That the virus originated zoonotically does not precude a lab accident + leak theory of origin in fact we know that one of the labs actively experimenting on bats there was within half a kilometer of the market. You combine that with a significant fraction of the first known hospitalized cases having no direct connection to the market it should be obvious that the source is unlikely to have been the market itself but rather something close to it with the market just acting as a regional landmark or amplifier.
It's like you walk past a bunch of kids playing with fireworks by the trail and an hour later the forest is on fire having started in the same area as you saw the kids. You obviously can't know for sure it was them without more evidence, it could have been a cigarette butt from a carless smoker, but you be a fool to think it that just because there was no accelleant involved that it couldn't have been the kids.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18224451-700-chinas-s...
The former is entirely dramatic, while the latter is neither dramatic, unreasonable, illogical, or "conspiracy".
We know that the lab was adding functionality to bat coronaviruses, making them able to infect human cells. This can be done without gene editing technology. We've been doing that in the opposite direction for decades, passing viruses through non-human cells in order to make weakened ones for live-virus vaccines. To make a virus worse for humans, simply pass it through human cells. This is what the lab was doing.
It's extremely hazardous research. The USA banned it.
If you do that and then you have a lab accident, your level of culpability is at neither extreme. You didn't gene-edit the virus and release it on purpose. You didn't just get infected while studying bats.
Source?
While it's true that Chinese scientists were investigating SARS, the above assertion is not supported by the evidence provided.
My best guess of where the confusion came from was the insertion of a temporary mammalian plasmid into HeLa cells in order to produce bat ACE2 for study.
While this could potentially be viewed as adding functionality to human cells in order to make them susceptible to bat coronaviruses, the above assertion doesn't follow. (and unfortunately we have no ability to genome-edit humans)
https://old.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/fnvvh8/some_th...
Keep in mind that the Chinese government doesn't have to be pursuing a centralized disinformation campaign for it to occur. It would appear that at least a decent amount of the misinformation is occurring because local officials are covering up the extent of the damage from the party for fear of retaliation. In this case, its entirely plausible for large-scale cover-up to be occuring in China, without the national CCP driving it or even being aware of the extent that its occuring.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/us/politics/cia-coronavir...
2. I'll grant that that's possibility in the exact same sense in which I grant the centralized cover-up theory to be a possibility, and in which I grant both the lab creation and the lab accident origin theories to be possibilities. But I'm not interested in possibilities. What I'm interested in is positive evidence supportive of this or that theory.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of stories produced by national security forces, but there are far more reasons to be skeptical of stories being produced by the CCP. If it's a question of who to believe, I don't know why one would pick the Chinese government.
> 2. I'll grant that that's possibility in the exact same sense in which I grant the centralized cover-up theory to be a possibility, and in which I grant both the lab creation and the lab accident origin theories to be possibilities. But I'm not interested in possibilities. What I'm interested in is positive evidence supportive of this or that theory.
I just gave you positive evidence, and you dismissed it as propaganda. CIA sources are saying that is exactly what is happening on the ground. But if you need more, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence coming from non-intelligence sources. About a month ago on the "This Week in Virology" podcast, one of the visiting virologists who is an expert on coronaviruses said that China had come out and said they won't be conducting any widespread serology testing, which would be necessary for determining how widespread the outbreak got. He said the only reason for not doing this is if you didn't want to know the answer. The implication being that China knows its much worse than has been reported and they don't want the world or their own people to know, as it challenges the narrative of a competent response. And secondly, its been widely reported that China is not including asymptomatic patients in their infection counts, which is absurd, given that we now know they make up anywhere from 20-50% of infections, and are capable of spreading the disease. Again, the only reason for this is if you want to make it seem like there are fewer infections than there actually are.
Source?
He believes this scientist was the first person infected, who it spread from.
With Wuhan's population it would not surprise me if there are millions who live or work closer to the institute than the market.
