8 ms·

Ensuring a transparent, thorough investigation of Covid-19’s origin

79 points by option 6y ago

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
At the end of December 2019, A friend had a layover in the business lounge in Seattle on a return flight from Europe to San Francisco. At the same time, a direct flight from Wuhan came in. He spent 3 hours in the lounge waiting for the flight to SFO, ate at the buffet. A few days later, he said he became deathly sick. Fever, coughing, and said he felt like he was going to die. His wife became very sick shortly after his illness began, and his 8 year old son as well. His symptoms did not completely clear up for him for a month. His wife was seeing one specialist after another for months with after-effects. His son got through it in 3 days. All of this was before the first cases was officially reported by the CDC as diagnosed in Seattle on January 20th. My friend's doctors did not know what they were dealing with at the time and did not test for COVID. After COVID became known, he looked into anti body tests. They were expensive ($700+ at that time) and he did not have one.
- raphlinus 6y ago
  There are a lot of anecdotal stories like these, but the idea that Covid was circulating widely in the US before January just isn't consistent with the evidence on the ground. Trevor Bedford has written about this several times [1], and he would know, the phylogenetic work he and his team have been doing is one of the most sensitive instruments we have in figuring out how this thing spreads. So this basically boils down to who to trust, your friend's uncle who works at Nintendo, or a highly regarded evolutionary biologist. [1]: https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1249414291297464321 https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1249414291297464321
  - pcthrowaway 6y ago
    It baffles me that we can't scrutinize the claims of "highly regarded" people when they run counter to the someone's experience or even intuition. I'm not saying we should base policy or decisions on this scrutiny, but it's not unreasonable to have doubts. Highly regarded virologists were tweeting earlier in 2020 about how stupid masks were because they couldn't be effective in preventing the spread of a disease which was "not airborne"
    - raphlinus 6y ago
      Of course we can and should scrutinize the claims of highly regarded people. For example, Michael Levitt has a Nobel Prize and I've publicly criticized him when I was convinced he was utterly wrong: https://twitter.com/raphlinus/status/1297182969514270721 https://twitter.com/raphlinus/status/1297182969514270721 The mask issue was a debacle from a scientific communications point of view. In the early days, there was legitimate debate among scientists regarding the value of masks. But I think the main thing that went wrong was a paternalistic attitude, trying to address supply chain issues of N95 mask usage by medical and other frontline workers by convincing people that masks weren't effective. That, I think most agree, was a huge mistake. Of course, your actual statement that highly regarded virologists tweeting that masks were "stupid" and "couldn't be effective" is false, and you probably know that.
  - cameldrv 6y ago
    He's not suggesting that it was widely circulating in the U.S. He's suggesting that someone coming off a flight from Wuhan might have passed it to him. At the end of December, we know for certain that there were numerous cases in Wuhan, so it's entirely possible that he caught it, passed it to his family, but they never infected anyone else. Now would I bet on this? No, but it is entirely possible without resorting to anything that's not established scientific fact.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    - corona has been traced in Wuhan back to Sept, 2019 - Italy claims corona was in sewage around that time - corona is highly contagious - the US received 100,000 passengers/week from Wuhan and Shanghai until flights were stopped (then passengers passengers routed through other airports) So corona was likely in the US in late 2019, but with only 1/1000 dying from it, could have been unnoticed for a while.
throwarayes 6y ago
I’m trying to piece together how any of this makes sense. The implication is that Covid was a biological weapon accidentally released? Wouldn’t this be a pretty idiotic biological weapon? An especially bad one for a heavily urbanized country to release? Not to mention the main outcome of this “weapon” would be hurt China’s top importers?
- throwawaybutwhy 6y ago
  Let me spell it out: China was knowingly playing with fire - conducting gain-of-function experiments on humanized mice and coronaviruses. This research may or may not be weaponizable, but China was willing to try. Unlike the US where a moratorium was put in place from 2014 to late 2017 after IIRC a National Academies report (the moratorium was lifted after setting up stricter controls, and no, it had nothing to do with the orange one). Most likely, it was an accidental release.
