9 ms·

It’s crazy to me how many people on even this forum, a place purportedly of science, continue to dismiss a lab leak origin out of hand citing it as some sort of

It’s crazy to me how many people on even this forum, a place purportedly of science, continue to dismiss a lab leak origin out of hand citing it as some sort of crackpot theory. The serious questions raised in this article have been around since last April but it’s only now it’s even allowed to talk about them on digital forums. Excellent write up by Vanity Fair.

analog31 5y ago
Here's what I remember from that time period. My recollection is that the wet market hypothesis fell out of favor rather quickly, but nothing else really emerged in its place. The lab leak theory was circulating, but amongst people such as rank-and-file scientists, the attitude was: We aren't going to get a straight answer about this, but we've got to defeat this virus. I don't remember dismissing the lab leak theory per se, but rather, taking it in as one of a massive spew of crackpot theories all coming from more or less one source. I'm reminded of the children's story, "The boy who cried wolf." Looking back in hindsight, I wonder how we could have picked out the lab leak theory as being worthy of consideration, given the context. And whether a more scientifically minded public and government would have faced that dilemma.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  > amongst people such as rank-and-file scientists Do you have a source? Is there some kind of periodic “rank-and-file scientist opinion survey” that provided this insight to you? Or are you just manufacturing (or repeating) a narrative to make sense of a complicated world?
  - analog31 5y ago
    Maybe there's a third option. Thanks.
- kaesar14 5y ago
  They would’ve had a better chance of being taken seriously if it wasn’t actively a bannable offense to talk about them on major social media websites.
  - analog31 5y ago
    Could be. I confess that I don't follow social media, but I participate in a handful of web forums that probably count as lightweight social media. On those forums, there are taboo topics, and my impression is that those are topics where any hope of civil discussion has long since evaporated. So, I wouldn't have high hopes for progress towards investigating this issue via a social medium if its curators have already concluded that the topic should be banned.
    - garmaine 5y ago
      FYI for the past year or so you could get a lifetime ban from YouTube (and Facebook and Twitter?) for discussing the lab-leak hypothesis. It was an outrageous overreaction.
- alexkcd 5y ago
  The article literally cites a statement put out by a respected medical journal on Feb. 29, 2020, and signed by 27 scientists, "roundly rejecting the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism." Whatever your recollection of "rank-and-file scientists" attitudes is, the narrative on record is to the contrary.
  - lmm 5y ago
    Rank-and-file scientists tend to stay out of that kind of political statement-making IME, just as when you see a statement from the student union of XZY university condemning whatever that tells you very little about what rank-and-file students of that university are thinking. So I don't see a contradiction here.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- Izkata 5y ago
  > Looking back in hindsight, I wonder how we could have picked out the lab leak theory as being worthy of consideration, given the context. There were a lot of threads to pull, and some of us were following it. For example, this video was posted in April 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU
- bart_spoon 5y ago
  > Looking back in hindsight, I wonder how we could have picked out the lab leak theory as being worthy of consideration, given the context. And whether a more scientifically minded public and government would have faced that dilemma. By actually considering the idea based on the information available, rather than judging solely on the messenger. Things we've known for most of the past year now: * The wet-market was likely not the origin of the outbreak. Earliest identified positive cases predate the market outbreak and have no connection with it. * The lab in question was very near to the wet market where the largest outbreak occurred. * The lab in question specifically researched coronaviruses in bats. * The closest match to the SARS-COV-2 virus we've found in bats in nature are bats that live over a 1000 kilometers away from Wuhan. However, these bats are among those being researched at the virology lab there. * The lab in question was the subject of concern among international inspectors years before the outbreak, who stated that they believed the lab didn't meet necessary safety and containment protocols, and didn't