15 ms·

Here's the Cliff Notes version of the argument in this paper: 1. SARS-CoV-2 has a number of unique and unusual genetic features, when compared to close relativ

Here's the Cliff Notes version of the argument in this paper: 1. SARS-CoV-2 has a number of unique and unusual genetic features, when compared to close relatives, many of which explain its high virulence and infectivity among humans. 2. A series of research papers published by a group of virologists, dating back a little over a decade, demonstrate (1) a progressively increasing understanding of viral features which make coronaviruses more infectious and virulent in humans, and (2) laboratory capabilities for successfully creating chimeric viruses (e.g. moving one specific protein sequence from a bat SARS-like virus to human SARS virus) to test their hypotheses. 3. Each of the unique and unusual features of SARS-CoV-2 appears somewhere in this line of research. 4. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city where the outbreak began, were intimately involved this line of research. Taken together, the publicly-available evidence indicates that a select group of virologists had the domain knowledge and laboratory capabilities to create chimeric viruses which possess each of the unusual features of SARS-CoV-2, and that select group of virologists was concentrated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology located at ground zero for the pandemic. The authors feel that, in light of this preponderance of circumstantial evidence, the hypothesis that the biogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 involved human intervention should be seen as the leading (i.e. most likely) explanation. They do not make any statement about how the virus first infected a live human and spread into a pandemic, but conditioned on their biogenesis hypothesis being true, one would then assume an accidental lab release from WIV as the most likely explanation.

