Maybe.

On the other hand, if they think that they'll catch up by replicating things in the united states down to the layout of research labs... then that's kind of hilarious and they've really missed the point. It's like the Soviets copying the space shuttle and concorde. They're copying the wrong things, too late.

This is bad read on the history of innovation. I offer two counter-examples, though there are many more:

(1) Japanese semiconductor industry, for which there is an excellent NHK documentary [1].

(2) After WW2, the British invited Soviet engineers to tour jet engine factories as a token of good faith. The engineers documented the factory layout, and wore adhesive on their shoes to gather metal filings for later analysis. A few years later, Mig-15's were shooting American planes out of the sky over Korea. A similar example: the British transferred huge bodies of knowledge to US aircraft engine manufacturers during WW2. This laid the foundation for the industry's future success.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihkRwArnc1k

(2) According to Mig-15 wp page, UK gave USSR an engine with blueprints. The part in your story about adhesive shoes sounds like an urban legend, unimportant detail at most.

Aerospace metallurgy is some of the most secretive aspects of development. Metal filings could literally have been more valuable than the blueprints. This is still a very competitive space a challenge for reverse engineering. Even with samples and atomic analyses, it is not always possible possible to reproduce without the proper method.

Here is a related link. https://www.inkstonenews.com/tech/chinese-spy-accused-trying...

As you hint, raw composition isn't even half the story. You can put your microscopic samples in the mass spec and then melt the same elements together and not end up with the same stuff.

Treatment, how it's worked, how it's coated are just as important.

Not to mention how contaminated filings usually are.

No, I've heard about that in a few different aircraft programs, so it's likely real.

Not the origin of gumshoe

> Wang similarly told his supervising UCSF professor that he had duplicated some of the work of that professor at the lab in China. Some of the work of the UCSF lab was funded by grants from the United States Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health (NIH). Wang also wiped his personal phone of WeChat messaging content earlier the morning he arrived at LAX.

They are being thorough.

Everyone has OpSec.

And then he told them everything during an interview. Or maybe it's all lies to hide something else. Who knows.

He's a "Level 9" PLA officer (apx. Major officer), if he spilled that out easily to CBP, definitely there's something more suspicious than just copy-cat labs design.

The official name for that is I believe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout

But something doesn't add up to him just confessing that quickly all that information

Level 9 technician is just a civilian employee, not an officer, let alone major.

Finally some effort to address the replication crisis

It doesn't say when the professors work was duplicated, it may have been a published experiment he duplicated at his university job. I imagine most US university medical labs have grant funding from those organizations, they don't even suggest Wang was involved with that research.

And wiping your phone before international travel, particular to China, is just smart. That doesn't imply wrongdoing.

Well, with TU 144 and Buran, the copying situation is rather interesting - both were substantially different that the Concorde and Space Shuttle. But the main copy aspect was that the politburo saw a cool thing and told the engineeres - we want THAT - NOW, get going on it or else.

> Well, with TU 144 and Buran, the copying situation is rather interesting - both were substantially different that the Concorde and Space Shuttle.

This is super common with industrial espionage. As a reductio ad absurdum after 1991 I believe the Russians sold working fighter jets with detailed blue prints and instructions on how to manufacture all the components to the Converse Chinese. They still failed to make a perfect copy. Same deal for whatever the Soviet copy of the B-52 was. Building a sophisticated piece of machinery when your supply chain is very different you have to make compromises and different choices and they all add up.

Not only that, but the Soviets realized that the STS (Space Transportation System) wasn't going to live up to its promises for flight rate and cost, and thought something else must be afoot.

IIRC the main thing Soviets feared was surprise strike on Moscow by nukes launched from a space shuttle.

This sounds rather absurd given that preparing a space shuttle for launch takes literally months. But the idea was, as far as I can tell, that it would launch on a regular mission, then use its heat shield and aerodynamic surfaces to change orbit inclination radically while out of reach of soviet radar, resulting in totally unexpected direct overflight of Moscow, making a decapitating strike possible.

