Because a lab leak could imply that China had a direct, active role in cultivating or engineering the virus, as opposed to the “mere” disastrous negligence entailed by the wet market theory.

That this is someone's fault and they can be punished is, I think, the reason people want it to be true. Rather than the world is a terrifying place that sometimes kills millions.

Occam's razor in this situation is the people people claiming the lab leak theory is most likely are interested in the truth and feel that a lab leak is the most probable cause. It never made sense either way to see how the virus came into existence to be a political question.

Whether or not someone gets punished is largely irrelevant. It isn't like 1 billion people in China would have sat down and decided to violate lab safety protocols; there'd be some supervisor somewhere who made mistakes. What happens to such a hypothetical person is irrelevant in the scheme of the damage the virus caused.

It sure seemed like a lot of people wanted the other theory to be true also though didn't it? I think the biggest driver for the lab leak arguments is backlash.

Both theories would presumably have people that are culpable due to violating safety rules designed to prevent exactly what happened. But I suppose a lab screwing up is more embarrassing to China than a hick selling wild animals or whatever illegally.

Theoretically, a lab leak should be considered less embarrassing than a hick selling wild animals perfectly legally - wet markets that sell even wild animal meat are legal in China (and other places in the world) in spite of the known dangers of this practice. And people making a mistake while intentionally working with dangerous substances/organisms is also seen as more explicitly culpable than the more distributed blame of people allowing a known dangerous traditional practice to continue, wherein the participants are not aware that they are performing dangerous experiments.

But of course, there is considerable bias to view traditional practices like wet markets more favorably than modern practices like virology labs. So, in reality, the virus leaking from a virology lab would be found far more condemnable than the virus being contracted randomly at a wet market.

Failing to enforce basic health codes is not a random act of God, it's a failure to perform the minimum functions of a state. It's not a single individual's fault, true, but these wet markets are not some obscure corner shop that managed to dodge regulation, their existence would not be tolerated in any developed country.

The zoonotic theory has no evidence to support it whatsoever. It's the viral equivalent of the 'Magic Bullet.'

- No samples were ever found, nor were any sick animals, in the market where it supposedly started. Period. Nothing.

- No evidence of genetic mutations and variants leading up to crossover, no intermediary host ever found.

- It just happened to start infecting people in the city of a lab which had been doing extremely similar experiments AND had issues with releases before.

- WHO rushed the investigation, involved Chinese scientists in the investigation, and the Chinese government did not cooperate in any way, shape, or form - no samples, no lab data, nothing. It was just "trust us." And everyone dusted off their hands and said "well, no evidence. Done then!"

The world's governments pushed the "zoological crossover" theory because the only alternative would be...what? Accusing the world's largest source of manufactured goods of killing 8 million people? And what would we do, exactly?

Level economic sanctions against a country producing most of the world's stuff? That is by and large quite self sufficient, far more so than most nations?

The initial outbreak cases were clustered around the wet market, not around WIV, and the cases weren't linked to WIV. There was a documented lab leak with SARS-CoV-1 and it killed the affected researcher's mother. That'd the kind of thing you expect to see in a lab leak. Instead you see a cluster of cases that look exactly like it spilled over from the wet market.

And there's zero evidence to support the lab leak. All the research they were doing on live virus was based on SARS-CoV-1. You can't get SARS-CoV-2 out of that. And while they sequenced RaTG-13, there is no evidence they ever had live virus, and RaTG-13 is still around a thousand mutations and a few decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2.

The research on “clustering” in the market is extremely flimsy. It relies on government data sources and very small sample sizes.

> There was a documented lab leak with SARS-CoV-1 and it killed the affected researcher's mother. That'd the kind of thing you expect to see in a lab leak.

SARS-1 had a CFR of 11% over all ages, 55% for >65. That's about 10x as deadly as SARS-CoV-2. The situations are thus not comparable--with SARS-CoV-2, we'd expect much more cryptic spread before someone gets sick enough to seek medical attention, and illness much more easily misdiagnosed as flu.

There's also zero question that the WIV had unpublished viruses during the pandemic, since they just published 56 new sequences collected "between 2004 and 2021". So do you really think it's impossible that they actually had 57?

Sequences aren't live virus and don't require live virus.

The article I read indicated a number of researchers did become ill and die in the right timeframe, with the wet market they routinely visited following that.