bredren 6y ago
The State Department does not have the credibility to make statements like this right now.
- option 6y ago
  The truth track record of State Department is still much better than that of CCP.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > The truth track record of State Department is still much better than that of CCP. Maybe over the long run, but maybe not the current State Department at this moment. IIRC, over the last month it's literally been trying to stir up shit however it can to make things difficult for the incoming Biden administration. The current administration seems to think it makes sense to burn US national credibility for petty, self-interested not-even-wins.
    - option 6y ago
      State department have warned about poor security at WIV before COVID-19 outbreak https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
      - nerdponx 6y ago
        These are not mutually exclusive.
      - Elof 6y ago
        This is most definitely not before the COVID-19 outbreak
        vanattab 6y ago
        I think there were some state department cables 2 years before the outbreak. https://www.foxnews.com/world/state-department-cables-coronavirus-origin-chinese-lab-bats https://www.foxnews.com/world/state-department-cables-corona...
SlipperySlope 6y ago
The new part is the assertion that lab researchers got sick in the fall of 2019. This is consistent with evidence of the virus in Italy in the same time period. Due to the large number of Chinese working in Italy, there was a direct flight between Italy and Wuhan at the time. The new Biden administration has no reason to cover this up further, due to the obvious danger that another pandemic results from a lab accident involving designer lethal virus.
- rllearneratwork 6y ago
  "leaked from lab" claim absolutely does not imply "designer". The virus could have been natural, collected for study (possibly in animal) by a lab which studies such viruses and still leaked via an accident (unexpected human transmission). To prove that it is "designer virus", additional, different kind of evidence is needed.
  - goldenkey 6y ago
    The Wuhan lab was doing gain-of-function research. https://www.vox.com/2020/5/1/21243148/why-some-labs-work-on-making-viruses-deadlier-and-why-they-should-stop https://www.vox.com/2020/5/1/21243148/why-some-labs-work-on-...
  - gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
    It may not be designer per se but the idea is that seemingly perfect human tropism could mean they were changing it and infecting humanized animals or something.
- geofft 6y ago
  > The new Biden administration has no reason to cover this up further, due to the obvious danger that another pandemic results from a lab accident involving designer lethal virus. This is true - but the implication, then, is that if they don't follow through with it, it is most likely to be because they don't feel the evidence is strong enough for it, as opposed to that they do believe it and are inexplicably covering it up.
omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
The United States government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. I'd wager several researchers in any research institution because sick in autumn 2019 and had symptoms consistent with common seasonal illness. And guess what new virus also has symptoms consistent with common seasonal illness...
- ghufran_syed 6y ago
  Depends exactly what symptoms they had. Rhinorrhea or cough are extremely non-specific, but if they had loss of taste or smell, or significantly abnormal low oxygen saturation, or multifocal pneumonia in young people - those are all a lot more specific given what we now know about covid
  - addicted 6y ago
    Yes, exactly, which is why this statement looks more like it's intended to add confusion rather than clarity.
    - dudeinjapan 6y ago
      We're talking about a BSL-4 lab here, one of ~50 in the world. Aren't there established protocols to quarantine lab techs if they are showing even minor symptoms?
bufferout 6y ago
If anyone else is wondering when "autumn 2019" is, in an international format: it's the fourth quarter of 2019.
- tedk-42 6y ago
  With a cross over with the 3rd quarter? (September to November)
fasteddie31003 6y ago
Great claims require great evidence
- option 6y ago
  and transparent investigation
- dudeinjapan 6y ago
  Absolutely. The great claim that SARS-Cov-2 has a zoonotic origin requires evidence of an animal with a virus similar to SARS-Cov-2. Unlike SARS-1 and MERS, we have not yet found such an animal.
  - inakarmacoma 6y ago
    Wouldn't minks fit your requirement here?
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    No, it really doesn't. Every single other virus ever has had a zoonotic origin. SARS-CoV-2 has a 96.3% homologue. The default, as with literally every other of thousands of viruses, is that like all the others it is the product of zoonosis. For most viruses too, the exact intermediate animal hosts aren't precisely known. It's really akin to find a new species of bird and trying asking for evidence that it specifically came from evolution and not genetic engineering. Sure, it's possible that it didn't, but every single other species of bird came from it and it's fully expected to happen. And by the way, the exact intermediate host for the original SARS was also never determined conclusively until fifteen years after the first outbreak.