And that Wuhan CDC has BSL-3 labs, although the Daily Mail passes on the entirely plausible rumor that bat coronavirus research was being done at both locations in BSL-2 labs. Lots of scientists all over the world do research in labs that aren't really at the level that should be used for what they're doing, the higher the level, the more obnoxious and difficult it is to do anything. A security/convenience trade-off we should be all to familiar with.
edit: Rewrote everything below here to make my probability beliefs more clear.
I think it's extremely likely to be zoonotic and not spread by anyone intentionally. As for the chance it was an unintentional lab escape, it's difficult to assess what the probability of that may be.
I don't think you can just simply assume "virology lab in proximity = likely source of outbreak" without looking at a lot of other factors. Wuhan is a massive city and economic hub, a lot bigger than NYC and the surrounding area. From what I've heard, there's basically every kind of facility and institute one could imagine there.
It could be a coincidence that the lab was there due to the size, density, and economic importance of the area.
Or maybe the lab could've been established there because they knew the area was biologically diverse and close to many species of animals carrying viruses which could jump to humans, and that such animals were commonly hunted and sold for food there. If that's true, then it would be a confounding variable, and one would expect outbreaks to be more likely to occur near the lab regardless of whether they originated in the lab.
There appear to be other potentially credible pieces of evidence which may support the lab escape hypothesis, but I think the whole case needs to be analyzed very robustly and carefully, with all of the possible priors and evidence taken into account.
the lab in wuhan is not just any virology lab though; it's one of only two biosafety level 4 labs in all of china and samples of similar coronaviruses are held and studied there. it may very well be a coincidence; improbable things happen all the time in a world of ~8 billion people. it would be a pretty big one though.
Maybe I shouldn't say overwhelmingly likely for all of those possibilities - a lab escape isn't that unlikely. But there's no evidence of that. If it's true, we indeed may never discover any evidence, but evidence is still required to actually make the claim. As it is now, it's only worthy of speculation.
edit: I edited my original post to make my beliefs more clear.
But I don't see what was to be gained. Take in mind there are a not insignificant number of people who believe that the US planned 9/11 and Pearl Harbor as well. It just seems like in all these cases (9/11, Pearl Harbor, Coronavirus) to not be in the country's interests at all.
It's not easy to find any Coronavirus-related political narratives for China or any other country yet, because nothing has changed in China politics, but we will wait and see.
1. A heavy dependency on economic growth for legitimacy, threatened by an impending demographic "time bomb" of the elderly:
https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/asia/article/21...
2. Also, a long standing fear of general over-population (one child policy)
3. An absolute fear of people gathering in large groups outside to protest and organise via non-electronic means that can't be monitored
From a Machiavellian perspective a virus that leaves the productive workforce untouched, kills primarily the old/infirm, is unlikely to be reliably vaccinatable, which can be used to justify near-endless waves of house arrest, which motivates neighbours to enforce house arrest against each other and in which the only information about whether there's an active resurgence comes via state controlled media .... doesn't look too bad as a tool for controlling the populace.
Actually I have to admit, I only came to understand just how perfect such a virus profile is for a totalitarian regime whilst writing out this comment. Devil's advocacy can take thoughts in surprising directions. I suppose that's why conspiracy theories play out as they do.
It'd be like trying to deal with overpopulation by setting a computer program to randomly select 20 of your own population centers to nuke, then launching nukes. Then a week later choosing other random cities around the world to nuke. Plus, it'd probably be discovered eventually, and would obviously be the most severe pre-emptive act of war ever known. It would inevitably cause WWIII, leading to much more death and chaos. It's a completely illogical and self-destructive strategy.
Now, if it were a virus that, say, couldn't infect those with a gene found in all Han Chinese people, and which isn't found in any other groups, that would be worthy of some investigation. Or only infected Uyghurs.
I know this is just playing Devil's advocate, but I think the odds are so low as to essentially be zero, unless the CCP has some sort of bizarre motivation that's extremely distant from nearly everyone else's motivation (like trying to end the world and make humans extinct).
The hit is massive but it's a relative hit - China probably ends up doing better than the rest of the world because it didn't really lock down everywhere, primarily just Wuhan. And bear in mind, China's government has a long history of doing extreme things that cripple its own economy. That's why places like South Korea and Taiwan were so far ahead (and still are, China's still a poor country). Communism isn't famous for being good for GDP, after all.