> politburo saw a cool thing and told the engineeres

There was industrial espionage too. Considering they had the former and political backing, it's surprising how much of a disaster the 144 was - Not least because it was built for a market that didn't exist (comrade) in the Soviet Union, it was a noisy deathtrap. Their western equivalents flew somewhere on the order of a thousand times further (Concordski only did about 100 commercial flights)

They made a space shuttle though, and it was pretty capable. It could even fly autonomously.

That's misleading, and anyone who cares presumably knows.

It could be they’re duplicating the physical layout of the lab to make stolen documents easier to understand.

> then that's kind of hilarious and they've really missed the point.

Not quite, a layout, and process organisation of some high end labs are quite important, especially if you deal with some hazardous materials, and want to design protocols to avoid contamination/theft.

If he is a bacteriologist, then, moreover given what's in the news these days

Soviets also copied the B-29 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4

"... the type entered large-scale service in 1949. Entry into service of the Tu-4 threw the USAF into a panic, since the Tu-4 possessed sufficient range to attack Chicago or Los Angeles on a one-way mission ...

and early Intel microchips: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KR580VM80A , which included military versions.

Their "space shuttle" was not a copy and was also far superior to the Western one in design.

It was different which means their was some arguable advantages, but it was less reusable and even more expensive to operate. They effectively copped the worst aspects of the shuttle and then made a lot of sacrifices to get it to fly. Which is why it only had a single unmanned flight.

Pretty sure the Buran only had one flight because of timing with the fall of the USSR.

Here’s a good summary of its life: https://youtu.be/XLOCQw5s9Uw

It’s possible the USSR would have had more flights for propaganda reasons, but in a direct comparison the Souyuz was simply the better design. So it was the Soyuz program that continued after the USSR’s fall.

If the US had the space shuttle, the Soyuz, and common sense, they would also drop the space shuttle and fly the Soyuz. But apparently the US had neither the Soyuz nor common sense.

The Buran only existed in order to send a message. And it was also technically better designed than the space shuttle.

Sure it seemed more capable, but it was also designed for propaganda. For example the version of Buran that actually flew sacrificed the spacecrafts engines to get more stuff into orbit. The shuttle on the other hand returned with them. If you want a space truck, the Buran failed a primary design goal.

Now NASA did end up spending a lot of time refurbishing those engines, but if they wanted more frequent launches they could have simply built more engines. The program dramatically misunderstood how much they would be flying resulting in vastly higher costs over time.

Which was the major design flaw of both systems. Dig into things more and Buran was simply an even worse fit for either program than the Shuttle ended up being.

Well, if it wasn't a response to the shuttle, the timing would have been different, earlier, wouldn't it?

If you've ever heard a counterfeiting story from a chipmaker this is unsurprising. They'll copy anything and everything just to be sure.

Forgotten weapons has a great video on early 20th century counterfeit Chinese weapons that is relatable - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HNaB7l2GQk

I saw a Chinese copy of a Nazi pistol (mauser broomhandle) and at distance it is a 1-1 copy but on closer inspection you realize instead of being machined every single part was filed by hand by someone. It must have taken an incredible amount of time to make a pistol that way. Also they tried to copy the stamped lettering but most of it is jibberish. Very interesting.

People in the Philippines also still make pistols by hand filing. It's quite incredible.

Buran is a bad example, as it was very different from the space shuttle and likely superior

>It's like the Soviets copying the space shuttle and concorde.

they didn't though, please try again.

The resemblance is obvious, whether or not it's a "copy" by some standard.

It just occurred to me to check out the Mig-29 on Wikipedia, and it has an uncanny resemblance to the F-15.

It might be an optimum design for a glider, e.g., here is a design for India's Space Shuttle https://dynaimage.cdn.cnn.com/cnn/c_fill,g_auto,w_1200,h_675...

