Conspiracy theories aside, Worebey's Science paper is not unanimously well received by the scientific community, and the data analysis was shown to be partly flawed.
"Animals infected with SARS-CoV-2 have been documented around the world. Most of these animals became infected after contact with people with COVID-19, including owners, caretakers, or others who were in close contact. We don’t yet know all of the animals that can get infected. Animals reported infected worldwide include ..."
Plenty of animals have been found to positive for Covid - and the animal cages in the market had numerous environmental positive samples. I think you mean that no source animals have been found -- but if the timeline in this paper is right, the zoonotic jump happened in late November and they didn't shut down the market and start testing until almost a month later -- so a strong case of "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence"
> It also raises eyebrows the fact that no animal has ever been found to be positive for COVID, in contrast to all of the previous SARS pandemics.
This doesn't really mean very much.
It took something like 15 years to find the bat population likely to have been the source of SARS-CoV-1. It's not like we were able to say definitively how the spillover began; it's all probabilities.
We have found similar viruses to SARS-CoV-2 floating around in pangolins and bats.
> It took something like 15 years to find the bat population likely to have been the source of SARS-CoV-1.
This is true but misleading. It took a long time to find the reservoir host (i.e., the animal in which most of the virus evolved) for SARS-1, but the proximal host (i.e., the animal that actually infected the first humans) was found within about a year.
Based on the WIV's pre-pandemic research, we knew immediately that the reservoir host of SARS-CoV-2 is bats. We still haven't found the proximal host. It's almost certainly not pangolins, and Nature eventually published an extensive correction to their pangolin paper.
Are you sure COVID has never been documented in animals? I seem to remember reading about cases where entire farm populations of minks were being killed. Perhaps you mean infection from an animal host to human?
One problem in these kinds of investigations is that nobody involved really wants the truth to be known. The lab isn't going to let anyone poke around and see what it was doing until the CPP falls. And even then records have probably been wiped already.
The problem is that there really isn't any evidence. SARS-COV-2 has never been detected in any Chinese land animals associated with the market. We know that birds can transmit it, but it needs to come from somewhere. There's no reservoir of the stuff found in the wild...unlike viruses like Ebola, Marburg, MERS, etc.
There were two variants in the market...but given the speed at which SARS-COV-2 variants have mutated in humans, well, how likely is it that the market was the source? SARS-COV-2 went through millions of humans before the first variant popped out. Is it reasonable to assume that some progenitor virus went though millions of iterations to become SARS-COV-2 in the market, then did it again and again?
But however unlikely, this is where we are today. Was it just bad luck that some virus entered an immuno-compromised animal at the market and mutated...twice?
> SARS-COV-2 has never been detected in any Chinese land animals associated with the market.
They acted very quickly to sterilize the market which eliminated the evidence.
In SARS-1 the market associated with that was allowed to operate until investigators were able to take samples from the animals there and find the related virus.
As a containment measure this was probably the right reflex to have, as an investigative measure this was highly counterproductive. If, however, you are one of the people who blame China for not acting fast enough to contain the spread then you can't criticize them for this.
> There's no reservoir of the stuff found in the wild...unlike viruses like Ebola, Marburg, MERS, etc.
MERS just happened to be very easy since we sampled the camels and they were positive and sitting right there with lots of human contact. In the case of SARS-1 the actual progenitor virus was only found 10 years later in bats in Yunnan. With Ebola the species that harbors the virus has actually yet to be determined, decades later. Marburg was first discovered in 1967 and was only isolated from Egyptian fruit bats in 2009, 42 years later.
I think you're vastly underestimating how hard it is to track down animal reservoirs, and with the reservoir of Ebola still being unknown 46 years after it was discovered kind of undermines your entire point.
We also now have the BANAL viruses found in bats in Laos which are getting closer and closer to a match to SARS-CoV-2, which is actually good progress after only 2-3 years (it would actually be highly suspicious if someone found the 99% homologous bat progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 after only a few years of looking, that would suggest that China knew where it was all along -- actual science that isn't on the TV or movies is quite difficult and usually a lengthy needle-in-a-haystack process as all of these examples show).
I'm not really disagreeing, but isn't comparing Ebola and Marburg to SARSes a bit apples-to-bananas?
Ebola and Marburg for decades were quite rare. Incredibly deadly, but an outbreak would affect a few tens of people, and invariably in remote locations. By the time the epidemiologists arrived, the outbreak was waning.
Clearly the Ebola outbreak in 2010s was much bigger, but that was the first such large outbreak.
Also, with outbreaks in the rainforest, and perhaps with poor sanitation, there are thousands of possible animal hosts, whereas hyper-urbanised China hives far less opportunity for wildlife contact.
> In the case of SARS-1 the actual progenitor virus was only found 10 years later in bats in Yunnan.
Why do you keep saying this? As you know, the closest animal viruses to SARS-1 were found in civet cats and raccoon dogs, within about a year of its emergence in humans.
The bat viruses that Dr. Shi later discovered are scientifically important, because most of SARS-1's genome probably evolved in bats. They provide no new insight as to how the virus came to infect humans, though.
Note that the zoonotic path of Ebola into humans isn't well-understood. There was pretty good evidence of the path for SARS-1 though, and very good evidence for MERS. For SARS-CoV-2, there's still nothing, despite the recent emergence and considerably greater effort searching.
The "two lineages" argument has been grossly distorted by Worobey and the media. They're just two single-nucleotide polymorphisms apart, so they could easily have arisen in a single human-to-human transmission. SARS-CoV-2 averages something around a third of an SNP per human-to-human transmission, so ~10% of such transmissions differ by two SNPs.
If a missing link does exist, then it's just a single mutation away from either strain. So there's no reason to consider the "two lineages" too significant in any direction, unless you believe sampling in humans has been perfectly good. That belief seems unreasonable to me, especially since belief in a natural zoonotic origin requires us to believe sampling in animals has been perfectly bad.
