Idea 1: SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab
Idea 2: SARS-CoV-2 was in/around/related to WIV and escaped
Idea 1 was widely debunked by American scientists.
Idea 2 is an idea that there is a considerable body of circumstantial evidence supporting and is certainly the most likely origin in my estimation.
> why these weird rumors about Gain of Function research that no one seemingly looks into etc.
You can read one such yourself: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/
we investigated the receptor usage of the SL-CoV S by
combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus
system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules
of human, civet, or horseshoe bat.
Our own American scientists said this process would likely result in biomarkers that were not found in the circulating virus (my layman, not expert, understanding).
The "Wuhan Institute of Virology" is named in a couple of news articles and scientific publications. However what is rarely discussed is that the Wuhan CDC (武汉市疾病预防控制中心), which also has a virus lab and was also researching coronaviruses is in walking distance from that wet market! I took a screenshot of it, in the top right is the Huanan Seafood Market, in the bottom the CDC, which includes a virus lab: https://i.imgur.com/smODVQe.png
Unfortunately you won't find it on Google Maps but anyone who is able to read Chinese can check this themselves. All the early cases were centered around this area, including the hospital that treated the first cases. It's absurd that this is almost never talked about anywhere. On the CDC website they had an open position looking for a researcher to study, among others, exactly the kind of bat CoV that's been identified as most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. This has since been deleted but it could still be accessed during the early days of the outbreak.
FYI, this really doesn't match my experience. I got curious and Googled about the lab's location myself about a year ago, not long after the outbreak, and found the hypothesis tantalizing, even in the absence of hard evidence.
I've seen ongoing discussion about this since then on various blogs and on Twitter.
As a more meta-comment, we're all in tiny, personalized information silos nowadays based on the sites and communities we frequent. Even a pseudo-public forum like Twitter is not really public - you only see the slice that you follow.
IMO 'nobody is talking about it' is more about how you've curated your own info-stream, rather than about the world at large.
1) taking sporadic notes, but not full urls
2) attempting to follow your same trail again
I often find I can't even, with knowledge of what I read/saw find the same sources again, using the same tools and sites without basically taking detailed notes. The idea that information is public and can be connected in the same way is preposterous, but only via experience.
If you have an insight, or a linkage between facts and events, please document it in a way that is shareable and findable. I too saw the ad for the virologist post-doc position in the Wuhan lab. I think lab escape of either a wild virus or a slightly modified one is likely. It doesn't mean that it is nefarious.
I think a full text and graphical log of the research process would be highly productive.
There's so much distraction, hysteria and extremely questionable science reporting. Without having in depth knowledge about Mainland China, I'm not sure if I'd not fallen for some of the misinformation as well. So yes, it's extremely important people document what they see and understand, and share it with other in a way that makes it easily accessible. When many journalists do a bad job at fact checking and questioning their sources, we have to be better than that, else we just contribute to the noise.
Check out Hunchly - https://www.hunch.ly/
"Hunchly automatically collects, documents, and annotates every web page you visit."
Not all that rarely IME, and certainly not "almost never". It's popped up every now and then for over a year now; here on HN among other places. (OTOH, maybe that was you I saw. :-)
Webarchive links are in the comments.
On the other hand, the WIV has recently published papers about creating new coronaviruses by combining a gene from one virus with the rest of another virus, as well as other types of modifications to existing coronaviruses. They have active grants to continue with this type of research. They also have acknowledged performing this work in BSL-2 labs, which would not be secure enough to contain SARS-CoV-2 if it were to have been the result of one of these experiments.
> Before 2020, the rules followed by virologists in China and elsewhere required that experiments with the SARS1 and MERS viruses be conducted in BSL3 conditions. But all other bat coronaviruses could be studied in BSL2, the next level down. BSL2 requires taking fairly minimal safety precautions, such as wearing lab coats and gloves, not sucking up liquids in a pipette, and putting up biohazard warning signs. Yet a gain-of-function experiment conducted in BSL2 might produce an agent more infectious than either SARS1 or MERS. And if it did, then lab workers would stand a high chance of infection, especially if unvaccinated. Much of Shi [Zheng-li, head researcher at WIV]’s work on gain-of-function in coronaviruses was performed at the BSL2 safety level, as is stated in her publications and other documents. She has said in an interview with Science magazine that “[t]he coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories.”
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
WIV has acknowledged that at least some of their bat coronavirus research was conducted in their BSL-2 labs which have a far, far lower level of security.
I don't personally doubt it's a conspiracy theory but would you clarify exactly where "American scientists" debunked this - is it in the link you provided, it's not clear, it appears to only deal with claim 2?