I actually just saw a documentary about the Mig 29, seems like it was a pretty revolutionary design https://youtu.be/zCnpuoD1PLo

Both the Mig-29 and Su-27 are based on the same aerodynamics research. That they look similar to the F-15 is probably more due to the fact that they were all designed to be air superiority fighters than any espionage.

Something that caught my eye was not just the overall layout but the intakes' shape.

When I say it looks like the F-15, I'm saying, as opposed to, say, the F-16 or F-18 or F-14.

And it's just a comment on the superficial appearance, not based on aerospace knowledge or about espionage.

This thread isn't even about espionage, is it?

Maybe you misread something? If I think something obviously looks like something else, that's not something you can disprove with a citation. There's no assumption involved.

The layout of the lab? That seems like something that could be public

Really? Care to tell everyone the layout of your home? How many feet in your room is your bed? How much storage do you have in your dresser? If someone wanted in and out as quick as possible, what's the best route?

Labs have sensitive areas too. Knowing the layout of them helps not just in-and-out operations but can also guide other kinds of educated guesses. Do lab staff in their offices have direct views of the lab equipment or are they separate? etc

The analogy is a bit silly. The layout of my home is on file at the county records office, and accessible online.

The real issue at hand is that he is suspected of something worse than merely copying a lab layout. Is a laboratory setup even protected? In many cases an experiment will elude replication because the lab setup was not properly documented.

Thinking that the quality of science is related to the layout of a lab is like thinking the creativity and beautiful of a piece of art is related to the location and color of the bin the artist stores their tools in.

That information may be used to assist in the theft of research down the line by someone else. Someone else could know exactly where someone's office is and what to grab out of there. Or what labs to try to get jobs/internships/etc in to be closer to a lab they want access to that they likely wouldn't get a job in.

That is.... a stretch.

Suppose there's a tool you really like at work. Issue tracker, build system, version control, whatever. At your next job it's missing. You influence the decision about how to fill the gap based on your experience.

Have you stolen intellectual property?

People are pretty open about "I'm planning to work at Google for a year so I can learn how they do things and then take that with me to my startup."

The Chinese are pretty openly doing things that are expected to give them military, technological and commercial supremacy over the United States. The 5G situation suggests the Chinese strategy might work. Having the technical leadership position on communications is a pretty big deal.

If they lose the research edge, basically the only structural advantages America has is (1) public elections, (2) likely more advanced legal theory and (3) not being an ethnostate. If they don't succeed in bringing those advantages into play then the US military is "soon" going to confined to the American continent.

The US is going to have legal problems with this Chinese activity and is going to try and do something about it, whether that is intellectually honest or not.

> If they don't succeed in bringing those advantages into play then the US military is "soon" going to confined to the American continent.

There is no scenario where that outcome happens. It's so absurd as to barely warrant a retort. Your premise requires that China enslave the entire planet, literally. China has to physically occupy - whether directly in-border or near-shore - and dictate all choices of every ally of the US, including all NATO members, as well as all of Asia.

You missed a lot of other advantages the US has over China.

4) A demographic advantage, which is a separate advantage from just not being an ethnostate. China's demographics are rapidly collapsing. There has never been a rising superpower that maintains its upward trajectory with a failing demographics, that will hold true as it pertains to China as well. Cheap, high volume labor is their largest single advantage, and they're losing those workers at an accelerating rate.

5) The US has fewer people and a system already transitioned to a high income low labor volume approach, which is a massive advantage in the era of automation and artificial intelligence. China has to go through that transition yet and it's going to be brutal for them. China has a population the size of the US living on $3 per day; one of the poorest large segments of population on the planet. Those people will never climb the prosperity ladder because it's impossible, and that dire context is only going to get worse as China's formerly easy growth slows perpetually going forward. China has already gotten old before they got rich at the median, it's too late.

