Did a coronavirus leak from the lab?
As of 2022, this is no longer true.
https://www.business-standard.com/amp/article/current-affair...
One of the things we know for sure is that that about 50 years of evolutionary changes separate RaTG13 and BANAL-52 from SARSCoV2, so they are not its direct ancestors.
We don't know as for unknown reasons the database of specimens collected by the Wuhan lab was taken down in September 2019.
The distance in years between two viral strains you mention makes no sense at all, as the mutation rate is extremely dependent on environment.
Do you have a source for this?
Also, I'm no biologist, but is comparing the base rate of evolutionary changes still relevant if SARSCoV2 wasn't of natural origins? E.g. through creating chimeras or 'serial passaging' as described in this article? Wouldn't that create an environment where 50 years could pass in a way shorter timeframe?
>Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID- 19 pandemic
>Divergence dates between SARS-CoV-2 and the bat sarbecovirus reservoir were estimated as 1948 (95% highest posterior density (HPD): 1879–1999), 1969 (95% HPD: 1930–2000) and 1982 (95% HPD: 1948–2009), indicating that the lineage giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating unnoticed in bats for decades.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4
You should also know that SARSCoV2 1) is not a chimeric virus, and 2) that the present study includes viruses linked to RaTGP13 but more distant from SARSCoV2, i.e. it includes evidence from viruses unassociated with the pandemic.
There is no basis for this claim. Genomic evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a chimera of any two previously-known viruses. No possible genomic evidence could exclude a chimera of two previously-unknown viruses, and the WIV was the world's leading collector of such novel sarbecoviruses from nature. They proposed to make chimeras of them in DEFUSE. That proposal wasn't funded, but this article now reports explicit claims they did such work:
> They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.
You're basically rehashing Andersen's "Proximal Origins" here, and even he has moved on to more sophisticated (though still unconvincing) arguments like Pekar. As David Relman wrote almost three years ago:
> This argument [that SARS-CoV-2 must be natural since it doesn't use a known backbone] fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory.
Of course such a virus could also have evolved naturally by a similar path; lots of sarbecoviruses are just a single mutation away from that FCS, and perhaps there's some yet-unknown natural animal host where that gets selected for. The point is that no genomic evidence can distinguish between these two cases, though.
For emphasis, it seems like you're assuming that we know all the natural viruses that the WIV was working with. Sampling of novel coronaviruses from nature was a core part of the WIV's research, so that's not a reasonable assumption. RaTG13 was sampled in 2013, but not fully published until 2020. At least one novel coronavirus was identified in contamination of rice samples sequenced on the same equipment that the WIV used:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2
That's a merbecovirus, so it couldn't possibly have any relationship to SARS-CoV-2; but if they had one unpublished novel virus, then it's hard to reject the possibility that they had more.
The article is not suggesting that Covid19 evolved from RaTG13; it is suggesting that Covid19 is a chimaera made with RaTG13.
[Of course, it could be propaganda, government or otherwise; or it could be a damned lie concocted by the reporter or editor. They've said they have sources, they haven't named them, so it's not unreasonable to suppose they have sources that don't want to be named.]
Why would one do that? Well, two reasons. First, the spike more variable as it is subject to greater evolutionary pressure as the major component of the viral surface. Second, in coronavirus reverse genetics typically the virus is segmented into multiple pieces, most of which compose the non-spike backbone and a subset which compose the spike protein. This is intentional to enable the swapping of spike proteins. So, if SARS-CoV-2 is spike-swap or spike variant assembly, a RaTG13-like virus could be the "backbone" of SARS-CoV-2.
Moreover, a hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 backbone could exist in the viral sequences list the WIV took down in Sept. 2019. They sequenced RaTG13 a few years prior. The lab's raison d'etre is collecting and sequencing coronaviruses poised for spillover. And, with modern DNA synthesis technology, it's not difficult to print out arbitrary backbone contigs for a viral assembly.
That is completely untrue. Agricultural labs for instance research plant viruses which are _incompatible_ with humans completely. Still these plant virus would have to be researched under stringent isolation because of the damage they may pose to crops.
> Most importantly, the general reader should know
Speak on our level, don't baby us.
What exactly are you trying to say here anyway? If they were researching some other virus type it wouldn't be getting a look. But they were researching coronavirus.
Especially the fact that covid was not found in a single animal sample does make the evidence rather weak.
In addition it seems that the lack of sampling from outside the market and the fact that the market is a busy place in the center of the city where the virus would likely be once it's spreading from person to person , does not really lend support to the conclusions in the paper at all.
>More than half of the earliest Covid-19 cases were connected to the Huanan market, and epidemiologic mapping revealed that the concentration of cases was centered there. In January 2020, Chinese officials cleared the market without testing live animals, but positive environmental samples, including those from an animal cage and a hair-and-feather–removal machine, indicated the presence of both SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-susceptible animals.5 Recently released findings included raccoon dog DNA, pointing to a possible SARS-CoV-2 progenitor.
Not a single positive animal sample at the market, or anywhere else. Not a single one. That raccoon dog "evidence" shows that raccoon dogs were at the market, in the same place where the virus was found. That's all.
Humans brought the virus to the market. It's screamingly obvious and always has been.
Well of course, the racoon dogs et al all come in via human transport.
Testing infrastructure was poor, and maybe it still is. Chinese government interest was not in finding facts, but in taking action to 'solve the problem'. It's hard to find facts when the people with power just want the problem to go away. IMHO, that doesn't weigh in favor of either explaination. The wuhan local government and the chinese national government would have likely taken the same actions regardless of the source, because they're both not very interested in facts.
US health authorities pushing on the market theory are just doing their typical behavior of taking what little information is available and pushing it with no nuance. I enjoyed seeing the cdc stickers telling me not to use a mask out in public areas when the cdc was requiring them; the congitive dissonance was so palpable.
They prioritized healthcare workers to wear masks
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/21/science/covid-raccoon-dog...
And the behavior of China behind that whole story looks very much like China tried to cover up the existence of susceptible animals at the market.
https://news.yahoo.com/raccoon-dogs-did-not-start-covid-19-n...
I'm not making the argument that the DNA samples indicate that the Raccoon Dogs that the samples were from had SARS-CoV-2. I'm just arguing that previously it had been stated that there were no Raccoon Dogs in the market at all and that has been proven wrong.
I’ve always thought it was a handling contamination that got into community spread. It’s a very parsimonious explanation.
A tourniquet won’t do anything for a needle stick injury. That’s pretty silly. A virus landing in a capillary bed takes 1 minute to reach the heart.
If the tourniquet somehow did stop fast enough, what will they do? Debride the entire area? Sounds like total bullsh.
There is no new direct evidence in the article, simply the weight of existing indirect evidence synthesized together. There does not seem to be another hypothosis for how the virus emerged that has as much indirect evidence pointing towards it?
The main gist of the article is:
* The institute applied for funding for a specific piece of research (inserting a furin cleavage site).
* The institute claims it did not perform the research.
* Covid is what we would expect if somebody did perform that research.
* The research would have been performed at the time and place where covid emerged.
It is not direct evidence, but under a weaker burden of proof (e.g. balance of probabilities) it is fairly convincing.
It is common for researchers to apply to grants/funding for work they are already doing. They tweak the research application to meet whatever the funding criteria is using knowledge they have from existing experiments.
https://twitter.com/BlockedVirology/status/16676623250907463...