- jariel 6y ago
  Nobody is making claims, but everyone - except for one nation - wants a thorough investigation.
peteretep 6y ago
Following with interest. I have a basic level of trust towards Uncle Sam and a basic level of distrust towards the CCP, but we are still very far from a reasonable bar of evidence to be cleared here yet.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Weren’t people being deplatformed for saying this back in March?
- option 6y ago
  is that a threat? :)
- SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
  IIRC, yes, ZeroHedge was. They claimed it came from scientists at Wuhan and many called it a conspiracy theory. They were banned from twitter if nothing else. Not even March, February https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronav... Now, I don't read that site. I don't know what evidence the state dept has now. I don't know where the virus came from. —- BUT, I do know CBS/Media, Twitter and critics didn't know then nor now either. To be fair ZeroHedge was guessing too.
raphlinus 6y ago
I like Carl Bergstrom's take on this: I have reason to believe that if the outgoing administration claims to have reason to believe something but refuses to provide the evidence behind it, they are lying. https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1350292056782954498 https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1350292056782954498 Here's a very serious, legitimate review of the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01205-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01205-5 Unfortunately, from my experience, most people are going to believe what they want to believe, based more on political affiliation more than anything else, and the empirical facts don't register too strongly.
- et-al 6y ago
  And keep in mind last week Mike Pompous of the State Department released a memo on forming a closer relationship with Taiwan [0]. The Trump administration is stoking the flames against the mainland China on their way out. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706155
- throw3848 6y ago
  Maybe if authorities were a bit more neutral. Some plausible options were ruled out from day 1, without any investigation. And words like "empirical facts" and "independent review" in context of China, do not add much credibility. If virus has natural origin, we should be able to find population of infected bats. Until then it is just another unproven theory.
  - raphlinus 6y ago
    I should clarify, neither I nor Dr. Rasmussen are claiming that we know what the true origin is, or that zoonotic spillover is definitely what happened. There is not enough evidence to make such a definitive conclusion. I can see how people might read my comment as implicitly asserting that if people did understand the empirical facts they would come to the conclusion of zoonotic origin. That said, there are facts, and they are relevant: the fact that COV RaTG13 has 96.2% similarity to SARS-COV-2. The incredible diversity of bat coronaviruses, and the fact that only fraction are studied and understood, despite serious study by the WIV. Here's another good quote from another good thread: And investigating zoonotic origins can take decades, and you may NEVER find the "smoking bat" or whatever other intermediate species that may be involved. It's like looking for a needle in a planet-sized haystack. -- https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1349754597275914242 https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/13497545972759142... The main point that I was trying to make, which I stand by, is that most people are going to base their beliefs about this question on essentially political considerations: do you trust the CCP or the US State Dept more? Unfortunately, both of those institutions have done terrible damage to objective scientific inquiry, and in my opinion neither one is really deserving of trust. Better to follow the science where it leads, but this is an often frustrating and time consuming process.
addicted 6y ago
"The COVID-19 pandemic was avoidable. Any responsible country would have invited world health investigators to Wuhan within days of an outbreak. China instead refused offers of help – including from the United States – and punished brave Chinese doctors, scientists, and journalists who tried to alert the world to the dangers of the virus. Beijing continues today to withhold vital information that scientists need to protect the world from this deadly virus, and the next one." The above shows this is a political statement. I happen to agree with this quote. It's also not, as the US administration likes to pretend, any sort of defense of their response to the pandemic. But at the same time, the presence of this quote makes it very clear that this is little more than a political, rather than a fact based statement intended to get to the truth. It also aligns with what Pompeo is doing in nearly every other delicate situation in the US over the past few weeks. Setting stuff on fire making it as difficult as possible for the incoming administration to deal with.
