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The lab-leak origin claim for Covid-19 is in the news, but it’s still fact-free
- dTal 5y agoI'm not impressed with this article, which is long on appeals to authority and short on actual analysis and facts. I recommend this one: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/ https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop... And this one: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
- throwaway4good 5y agoI recommend the official who report and also the YouTube channel / podcast this week in virology.
- dTal 5y agoAs the first link details, the "official WHO report" is marred by some pretty serious undeclared conflicts of interest.
- throwaway4good 5y agoThe podcast I mentioned has interviews with The Who people and episodes that walk thru even the wildest conspiracies. All done by actual virologists.
- ismail 5y agoI have to agree. thebulletin article lays out the evidence pretty clearly unlike this one.
- deeviant 5y ago> I'm not impressed with this article "I don't like those facts, I like these facts."
- tacitusarc 5y agoRather “This lacks facts, read other articles with facts.”
- dTal 5y agoIs there some shibboleth I can say to convince you that I am evaluating these articles on the strength of their arguments, rather than their conformance to a preselected conclusion? Or is the assumption of bad faith simply my doom?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cturner 5y agoThe scientific approach is to form hypotheses, and then seek facts that will allow us to rule on them. But the character of the epidemic has been a battle of wills between a priesthood of experts and their reactionaries.
- dTal 5y agoThe sad thing is that I am sure there are many scientists who cleave to those ideals. But it seems academia is no more immune to tribal groupthink than the rest of us, and it's usually a bad career move to fight the tide.
- neilwilson 5y agoA good overview of the evidence so far. Facts are hard to come by. It’s weight of evidence in context. https://swprs.org/on-the-origin-of-sars-coronavirus-2/ https://swprs.org/on-the-origin-of-sars-coronavirus-2/
- dqv 5y agoAbsolutely AMAZING resource. Thank you for sharing this. It is much needed.
- raphlinus 5y agoAgreed, that looks surprisingly good to my admittedly non-expert eyes. Thanks for posting!
- raphlinus 5y agoHmm, now I'm a lot less sure. Both this website and the recent Vanity Fair article represent the "Drastic" team as heroes, but establishment public health people are less impressed. Here's a fascinating Twitter thread on the Drastic authors[1], though I'm sure their fans would dismiss this as an ad hominem attack. The fact that the SPR people are anonymous is something people should be aware of when deciding how much stock to put in them. [1]: https://twitter.com/wokeglobaltimes/status/1399187095764279303 https://twitter.com/wokeglobaltimes/status/13991870957642793...
- K2L8M11N2 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Policy_Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Policy_Research In 2017 a University of Zurich report on media in Switzerland analyzed "six of the most-discussed 'alternative media'", including SPR, that "resort to conspiracy theories." Daniel Vogler concluded that SPR appears to be a "a pseudoscientific media research project."
- throwaway4good 5y agoQuestion to those who believe the lab leak story: If it came from an animal in the lab where did that animal come from? If it was synthetic, how was it synthesized?
- mjfl 5y agoYou are neglecting a third possibility in that it was accidentally generated in lab conditions. The furin cleavage site is a large insert relative to its closest aligning viral genome and is consistent with adaptation to cell culture conditions. The situation would look like someone infecting cells in a dish with some starter virus and continually passaging the supernatant to cells in new dishes, to examine the evolutionary adaptations. This person could have accidentally synthesized SARS-COV-2, and using improper safety protocols, got it on themselves and then went out and infected someone else.
- mam3 5y agoMan you can just look at the lab research papers. They take sars samples from bats and played with them for 10 years, including some paper where they modify the animal-only virus so that it gets into human cells... Its not a conspiracy, its just that accident can happen
- dTal 5y agoGlad you asked! >Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes (“reverse genetics” and “infectious clone technology”), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures (“in vitro”) and humanized mice (“in vivo”)... It cannot yet be stated that Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed, but it seems she was certainly on the right track to have done so. https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/ https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
- choward 5y ago
- WillPostForFood 5y agoThere is circumstantial evidence for a lab leak, and there is circumstantial evidence for the wet market. That's fair, but somehow the wet market was accepted as truth for the last year, and the lab leak was treated as a crazy conspiracy. We don't know the truth, China is blocking access to look into the facts.
- searine 5y agoHear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. Zoonotic transmission is the vast majority of new diseases. The lab leak is plausible but not the most probable (until evidence says otherwise). At the time the media needed a likely cause and zoonotic was the most probable, and confusion over this would've just caused more panic/hate/racism.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Justin_K 5y agoTo me, it's an act of guilt when CCP won't cooperate with the international community and is withholding crucial details.