> They're just two single-nucleotide polymorphisms apart
The problem with that argument, is that it doesn't explain the polytomies and is misleading, as you accuse Worobey of being.
"Just a few SNPs" is disingenuous and glosses over the usefulness of this evidence that almost everyone agrees on - eg, that it's highly unlikely that lineage B evolved from lineage A. (Even Jesse Bloom agrees on this.)
It may take a bit to find consensus on the dual-zoonosis theory and related phylogenetics, but the eagerness with which people dismiss this issue drives me nuts.
No, there were two distinct lineages in the market. That's different than variants.
The lineages are important because although the differences between the sequences are small, they are distinct, and there are no known transitional haplotypes.
> given the speed at which SARS-COV-2 variants have mutated in humans, well, how likely is it that the market was the source?
In Dr. Birx's recently released book she claims to have known it came from a lab origin from the start, based on evolutionary reasoning. As she describes: A virus takes years to learn/evolve the ability to infect humans, and does so poorly at the start. But covid was extremely effective at infecting humans "right out of the box." In a lab environment the virus is repeatedly exposed to human cells and gets better at infecting human cells with each iteration.
Evolutionary biologist Heather Heying similarly reasoned the origin of the virus through an understanding of evolution. Covid doesn't appear to transmit outside. If covid evolved naturally, it would be capable of spreading outside, where animals live. Instead, it appeared to evolve to spread in lab-like air conditioned conditions only.
> In a lab environment the virus is repeatedly exposed to human cells and gets better at infecting human cells with each iteration.
That is just replicating what nature does when it hops from individual to individual. Nature has billions of animals to do serial passage through.
And we still don't know that the species jump happened in the market, and I'm somewhat skeptical of the claims of this author. I tend to think it was circulating in rural Hubei, probably coinfecting domestic animals and people, getting better and better at infecting people until the market event happened which was where it found a densely packed human population where it spread with R0 significantly greater than 1 and took off. There's no evidence of that though because when the grandparents of farmers in rural villages die of pneumonia nobody bothers collecting samples because that's normal.
And we only noticed it when it started to efficiently infect human beings because that is when the pandemic started. The initial poor cryptic spread between humans and animals before that wouldn't have been detected because poor spreading couldn't cause the pandemic to start.
And we know that its possible for the virus to jump backwards and forwards between humans and minks, so the idea that an intermediate animal reservoir would have been infected with this virus and would have repeatedly attempted to jump to farm workers until it finally got good at spreading in humans is not that far fetched at all. Then the intermediate animal host becomes a massive bioreactor in close contact with humans, giving it many opportunities to roll the dice until it finds a combination that unlocks its pandemic potential, and then the first time it was transported into a dense human population it takes off.
There could be a hundred other viruses in animals in China all knocking on the door, occasionally infecting humans and not being good at it all right now, happening every day in China. This one was very good at infecting humans, along with being very good at infecting all kinds of other animals (mink, deer, dogs, cats, etc) because in order to cause a pandemic it had to be good at that, if it was bad at that it wouldn't have happened. It is like the anthropic principle--the virus seems incredibly lucky, because it had to be.
> A virus takes years to learn/evolve the ability to infect humans, and does so poorly at the start.
This sounds like pure speculation. How much actual data do we have on viruses that just made the jump from animals to humans? Probably nowhere near the amount needed to confidently say that the original Wuhan strain was somehow too infectious to realistically be of natural origin.
As for getting better at infecting humans over time, covid _has_ done that. Whatever omicron subvariant we're on could run circles around the original strain without breaking a sweat.
> If covid evolved naturally, it would be capable of spreading outside, where animals live. Instead, it appeared to evolve to spread in lab-like air conditioned conditions only.
Did she make an actual quantitative comparison between the infectiousness of covid and other respiratory viruses, inside versus outside?
I wonder how many people who are seemingly willing to believe the self-serving CCP party-line on this, would be just as believing of the owners of a nuclear power plant in their town, once the drinking water became radioactive, claiming "it didn't come from the plant, someone else down the street must have done it" - that is just about as believable as this.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the pandemic started in Wuhan, but probably not in the way you're thinking: Wuhan is the largest railway hub in all of China [1]. And that's likely the reason why both the institute and the market were situated there in the first place.
A good point. Another factor reducing the "coincidence" of a (probable) bat-originated coronavirus pandemic starting in a city with a lab studying bat coronaviruses is that labs studying viruses of type X tend to be located in areas where viruses of type X are found.
To take ejb999's example of radioactive water being found near a nuclear power plant, is it more likely that the radioactive water was found because there is increased monitoring of radiation near nuclear power plants?
It is important not to make emotional leaps to conclusions. Apparent correlations deserve study, but they are not proofs.
Maybe it was somebody in the flea market selling scrapped smoke detectors. Possible... but not my first guess. But it's worth keeping in mind that sometimes the most obvious answer is not the correct one.
In 1984: "During routine monitoring at a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant, a worker was found to be contaminated with radioactivity. A high concentration of radon in his home was subsequently identified as responsible."
For anyone who, like me, was curious about this, the worker's name was Stanley Watras. There's more on him on JSTOR if you want to read up: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44534629
You made no effort at all to criticize the methodology (which looks pretty standard to me, consistent with methods used to pinpoint the origin of other disease outbreaks besides COVID), or the raw data. Not one of the listed authors is Chinese, nor do any of them have any Chinese institutional affiliations.
What is your actual argument for why I should disregard this, beyond 'CCP bad'?
> Not one of the listed authors is Chinese, nor do any of them have any Chinese institutional affiliations.
Those are pretty naive criteria based on what we already know about the situation.
One of the biggest opponents of investigating the lab leak hypothesis was Peter Daszak, a British zoologist who is certainly not Chinese nor does his EcoHealth Alliance have any surface level ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. EcoHealth Alliance provided grants for the coronavirus research (and the activity that has been labeled by some as gain-of-research) and authored the misleading Lancet letter [0] that was used to ostracize anyone who publicly disagree with the animal-spillover hypothesis as well as enabled social media platforms and fact-checking sites to censor any content or discussion of the lab leak hypothesis.