calf 6y ago
I feel step 4. is just a more specific detail of step 2, and the critical tricky piece of their argument is step 3 because that's the step that synthesizes steps 1 and 2. I imagine that the rebuttals would try to show that step 1 or 3 do not hold.
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  Right, in the conclusion they refer to "means, timing, agent and place" which seems to frame this like one would prosecute a criminal trial in the absence of "smoking gun" physical evidence. If the researchers at the heart of all this were located far from the epicenter of the outbreak, then you'd need to find a good explanation for why it started where it did, which is why I think it should be mentioned as a distinct point of evidence.
  - calf 6y ago
    Ah okay it's like the difference between a forensic argument vs a scientific argument.
    - Taniwha 6y ago
      I think it's more people taking what a court calls 'evidence' and declaring it 'scientific evidence' - sure they both use that same word 'evidence' but they are quite different things and shouldn't be mixed
    - jkhdigital 6y ago
      No, that’s a misleading comparison. There is no such thing as a “scientific argument” about matters of historical record, because you cannot conduct science on history. Forensics is all there is. It’s just that there is no piece of evidence that incontrovertibly ties the virus to the lab prior to the outbreak, e.g. a leaked research document dated prior to the outbreak showing knowledge of the virus or something.
sandworm101 6y ago
Or, and this is a really crazy theory, they were studying it in China because it was a local virus that they were worried might one day infect humans. Maybe they were studying which changes would make it most dangerous because they wanted to be ready if those changes happened naturally. Honest hard work can sometimes look like evil plans, and not every coincidence is the result of conspiracy.
- markdown 6y ago
  > they were studying it in China because it was a local virus that they were worried might one day infect humans. Maybe they were studying which changes would make it most dangerous because they wanted to be ready if those changes happened naturally. The person you're responding to didn't say anything different to what you've said. > Honest hard work can sometimes look like evil plans, and not every coincidence is the result of conspiracy. Why did you say that? It certainly isn't stated or even implied by the person you're replying to.
  - matthewdgreen 6y ago
    The person he/she/they is responding to may not have originated the thought, but the quote this poster is responding to is very clear from context. It reads as follows: “The authors feel that, in light of this preponderance of circumstantial evidence, the hypothesis that the biogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 involved human intervention should be seen as the leading (i.e. most likely) explanation.”
    - bitcurious 6y ago
      Which is not an accusation of research done in bad faith. The linked paper referenced 4 others as evidence. It doesn't say that those 4 were somehow done for evil - just that they were done.
- stx 6y ago
  I actually believe this to be the case. From what I have read researchers often do something called gain of function research. In this research they add genetic features to viruses that could make it more infective. This is done, at least in part, to help learn how to protect society from such a virus if it were to evolve naturally. I thought I heard somewhere that one of the functions coronavirus has that its closest known relatives do not have just happens to be something that virologists frequently add. All this leads me to believe it was created in a lab. Likely for altruistic purposes but still. When this escaped whoever knew that it was from a lab should have disclosed it ASAP to help the world prepare. I have no experience in virology so don't trust me.
pmayrgundter 6y ago
Good summary, thanks! Related to the origin hypotheses, the hypothesis of zoonotic outbreak from a wet market in mid-Dec no longer seems as relevant. It was first laid out in a widely disseminated paper in The Lancet [1, see Figure 1B], but since then retrospective wastewater analyses from Italy[2], Spain[3], Brazil and others[4] have found it was circulating much earlier. "The Italian National Institute of Health looked at 40 sewage samples collected from wastewater treatment plants in northern Italy between October 2019 and February 2020. An analysis released on Thursday said samples taken in Milan and Turin on Dec. 18 showed the presence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus." [2] and "Most COVID-19 cases show mild influenza-like symptoms (14) and it has been suggested that some uncharacterized influenza cases may have masked COVID-19 cases in the 2019-2020 season (11). This possibility prompted us to analyze some archival WWTP samples from January 2018 to December 2019 (Figure 2). All samples came out to be negative for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 genomes with the exception of March 12, 2019, in which both IP2 and IP4 target assays were positive. This striking finding indicates circulation of the virus in Barcelona long before the report of any COVID-19 case worldwide." [3] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7159299/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7159299/ [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-sewage/italy-sewage-study-suggests-covid-19-was-there-in-december-2019-idUSKBN23Q1J9 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-... [3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v1.full.pdf+html https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v... [4] https://twitter.com/LMeigre/status/1282819131390210050 https://twitter.com/LMeigre/status/1282819131390210050
- FabHK 6y ago
