11 ms·

So, to summarize-the-summary: there are four possible theories: 1. Direct-jump from bat population 2. Started in bats, came to humans through intermediate ani

So, to summarize-the-summary: there are four possible theories: 1. Direct-jump from bat population 2. Started in bats, came to humans through intermediate animal 3. Came from frozen food outside of China 4. Lab accident. I used to think the lab accident theory was crazy, because it sounds like a science fiction movie. Not an impossible theory, just a crazy one. But according to this article, despite a year of investigation, (1) is unlikely because we haven't found anyone that interacted with the nearest bat population hundred of miles away that didn't work in the virus lab in Wuhan and that caught the virus, (2) is unlikely because we would have found the intermediate animal by now, (3) is unlikely because the first case found was in China (and not somewhere else... if frozen food had the virus, the food would have had it before it was frozen, and someone else would have had it), and (4) is unlikely because a government famous for blocking information and is paranoid about how it is perceived domestically and internationally says "No, trust us on this one." At some point, crazy theories become the most likely. Hopefully I'm wrong though, and they find an explanation that isn't "lab accident." It seems like we should be studying viruses and sharing that information with each other, and accidents like this will make it more likely that such research doesn't happen.

jsz0 6y ago
It wouldn't even be the first time Chinese labs have leaked dangerous pathogens so it's entirely plausible. People who reject the theory outright are just not living in a reality based world. It has happened before and it'll probably happen again.
- sampo 6y ago
  Here are some escape cases, from both West and East: https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Escaped-Viruses-final-2-17-14-copy.pdf https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Esc...
neuronic 6y ago
The lab accident isn't crazy. Happens in the West too, it's just something that will be politically weaponized against China if it were to admit it, although we just got lucky in the US and Europe before. Typical Western hypocrisy would be at play and China has no motivation whatsoever to subject itself to that. Also, SARS-1 escaped twice, in Singapore and Beijing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_laboratory_biosecurity#2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
- drran 6y ago
  You forgot about another country, which was not so lucky before, and which had an incident in their 4 level biolab just before the start of epidemic.
  - EMM_386 6y ago
    So that is more likely than a level 4 biolab that happened to be IN Wuhan and was being warned about by US State Department officials years before this happened? https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin-chaos-under-heaven-wuhan-lab-book-excerpt-474322 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...
    - drran 6y ago
      Yep. I cannot calculate exact numbers, but a similar incident happened already in the past: a blast at the disinfection site created an aerosol with virus particles, which caused infection. Distance doesn't matter so much in today's world, when cities are connected by planes.
    - drran 6y ago
      See investigation here (in Russian): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4Ny_TtcYc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4Ny_TtcYc8 . At 3:00 I see photo of typical Covid-19 lungs and description of typical Covid-19 symptoms at November 2019.
- twobitshifter 6y ago
  If China did allow this virus to escape, and covered it up shouldn’t they be held liable for trillions in economic damage, as well as compensation for victims around the world?
  - slightwinder 6y ago
    Why should china be held liable when it was the labs fails? Or even more specific someone in the lab? Would the USA be held liable when some lab fails? Is USA or even the company itself held liable for tech-companies fails on security or protecting privacy? I doubt there is some legal paragraph which would work here, even in International Law.
towergratis 6y ago
> I used to think the lab accident theory was crazy Accidents happen. Even if it was a lab accident, it's not a reason to be outraged with the Chinese government. I think in parallel to searching for the origin, they should also look into the reports that Chinese government tried to hid it under the carpet and only admitting that it couldn't control it after it was already spread all over the world. That's the real crime of the Chinese government in regards to Covid and that's what people should be outraged about. But yeah, good luck getting an unbiased report on that.
- AzzieElbab 6y ago
  But the cover up is the only way Chinese government could react. This property is embedded and immutable in this type of government.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  The problem is that this is proof that the slippery slope of social media censorship already has a causality. Twitter banned ZeroHedge, an irreverent but very well known financial website, for months just for pushing this theory. Yesterday’s crazy conspiracy theories become today’s plausibilities. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronav...
  - scythe 6y ago
    ZH singled out an individual and made statements that could subject him to harassment. That's not merely a case of having the wrong suspicions about globally significant events.
    - syrrim 6y ago
      >made statements that could subject him to harassment Not sure what said statements were, but as described, that is not at all a reason to ban someone. On the internet, legitimate criticism very frequently leads to harassment. That is not at all the fault of the critic, and as long as they didn't intend to cause harassment, it's no reason to ban them.
coding123 6y ago
What do all large countries not at war do? Prepare for war. Why would people think preparing for war be a crazy idea?
chmod600 6y ago