6) An immigration advantage, which is slightly different from (although it relates to) the ethnostate reference. China will never convince the Elon Musks of the world to move to China.

7) Freedom of expression and speech, which is a massive cultural benefit globally (including when it comes to propaganda). It's why the US is the only country in world history to acquire a position of global cultural hegemony, spanning music, TV, movies and cultural projection broadly. No other nation has come even remotely close. As is, China can never possess this advantage.

8) China's system requires that they install a global dictatorship, or it has to collapse back in on itself. Their system is too fragile, too easily broken. You can see that in their emotionalism and fear about Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, any tiny protest or movement, any challenge to the party dictatorship, and how you can't discuss any of their numerous atrocities like Mao's famines or Tiananmen (ie you can never actually discuss their history). They have to expand their system of censorship globally (which is what they're trying to do right now, with Wolf Warrior diplomacy, trying to browbeat and threaten everyone into submission). In the US, you can freely discuss all of the mistakes the US has made, and everyone constantly does; we're jabbed globally 24/7 and we absorb that as part of being a superpower; that openness to criticism generates real long-term stability (not fake perceived stability, a managed image that isn't real).

9) English as the globally dominant language. The world will never adopt Mandarin widely.

10) The US is a liberal, democratic nation with a huge number of powerful global allies that are also part of the liberal order (from France to South Korea). China has no allies, only frenemies like Russia and North Korea. All the countries near China are terrified of them and will naturally ally with the US accordingly, including Vietnam. Countries like Japan and South Korea will never be allies with China, they're permanent rivals.

11) Open societies are always vastly superior to insular, closed-off societies. That includes when it comes to attracting immigration, getting the maximum out of their own people, or producing cultural output to project into the world. In the US, a Muslim genius from Xinjiang is free to become the next Jensen Huang; in China, they're in a re-education camp being tortured and denied all human rights. In the US, you can freely mock our leaders if they do stupid things (as an example) - on TV, in movies, and so on, a critical cultural element that China entirely lacks and it makes their system weak, fragile (see: Alec Baldwin v Trump, or Will Ferrell v Bush; those people would be in prison for doing that in China; the US has a long, glorious history of taking its elites to the mat, going back before Mark Twain). Being able to freely make fun of the elites, is a critical necessity to a stable system over time; in China, joke apps are illegal.

12) China has an aggressive caste system that de facto wholly revokes all rights of minority groups such as gay persons (and also including many other groups). The US welcomes and celebrates openly the vast success of a Tim Cook or David Geffen or Ellen Degeneres or Peter Thiel, China doesn't; instead, China violently opppresses all gay people (going so far as to torture them, literally, in an attempt to convert them from being gay).

13) The US has the global reserve currency and it shows no signs of being under threat of being replaced. The Yuan has basically a zero global share of the currency market outside of their borders. The reason for that is because nobody trusts China. That isn't going to change anytime soon.

14) The people of the US have the ability to openly interact with the rest of the world, which is an extraordinary advantage in all regards. The people of China have no ability to freely interact with the rest of the world's citizens, a detriment in so many ways it would take me hours here to discuss it all.

15) Dictatorships always get worse with time, as the dictators seek to retain power against all the forces that inevitably naturally want to rebel against that. Long-serving dictators essentially never liberalize a society. Xi will further crush the people of China under his lust for power, as all dictatorships do as the years go on (and he has already done plenty of that, so it'll get that much worse yet). China's political trajectory is terrifying for the people of China, given the near total revocation of all practiced human rights we've seen there in just the past decade.

