I'm not a biologist, I don't have the slightest idea what the heck a furin cleavage site is, and so whether this is a red herring or a smoking gun.
But if you think this is such a smoking gun, can you point to somebody who explains in detail for a general audience what it means, why it's true, and how statistically unlikely it would be for it to be natural?
I just don't have anywhere near the background to know whether your comment is valid, but would like to know more.
The only benefit of being a member of the academy of sciences is that you can dump into PNAS whatever hot trash you couldn't sell to any other journal, because they almost never reject papers from members.
There’s a scientific claim in there; I will freely admit that I don’t know enough about viral genetics to have a valid opinion about it. What I do know is that people disagree about the implication of the furin cleavage site and it’s poor form not to acknowledge that.
The left wasn't denying the possibility that it leaked from the Wuhan lab. This was a theory very early on and it wasn't "denied" more that it wasn't substantiated.
It became political when it was asserted by people on the right, without any actual research or investigation, that was an intentional release from China.
Majority of that blame falls on Trump's inability to understand or articulate nuanced topics, particularly within geopolitical contexts. Instead of figuring out how to defeat the virus, majority of their energy went into pointing the finger at who to blame--a far easier task than being an actual leader.
Someone else can look up sources for all of this if they want, but I don't feel the need to. It was just a couple years ago, and I remember it perfectly.
I presume you just spend your time consuming healthier discourse than I do, which probably means you make some better choices in your free time than I do, so I'm not accusing you personally of this - but the walking back of all the effort made to deny and suppress discussion about this issue and pretend it never happened feels a lot like gaslighting.
> There absolutely, 100% was complete denial, all originating on the political left, that a leak from a lab in China was a possibility.
Well, that's just patently wrong. There was not "complete denial" by any means, as the majority of scientists were open to any and all possibility of origin. As such, the left--who was following those scientists--maintained the same position.
Saying that "there is no evidence that it was leaked" is not blanket denial. It is just that--there is no evidence, thus the possibility remains open but shouldn't be entertained as decisive.
Yet many politicians on the right, despite there being no evidence, dug their feet into the ground, convinced it was.
Not sure how you got the impression that not having evidence of something equates to "complete denial", but it's incorrect.
> Suggesting it was possible, much less plausible or even likely, was labeled racist.
We knew the virus originated in the Wuhan region of China. Don't pretend that suppression occurred because of simple discussion of the topic--it was predominantly due to politicians raging xenophobic wars by trying to rename it "The China Virus".
Trump did that to himself with his response by trying to stir xenophobic hate by calling it "The China Virus".
You are ignoring a few simple facts here.
1. The left doesn't congregate and worship at the cult of personality like the right does.
2. The first cases were in Wuhan. The right/Trumpets immediately blamed China. And this blame had exactly zero to do with any facts at the time. And in blaming China, hate crimes against all Asians increased dramatically, not even just Chinese.
3. It wasn't being called racist just saying it. It was racist being racists. Most people admitted it was a possibility, but definitely not confirmed in any way
The fact of the matter is it was turned into a political talking point.
The right says "IT IS THIS WAY BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT I BELIEVE AND IF YOU DON'T AGREE YOU ARE RADICAL LEFT"
The left says "We can't say that yet"
Learn the definition of gaslighting
One side said "the virus was leaked from a lab! we should call it Kung Flu or The China Virus!" and the other side said "there is no evidence that the virus was leaked from a lab".
They're not equal and opposite positions. One was kneejerk and unsubstantiated, the other was scientific.
I'm certain there were some people out there who took the lack of evidence as proof that it wasn't, but those people were wrong and unscientific as well.
Reality is there is still no definitive evidence of a lab leak and China is never going to admit to it. Trump's racist finger pointing didn't actually tangibly help US citizens. Even if he did prove it was China's fault, what was he going to do? Go to war with China? Cutoff trade our economy is inextricably tied to? It felt very much like a dog chasing a car. The dog has no clue what it'd do if it actually caught the car.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25587409
In the US, it's because this claim, or rejection of it, is strongly tied to political identity. Because the US is highly polarized right now, once political identity comes into play, you've left the realm of rationality and entered the realm of tribalism.
