7 ms·

Did any of them originate a few miles from a pathogen research lab that handled such pathogen that caused those outbreaks?

by yumraj 5y ago

flukus 5y ago
These labs are in major cities. Epidemics are likely to be detected in Major cities. The chance of an outbreak being near a research lab aren't as long as you seem to think. If an outbreak were to happen in the United states just about everywhere would be near a CDC location: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&tbs=lf:1,lf_ui:4&tbm=lcl&q=cdc+USA+locations&rflfq=1&num=10&ved=2ahUKEwj96PD03vzwAhWyyzgGHQhdBncQtgN6BAgKEAQ#rlfi=hd:;si:;mv:[[60.57887875049525,-50.50786451874999],[7.520438055110938,-132.68559889374998],null,[38.74123953804018,-91.59673170625],4 https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&tbs=lf:1,lf...]
- kaesar14 5y ago
  As pointed out in the article, there were exactly 3 cities in the world working on gain-of-function research related to bat-originated coronaviruses. Galveston, Texas, Chapel Hill N.C, and Wuhan. It’s way more narrow than just being near a biological laboratory.
  - flukus 5y ago
    At that point you've subtly moved from lab leak theory to engineered virus theory which is much higher up the conspiracy theory chain.
    - kaesar14 5y ago
      Why? Im not passing judgement on whether it was engineered as a bioweapon. But there was a lab that was actively engaged in research of viruses that are exactly what COVID is. They were conducting research on making said viruses more infectious. I’m not sure why the more likely thing is that it was just a virus sitting in a lab that spilled out, as opposed to a virus that was actively being worked on using the techniques the lab was known to be studying.
      - flukus 5y ago
        > Why? You've artificially limited the number of possible labs to those doing bioweapon research. If this isn't your claim there is no reason to do so and if there are more labs studying coronavirus it's far less coincidental.
        kaesar14 5y ago
        The lab wasn’t conducting bioweapon research. Gain of function research isn’t to create a bioweapon, nominally. It’s to examine the behavior of viruses under manipulation in order to better understand how we can respond to them given an outbreak. It’s not nefarious by nature, though it does seem like its usefulness hasn’t panned out as was thought. But again, you really should read the article to understand what gain of function research is instead of insinuating I said COVID was a bioweapon.
        tripletao 5y ago
        There is zero evidence that anyone, anywhere in the world was working to develop SARS-like bioweapons. The gain-of-function research in question would have been basic research, intended to develop more dangerous variants of the viruses in order to predict future pandemic emergence, develop more universal vaccines, etc. I believe this research was reckless and should never have been funded (by the USA!) or permitted, even considering only what they knew at the time. It wasn't malicious, though. In any case, beyond gain-of-function, the WIV and Wuhan CDC also had the biggest program in the world to sample novel SARS-like coronaviruses from nature, from remote bat caves that no other humans had any reason to enter. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronavirus-bats-china-wuhan/2021/06/02/772ef984-beb2-11eb-922a-c40c9774bc48_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronaviru... If SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus accidentally released by scientists, then Wuhan is the obvious place for it to emerge. That could have been directly from a lab, or a researcher could have become infected on a sampling trip, traveled home from the sampling sites (~900 miles away, to be clear; Wuhan was not an expected natural spillover region), and seeded the infection there. None of this is anywhere close to proven, but the previous dismissal of any unnatural origin as a "conspiracy theory" was an outrageous, unscientific smear.
    - tannhauser23 5y ago
      That's not what the person you are responding to said at all. Please stop dishonestly conflating the two theories. You can believe that a coronavirus accidentally leaked from a lab that was studying coronaviruses without believing that it was intentional, or that the disease was a bioweapon. Honestly, this is not a difficult distinction to understand. You have to wonder why people are so eager to conflate the two.
      - flukus 5y ago
        If it's nothing to do with an engineered virus conspiracy then there's no reason to constrain ourselves to the 1 or 2 labs doing that kind of research. If we don't have that constraint then appearing in Wuhan is much less coincidental.
        kaesar14 5y ago
        Listen, if the virus originated in a city that simply had an infectious disease lab, that’s one thing. For a virus to originate in a city with one of three labs in the entire world conducting heavy-duty researching involving the exact kind of virus that unleashed this pandemic, with the stated intention of working with said viruses to make them more infectious (NOT for the purposes of making a bioweapon) that deserves special consideration. Especially with the fact that the animal the virus is thought to come from ranges 1500 miles south from said city, and started during a time that animal is typically hybernating.
        dboreham 5y ago
        I think it may be possible to compute the probability that this is a coincidence. Someone should do that.
        lmm 5y ago
        > with the stated intention of working with said viruses to make them more infectious (NOT for the purposes of making a bioweapon) Why is this relevant unless you're claiming that the virus that we've observed has been engineered in that way? Otherwise it seems like the chance of a coronavirus outbreak caused by poor handling in a lab is the same for any lab that's studying them for any purpose.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
peter422 5y ago
I don’t dispute it is one point of suspicion, but Wuhan is also one of the 10 biggest cities in China. It isn’t a surprise the first US outbreak was in the biggest city. The first cases could have been anywhere. If there were more evidence that it was lab made then the location would be another point, not to me without further evidence it doesn’t mean all that much. And there have been 2 emerging coronavirus outbreaks in the last 20 years due to natural origin. Why is it so hard to believe there would be another one.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  > If there were more evidence that it was lab made Have you actually read any of these articles? The location of the lab is like the tip of the iceberg.