In this discussion and the older threads he links in there, Bedford basically rules out an 'engineered' virus, does not rule out a lab leak, but leans towards zoonosis (pathogen jumping from animal to human).
-
Here are Thread reader links for the older threads he references:
Were parts of HIV inserted into SARS-CoV-2? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1223666856923291648.html
What do the number of amino acid and nucleotide changes tell us? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1224207086013149184.html
Which data point are consistent with zoonosis or lab escape? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1230634136102064128.html
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
The other links you provide are rebuttals of particular arguments, but in no way settle the entire question. Knowing that bits of HIV weren't inserted into SARS-CoV2, for example, tells you nothing about whether this virus may have emerged from natural selection experiments in the lab. There are good arguments on both sides, but Twitter, in particular, seems stuck on the pronouncements of early 2020, when nobody knew much of anything about the virus and a certain prominent politician was speculating wildly, thus setting up a left/right polarization over what should be a factual debate.
We need to stop this hostile form of "scientific debate" where one person's opinion is held up as "the science", while all other voices are dismissed as fringe.
This is a very strange word. When I read history of science books, this word was almost never used. Change of scientific consensus is not uncommon in the history of science. Scientists disagree with each other, debate with each other, but they don't claim they debunk each other.
I don't believe people use this word in good faith. It seems to be politically loaded power grab.
I don't think very many people think very deeply about the meaning of words, and how subtle changes in the ones that are chosen can influence the collective consciousness. A lot of people even seem to strongly dislike the topic being mentioned.
They'd probably prefer that you didn't notice they were doing this.
If it was bred in a lab via humanized mice engineered with human ACE 2 receptors, would you consider that? What about forms of "no seeum" splicing?
From
https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-to-stop...
Where are all these animals in the wild (since the lab theory has been "debunked") with SARS-CoV-2?
I'd imagine we'd have found tons of them by now, right?
There is debate about that. Interesting article here:
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
(It also suggests that one of the loudest early detractors of the "escaped from lab" theory, the main author of the Feb 19, 2020 Lancet letter, had an undeclared conflict of interest because he is president of an organisation which funded Coronavirus research at WIV)
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
It's a long read but a worthy one. Exploring all the options better than the NYT article.
The lack of biomarkers is not proof either way.
There were a lot of them on twitter, and frankly, they disqualified themselves from the adult table. They've chosen politics over science.
If someone is telling people who already only believe that conclusion then that makes sense.
It's important to ask people that do this stuff to be very specific about their motivations in the moment, document them, and hold them accountable at a later date when the dust settles.
The childishness of telling people to unfollow you on Twitter is undeniable, but isn’t really related, and is just what you get when you’re reading Twitter.
Even ones who claim to be activists will ignore any good faith questions, because every second they spend engaging in meaningful dialogue doesn't allow them to sit there and attack others for points from their followers.
Would be interesting to dig further into who is funding their research.
I guess that's pretty popular, but I have to say I don't care for it.
Many people are still in the bargaining stage of COVID response -- if we find that some person made this virus and released it into the wild, we just send them to prison and the problem goes away. That's a very human reaction to the problem, but unfortunately it doesn't actually work. We have to clean up this colossal mess regardless of whether it was man-made or not, and we have to reckon with the millions that died and will never come back.
Finding someone to blame is just a distraction, and I imagine that many people want to move past that distraction and eradicate the disease. The learning can come later when we're collectively more calm.
I doubt that anyone was funded to create SARS-CoV-2 and then try to suppress discussion about it on Twitter. I think the "unfollow me if you think it's man-made" is just a short-circuit to avoid flamewars and distraction. It probably isn't a belief against doing a blameless postmortem so that we can handle things like this better in the future.
It's not about removing, it's about finding who they are speaking out for.
Discrediting your opposites is primarily a feature of rhetoric, not discourse.
If your goal is to have an earnest discussion, to go over the various sorts of evidence and the varied hypotheses, you need to address those first.
Some American scientists have claimed the virus does not look engineered. Why? What is their evidence for the claim? If you are asserting the virus is or at least could be engineered, can you account for the evidence supporting their assertion? Can you point to evidence that supports your hypothesis and not theirs? How do they respond to this evidence?
It may be -- in an earnest discussion -- that one side is not engaging, for one reason or another. Maybe they don't want to admit they are wrong, maybe they are getting paid not to. At that point, after you have yourself examined their claims, after you have examined whether you are just being stubborn yourself, it is quite reasonable to disregard them, maybe even in the future.
Bringing it in too early, before engaging with their claims, trying to find reasons not to examine their evidence, makes it seem like you are just interested in winning the rhetorical argument.