- jariel 6y ago
  It's not a political statement if it's factual. Or rather, it's 'always political between states' but the legitimacy of the facts give it credibility. China's initial dismissal and coverup of the spread of the virus, and their subsequent misinformation and lack of transparency, and finally, their attempts to stop an investigation into COVID origins are really seriously bad things. To boot - they've made a political appointment to the head of the WHO and have been trying to obtain leverage within that organization of years. It's actually reasonable that the US demands expulsion of China from the WHO on those grounds, until China plays be the rules. They can't claim 'it's an internal problem' as they always do here. Much like with currency and other things, if they want to be a part of these organizations they have to follow the rules.
  - agnosticmantis 6y ago
    > It's not a political statement if it's factual. I think “The COVID-19 pandemic was avoidable. Any responsible country would have invited world health investigators to Wuhan within days of an outbreak.” is counterfactual by definition.
themark 6y ago
People should consider this claim with the same scrutiny as the claim that Russia was behind SolarWinds.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  I do find it slightly bizarre that on HN, a website run by ycombinator i.e. Americana, seemingly the Russians always get the benefit of the doubt. Similarly with the President actually. The politics here is quite hard to characterise.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Hacker News is a diverse website. It’s more than people who just go “China bad” and “Russia bad”.
  - lsiebert 6y ago
    Personally I just give everything the Trump administration says high scrutiny. Just lie after lie, mistruth after mistruth, so that it's hard to believe anything that someone outside them doesn't back up. Especially on computer security... the absolute level of obvious falsehood and idiotic statements from Trump and his supporters about election security would be farcical if it wasn't so destructive to American democracy and democratic norms. But I believe that, while legitimate election security researchers have all basically said there is no reason to doubt the election or believe there was any sort of widespread fraud or abuse (and such statements conform to what was said in court, where lawyers can face consequences for stating falsehoods), legitimate computer security researchers outside the Trump Administration have pointed to Russia on the Solarwinds hack, so I give that claim more credence.
4ec0755f5522 6y ago
This article discusses how common it is to have accidents/mistakes in these types of research labs, I found it pretty interesting but cannot vouch for it (perhaps it's already been debunked?) https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
- raphlinus 6y ago
  This article is bullshit and real virologists are angry it's getting so much attention: https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1346232195430510592 https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/13462321954305105... You may or may not have noticed, but there are some real problems we should be thinking about, including the very real probability that the B.1.1.7 variant is going to be much harder to suppress, and how to get our vaccination program on track. Instead we end up talking about these distractions that have much more speculation than evidence behind them.
  - brippalcharrid 6y ago
    I'm curious as to why the arrival of developments like a new variant would make it appropriate to halt investigations into the original issue (like where can we find a physical sample of RaTG13, and why wasn't its sequence published until the beginning of last year?).
    - raphlinus 6y ago
      I don't think we should halt investigations. But the Baker article is not a serious investigation, it's a piece of pop-sci that is quite careless about scientific details. It is not helpful to those trying to understand the truth, but it might be an entertaining read or useful for other purposes.
eunos 6y ago
When I read the "teaser" of this announcement in a few UK tabloids (Daily Mail/Telegraph), the title seems bombastic ("UK diplomats brace for Pompeo's bombshell" or something like that). Yet for me the announcement seems lukewarm. The 3 points are rehash of theories that's been surfacing since March last year, it adds nothing new. I assume the announcement is made because Pompeo's want to stay relevant and WHO team has just arrived in China.