TL;DR: people can have agendas that may not be obvious to you at first glance.
> I wonder how many people who are seemingly willing to believe the self-serving CCP party-line on this
Which of the paper's authors do you believe are beholden to the "self-serving CCP party-line"? Do you see flaws in the paper's analysis, or are you perhaps employing a thought-terminating cliche?
Your comment is orthogonal to the parent's comment and there's no reason to assign malice to the commenter.
It's quite plausible that the CCP is lying and the paper authors are honest about their findings. The problem is the analysis is only as good as the inputs. From the article:
> "Chinese government notified the World Health Organization (WHO) of an outbreak of severe pneumonia of unknown etiology in Wuhan...after careful examination of reported case histories..."
Note that:
1. The CCP claims the virus was unknown to them.
2. The CCP is in charge of what case histories are analyzed, and can carefully select those which point away from the lab leak.
I don't know to what degree there's truth in it, but Marion Koopmans has been in hot waters over her connections to the Chinese government. Last year, she has also publicly stated that the search started too late, and that they have negotiated about the outcome with the Chinese government (e.g., https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2021/03/30/een-goed-resultaat-a403..., paywalled).
Given that the existence of the lab is public knowledge, the paper could have at least acknowledged that the market was also a perfect site to distribute the virus intentionally.
This paper proves nothing beyond that there was a spatial relationship between the market and some of the initial cases. It wouldn’t have been hard for the CCP to discretely put some CV-19 distribution devices in the market, if the virus was released on purpose.
The CCP lies about everything from its GDP numbers to COVID infection rate and deaths. You simply cannot believe anything the Chinese government puts out.
What a weird statement to make. Sure, the coincidental nature draws extra suspicion, but new diseases appear naturally in the wild all the time. How often does drinking water in a city randomly turn radioactive from natural causes?
Hypothetically speaking, if it were a lab-leak and if it were a malicious lab tech or an that was mad at the world or compromised by a political actor, they could have dumped/micronize sprayed a vial [1] into the food market which would make the statement not entirely false. This is of course a lazy theory and would be nearly impossible to test out.
On that basis it could have also been attack to discredit China by CIA or like... Release pandemic from China then politically and economically attack them. Entirely something reasonable to consider considering history of USA...
It’s painful in that scenario to give complete authority for resolving the nuclear safety issue to (1) the most likely cause of the issue, and (2) a low integrity party that has obscured their role in causation.
Quick reminder that the researchers at the Wuhan lab are American. So, according to the conspiracy theory, there is some motivation for Americans to help China with a cover up.
I met a nurse that said one of her family members lived in a small housing development where almost everyone got terminal brain cancer. A certain company that you've heard of handled hazardous materials next door and offered to do the testing in the development. Surprise, no contamination found. And they made it clear that if you implicate them, you'll be contacted by their sizable legal department.
Everyone affected was either dead or bankrupt from paying their family's medical bills. No lawsuits against the company.
The one thing that makes me think the Lab Leak theory is true is that the Chinese government very very strongly denies the story and does anything it can to deflect or redirect the discussion to some other theory.
For anyone reading these kinds of stories and reports but is not a regular China follower, there is one thing you really should know. Anytime the Chinese government reacts very negatively to a story (Denial, attacking, undermining, deflecting), it usually means the story is true. The Chinese government is really terrible at information management and addressing anything that might make them look bad or lose face.
Just admitting a Chinese lab collected, studied and by accident a lab worker got infected with COVID is just something China can not admit. It is perfectly reasonable that some lab somewhere would collect and study the COVID virus. What is unreasonable is that the lab or a lab worker just got sloppy and accidently released that virus out to the world.
> ...well, yes, of course they do. But they would also strongly deny the story if they thought it was untrue.
Then why would block any investigation from outside the Chinese government? If anything, if the Lab Leak theory is provable false, they should be inviting outsiders to investigate and waste their political capital/time/energy. If your advisories want to spin their wheels on something that is not true, then let them.
> So if they don't react negatively and deny something, then the story is... false? That doesn't make any sense.
When it comes to the Chinese government and information, surprisingly as it sounds, yes. If the Lab Leak story was not true, the Chinese government would not even react to it. They might even entertain it as part of their information ops strategy since the Lab Leak theory is a plausible theory.
If you think about it, how does the Wet Market theory make China look better than the Lab Leak theory? It really doesn't. If serious pandemics are coming out of Wet Markets, then why does China still allow Wet Markets to exist? At least with lab safety, labs can be improved and managed better while Wet Markets are just ticking pandemic timebombs.
> It is perfectly reasonable that some lab somewhere would collect and study the COVID virus. What is unreasonable is that the lab or a lab worker just got sloppy and accidently released that virus out to the world.
Is this still true? It is unfortunate that it took an event like this to prove what we already knew: lab workers, who are of course fallible humans, will make mistakes.
Given that Covid was released upon the world likely due to a lab accident and all of the damage it did over a span of years, it would seem reasonable to rethink whether unlimited experimentation and especially enhancement with viruses should be allowed. This in itself has proven to be a source of denial by the very virus experts (like Fauci) that do not want their area of science to be restricted.
> Given that Covid was released upon the world likely due to a lab accident
This is entirely without evidence.
> This in itself has proven to be a source of denial by the very virus experts (like Fauci) that do not want their area of science to be restricted.
Even if you ignore Covid19 -- epidemiologists and virologists have been screaming for years that pandemics are hugely problematic and will become increasingly likely as we densify and further intrude into the urban-wilderness interface. We got extremely lucky that SARS1 wasn't as lethal or infectious as Covid-19. If the work virologists do (even the 'riskiest' work) could lead to new universal coronavirus vaccines or better treatments, it's a much more complicated question on whether to continue the work than ignorant opinions insist.
This was known for two years. Markets are breeding grounds for zoonotic diseases. They often even jump from human to animal and back.
The real question is--how did the virus get to the live market?