• WIV added FCS's to coronavirus(es?) exactly as described in DEFUSE, according to a US lab collaborator.
• Zhou Yusen "fell" off the roof of the WIV in May 2020
• WIV was working on a 'closer [than published] unpublished variant'
• Of all caves/mines, only scholarly attempts to access the Mojiang mine made touched off access denial and confiscation of samples from other mines from the authorities. While alluded to in the past, (https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-coronavirus-pandem... ) this is the first time to my awareness that the Mojiang mine has been uniquely & unequivocally associated with the authorities' clamp-down efforts, that too with attribution to Alice C Hughes, PhD
• (still trying to ascertain to what extent the WIV1/SHC014 chimeric work is only old information vs new.)
I mean, this is a pretty significant and concerning new finding right? Someone associated with the lab researching COVID early on just mysteriously disappearing in China?
The WaPo journalist Josh Rogin who is known for maintainibg quality confidential sources in DC, had long ago tweeted the above. While some aspects may have been covered in intervening press, this is the first time to my knowledge all of tbese items are asserted explicitly with a quote attributed to one of the anonymous investigators.
--- my take fwiw: While intriguing, vis-a-vis a seasonal illness null hypothesis, it's never been discussed whether they were unique cases at that time with such symptoms (more likely covid), or if many others both in and out of the WIV had similar symtoms at the time (more likely seasonal illness)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9410163/US-State-De...
https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/9/6/402
if I understand correctly it concludes that the cluster correlates with population density and a concentration of elderly population in that area.
Unfortunately that wasn't mentioned in the senate report (nor in the news article)
- We have a bunch of evidence of WIV engineering SARS-1-like viruses because they talked about it before the pandemic.
- We have zero evidence of them ever doing experiments on live SARS-2-like virus
- We have zero evidence of the existence of a SARS-2-like progenitor virus
- Before the pandemic they had no reason to be more secretive of any SARS-2-like work than their SARS-1-like work
- The spread of SARS-CoV-2 looks exactly like it originated in the Seafood market.
- If it was transported to the seafood market by someone who worked at the lab that is highly coincidental that the place they infected first just happened to be the most likely place for zoonotic spillover
- The hypothetical infected labworker didn't spread it all over their residence or create any other superspreading incidents clustered elsewhere around Wuhan
On the balance of probabilities I'm going with zoonotic spillover. The coincidence that the lab happened to be in the city is much less of a coincidence than the lab causing a leak of a virus that there's zero evidence the lab ever had, causing a pandemic that looks exactly like it came from zoonotic spillover.
They refuse to share their records with WHO or the NIH. That's a crucial caveat when saying there is no evidence they held a precursor. We don't know as they have refused to share their database.
The Times article is interesting as it suggests the work in DEFUSE to add furin cleavage sites went ahead and they passaged the virus in humanized mice. This would explain the furin site not seen in other sarbecoviruses and why humans topped the list for binding affinity from the outset.
Note the cases near the market are based on what David Relman described as "hopelessly impoverished" early case data. There was also sampling bias in retrospectively counting cases as market link was often required. WHO hasn't accepted market origin in part as there were likely much earlier cases than those in December linked to the market where no animals tested positive.
This is an unbelievable coincidence that makes the zoonotic spillover hypothesis laughable. To a biologist, the likelihood of this happening by chance is clear: virtually 0. But explaining the size of the space of optimal solutions to a given binding problem versus the space of good solutions to the general public, well, that's really hard too. So an obvious and completely non-circumstantial piece of evidence is the last one in the public's mind. And we are still acting like there is a question of where the virus came from, and we will be for decades, or at least until the average level of biology education is raised by a few sharp degrees.
All viruses which have higher affinity for humans spilled over, didn't they?
If we're going with highly coincidental pairings, it seems like we can't ignore "the disease originated in the only city in China to have an institute that specializes in virology, viral pathology and virus technology."
I'm not convinced of any particular conclusion as to COVID's origin, but I don't down-weight the coincidence of the city of origin hosting WIV nearly as much as you appear to.
I always thought this was a good test for whether someone can apply Bayesian reasoning. It turns out not many can, including a lot of highly educated people.
Without hard evidence to contradict it, lab leak should have always been the default hypothesis. That it hasn’t is a case of political propaganda winning out over basic statistics.
The probability that a virus would crop up in Wuhan out of all cities in China is 1/70.
Feel free apply Bayes' formula.
That doesn't mean it's impossible. When it does happen, it has to happen somewhere, after all.
Except that we have another explanation that is demonstrably not extremely unlikely: a safety incident at a lab with a recent history of safety issues.
If you want to try to convince me that zoonotic transfers of diseases like Covid aren't rare, or that WIV was in fact extremely unlikely to have a safety incident, I'm all ears. I've never seen anyone even attempt to do either. Instead, the obvious statistical conclusion is simply hand-waved away.
As to which of the two hypotheses is more predicated on politics, I think there are more generally left-leaning people who are swayed by the lab leak (circumstantial) evidence, than there are right-leaning people who are swayed by the zoonotic origin (circumstantial) evidence. This perception may be mistaken, but assuming I’m correct, this would suggest that the zoonotic origin hypothesis is more likely to be predicated on politics.
Edit: typo
Huh? No it doesn’t. The discussion of a possible SARS outbreak started weeks before the seafood market incident. The lab leak theory started in China BEFORE the seafood market was pinned as the cause.
I would share family chats if they hadn’t been deleted. But we heard about it a few days before Xmas.
I don’t think ill-intent is the accusation, I think the argument is that the lab has poor safety protocols and made errors. I haven’t studied the “lab leak theory” extensively, but everything I read seems to be about lab failures resulting in a leak, not anything purposeful or ill-intentioned.
The military was also given positions of responsibility in the Wuhan institute, according to a US Senate report. A book published in 2015 by the military academy discusses how Sars viruses represent a “new era of genetic weapons” that can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed”.
The authors are PLA researchers, and one of the book’s editors has collaborated on numerous scientific papers with Wuhan scientists. They discuss how Sars can be weaponised by fusing it with other viruses and “serial passaging” the resulting mutant to make it more dangerous.
The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.
The evidence about what was happening is not only overwhelming but notice how not a single government is going to lift a finger about it. The NIH just refunded this work and the Biden admin doesn't give a shit. They're all deep in denial at this point and will never even admit to what has happened, let alone start WW3 over it.
It also states that Covid-19 is the only Coronavirus discovered with a furin cleavage site on the spike, and that the lab had applied for funding to research the insertion of such a site.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that the lab deliberately launched a pandemic by deliberately releasing the pathogen on its own doorstep.
"Never ascribe to conspiracy, what is adequately explained by incompetence".
I think the evidence is pretty clear that at least the Chinese government believes that the covid-19 virus came from their lab (they could, of course, be mistaken about that).
What evidence are you referring to?
The US does weapons research it does not mean ill intent. The Chinese does weapons research for the same reason the US does it.
No, it would not. First, dictatorships hide things all the time, whether there is something or nothing. It's just how they operate. (Many democratic governments do to btw. How often do we need freedom of information requests just to find out that it was totally benign, the government just stone-walled because they could).
Second, not saying anything is not evidence of guilt in any criminal case in the civilized world. Everyone has the right to silence.
Top notch defense right there.
https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/nih-to-terminate-ecohealth-a...
“Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”
The rate of hospitalization among 18-49 year olds with flu in the US was 54.1 per 100K in 2019-20. It’s rare, sure, but that kind of absolute statement from an anonymous researcher doesn’t instill confidence.
