> The agency made its new assessment with “low confidence,” which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete.
I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain.
---
One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as saying:
> “Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Mr. Cotton said.
So... I'm not certain this is a development worth trusting. Maybe it really did originate from a lab! But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.
Right. "Low confidence". Read [1] People who deal with intel data need to work with possibly wrong info. Most spy novels don't get this. Real military planning works more like: "Intel says the enemy is at A or B, most likely at A. How much resources should we devote to A vs B, or hold in reserve until we find out by encountering the enemy? What's our plan if we guess wrong?" Planning has to assume that intel might be wrong.
Go watch "A Bridge Too Far" (WWII). Read the story of the Son Tay raid (Vietnam). The many overestimates of Soviet capability during the Cold War. The underestimates of North Korean missile capability. Sometimes uncertain intel really works, as with the attack on the bin Laden compound in Pakistan.
Retrospective intel questions may never be answered. It's known that the US atomic bomb program had another Russian spy who is mentioned by code name in VENONA transcripts, but that spy was never identified. There are still arguments over whether the explosion of the Maine in Havana harbor in 1889 was an accident or a hostile act. It's still not clear why Turret 2 of the USS Iowa blew up in 1989. Huge amounts of effort were expended on all three of those questions, all of which were important at the time, and yet they remain unsettled.
It’s also important to weight dramatic changes in the White House this week, too, right? There’s the intel itself, but then there’s also the guy trying to control the news cycle.
> Real military planning works more like: "Intel says the enemy is at A or B, most likely at A. How much resources should we devote to A vs B, or hold in reserve until we find out by encountering the enemy? What's our plan if we guess wrong?"
Not quite, and you can't possibly capture all of that paper in that sentiment. For instance, there's this excerpt:
> People’s judgments and willingness to accept analytic findings are framed by multiple factors, including backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs. Every decisionmaker has cognitive biases, including theories that guide them (e.g., the liberal international order), beliefs about how the world works (e.g., the arc of history bends in a particular direction), or sacred beliefs (e.g., all things happen for a reason). Thus it is essential for the analyst to understand as much as possible about the decisionmakers and the environment in which they operate.
Military intelligence will happily give you high confidence leads that are entirely wrong because, by all appearances, the information came from a source in the right place with the seemingly right motivations when in reality they can be playing 4D chess better than the analyst.
The confidence level can only be expressed in finite ways but it can be analyzed in almost infinite, one of them being that the information needed to develop "high confidence" has disappeared and the window of opportunity to gain insight has long passed. Personally speaking, I do not think we will ever find out the origins because a whole gaggle of people with various interests had a vested interest in a particular answer at the time. This is the byproduct of a democracy and bureaucratic system which has not been functioning nominally for quite some time - doubly so now.
I would go so far as to describe the events at the time as parallel construction.
Both the FBI and DOE, which have their own foreign intelligence gathering capabilities, had previously assessed that COVID was caused by a lab leak with moderate confidence. So while I agree with you that the truth will likely remain shrouded in some mystery, most of us that believed it originated from zoonosis at first (and I would include myself in that camp) should update our priors both based on the CIA assessment and previous assessments
Lab leak and zoonotic origin are not mutually exclusive.
The lab leak hypothesis means "accelerated evolution" through either caged animals or "in vitro cells" infecting the lab personnel. Gene splicing and such are not necessary to make the argument.
The observed fact pointing to this is the number of generations required to produce the divergence between the first SCoV2 variant and the closest wild ancestor. It corresponds to something like 20 years (?) of evolution.
Are the FBI or DOE assessments public? What I last read in the peer-reviewed public literature seemed to point strongly to animal origin and not from a lab.
I have previously shared this little known, but factual, event on Hacker News. It is simply a Wikipedia article--the 1977 Russian Flu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu). This is not my statement, note this well dang, and read or argue with the editors of Wikipedia if you want (not me), but the following statement stands firm:
"Genetic analysis and several unusual characteristics of the 1977 Russian flu have prompted many researchers to say that the virus was released to the public through a laboratory accident, or resulted from a live-vaccine trial escape"
> Reanalysis of the H1N1 sequences excluding isolates with unrealistic sampling dates indicates that the 1977 re-emergent lineage was circulating for approximately one year before detection, making it difficult to determine the geographic source of reintroduction. We suggest that a new method is needed to account for viral isolates with unrealistic sampling dates.
Tangentially, risks like that are why I'm really frustrated-with/exasperated-by certain mRNA-vaccine scaremongers: Ones who act as if older techniques were already fine and sufficient.
I have family that have worked on developing NBC equipment for the military. The first thing they said when covid was spreading was that it was most likely from a lab. That was before anyone in the news was saying that. So an independent first-look assessment by someone with experience, followed by later finding out that there was in fact a lab there, has me heavily leaning towards it being true. But it doesn't really change anything unless there's hard proof. Even with hard proof, do you think China would pay for anything? I don't think so.
You should realize experience in a tangentially related field and there being a lab somewhere in the area is not the same as insight and evidence. That’s like saying that if a new flu came out of Atlanta, the fact the CDC is there proves it came from a lab, and must be true because someone’s janitor cousin who worked there one summer said it was true.
“Low confidence” means that there is a lack of evidence and the statement is ambiguous; that it could be completely true, or completely false. The only lower confidence would be direct evidence that it is outright false. Given, as you said, how nearly impossible it would be to prove true, wouldn’t you think it equally nearly impossible to prove false?
Believe what you want, but even the CIA doesn’t lean on the side of you being right.
there's a 19 bp sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade).
now an exact match of that length isn't impossible, but which is more likely? that this managed to be exactly correct on accident? or some grad student was told to just copypasta every furin cleavage site in the database into a GOF library and surprise surprise the most virulent form that became a pandemic came from the sequence that is engineered to be efficient.
any scientist that has any molecular biology wet experience will tell you this is exactly what they would have done (though us researchers would probably not have pulled from the patented BLAST sequences, since that selector is turned off by default by the NCBI)
If SARS-Cov-2 was from a lab, what about the original SARS?
Generally though, China is somewhat better suited to producing pandemics, because they have a larger and more dense population within which a disease can spread.
If I said I had cousins that were bankers, I am not sure that it would make me more credible to talk about finance. I mean - to the people who care about expertise.
I had a Chinese colleague in January of '20 saying it was obviously a leak. I hadn't even heard of Wuhan before, and he told me there is a bio lab there.
> But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.
Yes, the annoying thing is that "the truth about covid" literally only matters to culture war grievances, it has no relevance whatsoever to the actual world. If it was a lab leak, then China needs to improve their BSL-4 safety... but they need to do that anyway[0]. If it was zoonotic, then they need to clean up the wet markets... but they need to do that anyway. The true origin of covid makes no difference at all, and I wish these people would just come out and admit this is all domestic political peacocking.
[0]: and so does everyone else, for that matter. The US has also had several close calls with BSL-4 leaks; if covid did originate from a lab leak, the fact that it wasn't from an American lab is just sheer dumb luck.
If it were a lab leak then the people especially fearful and distrustful of gain of function research would feel vindicated and try to use that to shut down existing research programs. I don't think that group of people is meaningfully divided along partisan lines, and outside the professional class probably includes everybody.
Conversely, if it were a natural outbreak then that bolsters the case for continuing gain of function research as before. Such research is precisely why we were able to identify the threat and within weeks assemble a vaccine, at least on paper. (Granted, the arc began long before 2019 with a through-line of research going back to the 2002 SARS outbreak.) And it's why we've many other advancements. Creation of CRISPR and related technology emerged in part out of gain of function research with viruses. Gain of function is a critical tool in testing hypotheses about how foundational molecular machinery works, and viruses are a convenient research model for exploring and testing ideas in that space.
But I'm not sure the origin should matter to that debate. And I'm even more sure it probably won't matter, even if we agreed on a definitive answer.
Whenever you have an institutional failure, you need to do a root cause analysis to fix the problem. That includes Chinese labs. That also includes health organizations who may have put aside their objectivity and tried to discredit a theory merely because they disagreed with the politics of those supporting it.
The wet markets were a super spreader event... Doesn't really tell you much about where it started (even if it has animal origin).
People just assumed that the wet markets were the cause of the problem, because they found them digusting (and wanted an excuse to blame it on the Chinese being evil).
In a less dense population, without many people going to the same hospital... You would just not have noticed Covid much.
Wow do we live in the same "actual world?" If we knew for certain that covid began in the Wuhan lab, it would be World War 3.
I get your perspective: an outbreak is an unfortunate byproduct of the risks necessary for scientific progress. No one couldve known how bad it would be. The damage is done, learn from your mistakes and move on. Very enlightened.
In the real world, people will lose their absolute shit. There would be near global demand for sanctions and reparations, and there's enough anti china sentiment that its a real possibility.
Backed into a corner, the world against them, they would have no other choice. It would be a matter of survival.
As the article observes, “the new analysis … began under the Biden administration.”
The new administration has been in office a week. There is a political incentive to release it now, but they couldn’t have meaningfully created the analysis for political reasons in five days.
> they couldn’t have meaningfully created the analysis for political reasons in five days
CIA has been in the hot seat for long enough to be politically sensitive. Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce multiple reports for every conclusion. It's not implausible that this happened here. In any case, we're talking about a partian topic with low- and moderate-confidence reports with a President who has zero chance of holding China accountable on it. Parlour talk.
They say that there is no new data. That they are just altering their choice for what assumption is more likely.
Supposedly because they've had more time to think about the conditions of the lab before Covid was released...
But really, nothing has changed except their biases. Nothing has changed on the solid evidence side.
Separately, if there were actual safety issues and stuff was leaking... Then we're incredibly lucky that it was something as tame as Covid, and not one of the more serious kinds of horrors that gain of function research has successfully produced.