16) Command economies don't function well over time. China's fast growth had been quasi masking their vast inefficiencies and economic flaws. You can see those mistakes and problems showing up in their extreme, and rapidly growing debt levels (specifically in their economy), as they require enormous constant additional debt to fake growth; in the span of just ~20 years they became the most indebted nation in history. The market economy system always proves vastly superior, you can see this all over the globe. The most successful economies are market based economies, including: the US, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Britain, Finland, Germany, Belgium, Norway, Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Israel and so on. All the highest GDP per capita nations are market based economies (with the sole couple exceptions being small energy states like Qatar), not command economies like China. China's one great trick was the combination of mercantilism and vast cheap labor. That trick has been exhausted, going forward their situation will get far more difficult as the easy slack in their economy is gone.

There are a lot more I can list.

You have some good points on your list, but there are also vast misunderstandings and you clearly have preconceptions of what is 'best' based on your own preferences. To just mention a few

- the RMB is indeed in use in a number of Asian countries as an informal second currency.

- USD as global reserve currency is strong but on a downward trend. In some parts of the world the Euro has become more important and the largest holder of USD is China. If they truly wanted to harm the US they could dump these in big tranches - without this unique advantage a lot of US politics (in particular the eternal debt growth) simply don't work any longer.

- from a European perspective I have to say it does not look like the US is very democratic. A two-party state effectively run by the wealthy for their own profit, with a hundred million in an economically precarious condition with not even real access to healthcare.

I do think the last years have shown that the US too is extremely fragile, just as you diagnose for the PRC.

> There is no scenario where that outcome happens.

China successfully infiltrates the US military research network and develops/steals enough technology to close the arms tech gap. Then China, aka 'the factory of the world', starts producing military gear and using it to stabilise regimes in Middle East and Africa. The US, worn down under infighting and with very high debts, cannot sustain its involvement on the Asian and African continents and is forced to withdraw. The Europeans, sensing a sea change in the world order, remilitarise and ask the US to leave.

There you go, now you know a scenario that could play out over ~20-30 years. Maintaining a worldwide network of military bases is expensive, China doesn't have to 'enslave' the planet to force the US to mind their own business. It just has to level the playing field a little and the US won't be able to afford the effort.

Dang that's is really well said. Did you see that video on YouTube by this Australian guy talking about why China will not take over the world? I can't remember exactly what it's called.

It's called "Why China Will Not Become the Dominant Power in Asia" [0]. I saw it recently from a comment on HN.

[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_AvNT3vyzr0

How did usa lose both korea n vietnam?

> dictate all choices of every ally of the US, including all NATO members, as well as all of Asia.

Oh, you mean... kinda like the US does? How deep do you think our alliances that haven't even survived a century run?

See the difference of partners in Afghanistan vs Iraq.

I think there's a difference between individuals committing intellectual property theft, and organised state-sponsored intellectual property theft.

You mean like the US has been doing using their spying capabilities for years? Look up the echolon project or the recent scandal about US spying in Germany, a significant portion has been aimed at industrial espionage.

This is the thing that annoys me, many Americans approve their government doing industrial espionage to other countries, but then are morally outraged when others do it.

Then maybe we shouldn't approve J1 Visas for people who openly say had a working relationship with the People's Liberation Army?

US has plans for this with their F1 visa program for students. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8365229/US-expel-Ch...

It doesn't make sense to say "authorities should have known better" in the context of making a decision based on falsehoods. It's basically the quote from Animal House - "you fucked up, you trusted [me]". It's a joke, because it's a parody of chutzpah.

We're not at war, and I assume it's perfectly legal to copy information about labs or whatever, so long as you don't incidentally violate any contracts or laws.

I mean, kinda. In any case, state sponsored intellectual property theft is par for the course, and any state would do it in the situation where China is now, and indeed every state so far did it. So I don't really think it's morally wrong, we got where we are from state-sponsored intellectual property theft and they will get to where they will go from that too.

Ultimately, there is no real morality when it comes to the actions of state actors beyond "will it improve my citizen's life?". This most certainly will, so for a Chinese official it seems moral to them.

A person can, in principle, hold the opinion that copying IP is not inherently immoral, but that ancillary crimes may be. I mean, if you think it's ok to do something, does that mean anything you do in pursuit of it is ok?