We could have just embraced that blessing and let children continue to go to school and not experience massive declines in intelligence. But here we are.
“Think of the really old people” was truly hilarious. Indeed, all we could do was “think” when my grandpa died alone because visiting the nursing home was banned.
Edit: is your argument seriously “uhm actually, event X happens 0.054% of the time, so when you said {more rare version of X} doesn’t happen you’re wrong”
And yep, that’s my argument! The frequency of deadly viruses escaping from a bio lab is even lower, so if we’re going to eliminate possibilities based on percentages there are a few others that should get thrown out.
It’s a minor point but, as I said, it’s sloppy reasoning. If the anonymous researcher had said “low probability” I wouldn’t care. Instead, this reads like someone who’s willing to hand wave specifics for the sake of rhetoric.
But if you’re here to be put off by the smallest use of rhetoric, sure pop off on that.
It’s a contentious, difficult debate. I do actually think it’s bad to dismiss arguments you disagree with with casual rhetoric.
One thing to consider is not so much an individual's health and risk of getting serious ill, but rather that as the numbers grow geometrically, health care systems like hospitals can (and in fact, did) become severely overwhelmed.
Even with measures in place, here in Los Angeles we were at a point where for example if you had a heart attack at home, an ambulance / hospital couldn't deal with you.m https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/05/us/los-angeles-county-califor...
You should know the survival rate of a heart attack is far far lower than most expect, especially after 20 minutes of failed active attempts to resuscitate. The only real reason to take someone into a hospital after that is if they’re hypothermic or just so you can say “we did everything we could”.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-cpr-expectations-i...
At one point, LA had to resort to Fire Trucks because ambulances were unavailable.
If you don't think health care services were severely stretched, in some cases beyond breaking point (incl. staff unavailability because they themselves were sick), I really don't know what to say. This happened in New York as well.
Staff being unavailable because they’re sick is quite literally “normal day to day operations” that every company must be able to account for, not “beyond the breaking point”.
But if you “don’t know what to say” beyond vague emotional appeals unsupported by the very sources you claim to cite, I’m glad we agree on that at least.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/agenda/2021/10/26/lack-hospita...
[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-us-hospital-icu-bed-short...
[4] https://www.whsv.com/2021/08/27/man-dies-waiting-icu-bed-fam...
[5] https://www.businessinsider.com/man-covid-dead-doctors-icu-b...
[6] https://www.ketv.com/article/auburn-man-dies-in-des-moines-h...
[7] https://www.newsweek.com/kansas-man-dies-after-waiting-icu-b...
And how many millions of children have ongoing severely stunted development in both academics and social skills? More than 7 million. By some estimates 77 million, in fact.
The real question is how many more will die as a result of our horribly irresponsible treatment of our most valuable national resource: the children.
> “Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”
> It’s rare, sure
Then what makes an article terrible when you agree with the statement?
In 2018, WIV was part of a proposal with EcoHealth Alliance and UNC to add furin cleavage sites into novel SARS-related bat coronaviruses. DARPA declined to fund it. This investigation suggests the work went ahead. Something Nick Patterson suggested often occurs even when funding is declined. WIV had both NIAID and CAS grants to study spillover risk of SARS-related coronaviruses. They were also doing classified work with the PLA from 2017.
Regardless of whether or not there was a coverup, the Chinese government has certainly acted like it was covering something up.
The circumstantial evidence is sort of ridiculous here though. An institute with weak safety controls experimenting with creating novel pathogens has an outbreak of a novel pathogen next door? No no, it’s because of climate change (an actual argument I have seen).
It is certain that a new strain of some virus is emerging right now next to a lab that works with viruses, because that is a thing that happens continuously in nature, and labs exist within nature. It’s also likely that such a new strain will not cause human illness, as most viruses do not.
SARS-COV-2 only looks novel to humans because it made a lot of humans sick. There were tons of allegations that HIV was created in a lab too. This says more about our self-regard than about the virus itself.
As other comments have pointed out, while that lab was working with coronaviruses, none of the strains were genetically close to SARS-COV-2. Coronavirus is a broad category of viruses.
Scientists' best guess is that the precursor of the most common "M" virus jumped from the Cameroon chimps to humans sometime before 1931.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/virus/origins....
Yes, they covered up the existence of racoon dogs and other susceptible animals at the market.
It’s a fair point that if suppression of evidence is to be considered an indication of guilt, it has to work both ways.
Edit: typo
Is it possible? Sure! Is it likewise possible that some of the circumstantial claims about WIV are true? Sure! But if someone made this thing, someone else would have told us by now.
[1] This is science! There are notes and logs and backups and email and chat and whiteboard photos and conference attendees and visiting scholars, all spread around a population all trained to compete with each other.
Snowden revealed quite shocking information, and I think it is safe to say the secret of mass surveillance was going on for much longer than 4 years.
Im not aware of any way you could know that or the relative proportion of each.
Where do you get your certainty here?
You want the fact that I can't prove you wrong to be evidence that you're right, and that's not how logic works.
"The overwhelming majority of conspiracies likes this, especially ones in fundamentally civilian organizations like science labs, don't survive a year if that."
How do you know that the overwhelming majority of conspiracies don't survive a year if that? It's like sampling sick people and concluding that all people are sick. Without an estimate of the number of conspiracies that actually are kept hidden (which to me seems nearly impossible), how could you possibly know the proportion as you claimed?
This seems like a base rate fallacy to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
I'll put my money on bureaucrats being dumb over globalist nation state super autocracy every day.
I don't think it's very much a stretch to believe that pervasive observations of bureaucracies leaking and making mistakes serves as evidence that genuinely true Hidden Conspiracies are vanishingly rare. But you do you.
You're still missing the point: GGGP didn't argue in any “direction” at all; all they said was you can't know for sure what you claim.
> I don't think it's very much a stretch to believe that pervasive observations of bureaucracies leaking and making mistakes serves as evidence that genuinely true Hidden Conspiracies are vanishingly rare.
Sure. But don't then put your “hopefully not a stretch” guess in such cocksure terms.
> But you do you.
And you, obviously, you.
Part of any conspiracy theory is positing a great totalitarian enemy who is able to keep all these important truths from The People. The PRC is economically large and somewhat questionably ambitious. It's absolutely not the kind of super state people want to imagine.
When? There's a pretty short window where a WIV scientist might have known the subject they were studying had escaped the lab before the PRC did. Certainly by January 2020 the PRC could've clamped down on those scientists.
Spies caught outside the country don't tell me much about internal operations.
ETA: I think my thinking here is pretty colored by Tank Man, whose name is unknown. The CCP claims they don't know anything about him. Even if that's true, presumably he had friends, family, and fellow protestors who have decided it would be a very bad idea to even give his name.
Not after the top PLA vaccine researcher, Zhou Yusen died, allegedly "falling off the roof of the WIV" in May 2020. That sends a loud message.
Yours is a world where disproof rules, and conspiracies are assumed true until proven false. I'm sure it's entertaining, but it's not "true" any more than mine is.
In my world, Oswald probably shot JFK and covid was probably a natural virus, because those are the hypotheses that demand the least of the existing evidence. I'm willing to change my priors with more evidence, but not because of the lack of disproof of an entertaining counter-hypothesis.
I don't personally hold an opinion one way or another on JFK, but the fact is that the information on what happened still hasn't leaked out.
