Other than securing more funding for more research, and trivia for virologists, what good science has come from this lab?
The Wuhan institute was celebrated as an improvement over the facilities at which dangerous viruses had previously been studied in China. The 2004 SARS outbreak originated in a lab: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/
On the contrary, look at covid aftermath — it quite did! /s
Because this work is "dual-use", the civil/medical justification is just a fig leaf to cover up biological weapon development. Such research has never helped the development of medical treatments, and was never truly meant to. Covid was likely a 'strategic' weapon designed to disadvantage free democratic countries, giving an advantage to authoritarian governments which in principle were able to institute draconian controls to limit the damage of covid. It didn't quite work out that way, but those who think a biological weapon must necessarily have a limited geographic effect are being naive. The Americans who funded this research should be on trial for mass murder and treason, but they're probably going to get away with it.
This is news to me. The article you referenced opens by saying [0]:
> The World Health Organization has confirmed that breaches of safety procedures on at least two occasions at one of Beijing's top virology laboratories were the probable cause of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) there last month, which infected nine people, one of whom died.
This seems to be saying they traced the illness in nine people back to a lab leak, not that the entire outbreak originated in the lab.
There a lot of other studies, referenced in this wikipedia article [1], which explain that the virus originated in bats:
> Phylogenetic analysis of these viruses indicated a high probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and spread to humans either directly or through animals held in Chinese markets.
> In 2004, scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention of the University of Hong Kong and the Guangzhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention established a genetic link between the SARS coronavirus appearing in civets and humans, confirming claims that the virus might have transmitted from the animal species to humans.
In the last 15 years people have fallen ill of the plague, cowpox, meningococcus, h5n1, anthrax, and zika due to lab leaks in the Unites States [2]. These are just the leaks where people got sick and/or died, all lab workers I believe. None of that means these labs originated the diseases. The origin of a disease is separate from a localized outbreak.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-1#Origin_and_evolutio...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
No it isn't. The were studying SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1.
They sequenced RaTG13 but that is too far away from SARS-CoV-2 with a thousand random mutations across its genome. And there's no evidence that they ever recovered culturable virus from RaTG13 or were able to culture it--there's a vast gap between sequencing a virus and culturing it.
We also know about their SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1 work because they published it. Before the pandemic they had no reason to keep work on RaTG13 secret.
This is a case of Schrodinger's BSL4 lab. We know they built chimeras of other viruses because they told the world about that, we know they sequenced RaTG13 because they published that sequence, but there's a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor backbone that they found, which for some reason they picked to be the backbone in a new set of experiments, which they had perfect secrecy over and nobody has ever found any evidence of it.
Regardless of what actually happened in this case (FWIW I still believe a natural origin was most likely), the Chinese authorities covered up everything to do with the lab and destroyed potential evidence before a proper investigation could take place. In court cases we have a norm that evidence you destroy is treated as evidence against you, for good reason.
Destruction of evidence is considered only evidence of consciousness of guilt and cannot be used to prove guilt alone. The court also has to consider that an innocent person may commit destruction of evidence to avoid wrongful prosecution from situations that look damning.
> Early in the epidemic, the Chinese government discouraged its press from reporting on SARS, delayed reporting to WHO, and initially did not provide information to Chinese outside Guangdong province, where the disease is believed to have originated.[19] Also, a WHO team that travelled to Beijing was not allowed to visit Guangdong province for several weeks.[20] This resulted in international criticism, which seems to have led to a change in government policy in early April.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002–2004_SARS_outbreak
There was no BSL4 lab in Guangzhou and they didn't sterilize the market there right away, so in that case they were able to eventually track the virus to its origins--yet the reaction of the Chinese government was basically the same.
Americans have a fairly severe problem with assuming that other nations and people's will react with transparency to the US if they have nothing to hide. This is the same problem we saw with Hussein and the way that he tried to block the weapons inspectors and it turned out by his own admission that it was due to him not wanting to appear weak in the view of Iran and Hussein was preoccupied with Iran: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/02/saddam-hussein...
At a minimum the US government should not be funding any biological research in places without adequate transparency/controls.
We can't do it because of the CCP, not because of epistemological reasons.
They somehow had tighter controls than Apple developing a new iPhone, before they had any reason to.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517719113
Pretty bad secrecy.
We knew WIV1 existed as well because they published it 3 years earlier:
Your point? I'm not sure if you had one. Next time, just post the date up instead of some snarky RTFM that doesn't even fit the thread.
It’s a bit like Jaime Meitzl (sp?) said - for the first time in history you find a unicorn (furin binding site in a coronavirus) next to a lab that asked for funding to make regular horses into unicorns. But the lab says it’s “natural origin”.
