6 ms·

The cover up didn't need to be colossal, just for everyone to point to occams razor and call anyone with a hint of curiosity a racist. The fact that the origin

The cover up didn't need to be colossal, just for everyone to point to occams razor and call anyone with a hint of curiosity a racist. The fact that the origin of the outbreak appears to be in the same vicinity as a lab that experiments on similar viruses alone is sufficient reason to want a thorough investigation. Otherwise, the odds that nature produced such a virus, in such a location, make for a crazy coincidence, given that we havent been facing this problem every year for decades.

cratermoon 5y ago
Have you considered the possibility that it first appeared in the vicinity of a lab that experiments on similar viruses is because if it had appeared elsewhere, there would have been no sufficiently-equipped lab to isolate it? This is the streetlight effect: you find things where you (are able to) look for them. In other words, it couldn't have appeared somewhere far from a properly-equipped lab, because there would be no properly-equipped lab to detect it.
- johncena33 5y ago
  > Have you considered the possibility that it first appeared in the vicinity of a lab that experiments on similar viruses is because if it had appeared elsewhere, there would have been no sufficiently-equipped lab to isolate it? You are essentially arguing for lab leak theory. Initially there was only one cluster of COVID and that was at Wuhan. That's why lab leak hypothesis is more plausible. It was not the case that there were dozens of clusters all over the world and Wuhan lab was first able to identify the virus. Your argument would have _some_ validity if there are lot of clusters of outbreaks at the same time. But that was not the case. The initial cluster was only at Wuhan.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    The initial cluster was found at Wuhan, because there's a lab there. We have no idea how many sub-pandemic clusters arose and fell before this particular mutation got into a population sufficiently dense and mobile to spread it. Did you know that 1918 flu arose in Haskell County, Kansas, killed many, and then just .. died out? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/
    - johncena33 5y ago
      > The initial cluster was found at Wuhan, because there's a lab there Citation needed. This seems hand-wavy at best. As a matter of fact, people were uncertain about disease itself [1]. I havent seen any article yet that asserts the fact that Wuhan cluster was detected because of the lab. Furthermore, Wuhan lab is a research lab. It's not some diagnostic lab that people go there to get tested for new variant of SARS viruses. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025
- zdragnar 5y ago
  Plenty of virii have their origins traced to initial outbreaks where there are not labs. Using this as a justification to not investigate the possibility of a lab leak is wishful thinking at best.
- tripletao 5y ago
  SARS-CoV-2 came to the world's attention because so many people in Wuhan got sick that clinicians noticed the unexpectedly high volume of patients. No special skill in virology is required to detect that, and there's no indication that the WIV was involved in doing so; if you believe it was, please post a reference. The genome of SARS-CoV-2 was first published not by the WIV but by Professor Zhang Yongzhen at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3052966/chinese-laboratory-first-shared-coronavirus-genome-world-ordered https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3052966/chin... Of course it's possible that the WIV had discovered the outbreak earlier by more sophisticated means, and the CCP has chosen to conceal this fact. I don't think it's even that unlikely, considering all the other early warnings they tried and failed to conceal (e.g., the reports from Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist unaffiliated with the WIV); but the question would then become why.
lamontcg 5y ago
We had SARS-1 crop up in Guangdong in 2003 when the nearest known related virus has been found in Yunnan some ~700 miles away. There just wasn't a lab there to leak from. This time it popped up about ~700 miles away again, but where there was a lab. The actual chances of that happening are probably about 1-in-10 / 1-in-20 if we understood the movement of people and animals within China that produced both outbreaks. That isn't actually that crazy of a coincidence.
- tripletao 5y ago
  It's not an impossible coincidence, but what prior estimate of the probability that an arbitrary pandemic is lab-origin are you applying that to? Of the ~dozen pandemics in the last fifty years, one (the 1977 flu pandemic[1], which killed ~700k people) was probably lab-origin. A 1/12 prior plus a 1/10 coincidence in favor of lab origin is pretty close to even odds, so what evidence takes it back down? You can't just say "because pandemics are usually natural", since that's what the 1/12 prior already captures. You present many reasonable arguments that natural origin is possible, and I agree that it is. That doesn't mean lab origin is impossible though, and it doesn't mean the possibility is negligible unless your prior is very heavily biased against it. Considering that a lab-origin pandemic has probably happened before (and has even been dismissed as clearly natural by the WHO[2], before the later scientific consensus corrected that!), I don't see where you're getting the confidence you've expressed in other comments that the origin of this one is certainly natural. As to exact numbers, I agree that it's reasonable to consider only the urban population, since emergence would probably be in a city. There's no reason to limit the population to China, though--natural emergence elsewhere in SE Asia would also have been possible, and the WIV's research program is distinctive not just in China but in the world. It seems like our disagreement hinges mostly on that first prior (considering that a pandemic emerged, but no other information), though. 1. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0904322 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0904322 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bullwho00443-0095.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bul...
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    The 1977 flu pandemic was a known virus though which was released. It was highly plausible that the virus could have been in a lab. This virus is literally unlike any other known virus. The closest known virus to it is RaTG13 which is only 96% homologous and the 4% differences across all its basepairs is very high. We have a closer relationship to apes than SARS-CoV-2 does to RATG13. And we had SARS-1 in 2003 and H1N1 in 2009 and MERS in 2012, where there's no lab involvement at all. Not to mention Ebola, Zika. It estimated that some 30+ viruses have spilled over from animals to humans since the 1970s, and there's been one lab leak. And we know that Yunnan province has bats with very similar viruses, with one virus having been identified which is almost certainly the precursor to SARS-CoV-1 and another virus which is the cousin of SARS-CoV-2, and we have a spillover event that happened in 2003 to Guangdong with SARS-CoV-1 showing that this can certainly occur without the involvement of any labs. What remains that is objectionable about the spillover theory of SARS-CoV-2 is the "wild coincidence" of the WIV lab being in the same city as where the spillover happened. This time. But a large city is likely where it would have been identified first. Estimates from the genetic clock of the virus is that the spillover happened sometime as early as October. It would have been spreading in rural areas before it hit the nearest big city and caused a superspreading event and was noticed. To accurately determine the likelihood that the spillover was in Wuhan and not somewhere else you need to accurately know the distribution of the bats in China, the distribution of the sarbecoviruses in the bats, and the intermediate animals that might have been involved and their movement and the movement of humans. We know from SARS-CoV-2 that the virus jumping from bats in Yunnan to Guangdong can happen. We can expect it would be unlikely for the virus to leapfrog all the way to Beijing. We don't have all that information, so it now becomes pulling numbers out of butts time. To me that feels more like rolling a natural 20 on 1d20. With SARS-CoV-1 we rolled a 6 and it turned up in Guangdong. If we rolled a 11 or 12 maybe it winds up in Congquing. But we have no idea what the intermediate species might be, which might make spillovers in Congquing unlikely if those animals aren't farmed near there. And we still have no idea of the mechanism by which SARS-CoV-2 wound up in Guangdong, but we know it did, and it didn't involve a lab.

