I agree. I think it got labelled as crackpot because a lot of the early proponents were suggesting that it was leaked on purpose, which strays well into conspiracy theory territory.
Maybe, but the early communication allowed for no dissent:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
> The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife
> Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.
That's not ambiguous language. Pretty much a blatant slamming of the door on all non-natural theories of origin. Anything else was labeled "conspiracy" at a very early stage.
In the beginning it had a very xenophobic after taste, at least what laypeople were sharing on social media.
To be clear, I don't care much if it came from a lab. I'd probably even prefer it at least then we can do something about it and avoid it going forward rather than this being a random nature thing that could happen again at any time.
You don't remember when the sitting president called it "kung flu"[1]? I don't need a newspaper to see the xenophobia in that.
That's xenophobic... how?
Put another way: it takes our laziest view of a ethnicity and uses it to make light of a disease that we think came from there, one that everybody is unhappy about. It doesn’t take much to see the latent xenophobia in that.
Also, it's worth actually reading up on why we called it the Spanish Flu: our allies in WWI originally called it the "American Flu," but changed it to avoid offending us.
Edit: it's also worth nothing that (1) "Kung Flu" is significantly different in content from "Spanish Flu," and (2) it doesn't have to be the case for anyone to be offended for xenophobia to be wrong.
TIL that there were "German measels", in Germany we just called them "measels".
In other words, it's not German and it's not measles. Hopefully a lesson in using this naming pattern for diseases...
The current issue aside, racists and xenophobes basically always attempt to evade responsibility by claiming they were "only joking". Such claims should be tossed in the trash bin where they belong. First, it's not a joke, and it's not funny. Second, they're lying...they didn't intend it as a "joke" and don't really even understand what a "joke" actually is, for the most part. And third, it's not relevant whether it was a joke or not.
The west sucked this up and any mention of china in any capacity got you called racist.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is China's premier virology research lab, its first biosafety level 4 lab, and one of the very few (or only one?) that was doing gain-of-function research. Wuhan has a population of 12M, which is just under 1% of China's population.
The fact that the virus emerged there, of all places in China, is non-conclusive but highly suggestive circumstantial evidence.
So I would say, yes, you are looking at this wrong. Saying, "Well you were right but you couldn't possibly have known because you had insufficient information" is tantamount to believing "no one could possibly draw correct conclusions from less data than I could". Hopefully it's clear why that is wrong.
I'm not a big fan of lesswrong, but here's a pretty influential essay on the extreme version of the phenomenon of drawing conclusions from apparently insufficient data, and how it isn't just coincidence: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s....
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that everyone who believed this theory is more intelligent. That would be the most absurd thing of all! What I am saying however is that you can't distinguish between the people who believed it because they performed a (very!) minor Einsteinian feat and those who believe it just because they were told and like the theory. But you're better off not going around and calling them all racist or saying they all just guessed, because at least in some cases that isn't true, and would be anti-intellectual.
Most relevant paragraph from link:
"Of course, Einstein did turn out to be right. I try to avoid criticizing people when they are right. If they genuinely deserve criticism, I will not need to wait long for an occasion where they are wrong."
To be fair, at the time it was know that the Wuhan lab it was one of the leading two labs in the world working with bat and pangolin coronaviruses. They were genetically engineering and combining them and testing them in animal models. One of the primary investigations was modifying proteins so that they can infect hosts using human ACE2 pathway.
A novel one leaking out is a bit different.
They might had been holding out samples before publishing. People discover novel viruses all the time and publish papers based on these novel viruses. It's just that these viruses or publications based on them don't make the headlines outside of academia. That's why it's so important that publish their virus database, which they have taken down on Sept. 2019, right around the time of emergence of the pandemic. Unfortunately they will never publish that database.
A tiger escaping a zoo is unusual. A previously unknown species of tiger escaping a zoo is substantially more unusual.
> Unfortunately they will never publish that database.
This one? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/science/coronavirus-seque...
> A tiger escaping a zoo is unusual. A previously unknown species of tiger escaping a zoo is substantially more unusual.