That’s certainly motivation for releasing it, but he’s been in office for five days so the analysis being released was done under the prior administration.
1) Multiple departments of the executive branch were saying this under Biden too.
2) The US gov’t funded the biological weapons research lab at Wuhan. Mr Cotton has been a senator for 10 years, and therefore was around when the funding was approved. So if he wants to find someone to punish, maybe he should look in a mirror.
What’s most disturbing and highly irresponsible about comments like that and all of the reporting on this development is that there’s almost zero acknowledgement that the lab in question was being funded by the US government and much of the Gain of Function research was being directed by a US nonprofit with ties to the US government.
I think people are missing one very sympathizable effect of this joint research, that it prevents either country from gaining an offensive edge from dual-use research that could be used for bio-weapons. You could argue that this has the benefit of preventing a bio-weapons arms race.
Vertiginous to think about the layers of unknowns.
This is an event that saw a lot of the world effectively under house arrest for two years. I think that trying to finding out the underlying reason behind that is a reasonable goal.
Looking for reparations is secondary to that, but maybe not entirely unreasonable either; not that it'll ever happen.
I remember watching the movie War Games (1983 film) and even as a kid when they announced nuclear missiles had been launched and "confidence is high" I thought "That's a really good way to indicate that there are indications that something might be happening, AND indicate how much you believe it when you talk about things that you can't confirm."
Any new theory needs to match evidence for SARS-COV-2 being present in European wastewater during December 2019 [0] [1].
Maybe it leaked from the lab; maybe it was released? As far as I understand (but tbh, I have not kept up as much with immunology news) the alternative theory of the virus hopping from another species hadn't been confirmed, as no reservoir had been found. Does anyone know if that had been the case?
> So... I'm not certain this is a development worth trusting. Maybe it really did originate from a lab! But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.
0. COVID-19 was mostly harmless. Even more so than Douglas Adam's books.
1. China reacted asif they'd accidentally released a bioweapon.
2. China did what it does best, shut the F up on the world stage.
3. Everyone saw China's reaction because this isn't the 1950s and the internet exists.
4. The developed nations freaked out until there was data, hence the first set of lockdowns in Europe very quickly.
5. 2-3 years later after media pantomime, sectarian politics, holier than though preaching from everyone, the WHO declared the "emergency" over.
Some countries achieved 80%+ vaccination rates, didn't see 20% die. Some only achieved 50% and didn't see 50% death rates.
We now have a serious economic tab to be paid because of the BS pushed by developed countries in a panic that might have been less dramatic had there been information available from day 1.
China _has_ hidden and or destroyed a lot of "evidence" making certain discussions mute. (Again they are good at this let's not pretend otherwise).
Western countries, who, _like china_, jumped on a "who can punch themselves hardest with policy?" approach to this unknown now want someone else to blame.
Aka because we can pin a small significance and serious fault on China being a bad neighbour. (Snooze to the sensible this isn't news, china is very private about internal policy and now even more so) We are choosing to blame them for everything to get motivation up to get them to pay the bill...
This unfortunately was clear winter of 2020 and is clear now, it's just taken 4-5yr for politics to go through it's "he said she said" cycle. And I'm not referring to the US or UK political cycles this is the slow bi-partizan we all need someone to blame rather than be introspective and realise __"We should have handled this better"__.
> 0. COVID-19 was mostly harmless. Even more so than Douglas Adam's books.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I found out that my father and his partner had COVID. He lived, at the time, about 12 hours drive from me. Where he lived, his support network was thin (to say the least) - the little family he had nearby needed to keep away because they were responsible for caring for my cousin with a severely weakened immune system. His friends, sadly, also contracted COVID around the same time.
I called him twice a day, and each call he was worse than the last. I decided to rent an AirBnB nearby. My partner and I packed up the dog and everything we needed and drove overnight to get there.
We masked up, and got supplies at Walmart. We brought them to my Dad’s house and left them on the patio - retreated a safe distance - and my Dad came to retrieve them. He was in an awful condition, and his partner was worse.
For the next week I came to their porch every few hours, and called my dad, and we spoke with what little breath he had. He dictated his last will and testament to me. I delivered pedialyte, meal replacement shakes, pulse oximeters, anything to help them make it through. I forced them to get up and move around a little from time to time, and took notes on their condition. They wouldn’t let me in the house.
One day, before I arrived with supplies, my Dad told me they had called an ambulance for his partner. They took his partner to the local hospital… and the hospital turned him away because they had no beds. They essentially sent my Dad’s partner home to die.
By some miraculous turn of events, they survived. They have issues walking and breathing to this day, but they survived.
It’s one of the more agonizing, awful things I’ve ever had to watch. COVID-19 wasn’t harmless; it killed millions. I saw it up close. Especially early on, it was virulent and deadly, and very nearly took my parents from me. It did end up taking a lot of people in my extended social network. They died agonizing deaths.
>> One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as saying:
> “Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Mr. Cotton said.
That could backfire in a couple ways.
1. China could say that they'll consider paying for COVID escaping their borders if the US pays for the damage the things that have escaped its borders have caused, such as greenhouse gases.
Yes, I know that China currently is emitting more greenhouse gases than the US, but since CO2 emissions stay in the atmosphere for several hundred or even thousands of years the US is responsible for more of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere than China is.
It's 26% US, 16% China, 7% Russia, 6% Germany, 5% UK, 4% Japan, 4% India, 2% France, 2% Canada, 2% Ukraine, 2% Poland, rounded to the nearest 1%. All the rest of the countries round to 1% or 0%.
That's a can of worms I don't think the US wants to open.
2. China could say they they'll consider paying, but only up to the amount of damages that would have been reasonably incurred if the US had handled COVID competently.
There were several distinct patterns in COVID deaths in the US. First, there were states like Washington that had a fairly linear growth in the cumulative number of deaths per capita from the start through April 2022, and then after that continued with a linear growth but not as steep.
Then there were states like New York, which got hit very hard in the first two months, because of a combination of nobody really knowing yet how to treat it and dense populations of especially vulnerable people. New York reached in two months a deaths per capita number that Washington took 22 months to reach.
But after those first two months, New York's deaths grew at about the same rate as Washington's, except during the Delta surge and to a lesser extent the Omicron surge. Washington's rate picked up during those surges, but not very much.
There were states like Florida. Its curve was like Washington's first 3 months, the switched to growing about twice as fast. By the end of 2021 it had almost caught up to New York. From then it and New York both continued at about the same rate was Washington, with Florida slightly higher so it passed New York in August 2022.
Other states tended to be a mix of those three patterns. California was close to Washington up until Delta, which brought it to near Florida, but then after Delta was was similar to Washington. A little better actually. Right after Delta it had about 70 more deaths per 100k than Washington, but by March 2023 was down to 56 more deaths per 100k.
Texas was like Florida until Omicron, which it handled better, and after that it was similar to Washington, or even a little better. It had 140 more deaths per 100k than Washington right after Omicron, but only 115 more by March 2023.
By March 2023, which is when the data I'm using ends, Washington stood at 206 deaths per 100k population, California at 256, Texas at 322, New York at 396, and Florida at 404.
Tom Cotton's state, Arkansas, was basically the same pattern as Florida, except with a higher rate. It ended up at 431 deaths per 100k by March 2023.
A good case can probably be made that somewhere from 25% to 50% of the Florida deaths were due to Florida's lax handling of the pandemic.
That too is probably a can of worms many politicians would not want to open, especially if their state is one of the ones that China would be arguing should get greatly reduced damages.
> if the US pays for the damage the things that have escaped its borders have caused,
Or just covid. I remember after PRC lockdown when regional countries were publishing their inbound repatriation flight test data and basically they only got very low digit covid positives, i.e. it was epidemiologically containable. At same time you have all the news of western travellers spreading covid to different countrries because they kept borders open.
Placing rhetoric in context like you did has a way of cutting through the bs and really getting to the core of what current politicians want covid to be. A minor cold when it was running rampant, and now suddenly a plague. Why could that be? Could it be because during the pandemic it was in their best interest to downplay it while hundreds of thousands died, and now that we've passed it and the USA is facing the rise of a successful nation with a different political system, we need to paint them as the enemy? For what it's worth, the current administration is showing signs of cozying up to nations with weak or non-existent democracies. Just look at the proposed tariffs - they are NOT targeting China but rather Mexico and Canada. Why could that be?
Ultimately the question should be, how can we improve our systems to better respond to future pandemics. Does it matter if it was a lab leak? What will that do for those who died? Will revenge prevent a future pandemic from happening? Viruses and bacteria do not care about their nation of origin, once its out its out.
> I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain.
That's fine. The really problem is all debate on such matters was shut down during pandemic. To the benefit of no one (except for maybe Biden trying to cajole to Chinese into something, or other. Or to protect USG's role in this affair by financing Chinese gain of function research).
The real problem is, trying to cover that, they said masks were useless and other elucubrations for which they didn’t have proof, like “Stay inside”. “But they didn’t know it was false” Well, if so, don’t speak.
This is a strange take to me. Of course the search for truth is to some degree a search for accountability. It's not a gotcha to say "They just want to hold China accountable". Of course they do if it seems likely it came from poor procedure, it makes it their responsibility.
> It's not a gotcha to say "They just want to hold China accountable".
Sure, it’s not a gotcha if we divorce such a statement from all of its surrounding context.
But context in communication is incredibly important, and it’s unwise to analyze these kinds of statements in a context-free manner. I find it occurs on this site fairly often; it seems endemic to engineers. I try hard to avoid it myself, but frequently fail.