79 points by option 6y ago

At the end of December 2019, A friend had a layover in the business lounge in Seattle on a return flight from Europe to San Francisco. At the same time, a direct flight from Wuhan came in. He spent 3 hours in the lounge waiting for the flight to SFO, ate at the buffet. A few days later, he said he became deathly sick. Fever, coughing, and said he felt like he was going to die. His wife became very sick shortly after his illness began, and his 8 year old son as well. His symptoms did not completely clear up for him for a month. His wife was seeing one specialist after another for months with after-effects. His son got through it in 3 days. All of this was before the first cases was officially reported by the CDC as diagnosed in Seattle on January 20th. My friend's doctors did not know what they were dealing with at the time and did not test for COVID. After COVID became known, he looked into anti body tests. They were expensive ($700+ at that time) and he did not have one.

raphlinus 6y ago
There are a lot of anecdotal stories like these, but the idea that Covid was circulating widely in the US before January just isn't consistent with the evidence on the ground. Trevor Bedford has written about this several times [1], and he would know, the phylogenetic work he and his team have been doing is one of the most sensitive instruments we have in figuring out how this thing spreads. So this basically boils down to who to trust, your friend's uncle who works at Nintendo, or a highly regarded evolutionary biologist. [1]: https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1249414291297464321 https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1249414291297464321
- pcthrowaway 6y ago
  It baffles me that we can't scrutinize the claims of "highly regarded" people when they run counter to the someone's experience or even intuition. I'm not saying we should base policy or decisions on this scrutiny, but it's not unreasonable to have doubts. Highly regarded virologists were tweeting earlier in 2020 about how stupid masks were because they couldn't be effective in preventing the spread of a disease which was "not airborne"
  - raphlinus 6y ago
    Of course we can and should scrutinize the claims of highly regarded people. For example, Michael Levitt has a Nobel Prize and I've publicly criticized him when I was convinced he was utterly wrong: https://twitter.com/raphlinus/status/1297182969514270721 https://twitter.com/raphlinus/status/1297182969514270721 The mask issue was a debacle from a scientific communications point of view. In the early days, there was legitimate debate among scientists regarding the value of masks. But I think the main thing that went wrong was a paternalistic attitude, trying to address supply chain issues of N95 mask usage by medical and other frontline workers by convincing people that masks weren't effective. That, I think most agree, was a huge mistake. Of course, your actual statement that highly regarded virologists tweeting that masks were "stupid" and "couldn't be effective" is false, and you probably know that.
- cameldrv 6y ago
  He's not suggesting that it was widely circulating in the U.S. He's suggesting that someone coming off a flight from Wuhan might have passed it to him. At the end of December, we know for certain that there were numerous cases in Wuhan, so it's entirely possible that he caught it, passed it to his family, but they never infected anyone else. Now would I bet on this? No, but it is entirely possible without resorting to anything that's not established scientific fact.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  - corona has been traced in Wuhan back to Sept, 2019 - Italy claims corona was in sewage around that time - corona is highly contagious - the US received 100,000 passengers/week from Wuhan and Shanghai until flights were stopped (then passengers passengers routed through other airports) So corona was likely in the US in late 2019, but with only 1/1000 dying from it, could have been unnoticed for a while.

throwarayes 6y ago

I’m trying to piece together how any of this makes sense. The implication is that Covid was a biological weapon accidentally released? Wouldn’t this be a pretty idiotic biological weapon? An especially bad one for a heavily urbanized country to release? Not to mention the main outcome of this “weapon” would be hurt China’s top importers?

throwawaybutwhy 6y ago
Let me spell it out: China was knowingly playing with fire - conducting gain-of-function experiments on humanized mice and coronaviruses. This research may or may not be weaponizable, but China was willing to try. Unlike the US where a moratorium was put in place from 2014 to late 2017 after IIRC a National Academies report (the moratorium was lifted after setting up stricter controls, and no, it had nothing to do with the orange one). Most likely, it was an accidental release.

