11 ms·

If the Lab-Leak Theory Is Right, What’s Next?

economusty 5y ago
Hunter biden joins the board of the lab.
- blumomo 5y ago
  Conspiracy!
recursivedoubts 5y ago
Well, first and foremost, perhaps the media could pause and reflect on their treatment of anyone who raised the lab leak hypothesis for the past year. And, were any humility to arise out of that exercise, perhaps they could direct that newfound and unfamiliar trait towards some other things they currently dismiss as "conspiracy theories".
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > Well, first and foremost, perhaps the media could pause and reflect on their treatment of anyone who raised the lab leak hypothesis for the past year. Most didn't stop at "maybe this escaped from the lab in Wuhan", but went down the real rabbit hole accusing the Chinese government of manufacturing and releasing a bioweapon. In any case there won't be any proof ever for any origin theory, the Chinese government has made certain of that.
  - jghn 5y ago
    This is precisely why it is so touchy. There’s been a strong correlation between people who believe lab leak and people who believe the Chinese were doing something bad. As an anecdote, someone recently asked me if we could tell if the COVID genome had come via animals/natural origin or engineered in some way. I said that most likely, yes that should be possible. Their immediate reaction was that this meant I didn’t believe in lab leak. That’s not at all what I had said
    - pjc50 5y ago
      > if we could tell if the COVID genome had come via animals/natural origin or engineered in some way. I said that most likely, yes that should be possible How?
      - garblegarble 5y ago
        There's quite a comprehensive document compiled by a virologist on reddit discussing what the options for engineering would be, and what traces they would leave, I found it quite interesting: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kAHSEx9-eIyVIahczH8itHaUm9jI9WX7/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kAHSEx9-eIyVIahczH8itHaUm9j...
        baybal2 5y ago
        No engineering, I want to underline it. This is not precluding a natural virus leak with, or without gain of function experiment involvement. Current facts on the ground: - 1st response to CoVID occurrence was certainly in Wuhan. - The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan - Wuhan had two institutes which, on record, did gain of function experiments on bat coronaviruses - SARS had a record of lab escapes past the previous pandemic even without live animal hosts.
        jghn 5y ago
        The story with the miners[1] has caught my attention. A group of miners fell ill w/ a SARS-like virus via bat droppings. In retrospect it sounds a heck of a lot like COVID. Wuhan was known to have investigated the case. Perhaps a researcher manages to get infected, or something like that. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7606707/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7606707/
      - jghn 5y ago
        garblegarble's link explains it better than I could, but the tl;dr is that there are patterns that occur with natural evolution. Messing with those patterns would look, well, unnatural.
  - yanderekko 5y ago
    >Most didn't stop at "maybe this escaped from the lab in Wuhan", but went down the real rabbit hole accusing the Chinese government of manufacturing and releasing a bioweapon. I don't think it's fair to say that "most" of these people thought it was deliberately released, whether or not they believed it was a bioweapon.
- slightwinder 5y ago
  To be fair, the lab-theory was hijacked from the beginning by conspiracy-believers who told everyone it was a bio-weapon and released on purpose. The idea of an accidential leak of reasearch-material is poisoned till today, because any hint of a proof will be fuel for the nutheads. And at the moment there many nutheads and racists aiming at asians because of the pandemia.
  - yostrovs 5y ago
    To be fair, you are exactly the type that the parent comment was referring to... People that effortlessly dismiss reasonable ideas. You add smears of racism on top of it to make sure the side that you disagree with is hated. Please reflect as the parent comment suggests.
    - yanderekko 5y ago
      Precisely. "This theory is popular with crazy racists" leads to "if you believe this then I am forced to assume that you're a crazy racist and disparage you accordingly" pretty effortlessly in 2021. This sort of bad-faith ad hominem is the real problem.
    - duckfang 5y ago
      You can say that, but I've heard the diatribes that the "China virus" was because they were playing with 5G and viruses and it escaped into bats and those chinamen ate the bats and...(cringe). Just go look up the conspiracies if you think I'm out of line - this is the mild version. Most of the mouthbreathers talking earlier about the "China virus" labs was predominately with pro-trump, anti-vaxxer, anti-masker individuals (well, starting with trump first). It was political grandstanding at its best, combined with 'us vs them' mentality, and a hefty scooping of conspiracy theory. So yes, the bulk of us thinking peoples justly figured this was what it appeared to be: yet another Anti-Chinese diatribe done by a white nationalist conspiracy nut (aka: trump).
      - eplanit 5y ago
        Your comment makes mostrovs point in the comment above.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  The response to "conspiracy theories" is: show us your proof. Otherwise we will wait to give it any credibility. If time and data prove out your claims, then we will give it the proper attention it has earned. (ie, science > social media)
  - jtdev 5y ago
    The media didn’t ask for proof of animal origin… in fact the media largely ran with animal origin with zero evidence to back that up. There’s always been more evidence to support the lab leak theory for those paying attention.
    - bdcravens 5y ago
      The problem with "more evidence" is that much of it has been hearsay. Person A tells person B something. Person B repeats person A's claim to person C. Person A then talks to person C, and person C says it must be true because they've heard it from multiple sources. I have no doubt there's good evidence pointing to the lab leak origin, but virtually everything I've been exposed to over the last year are typically rumors or graphics shared on social media. Hearing something a lot doesn't give it additional credibility.
    - bdcravens 5y ago
      According to the article, it's both: "researchers had assembled an archive of cave-bat-borne coronaviruses" Researchers were studying viruses that had an animal origin. The lab leak would be from not following proper safety protocols.
      - jtdev 5y ago
        Ah yes, the phrasing tricks have been a media favorite when discussing covid origins… conflating lab origin with natural origin through the almost certainty that the viral material used at the WIV originated in nature is pure intellectual dishonesty.
      - bingbong70 5y ago
- arbitrage 5y ago
  the media has an interest in being right with their reporting. they won't apologise and say they were wrong; why would their customers continue reading & sharing their content if they're so fallible? it's perverted interests and motivations.
  - JoBrad 5y ago
    Respected media outlets frequently post retractions. That’s part of what makes them respectable, and attracts readers who are looking for honest reporting.
- moolcool 5y ago
  There's legitimate stories where there's a lot of smoke, and a lot of credible speculation (the Epstein story and lab-leak theory are two good examples). The problem is that these get coopted by qanon and affiliated groups and start to become less credible in the public eye as a result. There's some tragic irony to the fact that potentially well-meaning crackpots are being used as a smokescreen for those who are actually doing wrong.
  - scarmig 5y ago
    This isn't about the public eye, primarily. It's about the "expert" voices in media who report on these things. Most of what can reasonably called the mainstream media was misrepresenting lab leak theories as racist QAnon ramblings for a year before it entered the "it's okay to believe this" realm. This kind of dismissal ends up being the default mode for any idea which doesn't fall within a very narrow approved view of reality.
  - slibhb 5y ago
    This is not what happens. What happens is, people discuss something plausible for which there exists circumstantial evidence (e.g. lab leak theory). Then, the media, left and right, pretends it has defininitve answers and uses "q anon" as an excuse to claim the plausible theory is wrong.
    - moolcool 5y ago
      Why can't both be true? Actual qanon types absolutely latch on to stories like this-- kind of a broken clock situation.
      - slibhb 5y ago
        Why do we care about q anon? Why has this tiny group of flat-earthers (at least half of whom are probably screwing around on the internet) become nationally known?
        moolcool 5y ago
- dstroot 5y ago
  Media’s role is to a) entertain us, or b) inform us. Under a: say whatever gets you clicks. Period. Under b: hypotheses and theories cannot be reported as truths. Hard evidence is needed. There are two ways a virus evolves- naturally or guided/engineered. Without proof of the latter it is safe to assume former. No humility needed. If/when we have evidence of latter we can now report that.