Yes, there's a risk of CCP officials getting it of course. The whole 'escape from the lab' theory doesn't suggest it would have escaped at the right time or in the right way. A truly evil government would wait until there was enough vaccine for officials and other important people but not enough for everyone.
I guess any virus theory would assume it must spread all over the world. Given it's not very deadly that doesn't seem like a big deal if the goal is an excuse to establish lockdowns whenever the government requires one for its own stability. Just announce a sudden uptick in cases (a claim which can only come from official stats) and off you go.
I think the biggest reason why the theory doesn't work is that eventually it'd become suspicious because everyone would have had it, and the co-incidence of sudden outbreak at times of civil unrest might become too obvious for everyone. Unless of course the virus is used as an excuse to control mass gatherings permanently.
I don't really think the leaders would take that risk, considering all the unpredictable side effects, but there certainly was something gained.
Purely as a thought experiment, China's death rate and infection rate seems orders of magnitude less per capita compared to Western countries so maybe it is the perfect bioweapon for the task, minimal self casualties enough for deniability but the other side really takes a beating..
Again this is just a thought experiment and not a serious speculation :)
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/chinas-corporate-debt-is-big...
I still think the program would have been worthwhile even if it did leak the coronavirus. If China thinks the same, I can see why they would try to prevent a backlash against studying viruses.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-04-02/coronavirus...
Yeah. Just a coincidence.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3049397/bat-...
The flood of attacks came with allegations that the new coronavirus had escaped from her laboratory, which is in the same city, Wuhan, where the outbreak happened.
As the attacks increased, Shi felt forced to respond. On Sunday afternoon she sent a message to all her friends on the social media site WeChat: “I swear with my life, [the virus] has nothing to do with the lab.”
Just pointing out that Wuhan was studying viruses exactly like the one tearing through the world right now, lol.
Yes, and this is important, but this is also already publicly known. It's not providing any new or interesting information. There're still a lot of other variables and factors to take into account here. Statistics aren't so simple.
For example, Wuhan is a huge city, larger than NYC, and an important economic hub. The area has a very high number of people and is population-dense. Tons of scientific institutions are there, as one would generally expect of such a city. So by that alone, the prior for the lab being there could be pretty high.
Also, maybe the lab was created there and bats were studied there in the first place because the general area was known to already have virus-carrying animals like bats? Perhaps even created there because they considered it very likely the particular bats in that particular area could potentially carry human-transferable viruses? And perhaps also because they knew lots of animals in the area, including bats, were regularly hunted and sold for food, further increasing the likelihood that human-infecting viruses may be found in that area?
If that's true, one would expect outbreaks to be more likely to occur in that area whether or not the lab was involved. It'd be reversing cause and effect - maybe a lab is there because the area is a virus hotzone, rather than the area being a virus hotzone because a lab is there. I saw some other evidence saying coronavirus-carrying bats studied at the lab were taken from elsewhere in China, which could alter this assessment, so one would need to look at all of that more thoroughly, but the point is this isn't such a simple association to make.
A lab escape is totally plausible and wouldn't be shocking, but it needs strong arguments, analysis, and evidence.
Another commenter mentioned a third party inspecting the lab, though if the lab really were the source I think they'd probably be able to fully cover that up before any inspection took place.
I mean, even if they didn't cover it up but are responsible, an inspection may still find no evidence of it (samples or animals containing a 100% or near-100% match of the virus could add some additional evidence, but also isn't proof by itself).
Hell, maybe their leaders don't even know if their lab was responsible or not. If it did happen, maybe it was a fuckup they were totally unaware of and still have no way of tracing retroactively. In such a scenario, maybe an employee made a mistake, got infected, but became a permanently asymptomatic carrier. Then they could've spread it to someone while out on a walk, or in some other way that would be really hard to reliably go back and track.