The relevant context here, of course, is the rabid anti-China sentiment expressed by folks like Sen. Cotton for years, dating back to well before the COVID pandemic. I take no position on whether or not his views are accurate or fair - but a context-informed analysis of the situation suggests that Sen. Cotton (and others) are not simply seeking truth and accountability: rather, they seek pretext to justify their views.
> I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain.
There's never going to be any conclusive evidence of the source of covid, and anyone claiming they have certainty (who wasn't a witness to a lab leak) is simply lying to you. What they're doing is going along with everyone else worth listening to, who find the coincidence that we were funding banned research on coronaviruses in a lab a few feet away from the origin of the outbreak unlikely. They also find tales of non-lab origin both speculative and vague, while stories of lab origin are only speculative.
It's so strange to demand so much more proof of lab origin than one does of non-lab origin. The obvious reasons for that demand are that millions died, and that everybody involved with that lab can easily be named. Also weird that this observation is covid-skeptic coded, when in reality the worse you think covid is, the greater the crime that a lab leak entails.
I assumed it was a non-lab origin at first because that's how all previous pandemics have started as far as I am aware. A lab origin (and what precisely that means has never been particularly clear to me), but I have to say that I'd say your last observation cuts both ways - if one thinks this is such a great crime, then perhaps one would have encouraged masking, shutdowns/distancing, and vaccines, but those seem anti-correlated. Perhaps we'll do better next time around?
If we actually care about public health, we should act as if both the lab leak and zoonosis theories are correct. We should take laboratory biosecurity, wet markets, the bush meat trade and intensive livestock management equally seriously as threats. We should do this because we have no idea where the next pandemic - and there will be a next pandemic - will come from.
It seems fairly clear to me that a lot of people are much more concerned about finding someone to blame for the last pandemic than about preparing for or preventing the next pandemic.
Agree, that's the only sane way to approach things. I worry that it's already relatively rare for people to realize that problems in general can be multi-causal, let alone that we can approach problems as probabilistically multi-causal. Placing blame, on the other hand, is something everyone understands.
The problem is that the two theories can have competing indications as to how to prepare. Specifically: should we do gain of function research, or is that foolish — depends on how you read what happened in 2020.
I think the parent is arguing that lab leak is plausible, even if it wasn’t certainly the cause. GoF is foolish if you think the lab leak was remotely plausible.
Most folks had no idea about the sort of GoF being done, and the attitude of many researchers (highly dismissive of risks) should worry us a lot.
We should also be more worried about zoonotic transmission too, and press harder to ban wet markets.
I don't think these conclusions compete, that’s the point; the actual fact of the matter regarding origins doesn’t much affect the weight of the damning evidence.
Nobody in this thread seems to know what gain of function means. It's a very broad term covering a large percentage of all virology research. If you ban it, you might as well say that we don't want to do any research into understanding viruses from now on.
When you compare the massive risks of spillover from animal populations, which have millions of interactions with humans every minute of every day, with the risks from a small number of highly contained biology labs, the ratio between the two risks is so enormous that this entire discussion is absurd.
The actual future risks don’t change based on which specific origin happened.
The correct response is likely to spend significantly more on doing actual research and a great deal on making sure everyone is well contained. It’s likely a good idea to locate such labs outside of highly populated areas as part of a defense in depth strategy.
Gain of function research in a lab you can't (and more damningly won't) prove had adequate precautions is bad regardless of the source of Covid or the utility of the research. We should be taking it as a wake up call to make sure standards are appropriate and the institutions to make sure those standards are met are strong.
At the very least, we hopefully learned not to subsidize and encourage gain of function research at labs that were already known pre-Covid to have poor hygiene and containment practices.
The question of whether we should do gain-of-function research is a fairly complex cost/benefit analysis. The precise cause of the 2019 pandemic is only a very minor variable in that analysis, because that specific outcome doesn't change the underlying probability of a lab leak. More to the point, do we realistically believe that everyone will stop doing it, even if there's a credible international moratorium? If not, then we need to plan accordingly.
If this wasn't a political problem, but me and my teammates dealing with the aftermath of an incident that cost the company serious money, that's how we'd approach it. But we are technicians trying to prevent a problem, with incentives very well aligned with the company.
Government committees just don't have anywhere near this level of goal alignment, and it's not as if there is a lot of media whose best interests aligns with prevention either. You aren't getting a lot of information in the future out of a group of people you badmouthed a year ago.
> It seems fairly clear to me that a lot of people are much more concerned about finding someone to blame for the last pandemic than about preparing for or preventing the next pandemic.
That's why avian flu was allowed ro spread to cows in 16 states.
Well, assuming you’re part of the “we” that resides in the US, I think we’ve made it pretty clear we’re aren’t taking any of it seriously. Pulling out of the WHO is akin to burying our heads in the sand.
Sure, technically it “isn’t our problem” when some new disease breaks out in another country. But when (not if) it is eventually our problem, it’ll be a very big problem.
"Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time."
The Department of Energy concluded with low confidence that it was a lab leak.
The FBI concluded with moderate confidence that it was a lab leak.
The CIA's new report also concludes that they have low confidence that it was a lab leak.
It's important to note that low confidence is a positive number, not a negative number.
The wet market theory loses some credibility given some data points, but the lab leak theory remains plausible.
China has had lab leak origins in the past, so this would not have been unprecedented.
China obstructed and delayed the investigation.
Whether it leaked from a lab or not, China covered it up. China covering it up is not necessarily evidence that it was a lab leak. If there was any truth to it (which they may not even know), they probably wouldn't want it reflecting poorly on the state. China is big on "social harmony", so you don't have the right to know.
Whatever happened wasn't necessarily intentional. China made some deeply embarrassing and shameful decisions around this time and they won't want to promote them, but they were also not alone in making mistakes.
If China concluded it was a lab leak internally and shared that, there wouldn't have been as much need for the world to speculate, analyze and investigate so much which only hurt China's reputation more.
Coincidences occur, serendipity occurs. Most people have experienced one. As a result, proximity to the lab is not solid proof, but it is not the only datapoint either.
If China was more transparent and cooperative, there could have been more information to make higher confidence conclusions with.
The first large cluster of infections was associated with the Huanan Seafood Market, and retrospective analyses of influenza-like-illness patients and blood donations in Wuhan found no evidence of earlier circulation.
Sampling of many individuals prior to December 2019 showed no positives for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, suggesting that the virus did not spread widely before the market outbreak.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not known to have possessed a sufficiently close backbone strain to engineer SARS-CoV-2, and there is no public data indicating they had undisclosed viruses that match it.
Specific genomic features, like the furin cleavage site, appear suboptimal for an engineered virus (e.g. the PRRAR sequence and an out-of-frame insertion), which fits with a virus evolving naturally rather than through targeted gain-of-function work.
Several closely related bat coronaviruses have partial insertions near the S1/S2 region, suggesting that such changes can occur naturally over time and need not be artificially inserted.
A negative binomial pattern of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, with many zero-spreader events and a small number of superspreader events, is consistent with a spillover followed by rapid amplification in a crowded market setting.
Evidence of multiple potential intermediate animal hosts (e.g. wildlife farmed animals) further increases the probability that a bat coronavirus evolved into SARS-CoV-2 through natural spillover events rather than intentional engineering.
Early cases identified at the market and lack of widespread pre-epidemic infection clusters elsewhere in Wuhan align with the idea of a swift zoonotic jump to humans in late 2019.
The closest natural relative origin of SARS-CoV-2 was in Yunnan ~700 miles away from the market.
The Wuhan lab collected samples from that area and the lab is only ~10 miles away from the market.
Those wet markets are huge vectors for a viral spread, so a virus being spread there doesn't necessarily mean it started there.
Why that market in Hubei and not first at a market closer to Yunnan? It might be more profitable to transport and sell them there, but it's still a long way to travel and avoid spreading during that time just to end up at a market so close to that lab.
A lot of reasoning around whether a lab leak is more likely doesn't require it to be engineered or modified in any way.
Forgive the silly question, but does the lab leak theory entail the virus being engineered in the lab, or simply sampled from nature by researchers then not adequately contained?
I’m not clear on what exactly is being alleged by these agencies?
How many times do we need to repeat "lab leak != intentionally lab engineered"? Your most relevant parts are all about the latter. You know this, yet muddy the waters.
Very good summary, but the problem is, like most things, it is impossible to 100% rule out the lab theory. It is always possible to look at one of these evidences and say "yeah, but ...". And given how politicized this question is, people are just going to believe what they want to believe. I am quite pessimistic about this, that people will remain rational.
I have no idea if the report's conclusions are correct, but I doubt a report like that was created in three or four days. Tasking expert analysts, reassigning the manpower necessary and going through legal and secrecy review in 96 hours would be extraordinary for a large bureaucratic agency. Sure, it could happen but that kind of all-hands, crisis urgency is hard to keep quiet. It's something we'd hear about from insider leaks.
I think it's more plausible that the report existed (because we know the CIA did look into it multiple times already) and the previous director had decided not to release it. And now the new director decided differently. Both of those decisions (not release vs release) were probably politically motivated to some extent but we don't have to jump to assuming an entire new report was fabricated with different conclusions practically overnight. After all, most government agencies that looked into it already concluded with low or medium confidence that it was a lab leak. It's not like the CIA report conclusion is an outlier here.
> the agency was not bending its views to a new boss
Trump has thrown the China hawks under the bus. To the extent anyone is winning accolades by pushing this hypothesis, it's in giving Trump leverage in a trade negotiation. That's too marginal to motivate an adverse conclusion at the CIA.
(Counterfactual: Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce reports for every possible conclusion, and then pick the one that would please the boss.)
> That's too marginal to motivate an adverse conclusion at the CIA.