It took until 1992 for what appears to be the truth to be discovered, 3 decades with far more people involved in the process, and a much darker outcome than a man being assassinated.
See McNamara's recollection of that meeting in 1992.
http://web.archive.org/web/20210621032149/https://www.nytime...
Even closer to the SARS-CoV-2 case, the 1977 flu pandemic killed ~700k people and near-certainly arose from a research accident, probably a failed vaccine trial:
> The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event, as the genetic sequence of the virus was nearly identical to the sequences of decades-old strains.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/
That article argues that vaccine trial accident doesn't count as a "lab accident", which seems like legalistic wordplay to me; but I believe the historical context is good.
But in 1978, the WHO wrote:
> Laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bul...
It took decades for the consensus to change, and there's still been no official admission (though note the unverified personal communication from C. M. Chu via Peter Palese in Gronvall's paper, 27 years after the accident).
The USSR successfully manipulated many prominent Western civilian scientists (and subsequently Western newspapers) into buying the "bad meat" Soviet cover-up story, hook, line, and sinker: to the point that they publicly chided the American military for still believing in the "anthrax factory leak" theory:
> But Dr. Alexander Langmuir, a former director of epidemiology at the United States Centers for Disease Control, who presided at the session, said Tuesday that based on what he knew so far, "the current position of the U.S. military needs thorough re- examination; that is clear.'
> Dr. Philip Brachman of Emory University, a U.S. anthrax expert who has advised the Central Intelligence Agency on the incident, said the Soviet talk was a "landmark report" providing "a pretty good indication that this incident was an outbreak of gastrointestinal anthrax" from eating contaminated meat.
> Dr. Alexander Langmuir, a former chief epidemiologist for the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, agreed that the Soviet account was "very credible so far" but added that he hoped to obtain further details during the Soviets' weeklong stay.
The "bad meat" Soviet coverup story was fawningly parroted in _Science_ in 1988: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.3358121 (full text at https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.3358121) and also ended up in prominent American newspapers like the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/14/world/russians-explain-79...) and Wall Street Journal (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/04/13/s...), from which the above quotes are taken.
How did this happen? Why did this work so well? Because scientific methods designed for operation in adversary-free environments are catastrophically unfit for drawing dependable conclusions when intelligent motivated adversaries have tampered with the available data. The Western civilian scientists were thinking like...scientists, so they got easily manipulated into producing and disseminating literal Soviet disinformation while believing they were furthering the causes of science and of fighting anthrax. Oops:
> Three Soviet officials came to visit the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., on 11 April: Pyotr Burgasov, retired deputy minister of health; Vladimir Nikiforov, infectious diseases chief at the Moscow Institute for the Advanced Training of Physicians; and Vladimir Sergiyev, director of the Institute of Parasitology and Tropical Medicine. They gave the same explanation as in 1980, but provided many more details, convincing some long-time doubters that the account was true. U.S. intelligence officials still maintain a military facility was involved.
Spoiler alert: Pyotr Burgasov was part of the response to the leak and part of the Soviet biowarfare program.
The argument for a natural origin of Sverdlovsk anthrax is tragically familiar: establishing a highly plausible way it could have been zoonosis, along with providing evidence consistent with a zoonosis. From the _Science_ article:
> The citizens of Sverdlovsk did not have to look so far to find the bacillus. It has been endemic to the region for centuries.
> The source of the outbreak was traced to a single 29-ton lot of bone meal (cattle feed) sold in March from a factory in Aramil, 15 kilometers to the southeast of Sverdlovsk. It must have taken in and ground up the bones of animals who died the previous year of anthrax. Its product clearly contained live anthrax. An official investigation found that the factory did not follow the prescribed heating and pressure treatment methods. The feed it produced went to a state farm, where veterinarians inoculate the animals, and to private owners, whom state veterinarians often do not bother to visit, according to Burgasov. On the approach of the May Day holiday, animals are slaughtered, generally the weakest (in this case, the sickest) first. The meat from the private butchers is thought to have triggered the outbreak, Burgasov said.
It's only collapse of the USSR that enabled the truth to come out in public. Two Soviet pathologists, against KGB orders, had kept some autopsy samples, which (along with a defector's testimony) annihilated the "bad meat" cover-up story. Turns out the outbreak of airbone anthrax that happened in the same city as the industrial-scale weaponized anthrax spore factory was indeed caused by the industrial-scale weaponized anthrax spore factory! https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/11/sverdlovs...
What is known is the nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. Both areas WIV sampled and they refuse to share their records with WHO or the NIH.
There was also no mention of the mouse deaths in the grant renewal application Daszak filed to the NIH later that year. In this account, he said the mice had experienced “mild Sars-like clinical signs” when they were infected with the mutant virus. It had actually killed six of the eight infected humanised mice. Daszak eventually provided details of the experiment’s deadly results to the US authorities in a report after the Covid-19 pandemic. He now says his 2018 statement about the “mild” illness was based on preliminary results — even though the experiment in which the mice died had taken place several months before he issued the statement
So these people are all known liars. The US Government banned GoF research, they got around it by claiming their work was urgent and safe, they ignored reporting requirements, when they finally did report what they said was a lie, and now they're still lying to try and cover previous lies.
So when these people say they want to insert furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses, a coronavirus appears right next door that has a FCS - the first one ever seen - and they say, oh well we changed our minds and never did it, well, with overwhelming probability they're lying again.
Is this a case of yet another heat map being a population density map? I assume the wet market is a popular local destination and gathering place, while the lab is not. You would expect there to be more cases where there are more people.
I speculate in ignorance of the actual social dynamics in the city of Wuhan.
For a longer explanation of why we don't allow this, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... The short version is that the vast majority of these perceptions aren't grounded in evidence and we don't want discussions to be poisoned by accusations of bad faith.
p.s. Your comment would have been fine without that first paragraph.
https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/nih-to-terminate-ecohealth-a...
Maybe I'm deeply confused, but the Wuhan lab was reported by NYMag to be the one that discovered RaTG13.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
> How Did It Get Out? 1. The Tongguan Mine Shaft in Mojiang, Yunnan, where, in 2013, fragments of RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARSCoV-2, were recovered and transported to the Wuhan Institute of Virology; 2. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Shi Zhengli’s team brought the RaTG13 sample, sequenced its genome, then took it out of the freezer several times in recent years;
The probability that a novel SARS-related CoV would emerge naturally in the city in China that was used as a seropositivity control -and the location of the worlds largest SARS-related related research lab, and which had very low wildlife consumption compared to Southern coastal cities is < 1/1000
There is no evidence for any infected animals at the Huanan market https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.25.538336v2
There was a known ascertainment bias towards reporting associated with the market https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23
The modelling by Pekar et al inferring multiple spillovers at the market was flawed https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1
Prior to the pandemic, the State department literally warned the US govt. a SARS-related accident was a real risk at the WIV https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
Was that even insinuated?
"no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab"
Wut?
"Between 1 July and 1 October 2012, we received 13 serum samples collected from 4 patients"
There should be more attention on this. We're busy worrying about AI that can troll at a college level, while scientists are still busy making frankenviruses after a pandemic plausibly caused by a lab leak.
But I should not that not all viral engineering is gain of function, and while it gets a lot of attention, even in laboratory virology is relatively rare.
The indirect evidence of a lab leak theory is overwhelming frankly. And it doesn't require any malice. No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon.