  - peter422 5y ago
    Yes I have read more than the articles, which is why I’m correctly saying it was unlikely to come from the lab. I’m not saying it is impossible, just unlikely. And automatically degrading the opinions of experts who have detailed their arguments because you think they are biased is not proof of anything either.
- lawnchair_larry 5y ago
  There are mountains of evidence. Proximity to the lab is barely the tip of the iceberg.
- unishark 5y ago
  > I don’t dispute it is one point of suspicion, but Wuhan is also one of the 10 biggest cities in China. It isn’t a surprise the first US outbreak was in the biggest city. The first cases could have been anywhere. Is that really so for animal-borne viruses though? I thought they came from place with lots of animals, hence the focus on the market. If it just showed up on some random high-rise employee downtown that would be hard to believe. And after it starts, of course a highly-infectious virus shows up at densely populated places quickly. But for the same reason, I would also think it's hard for the first cases to travel to dense areas and spread the disease there without leaving a trail of cases along the trip. Ultimately they should point back to the animals they came from and testing can confirm it. Or at least rule various places out, if the govt was accommodating. Plus wasn't the first US case somewhere in Washington state.
tootie 5y ago
Other pertinent data point, how many epidemics have been positively traced to a lab leak since virology has been widely studied? The Wuhan lab was founded in the 1950s. You can say the likelihood that a virus would one day escape from one of these labs is pretty high. The likelihood that a given virus would be from a lab is very low. All of which brings us back to where we were at the start. It's plausible and possible but not really likely.
- Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
  There's no other credible explanation for the return of influenza H1N1 in 1976-7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu For an epidemic to occur, you need not just a lab leak, but a population sufficiently naive to the pathogen. H1N1 was displaced by H2N2 in the late 1950's pandemic, which in turn was displaced by H3N2 in the late 1960s pandemic. Thus it hit the cohort of people aged 25-6 or less who'd never been exposed to H1N1.
  - tootie 5y ago
    That article doesn't support your argument. It just says it was suspected. I found an NIH article that says the likelier origin is that the 1950 virus was used to produce a weakened live virus vaccine candidate that lead to the reemergence and not an accidental leak. It also concludes by saying there has never been a likely lab leak epidemic ever observed. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/
    - tripletao 5y ago
      That article's definition of "lab accident" seems narrow and legalistic to me. In either case, the virus spent 1950-1977 in a lab freezer. It ended up in the wild, with ~700k people dead. The only question is whether it escaped in an infected researcher (or in infectious lab waste, or in whatever else you'd consider a proper lab accident) vs. in that failed vaccine candidate. Those details do inform some details of the correct policy response. For example, they determine the relative importance of better PPE at the bench vs. better QA before allowing the vaccine to leave the lab. They don't change the overall question of whether scientific research has ever caused a pandemic, though. That causality is what matters, not whether the sign on the door said "lab" vs. "experimental vaccine nurse". For example, if the pandemic originated from a WIV researcher who became infected in the field (during their many expeditions to remote bat caves that no other humans would routinely enter), was that a "lab leak"? Literally no, since they weren't in the lab. The causality would still be the same, though--if not for that scientific research, that virus would likely have never left the cave. To avoid such confusion, it's probably better to say something like "unnatural origin", or "origin arising from scientific research". A much bigger mouthful than "lab leak", though.
Fomite 5y ago
Ebola Reston did.
- tripletao 5y ago
  Ebola Reston evolved naturally, and emerged in humans due to an infected lab monkey imported from the Philippines to a contract research organization in Reston. Anyone who guessed that it came from Fort Detrick would have been wrong about which lab it came from, but right that it came from a lab. Put differently, if scientists there hadn't been experimenting with monkeys, Ebola Reston wouldn't have entered humans there. We don't absolve exotic wildlife traffickers or farmers of the consequences of their actions in releasing novel, naturally-evolved viruses; so I'm not sure why we'd absolve scientific researchers.
stef25 5y ago
Labs may be built in areas relevant to their research.
- tripletao 5y ago
  They may be, but the WIV wasn't. In the words of Dr. Shi herself: > We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province. https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli%20Q%26A.pdf https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli... The closest animal virus to SARS-CoV-2 was found in nature about 900 miles from Wuhan (RaTG13, in Mojiang), closer to Chongqing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, or HK.
  - Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
    According to Wikipedia the lab had been established many decades ago, "The WIV was founded in 1956 as the Wuhan Microbiology Laboratory" and got its current name in 1978. For better or worse, open, public labs tend to be set up in urban areas, see the insane move of the work done at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center to college town Manhattan, Kansas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan,_Kansas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan,_Kansas in the heartland of American agriculture.