The decision to not release by the previous director and the decision to release by the new director probably were political to some extent. But I agree with you that the report's impact is too marginal to assume its creation or conclusion was politically motivated. But I think that for a different reason: I doubt adding yet another "low confidence" agency report onto the pile of existing ones changes much - either in geo-political super power negotiations or in the mind of the American public.
The issue has been played out and it's not top of mind or relevant anymore. The majority of people have already made up their minds one way or the other - or decided it doesn't matter anymore and they don't care. Pretty much everyone already acknowledges we'll never know for sure.
> ... giving Trump leverage in a trade negotiation.
That is a perfectly valid hypothesis. In the EU there are also doubts as to what Trump's actual goals are. People are preparing for the scenario that first Biden and now Trump are driving a wedge between the EU and China, whereupon Trump will suddenly change course and be China's best friend. (The unspoken second thesis is that the same scheme applies to Russia):
"There’s another scenario that has the Europeans worried: After getting a reluctant EU onside with his anti-Beijing agenda, the famously fickle Trump could U-turn and end up ganging up on the bloc with his “very, very good friend” Xi Jinping, China’s president."
"There’s precedent for that: In 2020, after years of escalating hostility during Trump’s first term in office, Washington and Beijing struck a mini trade deal aiming to increase U.S. exports to China and to ease their trade war."
"Now, Trump has billionaire China dove Elon Musk in his ear — and he needs Washington to retain good ties with Beijing to keep his electric vehicle company Tesla afloat."
>China covering it up is not necessarily evidence that it was a lab leak.
Yes it is, but the evidence is non-specific. China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis. The cover up is consistent with either theory, but it is the only reaction consistent with a lab leak.
Cover-ups are a cultural thing in East Asia because reputation is paramount. They'll attempt to cover up anything that makes them look bad as means to protect their reputation. So the second part of your statement is not necessarily true.
"China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis."
this is a blind assumption. they may just be covering up 100% of all things, especially when the international community (i.e. Trump) is trying to push/blame them.
You can only assume from this that whatever was going to be found would have been unfavorable to them. Although that would be the case with both the market theory and the lab leak theory.
Or you understand that there is going to be a viral outbreak and you can choose: save the rest of the world from the pandemic or limit information and allow people to spread the virus globally to ensure that your nation doesn’t suffer disproportionately.
I'm not sure what the Department of Energy's qualifications are (I know they're in charges of nukes so maybe also bioweapons?) but I don't see what relevance the FBI's opinion has.
The National Labs, where a tremendous amount of infectious disease work is done for national-scale questions. I've worked with them in the past, and considered taking a job with them - of the various agencies, they're the ones who have weighed in with probably the most expertise.
>If China concluded it was a lab leak internally and shared that,
This insinuates the only reasonable conclusion is PRC lab leak. The only fact is we don't know where covid originated, only PRC was the first to detect and acknowledge it, and for doing so, US under PRC hawk admin tried to weaponize for propaganda war. PRC can still say covid come out of Fort Detrick, and until US opens up soveriegn US soil to WHO investigation (good luck now), then this is all a US coverup and it would be perfecty cromulant position and as "true" as anything CIA claims.
>If China was more transparent and cooperative
If US under Trump and Pompeo wasn't utterly antagonistic to PRC during time frame, there might have been more cooperation. This new CIA spin is continuation of the same geopolitical games.
There are a few things to consider that I’ll add, which further bolster the idea that China has systematically covered up up a lab leak that caused the COVID-19 pandemic:
1. Coronaviruses are hard to contain, even if you have good practices. For example, the earlier SARS outbreak (from the early 2000s) had several documented lab leaks, including multiple within China (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/).
3. The WHO got completely manipulated by China, either willingly or just due to their incompetence. For example, it is well documented now that the WHO publicly praised the Chinese government but privately was concerned and frustrated by the lack of transparency and sharing of vital information, including blocking visits to Wuhan (https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-china-blocked...).
4. The NIAID (Fauci’s agency, under NIH) conducted gain of function research through a third party, EcoHealth Alliance. The grants are all public and document gain of function research, which was illegal since President Obama had banned it through an executive order. There was evidence that the NIH helped EcoHealth craft their grant language in a way to avoid oversight processes that would have blocked the grant (https://theintercept.com/2021/11/03/coronavirus-research-eco...). Note that the president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, is a listed author on gain of function publications from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. After years of trying to bury this, the Biden administration finally blocked funding to EcoHealth in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/health/us-government-suspends...).
5. China only allowed a WHO visit over a year after they knew of the COVID-19 outbreak, in early 2021. They only allowed specific people to participate in the investigation, and the only person allowed from the US, was the same Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance who participated in the research at Wuhan Institute of Virology (https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/03/asia/wuhan-coronavirus-who-ba...).
I think it’s important to note that there are really two “lab leak” theories:
One in which the virus developed naturally, was collected in a remote location, and was being studied in a lab when it leaked from the lab into nearby human society.
One in which it was not a dangerous virus originally, and it became dangerous in the lab through human agency, either maliciously (e.g. bioweapons research) or accidentally (e.g. gain-of-function research).
Note that in the first theory, the virus has a natural origin, but the pandemic originates in the lab leak.
These two theories get mixed up constantly, either by accident or on purpose, who knows. For example look at this CNN story:
First paragraph: “The CIA now assesses the virus that causes Covid-19 more likely originated from an accidental lab leak in China, rather than occurring naturally”
Deeper in the story: “Every US intelligence agency still unanimously maintains that Covid-19 was not developed as a biological weapon” and “almost all American intelligence agencies also assess that the virus itself was not genetically engineered.”
So it didn’t occur “naturally” but also wasn’t developed or engineered. Makes no sense.
> These two theories get mixed up constantly, either by accident or on purpose, who knows
I'm struggling to see the practical difference. Ebola naturally evolved. I'm not sure I'm be more incensed if an American lab released natural versus artifical Ebola into the population.
The practical difference is that many of the arguments against lab-leak theories in general are actually arguments against the gain-of-function theory in particular. Things like lack of markers that would indicate engineering, or the presence of markers that would indicate animal origins. So distinguishing the two candidate theories becomes important for discerning whether the evidence is for or against a lab leak: you can't use animal-origins evidence as evidence against a lab leak, only evidence against an engineered virus.
One way to look at the difference is that a "natural Ebola" almost certainly would have spread at some point anyways, and so it wouldn't affect the total number of world deaths in the end, just make them happen some number of years sooner.
Whereas an "artificial Ebola" would never have existed without it being intentionally created, so all the deaths aren't just time-shifted, they wouldn't have happened otherwise. They're new.
I think the natural-virus-leaked-by-lab theory hinges on the argument that, (assuming it was true, then) had the lab leak not have happened, SARS-CoV-2 wouldn't have made to jump to human by itself. And this is where the Ebola analogy breaks down. Because SARS-CoV-2 has a higher basic reproduction number than Ebola, meaning it's more transmissible. And it's also much less deadly than Ebola, meaning it has much more opportunities to spread.
Remember, it is a virus that caused a global pandemic, despite all the efforts made to stop it. Based on that, I think it is highly likely that whether the lab leaked it or not, it would have made its way to humans by itself. In other words, there would effectively be no way to tell one scenario from the other.
It guides policy. If it was engineered, it means this is research we really shouldn't be doing. If it was a wild virus being researched, it means we need to take the threat of spillover more seriously.
You may distinguish a 100 different lab leak theories, but they do have one thing in common: the virus came from the Wuhan lab. And it's not as if people are going to shrug and say: well, it only costs 100 of thousands or even millions of lives, and still cripples a great many, but forgive and forget.
The best theory I’ve ever read, wrote about miners working in caves with bat who came down with serious pneumonia, or something like that, in the area that the lab sampled viruses from.
The viruses could evolve quite a lot in an immunocompromised individual.
The virus was then probably leaked as part of the work to sequence its genome. So they wouldn’t have published anything on it yet.
I don’t think they did any GoF research or engineered the virus in any way.
I’m fairly certain China knows a lot more about what actually happened though.
>These two theories get mixed up constantly, either by accident or on purpose, who knows.
You literally just reduced 3 theories to 2: lab leak natural virus, lab leak medical GoF, and lab leak bioweapon. These theories get collapsed because there's no practical way to distinguish between them. A 4th theory, intentional release, is often used as a weakman for all lab leak theories, but isn't actually a leak at all.
>So it didn’t occur “naturally” but also wasn’t developed or engineered. Makes no sense.
Yeah, someone wants to split hairs, but it's impossible without knowing the specific definitions they want.
You've made great points throughout this entire post. This is yet another that I've just upvoted (from having been downvoted). But in each you've been needlessly aggressive and hostile. Everyone here knows how frustrating COVID-19 can be to discuss—as is the case with most topics worth discussing. But it's less frustrating when we all implicitly agree to stick to our thoughtful great points.
The CIA is not a neutral party in this. Discrediting China may well be their goal here.
A lab leak is not impossible, but there are good reasons to suspect a natural spillover event. There have been a number of studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests that the Wuhan wet market was the origin.
> There have been a number of studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests the Wuhan wet market was the origin.
Those are not mutually exclusive theories.
It could have been a lab leak that was then superspread by the visit of an affected lab worker (or someone they came into contact with) at the wet market.
A hypothetical lab worker which only spread it to the market and nowhere else seems implausible.
I suppose that could happen if what they were carrying wasn't capable of human transmission yet, but was capable of infecting some species of the live animals at the market, but that's a big if.
There's till the problem of the second lineage which would indicate multiple zoonotic crossover events.
That is possible, but the evidence doesn't suggest that. E.g. if I am reading the paper correctly, they say that there is evidence of two distinct spillover lineages, which wouldn't be consistent with a simple visit from a lab worker.