- throwawayzRUU6f 5y ago
  This has been the saddest part of the pandemic to me. The epistemology of health policy is completely broken - fully reliant on arguments from authority, impervious to contrary evidence, initial beliefs clutched onto until the bitter end. Opinion makers are unable to distinguish between entertaining an idea and embracing it. This lead to predictable debacles on mask usage, airborne spread, everyone's pet theories of innate population immunity, seasonality of the virus, virus origins, etc. And yet - there are zero calls for introspection, blameless post-mortems. Nobody seems to care.
  - loopz 5y ago
    This is just "bread and circus". Those who look deeper down will see more going on underneath the layers of policymaking. Though, the real workers will need support for new ideas and improvements later.
  - recursivedoubts 5y ago
    tragically underrated post i view the last decade (perhaps two) as a complete shattering of nearly all epistemology and social trust we are all now wandering in a forest of mirrors or perhaps, rather, this is not a new condition, and we merely understand it
    - loopz 5y ago
      Nobody expects the Spanish I^Hpandemic, that only happens once every 100 years or so. This should be expected, and the previous administration did everything to demolish whatever was left of pandemic response teams and plans, before it hit.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  Still waiting for the actual evidence...
baybal2 5y ago
> If the Lab-Leak Theory Is Right, What’s Next? What next is Western governments getting a solid scapegoat. They can say "We completely bungled the quarantine, but now you can blame commies" With so many Western governments guaranteed to loose their next election, only an absolutely massive outrage can save them.
- tantalor 5y ago
  Both can be true, that is no excuse
- hanselot 5y ago
  They can say what they want, while the media keeps stalling just long enough to keep people from learning the actual truth. Just long enough for Snopes to create another laughable "debunking". The term fake news and pizzagate have interesting history on google trends. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=fake%20news,pizzagate https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f...
fouc 5y ago
> We know enough to acknowledge that the scenario is possible, and we should therefore act as though it’s true. Kind of incendiary to act as if it's true. I do agree that it might be worth examining the wisdom of keeping virology institutions near cities.
hanselot 5y ago
As always, those who were ahead of the curve were branded as schizos, yet here we are. Not only were us schizos right, we were so much righter than you could have dared allow yourself to fathom. Now, you start pinching at the next little bit of this long spool of lies the WHO and Fauci has been perpetuating this entire time. What proof do we need to hunt down to convince YOU as a person reading this, that you are being lied to? If the answer is, you are in so deep that you can't go back and face the shame of being complicit in their narrative, then so be it. The only way then to resolve this is via violence, ironically, the way that the "Peaceful Protests" of the past year have gone down.
deleted 5y ago
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mikro2nd 5y ago
Narrator: The theory was wrong.
- mulletbum 5y ago
  Not going to stop Trumpies from lathing onto this article like flies on poo.
- JohnPrine 5y ago
  What makes you so sure?
mulletbum 5y ago
For all those jacked up to hype your conspiracy crap again, just FYI it says "IF the lab-leak." As in, this is an opinion column, just like your conspiracy, not based on facts. Worse, the very first line is "We know enough to acknowledge that the scenario is possible, and we should therefore act as though it’s true." We know you are all humans, which means you COULD be pedophiles, so we should therefore act as though it is true. That is the world you want.......
FriedrichN 5y ago
I don't know why some people are so sure that it couldn't be from a lab. People research viruses in labs and it's not impossible that a virus could escape from such a lab. And China doesn't like bad press and likes to suppress it as they did with Dr. Li Wenliang.[1] I'm not saying that I know that it did come from a lab, but to say it definitely didn't is just as silly in my opinion. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382
- eplanit 5y ago
  It's political. Trump accused the Chinese of negligence and/or intent. If Trump said it, then all left leaning folks rejected it outright as horrible and racist. Their hatred of him was so intense that they'd take the side of _anyone_ opposed to him, or that he opposed. Therefore, to be resolute in their hatred, they steadfastly demanded that it must not be from a lab.
  - TMWNN 5y ago
    >It's political. Trump accused the Chinese of negligence and/or intent. If Trump said it, then all left leaning folks rejected it outright as horrible and racist. Another example: Just last year, we had Biden, Harris, and Pelosi all saying they won't trust any Trump vaccine (https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism-democrat-politicization-1535559 https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism...)
- yostrovs 5y ago
  The answer is in the other comments. The reason the lab leak theory is rejected is because some people that believe in other theories that are not popular also believe in this one. It's guilt by association. It has nothing to do with the merits of the case.
nathias 5y ago
Think about how a claim that the outbreak of a virus from a place with a lab that did gain of function experiments on the same group of viruses was deemed to insane to exist online and was scrubbed from every platform. If something so very plausible can be so easily removed from global discourse, maybe the conspiracy loonies are on to something.
bdcravens 5y ago
Then hopefully the world powers with the resources to do this kind of research work together to come up with new standards to prevent lab-leaks. Without a doubt, countries like the US, Russia, and China, have tons of experiments going on as we speak that have the potential to create another COVID-19 or worse.
deleted 5y ago
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david-gpu 5y ago
If I had some ant colonies at home and after a while my neighbors complained of ants in their apartments, I would certainly audit my ant-husbandry procedures in case some of my ants had escaped. Ignoring the possibility of an escape, even in the absence of hard data, would be unnecessarily cavalier.
- JoBrad 5y ago
  Yeah, but if your neighbors bred ants that had to be sustained in a specialized environment to stay alive, you wouldn’t blame them for an outbreak. Viruses in the wild must be able to survive the environment, while a lab grown version would be protected from competitive viruses and enemies.
  - david-gpu 5y ago
    Based on the available data [0], it seems like this particular breed of ant not only lives but thrives in a non-specialized environment as long as humans are around. Just to make it clear, I am talking about an accidental release of an otherwise wild virus. I'm not implying the virus was engineered. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_deaths https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_deaths
jtdev 5y ago
What’s next!? Maybe we should stop fiddling with viruses in countries that struggle with basic quality control for even the most basic manufacturing?! Why is the left so uninterested in finding the truth here? This “if it came from a lab, what next” narrative is complete gaslighting.
pjc50 5y ago
There are two different kinds of inquiry: one to learn lessons for avoiding this in the future, and one for assigning blame. Blame assignment gives motivation to destroy evidence and obstruct the inquiry. The only culture that seems to have managed to reliably achieve low-blame investigations is air crash investigation. So there's basically three questions: - was this virus a lab escape? - if it was a lab escape, was that because it had been isolated from elsewhere, bred in the lab, or was it deliberately engineered for some purpose? - regardless of origin, was the escape somehow intentional? This seems unlikely given that it was first a disaster for China and - like all bioweapons - cannot really be targeted. There has been no visible politics associated with this, so we could apply the Dr Strangelove argument: what good is a superweapon if you don't tell anyone about it? And a question for the future: - what is the minimum tech level for virus engineering? At what point can a random militant just 3D print themselves a plague with no co-conspirators? We're a long way off that, but I don't think HN is willing to bet on technology being intractable forever. And for all of these: - what real evidence do we have? - if this were true, what would we do about it?
- darkerside 5y ago
  Framed that way, more important than investigating would be aiming there is a 50% likelihood that this came from a lab, and to introduce reforms as is it did. That does seem more productive than essentially a criminal investigation.