Finding someone to blame as you say is not really the key issue. If you want to prevent this from happening again you might just possibly want to know where this virus came from.
4 months after SARS 1 we knew the intermediate host was a civet. 9 months after MERS, we knew the intermediate host was a camel. As of now not a single intermediate zoonotic host has been identified.
At this point the probability threshold has shifted towards a lab leak. We can acknowledge this fact or we can collectively acknowledge that maybe just maybe a research center with a quarter of a billion dollars in funding from the United States government for evolving Corona viruses from bats to infect humanized mice might have had something to do with the virus that broke out in the exact same city.
I mean it really is absurd how quickly people dismiss this rather obvious fact.
Figuring out where this virus came from is extremely relevant considering that the gain of function research that in all likelihood created it is going to be increased in funding as a result of the pandemic. If the public knew that the virus was almost certainly not a naturally transmitted one from a wild animal host, they probably wouldn't be on board with funding more of the research that created it.
No, what I was getting at is that they might have a financial incentive to discredit the lab escape theory. For instance, some of this researcher's funding or his institution's funding might be from CCP-backed entities.
> We have to clean up this colossal mess regardless of whether it was man-made or not, and we have to reckon with the millions that died and will never come back. Finding someone to blame is just a distraction, and I imagine that many people want to move past that distraction and eradicate the disease. The learning can come later when we're collectively more calm.
This, trying to push the idea that fighting the virus or investigating the outbreak theory are mutually exclusive, is also a rhetoric I would expect to be pushed from the party responsible for the outbreak.
Truth is, why obstruct investigation efforts and try to hide the facts if the origin of the virus is natural?
The controversy around Peter Daszak goes deeper. First off, he was the only American on the WHO team that visited Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) earlier this year. Per the WSJ (https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-china-hunt-covid-origins-11...) the WHO rejected three different nominees from the Trump administration and instead chose Daszak. That seems suspicious to me, because Daszak's prior work with WIV means there is a clear conflict of interest, and it puts the WHO's judgment into doubt since it would seem like a convenient pick for the CCP, given how tightly they managed the WHO's visit and subsequent report.
Furthermore, Daszak's name appears as an author on a WIV paper that concerns coronavirus research (https://jvi.asm.org/content/jvi/90/6/3253.full.pdf), and the text within suggests WIV was actively performing gain of function research with SARS-like (SL) viruses:
> "We recently isolated a bat SL-CoV strain (WIV1) and constructed an infectious clone of another strain (SHC014); significantly, these strains are closely related to SARS-CoV and capable of using the same cellular receptor (angiotensin-convert-ing enzyme 2 [ACE2]) as SARS-CoV"
Note that EcoHealth's grant was omitted from the oversight process concerning research involving dangerous pathogens (https://news.yahoo.com/hhs-board-never-approved-wuhan-155055...). Per this article, Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard H. Ebright said that NIH and NIAID "systematically thwarted — indeed systematically nullified — the HHS P3CO Framework by declining to flag and forward proposals for review."
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While all of this could just be strange coincidence, incorrect speculation, or reasonably explained with more information, it has all the markers of something that deserves scrutiny and transparency. I feel like everyone who was and still is quick to shut down the lab leak possibility is acting against the spirit of open inquiry and thwarting the best understanding that we could have from this entire saga.
Some are pretty obviously wrong:
- they say the virus hasn't mutated to become more suitable or transmissible in humans
- they imply the first cases of COVID-19 were hospitalizations and imply that asymptomatic spread of the disease is not possible
Then also the article claims that science hasn't tracked gene mutations of the virus that took place in bats. I think that has indeed happened.
The logic of the people they blame us contradictory too. They say the base DNA could have been concealed by making a novel base but then they say by that this was a researcher doing public, documented research, which suggests they would indeed use standard practices and the signatures would be there.
From the article titled "Scientists: 'Exactly zero' evidence COVID-19 came from a lab"[1]:
> But that was before he learned more about COVID-19 and related coronaviruses, which have features already seen in nature. "There are lots of data and lots of evidence, as well as previous examples of this coming from nature," he said. "We have exactly zero evidence or data of this having any connection to a lab."
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/05/scientis...
I mean, I suppose from a pragmatic standpoint (the world as it is) it's starting to get into the realm of enlightenment, but if friggin' scientists can't think clearly, then perhaps their new found "five star", god-tier status in society should be knocked down to four or four and a half stars.