The current evidence points to at least two different spillover events (of slightly different variants) at the market, followed by spread of the virus in the communities surrounding the market, eventually radiating out to the rest of Wuhan. There is solid evidence now for each of those statements.
If you try to reconcile that with the lab leak theory, you end up with an ever more implausible theory: two different scientists got infected in the lab with different variants (of a virus we have good evidence never existed at the lab in the first place), then both of them went to the market (where the same types of wild animals that caused the original SARS outbreak in 2002 just happened to be sold) and infected people, but somehow they didn't infect anyone else at the lab. It's just one implausibility stacked on top of the next, all with the goal of avoiding what the data is obviously saying: the outbreak began at the market.
US intelligence likely has more evidence than they will publicly discuss. It is a matter of public record that parts of US intelligence (not CIA) had been tracking COVID in China since at least November of 2019. That they coincidentally happened to be johnny-on-the-spot when the initial infection(s) happened, long before anyone was paying attention or trying to create a narrative, suggests that they probably have more context around the conditions of the initial infections than they will ever disclose. How they managed to be "right place, right time" to observe the initial stages raises all kinds of interesting questions that aren't going to be answered.
However, what the (classified) evidence indicates is somewhat separate from whatever public posture the CIA finds useful to take.
> It is a matter of public record that parts of US intelligence (not CIA) had been tracking COVID in China since at least November of 2019.
What's public record is that ABC News reported[1] that two anonymous officials claimed there was an internal intelligence report in late November discussing an outbreak in China, and that it was briefed up the chain. All other news outlets then picked it up, with attribution (ABC News says someone else says...) buried deep in the text per usual. The report was immediately denied publicly by various officials and in over 4 years has never been corroborated, not even with other anonymous sources.
Plus, even if it were true, what's the relevance? It originally made headlines because it implied the Trump administration was slow to react; in particular, that they possibly had as many as 4 additional weeks in which to begin preparations. But it doesn't speak to origin. Most advocates for both the natural and lab-leak arguments all agree that the COVID-19 outbreak began sometime in Fall 2019. It's not a point of contention except possibly when comparing one overspecified theory against another overspecified, straw man theory. There are so many degrees of freedom to either theory (or rather, group of theories) that an early or late start doesn't significantly weigh in favor of one or the other.
US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no conclusive evidence of what exactly happened. The burden of proof is on China. But let's be honest if it was a lab leak of this scale and consequences in US, US wouldn't admit it as would probably no country.
There will be no major discrediting of China since the bat coronavirus research at Wuhan labs was funded by the National Institute of Health. This was firmly and unequivocally established by the hearing held by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Refer to “Overseeing the Overseers: A Hearing with NIH Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak”.
Dr. Tabak testified in this hearing that the NIH was funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China through a grant to EcoHealth.
Of-course this was in "direct contradiction" of the earlier testimony given by Dr Fauci under sworn oath. But hey - he has already been pardoned for it.
The only thing that can be laid at China's feet is ignorance of what was going on in their labs and the useless attempt at media suppression once the virus got out. However, anyone who has studied the facts in detail would easily form the judgement that a subsection of the U.S. government had the majority share of culpability.
> US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no conclusive evidence of what exactly happened.
The US funded the lab and the specific fields of research. I have no idea how people can still be banging on about lab-leak origin being a racist plot against the Chinese. Covid probably leaked from US lab experiments in China. The rest of the world should be raging against the US and China both.
> US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no conclusive evidence of what exactly happened.
Right, but in 2020 and 2021, the US was doing everything it could to discredit those who were trying to possibly discredit China. And the WHO was doing whatever China wanted. No scrutiny was to be tolerated. That in and of itself is very fishy.
The US funded the Wuhan lab through the EcoHealth Alliance, which was used as a vehicle to steer US government funding into areas of research that Obama had banned the US government from funding.
The idea that this assessment needs a goal is strange, because it is the most reasonable assessment, but the idea that it discredits China more than it discredits the US is bizarre. Maybe it does for the Chinese people, who can see that their government is willing to put Chinese people in danger in partnership with a US that was nominally refusing to put American people in danger. Turns out viruses don't need visas so it didn't matter, but maybe it's the thought that counts.
Eh, sure, the CIA isn't behind honest. China isn't being honest. There's too many parties with ulterior motives to trust anything being said. China has done a great job of looking like they're covering something up.
I read "Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley" and it convinced me the lab leak theory was at least fairly likely. The proximity of the outbreak to WIV -- which was doing gain-of-function research of bat coronaviruses -- is convincing. Occam's razor and all.
If only there was an inter-national body that everyone contributes to and that does these things /s. Both parties here are at blame: China didn't fully cooperate with the WHO and the US recently kicked it out.
It's not obvious that international bodies are the answer. Health agencies the world over lied through their teeth to manipulate the public to take specific actions.
So if you believe that your lauded international bodies are immune to politics and the abuse of authority, then maybe it will work. The rest of us prefer international bodies to be forums and coordination points for the real authorities.
What are you talking about? The NIH funded the research through Ecohealth alliance. It was funded from the US and created in the Wuhan lab. We've known the virus was created in a lab and not natural since early 2020.
The major reason for that is that many were doing this in language that was generally considered racist and/or mixed in some other weird stuff like how COVID lockdowns were like the Jewish persecution, rants about masking, or that type of stuff. I'm not saying everyone did that, but there was a huge overlap.
I had a pretty long post about this here before, due to the politicization of the issue it is highly unlikely any of us will ever know “the truth” without a surprise smoking gun. There are good reasons to believe the natural or the lab leak hypotheses.
I think you have to accept it is now unlikely we normies will ever know the truth.
Thanks for the dose of epistemic humility. I'm willing to go one step further: It's plausible that no one knows the truth. Keeping secrets is hard. If someone knew they might've died in the early stages of the outbreak.
There’s an asymmetry of potential evidence for each of the theories as well.
• If it was a lab leak, then even if the people responsible are dead, there was likely data that could trace it back. It is unlikely that data still exists or is findable, for obvious reasons.
• If it was not a lab leak, it may be impossible to find evidence to prove that is the case.
It would be trivial for the Chinese to determine if covid 19 matches with what they were investigating in the lab, and if the people in the lab were among the first infected.
The lab leak is more likely than zoonosis. Uncertainty still dominates.
The take away is not that we'll never know. The take away is that governments conspired to obscure the truth, control public opinion, and censor dissent.
> There are good reasons to believe the natural or the lab leak hypotheses.
Given the ridiculous response from everyone involved, I'm just going to assume it was an accidental biosecurity breach of a natural specimen. It happens frequently enough and enough puzzle pieces seem to fit. Not that I care or think anything should come of it, other than hopefully learning better biosecurity procedures.
I feel this is a great summary, and really calls out the issues that we are certain of — namely the politicization and the resulting uncertainty. IMO, everything else is difficult to know with high confidence, because of those two issues.
Readit News
I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain.
---
One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as saying:
> “Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Mr. Cotton said.
So... I'm not certain this is a development worth trusting. Maybe it really did originate from a lab! But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.
Go watch "A Bridge Too Far" (WWII). Read the story of the Son Tay raid (Vietnam). The many overestimates of Soviet capability during the Cold War. The underestimates of North Korean missile capability. Sometimes uncertain intel really works, as with the attack on the bin Laden compound in Pakistan.
Retrospective intel questions may never be answered. It's known that the US atomic bomb program had another Russian spy who is mentioned by code name in VENONA transcripts, but that spy was never identified. There are still arguments over whether the explosion of the Maine in Havana harbor in 1889 was an accident or a hostile act. It's still not clear why Turret 2 of the USS Iowa blew up in 1989. Huge amounts of effort were expended on all three of those questions, all of which were important at the time, and yet they remain unsettled.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Article-Principles-...
Not quite, and you can't possibly capture all of that paper in that sentiment. For instance, there's this excerpt:
> People’s judgments and willingness to accept analytic findings are framed by multiple factors, including backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs. Every decisionmaker has cognitive biases, including theories that guide them (e.g., the liberal international order), beliefs about how the world works (e.g., the arc of history bends in a particular direction), or sacred beliefs (e.g., all things happen for a reason). Thus it is essential for the analyst to understand as much as possible about the decisionmakers and the environment in which they operate.
Military intelligence will happily give you high confidence leads that are entirely wrong because, by all appearances, the information came from a source in the right place with the seemingly right motivations when in reality they can be playing 4D chess better than the analyst.
The confidence level can only be expressed in finite ways but it can be analyzed in almost infinite, one of them being that the information needed to develop "high confidence" has disappeared and the window of opportunity to gain insight has long passed. Personally speaking, I do not think we will ever find out the origins because a whole gaggle of people with various interests had a vested interest in a particular answer at the time. This is the byproduct of a democracy and bureaucratic system which has not been functioning nominally for quite some time - doubly so now.
I would go so far as to describe the events at the time as parallel construction.
The lab leak hypothesis means "accelerated evolution" through either caged animals or "in vitro cells" infecting the lab personnel. Gene splicing and such are not necessary to make the argument.
The observed fact pointing to this is the number of generations required to produce the divergence between the first SCoV2 variant and the closest wild ancestor. It corresponds to something like 20 years (?) of evolution.
"Genetic analysis and several unusual characteristics of the 1977 Russian flu have prompted many researchers to say that the virus was released to the public through a laboratory accident, or resulted from a live-vaccine trial escape"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2887442/
I will have to have a discussion with the editors of that page.
Ex: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/vaccine-derived-p...
“Low confidence” means that there is a lack of evidence and the statement is ambiguous; that it could be completely true, or completely false. The only lower confidence would be direct evidence that it is outright false. Given, as you said, how nearly impossible it would be to prove true, wouldn’t you think it equally nearly impossible to prove false?
