But like others, I have strong suspicions. It starts by an improbable coincidence (pandemic starting at the doorstep of a lab). The Chinese have acted guilty from the outset, by lying about the virus, arresting doctors, not allowing any investigation, and pushing crazy alternative theories.
I served it's purpose perfectly! It allowed China to pretend that an investigation was done.
Pandemic starting at the doorstep of a lab (that is not located in remotely close proximity to the Yunnan caves where the previous SARS viruses were originating from)
Previous SARS virus outbreaks (SARS1 and MERS) had zoonotic reservoirs identified in months with dramatically fewer resources, but coincidentally, with vast resources and global efforts, no zoonotic reservoir identified for this virus.
Previous SARS virus outbreaks showed a gradual evolution of a virus to progressively becoming more infectious to humans, and equivalent genetic changes in the virus that can be traced. This one started out as highly infectious, and until several months in, mutations weren't very significant.
The Chinese Communist Party (not China, not the Chinese people, but the CCP) has expended far more energy suppressing research and scientific access than any form of investigation into the origins of the virus.
The CCP deliberately suppressed and arrested doctors publicly talking about the virus early on.
Edit:
Forgot to add that there is a direct paper trail (publicly available on data.gov) of grant documents which specify that the funding will be used in WIV for research of bat coronaviruses with (and I quote from the paper) "humanized mice". Humanized mice, in this context, are mice genetically engineered to have human ACE2 receptors lining their respiratory tissue. In what was the most infuriating moment of public testimony I have ever seen, Dr. Fauci argues that infecting humanized mice with animal viruses (resulting in animal viruses that can more easily infect humans) is NOT gain of function research. He was playing an obvious semantic game, where his definition of GOF is the far narrower concept of making an existing human infecting virus more infectious..... Seriously, I was a big fan of the guy until that single bit of testimony. Now i know he's a lying bureaucrat more than he is a scientist.
https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
Both of these statements are so inaccurate. It took many years before scientists were certain what the reservoir was for SARS, and there were already different lineages of the virus at the Wuhan market!
You are mad at the CCP for putting out misleading information. You are guilty of the same thing!
My heuristic is, whenever I encounter these labels, it's the moment I stop reading. They signal the end of productive conversation, anything surrounding them can be ignored.
I'm not saying that this means it was definitely a lab leak. It absolutely doesn't, without further evidence, but discounting it completely, especially given how suspicious the CCP acted around it (why wait an entire year before letting the WHO investigate and then only for a few hours? why silence scientists and doctors?), is equally silly.
There's no evidence it was a lab leak, there's no evidence that it wasn't either. There's some circumstantial data to suggest that the CCP isn't a trustworthy source. That's all we know.
Yes its silly to assume that it was a lab leak. But its also silly to assume that it wasn't. We don't know what it was.
>Stop trying to play pretend and believe the truth.
Just like Bush and his Dubya Em Deez, right? The other side is always brainwashed, and your side always "knows the truth"
Why don't you go use that power of yours to go do something helpful?
Of course the dude had concerns, anyone with half a brain would explore all of the possible origins and theories. But the lab leak theory is just that - one theory that could explain the situation at hand.
The problem is that too many people have put far too much stock in the lab leak theory to the point that it's being treated as the most likely source of origin, but that's just not what the evidence says.
I don't even subscribe to Facebook or Twitter by choice. I definitely wouldn't subscribe to imprisonment by choice, haha. If you're concerned about these platforms controlling their content privately, don't use them.
If you think the U.S. is above unlawfully detaining a doctor, then I've got sad news for you.
The us does do this and has large and growing domestic opposition movements.
Born 12 October 1985 Beizhen, Jinzhou, Liaoning, China
Died 7 February 2020 (aged 34) Wuhan, Hubei, China
Cause of death COVID-19
Yes, all of that suspicious propaganda about the Chinese government's treatment of dissidents. The decoration came after his death at 34 years old.
> He died from the disease on 7 February 2020, at age 34.[8][9] A subsequent Chinese official inquiry exonerated him, and the Communist Party of China formally offered a "solemn apology" to his family and revoked the admonishment of him.
On the ground, the news of the virus was first supressed by local officials, allowing lots of people to attempt a "escape" from wuhan, when they got informed by relatives that something was up. When the pot boiled over, the bejing government stepped in and "walled" in wuhan. But they told that first and acted later, allowing thousands to "escape" ( they boasted about this on social media, thats how we know) and they escaped into lots of other countries - because while national flights were cancelled, international flights were still allowed.