What anciliary crime did they commit except copying IP? Lying on a visa application? It's very difficult to argue that this would be a grave moral crime.

Well, lying generally, and in this case, is a means to imposing something on people without their consent.

Many people do believe it is a moral wrong to impose something on other people without their consent.

Sure, but the ends do justify the means, at least to some extent. I really don't think anyone outside of the US thinks that stealing IP in the goal of (in their eyes) lifting millions out of poverty isn't justifiable.

You could also make an argument that the other people are withholding something that could be used to do good for their own interests they lose the moral high ground.

In any case, there is really no moral argument to indict them, it's purely a question of interests in this case, so let's not pretend.

What’s interesting is watching video game streaming in China. When playing games a few times then poking around a little more. I was extremly shocked at how mainstream cheating and stealing is embedded in... ugh I dunno for lack of better words, their current culture? When and how did this become a thing?

Let me clarify I’m pretty naïve on anything China. And not trying to say everyone over there lacks integrity (thought the opposite) but seems like lack of integrity was like trendy from what I could tell?

I don't know when it became a thing, but it's a well known fact in all gaming communities that the Chinese are responsible for the vast majority of cheaters. If you region-lock the game, cheating becomes a much smaller problem.

Maybe a person who has lived in China or is Chinese could shed more light on why they want to cheat in the first place?

> I’m pretty naïve on anything China

It's a helpful attitude. Other countries really do things differently than the US.

From what what I've read in newspapers, talking to recent immigrants and travelling for years in Asia:

1) Both China and India consider cheating on school tests to be a necessary thing to get the highest possible score. Riots occur when school physical security or test questions are changed. So it's baked into academics from a young age.

India arrests hundreds over Bihar school cheating

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-31998343

A Q and A about cheating among Chinese students

https://www.davisenterprise.com/local-news/ucd/a-q-and-a-abo...

Riot after Chinese teachers try to stop pupils cheating

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/101323...

2) In the case of China, invention originality is not a goal - results are.

3) Art copies are not seen as inferior because they have the same appearance:

https://aeon.co/essays/why-in-china-and-japan-a-copy-is-just...

4) Ideas around what democracy mean in other countries are often different than the Western model.

In Indonesia, candidates pay voters $2 to $5 per head (vote buying) and guarantee they will be repaid after they win. If they don't win, the candidates go into hiding for a while to avoid the repayments.

In China, there's Xi, dictator for life.

> In Indonesia, candidates pay voters $2 to $5 per head (vote buying)

no democracy can exist without first spilling blood for it imho.

They spilled some.

At least 3 Indonesian airports are named after heros of the revolution KIA against their Dutch colonizers. (IIRC a single DC-3 was shot down, killing most of those.)

Halim Perdanakusuma in Jakarta is one of those airports.

Indonesia finally got its independence after WW2 when the USA told the Dutch not to return. Indonesia is a close friend of the US government until today, doing most of their military pilot training in the US, NTSB investigation training, and of course periodic internal purges using US intelligence.

Aside from corona, Indonesia is doing very well in terms of having a popular and well-regarded general as President, and prospering. Jakarta is a beautiful capital today, and its traffic is tolerable. (They implemented a busway system with reserved lanes, which is heavily used by commuters, and a new light rail system is going online around this time.)

Bali is not doing so well, as peak tourism is tough on locals, with insufficient electrical production, and agricultural-use water diverted to the tourist areas like Kuta - in at least one area, they can no longer grow rice.

This is so interesting. Something to read about over the weekend. Thanks!

patio11 has a good collection of "working in Japan" anecdotes on HN also that match my experience there.

I see the same thing in Chinese webnovels. The victims of any scam get blamed for falling for it and the scammer is considered the intelligent one, though sometimes only until they themselves get scammed in turn. Basically, honesty isn't seen as a virtue, instead there's a sort of tit-for-tat mentality of returning evil for evil and good for good.

i highly suspect this is due to the massive population and the intense competition to survive and rise thru the ranks under such an environment.

