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"... proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence." "The natura

"... proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence." "The natural emergence theory battles a bristling array of implausibilities." This is a fantastic article, but amazingly almost all of it is year-old news. Most of this was known in March 2020, and nearly all of it by the end of 2020. How does it take so long for the truth to win? I published a meta-analysis covering much of the same ground in November 2020 and this was only after waiting and expecting for several months that someone with a better platform would do so first. The article above covers the most important points but the story does go deeper: https://followtheplot.org/covid19 https://followtheplot.org/covid19

shoto_io 5y ago
Well, I can relate to that. Most of 2020 we were focused on fighting the aftermath of the crisis. Now that things slowly are getting back to normal, at least in some Western countries, our focus shifts to the origins. I was also very skeptical in the beginning about the escape theory tbh. But after reading a couple of pieces I’m opening up to the possibility.
- unanswered 5y ago
  And how does this justify moral superiority to those of us who understood from the beginning that the lab hypothesis was the most likely? Or was that not true until you decided it was true?
  - roenxi 5y ago
    People aren't interested in whether you were right or not, what matters is the probability you will be right in the future. A body wandering around saying "I was right" is likely to get ignored, because people assume they were unreasonable and lucky, and therefore unlikely to be a good source of information in the future. Besides, it doesn't really matter. Lab accidents were going to happen and are going to happen regardless of where COVID came from. China as a nation isn't exactly responsible and whatever people do next will be more about geopolitics than about details like the virus' genesis. And a natural origin can't be ruled out either.
    - yonaguska 5y ago
      > Lab accidents were going to happen and are going to happen regardless of where COVID came from. China as a nation isn't exactly responsible and whatever people do next will be more about geopolitics than about details like the virus' genesis. The Wuhan lab where this supposedly originated from was a BSL-4 lab. These aren't accidents, this is negligence. The lab had safety problems and wasn't meeting BSL-4 requirements. Chinese researchers at the lab raised concerns about lack of qualified technicians, and lack of resources. This is negligence. If the Wuhan BSL-4 lab was the source of Covid-19, this is absolutely the fault of China. No one is blaming Chinese people or Chinese citizens for this, but China as a government is responsible. Furthermore, it does matter. Finding the source matters. If nothing changes, and root causes aren't fixed, it will happen again. Just dismissing this as an inevitability is a dangerous attitude.
      - roenxi 5y ago
        Pandemics are inevitable, we have a near miss every decade or so. Some of them will be near hits whether or not COVID came from a lab. COVID doesn't even seem to be that bad vs. some of the ones that occurred naturally - look at AIDS. I dunno, what do you think someone outside China can do if it turns out to be a lab leak? If anyone had any ability to influence China's policy, stopping COVID is meaningless compared to efforts promoting peace in the South China Sea which is a much bigger threat. The next big war will be devastating in a way that makes COVID look like the good old days.
    - jcims 5y ago
      >People aren't interested in whether you were right or not, what matters is the probability you will be right in the future. All of this is speculative re: COVID right now, but in the general case how would (royal) you know the probability of someone being right in the future if you don't investigate why they were right in the first place? Or, maybe more importantly why you were wrong? For example, if Fox News and Alex Jones come out in 4 hours after the first outbreak screaming "IT ESCAPED FROM A LAB IN WUHAN!!!", does that in any way influence what the scientific and medical communities are likely to explore? If you're directing resources for the WHO and you're 50/50 thinking of sending investigators to the lab or the wet markets, does this bias your decision at all? My guess is yes.
  - moralestapia 5y ago
    I remember a year ago you couldn't even MENTION the possibility of COVID having an artificial origin without being labelled a crazy conspiracy theorist. Funny how "smart and educated" people can be so dumb and close-minded in reality.
  - dang 5y ago
    Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. This is a noticeable step in the wrong direction. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
koheripbal 5y ago
Unfortunately, the reality is that we have no new data on the origin of covid-19. No on-the-ground analysis has been allowed in China.
- jerf 5y ago
  As this is now over a year later, this is a data point. It isn't proof. But it is a data point, not lack of data.
- raducu 5y ago
  But the article explains why no data actually leads credence to the lab-escape hypothesis. For SARS and MERS we had data within months. We don't have data on animals because it was a lab-escape event. The claim that lab workers got flu-like symptoms in late 2019 blew my mind. I wish I had time to investigate myself, but I'm 90% convinced that the reporter is correct and this is a lab-escape event.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    "The U.S. 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." US government had many perverse reasons to believe things that turned out to be false. I'm putting exactly zero trust in what US government says about what happens or happened in other countries especially those deemed by them as adversarial. And even if such thing happened it's way more probable that it was just common seasonal illness.
- bedhead 5y ago
  I mean, doesn't that alone kinda point us in one direction?
fossuser 5y ago