This thing has been a lecture in disastrous disaster management - nothing more, nothing less. Its proof that totalitarian states even suck at the one thing they claim to be good at- being totalitarian.
Depending on what you think about the virtues of government, that's something between a pretty good thing or the worst horror you can imagine.
I don't find it suspicious at all, precisely because I don't trust the Chinese government. In my estimation of the CPC, the following probabilities are all roughly equal (and close to 1):
* P(suppress investigation | natural origin)
* P(suppress investigation | lab leak of benign research)
* P(suppress investigation | lab leak of gain of function)
From a Bayesian point of view, then, P(lab leak | suppress investigation) is going to be almost equal to P(lab leak).
That said, it seems pretty unproductive at this point to blame anyone, but it does seem productive to avoid it happening again.
Years of propaganda has worked its magic in far more sinister ways than any of us want to admit, especially to ourselves.
* P(agressivley blame china | american lab leak of gain of function)
Not a 0 on that one.
Or are you in bad faith giving dubious priors?
"This lack of openness caused delays in efforts to control the epidemic, resulting in criticism of the People's Republic of China from the international community. China officially apologized for early slowness in dealing with the SARS epidemic."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
My experience in biology labs (though not virology labs) suggests that a leak of benign research is plausible, and that if it did happen odds are good that there wouldn't be a ton of documentation to suppress. Mistakes happen all the time, and if researchers filled out a report every time a tube was dropped or some PPE was ignored in a "pretty safe" scenario, there'd be almost no time for research.
I still think the total number of human-animal contacts outside the lab are at least an order of magnitude greater than inside of it, so I would rank the probabilities as (natural > benign research leak >> gain of function leak).
The SARS1 virus escaped from a lab many years after the original outbreak (via accidentally being put in a fridge reserved for inactive virus and being examined under electron microscope, infecting employee), and it wasn't engineered at all. It was 100% natural origin.
I have ZERO doubt in my mind that natural viruses have leaked from US labs in the past, and were covered up. Can't prove it of course. Superpowers don't admit to these kinds of things.
Belief that this wasn't leaked from a lab requires a dismissal of a huge chain of improbable coincidences, and it's much easier to believe when you are part of a community of scientists who will undoubtedly have funding up-ended when people figure out they were at fault. Not unlike what happened to the field of nuclear energy after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The international virology community knows this.
I also feel like if he's serious about it, he would produce something other than a tweet thread, at least a real blog post with links to papers he refers to. Otherwise it's hard for me to take them any more seriously than anyone else who handwaves about papers.
It would be nice to see something like that with good faith opportunities for people to respond and counterrespond but I'm skeptical about it happening.
There's also a sense that I have from reading stuff like that and others that we should treat the peer-reviewed academic paper trail as somehow the state of things, rather than looking at the evidence on its own terms. I don't mean anything conspiratorial about that, just that it's almost like they expect there to be some peer-reviewed paper out there from China that shows how they would have engineered it if they had, as if that's realistic at all.
That's not even getting into what you mention, which is the possibility nothing was engineered and there was a leak.
It's impossible to disprove but both SARS and Bird Flu crossed over from animals in Southern China so there's no reason it must have come from the lab, either. Right now we have zero evidence either way, just people speculating mostly based on their pre-existing opinions of the Chinese state.
We've seen lab leaks and this is supposedly different because it's not disclosed and numerous other reasons making it hard to prove. We know about lab made viruses which this is supposedly different because it somehow looks like a virus of zoonotic origin. We've seen the Chinese government cover up embarrassing situations but this is different because there was heavy involvement from American researchers and American public educational institutions and they are in on the cover up too for some reason. We've seen the US government dislose previously classified information but this is different because all of the government officials who say they saw classified information about a lab leak (and were in a position to declassify said information) did not accompany their accusations with gathered intelligence. At some point we should recognize that these necessary mental gymnastics put the theory well into crank territory.
It took 9 months to find the source of MERS (camels). It took 14 months to find the origin of SARS1 (bats).
What evidence do you have that this was transmitted from an animal carrier? What mammal in China (it's not like there are that many mammal species living in the Wuhan metropolitan area) has been identified that easily catches COVID? The answer is zero.