The study accurately says, "While there is insufficient evidence to define upstream events, and exact circumstances remain obscure, our analyses indicate that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred via the live wildlife trade in China, and show that the Huanan market was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic."
"The sustained presence of a potential source of virus transmission into the human population in late 2019, plausibly from infected live mammals sold at the Huanan market, offers an explanation of our findings and the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The pattern of COVID-19 cases reported for the Huanan market, with the earliest cases in the same part of the market as the wildlife sales and evidence of at least two introductions (38), resembles the multiple cross-species transmissions of SARS-CoV-2 subsequently observed during the pandemic from animals to humans on mink farms (46), and from infected hamsters to humans in the pet trade (47). There was an extensive network of wildlife farms in western Hubei province, including hundreds of thousands of raccoon dogs on farms in Enshi prefecture, which supplied the Huanan market (48). This region of Hubei contains extensive cave complexes housing Rhinolophus bats, which carry SARSr-CoVs (49). SARS-CoV-1 was recovered from farmed masked palm civets from Hubei in 2003 and 2004 (20). The animals on these farms (nearly 1 million) were rapidly released, sold, or killed in early 2020 (48), apparently without testing for SARS-CoV-2 (7). Live animals sold at the market (Table 1) were apparently not sampled either. By contrast, during the SARS-CoV-1 outbreaks farms and markets remained open for over a year after the first human cases occurred, allowing sampling of viruses from infected animals (20).
The live animal trade and live animal markets are a common theme in virus spillover events (21–23, 50), with markets such as the Huanan market selling live mammals being in the highest risk category (51). The events leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic mirror the SARS-CoV-1 outbreaks from 2002-2004, which were traced to infected animals in Guangdong, Jiangxi, Henan, Hunan, and Hubei provinces in China (20). Maximum effort must now be applied to elucidate the upstream events that might have brought SARS-CoV-2 into the Huanan market, culminating in the COVID-19 pandemic. To reduce the risk of future pandemics we must understand, and then limit, the routes and opportunities for virus spillover."
> However, the observation that the preponderance of early cases were linked to the Huanan market does not establish that the pandemic originated there.
Live markets exist in China because there is low trust in the food supply. For many Chinese, they want to see the animal killed in front of them so they can make sure they're not getting ripped off.
Due to various policies, China is a relatively low-trust society. Of course, it's also low trust because ripping people off isn't necessarily seen as bad, it's seen as clever.
wildlife markets were an idea from Mao, because what else are you going to do when you have a population of hundreds of millions that are dying of starvation after colonial expansion and civil war?
But even if it had been intended as a stop gap, at this point its large industry. So if you wanted to "clean up" as in, "end" the wild meat market trade, you'd be ending a large, growing industry, that brings money and food to poor parts of the country that can't afford other foods. Additionally, you'd be crushing an industry that is actively bringing new foods to market that aren't available in other countries, but for which China may one day be the primary agricultural provider.
Not an easy ask for any country to do, let alone a developing one.
If you're asking for better regulation of these markets, then I am sure China will do so over time. But authoritarian countries will never be able to self regulate to the degree a rule-of-law country does. Authoritarianism breeds a "if you're not cheating, you're not trying" mentality that undermines regulatory attempts.
They grow garlic with sewer water and the air is polluted because they're cranking out everything the world buys in suicide netted factories. China is a developing country, do you think government officials are going to go all around regulating wild life markets along with every other threat? They have the environmental and mental health concern of 1960's America.
The labs janitor sold dead animals for a side hustle, cheaper then cremation and the lower caste is not properly educated about bacterias, viruses and bio hazards.
(Wild speculation - may contain novel truth contamination)
Sorry this is an unscientific conclusion. The lab leak is more plausible based on the animals required and known and proposed research at that facility. It's simply another polemic. Without information / data from the lab you cannot claim one is more probable.
> The real question is--how did the virus get to the live market?
The chances are we'll never know, it may have spread through here (despite no real action to stop this form of trading from any of the wonderlfully eclectic groups still engaged in it).
> While there is insufficient evidence to define upstream events,
Also, we're not brave enough to say read the evidence it came from here. We're only brave enough to say it's the 'epicenter' of an early outbreak to keep from annoying those who don't co-operate anyway.
It's been fascinating and terrifying watching people (in general and on here) jump to answers that are nice but wrong (China did it on purpose, You can cure it with X, it's just the flu, etc) over the last few years. We will never know for certain what happened.
It's honestly killed me support for democracy. 95% of people seem to be incapable of thinking about uncertainty and living with not knowing. They just jump headlong into whatever looks good. Facts and reason are just justifications for things their prejudices already decided.
There's a difference between being informed and feeling informed. The Western civilization have increasing distanced itself from the former because its "offensive and hurts others feelings" in favor of the latter.
When emotion triumphs logic and reasoning, that society is nearing end of times. Such was the case for Roman empire, increasingly people's mentality started to shift away from reality and into idealized and complex web of absurdities leading up to its down fall, much of which were spouted by its upper echelon awash with luxury and comforts unaffordable by its masses
We see such absurdities being pushed in schools (ex. Math is racist) and in society in general which then antagonizes and gaslights, attacks opposing nuanced views that throws its own narratives into question.
While doing business with authoritarian states, we've ended up resembling in some form. It's a damn shame, once again reminded that open societies remain open only as long as its participants believe it to be so. If we close ourselves to one view then we are doomed to repeat the same attrocities that closed socities commit against individuals groups.
I generally find that, while there are a worrying amount of people with insane takes on things, often reaching 30% in various polls when something becomes "political", that the majority generally gets it right. If only there was a bit more democracy, a lot of bad things could be avoided.
Having said that, I looked up the polling on lab leaks and American democracy loses on this one:
Read up on selectorate theory for a good argument as to why majorities often don't matter. It's a well developed elaboration of the truism that politicians prefer to pick their voters, and it is absolutely employed strategically.
No it doesn't lead to different conclusions. The lower right one is where the bat experiments were conducted rather than the one in the middle. That is far from the epicenter.