The article that was written in the NYT by the same author that wrote the "yellow cake uranium in Niger" article that was the basis for the Iraq War.

I don't give that a lot of credit.

Pretty sure I read it on Vox, but it might have been a republishing of the same AP or Reuters source. It was a kind of retrospective of how problematic it is when someone so wrong about so many things is right about something.

You might want to check out the rootclaim debates or the preprint by Cilibrasi and Vitányi (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.22.216242v1....) with code - https://github.com/rudi-cilibrasi/ncd-covid

Right. It fits well with the Anglosphere’s concept of compensible negligence.

China had a duty to run the lab safely, it breached that duty, and so China is responsible for the harms and losses caused by its negligence.

Missouri actually filed suit against China, and it is set to go to trial next week. It will be interesting to watch. If Missouri were to get a judgement for all the costs created by the virus, it could theoretically collect Chinese-owned assets in the US.

And, the news has been full of stories about one particular Chinese asset the US would like to have held in the US: TikTok.

What I don't really get is why that concept doesn't apply to both the wet market and the lab leak scenarios.

Think about it this way: if a French tourist gets a severe toxinfection while eating in a seedy restaurant in some corner of the USA, would the French state, or even the family of the person, sue the US government for failing to enforce health codes / not having good enough health codes? Would you seriously imagine that trial happening and being successful?

Conversely, say the same person got equally badly sick while visiting a friend who works in a US government lab that researches and deals with live viruses. Wouldn't you feel the US government has a higher chance of losing a suit on this?

Most people grasp the reasonableness standard for running a disease lab: you were negligent if the diseases break containment, because lab standards should be in place to prevent that obvious risk.

Under the wet market scenario, it's not instinctively clear to me what was unreasonable about the practices of the vendors at the market. Does selling bats more likely than not result in spreading disease? Or selling bats in proximity to pangolins? It seems like the vendors were doing the same thing vendors have done for millennia, not doing something unusually or obviously substandard.

If it could be blamed on "China", it could as well be blamed on "the US" for having also funded that lab, and likely having been responsible for what security measures it would have.

And more realistically, if it was a lab leak, it was likely some lab technician being careless, or some thing breaking and whoever was responsible, not fixing it quickly enough.

Except for the part they left out which is that the lab was being funded by the US government and its GoF research directed by a US nonprofit entity with strong ties to the NIH.

Or less nefarious: that they mishandled an extracted virus /someone got bitten by a bat in the lab and was allowed to leave without quarantine.

No it wouldn't imply that at all. The same animals ending up in wet markets could have ended up in labs. Nothing to imply it was engineered, which is a whole other level of culpability. Sucks that so many people are itching to make this leap.

> lab leak could imply that China had a direct, active role in cultivating or engineering the virus, as opposed to the “mere” disastrous negligence entailed by the wet market theory

This was literally outsourced US DoD research...

The lab in question is BSL-2* while viruses like this are supposed to be researched in BSL-3*. If it was a lab leak, they were using insufficient safety protocols to keep the virus contained. It also implies they're probably still doing the same for much worse viruses.

*I think these were the levels, I'm going from memory.

There are two campuses in Wuhan. One has BSL-3 facilities, the other BSL-4. Not all work is done at the highest BSL available for cost and practicality reasons though. American rules were that research on agents in the same classification as COVID is BSL-3, but routine diagnostic work is only BSL-2. Chinese researchers classified both at BSL-2.

I wrote this awhile ago on a previous thread about this:

To my mind, there are a few reasons why people are so fixated on the lab leak thing

1) It makes the pandemic deterministic (bad lab security means an outbreak) instead of stochastic (wildlife spillover). That is, to be frank, even as an epidemiologist who is very skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis, a comforting thought.

2) It's a popular topic in the Substack/Medium set, because it moves the pandemic back into their wheelhouse of expertise, international relations, policy, etc. It becomes a human problem with human solutions.

3) It appeals to the contrarian mindset.

4) All of the lab leak papers at least attempt to show definitive proof. In contrast, actually finding the source of spillover events is the work of decades (and isn't always or even often successful). "Science is slow and uncertain" is a less compelling narrative.

There's a greater burden of proof for spillover when there just happens to be a lab doing virus research near the epicenter of the outbreak.

There have been two other spillover events from coronaviruses in the last 30 years. One of those (SARS) was from Chinese wet markets.

