It is interesting that a potential accidental leak is now labeled as a "conspiracy theory" by the media outlets, even though China already had two accidentally leaks from their lab in Beijing. Including the SARS leak accident for which Chinese CDC officials were publicly punished in 2004. Same media outlets who keep repeating that masks are useless for civilians, publishing bat soup pictures from Palau Island as Wuhan food, and relaying unfiltered chinese propaganda and stats as "real news".

It’s a conspiracy theory if there isn’t any good evidence. The fact that labs have accidentally leaked pathogens before is not evidence that all future new pathogens are leaked from labs.

Cool. Next time a cops investigate someone with priors or with similar MOs we should label them as conspiracy theorists.

I find it.. peculiar that giving merit to a theory about the Chinese government trying to cover up a lab accident is labeled or treated the same as other theories about Soros, Clintons, Illuminatis et al. There are data points which point to this. There is proof of doctors disappearing, active government censorship and prior accidents from China. Not to mention the statistical impossibility of their official epidemiological numbers. Why doesn't this merit at least the thought of an investigation? Or a non-zero probability? As someone who grew up in a communist state with a totalitarian government, I lived through 'manufactured realities' way more obscene than what I just described. This is peanuts.

It's interesting because whenever something like ^ appears online on reddit or (recently Blind), an army of people appear with one of the following arguments:

- I'm trying to deflect from the current US administration's incompetence. This IMO is an orthogonal problem

- the NY strains have European origins so why are you talking about China

- China was the only country to properly contain the virus

- tinfoil hat much?

No, rigorous investigation of possibilities indicated by priors is not conspiracy theory. It’s conspiracy theory when you claim that it’s true without any such investigation or evidence.

CMilk did a video a week or two ago on what evidence we have so far. I’d say it’s convincing enough; or rather, that within the context of China, there is enough smoke (disappearing lab members, papers removed...etc), lots of CCP efforts to call those rumors, and not much dispelling being done by the government. In all my years in China, if there’s one thing the government there hates, it’s rumors and they will do anything to squash them if they’re actually false (eg providing proof of life if people claim someone is missing vs just saying “I assure you they is alive.”)

Can we please cite something a little more substantive than random Youtube videos made by people with no apparent familiarity with the fields of endeavor they're trying to report on? I mean, I don't doubt the guy's good intentions, but this is like if I were trying to make a technical argument about the physics of string theory.

Well, one can easily dig into the sequences database, to find some useful clues:

-A lot of chinese papers have been published through the years on the topic, during multiples waves of sample collection over all the chinese mainland. Showing there was/is a notable interest about this pathogen issue.

-One can also easily spot which research center were/are the most active on the topic and its related research teams. Wuhan research center is not excluded from the list as some others main big labs.

-Each entry sequence in the database is dated with a location, publishing team and associated paper. It is useful for following the pathogen evolution building phylogeny trees.

-Aligning a lot of sequences clearly show that this strain is separated from the rest of the others mains strain. The only related sequences are the one released by the chinese team.

-The closest related sequences are 2013 year dated and other from 2015/2017/2019, which per se does not provide a lot of information about the real pathogen evolution.

-The different gain of function that this pathogen got compared to its predecessors is quite remarkable and hard to overlook.

-The overall AT/GC sequence content have also evolved from its predecessors showing rich AT content that is generally related to higher host habit and expression.

So yeah, knowing china is not smiley kind shaped, one can still question the research and lab habit as one would do for any other country. A theory based on excessive and unregulated animal sampling could have exacerbated the real cross-transmission issue is as valid as the one about pathogen leaking from the lab or simply by natural evolution.

Anyway one can clearly take a moment to question the overall package, along the safety lab practices deployed around the world when dealing with potential pathogens.

I'd be interested to look at that sequence comparison in more detail. IIRC you can link BLAST results etc. directly from NCBI's site, and I'm sure you can link the sequence accessions to which you refer.

Looking very carefully and with patience one can find everything on NCBI database. Otherwise there is a big repository of sequence here: http://www.mgc.ac.cn/DBatVir/

Yes, but the NCBI sequence database is quite vast. You seem already to have gone to the effort of finding and reviewing these sequences, and producing an analysis. Why not share your sources as well as your results, instead of asking others to find them from scratch and have to hope they're the same ones you're using?