If people would actually read and digest the article before spewing out their own biases, then you would see that the article addressed this very contention.
The article pointed out several facts. One was that there were two strains already. Having that come from the virology institute doesn't make sense. It makes more sense if the virus was spreading and mutating amongst the animals in the market.
Second, is charting the concentration of early spread. Again, the market was the epicenter.
Third is looking more closely at that and seeing this same epicenter pattern in a specific part of the market. This again points to the market being the epicenter.
Fourth, there is no such pattern of infection around the virology institute that was conducting the bat virus research.
That author is probably a crank, but the particular image he's critiquing is Fig. 1(a) of the linked paper (reproduced by the BBC), and the locations of both Wuhan institutes are not wrong.
Just to add to this, in the linked paper by Worobey et. al., Fig 2(B) shows something they label as "Centroid of Blue Cases". That centroid appears to be almost squarely on the location of the Wuhan Institute of Infectious Diseases.
For some reason, neither the locations of the Wuhan Institute of Infectious Diseases or the Wuhan Institute of Virology are mentioned in the linked paper.
This is correct, but the paper does observe that these second-stage cases (mostly reported around January and February) occur in an area of high density housing with a preponderance of elderly people.
We don't have testable theories here, we have Mad Libs.
A virus of (human)/(animal) origin was (un)intentionally (released)/(spread)/(detected) in Wuhan, starting at a (lab)/(market).
Narrative 1: Animal origin with extensive spread in a food market
Narrative 2: Animal origin with accidental release from lab study
Narrative 3: Intentional creation/modification of a virus for purposes of scientific study and subsequent (un)intentional release
Narrative 4: Intentional creation/modification of a virus for nefarious purposes with (un)intentional release
Narrative 5: Animal origin with slow undetected community spread somewhere and possibly random mutation that lead to more viral fitness in Wuhan.
---
What would actually change if you had certainty around one of these theories? Are you certain that there will not be a zoonotic viral pandemic in the future? If you aren't certain that there will never be a zoonotic pandemic again, then we should ramp up vector and disease surveillance.
Also, China has had no problem disciplining people that cause trouble and embarrassment. If they thought someone caused this, that person is fucking gone.
I'm not a fan of lab leak, but I don't really care.
What get's me is I'd support serious action against china because if its a lab leak they need to own that, and if it's from shitty food supply chain they need to own that too.
Also they're a shitty dictatorship, they're aggressive, they're genocidal etc.
People seem very enthusiastic to blame china for a lab leak, but have no enthusiasm to blame them for other mechanisms or to convert that blame into supporting action. It's a weird thing for my brain and I share this more as sharing my confusion to see if anyone else feels the same way.
I think you did a very nice job breaking down the many many uncertainties here btw.
That is exactly how this conspiracy theory is being employed. China is being punished because of a made-up story that is politically advantageous to spread. This is similar to Russia saying that Ukraine is infested with Nazis.
I guess I didn't say all of it - yes, if it is a possibility, we should take it seriously. I think they are all possible, we should take them all seriously.
I don't think there is any way to get to a scientific certainty either positively or negatively about any of the origin theories; thus we should take precautions about all of them.
I think there is certainly a discussion to be had around gain-of-function. I think that discussion should include how gain-of-function is actually used in research laboratories, and what mitigations are already in place.
Readit News
Here's a discussion on inference pointing to references and sources that argue against the results of the paper: https://inference-review.com/article/thunder-out-of-china
It also raises eyebrows the fact that no animal has ever been found to be positive for COVID, in contrast to all of the previous SARS pandemics.
EDIT: thanks everyone for correcting my assertion. No source animal was found.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/...
EDIT:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_that_can_get_S... - long list of refs
This doesn't really mean very much.
It took something like 15 years to find the bat population likely to have been the source of SARS-CoV-1. It's not like we were able to say definitively how the spillover began; it's all probabilities.
We have found similar viruses to SARS-CoV-2 floating around in pangolins and bats.
This is true but misleading. It took a long time to find the reservoir host (i.e., the animal in which most of the virus evolved) for SARS-1, but the proximal host (i.e., the animal that actually infected the first humans) was found within about a year.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2004/01/who-sees...
Based on the WIV's pre-pandemic research, we knew immediately that the reservoir host of SARS-CoV-2 is bats. We still haven't found the proximal host. It's almost certainly not pangolins, and Nature eventually published an extensive correction to their pangolin paper.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x#change-his...
Since this was a food market, it's possible and likely that all the source animals were eaten by the time the study was being done.
The problem is that there really isn't any evidence. SARS-COV-2 has never been detected in any Chinese land animals associated with the market. We know that birds can transmit it, but it needs to come from somewhere. There's no reservoir of the stuff found in the wild...unlike viruses like Ebola, Marburg, MERS, etc.
There were two variants in the market...but given the speed at which SARS-COV-2 variants have mutated in humans, well, how likely is it that the market was the source? SARS-COV-2 went through millions of humans before the first variant popped out. Is it reasonable to assume that some progenitor virus went though millions of iterations to become SARS-COV-2 in the market, then did it again and again?
But however unlikely, this is where we are today. Was it just bad luck that some virus entered an immuno-compromised animal at the market and mutated...twice?
They acted very quickly to sterilize the market which eliminated the evidence.
In SARS-1 the market associated with that was allowed to operate until investigators were able to take samples from the animals there and find the related virus.
As a containment measure this was probably the right reflex to have, as an investigative measure this was highly counterproductive. If, however, you are one of the people who blame China for not acting fast enough to contain the spread then you can't criticize them for this.
> There's no reservoir of the stuff found in the wild...unlike viruses like Ebola, Marburg, MERS, etc.
MERS just happened to be very easy since we sampled the camels and they were positive and sitting right there with lots of human contact. In the case of SARS-1 the actual progenitor virus was only found 10 years later in bats in Yunnan. With Ebola the species that harbors the virus has actually yet to be determined, decades later. Marburg was first discovered in 1967 and was only isolated from Egyptian fruit bats in 2009, 42 years later.
