure and the mutations needed to start to adapt to humans don't come easily once a jump occurs, it usually takes a few jumps to get it right. This one came out already well adapted to humans and has a furin site not seen in other bat corona viruses, plus 4 additional amino acid chains that give it even more ability to infect cells. This is why Elon Musk got egg on his face for making the prediction that it would be over within a few months, that was based on past outbreaks.
Bret is very clear that yes, this can happen naturally, but the chances are very slim that such a alignment of events occurred in proximity to a lab that was performing gain of function research which does this very thing of combining aspects of multiple viruses and rapidly adapting them in either other animal hosts or petri dishes of cells, including human cells.
Note that Bret is also a bit of a contrarian with a habit of 'just asking questions' (It is not clear their was substantial fraud in the 2020 U.S. election, but it is clear there is valid reason for concern. Why is there not broad, bipartisan interest in finding out?)
Doesn't mean he's necessarily wrong, and many of his takes are pretty reasonable, but personally, I nevertheless do take his opinions with an additional grain of salt...
To update your reference class of how likely this is and what kind of countries this can happen in— one or more of the outbreaks of foot and mouth disease in the UK were caused by lab leaks.
This is from a country that lets its state officials run wild with claims that it was imported from the US army into Wuhan, while keeping a tight enough leash to disappear any citizen when they cross arbitrary lines, and whose official line is now that it came to Wuhan through imported frozen seafood. We'll never know the origins, realistically.
Readit News
But there is so much more opportunity for the zoonotic possibilities. In fact, this is the seventh time we've seen Betacoronavirus cross from bats, through another animal, and then into humans. SARS came via palm civets. MERS came via camels. Four more types cause a mild cold only and so they don't get sexy names or a deep investigation as to how humans became hosts.
So why would Covid-19 even need to come from a lab? We (humans) had wet markets filled with animals, including the very bats that carry the base virus. It's the perfect breeding ground to create a pandemic-level virus and probably a few thousand more viruses of lesser impact.
> A lab accident — a dropped flask, a needle prick, a mouse bite, an illegibly labeled bottle — is apolitical.
Oh, I disagree. If the root cause is Big Government meddling where they ought not to, that tells us one story. If the root cause is unregulated wet markets with viruses crossing species freely, that tells a very different story.
Smaller government solves one problem, and more regulations solves the other. There are a lot of people who want each story to be the truth.
The question of how it got to Wuhan all the way from Southern China remains unanswered. There weren't any bats sold on the wet markets, nor has any other host animal been identified.
The virologists working in Wuhan did travel all the way to Southern China to collect bat coronavirus samples and they did perform gain-of-function experiments. Viruses - even highly pathogenic ones - have escaped labs on numerous occasions. There is a plausible scenario here.
There is another plausible scenario, which is that "ground zero" for Sars-CoV-2 is actually Southern China, just like Sars-CoV-1. However, the virus wasn't discovered there first, because it didn't cause enough illness. The outbreak in Wuhan, the 9th largest city in China, would've been discovered by chance.
A small counterpoint though -- the market is the Huanan market, i.e. specialising in south china sourced or styled food. I would not be surprised if some exotic animals were there but never admitted to.
It's also important to remember that the related virus we're talking about in southern China was identified in 2013. More than six years before the outbreak.
It didn't stay still. It hopped around, bat to bat, maybe to other animals. We don't have the history of the virus since then. It could have very well made the jump the humans or some other animal, years ago but only recently made the last few mutations to become the beast it is now.
Plus, it's a virus. It didn't take one path, it took all of them that it could. Each virus created a million more, repeat ad-infinitum.
So the idea that there's some mystery to how it traveled to Wuhan doesn't bother me. Viruses get around.
Another plausible scenario, in my opinion, is that the virus was brought to Wuhan by the virologists (in the virologist or their helpers) but never escaped from the lab itself.
If you have a bunch of people periodically going to interact with the bats, how improbable is that they get infected of something (unknowingly) on site?