Wuhan has a population of 13 million. It would be surprising if the city didn't have a lab doing virus research.

The WIV had the single largest collection of novel sarbecoviruses in the world. There's zero question that the UNC and WIV wished to engineer those sarbecoviruses to produce an enhanced virus broadly similar to SARS-CoV-2, in their unfunded DEFUSE proposal. An unconfirmed intelligence leak further claims that work was actually performed, at the WIV only.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/inside-wuhan-lab-covid-p...

Lots of cities have "a lab doing virus research". There's no reason to shift to that broader category except willful obfuscation, though.

As to prior spillovers, proximal hosts have been identified for those other two coronaviruses (SARS-1 and MERS), for both within a ~year of emergence. For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting.

> There's no reason to shift to that broader category except willful obfuscation

It's to point out the earlier argument that the mere presence of a virology lab in a large city should be a point of suspicion.

> An unconfirmed intelligence leak further claims that work was actually performed

And how much should we trust unconfirmed intelligence leaks?

> For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting.

Part of what's different here is that the entire world shut down, and the trail went cold.

I understand the desire to blame someone, but the features of the virus are all things that have evolved in naturally in other coronaviruses. The amount of mixing that happens in a single human body in a lingering infection dwarfs what labs do in a year.

Even the most "suspicious" thing about the virus, the furin cleavage site, seems to be something with a natural evolutionary path: https://bmcgenomdata.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...

> It's to point out the earlier argument that the mere presence of a virology lab in a large city should be a point of suspicion.

But we know it's not just "a virology lab", which indeed is not uncommon. It's the world's largest collection of related viruses, and one of only two sites in the world (with UNC) known to have proposed to enhance a sarbecovirus by genetic engineering. That's a much narrower thing.

The comment that you responded to used carelessly broad language, but I did not. So why have you reverted to that?

> Even the most "suspicious" thing about the virus, the furin cleavage site, seems to be something with a natural evolutionary path:

That's one researcher's unfalsifiable speculation, and the unusual coding has also been proposed as evidence of genetic engineering. I think the ability of genomic evidence to resolve that question of origin has been generally overstated by both sides. After DEFUSE it's certainly not evidence against lab origin, though.

The reality is that we don't know. The CIA's updated position is "lab" with "low confidence", and both parts of that seem correct to me. Public opinion has swung further towards lab origin than I would; but after years of smearing anyone who entertained that possibility as a conspiracy theorist and banning their social media accounts, it's no surprise to see a backlash.

Almost all origin theories "blame someone", since the usual alternative to lab origin is trafficking of wildlife known (from SARS-1) to present high risk. So I don't think that bit of amateur psychoanalysis explains much.

There are 42 BSL-4 facilities in the world. I'm too lazy to do the math, but I'm curious what percent of the world's population is near one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#List_of_BSL-4_...

One of these BSL4 had major incident on Sep 16 2019, just before start of epidemic.

If the work on coronaviruses that WIV was doing was at BSL-4, I'd be more skeptical of a lab leak origin. It was being done at BSL-2; see Ralph Baric's testimony covered in this Vanity Fair article:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-...

Even in the wildlife spillover case don't you still blame it on people doing business with bat carcasses or was there some kind of obviously fine as an animal product intermediary between the bats and the people?

Edit: name checks out.

>It makes the pandemic deterministic

I don't understand why determinism comforts you, but you do you. Unfortunately, a lab leak is totally stochastic, and I hope this revelation doesn't keep you up at night.

>It's a popular topic ... because it moves the pandemic back into ... policy, etc. It becomes a human problem with human solutions.

Zoonosis is a wet market hypothesis, not a random encounter. China failed, and continues to fail, to ban or regulate the wet markets to solve the problem. Zoonosis is clearly policy and human problem.

>It appeals to the contrarian mindset.

The lab leak appeals to anyone who groks statistics. Wet market zoonosis could happen at any one of 40,000 Chinese wet markets. But a lab leak could only happen at one of ~2 Chinese laboratories. Zoonosis happens more overall, but lab leaks are more probable in the direct vicinity of the lab specializing in collecting and studying samples of this exact family of viruses.

>finding the source of spillover events is the work of decades

The reservoirs for both SARS and MERS were found quickly with much less interest. The probability of the lab leak increases every day that we don't the reservoir. Worse, at this point even finding a reservoir isn't definitive, because we would need to establish that the reservoir predates the pandemic, and that it didn't spillover into the animal population from humans.