I think you're vastly underestimating how hard it is to track down animal reservoirs, and with the reservoir of Ebola still being unknown 46 years after it was discovered kind of undermines your entire point.
We also now have the BANAL viruses found in bats in Laos which are getting closer and closer to a match to SARS-CoV-2, which is actually good progress after only 2-3 years (it would actually be highly suspicious if someone found the 99% homologous bat progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 after only a few years of looking, that would suggest that China knew where it was all along -- actual science that isn't on the TV or movies is quite difficult and usually a lengthy needle-in-a-haystack process as all of these examples show).
Ebola and Marburg for decades were quite rare. Incredibly deadly, but an outbreak would affect a few tens of people, and invariably in remote locations. By the time the epidemiologists arrived, the outbreak was waning.
Clearly the Ebola outbreak in 2010s was much bigger, but that was the first such large outbreak.
Also, with outbreaks in the rainforest, and perhaps with poor sanitation, there are thousands of possible animal hosts, whereas hyper-urbanised China hives far less opportunity for wildlife contact.
Why do you keep saying this? As you know, the closest animal viruses to SARS-1 were found in civet cats and raccoon dogs, within about a year of its emergence in humans.
The bat viruses that Dr. Shi later discovered are scientifically important, because most of SARS-1's genome probably evolved in bats. They provide no new insight as to how the virus came to infect humans, though.
The "two lineages" argument has been grossly distorted by Worobey and the media. They're just two single-nucleotide polymorphisms apart, so they could easily have arisen in a single human-to-human transmission. SARS-CoV-2 averages something around a third of an SNP per human-to-human transmission, so ~10% of such transmissions differ by two SNPs.
If a missing link does exist, then it's just a single mutation away from either strain. So there's no reason to consider the "two lineages" too significant in any direction, unless you believe sampling in humans has been perfectly good. That belief seems unreasonable to me, especially since belief in a natural zoonotic origin requires us to believe sampling in animals has been perfectly bad.
https://mobile.twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/153463060722071...
The problem with that argument, is that it doesn't explain the polytomies and is misleading, as you accuse Worobey of being.
"Just a few SNPs" is disingenuous and glosses over the usefulness of this evidence that almost everyone agrees on - eg, that it's highly unlikely that lineage B evolved from lineage A. (Even Jesse Bloom agrees on this.)
It may take a bit to find consensus on the dual-zoonosis theory and related phylogenetics, but the eagerness with which people dismiss this issue drives me nuts.
https://twitter.com/jepekar/status/1499840349807656960
No, there were two distinct lineages in the market. That's different than variants.
The lineages are important because although the differences between the sequences are small, they are distinct, and there are no known transitional haplotypes.
> given the speed at which SARS-COV-2 variants have mutated in humans, well, how likely is it that the market was the source?
See Pekar et al: https://zenodo.org/record/6342616
They deal with this question directly.
Evolutionary biologist Heather Heying similarly reasoned the origin of the virus through an understanding of evolution. Covid doesn't appear to transmit outside. If covid evolved naturally, it would be capable of spreading outside, where animals live. Instead, it appeared to evolve to spread in lab-like air conditioned conditions only.
That is just replicating what nature does when it hops from individual to individual. Nature has billions of animals to do serial passage through.
And we still don't know that the species jump happened in the market, and I'm somewhat skeptical of the claims of this author. I tend to think it was circulating in rural Hubei, probably coinfecting domestic animals and people, getting better and better at infecting people until the market event happened which was where it found a densely packed human population where it spread with R0 significantly greater than 1 and took off. There's no evidence of that though because when the grandparents of farmers in rural villages die of pneumonia nobody bothers collecting samples because that's normal.
And we only noticed it when it started to efficiently infect human beings because that is when the pandemic started. The initial poor cryptic spread between humans and animals before that wouldn't have been detected because poor spreading couldn't cause the pandemic to start.
And we know that its possible for the virus to jump backwards and forwards between humans and minks, so the idea that an intermediate animal reservoir would have been infected with this virus and would have repeatedly attempted to jump to farm workers until it finally got good at spreading in humans is not that far fetched at all. Then the intermediate animal host becomes a massive bioreactor in close contact with humans, giving it many opportunities to roll the dice until it finds a combination that unlocks its pandemic potential, and then the first time it was transported into a dense human population it takes off.
There could be a hundred other viruses in animals in China all knocking on the door, occasionally infecting humans and not being good at it all right now, happening every day in China. This one was very good at infecting humans, along with being very good at infecting all kinds of other animals (mink, deer, dogs, cats, etc) because in order to cause a pandemic it had to be good at that, if it was bad at that it wouldn't have happened. It is like the anthropic principle--the virus seems incredibly lucky, because it had to be.
This sounds like pure speculation. How much actual data do we have on viruses that just made the jump from animals to humans? Probably nowhere near the amount needed to confidently say that the original Wuhan strain was somehow too infectious to realistically be of natural origin.
As for getting better at infecting humans over time, covid _has_ done that. Whatever omicron subvariant we're on could run circles around the original strain without breaking a sweat.
> If covid evolved naturally, it would be capable of spreading outside, where animals live. Instead, it appeared to evolve to spread in lab-like air conditioned conditions only.
Did she make an actual quantitative comparison between the infectiousness of covid and other respiratory viruses, inside versus outside?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Railway_Hub
To take ejb999's example of radioactive water being found near a nuclear power plant, is it more likely that the radioactive water was found because there is increased monitoring of radiation near nuclear power plants?
It is important not to make emotional leaps to conclusions. Apparent correlations deserve study, but they are not proofs.
In 1984: "During routine monitoring at a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant, a worker was found to be contaminated with radioactivity. A high concentration of radon in his home was subsequently identified as responsible."
You made no effort at all to criticize the methodology (which looks pretty standard to me, consistent with methods used to pinpoint the origin of other disease outbreaks besides COVID), or the raw data. Not one of the listed authors is Chinese, nor do any of them have any Chinese institutional affiliations.