There are coronavirus-carrying bats in Hubei province.
In the vacuum of information, it’s fair to point out that the market not being the source means something else was - and - there was a lab that had the closest variant to the virus within the same city.
If smallpox broke out in Atlanta, so you think anyone on earth wouldn’t immediately come to the conclusion that the CDC had a accident with their BSl? And there are 14 in the USA. Just one in China - and it’s Wuhan.
Let’s not act like this is a story about American regulation or deregulation.
What they want to cover up is any hint of fault. They want everyone to stay in line and question nothing, regardless of anything else.
I just don't think there's any real evidence of this being a man made pandemic either.
COVID is also interestingly contagious among minks and ferrets, common lab animals used for serial passage. It's also undergone remarkably little generic drift since the pandemic began. Since the moment it was released it was already human adapted. Extremely suspicious for a brand new virus.
For SARS, MERS, etc we were able to find a 99.9% identical virus in nature. The closest one we have to COVID is 96%, quite distant genetically.
The last time we couldn't find the virus in nature was the 1976 flu pandemic. 20 years later scientists began admitting that it was triggered by a lab leak. When genetic engineering became advanced enough it was obvious that the strain was identical to a pandemic flu strain from the 50's.
In reality, the scientist new from the beginning that the 1976 pandemic was a lab leak but the information was thoroughly suppressed so that the soviet union would cooperate with monitoring. This is exactly what happened with China early in the pandemic. Nobody wanted to criticize people being welded into their homes because China was providing data on the virus. I am completely convinced that this is why the lab leak hypothesis for COVID is being "debunked"
To me there is overwhelming evidence that COVID is a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. IMO the only reason everybody is denying it is the severe political repercussions for China essentially killing more people than WWII. US researchers are co-authors on many of the institutes papers on coronavirus genetic manipulation. The US was funding some of their research, presumably because gain of function research is banned in the states.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/
https://mbio.asm.org/content/6/4/e01013-15.full
Can you kindly cite literally every sentence of this? I googled, but my Google-fu is weak.
This is also not the first time a lab leak caused an outbreak, the 2004 SARS outbreak was caused by a lab leak [1]
[1]: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...
I agree that the natural zoonotic contamination hypothesis is more plausible to begin with, but since it has not been confirmed (as in: no natural reservoir has been identified), the less plausible but nonetheless not implausible lab escape hypothesis should still be on the table.
I’m not sure how that translates to “dismissed out of hand”.
There is a building of the Wuhan CDC (not the WIV) near the wildlife market, but the Wuhan CDC has numerous buildings and this particular one doesn't seem to be implicated in coronavirus research.
It was in fact a full seven miles away.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/01/covid-19-bioweapon/
That's not in evidence.
>Bats were initially suggested to be the source of the virus, although it remains unclear if bats were sold there (Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market).
>Despite the role that the market played in the pandemic, it is yet unclear whether the novel coronavirus outbreak started in the market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanan_Seafood_Wholesale_Marke...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06199
Deleted Comment
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/
No wet markets here where I am ... so maybe speak for yourself.
The fact that there is China's first biosaftey level 4 lab in the same town where the virus originated doesn't arouse any suspicion whatsoever?
Roll a dice representing all the possible bat-human interaction sites in the world.
How often do you get a result so incredibly close to one of the few sites in the world that intentionally collects these things?
I have worked in clean room environments for years. Everyone eventually has an off day (lack of sleep, usually) where you experience a near miss... (glad I don’t work in bio).
AIDS, for example, only got flagged because a normally extremely healthy group started appearing with diseases associated with the very old and failing immune systems. And, even then, it took quite a while to figure out that it was a virus.
In the middle of flu season, COVID probably wouldn't flag until your hospitals suddenly fill up for no reason. And even then most people would just write it off as a nasty flu. Otherwise, COVID is just a fairly invisible bump in your mortality rates for people with comorbidities and age. Do you really think China is gonna look too hard into a few extra old and/or sick people dying for some reason?