have the staff to do so. * US intelligence agencies have been signalling that the Chinese government has been covering up the origins of the lab. * The CCP themselves have demonstrated that they are actively working against the discovery of the origins of the disease. Soon after the wet-market outbreak, they closed the wet-market, prevented any international scientists and experts from examining it, and over their objections, purged all animals there and sanitized the entire place, making it impossible to determine what might have led to an outbreak at the market. They also cracked down internally on whistleblowers who said the situation in Wuhan early in the pandemic was much worse than being broadcasted. Finally, they have simultaneously insisted on the natural origin of the virus, while also pushing theories that it originated from non-Chinese sources, such as China, South Asian pangolin black market traders, and the US Army. * The CCP prevented WHO investigators from actually entering the country to look for origins of the virus for nearly a year, didn't give them full access when they arrived, and the resulting report was declared largely useless by the international community immediately upon its release. * All people claiming that the lab-leak theory had been "debunked" were actually referring to the theory that it was genetically engineered, which is not the same thing at all. None of this proves a lab leak, but its strong enough circumstantial evidence that it is at least as plausible as any other origin. Virtually the only new information to have come out is that some of the workers in the lab got sick with Covid-like symptoms in November. If you swapped China with the US and this lab with the CDC, people would have taken it far more seriously. Imagine a worldwide pandemic started down the street from the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, AND no one could find the origin of the virus but the closest match was in an animal native to Northern Ohio, AND that animal also happened to be at the CDC for studying the type of virus in question, AND whistleblowers had mentioned concerns about procedures there previously, AND the US government did everything in their power to prevent people from investigating. People would have zeroed in on the theory from day 1. There was always plenty of reason to see it as worthy of consideration, and for those who weren't judging solely based on "Does Trump think this is true or not", they did. The biggest reason it wasn't was solely due to the fact that our media/social media can't function outside the scope of our current political/cultural wars. Information is being judged less and less on its own merits, and more and more on who is providing it.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
Kevin Drum had a good summary of this a couple of weeks ago, much shorter. His take? There's no more evidence for the lab leak theory now than there was a year ago, BUT what has changed is that the cross-over theory implied that we would find certain evidence for the vectors, and that evidence has not shown up. KD's take was that it's not so much that the lab leak theory has become more likely, it's the that biological origin theory has become less likely.
- 542458 5y ago
  We’ve been trying to find the zoonotic origin of Ebola for decades without any success. We don’t have anywhere near a complete catalog of animal diseases, and of those only a fraction have been sequenced.
  - kaesar14 5y ago
    We didn’t have the same confluence of other circumstantial evidence we do in this case. There’s no good reason to think Ebola came from a lab.
    - TchoBeer 5y ago
      The point isn't "Ebola came from a lab" but rather "the fact that we can't pin down a natural origin doesn't prove it's man-made."
      - lmm 5y ago
        It doesn't prove anything, but it shifts the balance of evidence.
- lawnchair_larry 5y ago
  Haha. No. It’s because of politics and TDS. People were taught that this was a Trump theory. That’s all the media needs to say to ensure that nobody will take it seriously and nobody will tolerate anyone else who takes it seriously.
bpodgursky 5y ago
It's worth remembering that a good percent of any social media audience are paid Chinese posters (ie the $.50 army). China has been working _very_ hard to redirect the origin of COVID-19 away from the WIV, and even from China itself (starting rumors that it originated in Italy). Take any skeptical audience with a huge grain of salt, considering that the zeitgeist might not be organic in the slightest.
- ngc248 5y ago
