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Agreed, there's basically no current evidence to suggest it was engineered, and plenty of evidence to suggest it was zoonotic and evolved naturally. One possibi

Agreed, there's basically no current evidence to suggest it was engineered, and plenty of evidence to suggest it was zoonotic and evolved naturally. One possibility that can't be totally ruled out is that maybe this was one of many viruses collected from local animals which their virology lab had stored for current or future study, and some kind of mistake led to it escaping, perhaps through an employee unknowingly getting infected or taking home something with a contaminated surface. edit: Rewrote everything below here to make my probability beliefs more clear. I think it's extremely likely to be zoonotic and not spread by anyone intentionally. As for the chance it was an unintentional lab escape, it's difficult to assess what the probability of that may be. I don't think you can just simply assume "virology lab in proximity = likely source of outbreak" without looking at a lot of other factors. Wuhan is a massive city and economic hub, a lot bigger than NYC and the surrounding area. From what I've heard, there's basically every kind of facility and institute one could imagine there. It could be a coincidence that the lab was there due to the size, density, and economic importance of the area. Or maybe the lab could've been established there because they knew the area was biologically diverse and close to many species of animals carrying viruses which could jump to humans, and that such animals were commonly hunted and sold for food there. If that's true, then it would be a confounding variable, and one would expect outbreaks to be more likely to occur near the lab regardless of whether they originated in the lab. There appear to be other potentially credible pieces of evidence which may support the lab escape hypothesis, but I think the whole case needs to be analyzed very robustly and carefully, with all of the possible priors and evidence taken into account.