Believe what you want, but even the CIA doesn’t lean on the side of you being right.
any scientist that has any molecular biology wet experience will tell you this is exactly what they would have done (though us researchers would probably not have pulled from the patented BLAST sequences, since that selector is turned off by default by the NCBI)
Generally though, China is somewhat better suited to producing pandemics, because they have a larger and more dense population within which a disease can spread.
May be in the west? It was certainly well publicised in other regions.
Yes, the annoying thing is that "the truth about covid" literally only matters to culture war grievances, it has no relevance whatsoever to the actual world. If it was a lab leak, then China needs to improve their BSL-4 safety... but they need to do that anyway[0]. If it was zoonotic, then they need to clean up the wet markets... but they need to do that anyway. The true origin of covid makes no difference at all, and I wish these people would just come out and admit this is all domestic political peacocking.
[0]: and so does everyone else, for that matter. The US has also had several close calls with BSL-4 leaks; if covid did originate from a lab leak, the fact that it wasn't from an American lab is just sheer dumb luck.
Conversely, if it were a natural outbreak then that bolsters the case for continuing gain of function research as before. Such research is precisely why we were able to identify the threat and within weeks assemble a vaccine, at least on paper. (Granted, the arc began long before 2019 with a through-line of research going back to the 2002 SARS outbreak.) And it's why we've many other advancements. Creation of CRISPR and related technology emerged in part out of gain of function research with viruses. Gain of function is a critical tool in testing hypotheses about how foundational molecular machinery works, and viruses are a convenient research model for exploring and testing ideas in that space.
But I'm not sure the origin should matter to that debate. And I'm even more sure it probably won't matter, even if we agreed on a definitive answer.
People just assumed that the wet markets were the cause of the problem, because they found them digusting (and wanted an excuse to blame it on the Chinese being evil).
In a less dense population, without many people going to the same hospital... You would just not have noticed Covid much.
I get your perspective: an outbreak is an unfortunate byproduct of the risks necessary for scientific progress. No one couldve known how bad it would be. The damage is done, learn from your mistakes and move on. Very enlightened.
In the real world, people will lose their absolute shit. There would be near global demand for sanctions and reparations, and there's enough anti china sentiment that its a real possibility.
Backed into a corner, the world against them, they would have no other choice. It would be a matter of survival.
The new administration has been in office a week. There is a political incentive to release it now, but they couldn’t have meaningfully created the analysis for political reasons in five days.
CIA has been in the hot seat for long enough to be politically sensitive. Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce multiple reports for every conclusion. It's not implausible that this happened here. In any case, we're talking about a partian topic with low- and moderate-confidence reports with a President who has zero chance of holding China accountable on it. Parlour talk.
Supposedly because they've had more time to think about the conditions of the lab before Covid was released...
But really, nothing has changed except their biases. Nothing has changed on the solid evidence side.
Separately, if there were actual safety issues and stuff was leaking... Then we're incredibly lucky that it was something as tame as Covid, and not one of the more serious kinds of horrors that gain of function research has successfully produced.
Dead Comment
1) Multiple departments of the executive branch were saying this under Biden too.
2) The US gov’t funded the biological weapons research lab at Wuhan. Mr Cotton has been a senator for 10 years, and therefore was around when the funding was approved. So if he wants to find someone to punish, maybe he should look in a mirror.
Vertiginous to think about the layers of unknowns.
Looking for reparations is secondary to that, but maybe not entirely unreasonable either; not that it'll ever happen.
Maybe it leaked from the lab; maybe it was released? As far as I understand (but tbh, I have not kept up as much with immunology news) the alternative theory of the virus hopping from another species hadn't been confirmed, as no reservoir had been found. Does anyone know if that had been the case?
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53106444
[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7428442/
> So... I'm not certain this is a development worth trusting. Maybe it really did originate from a lab! But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.
0. COVID-19 was mostly harmless. Even more so than Douglas Adam's books. 1. China reacted asif they'd accidentally released a bioweapon. 2. China did what it does best, shut the F up on the world stage. 3. Everyone saw China's reaction because this isn't the 1950s and the internet exists. 4. The developed nations freaked out until there was data, hence the first set of lockdowns in Europe very quickly. 5. 2-3 years later after media pantomime, sectarian politics, holier than though preaching from everyone, the WHO declared the "emergency" over.
Some countries achieved 80%+ vaccination rates, didn't see 20% die. Some only achieved 50% and didn't see 50% death rates.
We now have a serious economic tab to be paid because of the BS pushed by developed countries in a panic that might have been less dramatic had there been information available from day 1.
China _has_ hidden and or destroyed a lot of "evidence" making certain discussions mute. (Again they are good at this let's not pretend otherwise).
Western countries, who, _like china_, jumped on a "who can punch themselves hardest with policy?" approach to this unknown now want someone else to blame.
Aka because we can pin a small significance and serious fault on China being a bad neighbour. (Snooze to the sensible this isn't news, china is very private about internal policy and now even more so) We are choosing to blame them for everything to get motivation up to get them to pay the bill...
This unfortunately was clear winter of 2020 and is clear now, it's just taken 4-5yr for politics to go through it's "he said she said" cycle. And I'm not referring to the US or UK political cycles this is the slow bi-partizan we all need someone to blame rather than be introspective and realise __"We should have handled this better"__.
> 0. COVID-19 was mostly harmless. Even more so than Douglas Adam's books.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I found out that my father and his partner had COVID. He lived, at the time, about 12 hours drive from me. Where he lived, his support network was thin (to say the least) - the little family he had nearby needed to keep away because they were responsible for caring for my cousin with a severely weakened immune system. His friends, sadly, also contracted COVID around the same time.
I called him twice a day, and each call he was worse than the last. I decided to rent an AirBnB nearby. My partner and I packed up the dog and everything we needed and drove overnight to get there.
We masked up, and got supplies at Walmart. We brought them to my Dad’s house and left them on the patio - retreated a safe distance - and my Dad came to retrieve them. He was in an awful condition, and his partner was worse.
For the next week I came to their porch every few hours, and called my dad, and we spoke with what little breath he had. He dictated his last will and testament to me. I delivered pedialyte, meal replacement shakes, pulse oximeters, anything to help them make it through. I forced them to get up and move around a little from time to time, and took notes on their condition. They wouldn’t let me in the house.
One day, before I arrived with supplies, my Dad told me they had called an ambulance for his partner. They took his partner to the local hospital… and the hospital turned him away because they had no beds. They essentially sent my Dad’s partner home to die.
By some miraculous turn of events, they survived. They have issues walking and breathing to this day, but they survived.
It’s one of the more agonizing, awful things I’ve ever had to watch. COVID-19 wasn’t harmless; it killed millions. I saw it up close. Especially early on, it was virulent and deadly, and very nearly took my parents from me. It did end up taking a lot of people in my extended social network. They died agonizing deaths.
How dare you paint it as “mostly harmless.”
> “Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Mr. Cotton said.
That could backfire in a couple ways.
1. China could say that they'll consider paying for COVID escaping their borders if the US pays for the damage the things that have escaped its borders have caused, such as greenhouse gases.
Yes, I know that China currently is emitting more greenhouse gases than the US, but since CO2 emissions stay in the atmosphere for several hundred or even thousands of years the US is responsible for more of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere than China is.
It's 26% US, 16% China, 7% Russia, 6% Germany, 5% UK, 4% Japan, 4% India, 2% France, 2% Canada, 2% Ukraine, 2% Poland, rounded to the nearest 1%. All the rest of the countries round to 1% or 0%.
That's a can of worms I don't think the US wants to open.
2. China could say they they'll consider paying, but only up to the amount of damages that would have been reasonably incurred if the US had handled COVID competently.
There were several distinct patterns in COVID deaths in the US. First, there were states like Washington that had a fairly linear growth in the cumulative number of deaths per capita from the start through April 2022, and then after that continued with a linear growth but not as steep.
Then there were states like New York, which got hit very hard in the first two months, because of a combination of nobody really knowing yet how to treat it and dense populations of especially vulnerable people. New York reached in two months a deaths per capita number that Washington took 22 months to reach.
But after those first two months, New York's deaths grew at about the same rate as Washington's, except during the Delta surge and to a lesser extent the Omicron surge. Washington's rate picked up during those surges, but not very much.
There were states like Florida. Its curve was like Washington's first 3 months, the switched to growing about twice as fast. By the end of 2021 it had almost caught up to New York. From then it and New York both continued at about the same rate was Washington, with Florida slightly higher so it passed New York in August 2022.
Other states tended to be a mix of those three patterns. California was close to Washington up until Delta, which brought it to near Florida, but then after Delta was was similar to Washington. A little better actually. Right after Delta it had about 70 more deaths per 100k than Washington, but by March 2023 was down to 56 more deaths per 100k.
Texas was like Florida until Omicron, which it handled better, and after that it was similar to Washington, or even a little better. It had 140 more deaths per 100k than Washington right after Omicron, but only 115 more by March 2023.
By March 2023, which is when the data I'm using ends, Washington stood at 206 deaths per 100k population, California at 256, Texas at 322, New York at 396, and Florida at 404.
Tom Cotton's state, Arkansas, was basically the same pattern as Florida, except with a higher rate. It ended up at 431 deaths per 100k by March 2023.
A good case can probably be made that somewhere from 25% to 50% of the Florida deaths were due to Florida's lax handling of the pandemic.
That too is probably a can of worms many politicians would not want to open, especially if their state is one of the ones that China would be arguing should get greatly reduced damages.
