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).

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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.