The most likely explanation for this, which fits with all the other circumstantial data, is that the zoonotic origin was a genetically engineered mouse with human ACE2 receptors lining it's lungs. Note that I'm saying the mouse was genetically engineered, not the virus itself. The virus could easily evolve to infect humans by repeatedly exposing the humanized mice to the original, completely natural origin bat viruses.
Calling out "mental gymnastics" when you are acting as if it's a pure coincidence that a bat virus pandemic originated in a city containing the world's leading bat-borne virus research facility is the height of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. And before you say that the lab is in Wuhan because that's where the viruses are, no, it's not. The viruses historically have emerged in Yunnan province, in remote caves 1000 KM away from Wuhan.
https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
It's right at the bottom of the summary.
"3. Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice."
But sure, it's fringe and unlikely that the virus leaked out of a lab where it was specifically stated by the scientists applying for the grant that the funding would be used for testing interspecies transmission of bat coronaviruses with humanized mice. The lab doing this being in Wuhan, where the pandemic originated is also totally fringe and unlikely, is totally unrelated, right?
Gain of function proponents are ignoring research that indicates it's not possible to generate a virus dangerous to humans without leaving specific telltales. While this study isn't necessarily conclusive or a door slam in the face of lab leak, it's pretty huge data point that makes it far less likely.
I also forgot to mention that he deliberately ignored the humanized mice being the location of the serial passage work, and straw manned a "petri dish". Completely misrepresenting the fact that was most crucial.
In the future, using a Twitter account with locked comments is inadvisable. He blocked comments for a reason.
His entire argument is very straightforward. Zoonotic origin is highly plausible, has caused previous SARS outbreaks, has no evidence against it. Lab leak is possible, though it has no precedent and there's evidence that makes it less likely. There's no conclusive evidence for either. The balance of evidence and history leans heavily to zoonotic. There is absolutely nothing anyone has said in this thread that he didn't directly address nor anything that weakens his argument. Anyone on the lab leak train right now is basing it purely on bias.
There was a lab leak of SARS1 in 2004 which infected a lab worker and the people he came in contact with. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.the-scientist.com/news-anal...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/the-sudden-...
The two scientists seemed to think that although a lab leak origin is possible the natural origin story is more likely.
It would be human nature for those who were involved in lobbying for gain-of-function research to continue are now unwilling to entertain the idea that something as devastating as COVID was a result of such research. If that is true, it means that they were disasterously wrong in their earlier stance and it means that there will be no appetite to continue funding their field of expertise.
I'm tired of being told not to believe what's clearly in front of me -- a coordinated campaign in China to cover up any inquiry in to the origins of the virus accompanied by very suspicious behavior in China in the months before they were supposed to have been aware of the outbreak.
Whether COVID-19 itself is exactly a product of research at the WIV funded by EcoHealth Alliance and the NIAID, I don't know, but I can read those grant requests myself and see that they clearly refer to manipulating coronaviruses so that they better infect humanized mice cells. This is a study that Fauci insists is not gain of function research, but I'm unclear as to the distinction. I suspect that they played with language in these requests so as to be able to avoid triggering the legally-required review.
Fauci, and others, are potentially aware that the pandemic could have stemmed from research that they themselves fast-tracked around the legally mandated review process, making them partially culpable in millions of deaths worldwide -- it would be incredibly difficult in that situation to start looking critically at the possibility that it's true.
We should be very careful about trusting experts with a lot at stake in the answer to the question.
It would be human nature for those who were involved in lobbying for 1+1=2 to continue are now unwilling to entertain the idea that something as devastating as 42 was a result of such a calculation.
Nobody is saying this virus was engineered in this thread.
It appears to me to be a deliberate psychological trick of lumping people who claim the virus leaked from a lab (by far the most probable cause) with people who say the virus was an engineered bioweapon (insane, nonsensical crazy talk). The entire virology community is dependent on government funding, and they have massive conflicts of interest. I work with academics all day every day, and far too many gradually turn into mealy-mouthed bureaucrats, doing and saying whatever it takes to chase their next juicy grant, abusing and exploiting graduate students all along the way.
There's the chance that it was a naturally occurring virus that wasd being stored in a lab (like RaTG13, it's closest known cousin). Then, there's the chance that it was manipulated in lab experiments by well-meaning scientists hoping to learn more about coronavirus transmission to humans (which I think is most likely, considering the behavior of the WIV, but far from certain). Finally, there's the chance that it was deliberately leaked as a bioweapon (doesn't make sense to me).