I think everyone knows that #4 is a plausible theory. But it's frustrating to see how the media played it as a conspiracy theory, which just discredits the media. Kind of like how they said that masks aren't helpful at first, with the ulterior (but noble) intention of preserving the mask supply for healthcare workers. It just reinforces the idea that misinformation is fine as long as it gets people to behave the "right" way, and only bad if it could cause someone to do something wrong.
- Touche 6y ago
  The media didn't treat #4 as a conspiracy theory. If you mean Tom Cotton's claims, he first implied it was intentional (later walked it back). He also was claiming it was a biological weapons lab. That's not what #4 is. It's always been accepted that #4 was possible.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Here's an example that was topping Google News the other day. https://www.businessinsider.com/former-cdc-director-redfield-coronavirus-leak-wuhan-lab-2021-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/former-cdc-director-redfield...
Touche 6y ago
I don't know why (1) is unlikely. We know that a lot of people have weak symptoms. We know that symptoms are similar to other diseases. If it were to start in a remote area you probably wouldn't notice it until it entered a big city.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  Would only take one person from a small village where the virus was otherwise burning itself out to travel to a big city. I think the Chinese's response was very good considering they had no warning. And western countries did far worse when they had 4-6 weeks of warning.
  - LudwigNagasena 6y ago
    When western countries had 4-6 weeks of warning they were running “hug a Chinese” campaigns instead of being advised to keep social distance with everyone.
Leary 6y ago
2 is not unlikely just because they haven't found the intermediate species. It took 4 years to find the immediate species in the case of SARS (2002->2006)
DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
> we haven't found anyone that interacted with the nearest bat population hundred of miles away This is simply untrue. People work and live in close proximity to bats throughout much of China and Southeast Asia, including in Yunnan province. The mine workers who got sick in Mojiang in 2012 (where RaTG13 was discovered) were literally cleaning out massive mounds of bat poop.[1] There is research that shows that a non-negligible fraction (up to a few percent) of the population in some areas of Yunnan province have antibodies to novel SARS-related coronaviruses.[2,3] Interestingly, it is not known how the people in these studies were infected, and before they were randomly tested for these studies, they were not aware that they had ever been infected. > is unlikely because we would have found the intermediate animal by now There's no reason to expect we'd have found the intermediate species by now. Finding intermediate hosts can be very difficult. For example, it took four decades to identify the likely host species of Ebola, and even so, there's still a huge amount of uncertainty about whether there are multiple host species, and how spillover occurs.[4] > (3) is unlikely because the first case found was in China The frozen food hypothesis that the WHO is looking at is that animals that were raised or caught in Yunnan province, slaughtered and frozen, and sent to Wuhan might have been carrying the virus. Option 4 is unlikely because nobody knew about this virus before it appeared in December 2019. The researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology work closely with international scientists (including in the US, Australia, France and Singapore). They regularly publish identifying RNA fragments of the viruses they discover. The viruses that they have isolated and cultured in the lab are well known, because they've published on them extensively, and because they collaborate with international researchers. They have only isolated three SARS-related coronaviruses (the vast majority of the viruses they discover are only detected as RNA fragments, not "live" virus particles), and those viruses are all much more closely related to the original SARS than they are to SARS-CoV-2. The reason for this is that before this pandemic, researchers focused their attention on viruses that were close to the original SARS (such as WIV-1[5,6]). SARS-CoV-2 and its closely related viruses would have been far less interesting to them. The lab leak theory really is a conspiracy theory, because it requires the scientists at WIV to have discovered a virus that they didn't tell anyone about, including their close collaborators abroad, for them to have secretly isolated it, for it to have escaped from a highly secure laboratory, and then for them to have covered it up. You can assert that all these things happened, but there's precisely zero evidence for it. The alternative is that one of the millions of people who regularly interact with animals that harbor SARS-related coronaviruses got infected, and that as is usually the case, it takes time and painstaking work to determine how, when and where that happened. 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2951-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2951-z 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ 3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590053619300308 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259005361... 4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4014719/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4014719/ 5. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711 6. https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048 https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048
phroobster 6y ago
A never before seen coronavirus was found just miles away from one of only two BSL-4 laboratories in all of China, which also happens to publish gain of function research on coronaviruses. I find it amusing that anyone can claim a lab accident origin is “crazy”.
- xienze 6y ago