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    The problem it is not very useful if we don't know how it happened. The Wuhan lab is already highest security, and in fact, higher security than what was required for coronaviruses. I guess they already thought of the "generic" security measures. For example, you will not take the same action if it is the result of someone intentionally taking the virus out or if there is something wrong with the ventilation system. And addressing both "just to be safe" will not help much it waste management turned out to be the problem.
- neither_color 5y ago
  This seems unlikely given that it was first a disaster for China On that note, from the very beginning China's reaction appeared extreme and overbearing, but in hindsight it worked better than most other countries' responses. The question is... if other countries had known that it was from an accidental leak would they and the population in general have taken it much more seriously? I think they would have. If it were proven to be from a leak would there be less vaccine hesitancy? I think so too. The strongest contrarian argument against doing anything was always "it's just a flu" and some variation of "let nature take its course."
LatteLazy 5y ago
The "lab or market" part of this is irrelevant. China caused a global pandemic by gross incompetence either way. Add that to their ethnic and religious cleansing, suppression of all descent, acts of aggression towards their neighbours and 101 other issues and decide: is sanctioning them worth the costs? I think so. Many disagree.
kstenerud 5y ago
Here's a scientist explaining the various covid origin hypotheses going around, and which one is correct: https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did_not_come_from_the_wuhan_institute_of/ https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did... The press likes to stir things up because emotional people follow their stories more and make them more popular. But this is definitely putting the cart before the horse. Stirring up a mob almost never ends well.
- 101001001001 5y ago
  This guy has a PhD and never heard of gain of function research?
  - La1n 5y ago
    I don't think that's an accurate representation. Can you link where he says he never heard of gain of function research?
    - 101001001001 5y ago
      I can’t link to an absence of a thing. I looked through his link and I didn’t see any mention of gain of function research. Maybe I missed it because that thread is completely schizophrenic, but I did look.
      - kstenerud 5y ago
        It's interesting that you dismiss it because it's completely schizophrenic, and yet mizzack dismisses it because it's neatly organized and long. And yes, he does talk about gain-of-function. His background is in high risk biocontainment viruses, and his PhD was specifically focused on Ebola-, Hanta-, and Flavi-viruses.
        101001001001 5y ago
        I said it’s schizophrenic because of its format which is more a consequence of the modern web than any particular person. Why did he say gain of function couldn’t be applied to a pre-existing virus and result in a highly infectious corona virus?
choeger 5y ago
The thing that should be noted is that a lab escape does not mean that the lab is the origin of the virus. It is equally plausible that the lab experimented with the virus after it was caught in the wild.
yaya69 5y ago
Belief is the death of intelligence.
code51 5y ago
"What do we do with this information?" Tell the lab to stop gain of function research. Any kind of gain of function research lab needs to run under continuous international supervision from now on. International Space Station (ISS) could serve as a good analogy here: have scientists and auditors from many countries in there so that we know what goes on day-to-day. After that? Hold any country doing independent gain of function research responsible (from potentially building a bioweapon)
- La1n 5y ago
  I think this would only work if already done research was shared. Otherwise you get in the situation where countries that had the resources to do this before oversight get access to knowledge they can deny others to obtain.
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
  >> Tell the lab to stop gain of function research "Please don't kill millions of people again".
- lamontcg 5y ago
  > Tell the lab to stop gain of function research. There's still no evidence, anywhere, that this lab did any gain of function research. The only gain of function research that was know was done was on American soil with SARS-CoV-1 in mice, where it gained function in mice (and most likely lost function in humans).
guilhas 5y ago
Apologize to "conspiracy theorists" and fact check the fact checkers
sgt101 5y ago
The fact is that the actions by the Chinese authorities in the early part of the epidemic created a global disaster. Lab leaks are a distraction from this fact - folks are obsessing over something that is possible (for which there is no real evidence that I have seen though) and ignoring the facts that having a massive party [1] in a city in the middle of a pandemic outbreak was criminally negligent. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/fa83463a-4737-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441 https://www.ft.com/content/fa83463a-4737-11ea-aeb3-955839e06...
- loopz 5y ago
  Indeed. This should be their Chernobyl. But the reasons are all the paranoia and fear that all the cognitive dissonance creates in such a repressing atmosphere.
asciimov 5y ago
This Lab-Leak Theory should have been killed in the cradle. This idle speculation about the origin theory of Covid19 only goes to fuel the machinations of conservative think tanks and does nothing to further science. As a scientist, I would love to know how why and where this covid strain started. But understand that lab-leak or lab-escaped is just a stones throw away from lab-created and the last thing we need is science blamed for this virus. With conservatives in the US so hell bent on defunding anything science related, this would only be used to kill off research programs. We need these programs to be researching against these pathogens now, so that when something new pops up we have methods to create vaccines. If it hadn't been for decades of covid research there wouldn't have been a covid19 vaccine created in 9 months. It would have been years, possibly decades, with our only hope of containment some kind of collapse of the virus similar to the Spanish Flu of 1918.
- 101001001001 5y ago
  Perhaps it’s important to discourage improper safety procedures in gain of function labs?
  - asciimov 5y ago
    Sure, but it's important to recognize that science is dangerous and slip-ups do happen. That is why research has rigorous safety precautions and procedures.
- akvadrako 5y ago
  > the last thing we need is science blamed for this virus. I think this is the primary reason so many virologists are against the lab-leak idea. It's not because they think it's unlikely, but because if people were aware of how dangerous this research was the funding would dry up and it might even get banned.
  - silicon2401 5y ago
    This lab leak caused a historical pandemic that's killed countless people and infected even more than that. That shows that whatever was being done safety-wise, it wasn't nearly enough. Research of covid-level danger shouldn't be suppressed (if anything, we need more of it to be prepared for the next pandemic), but it should absolutely be more stringently controlled. Millions of people now have to go through vaccinations, quarantines, testing, and more as a result of the leak. It would've been quite a return on investment to prevent all of that time and effort by requiring covid/coronavirus researchers to quarantine themselves from society or something in case of infections.
101001001001 5y ago
Josh rogan is a frequent CNN correspondent and a veteran journalist. He came on the joe rogan podcast to sell his book about China. He made a plausible claim that COVID was the result of “gain of function” research performed on a naturally occurring bat-born virus. This idea has also been floated on 60 minutes. He also claimed that China threatened the United States with cutting off our supply of masks if our government acknowledged the fact that all of the circumstantial evidence pointed to a lab-leak. China has been known to do this and it was certainly to their benefit, so it strikes me as plausible. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Biden admin is now signaling support for lab-leak just as it is becoming clear that the pandemic is now over. As a person with some background in biology, I initially dismissed lab-leak because the popular discussion was about engineered viruses which is bullshit. I didn’t know about gain of function. I’m personally heavily in favor of the lab-leak hypothesis. The entire world was a science experiment for a year. Stop gain of function research. Stop stigmatizing prepper culture.
- Zababa 5y ago
  Do you have any resources to learn more about "gain of function" for people with no background in biology?
- tpmx 5y ago