  Any rational person would give a bit of consideration to the lab leak theory, as some one said upthread 1. Corona virus outbreak started in wuhan 2. Wuhan has the WIV which does research on coronaviruses At a minimum this should make someone think that the lab leak theory is probable, instead of outright dismissing it. Also there were concerns raised by the US state department officials who had reviewed the protocols at the lab that the standards were not upto bar. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
fukmbas 5y ago
Because it is a conspiracy theory...
lifeformed 5y ago
The way I remember it was that people conflated the lab leak theory with it being engineered in a lab. Those are very different things but easy to mix up in a headline. It being engineered as a bioweapon is in the realm of a crackpot theory, but it being just a poorly contained natural research project was fairly reasonable. Some prominent people mixed the two up on purpose and eventually the whole thing - both ideas - got labeled a crackpot theory by people who just saw some headlines.
- Izkata 5y ago
  Half true, they did get conflated - but it wasn't just the titles, the articles themselves were using one to debunk the other.
- tayo42 5y ago
  > The way I remember it was that people conflated the lab leak theory with it being engineered in a lab. Those are very different things but easy to mix up in a headline. This is kind of how I remember things too I think, I feel like I'm being gaslit by the internet lately reading how certain some people are.
- gimmeThaBeet 5y ago
  I can definitely say that's what I understood outlets to mean, that it could have come from the lab in both contexts. I guess I don't quite follow with how people would think that it being a weapon that spread intentionally or unintentionally is the base case.
  - lifeformed 5y ago
    Certain right wing China hawks were pushing the bioweapon theory to stoke fears, and since the loudest and most outrageous talking points are what spreads on the internet, that became the default idea for a lot of people when they heard "lab origins".
- fireflash38 5y ago
  I've seen this so many times, yet 9 times out of ten, even in this thread, when people are claiming it originated in a lab, they also include claims that it was created in a lab.
mikem170 5y ago
I too am disappointed at how politicized this is. That includes the Vanity Fair article, which was mostly about press coverage, funding, memos, and circumstantial evidence. Here's some good science sources: - Comprehensive reddit post [0] from a virologist (table of contents, also linked as a 34 page pdf), referencing over 150 sources, with several sections going into the details of the genetic evidence, also interesting to read the comments. - Here's an article [1] talking about different origin theories and the related genetic evidence, having a section I was interested in about the cleavage site and o-linked glycan, something apparently that has to develop in an animal with an immune system (this is something I haven't seen any lab-made proponents speak to yet). - Lastly, here is an article [2], much more scientific than the Vanify Fair article, in favor of a lab connection (unfortunately, for me, this article doesn't mention the o-linked glycan, nor the genetic evidence that covid-19 may have originated hundreds of miles from Wuhan [3]) That's as far as I've gotten so far following the science. I'm hoping there will be more virologist commentary as more data comes out, perhaps something based on the full WHO report/data that I heard was released last week. I'd like to think that science will give us more definite answers eventually. It could take years. I'm not so much interested in conjecture from politicians and journalists. I'm really taken back by all the inaccuracies, half-truth's, innuendo, and conspiracy theories floating around. Are we all led so easily by the headlines they feed us? [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did_not_come_from_the_wuhan_institute_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did... [1] https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3 https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3 [2] 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... [3] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-13/scientist-suggests-coronavirus-originated-outside-of-wuhan https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
- haram_masala 5y ago
  Whether or not I agree with everything you wrote and sourced here, let me offer some enthusiastic praise for such a comprehensive and well-informed writeup. We should all aspire to be able to post something as substantive as this.
- deleted 5y ago
altcognito 5y ago
That’s because “lab leak” origin isn’t consistently defined. Is it that it was engineered? Was it just being studied? Were the first cases just workers at the lab workers who were doing collections? I’ve always said, focusing on the origins of “who was responsible” rather than dealing with containment first is counterproductive.