I will say, from everything I've seen, Chinese citizens are generally also quite concerned and angry about this whole situation. They've actually forced the government to apologize and backtrack on things quite a bit. If there's a highly convincing and credible leak that the virus escaped from the lab mistakenly, and they knew about it and covered it up, I think there would be outrage and possibly massive protests. Yes, I really think they'd be so outraged that huge numbers of them may do this even with an authoritarian regime that's infamous for killing protestors en masse.
Chinese citizens are pretty much no different from anyone else. They would absolutely want to know if their government is covering up that one of their labs accidentally unleashed the pandemic of the century. They're not necessarily going to buy all the propaganda about it if there's serious, clear evidence that this happened. But as it is now, there's no evidence, so they, and us, have no reason to be outraged about this particular accusation. It's something that should be investigated, but even if "unfounded accusations like these are dangerous" sounds like the words of a worried Chinese government censor, it's also true in this case.
Neither of these are actually going to happen. The conspiracy nuts probably prefer it that way.
In a murder investigation the police start with those closest related to the victim. If money is missing from a bank vault you start your investigation looking at all those who had access.
When a pandemic starts outside of a lab studying the same kind of virus tearing through the world you start with the lab.
We will likely never know for sure, but it is absolutely reasonable to suspect.
The prevailing theory is more or less ‘someone touched a bat’. Like who? Staff at a lab messing with bats?
We will never be allowed by totalitarian China to collect evidence, so all we have is suspicion. Very justified suspicion.
1) "Wuhan is a huge city"
That is true, but there are eight other more populous cities in China.Source: Wikipedia
2) "maybe the lab was created there and bats were studied there in the first place because the general area was known to already have virus-carrying animals like bats"
Not really, the southern provinces of China are much more prone to these outbreaks. Shi Zenghli herself said "“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...
3) "maybe the lab was created there and bats were studied there in the first place because the general area was known to already have virus-carrying animals like bats?!"
I'm afraid not. The bats used in her experiences were mainly from Yunnan province, over 1000kms away from Wuhan (check the same source).
4) "A lab escape is totally plausible and wouldn't be shocking, but it needs strong arguments, analysis, and evidence."Just read the papers authored by Shi Zenghli, they are all available online. Start at this one: Pre-print [ https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.22.914952v1 ]: "We then found a short RdRp region from a bat coronavirus termed BatCoV RaTG13 which we previously detected in Rhinolophus affinis from Yunnan Province showed high sequence identity to nCoV-2019. We did full-length sequencing to this RNA sample. Simplot analysis showed that nCoV-2019 was highly similar throughout the genome to RaTG13 (Fig. 1c), with 96.2% overall genome sequence identity."
Then, pay a visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology website:
"(...) is equipped with a general office, scientific research planning office, organization & personnel department, finance department, graduate student office , with five functional management departments, logistics support center, network information center, public technical service center (including analysis and testing center, experimental animal center, BSL -3 laboratory, isotope room, etc.), Virologica Sinica (English version), Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Virology and other support departments."
SARS-CoV-2 very likely had a laboratorial origin, not from cell cultures, but from the interaction between bats and their lab animal technicians. Considering how easily viruses mutate and recombine to acquire new genes, the RaTG13 coronavirus is very plausibly the origin of SARS-CoV-2, for instance in one or several of these circumstances:
a) Transmission chains in research animal facilities involving different species animals, including - but not necessarily restricted to - bats; b) Bidirectional transmission chains between lab animals and their handlers; c) Transmission of the RaTG13 coronavirus from a lab animal to a susceptible handler, with subsequent mutation and transmission chains within humans.
And this was certainly what Wuhan virologist Shi Zheng-Li, China's foremost coronavirus expert, was thinking when she candidly aknowledged to Scientific American's Jane Qiu, ' "If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?” '.
5) "You're accusing a specific person of involvement in a major pandemic with evidence you admit is flimsy at best"
Actually, this possibility was first raised by two Chinese authors, in February 2020, who uploaded an article titled "The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus" in ResearchGate. The paper was never published, and is no longer accessible in that platform, but can still be found online.
On the other hand, I believe this was an accidental event derived from negligent lab practices, rather than a deliberate action by someone.
Why are you so sure it is overwhelmingly likely?