What bothers me about it is not only did it take a long time for the “truth to win”, but mainstream media orgs actively suppressed it because of tribal stupidity. It was used as an example of “fake news”: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/technology/biden-reality-crisis-misinformation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/technology/biden-reality-... > “ Hoaxes, lies and collective delusions aren’t new, but the extent to which millions of Americans have embraced them may be. Thirty percent of Republicans have a favorable view of QAnon, according to a recent YouGov poll. According to other polls, more than 70 percent of Republicans believe Mr. Trump legitimately won the election, and 40 percent of Americans — including plenty of Democrats — believe the baseless theory that Covid-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab.” What makes my blood boil about this is the NYT is supposed to be able to tell the difference - this kind of self righteous stupidity explains the rise of trump and distrust of media orgs more than anything else, it’s what lays the groundwork for baseless conspiracy. Yes there were dumb conspiracies about a manufactured and intentionally released bio weapon, but the accidental release from the lab that actually exists and studies these exact viruses in Wuhan and the additional context of the lies from the CCP about the Pangolin (and just general suspicious blocking of access) made it a reasonable hypothesis. What irony that in a piece pushing support for a “reality czar” (presumably to censor certain stories?) is the position of the NYT so divorced from reality itself. Pair this with the WHO rep being afraid to say the word Taiwan and it looks bad there too: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-taiwan-idUSKBN27P1SL https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-ta... In a lot of ways it feels like the west is under constant attack from disinformation and self-inflicted censorship (movies, Apple, nba, etc. all afraid to be critical of the CCP) and doesn’t even realize what’s going on. I think the CCP understands what they’re doing. This is an ideological war, we’re already under attack, and the west is losing. The CCP (and Russia to a lesser extent) understand where our vulnerabilities lie and they’re exploiting them. Edit: Whenever this comment reaches +1 it’s quickly downvoted to -2, dang - if you see this do you have a way to tell if this is legitimate (users behaving as they wish to) or something else? I only consistently see this behavior on comments that mention the CCP.
- TrispusAttucks 5y ago
  Exactly! 2020 will be forever the year I lost total trust in mainstream media. It's one thing to just "get it wrong" it's an entirely different thing when the powers that be are actively trying to promote a false narrative. And then to turn around and label actual journalism and truth seeking as "conspiracy-theorist" and "crack pots" it is just too much to bear. Filling the news with endless critiques and shaming of the proper way and material of mask to wear but deflect any attempts at uncovering, How the Hell this thing Started in the First Place! They have become the anti-thesis of news and journalism and a driving force of division in the United States. A pillar of democracy and free speech has become the thing it was intended to prevent and is now firmly a Fifth Column [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_column https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_column
adrianb 5y ago
One reason this theory is becoming more mainstream lately is the lack of results looking for the natural reservoir of the virus after more than 1 year of searching and an amazing number of animals tested all over China.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
scotty79 5y ago
Or you can look at this and say that nothing more convincing was found to support this idea in a year so it isn't any more feasible explanation than it was a year ago when we didn't know anything about this virus and how easily it mutates to infect humans easier. And it mutates a lot, perfectly spontaneously.
trompetenaccoun 5y ago
Your article mentions the "Wuhan Institute of Virology", which one also finds named in a couple of news articles and scientific publications. However what is rarely discussed is that the Wuhan CDC (武汉市疾病预防控制中心), which also has a virus lab and was also researching coronaviruses is in walking distance from that wet market! I took a screenshot of it, in the top right is the Huanan Seafood Market, in the bottom the CDC, which includes a virus lab: https://i.imgur.com/smODVQe.png https://i.imgur.com/smODVQe.png Unfortunately you won't find it on Google Maps but anyone who is able to read Chinese can check this themselves. All the early cases were centered around this area, including the hospital that treated the first cases. It's absurd that this is almost never talked about anywhere. On the CDC website they had an open position looking for a researcher to study, among others, exactly the kind of bat CoV that's been identified as most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. This has since been deleted but it could still be accessed during the early days of the outbreak.
IIAOPSW 5y ago
Below the surface level question of "did it escape a lab" is the question of why that matters to people. Both escaping a lab and evolving naturally in the wild are in essence freak accidents. A roll of the cosmic dice. A bristling array of implausibilities. What difference does it make that we got unlucky in this way as opposed to that way? Would the logical conclusion from the "escaped a lab" theory be that China shouldn't be allowed to have virology research? Should any nation? Who gets to decide? Exactly what actionable conclusion depends on knowing if the origin of the virus was a lab or not? There are maybe one in a dozen proponents of the lab theory that are legitimately interested in these questions. For the remaining 11 out of 12, the Wuhan Lab theory is just a belief that they wear in public to signal "China bad". An alarming number of people think China created the virus and released it on purpose. I once heard someone say China released the virus just to prove that our healthcare system is bad. Let me highlight the absurdity here. This person believes China engineered a virus and then released it on their own people in a city most foreigners were unaware of so that it would eventually make it to the US. They did all this just to prove some politically left point about socialized healthcare. That's not a real belief about how the world works. That's thinly veiled "I hate liberals and China". Most of these people are trying to reach a conclusion that the world should punish China with sanctions or (in extreme cases) war. More than a few of them are using the lab theory as a fig leaf over blatant racism. There's a huge overlap between people who believe the lab theory and people who insist on calling it the "China virus" or "Wuhan Flu". That's not a coincidence. In short, the majority of the people agreeing with your theory aren't actually on your side. When you say "How does it take so long for the truth to win?", they have a very different idea of what "the truth" means. Don't give them legitimacy or talking points. Being honest about the lab theory in the face of people who will use your words dishonestly is a fools errand. Don't be the fool who thinks he can be nuanced enough to pull it off. Until you know you are talking with someone who cares about the lab theory for the right reasons, the correct thing to say is "it absolutely evolved naturally and did not escape a lab".
- RC_ITR 5y ago
  I know you’re trying to be high minded, but yes if it escaped from a lab, China should stop doing independent unsupervised virology. Full stop. EDIT: If a kid crashes a car, you sure as hell are going to make them take more driving lessons before letting them drive again. And hearing them then say “it was a cosmic accident, why should anyone be allowed to drive” is not going to absolve them of negligence