Given all publicly available information, the lab leak is far more likely. The uncertainty is very high, because China destroyed or concealed the data. Unless someone's memoirs leak it in 50 years, it's unlikely that we'll ever know.

That's one way to look at it. Another is that a lab leak makes the government seem much more culpable, since they would presumably have more direct control over the activities of government funded scientists. In any case, I think world governments have been reluctant to endorse theories that place more blame on the Chinese government for fear of forcing them into a defensive posture and risking a larger confrontation. But there are also those who desire such a confrontation. That makes it hard to trust the motives that any given party might have for promoting one theory or another.

At the end of the day, all that any sane person should care about is preventing another similar pandemic.

It may be true that other states don't want to antagonize them, and that may also be why we don't see enough emphasis placed on how absurd it is that China has allowed these wet markets to exist so long. Imposing a basic set of health codes is a very fundamental task of any government, and their inability or unwillingness to do so does not reflect well on them.

If anything, one reason why the China hawks may prefer the lab leak theory is because it makes China look more threatening than the alternative: the we-couldn't-enforce-basic-health-codes version of the story doesn't mesh well with the image we have in the West of the CCP as an all-powerful Big Brother that has complete control over every aspect of their citizens' lives. It instead projects a CCP that can barely perform the minimum functions of a state, which is harder to be afraid of.

Same reason Senators claimed American blood was spilled on American soil in ~1835 in the Mexican state of Tejas, which we now call Texas. Notably, Abraham Lincoln demanded proof, but the senate was too happy to see manifest destiny come about even on lies. Fast forward ~200 years and you're starting to hear the same things.

Lax health codes mean the virus came about through sheer (bad) luck, by a bunch of "dumb hicks". The US doesn't have to do anything to compete with a bunch of yokels with bad hygiene. We have those in the US too. But if it came from a lab, using advanced technology that the west doesn't have, China goes from being more than where shitty knockoffs come from, to a much scarier boogieman that requires us to give more money to the military-industrial complex.

Yeah, I think this hits closer to home: the zoonotic origins story makes the Chinese government look incompetent. They actually are much less competent than Western popular culture likes to paint them, but emphasizing that doesn't provide a very effective external threat to rally the masses against.

A lab leak plays into the stereotypical German or Russian mad scientist trope of the 20th century: the incredibly powerful supervillain who in their hubris (nearly) destroys the world.

"Can someone help me understand why a lab leak looks worse for China than zoonotic spillover?"

I'm sorry but we can't this is something you need to figure out on your own. Just think about it for a couple of minutes I'll sure it will be evident.

Here's a couple of hints: what's the difference between negligence and malice?

What is a bioweapon?

Even if there's no malicious intent, assuming only scientific or productive purposes, risk there's responsibility, liability that doesn't occur in natural zoonotic scenarios. See chernobyl.

It's the difference between an act of omission and comission, in one the government and people would be responsible for not hav8ng sanitation, in the other for actively playing with fire. see the trolley problem

Why don't you just answer the question? A lab leak makes China look incompetent.

It means sick animals infecting lab staff. It doesn't make it look malicious, it doesn't mean engineered bioweaponry, actively playing with fire or any other unsupported conspiracy nonsense.

>Just think about it

This always proceeds a cogent point.

>what's the difference between negligence and malice?

Wrong, these are both theories of Chinese negligence. Did you mean the difference in culpability for positive and negative action? The lab leak is negative action by the Chinese government, and positive action by some subset of the Chinese citizenry. Zoonosis is positive action by the Chinese government. China (government U citizenry) are 100% culpable either way.

Malice only appears in fringe theories about intentional release, which isn't a lab leak by definition.

I don't think it's an attack on China. It's a political attack on Fauci, who became public enemy #1 for conservatives early in the pandemic. They've been looking for reasons to blame him (oh, who just incidentally helped protect those dirty gay people during the AIDS crisis), and now our President has stripped him of security detail and announced he wouldn't feel responsible if something bad happened to him.

Lab leaks admit the possibility that China was developing a bioweapon. If you're a Chinahawk, this is something you'd be concerned about.

It's the difference between burning down the house because you were playing with fire indoors vs burning down the house because some cheaply bought electric appliance malfunctioned.