One of the closest relatives of SARS-CoV2 was discovered in 2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaTG13 and only published in 2016 or later. So yes, it's very common for labs to have virus samples and then publish later. And a pandemic killing millions is also an unusual event. The cause of an unusal event is by definition one or more unusual event(s). I am not sure exactly what you are arguing here. Speaking of unusual events, viruses routinely escape labs: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/20/18260669/deadly....
Also, please present facts. Not some weird zoo and tiger analogy. Viruses are collected for research purpose in labs, not to sell tickets to general population to make money. And, research is by definition novel or _previously unknown_, if you will.
WIV was bringing in bat's and pangolins from all over asia and engineering them to cross between species and enter cells using the a human Ace2 protein pathway. They published several papers you on their success making new viruses that do exactly this.
This is not proof, but you have to admit it ups the probability.
I'm not sure, but my understanding is that there are two databases of interest. The NIH one that WIV uploaded sequences to, and a separate WIV database. The WIV database went offline entirely in sep 2019 and hasn't come back. In early 2020 sequenced uploaded to the NIH were deleted. A some the NIH sequences were the ones recently restored and mentioned in your link.
It doesn't matter whether they did it on purpose like an evil mustache twirling villain, or some group of bats conspired to sully the good name of china, the rest of the world will still scream angry things at china. There's no way for them to win, so why bother.
Meanwhile the accusation of china doing bad things conveniently lets the rest of the world ignore the massive and blatant mistakes they made once the virus made it to their borders, as if an unfeeling chunk of proteins cares about national interests or what you call yourself
It is of course very misleading present to these "leaks" as evidence of "lab origin". Especially given that these were all incidents of, not surprisingly, lab workers contracting the virus after it had been brought into the lab for study, and fully a year after SARS-CoV-1 started infecting the public at large.
The overwhelming consensus is that SARS-Cov-1 has zoonotic origin with a number of intermediary hosts suspected, including civets, bats and cats.
This isn't some fringe crackpot theory
Well... let's just leave the terms "fringe" and "crackpot" to the side for a minute. Being as we're both open-minded, curious individuals at all.
The bigger point here the quality of one's reasoning -- and the argument you're presenting here -- "Lab workers infected by a virus 2 years after a public outbreak evidence lab origin" (my paraphrase) -- is patently specious.
Such that I'm not sure you even believe what you're saying, actually. Not that I'm saying you're lying to us. But seriously -- did you stop to think at all basic chain of cause and effect here?
Did you?
To be clear I don't have any evidence of a lab leak origin [edit](for COVID-19), and did not claim to!
I was pushing back on the initial out-of-hand rejection of this idea.
Its scary to see how quickly our formerly respected institutions were to suppress a legitimate inquiry, simply because... why? It was associated with Trump? It offended China?
Anyone who argues for more social media censorship needs to look long and hard at the lab leak theory and how it was handled. These corporate giants that are supposed to be the arbiters of what constitutes misinformation got it wrong, and they got it spectacularly wrong. They got it wrong to the detriment of people who want to know what really happened, and they got it wrong in favor of America's greatest adversary.
So Virologists have a choice: A: State that this virus is natural and be hailed as heroes as funding into your field and research floods in. B: Back the Lab Origin betraying all of their colleagues, become social pariahs and hated in society for being guilty by association for 6+ million deaths. All while you life's work and career all gets thrown down the drain.
For a Virologist supporting the lab origin only has downsides.
It wasn't "racist" per se, but it was subsequently used as an ideological weapon.
There was a clear consequence of tying COVID-19 with some sort of WMD released by the Chinese, and it was the increase in violence against AAPI folks.
Nobody said WMD. Most likely culprit is irresponsibly risky experimentation combined with documented poor lab safety practices.
That said, even if there was a direct link between theories about Covid-19 origins and a rise in hate crimes, does that mean that those theories shouldn't be discussed? If the search for truth leads to unintended and unfortunate side effects, does that mean that the search for truth should be abandoned in favor of burying our heads in the sand? Or worse, adopting an alternate reality that is more harmful to us, like maybe the Chinese Communist Party "theory" that Covid came from a US Army lab.