I totally agree that there are massive conflicts of interest, including the implication of being blacklisted from Chinese data sources for one's career and the chance that there simply won't be any funding in the future if the public believes that the research field itself is to blame.
What direct evidence of natural origins is he referring to? Kristian Andersen's argument in his oft-cited paper seems to be that the spike proteins are effective at infecting humans in a novel way, and that if he were engineering an infections coronavirus he would have designed it differently, therefore it's unlikely that it was bioengineered. Beyond that, they tend to point out that "there is no evidence" of a lab leak -- ignoring many pieces of evidence along the way, even if they are circumstantial, including the workers at the WIV contracting a dangerous disease w/ COVID-like symptoms in Fall 2019, the sudden disappearance of the WIV genome sequence database before the first publicly known cases, and the suspicious renaming of the RaTG13 virus sample (the closest known to COVID-19 genetically) in WIV literature. I feel perpetually gaslit but some of these scientists. The argument seems to go as follows: it is most reasonable to suspect a zoonotic transfer, even without direct evidence, because a community of scientists with clear conflicts of interest tell us so -- but we are supposed to dismiss the circumstantial evidence of a lab leak because the only satisfactory evidence would be if a smoking gun were found in the WIV records (and everyone knows that they won't be). The idea that it has natural origins stems from recent experience with SARS and MERS, but of course that doesn't mean much of anything at all -- those experience inform both theories. One should also consider the 1977 flu pandemic which was confirmed to have been related to a live vaccine trial done by the Chinese military -- information which was suppressed at the time by the WHO for fear of losing cooperation with China and Russia.
Origins aside, it is not disupted that the NIH through the NIAID and EcoHealth alliance were funding research into coronaviruses that was being done at the WIV, and that the data related to that research used to be readily available but now is suppressed by the Chinese government, exactly at the same time that we are experiencing a pandemic that the research was hoping to forestall. Isn't that alone troubling? Are the scientists in this community expressing any trouble with that fact, or are we meant to believe that we are conspiratorial nuts if we bring up China's behavior in any context?
This is not either/or at all!
It can be both completely natural AND also have escaped from a lab. Pretending that lab == bio-engineered is a disingenuous distraction. For the given purpose of that lab them having a lot of naturally occurring viruses is to be expected, since that is the basis of what they are supposed to research.
A lot of people have pointed that out, why do you keep touting that distraction that paints anyone serious about the lab leak question as a conspiracy nut unwilling to look at the evidence? Natural origin is accepted and does not contradict the lab escape hypothesis at all.
Basically: totalitarian governments suppress everything. It's what they do. It's not like the west had clear access inside facilities like WIV before the pandemic, so why do we expect different behavior now?
I remain really dubious, personally. Imagine it was a leak. Dozens or hundreds of people -- researchers with PhDs and international cred and travel ability -- would have had to be knowledgeable about the research and in on the coverup. Someone would have swung themselves an appointment at UCSF or Johns Hopkins or wherever in exchange for blabbing.
It's an attractive conspiracy, but really that's all there is. The existing circumstantial evidence is a big nothingburger (Chinese Institute of Virology studies known Chinese Viruses; News at 11!).
The ONLY significant evidence, itself still just a single source, is that the Journal reported that it was known to western intelligence agencies at the time that there was an outbreak of something flu-like among WIV employees in October 2020. That's I guess a little suspicious, but still unconfirmed and... really not enough to move the needle.
Add to that the fact that covid is a close cousin of already-known endemic viruses and that nothing about it looks engineered at all, and... this is still just a natural virus, sorry.
I don't see why this would be the case. It could be a lab leak with nobody at the being aware or having evidence. Why must people be in on a secret coverup?
Many activities that make evaluating the lab leak hypothesis difficult were done in the open: Destruction of early virus samples and deletion of Gene sequencing from public databases.
>Add to that the fact that covid is a close cousin of already-known endemic viruses and that nothing about it looks engineered at all, and... this is still just a natural virus, sorry.
The virus does not need to have been engineered to have leaked from a lab. Natural viruses can and do leak from labs as well.
I hadn't considered this before, but you're right that most of the people dismissing the 'lab leak' theory seem to believe that their intellectual opponents are proposing that a 'premeditated conspiracy' took place.
In any case, if I were a PRoC official, I would try to reduce the chance of any (direct or circumstantial) evidence of a lab leak came to light. That said, even suppression of circumstantial evidence is not necessarily evidence of either a lab leak or pre-meditated conspiracy.