> extremly shocked

I’m a little disappointed how words loose meaning over time. People are extremely shocked watching video games. And there are no words to express their feelings when, for example, their dog hit by a car? Because barely anything can be more shocking than extremely shocking.

Could you elaborate more and provide some examples? Personally I didn’t find any known streamers approved of cheating, and the mainstream absolute hate cheaters.

There seems to be no real consequences for it...so they keep at it.

...Its strange how 'thinking'is often synonymous with believing wildly implausible conspiracy theories on the basis of no evidence. Researchers have found hundreds of SARS like corona-viruses in horseshoe bats in southern china. This pandemic was predicted by many subject matter experts as a likely scenario and their research was oriented to try and prevent their worst case scenario from occurring. Because of the sheer number of potentially dangerous bat viruses, they are still concerned that we haven't even encountered the worst case virus, maybe there is something equally as hard to detect but more deadly out there. There is no need for an accidental release to occur. Zoonaotic viruses cross the species barrier and cause pandemics, that's literally the only way they happen, and it's always because of close contact between animals and humans, it's not some big mystery, eating bats in southern china was, and is incredibly dangerous.

That's correct: researchers have found a lot of similar coronaviruses in southern China.

> “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?” [0]

Given that a leading virologist who specifically studies bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology considers this a possibility, I think it's safe to say that it's not some wild conspiracy theory. I obviously don't know what happened, and it seems very plausible that the virus came from standard zoonotic transfer, but it's a bit unfair to characterize this as a conspiracy theory.

[EDIT] The article was actually changed since I read it:

"She is distressed because stories from the Internet and major media have repeated a tenuous suggestion that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally leaked from her lab—despite the fact that its genetic sequence does not match any her lab had previously studied."

So it sounds like she came to the conclusion that it wasn't an accidental release in April.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...

The tricky thing is that it's impossible to distinguish between "accidental release" and "standard zoonotic transfer," unless you're able to track the transmission chain to patient zero. China could possibly do that (though it's not guaranteed), but if they did and it was clearly something that was accidentally released, obviously that's not something they'd ever announce, so it'd look exactly the same as the current "we don't know anything" state.

And all the ambiguity means any stance on accidental release vs standard zoonotic transfer is going to be driven more by politics ("China is evil!" "No it's not!") than by any empirical evidence.

I agree that it's effectively impossible to distinguish between the two and that any stance on the issue is going to be driven by politics; my comment was just an objection to the claim that it is a "wildly implausible conspiracy theory" that the virus was accidentally released.

Not only does it not match what they have studied, but what is more likely: that a bio containment facility that is purpose built to seal off pathogens from escaping leaks and that one patient successfully infects many others with a virus that has a good chance of not even infecting them severely. Or, that multiple of the hundreds of thousands of bats that are in the region that have the virus spread it to humans because of their repeated and ongoing interaction. The latter has exponentially more chance of occurring because of the almost infinitely larger resivoir of virus and also has vastly more chance of occurring because of the number of interactions. The former is so unlikely as to be essentially an exercise in magical thinking and the only reason people give it any credence as far as I’m concerned is because it’s easier to blame something simple and politically convenient than a complex system of human behavior.

There is no proof that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab, however it remains a plausible hypothesis. Yuri Deigin wrote a good argument for that possibility.

https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throu...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug

I don't know why you would call a lab escape a "wildly implausible conspiracy theory." We know viruses like this are studied in labs and that lab escapes are possible. Maybe it didn't escape from a lab, but it's not a wild conspiracy like saying 5G causes Covid.

As I understand it, the best reasons to suspect lab escape are:

1. The horseshoe bats thought to carry the virus live about a thousand miles away from Wuhan. Why wouldn't the virus start over there instead of in Wuhan.