Other coronaviruses have an FCS and they have evolved multiple different times, independently:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
The fact that we knew that adding an FCS to a virus would likely enhance its ability to produce a pandemic really isn't a smoking gun that we actually did it, because we're just studying and copying what nature is already doing (who is actually a much better geneticist than we are, with vastly greater tools).
And since you want to talk about suspicious "unicorns" how about the idea that a lab worker was infected in the lab, and then the only thing that they did was visit the wet market. They didn't infect anyone they lived with, or go to any restaurants, or go visit grandma and this Typhoid Mary/Mike has no existence outside of working in the lab and visiting the wet market. And this idea gets worse if you include more workers in WIV having supposedly been exposed.
What fits with the facts better is that they genetically engineered the virus in perfect secrecy and deliberately let it loose in the wet market, which is just insanity--nobody gains anything from doing that, but it is also impossible to argue against.
If your only defense is that this is not the most commonly used way to add a FCS to coronaviruses, that seems pretty thin.
You realize that is going to rapidly descend into circular logic.
You might interested in this paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2
"Discovery of a novel merbecovirus DNA clone contaminating agricultural rice sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China"
MERS is really nasty, this is clearly evidence of engineering, and guess what the system is unpublished.
Personally I suspect this paper (which came out a while ago but got "boosted" recently) is the reason for DOE "confidence update".
Media have not reported on this and "the usual" zoonosis advocates have been remarkably silent about it.
While it is in the same group of beta coronaviruses that MERS is in, the HKU4 virus was first found in Kowloon and the "HK" stands for "Hong Kong" (although it would be a mistake to assume that says much more than where it was found and not what its range is throughout China)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111821/
And coronaviruses undergo recombination (XBB.1.5 is a recombinant which is all over the news) and that produces "Chimeric" viruses in nature. Finding evidence of "gene splicing" in samples and determining it must be humans ignores the fact that nature does it better than we do, and really points at how politically biased that article is.
They want you to believe that WIV imported MERS-like viruses from Saudi Arabia and were fucking around with them in the lab, and not that those viruses are found all over China naturally and nature fucks around them constantly in much higher volume than we can.
This is an engineering product.
As for "politics", sure there is a lot of that going around but you can verify this finding yourself with freely available software using the published sequences.
Cadhla (who works for EcoHealth alliance BTW) points out that it was HZAU who registered the rice sequences - which is not hugely relevant since the source of the contamination could be from anywhere (with an unpublished HKU4 reverse genetics system...).
Andreas points to incomplete sequence coverage (not unusual in a contamination scenario) and claims it might be "not dangerous work" because the sequence gap leaves open the possibility that the missing bit was non-functional. True but weak. It's 33 NTs of highly conserved sequence, what does he really think it would be?
Flo's comments are bizarre and seem to be claiming that https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 is plagiarizing https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr353109 (the team's earlier paper which included the same finding). The claim that a reverse genetics systems for HKU4-like COVs was previously "published" is particularly weird since it was this team that had previously disclosed it.
The theory was that it was a virus they'd have sampled from immunocompromised miners working in the same caves that the bats with the most closely related viruses inhabit. They had some references to a report with something like that happening some time prior.
It's so far the only theory I've read that seems to match the evidence.
The evidence doesn't seem to indicate that it was engineered, or that it was a product of gain of function research on animals. I think there would have been more solid evidence pointing in that direction by now, if that was the case. They would have published something related to it, or non-Chinese researchers connected to the lab would have known something.
Yet there's no evidence of any related animal resorvoir, and the virus was very well adapted to humans from the very start. And everything points to the virus passing through the lab somehow. Those things put together seems to point at them having sampled a virus that already made the jump to humans, and that somehow during the sampling, or retrieving the sample from storage, the virus escaped.
https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-r...
There's a lot of economic activity in China that is close to bat habitats and there's evidence that cross reactivity to sarbecoviruses exists in a significant amount in rural china.
The researchers collecting samples were a very tiny slice of the human-to-bat-virus exposure that is going on in China all the time.
And we know that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't last very long on surfaces, it isn't transmitted by fomites. It needs to be aerosolized and breathed in. It isn't likely that the researchers were collecting live viable virus in the samples that they brought back to the lab. What they were sequencing was overwhelmingly going to be "dead" mRNA.
The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened. They didn't start spreading it around their apartment building, they didn't infect people in restaurants, didn't infect elderly relatives who wound up in the hospital, etc.
It makes "more" sense that they deliberately genetically engineered the virus and released it in the wet market entirely on purpose.
Except that SARS-CoV-2's epidemiological dynamics are well-known to be overdispersed? Almost all lineages die out, and a few explode due to repeated super-spreader events. It's therefore unlikely that the first cluster will be discovered at the site of introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 was presumably first introduced to other continents at airports and seaports; but that's not where the first clusters were found.