> I think it's probably just a coincidence that there's a virology lab there
Only because you believe it to be purely coincidental of a virology lab being next to the outbreak source location?
I am entirely up for accepting this viewpoint. But, the lack of evidence to suggest an actual source location coupled with the (CCP sourced and pushed narrative of) "overwhelming evidence" that raw bat consumption at the market started it leads me to lean towards a more logical conclusion of a simple lab escape.
Am I being illogical in thinking that a pathogen escape from a virology lab (built in 2017, btw) in the same locale is more likely than a random zoonotic transfer of raw bat consumption (a practice likely being done at the same market for a considerable more amount of time)?
EDIT: change "less likely" to "more likely"
I am not sure why it is so necessary to be so adamant about vigorously dismissing the latter as a possibility.
Let's dig into this a bit more though. The WIV's location on Google Maps apparently changed after the incident [1]. I don't know if it was a legitimate correction or what, but for the sake of argument let's suppose that the old location was correct. Then the lab is 8.6 miles from the wet market, or ~14 km.
It looks like the population density in that area is around 10,000 people per km^2, so there are around 400k people in a 14km radius, or about 1/3,000 of China's population.
If we assume
P(virus from WIV) = 0.01
P(outbreak in 14km radius | virus from WIV) = 1
P(outbreak in 14km radius | virus not from WIV) = 1/3,000
So while I have no idea if the virus was a random mutation or what, I strongly suspect that it's somehow connected to the WIV.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/exdvt6/google_...
A pandemic was likely to start somewhere densely populated and first be detected in a city centre. Somewhere densely populated was likely to have a specialised biological research lab. That it was BSL4 instead of BSL3 is evidence but it isn't particularly compelling.
More to the point; it doesn't really make much of a difference whether it came from a Chinese lab or not. Horrible pandemics have happened before and will happen again.
P(individual is guilty) = 1 / 7 billion
P(individual's car on same block | individual is guilty) = 1
P(individual's car on same block | individual is innocent) = 50 / 7 billion
P(individual is guilty | individual's car on same block) = 1 / 50 (from Bayes' rule)
That probability is only 1 in hindsight, where the probability of everything is 1 because it has already happened. In foresight the probability was not 1. And whatever city the virus started in was going to have a BSL-2+ facility studying infectious diseases. I'm probably sitting within 2-4km of a BSL-3 facility studying infectious diseases as I type this, because I am in a city.
The fast that WIV is BSL-4 is significant, but it isn't going to get you to 97%. Even 75% is high. Particularly if WIV is located where it is because there are good local sources of coronaviruses to study.
We could change the model to not have any implicit assumption about location. Then instead of dividing by the population of China, we'd divide by the world population. The result should be the same, assuming we appropriately adjust our prior probability P(virus from WIV) to account for the fact that there are more BSL-4 facilities worldwide than in China.
P(Came from WIV|Global Epidemic starts in Wuhan) ~= 97%
However, P(Started Near a BSL Rated facility|Global Epidemic) is also high (not going to estimate it).
But you have assumed that P(Global Epidemic starts in Wuhan) = 1; which is not true. P(Global Epidemic starts in Wuhan) is probably quite low and they got unlucky because it had to start somewhere. In this context, that assumption is tantamount to flipping a coin then saying "P(Heads) = 1". It isn't, P(Head) = 0.5 but it does happen sometimes.
If we assume P(Global Epidemic starts in Wuhan) = 1 (because it did happen) then P(Came from WIV) is either 0 or 1, because it either did or didn't happen in the same way that the virus started in Wuhan.
The best I can come up with is that probability is very sensitive to what you assume is happening to generate results. In this case, you're assuming that the WIV in particular is important which I suspect links the pandemic implicitly to Wuhan. That isn't a math error, but it is not going to give you a useful result.
This isn't an error of logic so much as an error in scenario construction - it is ignoring possibility that the virus appeared near a random BSL rated facility, which is probably very high since a new virus would likely be detected first in dense urban centers where that sort of infrastructure tends to be. If the virus is likely to appear near a BSL facility, then the fact it appeared near a specific BSL facility shouldn't be leading you to the sort of answer you got.