  I think the “hypothesis of zoonotic outbreak from a wet market in mid-Dec” is still very relevant, and the few papers claiming to have evidence of SARS-CoV-2 prior to Dec 2019 outside China are still very questionable. It’s not like they tested old samples in a few places and the virus promptly showed up. Rather, lots of old samples were tested all over the place, and the virus almost never showed up, except in a very few instances that night more parsimoniously be explained with false positives.
  - hakfoo 6y ago
chris_wot 6y ago
That’s a heck of a lot of steps to get to that conclusion. There is a massive amount of misinformation around COVID-19. Check out this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation_related_to_the_... All the things that the article posits have been looked into and the conclusion from most of the scientific community is that it is extraordinarily unlikely that this came from a lab in Wuhan.
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  > the conclusion from most of the scientific community Who is this "scientific community" that you speak of, anyway? Modern science is conducted through published research papers. I read papers and decide for myself which arguments to believe. Do I understand everything? No, of course not, but I learn a helluva lot more than if I trust what a secondary source tells me about scientific research and leave it at that. You only have to read a few papers to realize that what is reported in the media is often radically different than what the authors actually claim in a paper. But really, this is tackled head-on in the paper itself. There is basically one peer-reviewed paper that argues against the man-made theory, and the authors point out flaws in that paper. I also read it an did not come away thinking that they had made a particularly convincing argument. I encourage you to do the same; it's a very approachable paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095063/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095063/ They even state that "More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another." In other words, the jury is out, and the prosecution has brought more evidence. Time to reevaluate.
m0hit 6y ago
Thank you for this summary. A slightly tangential question I'd love to get more perspective on is the impact of the virus being "man made" on our current predicament. Even assuming that the virus was not naturally evolved, and its characteristics are partly caused due to human interventions we're still stuck finding a vaccine, medication and ways of reducing transmission. Is there still a thread here that this virus is evidence that humans can possibly create chimeric viruses? In my limited understanding, using protein sequences to modify viruses is generally believed to be possible.
- mleonhard 6y ago
  In the article, the authors say that, in 2015, US researchers created a chimeric virus from a bat coronavirus to infect mice lung cells. They tested the virus on human lung cells and predicted that it would be very dangerous to humans. They stopped doing research on it because it would break the US rules against making human viruses more powerful. They were working with virus researchers from Wuhan. The authors conjecture that the Wuhan researchers used the same techniques and made Sars-cov-2 and it accidentally got out.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    The issue is that SARS-CoV-2 is much, much less powerful. So that doesn't really follow.
    - tomp 6y ago
      What do you mean by this? I heard that it has incredible affinity to ACE receptors, which is why it sprrads so quickly (combined with asymptomatic infection)
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        Yes, it binds to ACE2 receptors more strongly, but once you're infected it's about one order of magnitude less severe. To note, receptor affinity is not the only mechanism by which infectivity is modulated. You would already expect that a virus that is ten times less severe would spread more easily, and SARS was already able to spread efficiently through air at great distances, so it seems likely that me that receptor affinity is stronger but that other mechanism are weaker. This would explain the fact that it is less severe and not much more infectious.
sudosysgen 6y ago
This isn't entirely true, though. SARS-CoV-2 is much less virulent than SARS or MERS. For a virus that recently crossed the zoonotic barrier, and even moreso for one crossing from bats, it's virulence is actually astonishingly low. Therefore, the hypothesis of a two-stage crossing to humans, from bats to a larger land based mammal and then to humans is much much more likely, because this would explain high transmissibility due to the necessity to infect despite small lung volumes, as well as much lower virulence. Therefore, the pre-existing hypothesis seems to match reality more closely than an accidental release. A virus being engineered to be an order of magnitude less virulent seems unlikely to say the least.
- nomoreservices 6y ago
  > SARS-CoV-2 is much less virulent than SARS or MERS. Can you provide sources for that? I thought it was the opposite.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Virulence : 1. the severity or harmfulness of a disease or poison. COVID-19 - has an fatality rate of around 0.5-1%, according to the best methodologies we have, in various environments, with recent papers suggesting that it might be even less lethal in places where medical care is sufficient. In comparison, the best data for SARS fatality rates is of around 11% (!). This means that SARS-CoV-2 is around ten times less virulent than SARS. MERS is even worse than SARS. Now, SARS-CoV-2 is likely even more infectious than SARS, but part of that is because it's less severe, meaning that you can spread it even without being sick.
    - chaostheory 6y ago