My stance has always been that Lab Leak required the least number of assumptions. Intent was never factored in, just that it seems awfully strange to so vehemently deny even the possibility of it being a lab leak and not want to investigate. Could it have been the wet market? Sure, but it seems less likely.
There may be some interesting reckoning happening in a few years, but probably not. Like safe and effective vaccines. It turns out, that if you did a RCT with two placebos and only called the people with placebo A vaccinated after two weeks, and called them unvaccinated if the got COVID in those two weeks. Placebo A would have the same efficacy numbers as the vaccines they rolled out.
I also thought RFK Jr was full of shit when he said the current childhood vaccines have not been tested against placebo. I was wrong there. Turns out they only test against previous versions of the vaccines, some of which are known to have serious side effects, and most of the time the previous version goes back to a time when they didn't do much testing either.
1) wild virus, no lab involvement
2) wild virus, accidentally released from a lab
3) modified virus, accidentally released from lab
4) modified virus, intentional release
At the start of the pandemic, the conspiracy nuts embraced option 4, and the left by reflex embraced option 1 and accused anybody who believe in 2 or 3 of believing in 4. Only later did options 2 and 3 gain more acceptance
Because there are ways in which both of these can have answers less satisfying than a law of nature, they add another degree or yelling past each other to at least the range of 3 to 4.
Also who decides what is misinformation?
That was misinformation too, no?
I'm not sure if you remember, but the early lab leak suggestions were leading to a lot of abuse, threats, and in some cases even violence towards people of Asian decent.
He also ordered US spy agencies to do an investigation into the lab leak hypothesis.
"The left" wasn't denying anything. It just wasn't willing to jump to conclusions prematurely. Trying to rebrand it as "The China Virus" was a transparent attempt to focus blame and hate in a particular direction.
I'm pretty sure Twitter had pressure from the Virality Project which worked with Stanford and federal agencies so I think it's disingenuous to act as if they weren't denying anything or trying to play it down.
The China Virus thing has nothing to do with what I said
In fact, it's the opposite of what you were asserting.
Early on, virologists Michael Farzan and Robert Garry were on a call with Fauci and Collins about the potential that the virus could've leaked.
Following that, Fauci's released emails (another correction, since you called them "leaked") was part of a chain between him and Collins:
> Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy.
- Collins, April 16, 2020.
> I would not do anything about this right now. It is a shiny object that will go away in times.
- Fauci's response
What's more, Robert Garry clarified it further:
> One thing that could be misconstrued is that neither Dr Fauci or Dr Collins suggested in any way that we not write the Proximal Origin paper. Likewise, neither one suggested that we not mention the possibility of a Lab origin.
I hope that helps you put things in proper order.
Here is an example from 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...
The title is “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins”
It opens with:
> The rumor appeared shortly after the new coronavirus struck China and spread almost as quickly: that the outbreak now afflicting people around the world had been manufactured by the Chinese government.
> The conspiracy theory lacks evidence and has been dismissed by scientists. But it has gained an audience with the help of well-connected critics of the Chinese government such as Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist. And on Sunday, it got its biggest public boost yet.
It’s worth noting that the conspiracy they mention is that the virus was manufactured by the Chinese government. However, the only direct quote they provide from Cotton is this:
> “We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there,” the senator said, “but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving evidence on that question at all.”
This was just the first result from a quick Google search: “nyt 2020 lab leak conspiracy”. There were definitely many other examples.
nothing is obvious-true because someone likes how simple it is. nothing becomes obvious-false because someone thinks it's not simple enough.
any other thinking is pre-chewed lies faking as news.
Huh, isn't that kind of obvious?
A big part of left wing ideology is progressivism, which is an exaltation of progress. The exact definition of progress changes over time, but the idea is at heart about having the most intelligent and specialized people being granted power to re-organize society for the greater good, as they see it. It is explicitly against the public making their own decisions in a decentralized way (neither via markets nor politicians), because it's assumed they're too stupid to do so with good outcomes.