bredren 6y ago

The State Department does not have the credibility to make statements like this right now.

option 6y ago
The truth track record of State Department is still much better than that of CCP.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > The truth track record of State Department is still much better than that of CCP. Maybe over the long run, but maybe not the current State Department at this moment. IIRC, over the last month it's literally been trying to stir up shit however it can to make things difficult for the incoming Biden administration. The current administration seems to think it makes sense to burn US national credibility for petty, self-interested not-even-wins.
  - option 6y ago
    State department have warned about poor security at WIV before COVID-19 outbreak https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
    - nerdponx 6y ago
      These are not mutually exclusive.
    - Elof 6y ago
      This is most definitely not before the COVID-19 outbreak
      - vanattab 6y ago
        I think there were some state department cables 2 years before the outbreak. https://www.foxnews.com/world/state-department-cables-coronavirus-origin-chinese-lab-bats https://www.foxnews.com/world/state-department-cables-corona...

SlipperySlope 6y ago

The new part is the assertion that lab researchers got sick in the fall of 2019. This is consistent with evidence of the virus in Italy in the same time period. Due to the large number of Chinese working in Italy, there was a direct flight between Italy and Wuhan at the time. The new Biden administration has no reason to cover this up further, due to the obvious danger that another pandemic results from a lab accident involving designer lethal virus.

rllearneratwork 6y ago
"leaked from lab" claim absolutely does not imply "designer". The virus could have been natural, collected for study (possibly in animal) by a lab which studies such viruses and still leaked via an accident (unexpected human transmission). To prove that it is "designer virus", additional, different kind of evidence is needed.
- goldenkey 6y ago
  The Wuhan lab was doing gain-of-function research. https://www.vox.com/2020/5/1/21243148/why-some-labs-work-on-making-viruses-deadlier-and-why-they-should-stop https://www.vox.com/2020/5/1/21243148/why-some-labs-work-on-...
- gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  It may not be designer per se but the idea is that seemingly perfect human tropism could mean they were changing it and infecting humanized animals or something.
geofft 6y ago
> The new Biden administration has no reason to cover this up further, due to the obvious danger that another pandemic results from a lab accident involving designer lethal virus. This is true - but the implication, then, is that if they don't follow through with it, it is most likely to be because they don't feel the evidence is strong enough for it, as opposed to that they do believe it and are inexplicably covering it up.

omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago

The United States government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. I'd wager several researchers in any research institution because sick in autumn 2019 and had symptoms consistent with common seasonal illness. And guess what new virus also has symptoms consistent with common seasonal illness...

ghufran_syed 6y ago
Depends exactly what symptoms they had. Rhinorrhea or cough are extremely non-specific, but if they had loss of taste or smell, or significantly abnormal low oxygen saturation, or multifocal pneumonia in young people - those are all a lot more specific given what we now know about covid
- addicted 6y ago
  Yes, exactly, which is why this statement looks more like it's intended to add confusion rather than clarity.
  - dudeinjapan 6y ago
    We're talking about a BSL-4 lab here, one of ~50 in the world. Aren't there established protocols to quarantine lab techs if they are showing even minor symptoms?

bufferout 6y ago

If anyone else is wondering when "autumn 2019" is, in an international format: it's the fourth quarter of 2019.