What is your actual argument for why I should disregard this, beyond 'CCP bad'?
Those are pretty naive criteria based on what we already know about the situation. One of the biggest opponents of investigating the lab leak hypothesis was Peter Daszak, a British zoologist who is certainly not Chinese nor does his EcoHealth Alliance have any surface level ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. EcoHealth Alliance provided grants for the coronavirus research (and the activity that has been labeled by some as gain-of-research) and authored the misleading Lancet letter [0] that was used to ostracize anyone who publicly disagree with the animal-spillover hypothesis as well as enabled social media platforms and fact-checking sites to censor any content or discussion of the lab leak hypothesis.
TL;DR: people can have agendas that may not be obvious to you at first glance.
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Which of the paper's authors do you believe are beholden to the "self-serving CCP party-line"? Do you see flaws in the paper's analysis, or are you perhaps employing a thought-terminating cliche?
It's quite plausible that the CCP is lying and the paper authors are honest about their findings. The problem is the analysis is only as good as the inputs. From the article:
> "Chinese government notified the World Health Organization (WHO) of an outbreak of severe pneumonia of unknown etiology in Wuhan...after careful examination of reported case histories..."
Note that:
1. The CCP claims the virus was unknown to them.
2. The CCP is in charge of what case histories are analyzed, and can carefully select those which point away from the lab leak.
This paper proves nothing beyond that there was a spatial relationship between the market and some of the initial cases. It wouldn’t have been hard for the CCP to discretely put some CV-19 distribution devices in the market, if the virus was released on purpose.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksrWmPMZGiY [video, gets NSFW around 2:30]
Even this hypothetical theory doesn't explain the early lineage A / lineage B split and is not supported by existing data.
Dead Comment
Everyone affected was either dead or bankrupt from paying their family's medical bills. No lawsuits against the company.
For anyone reading these kinds of stories and reports but is not a regular China follower, there is one thing you really should know. Anytime the Chinese government reacts very negatively to a story (Denial, attacking, undermining, deflecting), it usually means the story is true. The Chinese government is really terrible at information management and addressing anything that might make them look bad or lose face.
Just admitting a Chinese lab collected, studied and by accident a lab worker got infected with COVID is just something China can not admit. It is perfectly reasonable that some lab somewhere would collect and study the COVID virus. What is unreasonable is that the lab or a lab worker just got sloppy and accidently released that virus out to the world.
...well, yes, of course they do. But they would also strongly deny the story if they thought it was untrue.
> Anytime the Chinese government reacts very negatively to a story (Denial, attacking, undermining, deflecting), it usually means the story is true.
So if they don't react negatively and deny something, then the story is... false? That doesn't make any sense.
Then why would block any investigation from outside the Chinese government? If anything, if the Lab Leak theory is provable false, they should be inviting outsiders to investigate and waste their political capital/time/energy. If your advisories want to spin their wheels on something that is not true, then let them.
> So if they don't react negatively and deny something, then the story is... false? That doesn't make any sense.
When it comes to the Chinese government and information, surprisingly as it sounds, yes. If the Lab Leak story was not true, the Chinese government would not even react to it. They might even entertain it as part of their information ops strategy since the Lab Leak theory is a plausible theory.
If you think about it, how does the Wet Market theory make China look better than the Lab Leak theory? It really doesn't. If serious pandemics are coming out of Wet Markets, then why does China still allow Wet Markets to exist? At least with lab safety, labs can be improved and managed better while Wet Markets are just ticking pandemic timebombs.
How do you believe the CCP's reaction would be different from what we saw them actually do?
Dead Comment
Is this still true? It is unfortunate that it took an event like this to prove what we already knew: lab workers, who are of course fallible humans, will make mistakes.
Given that Covid was released upon the world likely due to a lab accident and all of the damage it did over a span of years, it would seem reasonable to rethink whether unlimited experimentation and especially enhancement with viruses should be allowed. This in itself has proven to be a source of denial by the very virus experts (like Fauci) that do not want their area of science to be restricted.
This is entirely without evidence.
> This in itself has proven to be a source of denial by the very virus experts (like Fauci) that do not want their area of science to be restricted.
Even if you ignore Covid19 -- epidemiologists and virologists have been screaming for years that pandemics are hugely problematic and will become increasingly likely as we densify and further intrude into the urban-wilderness interface. We got extremely lucky that SARS1 wasn't as lethal or infectious as Covid-19. If the work virologists do (even the 'riskiest' work) could lead to new universal coronavirus vaccines or better treatments, it's a much more complicated question on whether to continue the work than ignorant opinions insist.
The real question is--how did the virus get to the live market?
The study accurately says, "While there is insufficient evidence to define upstream events, and exact circumstances remain obscure, our analyses indicate that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred via the live wildlife trade in China, and show that the Huanan market was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic."
"The sustained presence of a potential source of virus transmission into the human population in late 2019, plausibly from infected live mammals sold at the Huanan market, offers an explanation of our findings and the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The pattern of COVID-19 cases reported for the Huanan market, with the earliest cases in the same part of the market as the wildlife sales and evidence of at least two introductions (38), resembles the multiple cross-species transmissions of SARS-CoV-2 subsequently observed during the pandemic from animals to humans on mink farms (46), and from infected hamsters to humans in the pet trade (47). There was an extensive network of wildlife farms in western Hubei province, including hundreds of thousands of raccoon dogs on farms in Enshi prefecture, which supplied the Huanan market (48). This region of Hubei contains extensive cave complexes housing Rhinolophus bats, which carry SARSr-CoVs (49). SARS-CoV-1 was recovered from farmed masked palm civets from Hubei in 2003 and 2004 (20). The animals on these farms (nearly 1 million) were rapidly released, sold, or killed in early 2020 (48), apparently without testing for SARS-CoV-2 (7). Live animals sold at the market (Table 1) were apparently not sampled either. By contrast, during the SARS-CoV-1 outbreaks farms and markets remained open for over a year after the first human cases occurred, allowing sampling of viruses from infected animals (20).