Core to this worldview is the belief that there are such people as neutral experts, wise intellectuals, morally uncorrupted regulators and so on. You have to believe these people exist and in large numbers, otherwise the core progressivist project falls apart because who would be in charge of society? So the left are very keen on regulators, NGOs and especially "scientists", by which they don't mean corporate scientists but academics and government lab workers. They see in such people the core of the progressive project. Motivated by the greater good rather than self-centered profit, they deploy their superior skill and wisdom to make the world better.
So COVID comes along and it appears at first to be the perfect vehicle for validating the progressive project. Nature attacks, and who will defeat it? Not politicians or ordinary people! It will be the scientists and public health officials - but they say they can only do it if they're awarded total power over our lives, if politicians and markets are disposed of entirely and if we're all forced to act in concert (so we get collectivism as well as progressivism). Ideal!
The lab leak conspiracy turns this progressive dream into a nightmare. Suddenly the experts, the public health officials etc aren't the heroes of the story anymore, they're the villains. It turns a story about the virtues of progressive power into a story about how supposedly intelligent people killed millions through a foolish, careless and ultimately useless pursuit of abstract "progress" without regard to risks. And if they lied and covered up that then what else might they be lying about? How can anyone defend these people as superior leaders when they behave this way?
So depending on whether or not it came from a lab, the conclusions can switch from total validation of left wing goals to total repudiation. Of course they will never accept that it came from a lab leak.
"Putting words in someone's mouth" is different. It means ascribing a quote to them that they didn't actually say. It doesn't cover all speculation about what people think.
[1] Most of which have nothing to do with them, of course.
The lab was nowhere near the site of what they were studying.
The coronavirus strains came from a cave 600 miles away and brought to Wuhan for further study.
Again, none of these viruses have a unique furin cleavage site for ACE-2.
If you read the FOIA document requests, one of the people who got grant money said "I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature . . . it’s stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted.”.
This person afterwards did a complete u-turn and signed onto the infamous publication in The Lancet. A lot of people quickly did a u-turn around the exact same time.
> The coronavirus strains came from a cave 600 miles away and brought to Wuhan for further study.
The best theory I've come across is that patient zero was a person collecting bats in caves for the lab in Wuhan. By all records, they wore woefully inadequate PPE (unlike the people in the lab itself who had well-established procedures).
This theory explains the jump from animal to human, the geographic origin, the reason why China didn't allow any outside investigations, and why most geneticists believe it likely had a zoological origin. (Yes, that last bit remains true no matter how badly the conspiracy theorists want it to be false.)
Whenever I see a claim of this type, I always wonder how you back it up?
I'm not saying that most geneticists don't believe what you're saying, because I have no clue what most members of any profession believe about anything. I have plenty of gut feelings, but how do you go beyond that?
Did you mean most geneticists that you know? That you've seen articles from?
There are literally millions of people in China who live in close proximity to bats. You don't have to invoke the 1-in-a-million lab worker here (who will be much more careful than the other 999,999 people, anyways). There are literally people who go shovel bat poop out of caves for a living. Then there are all the millions of farmed animals that have contact with bats - this is how the original SARS got into people.
A lab worker getting infected in a cave and then going back to Wuhan is not the best theory. It's an extremely improbable explanation for the pandemic, when you realize just how much contact people and farmed animals have with bats.
But clearly enough for quite a number of people in scientific leadership positions to state publicly that any discussion of a lab leak is a conspiracy theory and to ridicule and censor anyone who thought so.
In fact, these scientific leaders were so good, and so on top of things, that they were able to do the research and examine the evidence, and come up with these strong unequivocal conclusions only a few weeks after covid started to spread worldwide (feb 2020)
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Damning evidence? Yes.
Can someone explain to me what the harm is in this practice?
I mean I can understand if there was an accidental lab leak of an engineered virus that killed millions was created in a Chinese lab with American tax dollars why those involved might want that information suppressed and to go away but why is it important to Klinky to take up that cause?
Have you spoken about your concerns with your congresspersons & asked them to support bans on risky gain-of-function research? That'd be something tangible you could do than just speculating on top of speculation.