- making a conscious decision not to think the unthinkable ("work in my scientific sub-discipline has caused a disaster")
- attempting to avoid particular repercussions for their field, such as a world-wide ban on gain-of-function research (plenty of scientists would want to avoid what they might see as a disproportionate knee-jerk reaction from lay members of the general public which hindered work in a field that they believed to have great promise for the future, and they might believe that this decision should be in the hands of experts).
- trying to prevent the loss of sources of funding for virological research and the resulting impact on their career
and finally, and most importantly
- being moved by a misplaced sense of humanitarian responsibility to try to prevent the escalation of geopolitical tensions between superpowers ("virologists the world over have a vital role to play at this present moment in standing shoulder to shoulder in heading off the looming threat of war").
If I were cynical, I'd think that recent changes to reporting on the subject were as much a result of changes to the occupancy of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as they were to evidence that has come to light over the last few months.
> being moved by a misplaced sense of humanitarian responsibility to try to prevent the escalation of geopolitical tensions between superpowers ("virologists the world over have a vital role to play at this present moment in standing shoulder to shoulder in heading off the looming threat of war").
> If I were cynical, I'd think that recent changes to reporting on the subject were as much a result of changes to the occupancy of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as they were to evidence that has come to light over the last few months.
I actually consider these to be fairly valid motivations. True, it violates strict epistemology, but if it is done with full knowledge at least it is understandable. However, I haven't encountered many examples of people who acknowledge that they are lying for the greater good - rather, it seems much more common that people are lying to themselves and others, motivated by a fear of Trump (or whatever the boogeyman du jour is). If lying is done with awareness, I seem to consider it less dangerous (which is perhaps a dumb way to think...."it depends" I imagine).
Everything can be and is politicized. Even local news about a petty theft or changes to a small park ends up being very political in the media or some local discussion board (looking at Nextdoor). If it crosses the border, it becomes international politics.
There are existing cases when coronaviruses leaked from the labs before and it is a known concern: [1], [2] The debate on the risking of such research has been going on for years [3] and in 2014 the US even paused funding selected gain-of-function research [4]. It happened before more than once, denying that it could have happened again in 2019, because there are no evidence, is simply lazy. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Why it matters? Because only in 2016 China adopted national guidelines for treatment of lab animals [5].
Knowing what happens critically important to make sure it does not happen again. Any system, that wants to adapt needs to analyze and find root cause of the mistake. Take rules and regulations in Aviation, all decisions about safety are driven by experience and past mistakes. If something is a pilot's mistake, then either there is a safeguard added, protocol or training altered, or everything above; but it's not customary to downplay or avoid highlighting human error. It is a common-sense approach used in any area, from aviation to military to sea navigation, etc. Either actors learn or the system learns by eliminating actors. Only in case of virus research, humanity is an actor that either needs to learn or ...
And I don't understand, why it is so important not o blame Chinese government? Do we not want to blame the Soviet government for the handling and the fallout of Chernobyl? Or those, who made risky decisions while operation the plant? If it is leaked from the lab, amend must be made to the facility, protocols, guidelines. Nevertheless, if it turns out that it is someone's gross negligence, the person or group of people should be reprimanded.
The US industrial farming can be a culprit of another "pig" or "chicken" flu or something more deadly. I would not be surprised, if some industrial farm with a string of sanitary and animal rights violations breeds a new virus. In this case, I want them to be reprimanded; if a state has loose regulations to prevent it, I want that state to be reprimanded by the federal government. And I would expect the US to take financial loss and pressure from the international community as an incentive to learn from mistake.
[1] SARS escaped Beijing lab twice (2004) https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...
[2] https://www.who.int/csr/don/2003_09_24/en/
[3] Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research (2015) https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...
[4] http://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Documents/gain-of-function.pdf
[5] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/china-finally-settin...
You'd believe scientists should know better that it's not about "China is guilty, they should pay for their crime" at all but "Let' us understand the origins so that we might prepare and protect ourselves better for another pandemic outbreak."
I mean: you seriously cannot make that up.
That being said, from what I've read it appears that a lab escape is a very real possibility. Though I doubt that we'll ever find out
Via @Ayjchan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1394327680456220672?s=20
I find that argument hard to corroborate and there are other parsimonious explanations, like WIV was located in Wuhan because Wuhan is a major world city with high quality institutions of higher education.
But i too think it all too likely that we won't be any wiser about the origins.
Though it would be great if a timeline could be established, i don't remember seeing a good explanation on Covid in Italy being discovered in 2019.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...
The hypothesis that COVID-19 came from an animal, namely a bat, in Wuhan China is independently suggested by multiple areas of science (genetics and epidemiology). It's also in line with similar outbreaks that happened in the past. The science of this is about as "unsettled" as the the theory of evolution vs creationism.