  For some reason so many people are hung up on “lab accident” implying that it was a bioweapon made by China. And honestly the biggest reason why this theory is rejected is because Trump called it the China Virus, and lots of people have this “Trump said a thing, so I must be in direct opposition to it” reflex, creating a mental block on the possibility of China because responsible at some level.
- rhino369 6y ago
  Especially since US and European labs have had a lot of accidents that risked viruses escaping the lab. I really don't have any reason to believe or disbelieve it came from a lab. But that possibility certainly is not crazy.
  - drran 6y ago
    > Especially since US and European labs Hey, Russian Federation still exists on the map.
sudosysgen 6y ago
I don't see why 1) is unlikely - people that work with bats have antibodies to bat (corona)viruses already, and we know that even in a vacuum people often have very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. It's even more likely since the virus was probably not adapted to human hosts initially. 2) is also likely, for some viruses it took years and years, sometimes even more than a decade to find the actual intermediate animal. 4) is unlikely because further analysis cannot produce a likely scenario. If the virus was from an animal source known to the lab, we would know already, and if it was due to a gain-of-function experiment, it would be quite unlikely for the virus to take so much time to adapt to humans (it still hasn't fully done so), and there is still a lot of function to be gained. Besides, there is no obvious marker for genetic engineering (the furin cleavage sites are perfectly well described by both 1 and 2), and the fact the virus does not seem to be at a local optima yet indicates that it's probably not the result of engineering by repeated selection.
- fendy3002 6y ago
  That point 1 is interesting. Got any articles/papers?
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Here is an interesting one on the subject : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ They found 2.7% seropositivity simply for people living near bat colonies. There is also this event in mine workers that handled bats and bat dropping : https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.581569/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.5815... All in all, antibodies to bat coronaviruses to people in contact with bats are quite common.
- analyte123 6y ago
  It's not "quite unlikely" for a virus to adapt to humans when you are digging through a lab archive of wild coronaviruses and injecting mice that express human proteins with them to see how sick they get. For example the president of EcoHealth, which sponsored bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, raved in November 2019 about all the exciting work they were doing filtering bat coronaviruses and even recombinant viruses for ones that look like they could infect humans and infecting humanized mice with them [1]. Researchers at the same lab published a study in 2017 where they tested the infectivity of 8 artificial coronaviruses (having been edited with 8 different spike proteins) on primate and human cell lines [2]. [1] https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1197631383470034951?s=20 https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1197631383470034951?s... [2] https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698 https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... "Rescue of bat SARSr-CoVs and virus infectivity experiments"
pippy 6y ago
Immunor & St Georges University of London released a paper outlining evidence that SARS-CoV-2 Spike was artificial. The paper was criticised for going against the popular narrative. While I hope they're wrong, many researches dance around the topic. https://www.minervanett.no/files/2020/07/13/TheEvidenceNoNaturalEvol.pdf https://www.minervanett.no/files/2020/07/13/TheEvidenceNoNat...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
LudwigNagasena 6y ago
Viruses get out of labs all the time, what’s so crazy about it?
doopy1 6y ago
Lab leak always seemed like the most obvious strong possibility considering that Wuhan was the epicenter and the epic reaction.
bandushrew 6y ago
I keep wondering how long it would take for a new cold virus to be recognised as such here in NZ. When you think about how common the basic symptoms are, I think it could take quite a while before someone wondered whether it was different from the common cold and went testing. IMO Its a perfectly reasonable theory that it was spreading slowly through China for months, from some distant province, and it wasn't recognised as a new virus until it arrived somewhere there was the expertise to look at it in the right way. That would mean that the reason it was found in Wuhan and not anywhere else is just because Wuhan was the first place with people who had the expertise and the interest to investigate and figure out it was new. Whatever the truth is, that is just as good a theory as any other, and it explains the apparent evidence for the virus appearing a few months earlier in some countries.
gjvnq 6y ago
You might be interested in this document: Evidence SARS-CoV-2 Emerged From a Biological Laboratory in Wuhan, China. Available at: https://project-evidence.github.io/ https://project-evidence.github.io/
happyconcepts 6y ago
Why is option #5 never on the table for examination? Option 5: Bioweapon.
slightwinder 6y ago
How likely is a combination of them all? Like something harmless which escaped from the lab, and then mutated another harmless variation out there? > But according to this article, despite a year of investigation One year of investigation is not long, especially if you have a party who has a significant interesst to hinder your investigation into certain directions.
loceng 6y ago
There's tons of propaganda trying to diminish the likelihood of a lab leak (purposeful or a mistake). Watch this though - https://youtu.be/q5SRrsr-Iug https://youtu.be/q5SRrsr-Iug - and it's very clear that it likely originated from the Wuhan lab (they were studying those bats originating from 200 miles away + multiple markers in the genes showing human intervention/editing) - and that what's being promoted by these orgs into mainstream is gaslighting.

