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.
Yeah. Just a coincidence.