There's also the question of ascertainment bias, whether cases were found in the wet market simply because that's where the authorities looked. I assume you've seen those endless debates, which seem basically unresolvable to me given the limited information available.
The infected lab worker causing exactly one massive superspreading event in the wet market without infecting anyone else, making it look exactly like zoonotic spillover, without leaving any other contacts around Wuhan is much less believable to me. That sounds like a thousand to one odds or much worse.
That's indeed unlikely, but it's a strawman. As I've noted repeatedly above, most lineages die out. If the introduction into humans occurred outside the market (naturally or otherwise), then it's quite likely that patient infected others outside the market; those lineages just died out. I remember Trevor Bedford showing genomic evidence of all the failed introductions into Seattle before the spread finally went exponential, early in the pandemic.
Pekar et al. is basically a more sophisticated version of your argument, with numerical models of the phylogenetic and epidemiological dynamics. I don't think it's convincing (since they chose their power law pretty arbitrarily), but at least they acknowledge and purport to model that stochasticity.
I've lived in the United States all my life, you're just missing the point.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecuri...
The money for WIV risky reasearch mostly came from the USA.
-- famous politician, responding to a question on a different issue
But yes, there's no indication that the US is trying to cover anything up. And China is secretive about all sorts of things, they're an authoritarian government.
I distinctly remember long stretches of time where it was a platform bannable offense and socially unacceptable to 'go against the science' and suggest this theory was feasible.
For too long bad, politically motivated 'science', drove narratives, and our society needs to be more open in discussing this so we can not fall for the same tricks next time
Sometimes, answers are more clear when questions are more clear.
“Why is the US waiting to secure a convincing case that produces useful diplomatic leverage instead of indulging public speculation by making an early call that wastes the opportunity?”
There’s a lot to lose by making a case that other nations can dismiss, and a lot to gain by having a case that they can’t. If there was a culpable lab leak, the game comes down to China making it easy for its partners to plausibly deny while others try to collect thorough enough evidence that they can’t. The tidbits that feed conspiracy circles might be 100% right and very convincing to individuals, but are too thin to put world leaders on the spot. For now.
I'm speculating of course but if you think about it, can you imagine him sitting patiently reading documents first thing in the morning? He would get bored so quickly he would end up on twitter to complain or gloat.
If your intention is to motivate Americans away from Chinese products, what better way to do it then to use a scary virus that seemed to emerge from China to that end.
If it was a lab leak from Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), it was likely from a research program partially funded by USA.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
"a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV itself."
It received special permission to continue despite a prohibition on gain-of-function research (Refer to the section: Biosafety and Security).[0]
Quoting:
Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.
And from the footnote describing author contributions:
[SHI Zhengli] provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids
As everyone knows by now, Shi is the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[1]
It's pretty clear that Shi subsequently continued that gain-of-function work at Wuhan.
My question is, what is the correlation between the spike sequence Shi supplied for the 2015 paper and that of the early variants of SARS-CoV-2?
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Zhengli
There is also a 2013 paper, written by Peter Dazak and Shi Zhengli, "Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor".[2] Peter Daszak has been centrally involved in the US funding of the Wuhan Institute, in his capacity as president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York.[3]
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24172901/
[3] https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
Some of the leading voices in opposition to the lab leak hypothesis such as Peter Daszak had close academic connections (collaboration, grants etc.) with the BSL4 lab in Wuhan.
I think that's being overlooked. (The article also notes "Four other agencies and the National Intelligence Council assess with 'low confidence' the pandemic was likely caused by natural transmission from an infected animal.")
Also, the Energy Department said this back in 2021 -- though there's since been a bunch of additional research done. ("All eight COVID-19 cases detected prior to 20 December were from the western side of the market, where mammal species were also sold," one new study found 7 months ago -- even concluding that the proximity to five stalls that sold live or recently butchered animals was predictive of human cases.)
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/26/health/wuhan-market-covid-19/...
Bat coronavirus work including chimera creation was done at WIV at BSL-2, not BSL-4.
The Coronavirus work at Wuhan was done in BSL2 environment; the BSL4 lab was still being built at that time.
The lab leak hypothesis doesn't even rule out that it was a natural virus. It just says that the virus leaked from the lab. It could have been:
- deliberately created in the lab (gain on function)
- accidentally created in the lab through repeated cross-species contamination of lab animals
- just stored in the lab from a natural sample
- or even not deliberately stored in the lab but acquired through infection of a researcher on a collection mission.
However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan, quite legitimately - and they produce good science from this work. But because this is China, if a lab accident happened, it won’t be getting reported in the media. It’s a state secret.
The Energy Department gave a low probability to their assessment, but this is still a bombshell. Imagine the legal liability for China in international courts if the evidence is solid enough for litigation.
1. https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/tag/lab-leak-hypothesis/