jsz0 6y ago

It wouldn't even be the first time Chinese labs have leaked dangerous pathogens so it's entirely plausible. People who reject the theory outright are just not living in a reality based world. It has happened before and it'll probably happen again.

sampo 6y ago
Here are some escape cases, from both West and East: https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Escaped-Viruses-final-2-17-14-copy.pdf https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Esc...

neuronic 6y ago

The lab accident isn't crazy. Happens in the West too, it's just something that will be politically weaponized against China if it were to admit it, although we just got lucky in the US and Europe before. Typical Western hypocrisy would be at play and China has no motivation whatsoever to subject itself to that. Also, SARS-1 escaped twice, in Singapore and Beijing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_laboratory_biosecurity#2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

drran 6y ago
You forgot about another country, which was not so lucky before, and which had an incident in their 4 level biolab just before the start of epidemic.
- EMM_386 6y ago
  So that is more likely than a level 4 biolab that happened to be IN Wuhan and was being warned about by US State Department officials years before this happened? https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin-chaos-under-heaven-wuhan-lab-book-excerpt-474322 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...
  - drran 6y ago
    Yep. I cannot calculate exact numbers, but a similar incident happened already in the past: a blast at the disinfection site created an aerosol with virus particles, which caused infection. Distance doesn't matter so much in today's world, when cities are connected by planes.
  - drran 6y ago
    See investigation here (in Russian): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4Ny_TtcYc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4Ny_TtcYc8 . At 3:00 I see photo of typical Covid-19 lungs and description of typical Covid-19 symptoms at November 2019.
twobitshifter 6y ago
If China did allow this virus to escape, and covered it up shouldn’t they be held liable for trillions in economic damage, as well as compensation for victims around the world?
- slightwinder 6y ago
  Why should china be held liable when it was the labs fails? Or even more specific someone in the lab? Would the USA be held liable when some lab fails? Is USA or even the company itself held liable for tech-companies fails on security or protecting privacy? I doubt there is some legal paragraph which would work here, even in International Law.

towergratis 6y ago

> I used to think the lab accident theory was crazy Accidents happen. Even if it was a lab accident, it's not a reason to be outraged with the Chinese government. I think in parallel to searching for the origin, they should also look into the reports that Chinese government tried to hid it under the carpet and only admitting that it couldn't control it after it was already spread all over the world. That's the real crime of the Chinese government in regards to Covid and that's what people should be outraged about. But yeah, good luck getting an unbiased report on that.

AzzieElbab 6y ago
But the cover up is the only way Chinese government could react. This property is embedded and immutable in this type of government.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
camjohnson26 6y ago
The problem is that this is proof that the slippery slope of social media censorship already has a causality. Twitter banned ZeroHedge, an irreverent but very well known financial website, for months just for pushing this theory. Yesterday’s crazy conspiracy theories become today’s plausibilities. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronav...
- scythe 6y ago
  ZH singled out an individual and made statements that could subject him to harassment. That's not merely a case of having the wrong suspicions about globally significant events.
  - syrrim 6y ago
    >made statements that could subject him to harassment Not sure what said statements were, but as described, that is not at all a reason to ban someone. On the internet, legitimate criticism very frequently leads to harassment. That is not at all the fault of the critic, and as long as they didn't intend to cause harassment, it's no reason to ban them.

coding123 6y ago

What do all large countries not at war do? Prepare for war. Why would people think preparing for war be a crazy idea?

chmod600 6y ago

I think everyone knows that #4 is a plausible theory. But it's frustrating to see how the media played it as a conspiracy theory, which just discredits the media. Kind of like how they said that masks aren't helpful at first, with the ulterior (but noble) intention of preserving the mask supply for healthcare workers. It just reinforces the idea that misinformation is fine as long as it gets people to behave the "right" way, and only bad if it could cause someone to do something wrong.