  Rogin's opinion peace here includes something about that: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/04/covid-trump-xi-josh-rogin/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/04/covid-tru... By the end of March, China had delivered aid to 120 countries, a massive “mask diplomacy” effort. Early on, these Chinese efforts were widely welcomed — but later “mask diplomacy” would become synonymous with China’s use of aid as a means of leverage over countries that might want to criticize it or its handling of the coronavirus outbreak that had begun within its borders. ... Privately but explicitly, Chinese diplomats told U.S. officials they would cut off exports of medical supplies to the United States if Washington wasn’t careful in this war of words. Beijing was seeking to snuff out any discussion of the virus, along with any criticism of its domestic response and any allegation that it was hiding or misrepresenting information about the virus. In a move that U.S. officials saw as punitive, Beijing had halted exports of items such as face masks, even when they were made by American companies like 3M, which had factories inside China
throwaway4good 5y ago
First of: The lab leak story has always been mainstream. It was pushed by the Trump administration and now by the Biden administration. For a take on what is wrong with it see: https://twitter.com/MoNscience/status/1396240581651742724 https://twitter.com/MoNscience/status/1396240581651742724
- 101001001001 5y ago
  This thread doesn’t address gain of function research. It’s doesn’t address the lab-leak hypothesis that is being talked about.
  - throwaway4good 5y ago
    It explicitly does (serial passing).
    - 101001001001 5y ago
      Sorry those Twitter threads are hard on my eyeballs. That’s the most convincing argument against lab leak I’ve seen so far. By his logic, gain of function could never produce a dangerous virus because any such virus would only be adapted to grow in a Petri dish. I don’t buy it. I googled lab leak for the first time just now. I haven’t wanted to get involved in the team sports. But anyway my mind is made up. The Seattle times (iirc) has a good timeline of all the developments. Bat infested copper mine workers fell ill with an “extremely similar” virus to COVID 19 back in 2012 and that virus was sampled and taken to WIV. It’s pretty much impossible to deny at this point. Which makes sense because nobody would be talking about it otherwise.
- akvadrako 5y ago
  > First of: The lab leak story has always been mainstream. Just because Trump said something doesn't make it mainstream. Until this week Facebook even blocked people from suggesting it was a possibility.
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
I have been continually bothered that "escaped from a lab" is allowed to carry hints that this is an 'experimental' or other modified form of the virus. Why does lab-origin reporting not come with a bright line between an engineered virus and samples collected for study?
- Invictus0 5y ago
  Whether the virus was recombinant or not has been a subject of debate. The fact is that we can't know for sure unless we hear from the researchers working in that lab. https://www.factcheck.org/2021/05/the-wuhan-lab-and-the-gain-of-function-disagreement/ https://www.factcheck.org/2021/05/the-wuhan-lab-and-the-gain...
- tim333 5y ago
  Because there isn't really a bright line there. It could be a sample collected and nothing done, or it could be one they've tried on humanized mice or a bunch of other stuff.
throwaway4good 5y ago
I think a more relevant question is: What if the lab leak story is not true, but it continues being pushed by the sitting US administration for political purposes, then what happens next? I think a parallel is the Soviet disinformation campaign in 80es trying to link AIDS to secret US biological weapons research. Especially in poorer countries it contributed to skepticism and paranoia around treatments and prevention measures. Ultimately the Soviet empire collapses while the paranoia and mistrust in official authorities persists.
- baybal2 5y ago
  > What if the lab leak story is not true, but it continues being pushed by the sitting US administration for political purposes, then what happens next? Them it will serve the task of galvanising West's otherwise weak popular demand to do anything about China. The political system in the West is driven by two things: elections, and lobbying. Western politicians will not go on offensive on China if it will not win them the election, and will probably oppose it if will loose them the election (imagine protesting angry hipster not getting their new iphone.)
  - throwaway4good 5y ago
    Yeah. That is probably the political purpose of it. The problem as I see it is that you are injecting your own population with anti-science and paranoia. Ultimately this may come back to haunt you.
silicon2401 5y ago
It's funny how quickly people tend to go towards Occam's razor until it doesn't fit their chosen worldview, whether that be political correctness, their trusted press outlets, attempting to protect scientific research, or something else. When two virology research labs happens to be in the same location as the origin of a contagious virus, that's a pretty likely candidate for the origin of the contagious virus. That's a completely separate from whether or not it was engineered and what should be done if the origin is determined, and it should be considered in its own right. It's no guarantee, but it's certainly a reasonable reason. Which makes you wonder then, what is the motive for media pushing so hard that it's not credible or comparable to a conspiracy theory, just to later (like the mask topic) have to admit that it's not so crazy after all? https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/25/timeline-how-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-suddenly-became-credible/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/25/timeline-... It's also important to have a healthy amount of skepticism and not fall into authoritarian thinking. The CDC and WHO are not beacons of flawless truth, as they revealed by the CDC unashamedly lying to the public about mask safety, and the WHO doing backflips to appease China and reject Taiwan's status as an independent country. Wherever the virus came from, so be it, whether that's a lab in China or a bat in Madagascar. But always be very careful when entities are invested in making you believe what they believe, rather than helping you be rational and consider the realistic possibilities.
sharikone 5y ago
It's fucked up that "it's wrong because that's what Trumpists say" is considered a powerful argument. The same as not wanting to publicize the results of the vaccine effectiveness with Trump in office "not to make it seem he should have the credit". But I fully know that "that's what the libtards say" is an equivalent idiotic argument. Luckily I don't live in the US and I never felt forced to pick a side. I have always been skeptical about the origins of the virus and even know I am not afraid to say that I don't know. It could be artificial or natural but I have yet to see something really conclusive. I am afraid what will happen when all Earth will live as a single society under a single government. I see too much stupidity and idiotic dynamics in human societies and I always managed to keep away or change my surroundings. As we become more and more connected this is becoming harder and harder.
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >It's fucked up that "it's wrong because that's what Trumpists say" is considered a powerful argument. >The same as not wanting to publicize the results of the vaccine effectiveness with Trump in office "not to make it seem he should have the credit". Indeed, last year we had Biden, Harris, and Pelosi all saying they won't trust any Trump vaccine (https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism-democrat-politicization-1535559 https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism...) Speaking as a fully vaccinated person, had Trump won reelection, the current relentless media drumbeat over a) how safe COVID19 vaccines are, b) how great the deployment has been, and c) how if you don't get vaccinated yesterday you are an antivax nut and traitor to the human race would be completely different.[1] We'd be hearing a lot more about the "Trump vaccine", both by the Trump administration itself (because it's the one that in March 2020 began Operation Warp Speed, the process of throwing incredible amounts of money at every proposed vaccine that resulted in the happy situation today of the US's massive and growing surplus of shots from multiple manufacturers) and by powerful media and opposition-politics voices continually highlighting every real and imagined fault in vaccines. [1] The federal government is almost completely uninvolved in the end-user vaccine delivery process. The process since the beginning—i.e., before the election—has been for the federal government to distribute vaccine supplies to each state based on population, with each state's government responsible for everything else.
underseacables 5y ago
The lab leak is right, does this mean the final nail in the coffin of so-called “journalism” and media? I’ve really had it with people in this country saying someone is wrong, only because of their political party.
fmajid 5y ago
What this showed is how woefully unprepared national defenses were for a bioattack, even though NBC is a core of military planning. I would expect Congress to reallocate DoD budgets, from trillion-dollar planes that stop flying if you look at them funny, to building enough PCR monitoring infrastructure and vaccine-generation capacity to nip any such future pandemic in the bud.