shoto_io 5y ago

Well, I can relate to that. Most of 2020 we were focused on fighting the aftermath of the crisis. Now that things slowly are getting back to normal, at least in some Western countries, our focus shifts to the origins. I was also very skeptical in the beginning about the escape theory tbh. But after reading a couple of pieces I’m opening up to the possibility.

unanswered 5y ago
And how does this justify moral superiority to those of us who understood from the beginning that the lab hypothesis was the most likely? Or was that not true until you decided it was true?
- roenxi 5y ago
  People aren't interested in whether you were right or not, what matters is the probability you will be right in the future. A body wandering around saying "I was right" is likely to get ignored, because people assume they were unreasonable and lucky, and therefore unlikely to be a good source of information in the future. Besides, it doesn't really matter. Lab accidents were going to happen and are going to happen regardless of where COVID came from. China as a nation isn't exactly responsible and whatever people do next will be more about geopolitics than about details like the virus' genesis. And a natural origin can't be ruled out either.
  - yonaguska 5y ago
    > Lab accidents were going to happen and are going to happen regardless of where COVID came from. China as a nation isn't exactly responsible and whatever people do next will be more about geopolitics than about details like the virus' genesis. The Wuhan lab where this supposedly originated from was a BSL-4 lab. These aren't accidents, this is negligence. The lab had safety problems and wasn't meeting BSL-4 requirements. Chinese researchers at the lab raised concerns about lack of qualified technicians, and lack of resources. This is negligence. If the Wuhan BSL-4 lab was the source of Covid-19, this is absolutely the fault of China. No one is blaming Chinese people or Chinese citizens for this, but China as a government is responsible. Furthermore, it does matter. Finding the source matters. If nothing changes, and root causes aren't fixed, it will happen again. Just dismissing this as an inevitability is a dangerous attitude.
    - roenxi 5y ago
      Pandemics are inevitable, we have a near miss every decade or so. Some of them will be near hits whether or not COVID came from a lab. COVID doesn't even seem to be that bad vs. some of the ones that occurred naturally - look at AIDS. I dunno, what do you think someone outside China can do if it turns out to be a lab leak? If anyone had any ability to influence China's policy, stopping COVID is meaningless compared to efforts promoting peace in the South China Sea which is a much bigger threat. The next big war will be devastating in a way that makes COVID look like the good old days.
  - jcims 5y ago
    >People aren't interested in whether you were right or not, what matters is the probability you will be right in the future. All of this is speculative re: COVID right now, but in the general case how would (royal) you know the probability of someone being right in the future if you don't investigate why they were right in the first place? Or, maybe more importantly why you were wrong? For example, if Fox News and Alex Jones come out in 4 hours after the first outbreak screaming "IT ESCAPED FROM A LAB IN WUHAN!!!", does that in any way influence what the scientific and medical communities are likely to explore? If you're directing resources for the WHO and you're 50/50 thinking of sending investigators to the lab or the wet markets, does this bias your decision at all? My guess is yes.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  I remember a year ago you couldn't even MENTION the possibility of COVID having an artificial origin without being labelled a crazy conspiracy theorist. Funny how "smart and educated" people can be so dumb and close-minded in reality.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. This is a noticeable step in the wrong direction. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