This was in fact a not uncommon claim. It wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the backlash if concerns about an accidental leak been expressed as questions rather than with certainty, by people who weren’t also making racist statements or otherwise acting in bad faith about the pandemic (you could easily find Republicans saying it was both mostly harmless and a Chinese attack just sentences apart).
I think this is a take as naive as it can be.
Not only can we read about this lab leak hypothesis across all media outlets, there is an ongoing debate about its validity in most respectable ones. Debates should include opposing opinions, I presume?
There are also plenty of historical examples of why public opinion driven by media outlets does not qualify as the “search of truth”. Reporting itself has mostly nothing to do with that, either. This hypothesis and many others could be true or false, but the vast majority of the population is simply not able to reach an informed conclusion, even more if we take into account that not even experts have enough information to do so. Thus, one shouldn’t believe otherwise, while ignoring the fact that it is already being used to push public opinion in a certain direction.
This was not the case throughout 2020, into 2021. Discussing the lab leak publicly was a great way to get banned from Twitter or branded a misinformation-spreading fringe alt-righter, a-la-Rogan. This was despite the fact that there was no less evidence supporting its probability.
In the first half of 2020 there was no evidence whatsoever. Even if the hypothesis is proven true in the future, promoting it without any supporting evidence is indistinguishable from just lying.
It was indeed peddled by right wing outlets earlier in 2020, coinciding with the ongoing trade war between the US and China [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory
What you've just said is baseless. Nobody "aimed" this theory. The theory simply came into being because it is plausible, probable, and just made sense if you looked at the facts of the situation objectively.
The lab leak theory was plausible from Day One, and anyone who said otherwise was motivated by ideology or fear.
> If you had evidence of a lab leak then present it and then you can promote a theory that is likely to result in violence towards individuals otherwise please keep it to yourself until you have proof
There is more evidence of a lab leak than there is of a zoonotic jump (none).
Because it immediately led to an increase in anti-asian hate crimes. That included effecting Chinese-Americans who have literally never been to China and south east asians that were mistaken as Chinese.
It is difficult to have a nuanced discussion about lab safety in the public view when there's a big chunk of the political sphere that will use it to rile up their base. It sucks that censorship is the better option but we've learned from 9/11 that people are anything but reasonable - I had wealthy middle eastern neighbors who fled the country within a week of the attacks and, after everything that came from 9/11, it seems like they made the right decision.
I'm asking the following as seriously and as respectfully as I possibly can, and let it be known that I abhor all crime.
Was this anti-Asian hate crime story ever real, or was it a media narrative designed to bash Trump?
Just to play Devil's Advocate: what if crime rates in cities where many Asians tend to live are going up in general? How would you be able to distinguish between anti-Asian hate crimes increasing, and crime in general increasing? Is the rate of crimes against Asians going up relative to the rate of crimes against say Latinos or Whites or Blacks? Is the rate of crimes against Asians increasing more or less in say Red regions that might tend to be influenced by Trump's rhetoric versus Blue regions that might be less likely to tend to listen to his rhetoric? Has the media even bothered to ask this question and analyze the data, or were they quick to instantly rush to blame Trump for any Asian that was a victim of a random crime in order to score political points.
I don't know myself as it requires a lot more research than I can do right now, but what I can see as factual is that there are probably hundreds of stories about crime going up in the last couple of years for every big city.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/major-crimes-up-38-in-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/opinion/new-york-rising-c...
https://gothamist.com/news/why-are-shootings-and-murders-ris...
Just my 2 cents. The data might not indicate what the media says it does and I would say that we should recheck all of our initial premises about the last 6 years.
1. I emigrated after university - I grew up in Massachusetts and Vermont and was in High School when 9/11 happened if you're curious how that gels with my previous comment.
2. Guardian Article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/23/vancoucer-anti...
3. Linked police report https://vancouverpoliceboard.ca/police/policeboard/agenda/20...
That's remarkably higher than the average increase.
The most legitimate response you could hope to get to such a question is some anecdotal evidence.
The reporting of harassment and hate crimes usually involve the aggressor’s statements at the time of the occurrence, thus it is perfectly possible to link a physical or verbal attack to a motivation.
There isn’t a concerted effort anywhere to stop the debate about the lab leak hypothesis, and proof of it is the widespread coverage in media, from MIT review to NYT.