Hunter biden joins the board of the lab.

blumomo 5y ago
Conspiracy!

Well, first and foremost, perhaps the media could pause and reflect on their treatment of anyone who raised the lab leak hypothesis for the past year. And, were any humility to arise out of that exercise, perhaps they could direct that newfound and unfamiliar trait towards some other things they currently dismiss as "conspiracy theories".

mschuster91 5y ago
> Well, first and foremost, perhaps the media could pause and reflect on their treatment of anyone who raised the lab leak hypothesis for the past year. Most didn't stop at "maybe this escaped from the lab in Wuhan", but went down the real rabbit hole accusing the Chinese government of manufacturing and releasing a bioweapon. In any case there won't be any proof ever for any origin theory, the Chinese government has made certain of that.
- jghn 5y ago
  This is precisely why it is so touchy. There’s been a strong correlation between people who believe lab leak and people who believe the Chinese were doing something bad. As an anecdote, someone recently asked me if we could tell if the COVID genome had come via animals/natural origin or engineered in some way. I said that most likely, yes that should be possible. Their immediate reaction was that this meant I didn’t believe in lab leak. That’s not at all what I had said
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > if we could tell if the COVID genome had come via animals/natural origin or engineered in some way. I said that most likely, yes that should be possible How?
    - garblegarble 5y ago
      There's quite a comprehensive document compiled by a virologist on reddit discussing what the options for engineering would be, and what traces they would leave, I found it quite interesting: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kAHSEx9-eIyVIahczH8itHaUm9jI9WX7/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kAHSEx9-eIyVIahczH8itHaUm9j...
      - baybal2 5y ago
        No engineering, I want to underline it. This is not precluding a natural virus leak with, or without gain of function experiment involvement. Current facts on the ground: - 1st response to CoVID occurrence was certainly in Wuhan. - The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan - Wuhan had two institutes which, on record, did gain of function experiments on bat coronaviruses - SARS had a record of lab escapes past the previous pandemic even without live animal hosts.
        jghn 5y ago
        The story with the miners[1] has caught my attention. A group of miners fell ill w/ a SARS-like virus via bat droppings. In retrospect it sounds a heck of a lot like COVID. Wuhan was known to have investigated the case. Perhaps a researcher manages to get infected, or something like that. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7606707/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7606707/
    - jghn 5y ago
      garblegarble's link explains it better than I could, but the tl;dr is that there are patterns that occur with natural evolution. Messing with those patterns would look, well, unnatural.
- yanderekko 5y ago
  >Most didn't stop at "maybe this escaped from the lab in Wuhan", but went down the real rabbit hole accusing the Chinese government of manufacturing and releasing a bioweapon. I don't think it's fair to say that "most" of these people thought it was deliberately released, whether or not they believed it was a bioweapon.
slightwinder 5y ago
To be fair, the lab-theory was hijacked from the beginning by conspiracy-believers who told everyone it was a bio-weapon and released on purpose. The idea of an accidential leak of reasearch-material is poisoned till today, because any hint of a proof will be fuel for the nutheads. And at the moment there many nutheads and racists aiming at asians because of the pandemia.
- yostrovs 5y ago
  To be fair, you are exactly the type that the parent comment was referring to... People that effortlessly dismiss reasonable ideas. You add smears of racism on top of it to make sure the side that you disagree with is hated. Please reflect as the parent comment suggests.
  - yanderekko 5y ago
    Precisely. "This theory is popular with crazy racists" leads to "if you believe this then I am forced to assume that you're a crazy racist and disparage you accordingly" pretty effortlessly in 2021. This sort of bad-faith ad hominem is the real problem.
  - duckfang 5y ago
    You can say that, but I've heard the diatribes that the "China virus" was because they were playing with 5G and viruses and it escaped into bats and those chinamen ate the bats and...(cringe). Just go look up the conspiracies if you think I'm out of line - this is the mild version. Most of the mouthbreathers talking earlier about the "China virus" labs was predominately with pro-trump, anti-vaxxer, anti-masker individuals (well, starting with trump first). It was political grandstanding at its best, combined with 'us vs them' mentality, and a hefty scooping of conspiracy theory. So yes, the bulk of us thinking peoples justly figured this was what it appeared to be: yet another Anti-Chinese diatribe done by a white nationalist conspiracy nut (aka: trump).
    - eplanit 5y ago
      Your comment makes mostrovs point in the comment above.
bdcravens 5y ago
The response to "conspiracy theories" is: show us your proof. Otherwise we will wait to give it any credibility. If time and data prove out your claims, then we will give it the proper attention it has earned. (ie, science > social media)
- jtdev 5y ago
  The media didn’t ask for proof of animal origin… in fact the media largely ran with animal origin with zero evidence to back that up. There’s always been more evidence to support the lab leak theory for those paying attention.
  - bdcravens 5y ago
    The problem with "more evidence" is that much of it has been hearsay. Person A tells person B something. Person B repeats person A's claim to person C. Person A then talks to person C, and person C says it must be true because they've heard it from multiple sources. I have no doubt there's good evidence pointing to the lab leak origin, but virtually everything I've been exposed to over the last year are typically rumors or graphics shared on social media. Hearing something a lot doesn't give it additional credibility.
  - bdcravens 5y ago
    According to the article, it's both: "researchers had assembled an archive of cave-bat-borne coronaviruses" Researchers were studying viruses that had an animal origin. The lab leak would be from not following proper safety protocols.
    - jtdev 5y ago
      Ah yes, the phrasing tricks have been a media favorite when discussing covid origins… conflating lab origin with natural origin through the almost certainty that the viral material used at the WIV originated in nature is pure intellectual dishonesty.
    - bingbong70 5y ago
arbitrage 5y ago
the media has an interest in being right with their reporting. they won't apologise and say they were wrong; why would their customers continue reading & sharing their content if they're so fallible? it's perverted interests and motivations.
- JoBrad 5y ago
  Respected media outlets frequently post retractions. That’s part of what makes them respectable, and attracts readers who are looking for honest reporting.
moolcool 5y ago
There's legitimate stories where there's a lot of smoke, and a lot of credible speculation (the Epstein story and lab-leak theory are two good examples). The problem is that these get coopted by qanon and affiliated groups and start to become less credible in the public eye as a result. There's some tragic irony to the fact that potentially well-meaning crackpots are being used as a smokescreen for those who are actually doing wrong.
- scarmig 5y ago
  This isn't about the public eye, primarily. It's about the "expert" voices in media who report on these things. Most of what can reasonably called the mainstream media was misrepresenting lab leak theories as racist QAnon ramblings for a year before it entered the "it's okay to believe this" realm. This kind of dismissal ends up being the default mode for any idea which doesn't fall within a very narrow approved view of reality.
- slibhb 5y ago
  This is not what happens. What happens is, people discuss something plausible for which there exists circumstantial evidence (e.g. lab leak theory). Then, the media, left and right, pretends it has defininitve answers and uses "q anon" as an excuse to claim the plausible theory is wrong.
  - moolcool 5y ago
    Why can't both be true? Actual qanon types absolutely latch on to stories like this-- kind of a broken clock situation.
    - slibhb 5y ago
      Why do we care about q anon? Why has this tiny group of flat-earthers (at least half of whom are probably screwing around on the internet) become nationally known?
      - moolcool 5y ago
dstroot 5y ago
Media’s role is to a) entertain us, or b) inform us. Under a: say whatever gets you clicks. Period. Under b: hypotheses and theories cannot be reported as truths. Hard evidence is needed. There are two ways a virus evolves- naturally or guided/engineered. Without proof of the latter it is safe to assume former. No humility needed. If/when we have evidence of latter we can now report that.
throwawayzRUU6f 5y ago
This has been the saddest part of the pandemic to me. The epistemology of health policy is completely broken - fully reliant on arguments from authority, impervious to contrary evidence, initial beliefs clutched onto until the bitter end. Opinion makers are unable to distinguish between entertaining an idea and embracing it. This lead to predictable debacles on mask usage, airborne spread, everyone's pet theories of innate population immunity, seasonality of the virus, virus origins, etc. And yet - there are zero calls for introspection, blameless post-mortems. Nobody seems to care.
- loopz 5y ago
  This is just "bread and circus". Those who look deeper down will see more going on underneath the layers of policymaking. Though, the real workers will need support for new ideas and improvements later.
- recursivedoubts 5y ago
  tragically underrated post i view the last decade (perhaps two) as a complete shattering of nearly all epistemology and social trust we are all now wandering in a forest of mirrors or perhaps, rather, this is not a new condition, and we merely understand it
  - loopz 5y ago
    Nobody expects the Spanish I^Hpandemic, that only happens once every 100 years or so. This should be expected, and the previous administration did everything to demolish whatever was left of pandemic response teams and plans, before it hit.
LatteLazy 5y ago
Still waiting for the actual evidence...