Or just covid. I remember after PRC lockdown when regional countries were publishing their inbound repatriation flight test data and basically they only got very low digit covid positives, i.e. it was epidemiologically containable. At same time you have all the news of western travellers spreading covid to different countrries because they kept borders open.
Does COVID being a “plague” jibe with the talking point that COVID is “no worse than a cold”
Ultimately the question should be, how can we improve our systems to better respond to future pandemics. Does it matter if it was a lab leak? What will that do for those who died? Will revenge prevent a future pandemic from happening? Viruses and bacteria do not care about their nation of origin, once its out its out.
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That's fine. The really problem is all debate on such matters was shut down during pandemic. To the benefit of no one (except for maybe Biden trying to cajole to Chinese into something, or other. Or to protect USG's role in this affair by financing Chinese gain of function research).
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Sure, it’s not a gotcha if we divorce such a statement from all of its surrounding context.
But context in communication is incredibly important, and it’s unwise to analyze these kinds of statements in a context-free manner. I find it occurs on this site fairly often; it seems endemic to engineers. I try hard to avoid it myself, but frequently fail.
The relevant context here, of course, is the rabid anti-China sentiment expressed by folks like Sen. Cotton for years, dating back to well before the COVID pandemic. I take no position on whether or not his views are accurate or fair - but a context-informed analysis of the situation suggests that Sen. Cotton (and others) are not simply seeking truth and accountability: rather, they seek pretext to justify their views.
There's never going to be any conclusive evidence of the source of covid, and anyone claiming they have certainty (who wasn't a witness to a lab leak) is simply lying to you. What they're doing is going along with everyone else worth listening to, who find the coincidence that we were funding banned research on coronaviruses in a lab a few feet away from the origin of the outbreak unlikely. They also find tales of non-lab origin both speculative and vague, while stories of lab origin are only speculative.
It's so strange to demand so much more proof of lab origin than one does of non-lab origin. The obvious reasons for that demand are that millions died, and that everybody involved with that lab can easily be named. Also weird that this observation is covid-skeptic coded, when in reality the worse you think covid is, the greater the crime that a lab leak entails.
It's not, zoonotic transmission has happened many times, lab leak is the extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence
It seems fairly clear to me that a lot of people are much more concerned about finding someone to blame for the last pandemic than about preparing for or preventing the next pandemic.
War happens to be my least favourite colour for a bikeshed...
Most folks had no idea about the sort of GoF being done, and the attitude of many researchers (highly dismissive of risks) should worry us a lot.
We should also be more worried about zoonotic transmission too, and press harder to ban wet markets.
I don't think these conclusions compete, that’s the point; the actual fact of the matter regarding origins doesn’t much affect the weight of the damning evidence.
When you compare the massive risks of spillover from animal populations, which have millions of interactions with humans every minute of every day, with the risks from a small number of highly contained biology labs, the ratio between the two risks is so enormous that this entire discussion is absurd.
The correct response is likely to spend significantly more on doing actual research and a great deal on making sure everyone is well contained. It’s likely a good idea to locate such labs outside of highly populated areas as part of a defense in depth strategy.
How, precisely, do you believe that gain of function will benefit us the next pandemic?
Edit:
Swap “aid” to “benefit us” for hopefully better clarity.
Government committees just don't have anywhere near this level of goal alignment, and it's not as if there is a lot of media whose best interests aligns with prevention either. You aren't getting a lot of information in the future out of a group of people you badmouthed a year ago.
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That's why avian flu was allowed ro spread to cows in 16 states.
Sure, technically it “isn’t our problem” when some new disease breaks out in another country. But when (not if) it is eventually our problem, it’ll be a very big problem.
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"Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time."
The Department of Energy concluded with low confidence that it was a lab leak.
The FBI concluded with moderate confidence that it was a lab leak.
The CIA's new report also concludes that they have low confidence that it was a lab leak.
It's important to note that low confidence is a positive number, not a negative number.
The wet market theory loses some credibility given some data points, but the lab leak theory remains plausible.
China has had lab leak origins in the past, so this would not have been unprecedented.
China obstructed and delayed the investigation.
Whether it leaked from a lab or not, China covered it up. China covering it up is not necessarily evidence that it was a lab leak. If there was any truth to it (which they may not even know), they probably wouldn't want it reflecting poorly on the state. China is big on "social harmony", so you don't have the right to know.
Whatever happened wasn't necessarily intentional. China made some deeply embarrassing and shameful decisions around this time and they won't want to promote them, but they were also not alone in making mistakes.
If China concluded it was a lab leak internally and shared that, there wouldn't have been as much need for the world to speculate, analyze and investigate so much which only hurt China's reputation more.
Coincidences occur, serendipity occurs. Most people have experienced one. As a result, proximity to the lab is not solid proof, but it is not the only datapoint either.
If China was more transparent and cooperative, there could have been more information to make higher confidence conclusions with.
The first large cluster of infections was associated with the Huanan Seafood Market, and retrospective analyses of influenza-like-illness patients and blood donations in Wuhan found no evidence of earlier circulation.
Sampling of many individuals prior to December 2019 showed no positives for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, suggesting that the virus did not spread widely before the market outbreak.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not known to have possessed a sufficiently close backbone strain to engineer SARS-CoV-2, and there is no public data indicating they had undisclosed viruses that match it.
Specific genomic features, like the furin cleavage site, appear suboptimal for an engineered virus (e.g. the PRRAR sequence and an out-of-frame insertion), which fits with a virus evolving naturally rather than through targeted gain-of-function work.
Several closely related bat coronaviruses have partial insertions near the S1/S2 region, suggesting that such changes can occur naturally over time and need not be artificially inserted.
A negative binomial pattern of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, with many zero-spreader events and a small number of superspreader events, is consistent with a spillover followed by rapid amplification in a crowded market setting.
Evidence of multiple potential intermediate animal hosts (e.g. wildlife farmed animals) further increases the probability that a bat coronavirus evolved into SARS-CoV-2 through natural spillover events rather than intentional engineering.
Early cases identified at the market and lack of widespread pre-epidemic infection clusters elsewhere in Wuhan align with the idea of a swift zoonotic jump to humans in late 2019.
The Wuhan lab collected samples from that area and the lab is only ~10 miles away from the market.
Those wet markets are huge vectors for a viral spread, so a virus being spread there doesn't necessarily mean it started there.
Why that market in Hubei and not first at a market closer to Yunnan? It might be more profitable to transport and sell them there, but it's still a long way to travel and avoid spreading during that time just to end up at a market so close to that lab.
A lot of reasoning around whether a lab leak is more likely doesn't require it to be engineered or modified in any way.
I’m not clear on what exactly is being alleged by these agencies?
Likely, the virus was not engineered but was stored in the laboratory.
Officials are saying that, true.
I have "low confidence" it actually is true. Everyone since the election has been scrambling to kowtow to the new boss to avoid his wrath.
I have no idea if the report's conclusions are correct, but I doubt a report like that was created in three or four days. Tasking expert analysts, reassigning the manpower necessary and going through legal and secrecy review in 96 hours would be extraordinary for a large bureaucratic agency. Sure, it could happen but that kind of all-hands, crisis urgency is hard to keep quiet. It's something we'd hear about from insider leaks.
I think it's more plausible that the report existed (because we know the CIA did look into it multiple times already) and the previous director had decided not to release it. And now the new director decided differently. Both of those decisions (not release vs release) were probably politically motivated to some extent but we don't have to jump to assuming an entire new report was fabricated with different conclusions practically overnight. After all, most government agencies that looked into it already concluded with low or medium confidence that it was a lab leak. It's not like the CIA report conclusion is an outlier here.
Trump has thrown the China hawks under the bus. To the extent anyone is winning accolades by pushing this hypothesis, it's in giving Trump leverage in a trade negotiation. That's too marginal to motivate an adverse conclusion at the CIA.
(Counterfactual: Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce reports for every possible conclusion, and then pick the one that would please the boss.)
The decision to not release by the previous director and the decision to release by the new director probably were political to some extent. But I agree with you that the report's impact is too marginal to assume its creation or conclusion was politically motivated. But I think that for a different reason: I doubt adding yet another "low confidence" agency report onto the pile of existing ones changes much - either in geo-political super power negotiations or in the mind of the American public.
The issue has been played out and it's not top of mind or relevant anymore. The majority of people have already made up their minds one way or the other - or decided it doesn't matter anymore and they don't care. Pretty much everyone already acknowledges we'll never know for sure.
That is a perfectly valid hypothesis. In the EU there are also doubts as to what Trump's actual goals are. People are preparing for the scenario that first Biden and now Trump are driving a wedge between the EU and China, whereupon Trump will suddenly change course and be China's best friend. (The unspoken second thesis is that the same scheme applies to Russia):
https://www.politico.eu/article/fear-and-loathing-in-davos-e...
"There’s another scenario that has the Europeans worried: After getting a reluctant EU onside with his anti-Beijing agenda, the famously fickle Trump could U-turn and end up ganging up on the bloc with his “very, very good friend” Xi Jinping, China’s president."
"There’s precedent for that: In 2020, after years of escalating hostility during Trump’s first term in office, Washington and Beijing struck a mini trade deal aiming to increase U.S. exports to China and to ease their trade war."
"Now, Trump has billionaire China dove Elon Musk in his ear — and he needs Washington to retain good ties with Beijing to keep his electric vehicle company Tesla afloat."
Yes it is, but the evidence is non-specific. China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis. The cover up is consistent with either theory, but it is the only reaction consistent with a lab leak.
this is a blind assumption. they may just be covering up 100% of all things, especially when the international community (i.e. Trump) is trying to push/blame them.
You can only assume from this that whatever was going to be found would have been unfavorable to them. Although that would be the case with both the market theory and the lab leak theory.
