5 ms·

There's a bit of a fuzzy overlap between "man made" and "lab leak". Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from th

by Lazare 5y ago

There's a bit of a fuzzy overlap between "man made" and "lab leak". Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. Certainly the lab was doing research; there's an ongoing debate over what they did, who funded it, whether what they did technically qualifies as "gain of function" research, what practical impact the research could reasonably have been predicted to have, etc. Still, if your theory is that the lab took a bat virus, performed some research on it such as "serial passaging" to determine if it could mutate to become more infectious to humans, the virus does mutate (thus proving the hypothesis), and then a sample of the mutated virus is accidentally leaked... ...that seems like a plausible theory, and it's now showing up in mainstream discussions; eg, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca.... But I could easily imagine that being considered a suggestion the virus was "man-made", and censored.

wearywanderer 5y ago
> Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. I disagree, the lab leak hypothesis is independent from the lab [inadvertently or deliberately] mutating the virus. The lab may have merely possessed the virus, having made only the mistake of transporting the virus from a remote region into the middle of a city and then subsequently losing control of it.
- Lazare 5y ago
  That would help explain how the virus got from the mine to Wuhan; it does not help explain how the virus mutated from a bat virus unable to infect humans to a virus that was extremely good at infecting humans with, so far, no intermediate stages identified. Much of the problem with the zoonotic explanation is that no evidence of the process has been found. Was a third virus involved? We haven't identified it. Was a third host species involved? We haven't identified one. Were there any half-way variants that were slightly capable of infecting humans, and then mutated further to reach their final form? We haven't identified any. There was some initial speculation about the wet market, but that hasn't panned out. Pangolins were briefly considered as a possible intermediate host, but I think that's also been ruled out. So if the lab collected the virus, flew it to Wuhan, stored it, and then accidentally leaked it in its original form, we still have no idea what happened next. It's a bat virus, so it infected a local Wuhan bat, and then what? And whatever the theory is, why have we been unable to find any evidence of it so far? Assuming RaTG13 was indeed the source of COVID-19, the question of "how it got to Wuhan" is, I think, much less interesting than "how did it mutate into COVID-19" (and "why can't we find evidence of that process?"). And I think when people talk about "lab leak" versus "zoonotic", they're generally focused on the latter questions.
  - gamblor956 5y ago
    We haven't found any evidence about what happened in the lab...because China barred WHO researchers from visiting the lab do look for that evidence.
    - fsckboy 5y ago
      "China barred WHO researchers"... and the WHO researchers themselves engage in (and fund) the same type of experiments as the Wuhan lab (and the Wuhan lab itself), and so had very little incentive to investigate or implicate themselves either... and further, there actually is evidence of what went on in the Wuhan lab, see https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
  - wearywanderer 5y ago
    I generally agree with you, my guess is the virus was messed with and accidentally got out. However I don't feel comfortable ruling out alternative scenarios, such as: 1) The sample the lab received was from the 'third host' and not from a bat; e.g. a field researcher mailed the lab a slice of pangolin. 2) A guano miner or lab researcher received a massive viral dose and inadvertently became a one-man walking "GoF lab" > Assuming RaTG13 was indeed the source of COVID-19, the question of "how it got to Wuhan" is, I think, much less interesting than "how did it mutate into COVID-19" (and "why can't we find evidence of that process?"). 'Interesting' is subjective, but I think both questions are important. Particularly, the wisdom of locating a lab like this inside a city should probably be called into question. Whether the lab was doing GoF research on this virus prior to outbreak is certainly an important question; arguably the more important of the two. But unless we are dealing with 'zero-sum importance', that does not diminish the importance of figuring out why and how the virus was transported into a city.
    - Lazare 5y ago
      > However I don't feel comfortable ruling out alternative scenarios I haven't suggested we should, not do I think that would be wise. We're in the uncomfortable position of having effectively no evidence in favour of any theory of COVID-19s origin, so we're reduced to trying to imagine which bits of missing evidence are the least likely to have been missed. It seems true that Wuhan is outside the flight range of the horseshoe bats living in the mine, and that a sample of RaTG13 was brought from the mine to the lab in Wuhan. If RaTG13 was a direct predecessor of COVID-19 (likely), and if the lab in Wuhan was the direct source of the initial infections in Wuhan (hard to estimate), then I think Occam's Razor suggests we have a good enough explanation for how RaTG13 got to Wuhan. It would be a remarkable coincidence if a sample of RaTG13 was in Wuhan to be studied, then RaTG13 independently mutated into an unknown COVID-19 precursor outside of Wuhan, then the precursor was separately brought to Wuhan to be studied, then the precursor leaked and became COVID-19! ...but as ever with this mess, I don't know of a reason we could rule it out. At most we can try and estimate the odds of the lab having a closer precursor than RaTG13 but not realising or, if they realised it, not admitting it, but I'm not sure how to even start evaluating that scenario, so...