baybal2 5y ago

> If the Lab-Leak Theory Is Right, What’s Next? What next is Western governments getting a solid scapegoat. They can say "We completely bungled the quarantine, but now you can blame commies" With so many Western governments guaranteed to loose their next election, only an absolutely massive outrage can save them.

tantalor 5y ago
Both can be true, that is no excuse
hanselot 5y ago
They can say what they want, while the media keeps stalling just long enough to keep people from learning the actual truth. Just long enough for Snopes to create another laughable "debunking". The term fake news and pizzagate have interesting history on google trends. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=fake%20news,pizzagate https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f...

fouc 5y ago

> We know enough to acknowledge that the scenario is possible, and we should therefore act as though it’s true. Kind of incendiary to act as if it's true. I do agree that it might be worth examining the wisdom of keeping virology institutions near cities.

hanselot 5y ago

As always, those who were ahead of the curve were branded as schizos, yet here we are. Not only were us schizos right, we were so much righter than you could have dared allow yourself to fathom. Now, you start pinching at the next little bit of this long spool of lies the WHO and Fauci has been perpetuating this entire time. What proof do we need to hunt down to convince YOU as a person reading this, that you are being lied to? If the answer is, you are in so deep that you can't go back and face the shame of being complicit in their narrative, then so be it. The only way then to resolve this is via violence, ironically, the way that the "Peaceful Protests" of the past year have gone down.

deleted 5y ago

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mikro2nd 5y ago

Narrator: The theory was wrong.

mulletbum 5y ago
Not going to stop Trumpies from lathing onto this article like flies on poo.
JohnPrine 5y ago
What makes you so sure?

mulletbum 5y ago

For all those jacked up to hype your conspiracy crap again, just FYI it says "IF the lab-leak." As in, this is an opinion column, just like your conspiracy, not based on facts. Worse, the very first line is "We know enough to acknowledge that the scenario is possible, and we should therefore act as though it’s true." We know you are all humans, which means you COULD be pedophiles, so we should therefore act as though it is true. That is the world you want.......

FriedrichN 5y ago

I don't know why some people are so sure that it couldn't be from a lab. People research viruses in labs and it's not impossible that a virus could escape from such a lab. And China doesn't like bad press and likes to suppress it as they did with Dr. Li Wenliang.[1] I'm not saying that I know that it did come from a lab, but to say it definitely didn't is just as silly in my opinion. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382

eplanit 5y ago
It's political. Trump accused the Chinese of negligence and/or intent. If Trump said it, then all left leaning folks rejected it outright as horrible and racist. Their hatred of him was so intense that they'd take the side of _anyone_ opposed to him, or that he opposed. Therefore, to be resolute in their hatred, they steadfastly demanded that it must not be from a lab.
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >It's political. Trump accused the Chinese of negligence and/or intent. If Trump said it, then all left leaning folks rejected it outright as horrible and racist. Another example: Just last year, we had Biden, Harris, and Pelosi all saying they won't trust any Trump vaccine (https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism-democrat-politicization-1535559 https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism...)
yostrovs 5y ago
The answer is in the other comments. The reason the lab leak theory is rejected is because some people that believe in other theories that are not popular also believe in this one. It's guilt by association. It has nothing to do with the merits of the case.

nathias 5y ago

Think about how a claim that the outbreak of a virus from a place with a lab that did gain of function experiments on the same group of viruses was deemed to insane to exist online and was scrubbed from every platform. If something so very plausible can be so easily removed from global discourse, maybe the conspiracy loonies are on to something.

bdcravens 5y ago

Then hopefully the world powers with the resources to do this kind of research work together to come up with new standards to prevent lab-leaks. Without a doubt, countries like the US, Russia, and China, have tons of experiments going on as we speak that have the potential to create another COVID-19 or worse.

deleted 5y ago

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david-gpu 5y ago

If I had some ant colonies at home and after a while my neighbors complained of ants in their apartments, I would certainly audit my ant-husbandry procedures in case some of my ants had escaped. Ignoring the possibility of an escape, even in the absence of hard data, would be unnecessarily cavalier.

JoBrad 5y ago
Yeah, but if your neighbors bred ants that had to be sustained in a specialized environment to stay alive, you wouldn’t blame them for an outbreak. Viruses in the wild must be able to survive the environment, while a lab grown version would be protected from competitive viruses and enemies.
- david-gpu 5y ago
  Based on the available data [0], it seems like this particular breed of ant not only lives but thrives in a non-specialized environment as long as humans are around. Just to make it clear, I am talking about an accidental release of an otherwise wild virus. I'm not implying the virus was engineered. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_deaths https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_deaths

jtdev 5y ago

What’s next!? Maybe we should stop fiddling with viruses in countries that struggle with basic quality control for even the most basic manufacturing?! Why is the left so uninterested in finding the truth here? This “if it came from a lab, what next” narrative is complete gaslighting.

pjc50 5y ago

There are two different kinds of inquiry: one to learn lessons for avoiding this in the future, and one for assigning blame. Blame assignment gives motivation to destroy evidence and obstruct the inquiry. The only culture that seems to have managed to reliably achieve low-blame investigations is air crash investigation. So there's basically three questions: - was this virus a lab escape? - if it was a lab escape, was that because it had been isolated from elsewhere, bred in the lab, or was it deliberately engineered for some purpose? - regardless of origin, was the escape somehow intentional? This seems unlikely given that it was first a disaster for China and - like all bioweapons - cannot really be targeted. There has been no visible politics associated with this, so we could apply the Dr Strangelove argument: what good is a superweapon if you don't tell anyone about it? And a question for the future: - what is the minimum tech level for virus engineering? At what point can a random militant just 3D print themselves a plague with no co-conspirators? We're a long way off that, but I don't think HN is willing to bet on technology being intractable forever. And for all of these: - what real evidence do we have? - if this were true, what would we do about it?

darkerside 5y ago
Framed that way, more important than investigating would be aiming there is a 50% likelihood that this came from a lab, and to introduce reforms as is it did. That does seem more productive than essentially a criminal investigation.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  The problem it is not very useful if we don't know how it happened. The Wuhan lab is already highest security, and in fact, higher security than what was required for coronaviruses. I guess they already thought of the "generic" security measures. For example, you will not take the same action if it is the result of someone intentionally taking the virus out or if there is something wrong with the ventilation system. And addressing both "just to be safe" will not help much it waste management turned out to be the problem.
neither_color 5y ago
This seems unlikely given that it was first a disaster for China On that note, from the very beginning China's reaction appeared extreme and overbearing, but in hindsight it worked better than most other countries' responses. The question is... if other countries had known that it was from an accidental leak would they and the population in general have taken it much more seriously? I think they would have. If it were proven to be from a leak would there be less vaccine hesitancy? I think so too. The strongest contrarian argument against doing anything was always "it's just a flu" and some variation of "let nature take its course."