Also, here's your falsifiability: when it can be shown that the virus is zoonotic in origin, the other theories of its origin are falsified.
I do not believe that the virus was engineered in a lab at this point, but turning this into tribe warfare will not help anything. Saying that the opinion you disagree with is unscientific and comparing it to creationism just shows you aren't looking to have an actual conversation.
A real scientist with close knowledge of the virus and the lab offered this.
I can only find sources saying that the Furin cleavage site doesn’t rule out engineering, or sources saying the Furin cleave site could be naturally occurring. Sounds like we don’t know yet.
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
As addition of a Furin cleavage site is an old hat acknowledged technique for increasing human infectivity of a virus. The issue with a zoonotic origin though, is that the odds of a mutation is incredibly small, and a recombination at that site would require the sequence to exist in another coronavirus, which has not been discovered to date.
It is also known WIV researchers had recieved instruction from another virologist on "no-see-um" editing techniques that would not leave traces of the mechanism used to splice in an edit.
So not proof, but the network of coincidence is as hard to ignore as a spinal tap amp duct taped to your head, cranked to 11, playing the 1812 Overture.
https://twitter.com/wanderer_jasnah/status/13942477140246609...
Some more reading: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210217/The-origin-of-SAR...
All these lines of evidence and reasoning show that the acquisition of the polybasic furin cleavage site by SARS-CoV-2 is a “missing link” in our understanding of its evolutionary history, that can only be addressed through the discovery of new viruses.”
This is becoming more and more common, Pure Science is almost never practiced anymore. The Hard sciences like Immunology, virology, general medicine used to be some what insulated from politics however in the last few years all sciences are no longer data driven.
You form a conclusion then find the facts that fit your narrative, and if your narrative is not the "correct" one you better not release your facts...
[1] https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2020/09/18/what...
[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/handwashi...
[3] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e...
If you’re interested, here is a more recent example of “politics vs science” and politics losing badly: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Abe-declares-e...
Here’s a fun quote from the article:
"We have managed to bring the outbreak under control within just one and a half months. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the Japan model,"
Meanwhile at the time of writing Japan is experiencing a surge in coronavirus cases and Abe has resigned.
Abe resignation seems to be based on being sick though, there was some, well extreme people measuring how long it took him to walk a fixed distance over time and when he started to slow down significatively, they predicted he was sick. He resigned few days later, officially because of an illness:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/japans-abe-goes-to-hospital-for...
APA (and WHO, and...) will say no. But you'll see curious notes about recommendations to monitor bone density, and curious usages of auxiliary drugs whose purpose is to combat osteoporosis. Turns out, the therapies are well known to permanently and negatively affect bone density and long term effects-- while assumed to include osteoporosis and more frequent fractures-- are simply unknown.
But the science and statistics cannot be allowed to trump the politics, so you will see no mention of this in complete contravention of traditional Hippocratic responsibilities and medical ethics.
The sorts of science that the public finds most interesting are those with a human backstory and politics is the best kind of story.
Take a similar situation, imagine you were a structural engineer a decade ago and you tweeted "If you think 9/11 was an inside job because jet fuel can't melt steel beams, please unfollow me" or an astronaut tweeting "if you think we didn't land on the moon, please unfollow me" - whether the particular issue they've mentioned is true or false doesn't actually matter. They're trying to avoid the confrontationalists/conspiracy theorists following them/replying to their tweets. They're pretty much tweeting "don't @ me"
That's a pretty bad analogy. It's not like a lab leak is an extremely unlikely possibility at all.
You should rather check who is funding the people who are making certain statements like that. Follow the money trail.
The tweet was talking about the virus being engineered in a lab, not the possibility it escaped from a lab. Their opinion on the possibility of lab leak seems [1] quite reasonable to me - they believe it's possible but unlikely, and link to more info.
> You should rather check who is funding the people who are making certain statements like that.
Sure - do you have more info on his sources of grants etc?
[1] https://twitter.com/macroliter/status/1391777097434152963
Then you have other academics in the comments saying nothing is certain yet, and other prominents labs like Gupta Labs at Cambridge and Bloom Lab from Seattle saying there could be multiple explanations.
I know the issue is politicised and that's wrong as Ecohealth alliance from the US sponsored this research so there is no "single country at fault" - no need to avoid topics.
It's not "chinas fault" it's more like, what on earth was the US based Ecohealth alliance doing with this research, why so many previous lab leaks with little attention, what is the history if the Wuhan lab, whats the actual facts about Gain of Function research etc. All topics that the press is not looking into for some reason.
On Ecohealth alliance:
“ It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.””
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432