Gain of function research is real, scientists intentionally make viruses which could start a pandemic. They do this for the purposes of knowledge and preparedness for the inevitable natural spillover events that will happen. It isn't nefarious.
But it is risky, and there many people now and before who thought it was a practice that should be curtailed because of the risk.
If you wanted to make a bioweapon with modern technology and modern understanding of genetics you'd make something super deadly with somewhat limited contagion or even better keyed to biomarkers that are uncommon in your own population. China could do this effectively since it's ethnically more homogeneous than many other countries. COVID is none of these things.
To add to this, most countries have turned away from infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control. The the release of them might harm your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself. It is like trying to cut off your enemy's leg by cutting off your own arm. It ends up kinda being like MAD except you're also the aggressor. The threat of a infectious weapon is not from other nations, but from a terrorist organization (which of course dramatically reduces risk). Not to say that this can't happen, but it is well known enough that were a contagious disease to get out, it would be more likely accidental. It would also be odd to release the disease into your own community first. I'm not saying it was or wasn't a lab leak or bioweapon, but if we're discussing weapon vs accident, there's good reason to believe a weapon is unlikely. Gain of research has significant value outside weapons and this also shows you why the weapon arguments against GoF aren't of high concern to those that are close to the work. Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances).
It is quite clear that they did amplification research as they’ve planned. And had inserted the furin site into the coronavirus . And they’ve mismanaged the research and they’ve let the virus to spread. This had caused a lot of damage, in particular the deaths, economical damage, long-covid damages, mental illnesses and diminished IQ (covid brain fog). There’ve been some positive sides: diminished air travel, diminished carbon emissions, transition to work from home, more pedestrian zones in the cities, mRNA vaccine technology. But the negative side from the pandemic is still overwhelming.
Arguably this lab should be sued out of existence for damages.
A claim was made about that, but it’s far from settled. One could argue it has been debunked. See “SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was not engineered”: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119
> And they’ve mismanaged the research and they’ve let the virus to spread.
That’s speculation. Irresponsible speculation, in fact, which has been pushed by people who should have known better. But they pushed it for jingoistic reasons.
> Arguably this lab should be sued out of existence for damages.
That’s an emotional reaction which you’re not examining rationally. If you remove the confirmation bias you’re applying to the evidence, there’s simply no substantial basis for the conclusions you’re reaching.
There is evidence that the Chinese authorities were suppressing information about the leak (information about that virus had leaked accidentally, by an ophthalmologist that saw cases spreading in his hospital).
Yes, it is not clear exactly, how the furin site got there. Was it a long series of mutations and a recombination with another virus in a lab animal? Was it spliced? We’ll never know, unless the scientists responsible would decide to tell how it had happened.
But I’m not particularly emotional about that virus. If you read the above, you’ll see that I see positive and negative after effects. Viruses and mistakes happen.
But it’d be a good idea to make a point and get rid of that lab. Failures like that should not be rewarded with continual existence.
It's in China, not America. Come on now.
The CCP might remove the lab from existence, but they're not gonna do it with a lawsuit.
"The drone's female voice also tells listeners, "Control your soul's thirst for freedom. Do not open your windows and sing.""
Most countries ( small to mid-tier ) lack the expertise, will or reason for it. But most major countries are working on biological weapons. If you think the US, Russia, China, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, etc aren't running bio-weapons labs, then you are being too trusting at best or too naive at worst. Or maybe I'm just being too cynical.
> The the release of them might harm your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself.
Never prevented intentional disease warfare throughout history. What makes you think leaders aren't willing to hurt their own countries to hurt their enemies? More importantly, what makes you think these countries will develope bio-weapons, but not vaccines for them?
> The threat of a infectious weapon is not from other nations, but from a terrorist organization (which of course dramatically reduces risk).
Every major terrorist organization is or was created, funded and controlled by major nations.
> Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances).
And yet, all weapons labs in history were created by big/rich countries. You so desperately want a world without bio-weapons that you are blinded to the contradictions in your argument.
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch... covers this in some detail (it's geared towards chemical weapons, but biological weapons are the same boat). In short, chemical and biological weapons just aren't useful. For any platform you put it on, conventional explosives will do more damage. For major militaries, there's no point in using them, which is why the "big" military powers have all signed up to the anti-chemical weapons and anti-biological weapons treaties, but not the anti-nuclear or anti-cluster munitions or anti-landmines, etc.
If chemical and biological weapons aren't useful, why does one need a treaty to ban them? Makes one wonder? Is there are treaty to ban feathers as weapons? The fact that there is an anti-biological weapons treaty is proof enough that countries are working on biological weapons, just like the anti-nuclear weapons treaty is proof that countries are working on nukes.
The ability to think is a far greater tool than reading silly blogs. Take it from someone who has read too many silly blogs and watch too many silly youtube videos.
Also, pretty much every treaty ( international and intranational ) has been broken. Some even say treaties are meant or created to be broken.
Yes, countries can break treaties. But there is a real cost to doing so. The point of treaties (especially the anti-war treaties) is essentially to break a prisoner's dilemma: all parties can agree to do something that is mutually beneficial for everybody, but only when no one defects. The first arms control treaty was the Washington Naval Treaty, which was signed when most countries were literally unable to find the resources to keep up with the naval arms race and proposed by the one country that could.
If you read the post I linked (I suspect you did not, as you are only reacting to my comments and not other material within the post), you'll see that there are many other lines of evidence we can use to ascertain the inutility of chemical weapons, not least of which is the lack of its use in conflicts after WWI, even in existential state conflicts like WWII or the Arab-Israel wars.
> If chemical and biological weapons aren't useful, why does one need a treaty to ban them?
The same reason why we have laws against murder. The existence of the treaty isn't to keep people from doing something useful (indeed, if you look at which treaties are acceded to, it's the treaties that keep people from doing something useful that don't get the signatories). Instead, it's to signal the unwillingness to use it and to pressure others not to consider its use. And if you know sufficiently few people are willing to use it, then you can avoid spending the money on countermeasures to chemical weapons.
It's not gotchas. It's just history and reasoning. Logic. It's persuasive to people who are willing to think. But no amount of reason will convince someone with an agenda.
> If the point of treaties is to be broken, why bother signing up to them in the first place?
As your buddy godelski pointed out, governments do things for optics, political grandstanding, etc. Why did germany and the soviet union sign the nonaggression treaty? Also to appease the naive masses who believe in fairy tales. So that naive people can say nobody is working on chemical or biological weapons since a treaty says so. See, this nonaggression treaty is proof germany and the soviet union will never attack each other. Genius logic.
> The first arms control treaty was the Washington Naval Treaty, which was signed when most countries were literally unable to find the resources to keep up with the naval arms race and proposed by the one country that could.
No. It was proposed by the one country that had isolationist political pressure against naval buildup due to our history and founding fathers warning against standing armies. It was proposed by the one country to kneecap british attempts to enforce navy limits. Also, the Washington Naval Treaty was a complete failure? It set the stage for japan to build more resentment which led to ww2.
> not least of which is the lack of its use in conflicts after WWI, even in existential state conflicts like WWII or the Arab-Israel wars.
Chemical weapons were used in iraq-iran war. In the syrian war just a few years ago.
> The same reason why we have laws against murder.
There are laws against murder because murder exists. People murder. So the treaty against chemical weapons must exist because chemical weapons exist?