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  Indeed, a lab leak includes all of these possible priors of how the virus ended up in the lab in the first place. But the only serious contender for the prior hypothesis is that the researchers produced a highly infectious chimeric coronavirus through gain-of-function/serial passage.
  - gamblor956 5y ago
    At least one researcher who has worked with the head of the Wuhan lab has accused her of shoddy adherence to safety practices, so it's also quite possible that simple negligence led to cross-contamination and subsequently to human exposure. It would certainly explain how the predecessor candidates simultaneously acquired all of the necessary mutations: all of the most genetically similar coronaviruses were all being studied in the lab; if precautions were not taken to avoid cross-contamination then they could picked up the mutations in a relatively benign environment without external stressors. (One of the initial reasons given for the man-made theory was due to the fact that COVID19 was unlikely to arise naturally in the wild because any combination of mutations among the predecessor strains short of the entire package of mutations that ended up in COVID19 would have resulted in a strain less able to reproduce than existing competing strains.) Similarly, lax attention to safety practices would also explain why the first known cluster of COVID19 cases occurred among Wuhan lab workers.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      Stored in what form. A lab having a bunch of samples in a refrigerator doesn't mean that a spill causes them all to spontaneously recombinate.
- fsckboy 5y ago
  while you are correct that lab-leak is "theoretically" a distinct hypothesis, in this specific case the apparent splicing of pangolin virus parts together with bat virus parts is a highly suggestive smoking gun for man-made, especially when you consider that this lab does splicing experiments
  - wearywanderer 5y ago
    From what I understand, this lab and those like it likely have/had a large backlog of samples they had received from field researchers but had not yet had an opportunity to identify, sequence, or otherwise mess around with. A procedural error in handling a sample in that backlog could have occurred, at least in theory.
- XorNot 5y ago
  So here's the thing: the more improbable thing about the lab leak hypothesis is that the lab would even have had enough virus, in virion form, to cause even 1 human infection. Biological materials are hard to grow and store. Very few people have ever been infected from handling corpses from much more pathogenic viruses (i.e. the black death was one of the only significant ones, and that's because it's a bacterium). And that's about 70kg and trillions of bacteria to "maybe" end up contaminated. In-vitro scale research on viruses has been going on for a long time, in BSL2 facilities (your university bio-labs for students probably met this standard), and people getting infected from much more contagious human-viruses in those settings just doesn't happen. The scale of difference in quantity between a smear of virus particles on a petridish (pretty much immobilized, and, as we know, at serious risk of being destroyed by the trace UV from fluorescent lighting) and the quantity from an active infection in a human cough is multiple orders of magnitude (also a massive difference in exposure path: COVID spreads principally by going in through mucus membranes as aersolized droplets - dead tissue doesn't produce these, neither do immobilized particles). No one pushing "lab leak" has ever proposed a mechanism by which it happened - they just assume it can, because they don't work in a biology lab and have no idea about what biological research actually looks like.
  - wearywanderer 5y ago
    > So here's the thing: the more improbable thing about the lab leak hypothesis is that the lab would even have had enough virus, in virion form, to cause even 1 human infection. I reject that. Lab leaks have been known to occur, with human casualties: > "After the outbreak of SARS in 2003, labs around the world began studying the virus, which had come perilously close to causing a global pandemic. Since that time, there have been no less than six lab leaks of SARS. The first took place in at the National University of Singapore, where a graduate student contracted the disease from a contaminated sample. This was followed by an incident in Taiwan, when a researcher contracted it, most likely during a botched decontamination of laboratory waste. Then several leaks took place at China’s National Institute of Virology. In one case, a researcher passed the infection to her mother, who died of SARS. In each case, human error, most likely exacerbated by inadequate safety protocols, accounted for the leaks." https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-27/covid-19-and-lab-leak-history-smallpox-h1n1-sars https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-27/covid-...