The live animal trade and live animal markets are a common theme in virus spillover events (21–23, 50), with markets such as the Huanan market selling live mammals being in the highest risk category (51). The events leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic mirror the SARS-CoV-1 outbreaks from 2002-2004, which were traced to infected animals in Guangdong, Jiangxi, Henan, Hunan, and Hubei provinces in China (20). Maximum effort must now be applied to elucidate the upstream events that might have brought SARS-CoV-2 into the Huanan market, culminating in the COVID-19 pandemic. To reduce the risk of future pandemics we must understand, and then limit, the routes and opportunities for virus spillover."
My guess is that someone was selling animals from the lab that were supposed to be destroyed.
Due to various policies, China is a relatively low-trust society. Of course, it's also low trust because ripping people off isn't necessarily seen as bad, it's seen as clever.
But even if it had been intended as a stop gap, at this point its large industry. So if you wanted to "clean up" as in, "end" the wild meat market trade, you'd be ending a large, growing industry, that brings money and food to poor parts of the country that can't afford other foods. Additionally, you'd be crushing an industry that is actively bringing new foods to market that aren't available in other countries, but for which China may one day be the primary agricultural provider.
Not an easy ask for any country to do, let alone a developing one.
If you're asking for better regulation of these markets, then I am sure China will do so over time. But authoritarian countries will never be able to self regulate to the degree a rule-of-law country does. Authoritarianism breeds a "if you're not cheating, you're not trying" mentality that undermines regulatory attempts.
AFAIK those markets are out-right banned already.
(Wild speculation - may contain novel truth contamination)
> you cannot claim one is more probable
Am I missing something here?
The chances are we'll never know, it may have spread through here (despite no real action to stop this form of trading from any of the wonderlfully eclectic groups still engaged in it).
> While there is insufficient evidence to define upstream events,
Also, we're not brave enough to say read the evidence it came from here. We're only brave enough to say it's the 'epicenter' of an early outbreak to keep from annoying those who don't co-operate anyway.
It's honestly killed me support for democracy. 95% of people seem to be incapable of thinking about uncertainty and living with not knowing. They just jump headlong into whatever looks good. Facts and reason are just justifications for things their prejudices already decided.
When emotion triumphs logic and reasoning, that society is nearing end of times. Such was the case for Roman empire, increasingly people's mentality started to shift away from reality and into idealized and complex web of absurdities leading up to its down fall, much of which were spouted by its upper echelon awash with luxury and comforts unaffordable by its masses
We see such absurdities being pushed in schools (ex. Math is racist) and in society in general which then antagonizes and gaslights, attacks opposing nuanced views that throws its own narratives into question.
While doing business with authoritarian states, we've ended up resembling in some form. It's a damn shame, once again reminded that open societies remain open only as long as its participants believe it to be so. If we close ourselves to one view then we are doomed to repeat the same attrocities that closed socities commit against individuals groups.
Having said that, I looked up the polling on lab leaks and American democracy loses on this one:
https://morningconsult.com/2021/06/09/coronavirus-lab-leak-w...
Here’s a link to that, if we’re open to differing perspectives.
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/lie-exposed-bbc-says-covid...
If people would actually read and digest the article before spewing out their own biases, then you would see that the article addressed this very contention.
The article pointed out several facts. One was that there were two strains already. Having that come from the virology institute doesn't make sense. It makes more sense if the virus was spreading and mutating amongst the animals in the market.
Second, is charting the concentration of early spread. Again, the market was the epicenter.
Third is looking more closely at that and seeing this same epicenter pattern in a specific part of the market. This again points to the market being the epicenter.
Fourth, there is no such pattern of infection around the virology institute that was conducting the bat virus research.
* "Sars-Cov-2 was Lab Made Under Project DEFUSE"
* "Was Sars-Cov-2 DESIGNED to Spawn so Many Variants?"
* "Vaccine Shedding Finally Proven!"
* ""COVID Vaccine Technology" will Make Varroa Mites Infertile"
* "Boosters Now PROMOTE Covid Deaths in Europe"
* "Developmental Disorders in Babies born to Vaccinated Mothers?"
For some reason, neither the locations of the Wuhan Institute of Infectious Diseases or the Wuhan Institute of Virology are mentioned in the linked paper.
A virus of (human)/(animal) origin was (un)intentionally (released)/(spread)/(detected) in Wuhan, starting at a (lab)/(market).
Narrative 1: Animal origin with extensive spread in a food market
Narrative 2: Animal origin with accidental release from lab study
Narrative 3: Intentional creation/modification of a virus for purposes of scientific study and subsequent (un)intentional release
Narrative 4: Intentional creation/modification of a virus for nefarious purposes with (un)intentional release
Narrative 5: Animal origin with slow undetected community spread somewhere and possibly random mutation that lead to more viral fitness in Wuhan.
---
What would actually change if you had certainty around one of these theories? Are you certain that there will not be a zoonotic viral pandemic in the future? If you aren't certain that there will never be a zoonotic pandemic again, then we should ramp up vector and disease surveillance.
Also, China has had no problem disciplining people that cause trouble and embarrassment. If they thought someone caused this, that person is fucking gone.
What get's me is I'd support serious action against china because if its a lab leak they need to own that, and if it's from shitty food supply chain they need to own that too.
Also they're a shitty dictatorship, they're aggressive, they're genocidal etc.
People seem very enthusiastic to blame china for a lab leak, but have no enthusiasm to blame them for other mechanisms or to convert that blame into supporting action. It's a weird thing for my brain and I share this more as sharing my confusion to see if anyone else feels the same way.
I think you did a very nice job breaking down the many many uncertainties here btw.
I don't think there is any way to get to a scientific certainty either positively or negatively about any of the origin theories; thus we should take precautions about all of them.
Widespread political support for ending all public funding of gain-of-function research or outright banning it.