StandardFuture 7y ago
> I think it is overwhelmingly likely Why are you so sure it is overwhelmingly likely? > I think it's probably just a coincidence that there's a virology lab there Only because you believe it to be purely coincidental of a virology lab being next to the outbreak source location? I am entirely up for accepting this viewpoint. But, the lack of evidence to suggest an actual source location coupled with the (CCP sourced and pushed narrative of) "overwhelming evidence" that raw bat consumption at the market started it leads me to lean towards a more logical conclusion of a simple lab escape. Am I being illogical in thinking that a pathogen escape from a virology lab (built in 2017, btw) in the same locale is more likely than a random zoonotic transfer of raw bat consumption (a practice likely being done at the same market for a considerable more amount of time)? EDIT: change "less likely" to "more likely"
- CreRecombinase 7y ago
  I don't know about illogical, but I think your intuition that zoonotic transfer is unlikely because it hasn't happened in the recent past is not a good one.
  - StandardFuture 7y ago
    But here is the crux of the matter. Is it possible that zoonotic transfer through consumption of bats caused this? Yes. Is it possible that zoonotic transfer via handling of bats inside the virology lab caused this? Yes. I am not sure why it is so necessary to be so adamant about vigorously dismissing the latter as a possibility.
  - andromeduck 7y ago
    Most bat consumption in China happens in the South, along with the population in general. The odds of a zoonotic event occuring in Wuhan of all places and within a block of one of the few labs known to have been activity hunting for a virus just like this is too much of a coincidence.
leetcrew 7y ago
I don't see any evidence to suggest the virus was engineered or released deliberately. why would you deliberately release a bioweapon in a densely populated part of your own country? doesn't make sense. the lab in wuhan is not just any virology lab though; it's one of only two biosafety level 4 labs in all of china and samples of similar coronaviruses are held and studied there. it may very well be a coincidence; improbable things happen all the time in a world of ~8 billion people. it would be a pretty big one though.
- meowface 7y ago
  There are still lots of other confounding variables there that you need to factor into the probability. Maybe I shouldn't say overwhelmingly likely for all of those possibilities - a lab escape isn't that unlikely. But there's no evidence of that. If it's true, we indeed may never discover any evidence, but evidence is still required to actually make the claim. As it is now, it's only worthy of speculation. edit: I edited my original post to make my beliefs more clear.
- endtime 7y ago
  So I'm definitely not advocating the lab theory overall, and even if it did come from a lab it could have escaped rather than been deliberately released...but to answer your question, China does/did have problems with A) an aging population, B) a male heavy population, and C) Hong Kong streets full of protesters. This virus "helps" with all of those.
  - sv9 7y ago
    Bioweapons are crappy precisely because of what's happening now. A good weapon discriminates, and lets you kill exactly who you want. By that measure, a virus is about as hamfisted as you can get. Besides, why unleash a pandemic on the whole world when you can just do what China normally does and use conventional military power instead? It's cheaper and easier to get some men in boots with guns to stop a protest than it is to unleash a worldwide pandemic that might last for years or longer.
    - 7y ago
rpiguy 7y ago
Dr Shi Zhengli was working on bat Coronavirus research in the US and we closed the program down in the US in 2014 for being too dangerous. She returned to China to continue her research in Wuhan. Yeah. Just a coincidence.
- MustComment 7y ago
  Let's talk coincidences, then: 1) "Wuhan is a huge city" That is true, but there are eight other more populous cities in China.Source: Wikipedia 2) "maybe the lab was created there and bats were studied there in the first place because the general area was known to already have virus-carrying animals like bats" Not really, the southern provinces of China are much more prone to these outbreaks. Shi Zenghli herself said "“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo... 3) "maybe the lab was created there and bats were studied there in the first place because the general area was known to already have virus-carrying animals like bats?!" I'm afraid not. The bats used in her experiences were mainly from Yunnan province, over 1000kms away from Wuhan (check the same source). 4) "A lab escape is totally plausible and wouldn't be shocking, but it needs strong arguments, analysis, and evidence."Just read the papers authored by Shi Zenghli, they are all available online. Start at this one: Pre-print [ https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.22.914952v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.22.914952v1 ]: "We then found a short RdRp region from a bat coronavirus termed BatCoV RaTG13 which we previously detected in Rhinolophus affinis from Yunnan Province showed high sequence identity to nCoV-2019. We did full-length sequencing to this RNA sample. Simplot analysis showed that nCoV-2019 was highly similar throughout the genome to RaTG13 (Fig. 1c), with 96.2% overall genome sequence identity." Then, pay a visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology website: "(...) is equipped with a general office, scientific research planning office, organization & personnel department, finance department, graduate student office , with five functional management departments, logistics support center, network information center, public technical service center (including analysis and testing center, experimental animal center, BSL -3 laboratory, isotope room, etc.), Virologica Sinica (English version), Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Virology and other support departments." SARS-CoV-2 very likely had a laboratorial origin, not from cell cultures, but from the interaction between bats and their lab animal technicians. Considering how easily viruses mutate and recombine to acquire new genes, the RaTG13 coronavirus is very plausibly the origin of SARS-CoV-2, for instance in one or several of these circumstances: a) Transmission chains in research animal facilities involving different species animals, including - but not necessarily restricted to - bats; b) Bidirectional transmission chains between lab animals and their handlers; c) Transmission of the RaTG13 coronavirus from a lab animal to a susceptible handler, with subsequent mutation and transmission chains within humans. And this was certainly what Wuhan virologist Shi Zheng-Li, China's foremost coronavirus expert, was thinking when she candidly aknowledged to Scientific American's Jane Qiu, ' "If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?” '. 5) "You're accusing a specific person of involvement in a major pandemic with evidence you admit is flimsy at best" Actually, this possibility was first raised by two Chinese authors, in February 2020, who uploaded an article titled "The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus" in ResearchGate. The paper was never published, and is no longer accessible in that platform, but can still be found online. On the other hand, I believe this was an accidental event derived from negligent lab practices, rather than a deliberate action by someone.
Noumenon72 7y ago
It's not at all a coincidence that there's a lab there. George W. Bush started an anti-pandemic project called PREDICT whose purpose was to collect specimens from bats and other mammals to identify ones that could transfer from bats to humans[1]. They trained and supported the lab in Wuhan. To me if you're looking for zoonotic transfer, one of the most likely places to look is someplace that's actively out there collecting viruses that are zoonotically transferrable. I still think the program would have been worthwhile even if it did leak the coronavirus. If China thinks the same, I can see why they would try to prevent a backlash against studying viruses. [1]: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-04-02/coronavirus-trump-pandemic-program-viruses-detection?referringSource=articleShare https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-04-02/coronavirus...
dlubarov 7y ago
> Wuhan is a massive city and economic hub Let's dig into this a bit more though. The WIV's location on Google Maps apparently changed after the incident [1]. I don't know if it was a legitimate correction or what, but for the sake of argument let's suppose that the old location was correct. Then the lab is 8.6 miles from the wet market, or ~14 km. It looks like the population density in that area is around 10,000 people per km^2, so there are around 400k people in a 14km radius, or about 1/3,000 of China's population. If we assume P(virus from WIV) = 0.01 P(outbreak in 14km radius | virus from WIV) = 1 P(outbreak in 14km radius | virus not from WIV) = 1/3,000 Then Bayes' rule gives P(virus from WIV | outbreak in 14km radius) ~= 97%. Even if we reduce our prior to 0.001 (0.1%), the result is still ~75%. So while I have no idea if the virus was a random mutation or what, I strongly suspect that it's somehow connected to the WIV. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/exdvt6/google_maps_moved_the_wuhan_institute_of_virology/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/exdvt6/google_...
- roenxi 7y ago
  You can apply the same logic to a specific license plate number seen near a murder meaning that the car's owner was almost surely the murderer. That isn't a high enough standard of evidence as any specific event is unlikely in hindsight. A pandemic was likely to start somewhere densely populated and first be detected in a city centre. Somewhere densely populated was likely to have a specialised biological research lab. That it was BSL4 instead of BSL3 is evidence but it isn't particularly compelling. More to the point; it doesn't really make much of a difference whether it came from a Chinese lab or not. Horrible pandemics have happened before and will happen again.
  - dlubarov 7y ago
    In the murder scenario, we would have something like P(individual is guilty) = 1 / 7 billion P(individual's car on same block | individual is guilty) = 1 P(individual's car on same block | individual is innocent) = 50 / 7 billion P(individual is guilty | individual's car on same block) = 1 / 50 (from Bayes' rule) You might disagree with the priors, but I'm pretty sure the argument is sound.