by Lazare 5y ago

wearywanderer 5y ago

> Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. I disagree, the lab leak hypothesis is independent from the lab [inadvertently or deliberately] mutating the virus. The lab may have merely possessed the virus, having made only the mistake of transporting the virus from a remote region into the middle of a city and then subsequently losing control of it.

Lazare 5y ago
That would help explain how the virus got from the mine to Wuhan; it does not help explain how the virus mutated from a bat virus unable to infect humans to a virus that was extremely good at infecting humans with, so far, no intermediate stages identified. Much of the problem with the zoonotic explanation is that no evidence of the process has been found. Was a third virus involved? We haven't identified it. Was a third host species involved? We haven't identified one. Were there any half-way variants that were slightly capable of infecting humans, and then mutated further to reach their final form? We haven't identified any. There was some initial speculation about the wet market, but that hasn't panned out. Pangolins were briefly considered as a possible intermediate host, but I think that's also been ruled out. So if the lab collected the virus, flew it to Wuhan, stored it, and then accidentally leaked it in its original form, we still have no idea what happened next. It's a bat virus, so it infected a local Wuhan bat, and then what? And whatever the theory is, why have we been unable to find any evidence of it so far? Assuming RaTG13 was indeed the source of COVID-19, the question of "how it got to Wuhan" is, I think, much less interesting than "how did it mutate into COVID-19" (and "why can't we find evidence of that process?"). And I think when people talk about "lab leak" versus "zoonotic", they're generally focused on the latter questions.
- gamblor956 5y ago
  We haven't found any evidence about what happened in the lab...because China barred WHO researchers from visiting the lab do look for that evidence.
  - fsckboy 5y ago
    "China barred WHO researchers"... and the WHO researchers themselves engage in (and fund) the same type of experiments as the Wuhan lab (and the Wuhan lab itself), and so had very little incentive to investigate or implicate themselves either... and further, there actually is evidence of what went on in the Wuhan lab, see https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
- wearywanderer 5y ago
  I generally agree with you, my guess is the virus was messed with and accidentally got out. However I don't feel comfortable ruling out alternative scenarios, such as: 1) The sample the lab received was from the 'third host' and not from a bat; e.g. a field researcher mailed the lab a slice of pangolin. 2) A guano miner or lab researcher received a massive viral dose and inadvertently became a one-man walking "GoF lab" > Assuming RaTG13 was indeed the source of COVID-19, the question of "how it got to Wuhan" is, I think, much less interesting than "how did it mutate into COVID-19" (and "why can't we find evidence of that process?"). 'Interesting' is subjective, but I think both questions are important. Particularly, the wisdom of locating a lab like this inside a city should probably be called into question. Whether the lab was doing GoF research on this virus prior to outbreak is certainly an important question; arguably the more important of the two. But unless we are dealing with 'zero-sum importance', that does not diminish the importance of figuring out why and how the virus was transported into a city.
  - Lazare 5y ago
    > However I don't feel comfortable ruling out alternative scenarios I haven't suggested we should, not do I think that would be wise. We're in the uncomfortable position of having effectively no evidence in favour of any theory of COVID-19s origin, so we're reduced to trying to imagine which bits of missing evidence are the least likely to have been missed. It seems true that Wuhan is outside the flight range of the horseshoe bats living in the mine, and that a sample of RaTG13 was brought from the mine to the lab in Wuhan. If RaTG13 was a direct predecessor of COVID-19 (likely), and if the lab in Wuhan was the direct source of the initial infections in Wuhan (hard to estimate), then I think Occam's Razor suggests we have a good enough explanation for how RaTG13 got to Wuhan. It would be a remarkable coincidence if a sample of RaTG13 was in Wuhan to be studied, then RaTG13 independently mutated into an unknown COVID-19 precursor outside of Wuhan, then the precursor was separately brought to Wuhan to be studied, then the precursor leaked and became COVID-19! ...but as ever with this mess, I don't know of a reason we could rule it out. At most we can try and estimate the odds of the lab having a closer precursor than RaTG13 but not realising or, if they realised it, not admitting it, but I'm not sure how to even start evaluating that scenario, so...