Please don't resort to personal insults on HN. It's a violation of the guidelines[1] and makes for poor and uninteresting discussion.
Instead...
> It's extremely hard to figure out who we're talking to.
...don't resort to personal attacks, and assess the argument that the individual is making, without setting up a straw-man argument. If you're unclear what their assumptions are, then ask.
Why are you insulting me? I honestly don't know where this virus came from, and am more interested in what the polarized discourse says about our current state of affairs.
Maybe. And? Dozens or hundreds of internationally-relevant people would have been knowledgeable about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's specific involvement in 9/11, but that didn't stop it from being covered up for almost a decade.
While non of that proves anything, it certainly makes CCP look incredibly suspicious. Of course, if it was a lab leak, its pretty unlikely we will ever know. All I know is that the CCP acted extremely shady and that alone makes me doubt their official story. Again, this doesn't mean it wasn't the wet market hypothesis, but its clear that the CCP's word cannot be trusted.
We also know that viruses have leaked form high security labs in the past (including smallpox!) so its not exactly unheard of.
Some footnotes: Its important to separate China/Chinese people from the CCP. Its also important to separate "bioengineered" from "lab accident", I think the former is extremely unlikely and the latter is very possible.
Is that meant to be a counterargument? (just because the USA downplayed it doesn't make CCP's doing so better, especially since they had advance knowledge and could have potentially completely prevented the global pandemic, while when it was in the USA, it was already global, even if lesser) Are you agreeing with me but adding that the USA isn't faultless? (Its true, but I don't know how its relevant to what I said) I really have no idea what you're trying to say.
It turns out that when you do this simple find and replace, we get equally as factual statements. So does this imply that it leaked from a US operated facility? Or is this an indication of the type of work the US was funding at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and conducting more generally? Or most likely, is this an irrelevant piece of 'evidence' of wrong doing on the part of any person or nation by assuming guilt based on their claim of innocence?
An innocent person will say they were innocent just as often as a guilty person who is trying to hide their guilt.
Only if you ignore the known facts. We know that covid-19 originated from wuhan, we know that the wuhan institute of virology was studying that exact virus. We know that the CCP did not allow the WHO to investigate the WIV hypotheses until over a year later.
Yes the USA acted shady, but the USA doesn’t have these addictions factual contributing elements. These factors don’t prove anything, of course, I never said that they do, but they certainly paint a picture that shows that the lab leak hypothesis is at least viable and the alternatives require some coincidences to be true. Again not proof, but certainly evidence that shouldn’t be ignored.
The USA analogy is ignoring all of the other factual information we have and is focusing purely on “well China isn’t the only country acting shady”, which I don’t think is relevant or useful. CCP aren’t the only ones responsible for where we are today, but they were a rather key part of it, regardless whether covid-19 was a lab leak or not.
> by assuming guilt based on their claim of innocence?
It’s not their claim of innocence that is suspicious, it’s their actively suppressing information that is: they didn’t allow the WHO to investigate until over a year later and they didn’t allow scientists and doctors to acknowledge there was a virus. More recently they even tried to say the virus originated in countries other than China. That’s rather more than a claim of innocence.
After all, there is no indication the virus was engineered by the US government, yet the danger was repeatedly lied about by the highest levels of government in January and February 2020, e.g. “when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away” (Feb 10), “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero” (Feb 26) ”It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear” (Feb 27), etc.
It’s claimed the local CCP apparatus lying and covering up the virus in December 2019 was for similar political reasons - there was an important event coming up in the city and they didn’t want it to be canceled.
Besides, reports from China predated any from the USA, so for it to even be in the USA, CCP needed to have failed in containing it.
I'm not denying that the USA's covering it up made it worse, it absolutely did. The US government aren't innocent in the global spread of the virus. But this entire discussion was about whether it originated from a lab break or natural spread through the wet market, so in that context, it doesn't really seem relevant, while CCP's behaviour is relevant in the sense that it paints a picture of them being untrustworthy and having acted shady when their culpability was questioned, so their denials of the WIV break, as well as their other actions (especially denying the WHO the ability to investigate for OVER A YEAR) puts doubt on their story.
Doubt, though, isn't definitive proof. I never said that I think it was definitely a lab break, just that I think the chances are higher than many people like to admit and that the CCP have not proven trustworthy. We will probably never know for sure, either way.
We should definitely be reconsidering our own funding and oversight of any research that is similar to “gain of function”.