Did any of them originate a few miles from a pathogen research lab that handled such pathogen that caused those outbreaks?

by yumraj 5y ago

Did any of them originate a few miles from a pathogen research lab that handled such pathogen that caused those outbreaks?

flukus 5y ago

These labs are in major cities. Epidemics are likely to be detected in Major cities. The chance of an outbreak being near a research lab aren't as long as you seem to think. If an outbreak were to happen in the United states just about everywhere would be near a CDC location: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&tbs=lf:1,lf_ui:4&tbm=lcl&q=cdc+USA+locations&rflfq=1&num=10&ved=2ahUKEwj96PD03vzwAhWyyzgGHQhdBncQtgN6BAgKEAQ#rlfi=hd:;si:;mv:[[60.57887875049525,-50.50786451874999],[7.520438055110938,-132.68559889374998],null,[38.74123953804018,-91.59673170625],4 https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&tbs=lf:1,lf...]

kaesar14 5y ago
As pointed out in the article, there were exactly 3 cities in the world working on gain-of-function research related to bat-originated coronaviruses. Galveston, Texas, Chapel Hill N.C, and Wuhan. It’s way more narrow than just being near a biological laboratory.
- flukus 5y ago
  At that point you've subtly moved from lab leak theory to engineered virus theory which is much higher up the conspiracy theory chain.
  - kaesar14 5y ago
    Why? Im not passing judgement on whether it was engineered as a bioweapon. But there was a lab that was actively engaged in research of viruses that are exactly what COVID is. They were conducting research on making said viruses more infectious. I’m not sure why the more likely thing is that it was just a virus sitting in a lab that spilled out, as opposed to a virus that was actively being worked on using the techniques the lab was known to be studying.
    - flukus 5y ago
      > Why? You've artificially limited the number of possible labs to those doing bioweapon research. If this isn't your claim there is no reason to do so and if there are more labs studying coronavirus it's far less coincidental.
      - kaesar14 5y ago
        The lab wasn’t conducting bioweapon research. Gain of function research isn’t to create a bioweapon, nominally. It’s to examine the behavior of viruses under manipulation in order to better understand how we can respond to them given an outbreak. It’s not nefarious by nature, though it does seem like its usefulness hasn’t panned out as was thought. But again, you really should read the article to understand what gain of function research is instead of insinuating I said COVID was a bioweapon.
      - tripletao 5y ago
        There is zero evidence that anyone, anywhere in the world was working to develop SARS-like bioweapons. The gain-of-function research in question would have been basic research, intended to develop more dangerous variants of the viruses in order to predict future pandemic emergence, develop more universal vaccines, etc. I believe this research was reckless and should never have been funded (by the USA!) or permitted, even considering only what they knew at the time. It wasn't malicious, though. In any case, beyond gain-of-function, the WIV and Wuhan CDC also had the biggest program in the world to sample novel SARS-like coronaviruses from nature, from remote bat caves that no other humans had any reason to enter. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronavirus-bats-china-wuhan/2021/06/02/772ef984-beb2-11eb-922a-c40c9774bc48_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronaviru... If SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus accidentally released by scientists, then Wuhan is the obvious place for it to emerge. That could have been directly from a lab, or a researcher could have become infected on a sampling trip, traveled home from the sampling sites (~900 miles away, to be clear; Wuhan was not an expected natural spillover region), and seeded the infection there. None of this is anywhere close to proven, but the previous dismissal of any unnatural origin as a "conspiracy theory" was an outrageous, unscientific smear.