LatteLazy 5y ago

The "lab or market" part of this is irrelevant. China caused a global pandemic by gross incompetence either way. Add that to their ethnic and religious cleansing, suppression of all descent, acts of aggression towards their neighbours and 101 other issues and decide: is sanctioning them worth the costs? I think so. Many disagree.

kstenerud 5y ago

Here's a scientist explaining the various covid origin hypotheses going around, and which one is correct: https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did_not_come_from_the_wuhan_institute_of/ https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did... The press likes to stir things up because emotional people follow their stories more and make them more popular. But this is definitely putting the cart before the horse. Stirring up a mob almost never ends well.

101001001001 5y ago
This guy has a PhD and never heard of gain of function research?
- La1n 5y ago
  I don't think that's an accurate representation. Can you link where he says he never heard of gain of function research?
  - 101001001001 5y ago
    I can’t link to an absence of a thing. I looked through his link and I didn’t see any mention of gain of function research. Maybe I missed it because that thread is completely schizophrenic, but I did look.
    - kstenerud 5y ago
      It's interesting that you dismiss it because it's completely schizophrenic, and yet mizzack dismisses it because it's neatly organized and long. And yes, he does talk about gain-of-function. His background is in high risk biocontainment viruses, and his PhD was specifically focused on Ebola-, Hanta-, and Flavi-viruses.
      - 101001001001 5y ago
        I said it’s schizophrenic because of its format which is more a consequence of the modern web than any particular person. Why did he say gain of function couldn’t be applied to a pre-existing virus and result in a highly infectious corona virus?

choeger 5y ago

The thing that should be noted is that a lab escape does not mean that the lab is the origin of the virus. It is equally plausible that the lab experimented with the virus after it was caught in the wild.

yaya69 5y ago

Belief is the death of intelligence.

code51 5y ago

"What do we do with this information?" Tell the lab to stop gain of function research. Any kind of gain of function research lab needs to run under continuous international supervision from now on. International Space Station (ISS) could serve as a good analogy here: have scientists and auditors from many countries in there so that we know what goes on day-to-day. After that? Hold any country doing independent gain of function research responsible (from potentially building a bioweapon)

La1n 5y ago
I think this would only work if already done research was shared. Otherwise you get in the situation where countries that had the resources to do this before oversight get access to knowledge they can deny others to obtain.
rufus_foreman 5y ago
>> Tell the lab to stop gain of function research "Please don't kill millions of people again".
lamontcg 5y ago
> Tell the lab to stop gain of function research. There's still no evidence, anywhere, that this lab did any gain of function research. The only gain of function research that was know was done was on American soil with SARS-CoV-1 in mice, where it gained function in mice (and most likely lost function in humans).

guilhas 5y ago

Apologize to "conspiracy theorists" and fact check the fact checkers

sgt101 5y ago

The fact is that the actions by the Chinese authorities in the early part of the epidemic created a global disaster. Lab leaks are a distraction from this fact - folks are obsessing over something that is possible (for which there is no real evidence that I have seen though) and ignoring the facts that having a massive party [1] in a city in the middle of a pandemic outbreak was criminally negligent. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/fa83463a-4737-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441 https://www.ft.com/content/fa83463a-4737-11ea-aeb3-955839e06...

loopz 5y ago
Indeed. This should be their Chernobyl. But the reasons are all the paranoia and fear that all the cognitive dissonance creates in such a repressing atmosphere.

asciimov 5y ago

This Lab-Leak Theory should have been killed in the cradle. This idle speculation about the origin theory of Covid19 only goes to fuel the machinations of conservative think tanks and does nothing to further science. As a scientist, I would love to know how why and where this covid strain started. But understand that lab-leak or lab-escaped is just a stones throw away from lab-created and the last thing we need is science blamed for this virus. With conservatives in the US so hell bent on defunding anything science related, this would only be used to kill off research programs. We need these programs to be researching against these pathogens now, so that when something new pops up we have methods to create vaccines. If it hadn't been for decades of covid research there wouldn't have been a covid19 vaccine created in 9 months. It would have been years, possibly decades, with our only hope of containment some kind of collapse of the virus similar to the Spanish Flu of 1918.

101001001001 5y ago
Perhaps it’s important to discourage improper safety procedures in gain of function labs?
- asciimov 5y ago
  Sure, but it's important to recognize that science is dangerous and slip-ups do happen. That is why research has rigorous safety precautions and procedures.
akvadrako 5y ago
> the last thing we need is science blamed for this virus. I think this is the primary reason so many virologists are against the lab-leak idea. It's not because they think it's unlikely, but because if people were aware of how dangerous this research was the funding would dry up and it might even get banned.
- silicon2401 5y ago
  This lab leak caused a historical pandemic that's killed countless people and infected even more than that. That shows that whatever was being done safety-wise, it wasn't nearly enough. Research of covid-level danger shouldn't be suppressed (if anything, we need more of it to be prepared for the next pandemic), but it should absolutely be more stringently controlled. Millions of people now have to go through vaccinations, quarantines, testing, and more as a result of the leak. It would've been quite a return on investment to prevent all of that time and effort by requiring covid/coronavirus researchers to quarantine themselves from society or something in case of infections.

101001001001 5y ago

Josh rogan is a frequent CNN correspondent and a veteran journalist. He came on the joe rogan podcast to sell his book about China. He made a plausible claim that COVID was the result of “gain of function” research performed on a naturally occurring bat-born virus. This idea has also been floated on 60 minutes. He also claimed that China threatened the United States with cutting off our supply of masks if our government acknowledged the fact that all of the circumstantial evidence pointed to a lab-leak. China has been known to do this and it was certainly to their benefit, so it strikes me as plausible. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Biden admin is now signaling support for lab-leak just as it is becoming clear that the pandemic is now over. As a person with some background in biology, I initially dismissed lab-leak because the popular discussion was about engineered viruses which is bullshit. I didn’t know about gain of function. I’m personally heavily in favor of the lab-leak hypothesis. The entire world was a science experiment for a year. Stop gain of function research. Stop stigmatizing prepper culture.