analog31 5y ago

Here's what I remember from that time period. My recollection is that the wet market hypothesis fell out of favor rather quickly, but nothing else really emerged in its place. The lab leak theory was circulating, but amongst people such as rank-and-file scientists, the attitude was: We aren't going to get a straight answer about this, but we've got to defeat this virus. I don't remember dismissing the lab leak theory per se, but rather, taking it in as one of a massive spew of crackpot theories all coming from more or less one source. I'm reminded of the children's story, "The boy who cried wolf." Looking back in hindsight, I wonder how we could have picked out the lab leak theory as being worthy of consideration, given the context. And whether a more scientifically minded public and government would have faced that dilemma.

jkhdigital 5y ago
> amongst people such as rank-and-file scientists Do you have a source? Is there some kind of periodic “rank-and-file scientist opinion survey” that provided this insight to you? Or are you just manufacturing (or repeating) a narrative to make sense of a complicated world?
- analog31 5y ago
  Maybe there's a third option. Thanks.
kaesar14 5y ago
They would’ve had a better chance of being taken seriously if it wasn’t actively a bannable offense to talk about them on major social media websites.
- analog31 5y ago
  Could be. I confess that I don't follow social media, but I participate in a handful of web forums that probably count as lightweight social media. On those forums, there are taboo topics, and my impression is that those are topics where any hope of civil discussion has long since evaporated. So, I wouldn't have high hopes for progress towards investigating this issue via a social medium if its curators have already concluded that the topic should be banned.
  - garmaine 5y ago
    FYI for the past year or so you could get a lifetime ban from YouTube (and Facebook and Twitter?) for discussing the lab-leak hypothesis. It was an outrageous overreaction.
alexkcd 5y ago
The article literally cites a statement put out by a respected medical journal on Feb. 29, 2020, and signed by 27 scientists, "roundly rejecting the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism." Whatever your recollection of "rank-and-file scientists" attitudes is, the narrative on record is to the contrary.
- lmm 5y ago
  Rank-and-file scientists tend to stay out of that kind of political statement-making IME, just as when you see a statement from the student union of XZY university condemning whatever that tells you very little about what rank-and-file students of that university are thinking. So I don't see a contradiction here.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Izkata 5y ago
> Looking back in hindsight, I wonder how we could have picked out the lab leak theory as being worthy of consideration, given the context. There were a lot of threads to pull, and some of us were following it. For example, this video was posted in April 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU
bart_spoon 5y ago
> Looking back in hindsight, I wonder how we could have picked out the lab leak theory as being worthy of consideration, given the context. And whether a more scientifically minded public and government would have faced that dilemma. By actually considering the idea based on the information available, rather than judging solely on the messenger. Things we've known for most of the past year now: * The wet-market was likely not the origin of the outbreak. Earliest identified positive cases predate the market outbreak and have no connection with it. * The lab in question was very near to the wet market where the largest outbreak occurred. * The lab in question specifically researched coronaviruses in bats. * The closest match to the SARS-COV-2 virus we've found in bats in nature are bats that live over a 1000 kilometers away from Wuhan. However, these bats are among those being researched at the virology lab there. * The lab in question was the subject of concern among international inspectors years before the outbreak, who stated that they believed the lab didn't meet necessary safety and containment protocols, and didn't have the staff to do so. * US intelligence agencies have been signalling that the Chinese government has been covering up the origins of the lab. * The CCP themselves have demonstrated that they are actively working against the discovery of the origins of the disease. Soon after the wet-market outbreak, they closed the wet-market, prevented any international scientists and experts from examining it, and over their objections, purged all animals there and sanitized the entire place, making it impossible to determine what might have led to an outbreak at the market. They also cracked down internally on whistleblowers who said the situation in Wuhan early in the pandemic was much worse than being broadcasted. Finally, they have simultaneously insisted on the natural origin of the virus, while also pushing theories that it originated from non-Chinese sources, such as China, South Asian pangolin black market traders, and the US Army. * The CCP prevented WHO investigators from actually entering the country to look for origins of the virus for nearly a year, didn't give them full access when they arrived, and the resulting report was declared largely useless by the international community immediately upon its release. * All people claiming that the lab-leak theory had been "debunked" were actually referring to the theory that it was genetically engineered, which is not the same thing at all. None of this proves a lab leak, but its strong enough circumstantial evidence that it is at least as plausible as any other origin. Virtually the only new information to have come out is that some of the workers in the lab got sick with Covid-like symptoms in November. If you swapped China with the US and this lab with the CDC, people would have taken it far more seriously. Imagine a worldwide pandemic started down the street from the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, AND no one could find the origin of the virus but the closest match was in an animal native to Northern Ohio, AND that animal also happened to be at the CDC for studying the type of virus in question, AND whistleblowers had mentioned concerns about procedures there previously, AND the US government did everything in their power to prevent people from investigating. People would have zeroed in on the theory from day 1. There was always plenty of reason to see it as worthy of consideration, and for those who weren't judging solely based on "Does Trump think this is true or not", they did. The biggest reason it wasn't was solely due to the fact that our media/social media can't function outside the scope of our current political/cultural wars. Information is being judged less and less on its own merits, and more and more on who is providing it.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

Kevin Drum had a good summary of this a couple of weeks ago, much shorter. His take? There's no more evidence for the lab leak theory now than there was a year ago, BUT what has changed is that the cross-over theory implied that we would find certain evidence for the vectors, and that evidence has not shown up. KD's take was that it's not so much that the lab leak theory has become more likely, it's the that biological origin theory has become less likely.

542458 5y ago
We’ve been trying to find the zoonotic origin of Ebola for decades without any success. We don’t have anywhere near a complete catalog of animal diseases, and of those only a fraction have been sequenced.
- kaesar14 5y ago
  We didn’t have the same confluence of other circumstantial evidence we do in this case. There’s no good reason to think Ebola came from a lab.
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    The point isn't "Ebola came from a lab" but rather "the fact that we can't pin down a natural origin doesn't prove it's man-made."
    - lmm 5y ago
      It doesn't prove anything, but it shifts the balance of evidence.
lawnchair_larry 5y ago
Haha. No. It’s because of politics and TDS. People were taught that this was a Trump theory. That’s all the media needs to say to ensure that nobody will take it seriously and nobody will tolerate anyone else who takes it seriously.