cratermoon 5y ago

Have you considered the possibility that it first appeared in the vicinity of a lab that experiments on similar viruses is because if it had appeared elsewhere, there would have been no sufficiently-equipped lab to isolate it? This is the streetlight effect: you find things where you (are able to) look for them. In other words, it couldn't have appeared somewhere far from a properly-equipped lab, because there would be no properly-equipped lab to detect it.

johncena33 5y ago
> Have you considered the possibility that it first appeared in the vicinity of a lab that experiments on similar viruses is because if it had appeared elsewhere, there would have been no sufficiently-equipped lab to isolate it? You are essentially arguing for lab leak theory. Initially there was only one cluster of COVID and that was at Wuhan. That's why lab leak hypothesis is more plausible. It was not the case that there were dozens of clusters all over the world and Wuhan lab was first able to identify the virus. Your argument would have _some_ validity if there are lot of clusters of outbreaks at the same time. But that was not the case. The initial cluster was only at Wuhan.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  The initial cluster was found at Wuhan, because there's a lab there. We have no idea how many sub-pandemic clusters arose and fell before this particular mutation got into a population sufficiently dense and mobile to spread it. Did you know that 1918 flu arose in Haskell County, Kansas, killed many, and then just .. died out? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/
  - johncena33 5y ago
    > The initial cluster was found at Wuhan, because there's a lab there Citation needed. This seems hand-wavy at best. As a matter of fact, people were uncertain about disease itself [1]. I havent seen any article yet that asserts the fact that Wuhan cluster was detected because of the lab. Furthermore, Wuhan lab is a research lab. It's not some diagnostic lab that people go there to get tested for new variant of SARS viruses. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025
zdragnar 5y ago
Plenty of virii have their origins traced to initial outbreaks where there are not labs. Using this as a justification to not investigate the possibility of a lab leak is wishful thinking at best.
tripletao 5y ago
SARS-CoV-2 came to the world's attention because so many people in Wuhan got sick that clinicians noticed the unexpectedly high volume of patients. No special skill in virology is required to detect that, and there's no indication that the WIV was involved in doing so; if you believe it was, please post a reference. The genome of SARS-CoV-2 was first published not by the WIV but by Professor Zhang Yongzhen at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3052966/chinese-laboratory-first-shared-coronavirus-genome-world-ordered https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3052966/chin... Of course it's possible that the WIV had discovered the outbreak earlier by more sophisticated means, and the CCP has chosen to conceal this fact. I don't think it's even that unlikely, considering all the other early warnings they tried and failed to conceal (e.g., the reports from Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist unaffiliated with the WIV); but the question would then become why.