Does it somehow bother your politics in some way? Are you just being a contrarian for contrary sake? Your desire for evidential purity in a situation where you are most likely not involved is really strange. I am just interested in why that is. What is motivating you here? Please articulate it.
Didn't discount or argue against using circumstantial evidence, nor did I argue against speculating. I am stating the evidence only supports the possibility, it does not prove it happened. Please stop making up false arguments.
>neither side of the debate has the definitive evidence
Agreed.
I read the comment to mean thatit was offered as a strong circumstantial evidence because it was indisputably true due to the public records that support it.
Every study I see leaning towards a lab leak origin conclusion tend to be pretty specific to use words like “likely” or “probable” because of the lack of definitive evidence. Circumstantial evidence can be powerful, especially when the other side does not have a set of similar or better circumstantial evidence in their favor.
They implied their confidence through the rhetorical use of "What are the chances?". That was not a genuine question.
> circumstantial evidence can still be provably true
Circumstantial evidence MUST be true to be usable.
The circumstantial evidence provided in the articles was:
- There was a denied research grant that was going to look into modifying the furin site of SARs viruses. It was denied though, and as far as we know, never done.
- The furin site was complex, but could've evolved naturally.
- Some scientists think it could have been of lab origin.
- Some scientists think it could have been zoonotic origin.
All of this is true, but it doesn't mean a lab leak is "probable" or "more than likely".
>Every study I see leaning towards a lab leak origin
So even the studies that lean towards the theory qualify that the evidence is not definitive. We're back where we started.
Definitive or Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: No
Probable or More Likely Than Not: No
A strong possibility: Yes
There is not a consensus on the origin of COVID-19 at this time.
US law already bans US funding of gain-of-function research.
No matter if it was lab leak or not, my problem with the Chinese government is the way they tried to handle it. Can help but draw parallels to the Chernobyl accident.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
I found all of this in about 10 minutes of googling and 15 minutes of reading. Which means I’m as qualified to weigh in on the subject as anyone else here now.
They aren't "very common" and check the sources on that paper. "10 minutes of googling" isn't enough to know if what you are reading is accurate, or if the authors had any conflicts of interest.
Here's the details on the furin cleavage site for Covid-19, which is most similar to MERS:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202000240
Many people who were directly involved in this research had very large conflicts of interest. Hence:
Read my link to the FOIA documents. There are many redacted, for "national security".
Why would they be redacted for US national security if this came from a natural animal origin? It should at least give you pause to think. Possibly because the US was funding it via NIH grants to EcoHealth Alliance, which puts everyone in quite the bind? 6+ million dead and finger pointing between global superpowers probably isn't the outcome they had in mind.
"In April 2020 correspondence with EcoHealth Alliance, NIH wrote that it "received reports that the Wuhan Institute of Virology ... has been conducting research at its facilities in China that pose serious bio-safety concerns."
Page 54.
Or this, where the NIH is requesting the location of a scientist who disappeared?
Page 235.
"The Wuhan institute sequenced the genome of the new virus in January after receiving patient samples. In addition to requiring EcoHealth Alliance provide a sample of the sequenced coronavirus, the NIH said in its letter that EcoHealth Alliance must “explain the apparent disappearance” of a scientist who worked in the Wuhan lab."
There are too many other pages (between all the pages of redactions) worth reading to mention them all.
Because US intelligence has an asset in the lab perhaps?
I've heard it said that intelligence briefings are often 90-95% what you can find in any newspaper (or website nowadays), but the last few percentage points use various 'assets and techniques' that the other side doesn't want to get out.
Often it's not about knowing the what of actions and events, but the why.
This is factual, because the grant proposals are out there and DARPA in the US turned them down:
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
Suddenly, we have a global pandemic featuring a bat coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that binds to human ACE-2 receptors, out of Wuhan, China, directly next to the lab where they were studying this.
What are the chances?
We know what they were studying because all of the grants, emails, and other information from NIH to EcoHealth Alliance have been acquired via the Freedom of Information Act:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23793974-tobias-v-hh...