koheripbal 5y ago

Unfortunately, the reality is that we have no new data on the origin of covid-19. No on-the-ground analysis has been allowed in China.

jerf 5y ago
As this is now over a year later, this is a data point. It isn't proof. But it is a data point, not lack of data.
raducu 5y ago
But the article explains why no data actually leads credence to the lab-escape hypothesis. For SARS and MERS we had data within months. We don't have data on animals because it was a lab-escape event. The claim that lab workers got flu-like symptoms in late 2019 blew my mind. I wish I had time to investigate myself, but I'm 90% convinced that the reporter is correct and this is a lab-escape event.
- scotty79 5y ago
  "The U.S. 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." US government had many perverse reasons to believe things that turned out to be false. I'm putting exactly zero trust in what US government says about what happens or happened in other countries especially those deemed by them as adversarial. And even if such thing happened it's way more probable that it was just common seasonal illness.
bedhead 5y ago
I mean, doesn't that alone kinda point us in one direction?

fossuser 5y ago

What bothers me about it is not only did it take a long time for the “truth to win”, but mainstream media orgs actively suppressed it because of tribal stupidity. It was used as an example of “fake news”: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/technology/biden-reality-crisis-misinformation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/technology/biden-reality-... > “ Hoaxes, lies and collective delusions aren’t new, but the extent to which millions of Americans have embraced them may be. Thirty percent of Republicans have a favorable view of QAnon, according to a recent YouGov poll. According to other polls, more than 70 percent of Republicans believe Mr. Trump legitimately won the election, and 40 percent of Americans — including plenty of Democrats — believe the baseless theory that Covid-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab.” What makes my blood boil about this is the NYT is supposed to be able to tell the difference - this kind of self righteous stupidity explains the rise of trump and distrust of media orgs more than anything else, it’s what lays the groundwork for baseless conspiracy. Yes there were dumb conspiracies about a manufactured and intentionally released bio weapon, but the accidental release from the lab that actually exists and studies these exact viruses in Wuhan and the additional context of the lies from the CCP about the Pangolin (and just general suspicious blocking of access) made it a reasonable hypothesis. What irony that in a piece pushing support for a “reality czar” (presumably to censor certain stories?) is the position of the NYT so divorced from reality itself. Pair this with the WHO rep being afraid to say the word Taiwan and it looks bad there too: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-taiwan-idUSKBN27P1SL https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-ta... In a lot of ways it feels like the west is under constant attack from disinformation and self-inflicted censorship (movies, Apple, nba, etc. all afraid to be critical of the CCP) and doesn’t even realize what’s going on. I think the CCP understands what they’re doing. This is an ideological war, we’re already under attack, and the west is losing. The CCP (and Russia to a lesser extent) understand where our vulnerabilities lie and they’re exploiting them. Edit: Whenever this comment reaches +1 it’s quickly downvoted to -2, dang - if you see this do you have a way to tell if this is legitimate (users behaving as they wish to) or something else? I only consistently see this behavior on comments that mention the CCP.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago
Exactly! 2020 will be forever the year I lost total trust in mainstream media. It's one thing to just "get it wrong" it's an entirely different thing when the powers that be are actively trying to promote a false narrative. And then to turn around and label actual journalism and truth seeking as "conspiracy-theorist" and "crack pots" it is just too much to bear. Filling the news with endless critiques and shaming of the proper way and material of mask to wear but deflect any attempts at uncovering, How the Hell this thing Started in the First Place! They have become the anti-thesis of news and journalism and a driving force of division in the United States. A pillar of democracy and free speech has become the thing it was intended to prevent and is now firmly a Fifth Column [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_column https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_column