P(virus from CIA) = 0.01
P(outbreak in 14km radius | virus from CIA) = 1
P(outbreak in 14km radius | virus not from CIA) = 1/3,000
But wait a second! How can there both be a 97% chance that the CIA did it, and a 97% chance that WIV made it? The reason is that both of these calculations are total bullshit.
> How can there both be a 97% chance that the CIA did it, and a 97% chance that WIV made it?
There's no contradiction there. If the CIA planted the virus in the WIV, then it's simultaneously true that the CIA planted the virus and that the WIV was the source of the outbreak.
Using your exact logic three times:
- there's a 97% chance the CIA planted it in the seafood market
- there's a 97% chance the CIA planted it in the WIV
- there's a 97% chance the WIV made it
Now it's obvious that something is going wrong here. There is no conceivable way these probability assignments can make sense. But your math was formally correct! What a mystery.
It doesn't make sense to apply the same prior to "the CIA planted COVID-19 in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market", because there are many such markets in China, and only one BSL-4 facility. You might think 1% is a reasonable prior for "the CIA planted COVID-19 in some market in China", but then it wouldn't make sense to adjust the probability based on the outbreak location as I did.
What you're doing is like starting with a prior probability of 10% that a random individual lives in Maui, and 10% that a random individual lives in Kawaii. Then you learn that an individual lives in Hawaii, and you try to adjust both probabilities based on Hawaii's population in relation to the world population. Bayes' theorem gives ~99.8% each for P(Maui | Hawii) and P(Kawaii | Hawaii). The results are obviously impossible, but the argument wasn't structurally wrong, you just started with bad priors. You should have started with P(Kawaii) ~= 0.001%, giving P(Kawaii | Hawaii) ~= 5%, which is correct.
I didn't make an error. The way the conspiracy theory goes in China is that the Military World Games [0] were held in Wuhan just before the outbreak. In other words, they knew the US military was in Wuhan specifically (in fact, right next to the seafood market), just like you know that WIV is in Wuhan specifically. The two conspiracy theories really are equally credible, by which I mean they're both bullshit.
The reason is because of this assumption you made:
P(my favorite conspiracy theory) = 0.01
P(outbreak in 14km radius | my favorite conspiracy theory is false) = 1/3,000
This alternate conspiracy seems way more farfetched to me (why would US intelligence need such any such event to get an agent into China?), but if someone believed that it should be given a non-negligible prior, then they should revise my assumption that
> P(outbreak in 14km radius | virus not from WIV) = 1/3,000
I.e. their revised value should be at least as large as their prior for the alternate conspiracy.
What part of the argument are you disputing exactly? Are you claiming that applying Bayes' theorem in this way is somehow invalid, or are you just taking issue with the assumption quoted above?
I am also very surprised at people throwing probabilistic equivalence between foreign-agent conspiracy, and an accident in a lab. It seems that the latter is so much more probable.
Also, it isn't accounting for lots of other highly relevant, potentially confounding variables.
And those assumptions make no sense to me at all. Can you write them out much more explicitly?
I think it's totally plausible it was a lab escape, but this analysis seems extremely oversimplified and naive, and I'd even say a misuse and abuse of Bayes' theorem. A full Bayesian analysis is a good idea, though. I'd like to see a much more robust and detailed one from someone.
Maybe I should have been more explicit, but they're not the same. The prior here is the probability that the virus originated from WIV, knowing only that the virus originated in China, and not accounting for the location of the outbreak. I'm trying to calculate an adjusted probability given the outbreak location.
> I don't think you can just try different numbers picked from a hat for that value.
My goal was not to convince anyone that a prior of 1% or 0.1% is appropriate, but rather to suggest a framework in which people can insert their own priors.
And sure, it's a simplified analysis, but it's better than just asserting whatever our intuitions say about coincidences.
Makes more sense, but as you say, there's really no way of knowing what number is appropriate there. I'm not a statistics expert, but I'd say it's inextricably tied up with what you're trying to calculate the probability of in the first place. The whole point is we don't have a prior for WIV being likely to have a virus escape the lab, or a coronavirus, or this specific virus.