      Should we go by the crude fatality rate since the data around COVID-19 isn't rock solid yet right? Shouldn't we measure COVID-19's virulence by the IFR aka infection fatality rate instead? As of today with 14,194,795 cases and 599,438 deaths, COVID-19's infection fatality rate is 4.23%. By comparison, SARS only had 8,098 cases and only 774 deaths, giving it an IFR of 9.56%.
ezVoodoo 6y ago
It is a false claim that the Covid-19 outbreak started from Wuhan. Scientists from Spain, Italy and Brazil have independently reported the detection of the coronavirus in their city waste water samples dating back to early 2019. China was the first country to detect the existence of the coronavirus, but it does not mean the virus started in China. If a country announces the finding of a new virus, it makes that country a whistle-blower for the mankind, not the scapegoat.
- arrayjumper 6y ago
  Could you link some sources for that claim?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ezVoodoo 6y ago
    Brazil https://www.scmp.com/news/world/americas/article/3091757/earlier-signs-coronavirus-sewage-samples-brazil https://www.scmp.com/news/world/americas/article/3091757/ear... Spain https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-science/coronavirus-traces-found-in-march-2019-sewage-sample-spanish-study-shows-idUSKBN23X2HQ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-... Italy https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53106444 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53106444
    - mieses 6y ago
      November 17 in China? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/first-covid-19-case-happened-in-november-china-government-records-show-report https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/first-covid-19... Possibly in October.. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/coronavirus-may-have-silently-existed-in-china-as-early-as-last-october-study/articleshow/75820650.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/coronavirus-... as early as September? https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-outbreak-september-not-wuhan-1498566 https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-outbreak-september-not-... I'm getting tired of Googling fake news
Cantbekhan 6y ago
> China 5. Cui Bono?
hazeii 6y ago
As noted downthread, these points don't particularly point to it being engineered (point 1 applies in spades to SARS and MERS, for example). Most scientists believe the evidence [0] indicates it's of natural origin. [0] https://www.sciencealert.com/the-new-coronavirus-could-have-been-percolating-innocently-in-humans-for-years https://www.sciencealert.com/the-new-coronavirus-could-have-...
- trevelyan 6y ago
  > SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins were so effective at binding to human cells, they had to be caused by natural selection. Read the article you are citing. There is convincing evidence that the virus developed via evolutionary mechanisms. That in no way refutes lab-origin and is entirely consistent with how most labs promote infectiousness (particularly airborn infectiousness) through gain-of-function research. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4693520/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4693520/
  - hazeii 6y ago
    >There is convincing evidence it developed via evolutionary origins. Er, yes. Not sure what you're saying here (the title is "..Covid-19 is not a naturally-evolved virus...')?
    - trevelyan 6y ago
      Gain of function serial infection techniques do not constitute natural evolution: they constitute lab-directed evolution. That is for all intents and purposes man-made, unless one is splitting hairs, which much of the politicized media is doing.
      - hazeii 6y ago
        Very unlikely to be the case here though, in particular because the same receptor domain is found in the wild (e.g. pangolins). Yes, quite a lot of media have become politicised (the reason for which being quite well understood). None the less, the science is what it is - provisional. It is not surprising that commercial entities take particular positions to benefit from said politicisation. In most countries at least, the science will ultimately give us the answer.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
matwood 6y ago
Thanks for the summary. It feels a bit like the intelligent design argument for God. It has these features, we can’t imagine them randomly coming together, so it must have been designed. Add that humans really want to ascribe motive and reason to events, when sometimes it really is jus chance.
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  You’re missing step 2: a group of virologists published research showing (indirectly, over time) exactly how one might create a chimeric virus with the characteristics of SARS-CoV-2. The argument is not “we can’t imagine them randomly coming together”, the argument is “these virologists had the experience and knowledge to put them together, and have been doing so for years in their experiments”
- TheBigSalad 6y ago
  So in other words, you choose to disregard all of this evidence.
  - matwood 6y ago
    No, but other similar viruses have already risen out the same general conditions in China before. The evidence to say that this one is different is going to need to be very compelling. Circumstances are not enough.
jerome-jh 6y ago
The summary is very much faithful, unfortunately followed by comments from commenters who obviously did not read the paper. I would just add this item, paraphrasing the paper: In 2015 the Wuhan team of virologists working with researchers from Chapel Hill, NC obtained a chimeric virus able to infect the human respiratory tract, while unexpectedly featuring an increased pathogenesis in the mouse. The dangerous outcome was briefly discussed in the original paper, and further experiments seemed to have been carried out only at the Wuhan lab, possibly because of a US gov ban on such experiments that existed at that time.