There is though a more unified push of such hypothesis made by right-wing outlets, like this one, FOX, or NYP, among others. And, if anything, that should give us pause, as this is more about shaping public opinion than informing.
There was, and is, no evidence of the theory that it originated from a zoonotic leap at a wet market, which is arguably more racist because it places Chinese culinary practices in the spotlight instead of risky science experiments.
It was denounced because the scientists (like Peter Daszak) who were cited by the media in stifling the theory were the same scientists who were backing the risky research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that likely lead to the lab leak. There was a clear conflict of interest that was undisclosed to the public.
The bat theory was asserted with way more force at the time with even less evidence.
We can't truly know just how novel covid-19 is; we don't have sequences from the database of coronaviruses, and even if we did it might have leaked right after it was collected, without having been sequenced yet.
I'm not an expert in the history of viral origin stories, but I'm pretty informed, and I'm not aware of any documented examples of pathogens emerging from public markets.
To be clear, I'm aware of lots of examples associated with pig and chicken farms, and several viruses that are presumed to have emerged from various kinds of "bush meat" (monkeys, guinea pigs, deer), but even these are pretty much correlative lines of evidence. A documented case of a virus emerging from a wet market? No. Moreover, if you've been to one of these things, it's pretty implausible as the source of a respiratory virus. They're usually outdoors, or in vast spaces. At least in farms you've usually got a farmer hanging around in a small building with hundreds or thousands of identical animals on a regular basis.
The evidence for the wet-market theory has always felt like one of those things that "scientists just know"...until it turns out they were repeating apocryphal stories to each other. This happens far more often than scientists care to admit.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/34/Supplement_2/S58/459...
> In summary, the present evidence indicates that the H5N1 strains that caused the Hong Kong 1997 outbreak were reassortants from multiple cocirculating avian influenza virus strains
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3323155/
> On January 2, 2003, two cases of atypical pneumonia in the city of Heyuan, Guangdong Province, were associated with transmission of infection to several healthcare workers at the hospital (5). Investigation by the Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention led to the identification of clusters of cases in six other municipalities (Foshan, Jiangmen, Zhongshan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhaoqing) from November 2002 to mid-January 2003.
I literally took the first two papers I found via googling.
> the wet market theory has a reasonably credible history.
You're free to cite some of this history.
I heard someone once describe that kind of germ warfare as "attempting to use a grenade as a handgun." Yes it hurts your opponent, but...
Someone will bring up the fact that China seems (if you buy their numbers) to have had good success containing COVID, but the thing is: there's no way they could have known this would be the case. What if they released it on purpose and their containment efforts failed? What if it mutated into something 5X as deadly and 100X as contagious? Viruses don't take loyalty oaths.
Also: the global recession it caused probably did not do China any good in terms of net economic growth.
Also also: why would China release it inside their own country? Why not drop it in some random airport somewhere? If they really wanted to target the USA the thing to do would have been to drop it in Bethesda, Maryland and then spread a lot of anti-US conspiracy theories.
Lots of reasons it would have been a stupid idea to release it on purpose. China's leadership might be evil in some ways but they're not stupid or careless.
> The Wuhan Institute of Virology is China's premier virology research lab, its first biosafety level 4 lab, and one of the very few (or only one?) that was doing gain-of-function research. Wuhan has a population of 12M, which is just under 1% of China's population.
> The fact that the virus emerged there, of all places in China, is non-conclusive but highly suggestive circumstantial evidence.
Just for the lolz I would have asked if they are frequent patrons :)
IDK, but I tend to apply Occam's to the theory, and to me, the alternative theory looked a LOT more crackpot-ish...
The lab leak theory in particular seems to continue to get evidence supporting it.
A big concern was the bloodlust against China - and that by humouring this theory, there could be fatal consequences for Chinese nationals across the world, and a potential public desire for retribution.
I can understand why the theory was shut down - a large chunk of society isn't capable of understanding that "this is just one of those unfortunate occurrences. I can forgive this lie.
Those contentions don't follow. Yes, if covid existed in Wuhan as a sample under study, it absolutely could have been leaked. The question is whether it was or not, and your "could have" doesn't speak to that.