I think you'd need to break it down into priors like: probability any Chinese lab has any virus escape, probability this particular lab has any virus escape, probably this particular lab had any virus escape around this time frame, probability this particular lab had a sample of SARS-CoV-2, and a lot more things.
>And sure, it's a simplified analysis, but it's better than just asserting whatever our intuitions say about coincidences.
It certainly can be much better in general, and I'm a huge fan of Bayesianism, but it can also sometimes provide a very misleading impression to others. I'm somewhat tempted to try to do a deep dive into a Bayesian analysis of this, but I'm not really qualified, and it would be a ton of work, and there would be some priors that would be nearly impossible to know (number and density of animals of certain species in the area, what pathogens they may have, what animals and viruses the lab may have collected or been interested in collecting, what and how many animals are hunted in the area, what and how many hunted animals are sold at local wet markets, how such animals are handled or prepared, etc.)
I think to assess this with any serious confidence, we're probably going to need something like leaked/stolen documents or a whistleblower.
And then there's the behavior of the CCP.
I carry no brief for the CCP. But I do find it difficult to say nothing in the face of what looks like a struggle among a variety of factions, none openly declared, to establish a narrative of responsibility for a world-altering catastrophe, with no closer or more consistent reference to facts of any kind than is judged useful in support of whatever claim is being pushed at the moment - and, most notably, with the only reference to potentially contradictory facts being to claim either that they're unfounded, or presented with ulterior intent, or both.
Last time I saw something play out that looked like this, it followed the World Trade Center attack and resulted in the Iraq war. That was a catastrophe from both a humanitarian perspective and one concerned with enhancing the geopolitical power of the US - but it was, at least, relatively minor in both respects. This one, if it plays out similarly, seems likely to be much worse.
And aside from all of that, what the hell, is your time of no value? If you're going to peddle what may very well prove to be war propaganda, at least you should have the self-respect to refuse to do it for free.
To compare this to Iraq is absolutely preposterous and fallacious. The two have absolutely nothing in common and nobody here is suggesting we invade China over it but sure as hell they ought to be held accountable.
"Held accountable" is a rhetorical phrase that was much used then, too. (2) So it's an interesting thing to find in an argument that this situation and that one are totally unalike.
(1) https://www.wypr.org/sites/wyprmain/files/styles/x_large/pub...
(2) https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/28/iraq.brianwhit...
Your theory also doesn't along with the evidence, that the first known cases had a significant population with no known connection to the market, 27 with connection, 14 without; and that other than the market there are no other obvious connections. If it were just some hawker you'd expect a much stronger connection to the market. And over a longer period.
Do we know that bats are the only (or only likely) nonhuman host? Was there a significant population of cases with a known connection to the lab?
I'd believe this is a story of grave incompetence, and brazen managerial failure at a biolab. The intern gets bled on, bitten, or just breathed on by the test bat, gets a bit sick but comes into work anyway. After it seems to pass, she heads down to the market on the way home, and spreads the disease to one of the live animals, including humans, in the vicinity.
Boom, outbreak.
Could be as simple as that, with it being a pretty tenacious virus.
The proven conspiracy follows, when authorities up to the top sought to cover up this embarrassment, then to make sure that the damage was global so that they wouldn't be at a relative disadvantage, and could maybe start claiming that it came from somewhere else (as they are now doing).
It is neither fiction, nor dangerous to speculate that this outbreak started at the Wuhan lab.
It may not have been engineered.
However, the bats are brought to Wuhan lab from hundreds of miles away to be studied. It is also very possible that a bat carrying the natural virus being studied at the lab escapes or infected a person.
Only the conspiracy theorists claim it was an "engineered bio-weapon". The most likely explanation is that it just escaped involuntarily from the lab. Why from the lab, and not the wet market?