For example, maybe the people shutting down the investigation had no idea what it would find and just didn't want to take the chance.
There’s 17 intelligence agencies that all staff knowledgeable experts on all sorts of topics. Our government is Leviathan.
This insinuates the only reasonable conclusion is PRC lab leak. The only fact is we don't know where covid originated, only PRC was the first to detect and acknowledge it, and for doing so, US under PRC hawk admin tried to weaponize for propaganda war. PRC can still say covid come out of Fort Detrick, and until US opens up soveriegn US soil to WHO investigation (good luck now), then this is all a US coverup and it would be perfecty cromulant position and as "true" as anything CIA claims.
>If China was more transparent and cooperative
If US under Trump and Pompeo wasn't utterly antagonistic to PRC during time frame, there might have been more cooperation. This new CIA spin is continuation of the same geopolitical games.
1. Coronaviruses are hard to contain, even if you have good practices. For example, the earlier SARS outbreak (from the early 2000s) had several documented lab leaks, including multiple within China (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/).
2. The US state department was aware that China was conducting dangerous research on coronaviruses on poorly managed labs a few years before the COVID-19 pandemic (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...).
3. The WHO got completely manipulated by China, either willingly or just due to their incompetence. For example, it is well documented now that the WHO publicly praised the Chinese government but privately was concerned and frustrated by the lack of transparency and sharing of vital information, including blocking visits to Wuhan (https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-china-blocked...).
4. The NIAID (Fauci’s agency, under NIH) conducted gain of function research through a third party, EcoHealth Alliance. The grants are all public and document gain of function research, which was illegal since President Obama had banned it through an executive order. There was evidence that the NIH helped EcoHealth craft their grant language in a way to avoid oversight processes that would have blocked the grant (https://theintercept.com/2021/11/03/coronavirus-research-eco...). Note that the president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, is a listed author on gain of function publications from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. After years of trying to bury this, the Biden administration finally blocked funding to EcoHealth in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/health/us-government-suspends...).
5. China only allowed a WHO visit over a year after they knew of the COVID-19 outbreak, in early 2021. They only allowed specific people to participate in the investigation, and the only person allowed from the US, was the same Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance who participated in the research at Wuhan Institute of Virology (https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/03/asia/wuhan-coronavirus-who-ba...).
Can you provide a link to the executive order? It sounds seriously strange.
One in which the virus developed naturally, was collected in a remote location, and was being studied in a lab when it leaked from the lab into nearby human society.
One in which it was not a dangerous virus originally, and it became dangerous in the lab through human agency, either maliciously (e.g. bioweapons research) or accidentally (e.g. gain-of-function research).
Note that in the first theory, the virus has a natural origin, but the pandemic originates in the lab leak.
These two theories get mixed up constantly, either by accident or on purpose, who knows. For example look at this CNN story:
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/01/25/politics/covid-19-lab-lea...
First paragraph: “The CIA now assesses the virus that causes Covid-19 more likely originated from an accidental lab leak in China, rather than occurring naturally”
Deeper in the story: “Every US intelligence agency still unanimously maintains that Covid-19 was not developed as a biological weapon” and “almost all American intelligence agencies also assess that the virus itself was not genetically engineered.”
So it didn’t occur “naturally” but also wasn’t developed or engineered. Makes no sense.
I'm struggling to see the practical difference. Ebola naturally evolved. I'm not sure I'm be more incensed if an American lab released natural versus artifical Ebola into the population.
Whereas an "artificial Ebola" would never have existed without it being intentionally created, so all the deaths aren't just time-shifted, they wouldn't have happened otherwise. They're new.
Remember, it is a virus that caused a global pandemic, despite all the efforts made to stop it. Based on that, I think it is highly likely that whether the lab leaked it or not, it would have made its way to humans by itself. In other words, there would effectively be no way to tell one scenario from the other.
The viruses could evolve quite a lot in an immunocompromised individual.
The virus was then probably leaked as part of the work to sequence its genome. So they wouldn’t have published anything on it yet.
I don’t think they did any GoF research or engineered the virus in any way.
I’m fairly certain China knows a lot more about what actually happened though.
You literally just reduced 3 theories to 2: lab leak natural virus, lab leak medical GoF, and lab leak bioweapon. These theories get collapsed because there's no practical way to distinguish between them. A 4th theory, intentional release, is often used as a weakman for all lab leak theories, but isn't actually a leak at all.
>So it didn’t occur “naturally” but also wasn’t developed or engineered. Makes no sense.
Yeah, someone wants to split hairs, but it's impossible without knowing the specific definitions they want.
A lab leak is not impossible, but there are good reasons to suspect a natural spillover event. There have been a number of studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests that the Wuhan wet market was the origin.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2
Those are not mutually exclusive theories.
It could have been a lab leak that was then superspread by the visit of an affected lab worker (or someone they came into contact with) at the wet market.
I suppose that could happen if what they were carrying wasn't capable of human transmission yet, but was capable of infecting some species of the live animals at the market, but that's a big if.
There's till the problem of the second lineage which would indicate multiple zoonotic crossover events.
The current evidence points to at least two different spillover events (of slightly different variants) at the market, followed by spread of the virus in the communities surrounding the market, eventually radiating out to the rest of Wuhan. There is solid evidence now for each of those statements.
If you try to reconcile that with the lab leak theory, you end up with an ever more implausible theory: two different scientists got infected in the lab with different variants (of a virus we have good evidence never existed at the lab in the first place), then both of them went to the market (where the same types of wild animals that caused the original SARS outbreak in 2002 just happened to be sold) and infected people, but somehow they didn't infect anyone else at the lab. It's just one implausibility stacked on top of the next, all with the goal of avoiding what the data is obviously saying: the outbreak began at the market.
However, what the (classified) evidence indicates is somewhat separate from whatever public posture the CIA finds useful to take.
What's public record is that ABC News reported[1] that two anonymous officials claimed there was an internal intelligence report in late November discussing an outbreak in China, and that it was briefed up the chain. All other news outlets then picked it up, with attribution (ABC News says someone else says...) buried deep in the text per usual. The report was immediately denied publicly by various officials and in over 4 years has never been corroborated, not even with other anonymous sources.
Plus, even if it were true, what's the relevance? It originally made headlines because it implied the Trump administration was slow to react; in particular, that they possibly had as many as 4 additional weeks in which to begin preparations. But it doesn't speak to origin. Most advocates for both the natural and lab-leak arguments all agree that the COVID-19 outbreak began sometime in Fall 2019. It's not a point of contention except possibly when comparing one overspecified theory against another overspecified, straw man theory. There are so many degrees of freedom to either theory (or rather, group of theories) that an early or late start doesn't significantly weigh in favor of one or the other.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-c...
But they are saying that they have low confidence, and that there is no new evidence that changes anything.
They're just changing the way they're biased, because they think that the lab's conditions weren't particularly safe.
But then, we might as well expect that dozens of dangerous viruses should've gotten out.
Dr. Tabak testified in this hearing that the NIH was funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China through a grant to EcoHealth.
Of-course this was in "direct contradiction" of the earlier testimony given by Dr Fauci under sworn oath. But hey - he has already been pardoned for it.
The only thing that can be laid at China's feet is ignorance of what was going on in their labs and the useless attempt at media suppression once the virus got out. However, anyone who has studied the facts in detail would easily form the judgement that a subsection of the U.S. government had the majority share of culpability.
The US funded the lab and the specific fields of research. I have no idea how people can still be banging on about lab-leak origin being a racist plot against the Chinese. Covid probably leaked from US lab experiments in China. The rest of the world should be raging against the US and China both.
Right, but in 2020 and 2021, the US was doing everything it could to discredit those who were trying to possibly discredit China. And the WHO was doing whatever China wanted. No scrutiny was to be tolerated. That in and of itself is very fishy.
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The idea that this assessment needs a goal is strange, because it is the most reasonable assessment, but the idea that it discredits China more than it discredits the US is bizarre. Maybe it does for the Chinese people, who can see that their government is willing to put Chinese people in danger in partnership with a US that was nominally refusing to put American people in danger. Turns out viruses don't need visas so it didn't matter, but maybe it's the thought that counts.
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I read "Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley" and it convinced me the lab leak theory was at least fairly likely. The proximity of the outbreak to WIV -- which was doing gain-of-function research of bat coronaviruses -- is convincing. Occam's razor and all.
So if you believe that your lauded international bodies are immune to politics and the abuse of authority, then maybe it will work. The rest of us prefer international bodies to be forums and coordination points for the real authorities.
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https://peakprosperity.com/more-evidence-covid-19-may-not-be...
Of course the immediate jump to conclusion in the first few months by some who found it politically expedient was no better either.
People need to be more comfortable saying I don’t know but we are looking into it.
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All other theories sound as made up bs.
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I think you have to accept it is now unlikely we normies will ever know the truth.
The post, and its comments, are worth reading still IMO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26750452#26751943
Thanks for the dose of epistemic humility. I'm willing to go one step further: It's plausible that no one knows the truth. Keeping secrets is hard. If someone knew they might've died in the early stages of the outbreak.
• If it was a lab leak, then even if the people responsible are dead, there was likely data that could trace it back. It is unlikely that data still exists or is findable, for obvious reasons.
• If it was not a lab leak, it may be impossible to find evidence to prove that is the case.
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The take away is not that we'll never know. The take away is that governments conspired to obscure the truth, control public opinion, and censor dissent.
Given the ridiculous response from everyone involved, I'm just going to assume it was an accidental biosecurity breach of a natural specimen. It happens frequently enough and enough puzzle pieces seem to fit. Not that I care or think anything should come of it, other than hopefully learning better biosecurity procedures.
Why bother assuming? Why isn’t “I don’t know” good enough?
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