The linked article does, a little. It's not great evidence but it's something, and the sequence seems to be an early/transitional variant that hasn't been heretofore attested. That's something.
But prior to this? There wasn't anything but some general circumstantial evidence that coronaviruses were under study and that maybe that involved gain of function research. So arguing for a lab origin yesterday was, if not "crackpot", at least premature.
Today? Maybe, I guess? I think if nothing else this opens up an avenue of investigation. There are probably a lot of samples in freezers around the world that passed through the handful of Chinese institutions in question in 2019. If more of those turn up, then I think the "fringe" folks may actually have something.
But you don't get to argue for something like that (literally accusing people of being responsible for the most damaging public health event of the last century) before you have the evidence.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/anti-asian-hate-c...
[2]: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2021/03/420081/trumps-chinese-viru...
**** [1] This Fine Telegraph - Feb '22
_The timeline matters a lot here. If they were sequenced in Dec 2019 then it’s exceptionally important, because [China] holds SarsCov2s not discovered until December 30 to 31._
“On other hand, if sequenced in early 2020 then they could be contaminated with some early patient samples and still concord with Chinese government timeline. Right now, it doesn't seem there is enough info to narrow down timeline to distinguish between these.
“All we can say is that these samples were contaminated at Sangon Biotech with some early SarsCov2 viruses, some of which appear to have been from lab-grown samples.” *****
====[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/25/timeline-... - March '21
Dec. 30, 2019: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issues an “urgent notice” to medical institutions in Wuhan, saying that cases of pneumonia of unknown cause have emerged from the city’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
Jan. 5, 2020: Earliest known tweet suggesting China created the virus. @GarboHK tweeted: “18 years ago, #China killed nearly 300 #HongKongers by unreporting #SARS cases, letting Chinese tourists travel around the world, to Asia specifically to spread the virus with bad intention. Today the evil regime strikes again with a new virus.”
Jan. 23: A Daily Mail article appears, headlined: “China built a lab to study SARS and Ebola in Wuhan — and U.S. biosafety experts warned in 2017 that a virus could ‘escape’ the facility that’s become key in fighting the outbreak.”
Jan. 26: The Washington Times publishes an article with the headline: “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” An editor’s note is added March 25: “Since this story ran, scientists outside of China have had a chance to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They concluded it does not show signs of having been manufactured or purposefully manipulated in a lab.” ======
[3] Immediately after, we have Chinese propaganda saying it came from US deer and Fort Detrick. May '21
It also spills over into other domains. If people feel they aren't allowed to be curious or skeptical about the origins of CoV2, how are they going to feel when you tell them manmade global warming is "settled science"?
Curiosity is what fuels life. It's not healthy for us or for our discourse to suppress it.
I bought the book The Skeptical Environmentalist, for just this reason. I love hearing dissenting opinions from people who aren't a PR firm flunky. Bjørn Lomborg was and is paying a high price for his honest heterodoxy, and the least we can do is listen and not lump him in with the self-serving, lying Koch brother funded PR machine. That effort is driven by the psychological requirement of emotionally manipulating people to your side, not by an intellectually honest questioning of "common sense", and it's a real shame the two get confused.
It's: obey authority. That's what they really mean when they say it. It's philosophically very wide, it represents a much broader spectrum for the person using it than just science. What you're witnessing is a coward's soul laid bare, when you witness someone shut down discussion with bumper sticker regurgitations.
When you read the history of any given authoritarian regime of more recent times, there is a large fraction of the general population that tremendously assists the monsters into coming to power, through endless acquiescing. They're the gray moralists, the fence sitters: who am I to have a brain, who am I to have an opinion, little me, who am I to do anything, who am I to hold an opinion separate from such and such important person, I do what I'm told when I'm told without asking questions. They're zombies and they're terrifying to observe in action.
Also at the time, there was huge reactionary responses to Trumpism, BLM was in full fling, and there wasn't much mental space (and time) left for most people to make clear informed decisions. The trustworthy-looking authorities were saying it's not a leak... and wink-wink if you think it is, you're a Trump supporter.