  - tannhauser23 5y ago
    That's not what the person you are responding to said at all. Please stop dishonestly conflating the two theories. You can believe that a coronavirus accidentally leaked from a lab that was studying coronaviruses without believing that it was intentional, or that the disease was a bioweapon. Honestly, this is not a difficult distinction to understand. You have to wonder why people are so eager to conflate the two.
    - flukus 5y ago
      If it's nothing to do with an engineered virus conspiracy then there's no reason to constrain ourselves to the 1 or 2 labs doing that kind of research. If we don't have that constraint then appearing in Wuhan is much less coincidental.
      - kaesar14 5y ago
        Listen, if the virus originated in a city that simply had an infectious disease lab, that’s one thing. For a virus to originate in a city with one of three labs in the entire world conducting heavy-duty researching involving the exact kind of virus that unleashed this pandemic, with the stated intention of working with said viruses to make them more infectious (NOT for the purposes of making a bioweapon) that deserves special consideration. Especially with the fact that the animal the virus is thought to come from ranges 1500 miles south from said city, and started during a time that animal is typically hybernating.
        dboreham 5y ago
        I think it may be possible to compute the probability that this is a coincidence. Someone should do that.
        lmm 5y ago
        > with the stated intention of working with said viruses to make them more infectious (NOT for the purposes of making a bioweapon) Why is this relevant unless you're claiming that the virus that we've observed has been engineered in that way? Otherwise it seems like the chance of a coronavirus outbreak caused by poor handling in a lab is the same for any lab that's studying them for any purpose.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

peter422 5y ago

I don’t dispute it is one point of suspicion, but Wuhan is also one of the 10 biggest cities in China. It isn’t a surprise the first US outbreak was in the biggest city. The first cases could have been anywhere. If there were more evidence that it was lab made then the location would be another point, not to me without further evidence it doesn’t mean all that much. And there have been 2 emerging coronavirus outbreaks in the last 20 years due to natural origin. Why is it so hard to believe there would be another one.

jkhdigital 5y ago
> If there were more evidence that it was lab made Have you actually read any of these articles? The location of the lab is like the tip of the iceberg.
- peter422 5y ago
  Yes I have read more than the articles, which is why I’m correctly saying it was unlikely to come from the lab. I’m not saying it is impossible, just unlikely. And automatically degrading the opinions of experts who have detailed their arguments because you think they are biased is not proof of anything either.
lawnchair_larry 5y ago
There are mountains of evidence. Proximity to the lab is barely the tip of the iceberg.
unishark 5y ago
> I don’t dispute it is one point of suspicion, but Wuhan is also one of the 10 biggest cities in China. It isn’t a surprise the first US outbreak was in the biggest city. The first cases could have been anywhere. Is that really so for animal-borne viruses though? I thought they came from place with lots of animals, hence the focus on the market. If it just showed up on some random high-rise employee downtown that would be hard to believe. And after it starts, of course a highly-infectious virus shows up at densely populated places quickly. But for the same reason, I would also think it's hard for the first cases to travel to dense areas and spread the disease there without leaving a trail of cases along the trip. Ultimately they should point back to the animals they came from and testing can confirm it. Or at least rule various places out, if the govt was accommodating. Plus wasn't the first US case somewhere in Washington state.