calf 6y ago

I feel step 4. is just a more specific detail of step 2, and the critical tricky piece of their argument is step 3 because that's the step that synthesizes steps 1 and 2. I imagine that the rebuttals would try to show that step 1 or 3 do not hold.

jkhdigital 6y ago
Right, in the conclusion they refer to "means, timing, agent and place" which seems to frame this like one would prosecute a criminal trial in the absence of "smoking gun" physical evidence. If the researchers at the heart of all this were located far from the epicenter of the outbreak, then you'd need to find a good explanation for why it started where it did, which is why I think it should be mentioned as a distinct point of evidence.
- calf 6y ago
  Ah okay it's like the difference between a forensic argument vs a scientific argument.
  - Taniwha 6y ago
    I think it's more people taking what a court calls 'evidence' and declaring it 'scientific evidence' - sure they both use that same word 'evidence' but they are quite different things and shouldn't be mixed
  - jkhdigital 6y ago
    No, that’s a misleading comparison. There is no such thing as a “scientific argument” about matters of historical record, because you cannot conduct science on history. Forensics is all there is. It’s just that there is no piece of evidence that incontrovertibly ties the virus to the lab prior to the outbreak, e.g. a leaked research document dated prior to the outbreak showing knowledge of the virus or something.

sandworm101 6y ago

Or, and this is a really crazy theory, they were studying it in China because it was a local virus that they were worried might one day infect humans. Maybe they were studying which changes would make it most dangerous because they wanted to be ready if those changes happened naturally. Honest hard work can sometimes look like evil plans, and not every coincidence is the result of conspiracy.

markdown 6y ago
> they were studying it in China because it was a local virus that they were worried might one day infect humans. Maybe they were studying which changes would make it most dangerous because they wanted to be ready if those changes happened naturally. The person you're responding to didn't say anything different to what you've said. > Honest hard work can sometimes look like evil plans, and not every coincidence is the result of conspiracy. Why did you say that? It certainly isn't stated or even implied by the person you're replying to.
- matthewdgreen 6y ago
  The person he/she/they is responding to may not have originated the thought, but the quote this poster is responding to is very clear from context. It reads as follows: “The authors feel that, in light of this preponderance of circumstantial evidence, the hypothesis that the biogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 involved human intervention should be seen as the leading (i.e. most likely) explanation.”
  - bitcurious 6y ago
    Which is not an accusation of research done in bad faith. The linked paper referenced 4 others as evidence. It doesn't say that those 4 were somehow done for evil - just that they were done.
stx 6y ago
I actually believe this to be the case. From what I have read researchers often do something called gain of function research. In this research they add genetic features to viruses that could make it more infective. This is done, at least in part, to help learn how to protect society from such a virus if it were to evolve naturally. I thought I heard somewhere that one of the functions coronavirus has that its closest known relatives do not have just happens to be something that virologists frequently add. All this leads me to believe it was created in a lab. Likely for altruistic purposes but still. When this escaped whoever knew that it was from a lab should have disclosed it ASAP to help the world prepare. I have no experience in virology so don't trust me.

pmayrgundter 6y ago

Good summary, thanks! Related to the origin hypotheses, the hypothesis of zoonotic outbreak from a wet market in mid-Dec no longer seems as relevant. It was first laid out in a widely disseminated paper in The Lancet [1, see Figure 1B], but since then retrospective wastewater analyses from Italy[2], Spain[3], Brazil and others[4] have found it was circulating much earlier. "The Italian National Institute of Health looked at 40 sewage samples collected from wastewater treatment plants in northern Italy between October 2019 and February 2020. An analysis released on Thursday said samples taken in Milan and Turin on Dec. 18 showed the presence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus." [2] and "Most COVID-19 cases show mild influenza-like symptoms (14) and it has been suggested that some uncharacterized influenza cases may have masked COVID-19 cases in the 2019-2020 season (11). This possibility prompted us to analyze some archival WWTP samples from January 2018 to December 2019 (Figure 2). All samples came out to be negative for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 genomes with the exception of March 12, 2019, in which both IP2 and IP4 target assays were positive. This striking finding indicates circulation of the virus in Barcelona long before the report of any COVID-19 case worldwide." [3] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7159299/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7159299/ [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-sewage/italy-sewage-study-suggests-covid-19-was-there-in-december-2019-idUSKBN23Q1J9 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-... [3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v1.full.pdf+html https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v... [4] https://twitter.com/LMeigre/status/1282819131390210050 https://twitter.com/LMeigre/status/1282819131390210050

FabHK 6y ago
I think the “hypothesis of zoonotic outbreak from a wet market in mid-Dec” is still very relevant, and the few papers claiming to have evidence of SARS-CoV-2 prior to Dec 2019 outside China are still very questionable. It’s not like they tested old samples in a few places and the virus promptly showed up. Rather, lots of old samples were tested all over the place, and the virus almost never showed up, except in a very few instances that night more parsimoniously be explained with false positives.
- hakfoo 6y ago

chris_wot 6y ago

That’s a heck of a lot of steps to get to that conclusion. There is a massive amount of misinformation around COVID-19. Check out this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation_related_to_the_... All the things that the article posits have been looked into and the conclusion from most of the scientific community is that it is extraordinarily unlikely that this came from a lab in Wuhan.