StandardFuture 7y ago

> I think it is overwhelmingly likely Why are you so sure it is overwhelmingly likely? > I think it's probably just a coincidence that there's a virology lab there Only because you believe it to be purely coincidental of a virology lab being next to the outbreak source location? I am entirely up for accepting this viewpoint. But, the lack of evidence to suggest an actual source location coupled with the (CCP sourced and pushed narrative of) "overwhelming evidence" that raw bat consumption at the market started it leads me to lean towards a more logical conclusion of a simple lab escape. Am I being illogical in thinking that a pathogen escape from a virology lab (built in 2017, btw) in the same locale is more likely than a random zoonotic transfer of raw bat consumption (a practice likely being done at the same market for a considerable more amount of time)? EDIT: change "less likely" to "more likely"

CreRecombinase 7y ago
I don't know about illogical, but I think your intuition that zoonotic transfer is unlikely because it hasn't happened in the recent past is not a good one.
- StandardFuture 7y ago
  But here is the crux of the matter. Is it possible that zoonotic transfer through consumption of bats caused this? Yes. Is it possible that zoonotic transfer via handling of bats inside the virology lab caused this? Yes. I am not sure why it is so necessary to be so adamant about vigorously dismissing the latter as a possibility.
- andromeduck 7y ago
  Most bat consumption in China happens in the South, along with the population in general. The odds of a zoonotic event occuring in Wuhan of all places and within a block of one of the few labs known to have been activity hunting for a virus just like this is too much of a coincidence.

leetcrew 7y ago

I don't see any evidence to suggest the virus was engineered or released deliberately. why would you deliberately release a bioweapon in a densely populated part of your own country? doesn't make sense. the lab in wuhan is not just any virology lab though; it's one of only two biosafety level 4 labs in all of china and samples of similar coronaviruses are held and studied there. it may very well be a coincidence; improbable things happen all the time in a world of ~8 billion people. it would be a pretty big one though.

meowface 7y ago
There are still lots of other confounding variables there that you need to factor into the probability. Maybe I shouldn't say overwhelmingly likely for all of those possibilities - a lab escape isn't that unlikely. But there's no evidence of that. If it's true, we indeed may never discover any evidence, but evidence is still required to actually make the claim. As it is now, it's only worthy of speculation. edit: I edited my original post to make my beliefs more clear.
endtime 7y ago
So I'm definitely not advocating the lab theory overall, and even if it did come from a lab it could have escaped rather than been deliberately released...but to answer your question, China does/did have problems with A) an aging population, B) a male heavy population, and C) Hong Kong streets full of protesters. This virus "helps" with all of those.
- sv9 7y ago
  Bioweapons are crappy precisely because of what's happening now. A good weapon discriminates, and lets you kill exactly who you want. By that measure, a virus is about as hamfisted as you can get. Besides, why unleash a pandemic on the whole world when you can just do what China normally does and use conventional military power instead? It's cheaper and easier to get some men in boots with guns to stop a protest than it is to unleash a worldwide pandemic that might last for years or longer.
  - 7y ago

rpiguy 7y ago

Dr Shi Zhengli was working on bat Coronavirus research in the US and we closed the program down in the US in 2014 for being too dangerous. She returned to China to continue her research in Wuhan. Yeah. Just a coincidence.