It would be great if chemical, biological, etc weapons are never used. But you'd have to be absolutely naive to think that every major nation isn't working on chemical or biological weapons. It's like all the naive people who claimed that government agencies stopped collecting our data after getting caught in the 70s. Of course they didn't stop collecting data. They increased the gathering of data.
I live in a country where biological weapons wiped out a significant portion of the native population. Do you think such a country is working on biological weapons? If one major country is, then so is every major nation around the world.
The real world isn't an utopian fairy tale. No matter how much one wishes it were. But it's a free country. Believe whatever you want.
1. Attributing the whole of Japan's imperial ambition to the Washington Naval Treaty is farcical.
2. This chart of battleship displacement by date of construction plainly reveals that the Washington Navy Treaty was a massive success. Yes, treaty-breaking ships were constructed, but you cannot look at this graph and conclude that the treaty did not succeed in substantially disrupting the arms escalation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty#/media...
FWIW, I agree with you that the development and research into chemical and biological weapons never stopped. However it is likely that most countries no longer maintain up-to-date stockpiles of these weapons. Research continues for game theory reasons, but the treaties (and moreover the general public sentiment against such weapons, particularly the sentiment that use of those weapons would constitute the use of "WMDs" to which a nuclear response would be warranted) had the effect of greatly reducing the risk that such weapons would be used en masse. To this point; these sort of weapons have not yet been used in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, despite most late-cold war analysts believing that the Soviet Union would use chemical weapons during their anticipated war with NATO.
Serious question, are you surprised governments do things that aren't useful? That they'll focus more on signaling than utility? That's literally 80% of politics: show.
> The fact that there is an anti-biological weapons treaty is proof enough that countries are working on biological weapons, just like the anti-nuclear weapons treaty is proof that countries are working on nukes.
Now that we got the above out of the way, maybe notice that China, Russia, and the US have all signed the Biological Weapons Convention[0] (outlaw bio weapons). All signed during the cold war. Then maybe notice that China, Russia, and the US have NOT signed the ban on the use of nuclear weapons[1].
> The ability to think is a far greater tool than reading silly blogs
I agree. I mean just the dichotomy of [0] and [1] really tells a lot. You make a good point that governments are difficult to discuss because you can't take anything they do at face value so you have to dig in and think about their actions and what signals they are making.
But most major countries are working on biological weapons.
No, they are. But that's a bit different. Though I understand the confusion. Gain of function research can be classified as weapons. You got to develop weapons to defend against them. And of course, momentum. Especially in politics, where once funding is given it is hard to take it away, though not hard to reduce. I'm more saying if they would seriously deploy such a weapon and how serious the research is.
> What makes you think leaders aren't willing to hurt their own countries to hurt their enemies?
Some yes, some no. I think most countries have learned that the Russian strategy doesn't lead to great outcomes. Then again, you think Russia would have learned it too. But most countries realize that you can't rule over the dead. But you're right, that I may be too trusting. As far as vaccines, it is hard to keep those secret. Especially if we're talking about a country like China with a billion people, where you have to distribute at least a few hundred million. You don't think a few are going to fall off the truck? There'd be a lot of money for such a situation. Or even just the recipe. I mean vaccines don't confer 100% immunity so it still comes with big costs to yourself. But you're right, Russia keeps doing the Russian strategy. Though this is more easily done in an authoritative country. This is a lot of what jcranmer is pointing to. One more thing to consider, it is hard to invade this region after. You might think the same thing about nuclear but there's a reason they've focused on increasing the explosion and decreasing the radiation. Same reasons.
> Every major terrorist organization is or was created, funded and controlled by major nations.
Not quite true, but if they were, then the above arguments would apply there so that no terrorist organization would get the bio weapons from the big countries. You might want to ask why there haven't been any dirty bombs, despite that this should be easier, especially after the collapse of the USSR where many nuclear materials went missing. They all went somewhere (smaller countries and probably bigger countries too, to keep away from smaller countries), but we'll probably never know the full extent.
> And yet, all weapons labs in history were created by big/rich countries.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. Not all weapons were created in big countries. But weapons like nuclear, bio, and others were from big countries because to have such a program is quite expensive. Currently bioweapons, of the kind we're discussing, are still fairly expensive. This may change as things become cheaper. But regardless, these types of weapons are more attractive to the crazy anarchist who wants to watch the world burn than the angry dictator. They just aren't practical in the modern globalized world.
But there's got to be a logical reason for well over a century of research in the area and not seeing it used in practice. If it were a good weapon, it would have been used.
Okay good, I'm glad we are agreed.
> Some yes, some no.
If some are, then "everyone" has to, especially major powers. Just think about it.
> This is a lot of what jcranmer is pointing to.
I debunked what he wrote.
> the Russian strategy
What's that?
> Though this is more easily done in an authoritative country.
No. It's done more easily in a democracy. An authoritative country never developed nuked and used it on innocent civilians. It was one of those wonderful democracies. Just like a wonderful democracy and our democratic friends overthrew the ukrainian democracy and now another wonderful democracy is invading ukraine. Most of the horror in this world has been done by democracies. Funny how all parties involved in ukraine are democracies...
> Not quite true
No. Absolutely true.
> I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here.
You wrote "Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances)."
And I was pointing out that all "contagion weapons" were created by big/rich countries. I was simply debunking your claim.
> But there's got to be a logical reason for well over a century of research in the area and not seeing it used in practice.
Has it not been used "in practice". Biological weapons have been used since ancient times. Biological weapons have been used more often than nuclear weapons.
The blind and naive were adamant our agencies don't collect data and spy on us. And were absolutely shocked when it was revealed they do. Of course they do. As I said, people who are too naive or too trusting believe otherwise. I guess the third option are state actors or those who brainwashed by the media. Or maybe I'm just too cynical.
Very clearly false dilemma.
> I debunked what he wrote.
That's a strong word for what you wrote.
> What's that?
I'd link it to you, but you said you don't want to read "silly blogs". So I'm not sure how I can communicate anything to you. I don't feel like it'd help. I think we're done here.
No. It's game theory. It's geopolitics. It's why russia, britain, france and china developed nukes. It's why india and pakistan developed it.
> That's a strong word for what you wrote.
Not strong or weak. Just reality.
> I'd link it to you, but you said you don't want to read "silly blogs".
No. What I actually wrote: "The ability to think is a far greater tool than reading silly blogs. Take it from someone who has read too many silly blogs and watch too many silly youtube videos."
What do you think "take it from someone who has read too many silly blogs" means? You aren't going to link to anything I don't already know.
As I said, wishing there was no biological weapons is a noble thought. But believing nobody is working on biological weapons is naive. No serious rational intelligent person could believe it. But like I said, maybe life has made me too cynical.
Hey chief, these white men aren't going to take any more of our land. Here's the treaty we signed with them proving that. Hey stalin, germany isn't going to attack us. Look at this non-aggression pact we sign with them.
>> no amount of reason will convince someone with an agenda.
You're exactly right. You already know.
So do you. But you've got an agenda and a worldview that prevents you from accepting it. Imagine being naive enough to believe that there isn't chemical nor biological weapons in this world. Believe what you want. This discussion is getting pointless and I'll end it here.
You mean contagious, not infectious. Biological weapons which are infectious but not particularly contagious, such as anthrax, are much easier to control and have been the focus of most biological weapons research. Biological weapons are banned and aren't, used not because they don't work, but because other things work better and with less political fallout.