Given that a full hospital is likely to be the first point where someone will start looking for cause, that really has no relation to origin point.
And, I would argue, China is worse than that. A local party leader in China will absolutely not bump something like COVID up the chain until absolutely forced to. It is quite possible that there were other flare ups that were covered up and the Wuhan one was simply large enough to be uncontainable, close enough to a virology lab to get flagged, and occurred right before Chinese New Year which forced a government response.
That didn't happen in Beijing, or Shanghai, or Guangzhou or anywhere else in China, because it didn't need to. The outbreak started somewhere in Hubei. The most likely place of anywhere in Hubei for it to have started is Wuhan, just statistically; it's the largest city, with the most people living in it (not to mention it had the first recorded outbreak). But if it wasn't Wuhan, it was somewhere nearby.
As far as I know, the WIV wasn't involved in identifying the virus. That happened in Beijing after weeks of doctors sounding alarm bells about a new disease in Wuhan.
What does the age distribution look like for the Wuhan region? I think I read somewhere that the percentage of old (70+) people is a lot smaller than in e.g. Europe, which might be another data point why this wasn't flagged earlier.
Very often for organizations like that who have labs and offices over much of the country. Take a look at the CDC locations for instance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_for_Disease_Control_an...) , if an outbreak were to start anywhere in the US there would be a "suspicious" CDC office nearby.
Even higher when you consider these things tend to be near major cities and that's where a new virus is most likely to be discovered and grow exponentially. It could have been spreading among rural areas for months with no one noticing, until one contagious person travels to a large city.
Roll a dice representing all the possible years of bat-human interaction.
How often do you get a result so incredibly close to the start of related gain-of-function research?
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296...
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02473-4
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What he is saying is that animal-to-human coronavirus transmission is common - which most people agree upon. ...and possibly implying that there may be cross-immunity protection - also as many suspect.
...but for COVID-19 specifically, there is no evidence that it circulated in rural China prior to entering Wuhan.
...and sadly China is blocking the collection of samples for exactly that sort of serology/antibody analysis.
The chances of the CCP releasing a self-harming bioweapon in order to harm the US seems silly. But an accident involving a well-intentioned gain-of-function experiment seems quite possible and was something that the US was concerned about with its own gain-of-function research.
In any case, this, like so much of this other nonsense around Covid [lockdowns in Contra Costa County when the major hospitals were empty-ish; no gradual escalation of lockdown given mid-January knowledge of Covid], seems pretty amenable to a calm, clear analysis...
Doesn't seem too difficult...https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296...
So I would upgrade that quite a bit from "moderate-low." (One of the researchers in this NPR article seems to rate it as an obvious suspect, so I'd call that "high likelihood.")
It also presents some reasons why bat viruses on their own were unlikely to become as contagious as COVID, citing the example of RaTG13's discovery.
So the "zoonotic transfer from bats" theory requires an extraordinary new strain (possible!) to travel a thousand miles before spreading enough to be detected.
Sequence analysis show a unique mutation that increased receptor binding affinity that was not predicted by previous models. It just shows, nature knows best.
I find this debate extremely stupid. We always known that as natural habitats are being encroached upon, the more likely diseases like this will emerge. By focusing on our human conspiracies, I am afraid we will ignore Nature's conspiracy to get us.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06199
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There’s every reason to believe that a country attempting to develop bio weapons may accidentally release that bio weapon against its own people for the same reason: mistakes were made.
It may also be the case that the bio weapon was successfully deployed in the USA months before some unsuspecting American went on their tour of China thinking they will get over that mild flu in the clean air of Wuhan.
The USA health care system is basically designed to ensure that a pandemic will spread as quickly as possible, since the expense of medical care means people will actively avoid seeing a doctor unless they are literally dying.
So engineer a virus that affects wet membranes, limit its symptoms to “mild flu” and you will get maximal transmission even without propaganda suggesting that no action needs to be taken to control the disease because it’s not really that bad.