But the fact that a government sometimes tries to cover up things does not mean that every claim is true. “They’ve covered stuff up before” just is not sufficient evidence for anything, including, say, Bigfoot.

We are not judging the validity of the claim from the claim alone. We are doing so from the pattern of behaviors around it by the CCP and how those patterns correlate to priors we’ve seen in the past when they’ve tried to hide the truth.

Researchers who warned us years ago about dangers of engineered bat virus leak scenario in an article from Nature Research Journal, should we label them as conspiracy theorists too?

No, that warning is either valid or invalid, based solely on the evidence and explanations provided in that warning.

It's not a conspiracy theory if there are significant priors, which this would be, assuming it's true. That's enough to justify taking the idea seriously on first pass, even if it turns out not to have been what happened in this case.

Lack of evidence isn’t sufficient to label a theory as conspiracy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory

Here is a study of "Serological Evidence of Bat SARS-Related Coronavirus Infection in Humans, China" done in 2018 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ The corresponding author Zheng-Li Shi is also the lead reasearcher of Wuhan lab.

I wish people use peer reviewed articles as supporting evidence when making arguments. These subjects (coronavirus origin and transmission) are well researched and disseminated.

I wish people who use peer-reviewed articles as supporting evidence when making arguments would do a better job of understanding what those peer-reviewed articles are about.

Or, for that matter, of making an argument in the first place. You're not doing that here. You're just noting that a researcher who does research on transmission of coronaviruses from bats to humans, has published research on transmission of coronaviruses from bats to humans. I don't know what conclusion you expect anyone to draw from that.

People can draw their own conclusions. That is what is nice about solid evidence. I will make two notes:

1. Bats can transmit viruses to humans independent of wet markets and research activities and these villagers do travel to cities;

2. This particular research was funded jointly by USA, China and Singapore to monitor possible recurrence of SARS like virus.

Is that supposed to be evidence of the covid-19 outbreak originating from the Wuhan lab?

How do you suggest research be done?

With great care and from a distance.

If we're manually catching and swabbing wild bat rectums, I don't think we're doing a good job of keeping a distance, especially considering how far technology has progressed.

Humans and bats aren't going to stop interacting, not least because guano is an excellent fertilizer and the easiest way to get it is by giving bats incentives to defecate over your fields.

That being so, and given the utter implausibility of bat-butthole-swabbing robots or whatever, would you rather we had people taking the negligible additional risk of doing this kind of research, so that we have a chance of being able to prepare in advance for the arrival of zoonoses like SARS-CoV-2? Or would you rather be taken by surprise?

Going by the current state of affairs in the world, I have to say that being taken by surprise seems to have very little to recommend it.

With great care, in isolation and with full transparency. Tthere are protocols for how to deal with lab accidents or outbreaks and prior incidents show that all of these have lower priority than 'saving face' for the Chinese government.

In whatever fashion you might think of, which does not endanger the lives of millions of people?

I feel like it is completely speculative as you said and I am not conspiratorial at all. Because China is so secretive and has already been known to punish people for reporting on this it seems likely that these theories will only increase (I mean, how could you ever prove them wrong given China's actions)

The US is far more open than China, yet the amount of batshit crazy conspiracy theories that circulate about it is staggering. Only an incredibly slim minority of them actually turn out to be true... Or something resembling true.

I don't think the openness of a country has much to do with the number of conspiracy theories that form about it.

Conspiracy theories find patterns in incomplete data. There is always incomplete data, and there are always patterns to find. IF you get deep enough into them, then you can even turn around and point at evidence that disproves your theory, with the claim that actually, it proves it!

Just the other day, I responded to a post on HN that claimed that there's a vast conspiracy by the Labour Bureau to hide unemployment numbers, by reporting only the U3 numbers, when the U6 numbers are more relevant.

When it was pointed out that the bureau reports the U6 numbers, as well as the U3, the claim turned into 'Well, its obviously a conspiracy - what better way to hide the truth than to conceal it in irrelevant gibberish!'

No amount of openness is ever going to dissuade that kind of intellectual dishonesty.

I’d add that in China, the government is especially aggressive at squashing down rumors/conspiracy-theories that involve itself. If the rumors are false, the evidence they provide is usually rock solid. When the evidence they provide is garbage (eg friend of said person swears that they are alive), then you can assume the rumors are true.

I'd say conspiracy theories thrive in communities where the people are used to being screwed over.