- that lab was specifically researching coronavirii in bats
- there are reports researchers there got splashed with blood and fecies of bats [0]
- the researcher in question (Huang Yan Lin), the likely patient zero, disappeared without a trace, both physically and online [0]
- the horseshoe bats that most likely hosted the virus weren't even sold on the wuhan wet market, according to several eye witnesses
- there are no known horseshoe bat colonies in a 900km diameter around wuhan
- the lab is just 280 meters away from the wet market, so the market was a very convenient scape goat
And why was COVID-19 not engineered? Simple, it is not necessary to explain the pandemic potential. All of this is not new and there were warnings about exactly this happening:
- it was long known that horseshoe bats were a dangerous reservoir of SARS-CoV like virii [1]
- there were US simulations held on how to respond to a respiratory virus with chinese origin in 2019 [2]
- there were WHO warnings on how respiratory RNA virii are prime candidates for the next pandemic [3]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU (starts at ~3:00) [1] https://twitter.com/_benoux_/status/1245381552672059392?s=20 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Contagion [3] https://twitter.com/bmiloy/status/1238541860542377984/photo/...
- there are no known horseshoe bat colonies in a 900km diameter around wuhan
If you have sources for these, you will have convinced me that it's more likely that it originated from the lab than the market.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https:/www.resear...
Just to give you an example, this is an active area of research that Raytheon is engaged in: https://www.raytheonintelligenceandspace.com/news/feature/ri...
Whether or not the virus is human engineered or not is orthogonal to whether or not it escaped from the nearby lab.
It is known that the lab was studying these sorts of viruses.
The same lab was responsible for a SARS outbreak in the year following the big SARS outbreak.
Mistakes happen.
EDIT. I was mistaken about the specific lab that was the source of the 2004 SARS outbreak. The lab responsible for that outbreak was in Beijing.
I see that DNA changes are possible through CRISPR.
But it seems changing RNA could be possible if you've extracted similar virus from some animal then you replicated virus in a culture, after that you wait for the virus to mutate on its own or create condition to increase mutation rate for example radiation etc...
So the biological footprint being similar to the one which exists in nature doesn't really remove the possibility that the virus might be man made.
"That the virus originated zoonotically does not precude a lab accident + leak theory of origin"
Really? A lab spends some time analysing whether a virus is a natural progression from another virus via natural selection instead of deliberate manipulation. They write it up etc. At least spell "preclude" correctly in a rebuttal.
Alternatively they could be accurately reporting results but just systematically not testing infected people for one reason or another.
It’s not clear to me that they are totally wrong though they seem quite unbelievable. I think I don’t want to think about that question as I’m not sure the answer would be much use to me.
One thing that is certain is that we can expect to see a lot of different people trying to set/change the narrative of how this outbreak happened. Any state that instituted a large lockdown will want people to believe that it was worth it and that it was necessary. One might ask why there isn’t much talk of Taiwan and Hong Kong where the outbreak was controlled without oppressive lockdowns (before cases from external arrivals became a big problem). One reason could be Chinese politics about those places.
In the US it seems plausible that being able to rewrite the history of the outbreak in the first few months of the year will be very important to Trump’s re-election. It also seems plausible that it won’t matter that much; his approval ratings are basically their highest ever.
I think some leaders will also want to move the blame away from themselves. A lab-escape story would be very useful to those people as it gives some people to directly blame (whoever let it out of the lab), rather than blaming the failures of leadership during a natural disaster.
It's unlikely that we'll ever really know. RNA sequences don't come with the signatures of their authors.
But, every time you see someone saying that the lab theory has been "debunked", you should immediately think fake news. There is no way to rule this theory out--rather, it's balance of probabilities.
Pretty much all stats I've seen relating to this thing are painfully awful. Here in the UK (in England), care home deaths are not reported in the main death stat etc etc ad nauseam. Scotland reports in its own way as does NI (or not bother) compared to England and Wales. We have minimal testing anyway so who knows what is actually going on?
Anyway, one thing I am absolutely certain of is that whilst the stats in Europe and the US, CA etc are a bit wonky at best they are at least a decent attempt to have a go at reporting the situation.
I think that the CN and other results that are so way off the curve that other nations and territories are reporting are complete fiction and dangerous fiction at that.