tedk-42 6y ago
With a cross over with the 3rd quarter? (September to November)

fasteddie31003 6y ago

Great claims require great evidence

option 6y ago
and transparent investigation
dudeinjapan 6y ago
Absolutely. The great claim that SARS-Cov-2 has a zoonotic origin requires evidence of an animal with a virus similar to SARS-Cov-2. Unlike SARS-1 and MERS, we have not yet found such an animal.
- inakarmacoma 6y ago
  Wouldn't minks fit your requirement here?
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  No, it really doesn't. Every single other virus ever has had a zoonotic origin. SARS-CoV-2 has a 96.3% homologue. The default, as with literally every other of thousands of viruses, is that like all the others it is the product of zoonosis. For most viruses too, the exact intermediate animal hosts aren't precisely known. It's really akin to find a new species of bird and trying asking for evidence that it specifically came from evolution and not genetic engineering. Sure, it's possible that it didn't, but every single other species of bird came from it and it's fully expected to happen. And by the way, the exact intermediate host for the original SARS was also never determined conclusively until fifteen years after the first outbreak.
jariel 6y ago
Nobody is making claims, but everyone - except for one nation - wants a thorough investigation.

peteretep 6y ago

Following with interest. I have a basic level of trust towards Uncle Sam and a basic level of distrust towards the CCP, but we are still very far from a reasonable bar of evidence to be cleared here yet.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

Weren’t people being deplatformed for saying this back in March?

option 6y ago
is that a threat? :)
SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
IIRC, yes, ZeroHedge was. They claimed it came from scientists at Wuhan and many called it a conspiracy theory. They were banned from twitter if nothing else. Not even March, February https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronav... Now, I don't read that site. I don't know what evidence the state dept has now. I don't know where the virus came from. —- BUT, I do know CBS/Media, Twitter and critics didn't know then nor now either. To be fair ZeroHedge was guessing too.

raphlinus 6y ago

I like Carl Bergstrom's take on this: I have reason to believe that if the outgoing administration claims to have reason to believe something but refuses to provide the evidence behind it, they are lying. https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1350292056782954498 https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1350292056782954498 Here's a very serious, legitimate review of the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01205-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01205-5 Unfortunately, from my experience, most people are going to believe what they want to believe, based more on political affiliation more than anything else, and the empirical facts don't register too strongly.

et-al 6y ago
And keep in mind last week Mike Pompous of the State Department released a memo on forming a closer relationship with Taiwan [0]. The Trump administration is stoking the flames against the mainland China on their way out. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706155
throw3848 6y ago
Maybe if authorities were a bit more neutral. Some plausible options were ruled out from day 1, without any investigation. And words like "empirical facts" and "independent review" in context of China, do not add much credibility. If virus has natural origin, we should be able to find population of infected bats. Until then it is just another unproven theory.
- raphlinus 6y ago
  I should clarify, neither I nor Dr. Rasmussen are claiming that we know what the true origin is, or that zoonotic spillover is definitely what happened. There is not enough evidence to make such a definitive conclusion. I can see how people might read my comment as implicitly asserting that if people did understand the empirical facts they would come to the conclusion of zoonotic origin. That said, there are facts, and they are relevant: the fact that COV RaTG13 has 96.2% similarity to SARS-COV-2. The incredible diversity of bat coronaviruses, and the fact that only fraction are studied and understood, despite serious study by the WIV. Here's another good quote from another good thread: And investigating zoonotic origins can take decades, and you may NEVER find the "smoking bat" or whatever other intermediate species that may be involved. It's like looking for a needle in a planet-sized haystack. -- https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1349754597275914242 https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/13497545972759142... The main point that I was trying to make, which I stand by, is that most people are going to base their beliefs about this question on essentially political considerations: do you trust the CCP or the US State Dept more? Unfortunately, both of those institutions have done terrible damage to objective scientific inquiry, and in my opinion neither one is really deserving of trust. Better to follow the science where it leads, but this is an often frustrating and time consuming process.