bpodgursky 5y ago

It's worth remembering that a good percent of any social media audience are paid Chinese posters (ie the $.50 army). China has been working _very_ hard to redirect the origin of COVID-19 away from the WIV, and even from China itself (starting rumors that it originated in Italy). Take any skeptical audience with a huge grain of salt, considering that the zeitgeist might not be organic in the slightest.

ngc248 5y ago
Any rational person would give a bit of consideration to the lab leak theory, as some one said upthread 1. Corona virus outbreak started in wuhan 2. Wuhan has the WIV which does research on coronaviruses At a minimum this should make someone think that the lab leak theory is probable, instead of outright dismissing it. Also there were concerns raised by the US state department officials who had reviewed the protocols at the lab that the standards were not upto bar. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...

fukmbas 5y ago

Because it is a conspiracy theory...

lifeformed 5y ago

The way I remember it was that people conflated the lab leak theory with it being engineered in a lab. Those are very different things but easy to mix up in a headline. It being engineered as a bioweapon is in the realm of a crackpot theory, but it being just a poorly contained natural research project was fairly reasonable. Some prominent people mixed the two up on purpose and eventually the whole thing - both ideas - got labeled a crackpot theory by people who just saw some headlines.

Izkata 5y ago
Half true, they did get conflated - but it wasn't just the titles, the articles themselves were using one to debunk the other.
tayo42 5y ago
> The way I remember it was that people conflated the lab leak theory with it being engineered in a lab. Those are very different things but easy to mix up in a headline. This is kind of how I remember things too I think, I feel like I'm being gaslit by the internet lately reading how certain some people are.
gimmeThaBeet 5y ago
I can definitely say that's what I understood outlets to mean, that it could have come from the lab in both contexts. I guess I don't quite follow with how people would think that it being a weapon that spread intentionally or unintentionally is the base case.
- lifeformed 5y ago
  Certain right wing China hawks were pushing the bioweapon theory to stoke fears, and since the loudest and most outrageous talking points are what spreads on the internet, that became the default idea for a lot of people when they heard "lab origins".
fireflash38 5y ago
I've seen this so many times, yet 9 times out of ten, even in this thread, when people are claiming it originated in a lab, they also include claims that it was created in a lab.

mikem170 5y ago

I too am disappointed at how politicized this is. That includes the Vanity Fair article, which was mostly about press coverage, funding, memos, and circumstantial evidence. Here's some good science sources: - Comprehensive reddit post [0] from a virologist (table of contents, also linked as a 34 page pdf), referencing over 150 sources, with several sections going into the details of the genetic evidence, also interesting to read the comments. - Here's an article [1] talking about different origin theories and the related genetic evidence, having a section I was interested in about the cleavage site and o-linked glycan, something apparently that has to develop in an animal with an immune system (this is something I haven't seen any lab-made proponents speak to yet). - Lastly, here is an article [2], much more scientific than the Vanify Fair article, in favor of a lab connection (unfortunately, for me, this article doesn't mention the o-linked glycan, nor the genetic evidence that covid-19 may have originated hundreds of miles from Wuhan [3]) That's as far as I've gotten so far following the science. I'm hoping there will be more virologist commentary as more data comes out, perhaps something based on the full WHO report/data that I heard was released last week. I'd like to think that science will give us more definite answers eventually. It could take years. I'm not so much interested in conjecture from politicians and journalists. I'm really taken back by all the inaccuracies, half-truth's, innuendo, and conspiracy theories floating around. Are we all led so easily by the headlines they feed us? [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did_not_come_from_the_wuhan_institute_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did... [1] https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3 https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3 [2] 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... [3] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-13/scientist-suggests-coronavirus-originated-outside-of-wuhan https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...

haram_masala 5y ago
Whether or not I agree with everything you wrote and sourced here, let me offer some enthusiastic praise for such a comprehensive and well-informed writeup. We should all aspire to be able to post something as substantive as this.
deleted 5y ago

altcognito 5y ago

That’s because “lab leak” origin isn’t consistently defined. Is it that it was engineered? Was it just being studied? Were the first cases just workers at the lab workers who were doing collections? I’ve always said, focusing on the origins of “who was responsible” rather than dealing with containment first is counterproductive.