Touche 6y ago
The media didn't treat #4 as a conspiracy theory. If you mean Tom Cotton's claims, he first implied it was intentional (later walked it back). He also was claiming it was a biological weapons lab. That's not what #4 is. It's always been accepted that #4 was possible.
- tpmx 6y ago
  Here's an example that was topping Google News the other day. https://www.businessinsider.com/former-cdc-director-redfield-coronavirus-leak-wuhan-lab-2021-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/former-cdc-director-redfield...

Touche 6y ago

I don't know why (1) is unlikely. We know that a lot of people have weak symptoms. We know that symptoms are similar to other diseases. If it were to start in a remote area you probably wouldn't notice it until it entered a big city.

Gibbon1 6y ago
Would only take one person from a small village where the virus was otherwise burning itself out to travel to a big city. I think the Chinese's response was very good considering they had no warning. And western countries did far worse when they had 4-6 weeks of warning.
- LudwigNagasena 6y ago
  When western countries had 4-6 weeks of warning they were running “hug a Chinese” campaigns instead of being advised to keep social distance with everyone.

Leary 6y ago

2 is not unlikely just because they haven't found the intermediate species. It took 4 years to find the immediate species in the case of SARS (2002->2006)

DiogenesKynikos 6y ago

> we haven't found anyone that interacted with the nearest bat population hundred of miles away This is simply untrue. People work and live in close proximity to bats throughout much of China and Southeast Asia, including in Yunnan province. The mine workers who got sick in Mojiang in 2012 (where RaTG13 was discovered) were literally cleaning out massive mounds of bat poop.[1] There is research that shows that a non-negligible fraction (up to a few percent) of the population in some areas of Yunnan province have antibodies to novel SARS-related coronaviruses.[2,3] Interestingly, it is not known how the people in these studies were infected, and before they were randomly tested for these studies, they were not aware that they had ever been infected. > is unlikely because we would have found the intermediate animal by now There's no reason to expect we'd have found the intermediate species by now. Finding intermediate hosts can be very difficult. For example, it took four decades to identify the likely host species of Ebola, and even so, there's still a huge amount of uncertainty about whether there are multiple host species, and how spillover occurs.[4] > (3) is unlikely because the first case found was in China The frozen food hypothesis that the WHO is looking at is that animals that were raised or caught in Yunnan province, slaughtered and frozen, and sent to Wuhan might have been carrying the virus. Option 4 is unlikely because nobody knew about this virus before it appeared in December 2019. The researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology work closely with international scientists (including in the US, Australia, France and Singapore). They regularly publish identifying RNA fragments of the viruses they discover. The viruses that they have isolated and cultured in the lab are well known, because they've published on them extensively, and because they collaborate with international researchers. They have only isolated three SARS-related coronaviruses (the vast majority of the viruses they discover are only detected as RNA fragments, not "live" virus particles), and those viruses are all much more closely related to the original SARS than they are to SARS-CoV-2. The reason for this is that before this pandemic, researchers focused their attention on viruses that were close to the original SARS (such as WIV-1[5,6]). SARS-CoV-2 and its closely related viruses would have been far less interesting to them. The lab leak theory really is a conspiracy theory, because it requires the scientists at WIV to have discovered a virus that they didn't tell anyone about, including their close collaborators abroad, for them to have secretly isolated it, for it to have escaped from a highly secure laboratory, and then for them to have covered it up. You can assert that all these things happened, but there's precisely zero evidence for it. The alternative is that one of the millions of people who regularly interact with animals that harbor SARS-related coronaviruses got infected, and that as is usually the case, it takes time and painstaking work to determine how, when and where that happened. 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2951-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2951-z 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ 3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590053619300308 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259005361... 4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4014719/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4014719/ 5. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711 6. https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048 https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048

phroobster 6y ago

A never before seen coronavirus was found just miles away from one of only two BSL-4 laboratories in all of China, which also happens to publish gain of function research on coronaviruses. I find it amusing that anyone can claim a lab accident origin is “crazy”.

xienze 6y ago
For some reason so many people are hung up on “lab accident” implying that it was a bioweapon made by China. And honestly the biggest reason why this theory is rejected is because Trump called it the China Virus, and lots of people have this “Trump said a thing, so I must be in direct opposition to it” reflex, creating a mental block on the possibility of China because responsible at some level.
rhino369 6y ago
Especially since US and European labs have had a lot of accidents that risked viruses escaping the lab. I really don't have any reason to believe or disbelieve it came from a lab. But that possibility certainly is not crazy.
- drran 6y ago
  > Especially since US and European labs Hey, Russian Federation still exists on the map.