Zababa 5y ago
Do you have any resources to learn more about "gain of function" for people with no background in biology?
tpmx 5y ago
Rogin's opinion peace here includes something about that: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/04/covid-trump-xi-josh-rogin/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/04/covid-tru... By the end of March, China had delivered aid to 120 countries, a massive “mask diplomacy” effort. Early on, these Chinese efforts were widely welcomed — but later “mask diplomacy” would become synonymous with China’s use of aid as a means of leverage over countries that might want to criticize it or its handling of the coronavirus outbreak that had begun within its borders. ... Privately but explicitly, Chinese diplomats told U.S. officials they would cut off exports of medical supplies to the United States if Washington wasn’t careful in this war of words. Beijing was seeking to snuff out any discussion of the virus, along with any criticism of its domestic response and any allegation that it was hiding or misrepresenting information about the virus. In a move that U.S. officials saw as punitive, Beijing had halted exports of items such as face masks, even when they were made by American companies like 3M, which had factories inside China

throwaway4good 5y ago

First of: The lab leak story has always been mainstream. It was pushed by the Trump administration and now by the Biden administration. For a take on what is wrong with it see: https://twitter.com/MoNscience/status/1396240581651742724 https://twitter.com/MoNscience/status/1396240581651742724

101001001001 5y ago
This thread doesn’t address gain of function research. It’s doesn’t address the lab-leak hypothesis that is being talked about.
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  It explicitly does (serial passing).
  - 101001001001 5y ago
    Sorry those Twitter threads are hard on my eyeballs. That’s the most convincing argument against lab leak I’ve seen so far. By his logic, gain of function could never produce a dangerous virus because any such virus would only be adapted to grow in a Petri dish. I don’t buy it. I googled lab leak for the first time just now. I haven’t wanted to get involved in the team sports. But anyway my mind is made up. The Seattle times (iirc) has a good timeline of all the developments. Bat infested copper mine workers fell ill with an “extremely similar” virus to COVID 19 back in 2012 and that virus was sampled and taken to WIV. It’s pretty much impossible to deny at this point. Which makes sense because nobody would be talking about it otherwise.
akvadrako 5y ago
> First of: The lab leak story has always been mainstream. Just because Trump said something doesn't make it mainstream. Until this week Facebook even blocked people from suggesting it was a possibility.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago

I have been continually bothered that "escaped from a lab" is allowed to carry hints that this is an 'experimental' or other modified form of the virus. Why does lab-origin reporting not come with a bright line between an engineered virus and samples collected for study?

Invictus0 5y ago
Whether the virus was recombinant or not has been a subject of debate. The fact is that we can't know for sure unless we hear from the researchers working in that lab. https://www.factcheck.org/2021/05/the-wuhan-lab-and-the-gain-of-function-disagreement/ https://www.factcheck.org/2021/05/the-wuhan-lab-and-the-gain...
tim333 5y ago
Because there isn't really a bright line there. It could be a sample collected and nothing done, or it could be one they've tried on humanized mice or a bunch of other stuff.

throwaway4good 5y ago

I think a more relevant question is: What if the lab leak story is not true, but it continues being pushed by the sitting US administration for political purposes, then what happens next? I think a parallel is the Soviet disinformation campaign in 80es trying to link AIDS to secret US biological weapons research. Especially in poorer countries it contributed to skepticism and paranoia around treatments and prevention measures. Ultimately the Soviet empire collapses while the paranoia and mistrust in official authorities persists.

baybal2 5y ago
> What if the lab leak story is not true, but it continues being pushed by the sitting US administration for political purposes, then what happens next? Them it will serve the task of galvanising West's otherwise weak popular demand to do anything about China. The political system in the West is driven by two things: elections, and lobbying. Western politicians will not go on offensive on China if it will not win them the election, and will probably oppose it if will loose them the election (imagine protesting angry hipster not getting their new iphone.)
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  Yeah. That is probably the political purpose of it. The problem as I see it is that you are injecting your own population with anti-science and paranoia. Ultimately this may come back to haunt you.

silicon2401 5y ago

It's funny how quickly people tend to go towards Occam's razor until it doesn't fit their chosen worldview, whether that be political correctness, their trusted press outlets, attempting to protect scientific research, or something else. When two virology research labs happens to be in the same location as the origin of a contagious virus, that's a pretty likely candidate for the origin of the contagious virus. That's a completely separate from whether or not it was engineered and what should be done if the origin is determined, and it should be considered in its own right. It's no guarantee, but it's certainly a reasonable reason. Which makes you wonder then, what is the motive for media pushing so hard that it's not credible or comparable to a conspiracy theory, just to later (like the mask topic) have to admit that it's not so crazy after all? https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/25/timeline-how-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-suddenly-became-credible/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/25/timeline-... It's also important to have a healthy amount of skepticism and not fall into authoritarian thinking. The CDC and WHO are not beacons of flawless truth, as they revealed by the CDC unashamedly lying to the public about mask safety, and the WHO doing backflips to appease China and reject Taiwan's status as an independent country. Wherever the virus came from, so be it, whether that's a lab in China or a bat in Madagascar. But always be very careful when entities are invested in making you believe what they believe, rather than helping you be rational and consider the realistic possibilities.

sharikone 5y ago

It's fucked up that "it's wrong because that's what Trumpists say" is considered a powerful argument. The same as not wanting to publicize the results of the vaccine effectiveness with Trump in office "not to make it seem he should have the credit". But I fully know that "that's what the libtards say" is an equivalent idiotic argument. Luckily I don't live in the US and I never felt forced to pick a side. I have always been skeptical about the origins of the virus and even know I am not afraid to say that I don't know. It could be artificial or natural but I have yet to see something really conclusive. I am afraid what will happen when all Earth will live as a single society under a single government. I see too much stupidity and idiotic dynamics in human societies and I always managed to keep away or change my surroundings. As we become more and more connected this is becoming harder and harder.

TMWNN 5y ago
>It's fucked up that "it's wrong because that's what Trumpists say" is considered a powerful argument. >The same as not wanting to publicize the results of the vaccine effectiveness with Trump in office "not to make it seem he should have the credit". Indeed, last year we had Biden, Harris, and Pelosi all saying they won't trust any Trump vaccine (https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism-democrat-politicization-1535559 https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism...) Speaking as a fully vaccinated person, had Trump won reelection, the current relentless media drumbeat over a) how safe COVID19 vaccines are, b) how great the deployment has been, and c) how if you don't get vaccinated yesterday you are an antivax nut and traitor to the human race would be completely different.[1] We'd be hearing a lot more about the "Trump vaccine", both by the Trump administration itself (because it's the one that in March 2020 began Operation Warp Speed, the process of throwing incredible amounts of money at every proposed vaccine that resulted in the happy situation today of the US's massive and growing surplus of shots from multiple manufacturers) and by powerful media and opposition-politics voices continually highlighting every real and imagined fault in vaccines. [1] The federal government is almost completely uninvolved in the end-user vaccine delivery process. The process since the beginning—i.e., before the election—has been for the federal government to distribute vaccine supplies to each state based on population, with each state's government responsible for everything else.

underseacables 5y ago

The lab leak is right, does this mean the final nail in the coffin of so-called “journalism” and media? I’ve really had it with people in this country saying someone is wrong, only because of their political party.

fmajid 5y ago

What this showed is how woefully unprepared national defenses were for a bioattack, even though NBC is a core of military planning. I would expect Congress to reallocate DoD budgets, from trillion-dollar planes that stop flying if you look at them funny, to building enough PCR monitoring infrastructure and vaccine-generation capacity to nip any such future pandemic in the bud.