lamontcg 5y ago

We had SARS-1 crop up in Guangdong in 2003 when the nearest known related virus has been found in Yunnan some ~700 miles away. There just wasn't a lab there to leak from. This time it popped up about ~700 miles away again, but where there was a lab. The actual chances of that happening are probably about 1-in-10 / 1-in-20 if we understood the movement of people and animals within China that produced both outbreaks. That isn't actually that crazy of a coincidence.

tripletao 5y ago
It's not an impossible coincidence, but what prior estimate of the probability that an arbitrary pandemic is lab-origin are you applying that to? Of the ~dozen pandemics in the last fifty years, one (the 1977 flu pandemic[1], which killed ~700k people) was probably lab-origin. A 1/12 prior plus a 1/10 coincidence in favor of lab origin is pretty close to even odds, so what evidence takes it back down? You can't just say "because pandemics are usually natural", since that's what the 1/12 prior already captures. You present many reasonable arguments that natural origin is possible, and I agree that it is. That doesn't mean lab origin is impossible though, and it doesn't mean the possibility is negligible unless your prior is very heavily biased against it. Considering that a lab-origin pandemic has probably happened before (and has even been dismissed as clearly natural by the WHO[2], before the later scientific consensus corrected that!), I don't see where you're getting the confidence you've expressed in other comments that the origin of this one is certainly natural. As to exact numbers, I agree that it's reasonable to consider only the urban population, since emergence would probably be in a city. There's no reason to limit the population to China, though--natural emergence elsewhere in SE Asia would also have been possible, and the WIV's research program is distinctive not just in China but in the world. It seems like our disagreement hinges mostly on that first prior (considering that a pandemic emerged, but no other information), though. 1. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0904322 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0904322 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bullwho00443-0095.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bul...
- lamontcg 5y ago
  The 1977 flu pandemic was a known virus though which was released. It was highly plausible that the virus could have been in a lab. This virus is literally unlike any other known virus. The closest known virus to it is RaTG13 which is only 96% homologous and the 4% differences across all its basepairs is very high. We have a closer relationship to apes than SARS-CoV-2 does to RATG13. And we had SARS-1 in 2003 and H1N1 in 2009 and MERS in 2012, where there's no lab involvement at all. Not to mention Ebola, Zika. It estimated that some 30+ viruses have spilled over from animals to humans since the 1970s, and there's been one lab leak. And we know that Yunnan province has bats with very similar viruses, with one virus having been identified which is almost certainly the precursor to SARS-CoV-1 and another virus which is the cousin of SARS-CoV-2, and we have a spillover event that happened in 2003 to Guangdong with SARS-CoV-1 showing that this can certainly occur without the involvement of any labs. What remains that is objectionable about the spillover theory of SARS-CoV-2 is the "wild coincidence" of the WIV lab being in the same city as where the spillover happened. This time. But a large city is likely where it would have been identified first. Estimates from the genetic clock of the virus is that the spillover happened sometime as early as October. It would have been spreading in rural areas before it hit the nearest big city and caused a superspreading event and was noticed. To accurately determine the likelihood that the spillover was in Wuhan and not somewhere else you need to accurately know the distribution of the bats in China, the distribution of the sarbecoviruses in the bats, and the intermediate animals that might have been involved and their movement and the movement of humans. We know from SARS-CoV-2 that the virus jumping from bats in Yunnan to Guangdong can happen. We can expect it would be unlikely for the virus to leapfrog all the way to Beijing. We don't have all that information, so it now becomes pulling numbers out of butts time. To me that feels more like rolling a natural 20 on 1d20. With SARS-CoV-1 we rolled a 6 and it turned up in Guangdong. If we rolled a 11 or 12 maybe it winds up in Congquing. But we have no idea what the intermediate species might be, which might make spillovers in Congquing unlikely if those animals aren't farmed near there. And we still have no idea of the mechanism by which SARS-CoV-2 wound up in Guangdong, but we know it did, and it didn't involve a lab.