Now that US internal politics is a lot less saturated with crazy stuff, it seems like there's more breathing room for people to sit back and requestion their prior beliefs. And the audience is more receptive, more ready to hear, less occupied with anti-Trumpism.
Maybe they suffer from a deficiency of midichlorions.
And the alternative to a supposed "scientific belief" is "wishful thinking".
You can believe in scientists' claims about what scientific studies say/mean, or about what the scientific consensus on a question is — without believing any random claim a group of scientists makes about any random subject.
Specifically, there is strong reason to treat scientists as just like any other group of people, where claims about how the work of science gets done (e.g. whether it's possible for a lab to have an accident resulting in a leak) are concerned.
It would be naive to believe that every single person out there is equipped with the knowledge and the critical thinking skills to discern between good and bad information, thus it would be vastly preferable that people trust science.
So, I'd say that this actually wasn't an example of TDS the left really supports Xi and China.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/trumps-false-claims-about-...
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel...
As background:
[1] Jan 2021 - Intelligencer: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
[2] June 2021 - Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
[3] Oct 2021 - New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-mysterious-ca...
[4] Feb 2022 - Inference Review https://inference-review.com/article/thunder-out-of-china
The points presented in these articles are all thoroughly well researched and balanced. IMO the points and facts raised taken in a mosiac paint a palpable picture of events.
From the last articles conclusion:
THE CURRENT SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been, and continues to be, a public health catastrophe—the most serious in a century. Questions about the origins of COVID-19 are, at once, matters of legal, financial, and moral concern. For the moment, researchers can do no better than to hope for an inference to the best explanation; and, for the moment, the best explanation seems to be that the virus escaped from the WIV.
The WIV was the biggest transporter of viruses to Wuhan from all over Asia, including many SARS-like viruses from Laos and Yunnan. Phylogenetic analysis shows that the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak was perfectly localized in Wuhan, as all strains that have been found in other locations are descendants of the Wuhan strain. Had the virus been circulating undetected in other parts of China, virologists would have eventually noted those pre-Wuhan strains and their descendants in the phylogenetic tree. Even after sequencing over six million SARS-CoV-2 genomes, no evidence has been found of pre-Wuhan SARS-CoV-2.
Not only was the WIV the biggest reservoir of SARS-like viruses in Wuhan, if not the world, its scientists were engaged in creating novel SARS-like and MERS-like chimeras and potentially supercharging their transmissibility and pathogenicity. With these circumstances in mind, consider the following facts:
Shi and Jiang were experts in spike protein cleavage and were working on a pan-coronavirus therapeutic to inhibit post-cleavage fusion of the virus with cell membranes. Jiang had previously created a novel furin cleavage site via a 12-nucleotide insertion, though not in a coronavirus. In a joint grant proposal the WIV and EcoHealth submitted to DARPA they suggested creating novel human-specific cleavage sites. Taken together, these points make the 12-nucleotide insertion that has created a novel furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2—so uncharacteristic of SARS-like viruses—look extremely suspicious.
The behavior of the WIV and its scientists also raises any number of troubling questions. The viral strain RaTG13 is a case in point. First collected by the WIV in 2013, RaTG13 was sequenced in 2018, but not disclosed until after the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. In their initial disclosure, the WIV failed to mention how or when they came to possess RaTG13, failed to indicate that it was previously called Ra4991, failed to cite their own 2016 paper first mentioning it, and seemed to imply that they only sequenced the sample after the outbreak. This does not seem like the behavior of scientists trying their utmost to establish how a Laotian or Yunnan virus came to cause an outbreak in Wuhan.
None of these points is in itself conclusive, but the circumstantial evidence is more suggestive of a lab leak than an act of nature.
There is an additional reason to take seriously the question at hand. It is prophylactic. Knowing at last that COVID-19 had its origins in the WIV would go some way toward enforcing a worldwide ban on gain-of-function research—research that is almost as useless as it is dangerous.
There’s plenty of precedent for lab leaks. What the conspiracy theorists are lumping it into is that it was created AND leaked. See Rand Paul and his whole Fauci interrogation
It could have happened. I'm not sure it did, but it certainly could have. This isn't some fringe crackpot theory - and it shouldn't ever have been treated as such.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC403836/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...