addicted 6y ago

"The COVID-19 pandemic was avoidable. Any responsible country would have invited world health investigators to Wuhan within days of an outbreak. China instead refused offers of help – including from the United States – and punished brave Chinese doctors, scientists, and journalists who tried to alert the world to the dangers of the virus. Beijing continues today to withhold vital information that scientists need to protect the world from this deadly virus, and the next one." The above shows this is a political statement. I happen to agree with this quote. It's also not, as the US administration likes to pretend, any sort of defense of their response to the pandemic. But at the same time, the presence of this quote makes it very clear that this is little more than a political, rather than a fact based statement intended to get to the truth. It also aligns with what Pompeo is doing in nearly every other delicate situation in the US over the past few weeks. Setting stuff on fire making it as difficult as possible for the incoming administration to deal with.

jariel 6y ago
It's not a political statement if it's factual. Or rather, it's 'always political between states' but the legitimacy of the facts give it credibility. China's initial dismissal and coverup of the spread of the virus, and their subsequent misinformation and lack of transparency, and finally, their attempts to stop an investigation into COVID origins are really seriously bad things. To boot - they've made a political appointment to the head of the WHO and have been trying to obtain leverage within that organization of years. It's actually reasonable that the US demands expulsion of China from the WHO on those grounds, until China plays be the rules. They can't claim 'it's an internal problem' as they always do here. Much like with currency and other things, if they want to be a part of these organizations they have to follow the rules.
- agnosticmantis 6y ago
  > It's not a political statement if it's factual. I think “The COVID-19 pandemic was avoidable. Any responsible country would have invited world health investigators to Wuhan within days of an outbreak.” is counterfactual by definition.

themark 6y ago

People should consider this claim with the same scrutiny as the claim that Russia was behind SolarWinds.

mhh__ 6y ago
I do find it slightly bizarre that on HN, a website run by ycombinator i.e. Americana, seemingly the Russians always get the benefit of the doubt. Similarly with the President actually. The politics here is quite hard to characterise.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Hacker News is a diverse website. It’s more than people who just go “China bad” and “Russia bad”.
- lsiebert 6y ago
  Personally I just give everything the Trump administration says high scrutiny. Just lie after lie, mistruth after mistruth, so that it's hard to believe anything that someone outside them doesn't back up. Especially on computer security... the absolute level of obvious falsehood and idiotic statements from Trump and his supporters about election security would be farcical if it wasn't so destructive to American democracy and democratic norms. But I believe that, while legitimate election security researchers have all basically said there is no reason to doubt the election or believe there was any sort of widespread fraud or abuse (and such statements conform to what was said in court, where lawyers can face consequences for stating falsehoods), legitimate computer security researchers outside the Trump Administration have pointed to Russia on the Solarwinds hack, so I give that claim more credence.

4ec0755f5522 6y ago

This article discusses how common it is to have accidents/mistakes in these types of research labs, I found it pretty interesting but cannot vouch for it (perhaps it's already been debunked?) https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...

raphlinus 6y ago
This article is bullshit and real virologists are angry it's getting so much attention: https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1346232195430510592 https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/13462321954305105... You may or may not have noticed, but there are some real problems we should be thinking about, including the very real probability that the B.1.1.7 variant is going to be much harder to suppress, and how to get our vaccination program on track. Instead we end up talking about these distractions that have much more speculation than evidence behind them.
- brippalcharrid 6y ago
  I'm curious as to why the arrival of developments like a new variant would make it appropriate to halt investigations into the original issue (like where can we find a physical sample of RaTG13, and why wasn't its sequence published until the beginning of last year?).
  - raphlinus 6y ago
    I don't think we should halt investigations. But the Baker article is not a serious investigation, it's a piece of pop-sci that is quite careless about scientific details. It is not helpful to those trying to understand the truth, but it might be an entertaining read or useful for other purposes.

eunos 6y ago

When I read the "teaser" of this announcement in a few UK tabloids (Daily Mail/Telegraph), the title seems bombastic ("UK diplomats brace for Pompeo's bombshell" or something like that). Yet for me the announcement seems lukewarm. The 3 points are rehash of theories that's been surfacing since March last year, it adds nothing new. I assume the announcement is made because Pompeo's want to stay relevant and WHO team has just arrived in China.