adrianb 5y ago

One reason this theory is becoming more mainstream lately is the lack of results looking for the natural reservoir of the virus after more than 1 year of searching and an amazing number of animals tested all over China.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

scotty79 5y ago

Or you can look at this and say that nothing more convincing was found to support this idea in a year so it isn't any more feasible explanation than it was a year ago when we didn't know anything about this virus and how easily it mutates to infect humans easier. And it mutates a lot, perfectly spontaneously.

trompetenaccoun 5y ago

Your article mentions the "Wuhan Institute of Virology", which one also finds named in a couple of news articles and scientific publications. However what is rarely discussed is that the Wuhan CDC (武汉市疾病预防控制中心), which also has a virus lab and was also researching coronaviruses is in walking distance from that wet market! I took a screenshot of it, in the top right is the Huanan Seafood Market, in the bottom the CDC, which includes a virus lab: https://i.imgur.com/smODVQe.png https://i.imgur.com/smODVQe.png Unfortunately you won't find it on Google Maps but anyone who is able to read Chinese can check this themselves. All the early cases were centered around this area, including the hospital that treated the first cases. It's absurd that this is almost never talked about anywhere. On the CDC website they had an open position looking for a researcher to study, among others, exactly the kind of bat CoV that's been identified as most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. This has since been deleted but it could still be accessed during the early days of the outbreak.

IIAOPSW 5y ago

Below the surface level question of "did it escape a lab" is the question of why that matters to people. Both escaping a lab and evolving naturally in the wild are in essence freak accidents. A roll of the cosmic dice. A bristling array of implausibilities. What difference does it make that we got unlucky in this way as opposed to that way? Would the logical conclusion from the "escaped a lab" theory be that China shouldn't be allowed to have virology research? Should any nation? Who gets to decide? Exactly what actionable conclusion depends on knowing if the origin of the virus was a lab or not? There are maybe one in a dozen proponents of the lab theory that are legitimately interested in these questions. For the remaining 11 out of 12, the Wuhan Lab theory is just a belief that they wear in public to signal "China bad". An alarming number of people think China created the virus and released it on purpose. I once heard someone say China released the virus just to prove that our healthcare system is bad. Let me highlight the absurdity here. This person believes China engineered a virus and then released it on their own people in a city most foreigners were unaware of so that it would eventually make it to the US. They did all this just to prove some politically left point about socialized healthcare. That's not a real belief about how the world works. That's thinly veiled "I hate liberals and China". Most of these people are trying to reach a conclusion that the world should punish China with sanctions or (in extreme cases) war. More than a few of them are using the lab theory as a fig leaf over blatant racism. There's a huge overlap between people who believe the lab theory and people who insist on calling it the "China virus" or "Wuhan Flu". That's not a coincidence. In short, the majority of the people agreeing with your theory aren't actually on your side. When you say "How does it take so long for the truth to win?", they have a very different idea of what "the truth" means. Don't give them legitimacy or talking points. Being honest about the lab theory in the face of people who will use your words dishonestly is a fools errand. Don't be the fool who thinks he can be nuanced enough to pull it off. Until you know you are talking with someone who cares about the lab theory for the right reasons, the correct thing to say is "it absolutely evolved naturally and did not escape a lab".

RC_ITR 5y ago
I know you’re trying to be high minded, but yes if it escaped from a lab, China should stop doing independent unsupervised virology. Full stop. EDIT: If a kid crashes a car, you sure as hell are going to make them take more driving lessons before letting them drive again. And hearing them then say “it was a cosmic accident, why should anyone be allowed to drive” is not going to absolve them of negligence