tootie 5y ago

Other pertinent data point, how many epidemics have been positively traced to a lab leak since virology has been widely studied? The Wuhan lab was founded in the 1950s. You can say the likelihood that a virus would one day escape from one of these labs is pretty high. The likelihood that a given virus would be from a lab is very low. All of which brings us back to where we were at the start. It's plausible and possible but not really likely.

Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
There's no other credible explanation for the return of influenza H1N1 in 1976-7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu For an epidemic to occur, you need not just a lab leak, but a population sufficiently naive to the pathogen. H1N1 was displaced by H2N2 in the late 1950's pandemic, which in turn was displaced by H3N2 in the late 1960s pandemic. Thus it hit the cohort of people aged 25-6 or less who'd never been exposed to H1N1.
- tootie 5y ago
  That article doesn't support your argument. It just says it was suspected. I found an NIH article that says the likelier origin is that the 1950 virus was used to produce a weakened live virus vaccine candidate that lead to the reemergence and not an accidental leak. It also concludes by saying there has never been a likely lab leak epidemic ever observed. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/
  - tripletao 5y ago
    That article's definition of "lab accident" seems narrow and legalistic to me. In either case, the virus spent 1950-1977 in a lab freezer. It ended up in the wild, with ~700k people dead. The only question is whether it escaped in an infected researcher (or in infectious lab waste, or in whatever else you'd consider a proper lab accident) vs. in that failed vaccine candidate. Those details do inform some details of the correct policy response. For example, they determine the relative importance of better PPE at the bench vs. better QA before allowing the vaccine to leave the lab. They don't change the overall question of whether scientific research has ever caused a pandemic, though. That causality is what matters, not whether the sign on the door said "lab" vs. "experimental vaccine nurse". For example, if the pandemic originated from a WIV researcher who became infected in the field (during their many expeditions to remote bat caves that no other humans would routinely enter), was that a "lab leak"? Literally no, since they weren't in the lab. The causality would still be the same, though--if not for that scientific research, that virus would likely have never left the cave. To avoid such confusion, it's probably better to say something like "unnatural origin", or "origin arising from scientific research". A much bigger mouthful than "lab leak", though.

Fomite 5y ago

Ebola Reston did.

tripletao 5y ago
Ebola Reston evolved naturally, and emerged in humans due to an infected lab monkey imported from the Philippines to a contract research organization in Reston. Anyone who guessed that it came from Fort Detrick would have been wrong about which lab it came from, but right that it came from a lab. Put differently, if scientists there hadn't been experimenting with monkeys, Ebola Reston wouldn't have entered humans there. We don't absolve exotic wildlife traffickers or farmers of the consequences of their actions in releasing novel, naturally-evolved viruses; so I'm not sure why we'd absolve scientific researchers.

stef25 5y ago

Labs may be built in areas relevant to their research.

tripletao 5y ago
They may be, but the WIV wasn't. In the words of Dr. Shi herself: > We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province. https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli%20Q%26A.pdf https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli... The closest animal virus to SARS-CoV-2 was found in nature about 900 miles from Wuhan (RaTG13, in Mojiang), closer to Chongqing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, or HK.
- Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
  According to Wikipedia the lab had been established many decades ago, "The WIV was founded in 1956 as the Wuhan Microbiology Laboratory" and got its current name in 1978. For better or worse, open, public labs tend to be set up in urban areas, see the insane move of the work done at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center to college town Manhattan, Kansas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan,_Kansas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan,_Kansas in the heartland of American agriculture.