jkhdigital 5y ago
Indeed, a lab leak includes all of these possible priors of how the virus ended up in the lab in the first place. But the only serious contender for the prior hypothesis is that the researchers produced a highly infectious chimeric coronavirus through gain-of-function/serial passage.
- gamblor956 5y ago
  At least one researcher who has worked with the head of the Wuhan lab has accused her of shoddy adherence to safety practices, so it's also quite possible that simple negligence led to cross-contamination and subsequently to human exposure. It would certainly explain how the predecessor candidates simultaneously acquired all of the necessary mutations: all of the most genetically similar coronaviruses were all being studied in the lab; if precautions were not taken to avoid cross-contamination then they could picked up the mutations in a relatively benign environment without external stressors. (One of the initial reasons given for the man-made theory was due to the fact that COVID19 was unlikely to arise naturally in the wild because any combination of mutations among the predecessor strains short of the entire package of mutations that ended up in COVID19 would have resulted in a strain less able to reproduce than existing competing strains.) Similarly, lax attention to safety practices would also explain why the first known cluster of COVID19 cases occurred among Wuhan lab workers.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Stored in what form. A lab having a bunch of samples in a refrigerator doesn't mean that a spill causes them all to spontaneously recombinate.
fsckboy 5y ago
while you are correct that lab-leak is "theoretically" a distinct hypothesis, in this specific case the apparent splicing of pangolin virus parts together with bat virus parts is a highly suggestive smoking gun for man-made, especially when you consider that this lab does splicing experiments
- wearywanderer 5y ago
  From what I understand, this lab and those like it likely have/had a large backlog of samples they had received from field researchers but had not yet had an opportunity to identify, sequence, or otherwise mess around with. A procedural error in handling a sample in that backlog could have occurred, at least in theory.
XorNot 5y ago
So here's the thing: the more improbable thing about the lab leak hypothesis is that the lab would even have had enough virus, in virion form, to cause even 1 human infection. Biological materials are hard to grow and store. Very few people have ever been infected from handling corpses from much more pathogenic viruses (i.e. the black death was one of the only significant ones, and that's because it's a bacterium). And that's about 70kg and trillions of bacteria to "maybe" end up contaminated. In-vitro scale research on viruses has been going on for a long time, in BSL2 facilities (your university bio-labs for students probably met this standard), and people getting infected from much more contagious human-viruses in those settings just doesn't happen. The scale of difference in quantity between a smear of virus particles on a petridish (pretty much immobilized, and, as we know, at serious risk of being destroyed by the trace UV from fluorescent lighting) and the quantity from an active infection in a human cough is multiple orders of magnitude (also a massive difference in exposure path: COVID spreads principally by going in through mucus membranes as aersolized droplets - dead tissue doesn't produce these, neither do immobilized particles). No one pushing "lab leak" has ever proposed a mechanism by which it happened - they just assume it can, because they don't work in a biology lab and have no idea about what biological research actually looks like.
- wearywanderer 5y ago
  > So here's the thing: the more improbable thing about the lab leak hypothesis is that the lab would even have had enough virus, in virion form, to cause even 1 human infection. I reject that. Lab leaks have been known to occur, with human casualties: > "After the outbreak of SARS in 2003, labs around the world began studying the virus, which had come perilously close to causing a global pandemic. Since that time, there have been no less than six lab leaks of SARS. The first took place in at the National University of Singapore, where a graduate student contracted the disease from a contaminated sample. This was followed by an incident in Taiwan, when a researcher contracted it, most likely during a botched decontamination of laboratory waste. Then several leaks took place at China’s National Institute of Virology. In one case, a researcher passed the infection to her mother, who died of SARS. In each case, human error, most likely exacerbated by inadequate safety protocols, accounted for the leaks." https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-27/covid-19-and-lab-leak-history-smallpox-h1n1-sars https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-27/covid-...