jkhdigital 6y ago
> the conclusion from most of the scientific community Who is this "scientific community" that you speak of, anyway? Modern science is conducted through published research papers. I read papers and decide for myself which arguments to believe. Do I understand everything? No, of course not, but I learn a helluva lot more than if I trust what a secondary source tells me about scientific research and leave it at that. You only have to read a few papers to realize that what is reported in the media is often radically different than what the authors actually claim in a paper. But really, this is tackled head-on in the paper itself. There is basically one peer-reviewed paper that argues against the man-made theory, and the authors point out flaws in that paper. I also read it an did not come away thinking that they had made a particularly convincing argument. I encourage you to do the same; it's a very approachable paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095063/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095063/ They even state that "More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another." In other words, the jury is out, and the prosecution has brought more evidence. Time to reevaluate.

m0hit 6y ago

Thank you for this summary. A slightly tangential question I'd love to get more perspective on is the impact of the virus being "man made" on our current predicament. Even assuming that the virus was not naturally evolved, and its characteristics are partly caused due to human interventions we're still stuck finding a vaccine, medication and ways of reducing transmission. Is there still a thread here that this virus is evidence that humans can possibly create chimeric viruses? In my limited understanding, using protein sequences to modify viruses is generally believed to be possible.

mleonhard 6y ago
In the article, the authors say that, in 2015, US researchers created a chimeric virus from a bat coronavirus to infect mice lung cells. They tested the virus on human lung cells and predicted that it would be very dangerous to humans. They stopped doing research on it because it would break the US rules against making human viruses more powerful. They were working with virus researchers from Wuhan. The authors conjecture that the Wuhan researchers used the same techniques and made Sars-cov-2 and it accidentally got out.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  The issue is that SARS-CoV-2 is much, much less powerful. So that doesn't really follow.
  - tomp 6y ago
    What do you mean by this? I heard that it has incredible affinity to ACE receptors, which is why it sprrads so quickly (combined with asymptomatic infection)
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Yes, it binds to ACE2 receptors more strongly, but once you're infected it's about one order of magnitude less severe. To note, receptor affinity is not the only mechanism by which infectivity is modulated. You would already expect that a virus that is ten times less severe would spread more easily, and SARS was already able to spread efficiently through air at great distances, so it seems likely that me that receptor affinity is stronger but that other mechanism are weaker. This would explain the fact that it is less severe and not much more infectious.

sudosysgen 6y ago

This isn't entirely true, though. SARS-CoV-2 is much less virulent than SARS or MERS. For a virus that recently crossed the zoonotic barrier, and even moreso for one crossing from bats, it's virulence is actually astonishingly low. Therefore, the hypothesis of a two-stage crossing to humans, from bats to a larger land based mammal and then to humans is much much more likely, because this would explain high transmissibility due to the necessity to infect despite small lung volumes, as well as much lower virulence. Therefore, the pre-existing hypothesis seems to match reality more closely than an accidental release. A virus being engineered to be an order of magnitude less virulent seems unlikely to say the least.

nomoreservices 6y ago
> SARS-CoV-2 is much less virulent than SARS or MERS. Can you provide sources for that? I thought it was the opposite.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Virulence : 1. the severity or harmfulness of a disease or poison. COVID-19 - has an fatality rate of around 0.5-1%, according to the best methodologies we have, in various environments, with recent papers suggesting that it might be even less lethal in places where medical care is sufficient. In comparison, the best data for SARS fatality rates is of around 11% (!). This means that SARS-CoV-2 is around ten times less virulent than SARS. MERS is even worse than SARS. Now, SARS-CoV-2 is likely even more infectious than SARS, but part of that is because it's less severe, meaning that you can spread it even without being sick.
  - chaostheory 6y ago
    Should we go by the crude fatality rate since the data around COVID-19 isn't rock solid yet right? Shouldn't we measure COVID-19's virulence by the IFR aka infection fatality rate instead? As of today with 14,194,795 cases and 599,438 deaths, COVID-19's infection fatality rate is 4.23%. By comparison, SARS only had 8,098 cases and only 774 deaths, giving it an IFR of 9.56%.