So in this hypothetical scenario it is not “360 dumb of the CCP” at all. They know how dangerous it is and how to contain it when it inevitably arrives on their shores. They have a vaccine but they won’t use it until a believable amount of time has passed. The future of warfare isn’t drones circling in the skies with guns pointed at the people on the ground.
What is the fourth most common death from firearms in the USA?
If covid mostly kills old or otherwise compromised individuals then a socialist country could see it in their interest to release a virus that eliminates the least productive part of the population. It would not be as much self harm as an exercise to increase the strength of the whole.
But to harm someone else?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/04/health/coronavirus-neande...
]] Dr. Paabo said the DNA segment may account in part for why people of Bangladeshi descent are dying at a high rate of Covid-19 in the United Kingdom.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/oios-tan0930...
]] IMAGE: THESE GENETIC VARIANTS ARE ALMOST COMPLETELY ABSENT IN AFRICA AND OCCUR IN THE HIGHEST FREQUENCY IN BANGLADESH.
https://media.eurekalert.org/multimedia_prod/pub/web/244496_...
My conclusion: Lab leak's not inconsistent with the evidence, but there's no smoking gun.
China's behavior is highly suggestive of guilt -- the moving location on Google Maps, destroying records, and not permitting any outside investigation.
However, China could actually be completely innocent and just doing things that make them look guilty, because "we need to do something to get people to stop talking about this" may be a strong motive of their government.
For the record, personally I'm a little cheesed off that our politicians aren't making a bigger deal out of this. (E.g. give China a binary choice: Pick one, either (a) provide us a complete explanation of why you did the things that make you look guilty and let us see some evidence to back up that explanation, or (b) we'll assume it was negligence, and try to recover the costs of the virus by putting a ton of tariffs on your goods.) I don't even think Trump's said the words "Chinese virus" for months.
But who knows, maybe world powers have some secret agreements about how to handle bioweapon accidents? Maybe China's people and our people got together back in March or April, they privately admitted it was an accident and privately made some concessions, on the condition we don't publicly blame them, keep everything they said super classified for at least 70 years, and they don't publicly criticize US bioweapons programs if we don't criticize theirs? I'm just guessing here, but it seems plausible.
The one new argument I've heard only today is the argument "But how did it get all the way from where wild bats are to Wuhan?" (From two different sources, OP is one of them, I believe the other one was from CBS News on Youtube.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22805043
My view for China's actions is that they're likely by individual bureaucrats trying to hide their own incompetence from everyone
Not true. State friendly media and even state media here in China regularly push the narrative of foreign origin. They even claimed this a US bioweapon during height of their bullsh*t. And yes, a non-insignificant amount of people buy into this (data point of two: my parents).
Note that China intentionally fudges all locations, apparently you can see that in HK (where Maps is available), locations across the border are completely wrong (in the sea, etc)
The US may also have been complicit in this particular experiment. There was a lot of collaboration with Chinese researchers working in US labs and the US sponsoring the WIV, etc.
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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bret-weinstein-and-yur...
Related article by Deigin:
https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
The podcast is a much easier listen then the deep dive that is in the article. All in all, the facts do not rule out lab leak, and there are definitely mysteries to explain.
The Barker article is confused about a 7-hour train ride not being compatible with a 4.5 day average incubation period.
I see no mysteries to explain just the hard work of animal surveillance required to connect the dots.
Bret is very clear that yes, this can happen naturally, but the chances are very slim that such a alignment of events occurred in proximity to a lab that was performing gain of function research which does this very thing of combining aspects of multiple viruses and rapidly adapting them in either other animal hosts or petri dishes of cells, including human cells.
Doesn't mean he's necessarily wrong, and many of his takes are pretty reasonable, but personally, I nevertheless do take his opinions with an additional grain of salt...
2007: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2007/08/report-l...
2011: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/countryside-i...