2. The Wuhan Virology institute was a "BSL-4" lab, China's first and only. The BSL-4 lab is the only kind rated to handle very severe or infectious pathogens.

2.5 There were preexisting documented concerns about the safety protocols at the lab, saying they were substandard.

3. The Wuhan lab worked on "Chimeric coronavirus" exactly like Covid.

There's a lot more evidence and analysis from people more capable than me (see sources 3 & 4), but to me, the basic case "We are absolutely certain it came from bats a thousand miles away and definitely not the bioweapons lab next door researching this exact type of virus" makes me pretty suspicious. Add on to that the "mainstream" consensus has been wrong at every step, no lockdown, it's the flu, masks won't help, slow and few tests, etc - and I don't think anyone is really justified in dismissing the lab escape theory out of hand. Perhaps the experts are wrong. Again.

I'm actually not familiar with the evidence claiming that it's certainly zoonotic. My understanding is that is less likely due to the fact that it looks like a combination of a horseshoe bat virus and a pangolin virus - which theoretically could happen if a bat caught a pangolin virus, those two viruses infected the same cell, while reproducing the viruses were accidentally merged to cause the resultant virus to still be viable and have gained function, and then that unlucky bat traveled a thousand miles away to Wuhan to enjoy a bat stew...

Either all that, or, again, the neighborhood bioweapons lab with sloppy safety controls that was genetically modifying coronaviruses accidentally let one out.

1. https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-complicate...

2. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52318539

3. https://project-evidence.github.io/

4. https://link.medium.com/MI3PjBt0g7

Look, believe what you want to, I honestly don’t care, but if you think this is what a bio weapon looks like you need your head examined. Why would anyone make a weapon that kills old people by the tens of thousands and leaves most of the rest of us fine after a few weeks? Also, there are virologists aplenty out their trying to inform the world at the moment, maybe listen to them, this is literally all they do, they might know more than you do about how viruses evolve.

Thank you, I was waiting for your permission to form my own opinions based on evidence.

Whether or not this is a bioweapon is unclear. If it is, perhaps it's designed to shut down economies rather than kill people. On the other hand, perhaps it isn't a weapon at all and is just a research project similar to the other Chimeric coronaviruses produced and studied at the Wuhan lab.

There may be plenty of virologists who think this couldn't possibly have come from a lab, but the problem right now is that when they say it couldn't possibly have come from a lab, they don't have any good reason, that I've seen, to support that conclusion, whereas there's a lot to suggest lab escape is possible. I'm willing to listen to people who know more than me, but I need them to actually show some evidence. The people who are showing evidence are those I linked to in my previous comment in points 3 and 4. It seems like there's a great deal of evidence for a lab escape.

It's not "widely implausible" that the virus in Wuhan could come from the P4 lab in Wuhan that studied those viruses.

In fact, I would say it's "likely". If you see a nuclear leak somewhere, it's not a "widely implausible conspiracy theory" to think it might come from the nuclear power plant in that same area.

The difference is there arent random natural sources of liquid radioactive materials all over the place that could cause a large scale leak and have humans randomly tapping on them and hoping they don't cause it to blow.

Maybe not necessarily natural, but I think you underestimate how much radioactive material is out among the general public (i.e. outside of power plants and missile silos). Radiology as a medical field literally revolves around using radioactive materials for medical imaging, and there have indeed been incidents where regular people got their hands on some canister of the stuff (that didn't get properly disposed of), oohed and aahed as it glowed in the dark and they painted themselves with it, and a week later dozens of people are dead and hundreds injured from radiation sickness.

Sure, my analogy is not perfect. But similar accidents have happened in the past (accidental leak of anthrax from a Russian lab, and voluntary leak of anthrax from a US lab).

I don't know if it actually comes from that lab. I'm just saying it's not a wild conspiracy theory to think that it might well come from there.