MustComment 7y ago
Let's talk coincidences, then: 1) "Wuhan is a huge city" That is true, but there are eight other more populous cities in China.Source: Wikipedia 2) "maybe the lab was created there and bats were studied there in the first place because the general area was known to already have virus-carrying animals like bats" Not really, the southern provinces of China are much more prone to these outbreaks. Shi Zenghli herself said "“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo... 3) "maybe the lab was created there and bats were studied there in the first place because the general area was known to already have virus-carrying animals like bats?!" I'm afraid not. The bats used in her experiences were mainly from Yunnan province, over 1000kms away from Wuhan (check the same source). 4) "A lab escape is totally plausible and wouldn't be shocking, but it needs strong arguments, analysis, and evidence."Just read the papers authored by Shi Zenghli, they are all available online. Start at this one: Pre-print [ https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.22.914952v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.22.914952v1 ]: "We then found a short RdRp region from a bat coronavirus termed BatCoV RaTG13 which we previously detected in Rhinolophus affinis from Yunnan Province showed high sequence identity to nCoV-2019. We did full-length sequencing to this RNA sample. Simplot analysis showed that nCoV-2019 was highly similar throughout the genome to RaTG13 (Fig. 1c), with 96.2% overall genome sequence identity." Then, pay a visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology website: "(...) is equipped with a general office, scientific research planning office, organization & personnel department, finance department, graduate student office , with five functional management departments, logistics support center, network information center, public technical service center (including analysis and testing center, experimental animal center, BSL -3 laboratory, isotope room, etc.), Virologica Sinica (English version), Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Virology and other support departments." SARS-CoV-2 very likely had a laboratorial origin, not from cell cultures, but from the interaction between bats and their lab animal technicians. Considering how easily viruses mutate and recombine to acquire new genes, the RaTG13 coronavirus is very plausibly the origin of SARS-CoV-2, for instance in one or several of these circumstances: a) Transmission chains in research animal facilities involving different species animals, including - but not necessarily restricted to - bats; b) Bidirectional transmission chains between lab animals and their handlers; c) Transmission of the RaTG13 coronavirus from a lab animal to a susceptible handler, with subsequent mutation and transmission chains within humans. And this was certainly what Wuhan virologist Shi Zheng-Li, China's foremost coronavirus expert, was thinking when she candidly aknowledged to Scientific American's Jane Qiu, ' "If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?” '. 5) "You're accusing a specific person of involvement in a major pandemic with evidence you admit is flimsy at best" Actually, this possibility was first raised by two Chinese authors, in February 2020, who uploaded an article titled "The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus" in ResearchGate. The paper was never published, and is no longer accessible in that platform, but can still be found online. On the other hand, I believe this was an accidental event derived from negligent lab practices, rather than a deliberate action by someone.

Noumenon72 7y ago

It's not at all a coincidence that there's a lab there. George W. Bush started an anti-pandemic project called PREDICT whose purpose was to collect specimens from bats and other mammals to identify ones that could transfer from bats to humans[1]. They trained and supported the lab in Wuhan. To me if you're looking for zoonotic transfer, one of the most likely places to look is someplace that's actively out there collecting viruses that are zoonotically transferrable. I still think the program would have been worthwhile even if it did leak the coronavirus. If China thinks the same, I can see why they would try to prevent a backlash against studying viruses. [1]: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-04-02/coronavirus-trump-pandemic-program-viruses-detection?referringSource=articleShare https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-04-02/coronavirus...

dlubarov 7y ago

> Wuhan is a massive city and economic hub Let's dig into this a bit more though. The WIV's location on Google Maps apparently changed after the incident [1]. I don't know if it was a legitimate correction or what, but for the sake of argument let's suppose that the old location was correct. Then the lab is 8.6 miles from the wet market, or ~14 km. It looks like the population density in that area is around 10,000 people per km^2, so there are around 400k people in a 14km radius, or about 1/3,000 of China's population. If we assume P(virus from WIV) = 0.01 P(outbreak in 14km radius | virus from WIV) = 1 P(outbreak in 14km radius | virus not from WIV) = 1/3,000 Then Bayes' rule gives P(virus from WIV | outbreak in 14km radius) ~= 97%. Even if we reduce our prior to 0.001 (0.1%), the result is still ~75%. So while I have no idea if the virus was a random mutation or what, I strongly suspect that it's somehow connected to the WIV. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/exdvt6/google_maps_moved_the_wuhan_institute_of_virology/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/exdvt6/google_...

roenxi 7y ago
You can apply the same logic to a specific license plate number seen near a murder meaning that the car's owner was almost surely the murderer. That isn't a high enough standard of evidence as any specific event is unlikely in hindsight. A pandemic was likely to start somewhere densely populated and first be detected in a city centre. Somewhere densely populated was likely to have a specialised biological research lab. That it was BSL4 instead of BSL3 is evidence but it isn't particularly compelling. More to the point; it doesn't really make much of a difference whether it came from a Chinese lab or not. Horrible pandemics have happened before and will happen again.
- dlubarov 7y ago
  In the murder scenario, we would have something like P(individual is guilty) = 1 / 7 billion P(individual's car on same block | individual is guilty) = 1 P(individual's car on same block | individual is innocent) = 50 / 7 billion P(individual is guilty | individual's car on same block) = 1 / 50 (from Bayes' rule) You might disagree with the priors, but I'm pretty sure the argument is sound.