And FWIW, very contagious pathogens could be used as weapons for strategic effect if you had reason to believe they would hurt your economy less than your enemy's. For instance, if you believe your authoritarian government will allow you to flatten the curve but liberal governments will have a disordered response that precludes this. I'm not saying they did it, but the possibility isn't patently absurd.
See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...
In my opinion, gain of function is too dangerous with current security measures, and we should consider a moratorium.
I don't agree about the point of virology being just about studying gain of function. There are tons of things you can study in virology without needing to create novel viruses.
https://www.criver.com/eureka/why-are-lentivirus-vector-safe...
The gain of function research of concern takes viruses already capable of sickening and killing humans (or their close relatives), and deliberately makes them deadlier and easier to spread among humans. This is a tiny fraction of virology, and has yet to deliver any practical benefit.
There's a legitimate concern that an overbroad ban on gain-of-function research could restrict safe and beneficial activities. The WIV's work was pretty far at the dangerous extreme, though--Ralph Baric's work was already controversial, and the WIV was working with a greater diversity of viruses, at lower BSL.
Either way my point was that we actively use a known highly transmissible virus, with some parts removed, under the general assumption that it's safe, and it's been demonstrated to not cause large issues (compared to other problems in gene therapy). I think people should be aware of that and in some sense I am surprised there isn't more attention placed on this practice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw-nR6-4kQQ&t=2466s
I said "gain of function research of concern", which is vague but seems to have become the standard phrase to convey that narrower sense. There's definitely some grey, but the WIV's work was pretty deep in the black.
I'm reading more about lentiviral vectors now, and not totally comforted to see all the ways the earlier generations could regain replication competence. That still seems much less frightening to me than GOFROC, which is deliberately just one containment failure away from a novel pandemic.
[edit] To be clear, I'm not saying this definitely did or did not happen, I don't know. I'm saying if it came out later that it did, I wouldn't be surprised.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7096887/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
It really makes me wonder how many lab leaks may have happened during this time period when we started collecting and storing samples but we didn't yet have the ability to track diseases like we do today.
But it's intellectually dishonest of you to pretend that was in fact the purpose of the anecdote, and not to serve as evidence of a lab leak.
Please don't "actually" something with an uncited statement without backing it up with any sort of detail. A news article? Anything, honestly.
> that is what the Wuhan institute of coronaviruses was built to do right?
Really? It's "Wuhan institute of virology". Not "coronaviruses". Right?
I have no specific horse in this race but I feel like I'm losing my mind every time I read any discussion on this subject because there's always folks throwing around random statements as if they're established fact and I feel like at this point, on this specific subject, on this website, we should know better, geez.
> The institute has been an active premier research center for the study of coronaviruses.[6]
> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[17][21]
The evidence is pretty damning, and points to way too much to be coincidental. It's not solid evidence, but that would be impossible to get since China blocked anyone from visiting or doing independent investigations.
My major and Msc are related to microbiology (which is highly related to virology), and I'd estimate it's a 95% chance of having originated from the lab.
I'd both put my estimate at much lower than 95%, and I'd be substantially less confident in it, since my expertise kicks in about two weeks after an initial spillover event occurs.
For covid to be natural it would have had to mutate in the same way as planned in the grant proposal within 2 years of the grant proposal, and then travel hundreds of miles not infecting anyone on the way until it got to the city where this research was planned to be done.
Think about it.
Did you consider that maybe the reason this proposal was written was because this mutation was the most likely way this kind of virus could mutate to infect humans? Think about it.
I don’t understand why people keep throwing around all kind of unsubstantiated facts like if they suddenly made things clearer. The situation is overall pretty clear. Could the pandemic be linked to an accidental leak from a gain-of-function study at the Wuhan lab? Most certainly. Do we have evidence that it did? No, we don’t. Could it come from somewhere else? Sure, it can. Was there a properly done inquiry with full collaboration from the lab and the host country? Absolutely not, China was extremely uncooperative and did all it could to control the narrative surrounding the pandemic.
Who in a right mind (just leaving for a moment how) would do that? As: create a separate strain of coronavirus just to introduce one specific mutation.
Incorrect. We need to determine what happened based on all the evidence. We can't just make stuff up to fill in the blanks.
i.e. If what we know doesn't contain facts essential to the determination, we can't just "think about it" harder.
That's the hard-hitting evidence that was missing.
And that's why this topic is so taboo and annoying. People turn coincidence into proof.
Clearly, you have an agenda that encourages people to stop looking at facts and instead to make things up they don't have answers for.
Think about it. (This means I'm right, right? This means if you don't agree with me, you aren't thinking, right?)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-05/covid-lik...
There was some indirect and even some more direct evidence of Iraq doing nuclear weapons research in some capacity at some point too, this is incredibly dangerous line to go own without being 250% sure. Indirect evidence simply doesn't cut it.
> No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon.
It may not be someone 'credible', but within the current context of the U.S. preparing for what increasingly looks like a direct confrontation with China, it sure suits a lot of neocons in Washington, who seem to always be failing upwards in the ranks despite having lost all credibility over a dozen times in the last decade alone.
It does actually. Because when a government can destroy and hide evidence, assuming the worst of them is one way to get them to comply and share evidence in future.
The point the parent comment is trying to make is all we have is speculation and you can speculate either way. Just make whatever you want up in your head that doesn't include malice.
What you described is still the lab leak theory.
Bats -> humans in the market.
Point remains the same. We're all speculating because I agree with the statement that trying to create foreign policy based on speculation creates so many problems - Iraq war for one (but, being fair, supposedly that was credible).
But, I'm sure china would admit to the world that their research lab was the fuck up that killed millions of people. It isn't like china would ever try to censor and control information that makes them look bad.
The point is - from where we stand, not where we want to be. We stand in pure speculation, and cannot create foreign policy based on "we're, like, pretty sure you did it... in our heads!"
If we did, this kind of system creates guantanamo bay and the iraq war. We hold people against their will swearing they have information. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. So we resort to torture and have murdered plenty in the name of it. What if they actually don't have the information? Then we're just torturing/murdering innocents.
Is it worth it? Personally I say no. But it won't stop us from parading around the success cases screaming "the ends justify the means".
Also because gain of function research is risky as hell with seemingly little benefit. The same lab had requested funds to do it on viruses that were much deadlier.
In fact COVID seems somewhat unique amongst modern maladies to not have a clear zoonotic origin.
But I'm sure nature evolving this exact mutation coincidentally in a relatively short period after scientist documented their plans to engineer it is an equally likely outcome.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...
"Farzan was “bothered by the furin site and has a hard time explaining that as an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely).” On the question of whether the virus had a natural origin or came from some sort of accidental lab release, Farrar reported that Farzan was “70:30” or “60:40” in favor of an “accidental-release” explanation and that “Bob” — an apparent reference to Robert Garry — was also surprised by the presence of a furin cleavage site in this virus. Farrar quoted Bob saying: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. … it’s stunning.” - https://theintercept.com/2023/01/19/covid-origin-nih-emails/
I'm not qualified to evaluate these arguments on their merit.
"Harrison and Sachs (1) allege that scientists at NIH and elsewhere, including myself and colleagues, conspired to suppress theories of a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. This is false. A possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 was discussed in our earlier publications"
But there absolutely was a conspiracy to suppress the lab leak theory. This conspiracy is why the infamous letter published in the lancet that admonished the lab leak theory as a 'conspiracy theory's was retracted by the lancet. Peter daszak was one of the signers of the letter, but it came out he attempted to avoid signing the letter even though he arranged the entire thing. The reason he didn't want to sign it? In his words:
“so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn't work in a counterproductive way.” - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/wuhan-lab-collaborat...