sudosysgen 6y ago

I don't see why 1) is unlikely - people that work with bats have antibodies to bat (corona)viruses already, and we know that even in a vacuum people often have very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. It's even more likely since the virus was probably not adapted to human hosts initially. 2) is also likely, for some viruses it took years and years, sometimes even more than a decade to find the actual intermediate animal. 4) is unlikely because further analysis cannot produce a likely scenario. If the virus was from an animal source known to the lab, we would know already, and if it was due to a gain-of-function experiment, it would be quite unlikely for the virus to take so much time to adapt to humans (it still hasn't fully done so), and there is still a lot of function to be gained. Besides, there is no obvious marker for genetic engineering (the furin cleavage sites are perfectly well described by both 1 and 2), and the fact the virus does not seem to be at a local optima yet indicates that it's probably not the result of engineering by repeated selection.

fendy3002 6y ago
That point 1 is interesting. Got any articles/papers?
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Here is an interesting one on the subject : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ They found 2.7% seropositivity simply for people living near bat colonies. There is also this event in mine workers that handled bats and bat dropping : https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.581569/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.5815... All in all, antibodies to bat coronaviruses to people in contact with bats are quite common.
analyte123 6y ago
It's not "quite unlikely" for a virus to adapt to humans when you are digging through a lab archive of wild coronaviruses and injecting mice that express human proteins with them to see how sick they get. For example the president of EcoHealth, which sponsored bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, raved in November 2019 about all the exciting work they were doing filtering bat coronaviruses and even recombinant viruses for ones that look like they could infect humans and infecting humanized mice with them [1]. Researchers at the same lab published a study in 2017 where they tested the infectivity of 8 artificial coronaviruses (having been edited with 8 different spike proteins) on primate and human cell lines [2]. [1] https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1197631383470034951?s=20 https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1197631383470034951?s... [2] https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698 https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... "Rescue of bat SARSr-CoVs and virus infectivity experiments"

pippy 6y ago

Immunor & St Georges University of London released a paper outlining evidence that SARS-CoV-2 Spike was artificial. The paper was criticised for going against the popular narrative. While I hope they're wrong, many researches dance around the topic. https://www.minervanett.no/files/2020/07/13/TheEvidenceNoNaturalEvol.pdf https://www.minervanett.no/files/2020/07/13/TheEvidenceNoNat...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

LudwigNagasena 6y ago

Viruses get out of labs all the time, what’s so crazy about it?

doopy1 6y ago

Lab leak always seemed like the most obvious strong possibility considering that Wuhan was the epicenter and the epic reaction.

bandushrew 6y ago

I keep wondering how long it would take for a new cold virus to be recognised as such here in NZ. When you think about how common the basic symptoms are, I think it could take quite a while before someone wondered whether it was different from the common cold and went testing. IMO Its a perfectly reasonable theory that it was spreading slowly through China for months, from some distant province, and it wasn't recognised as a new virus until it arrived somewhere there was the expertise to look at it in the right way. That would mean that the reason it was found in Wuhan and not anywhere else is just because Wuhan was the first place with people who had the expertise and the interest to investigate and figure out it was new. Whatever the truth is, that is just as good a theory as any other, and it explains the apparent evidence for the virus appearing a few months earlier in some countries.

gjvnq 6y ago

You might be interested in this document: Evidence SARS-CoV-2 Emerged From a Biological Laboratory in Wuhan, China. Available at: https://project-evidence.github.io/ https://project-evidence.github.io/

happyconcepts 6y ago

Why is option #5 never on the table for examination? Option 5: Bioweapon.

slightwinder 6y ago

How likely is a combination of them all? Like something harmless which escaped from the lab, and then mutated another harmless variation out there? > But according to this article, despite a year of investigation One year of investigation is not long, especially if you have a party who has a significant interesst to hinder your investigation into certain directions.

loceng 6y ago

There's tons of propaganda trying to diminish the likelihood of a lab leak (purposeful or a mistake). Watch this though - https://youtu.be/q5SRrsr-Iug https://youtu.be/q5SRrsr-Iug - and it's very clear that it likely originated from the Wuhan lab (they were studying those bats originating from 200 miles away + multiple markers in the genes showing human intervention/editing) - and that what's being promoted by these orgs into mainstream is gaslighting.