ezVoodoo 6y ago

It is a false claim that the Covid-19 outbreak started from Wuhan. Scientists from Spain, Italy and Brazil have independently reported the detection of the coronavirus in their city waste water samples dating back to early 2019. China was the first country to detect the existence of the coronavirus, but it does not mean the virus started in China. If a country announces the finding of a new virus, it makes that country a whistle-blower for the mankind, not the scapegoat.

arrayjumper 6y ago
Could you link some sources for that claim?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ezVoodoo 6y ago
  Brazil https://www.scmp.com/news/world/americas/article/3091757/earlier-signs-coronavirus-sewage-samples-brazil https://www.scmp.com/news/world/americas/article/3091757/ear... Spain https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-science/coronavirus-traces-found-in-march-2019-sewage-sample-spanish-study-shows-idUSKBN23X2HQ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-... Italy https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53106444 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53106444
  - mieses 6y ago
    November 17 in China? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/first-covid-19-case-happened-in-november-china-government-records-show-report https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/first-covid-19... Possibly in October.. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/coronavirus-may-have-silently-existed-in-china-as-early-as-last-october-study/articleshow/75820650.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/coronavirus-... as early as September? https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-outbreak-september-not-wuhan-1498566 https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-outbreak-september-not-... I'm getting tired of Googling fake news

Cantbekhan 6y ago

> China 5. Cui Bono?

hazeii 6y ago

As noted downthread, these points don't particularly point to it being engineered (point 1 applies in spades to SARS and MERS, for example). Most scientists believe the evidence [0] indicates it's of natural origin. [0] https://www.sciencealert.com/the-new-coronavirus-could-have-been-percolating-innocently-in-humans-for-years https://www.sciencealert.com/the-new-coronavirus-could-have-...

trevelyan 6y ago
> SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins were so effective at binding to human cells, they had to be caused by natural selection. Read the article you are citing. There is convincing evidence that the virus developed via evolutionary mechanisms. That in no way refutes lab-origin and is entirely consistent with how most labs promote infectiousness (particularly airborn infectiousness) through gain-of-function research. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4693520/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4693520/
- hazeii 6y ago
  >There is convincing evidence it developed via evolutionary origins. Er, yes. Not sure what you're saying here (the title is "..Covid-19 is not a naturally-evolved virus...')?
  - trevelyan 6y ago
    Gain of function serial infection techniques do not constitute natural evolution: they constitute lab-directed evolution. That is for all intents and purposes man-made, unless one is splitting hairs, which much of the politicized media is doing.
    - hazeii 6y ago
      Very unlikely to be the case here though, in particular because the same receptor domain is found in the wild (e.g. pangolins). Yes, quite a lot of media have become politicised (the reason for which being quite well understood). None the less, the science is what it is - provisional. It is not surprising that commercial entities take particular positions to benefit from said politicisation. In most countries at least, the science will ultimately give us the answer.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

matwood 6y ago

Thanks for the summary. It feels a bit like the intelligent design argument for God. It has these features, we can’t imagine them randomly coming together, so it must have been designed. Add that humans really want to ascribe motive and reason to events, when sometimes it really is jus chance.

jkhdigital 6y ago
You’re missing step 2: a group of virologists published research showing (indirectly, over time) exactly how one might create a chimeric virus with the characteristics of SARS-CoV-2. The argument is not “we can’t imagine them randomly coming together”, the argument is “these virologists had the experience and knowledge to put them together, and have been doing so for years in their experiments”
TheBigSalad 6y ago
So in other words, you choose to disregard all of this evidence.
- matwood 6y ago
  No, but other similar viruses have already risen out the same general conditions in China before. The evidence to say that this one is different is going to need to be very compelling. Circumstances are not enough.

jerome-jh 6y ago

The summary is very much faithful, unfortunately followed by comments from commenters who obviously did not read the paper. I would just add this item, paraphrasing the paper: In 2015 the Wuhan team of virologists working with researchers from Chapel Hill, NC obtained a chimeric virus able to infect the human respiratory tract, while unexpectedly featuring an increased pathogenesis in the mouse. The dangerous outcome was briefly discussed in the original paper, and further experiments seemed to have been carried out only at the Wuhan lab, possibly because of a US gov ban on such experiments that existed at that time.