Why might he feel that way? Well for one his name was on the DARPA grant proposal from 2018 to engineer a coronavirus with the same mutation covid has.
COVID-19 is not "some previously known coronavirus strain with furin cleavage site".
Trying to use difference in details in this case to sow doubt isn't reasonable in my opinion because it's details that are realistically impossible to nail down.
It seems like the standards applied in this discussion by some are essentially that nothing short of irrefutable proof even qualifies as evidence.
There were serious attempts to completely shut the conversation down and prevent investigations into there being a lab leak.
To quote Doyle - "never theorize before you have data [...] you end up twisting facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts".
The latter is what the article above is suggesting, that the Wuhan lab was working for the Chinese military to develop a virus for biological warfare research. For example, if you look at the ridiculous hero image of the article, you'll see someone who looks like they might be a Chinese military officer holding a clipboard and wearing a mask, while the Chinese flag's star is surrounded by what look like little stylised coronaviruses.
Half this very thread. "you couldn't mention the lab without being called a racist" and then they proceed to talk about china bioengineering weapons instead of an accidental lab leak.
The constant "the news suppresed this because of trump" is also a pretty loud dogwhistle.
The idea that a lab could have a leak was studied, there were multiple papers on it. The evidence did not add up to much, other than the circumstancial. The zootropic evidence had a bit more weight but still came up with "we might not have enough data to come up with a conclusive answer".
Because scientists said they leaned on that evidence the popular science outlets explained it as "origin is a bat not a lab leak" which should have had more nuance in the headlines but popular science outlets try to summarise hard science into easy to understand articles and they are fairly guilty of clickbait (how many times have we cured cancer, or some physics experiment done something close to a black hole). And between that and a number of bad actors starting conspiracy theories about the lab being a hidden bioweapon lab and China releasing it intentionally the discourse got all sorts of distorted.
The problem is Bioweapon dudes hid behind lab leak concerns and the lack of evidence from a scientific prespeective gave the wet market Patient 0 more visibility. To this day, half this thread is people with conspiracy theories hidding behind the lab leak. Makes a conversation about it almost entirely useless when you engage with someone and a few messages in they say the media is jewish and wanted to destroy the economy with lockdowns to make trump lose (this is a comment on this very thread further up, although i think they have been shadowbanned already)
I was being slightly hyperbolic. A good chhunk outright said it, another good group was using plausible deniability, which means if pressed they might say thats not what they meant. Makes separating them quite hard
> Are you unable to distinguish that assertion from the assertion that the engineered weapon was intentionally deployed?
I am not. The issue is not that either. The issue is "The origin of COVID-19".
When it came out two main theories appeared. Either the wet market where it was first noticed, or a lab leak in a lab over an hour away that was studying coronaviruses.
The two were studied by the scientific community, china put a lot of hurdles and the best availeble evidence pointed towards the wetmarket.
While this was happening, a number of conspiracies started, many of which pointed towards China as a bioweapons manufacturer (something that is very illegal). Those theories included that china was not studying viruses but manufacturing them (that is a very key distinction) and the theoreis then spawn over if China leaked it to test it, or infected its own population etc. Theories adjacent to this were heavily repeated by a number of news outlets, mayorly OAN a far right news station. The great smoke screen was that when pressed they could always fall back on "the lab leak theory" which is way more sensible.
Essentially the problem is the lab leak theory meant two very different things. It should have been called the accident leak and the bio weapon theory, but both were called lab leak and people who mean bioweapon hide behind the larger, more defensible lab leak umbrella.
You can't read much into the early case data that David Relman described as "hopelessly impoverished". There were likely much earlier cases based on excess mortality data (a key reason WHO haven't accepted market origin). Also, there is a clear sampling bias in the cases in the article cited above. https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23
Why was the wet market on the other side of the city the only identified outbreak site if it came from the lab? There were/are many markets on the other side of the mirror that would be much more relevant to residents living and working on that side.
People looking up flu symptoms in the middle of winter is not evidence of anything abnormal.
I don’t understand the intellectual effort going into the lab Leah theory… it feels like some kind of state run propaganda piece, I assume to just keep a negative view on China in people’s minds. It’s crazy given that whatever the truth there is no consequence… literally an inconsequential endeavour
It wasn't exclusively in the wet market, it was in lots of places.
America was involved with that lab, too. It should really be the rest of the world with a negative view of America and China.
China is a fantastic country filled with amazing people, culture, history and so on. It is quite possible to recognise a country's positive characteristics while questioning specific actions by some of the people within that country. This is as true of China as it is of any other country.
>They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.
That procedure is pretty much exactly what you'd have to do to make covid in a lab. Assuming that's true, it's pretty much a smoking gun.
>The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. They said the Wuhan scientists...
So presumably The Times has the names of the researchers and someone like the FBI could investigate and see what correspondence if any they have with Wuhan about it.
As others have noted, this is mostly wrong. The WIV is the only lab in the world ever to publish a genome for RaTG13. They'd published a portion (under a different name, Ra4991) before the onset of the pandemic. The similarity to SARS-CoV-2 made it obvious they had something relevant, so they published the rest after. Perhaps you meant there's no evidence that the WIV ever had live RaTG13, and that's true--indeed, there's no evidence that anyone ever has, and some highly speculative claims that it might be an in silico fraud.
It's also not the closest relative anymore. From your other comments here, I believe your knowledge is about a year behind; you're repeating many old arguments that even those arguing most strongly against a possible research-related origin have long since abandoned.
> The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab [0].
The market was the first big cluster, but the earliest cases show much less structure. See the paragraph beginning "A later study by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid", which I believe is intended as explanation for that map (though that's not completely clear to me).
In any case, there's no reason to expect the first identified cluster in the same location as the first introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 must have been introduced into other continents at airports and seaports; but the first clusters were elsewhere, at nursing homes, choir practices, and other locations where the (a) the virus spread easily, and (b) the patients are likely to get sick enough for people to notice.
> Furthermore, several different isolates were found in the market, indicating that SARSCoV2 had been circulating before the epidemic took off.
I guess you're referring here to Pekar et. al? Their "different isolates" are literally just two SNPs apart. Roughly 1/10 of human-to-human transmissions result in two lineages at least that different, so this seems intuitively like it could easily evolve in cryptic human spread. Pekar did some complicated epidemiological modeling that claims otherwise, but I don't think it means much; see for example the criticism at
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1
I'm curious how you came up with this heuristic. It seems to me that there's plenty of incentives to study benign viruses: the primary one being to develop a deeper understanding of the biology of viruses in general.
The article says that the viruses from Mojiang were transported to the Wuhan lab and studied there.
May be a good idea to get acquainted with inference to best explanation, and to understand that 'direct evidence' should not automatically be awarded epistemological primacy over 'circumstantial evidence' (or what you're calling 'innuendo').
Prolly you'll have a hard time finding a metropolis which wasnt researching corona viruses.
Converting the distance in phylogenetic analysis to evolutionary distance is based on natural gene drafting rate, which does not consider passaging with human selections.
This is false
Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an indication of any ill-intent. Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab. Further, genetic clocks show that RaTG13 and SARSCoV2 diverged almost 50 years ago.
The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab [0]. Furthermore, several different isolates were found in the market, indicating that SARSCoV2 had been circulating before the epidemic took off.
[0] The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715