- Filligree 5y agoThe CCP habitually does that, so it doesn’t add much information one way or the other.
- waterhouse 5y agoTrue. However, they should bear consequences for such behavior. Being treated as guilty for covering things up seems like a reasonably appropriate consequence.
- Filligree 5y agoThere should be consequences, I agree. I would strongly disagree that the consequences should involve us biasing our own map of the world. I'm sure we can find some solution that doesn't involve spreading probable falsehoods.
- mjfl 5y agohttps://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
- raphlinus 5y agoThese threads are long, contentious, and often go in circles. To save time, I propose a scale: 1. It was definitely zoonotic, and suggestions otherwise are racist conspiracy theories. 2. While it's impossible to rule out a lab leak, I believe it's zoonotic unless confronted with hard evidence. 3. While I admit the possibility of a lab leak, I secretly am pretty sure it was spillover. 4. Both lab leak and spillover are plausible, and the best priors are past experience (dozens or more spillovers, probably one or two lab leaks). 5. Lab leak and spillover seem equally likely, and a lot of the behavior of the CCP, WHO, EcoHealth Alliance are suspicious. 6. It was almost certainly a lab leak, the CCP is covering it up. 7. Definitely at least a lab leak, probably an engineered bioweapon. 8. Kill Fauci, he was in on it. This article is 3. The recent Vanity Fair article is 5. Most virologists I follow on Twitter are 2 or 3. As I say, you can save time in responding by just posting the number of where you are on this scale. Explaining why you think so won't add too much more information, it's a function of what sources you pay attention to and that can be pretty reliably inferred from the position on the scale.
- waterhouse 5y ago5.5
- 0-_-0 5y agoCorrection to 4: Biosecurity incidents are common, there were about 17 in the last decade [0]. Just SARS-CoV-1 leaked from the lab 4 times [1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome#Laboratory_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
- raphlinus 5y agoThis is fair! I was only really counting events with large numbers of infections (so the 1977 flu and maybe one or two others), but biosecurity incidents themselves are, as you say, common, and many prominent people in the field (Marc Lipsitch particularly comes to mind) have been calling for better biosecurity - and strict limitations on gain of function research - for some time.
- cronix 5y agoMaybe if journalists (and those who employ them) actually started investigating a year ago when this stuff was first coming out instead of immediately and dismissively labeling everyone who actually did as a conspiracy theorist nutjob and thus stymieing legitimate discovery, we'd have slightly more accurate information by now.
- jokethrowaway 5y agoThat would have fuelled calls for China to pay covid sanctions, at a time where countries were adding huge amounts to the debt future people will need to pay. There was enough money on the table to keep everyone quiet.
- infamouscow 5y agoWhat's to stop those calls from happening now? The answer is nothing.
- choward 5y agoBut that would require doing actual journalism.
- spookthesunset 5y agoI mean anybody who wasn't fully on board with the party line was labeled as a right-wing nut job. Asking even basic questions about what we are doing, why we are doing it and what the end game was has been met with extreme vitriol. It's one of the biggest tip-offs I had that my gut was onto something. Thank god we got vaccines as soon as we did because honestly the route society was taking was complete madness.
- xiphias2 5y agoPlease don't say thanks god we got the vaccines. I got it, you got it, but most of the people in the world having, and they are suffering more from the lack of jobs in their countries than any of us living in a richer country could imagine.
- yawaworht1978 5y agoIf it's a lab leak but from natural source, then it would have been a matter of time anyway.
- choward 5y agoAnd that time could have been thousands of years from now.
- gumby 5y agoThe important question is, “who cares?” (Non rhetorically). There is a useful scientific question of interest to a small nu,ebr of people: if the virus transferred from Petri dish to humans, what can we learn about bio safety practices for future research. There is an unuseful question which is what most people are asking: “how can I find someone to blame after the fact for what is essentially a natural phenomenon?” Not impressed by humanity on this one.
- oh_sigh 5y agoPresumably it matters because if it was a GoF research leak, we either need to suspend GoF research or increase security at labs doing it. Is it going to be the GoF researchers who call for a moratorium on GoF research? Possibly but there is a clear conflict of interest there. A powered up virus escaping from a lab is almost definitionally not a natural event
- rsync 5y agoI will repeat here what I mentioned in the previous HN thread from this morning ... [1] If it's a lab screwup that's relatively good news because we can fix lab screwups - it is not an indictment of our globalized, urbanized way of life. However, if it is a natural event then it, along with SARS and MERS are starting to create a trendline that suggests our globalized and urbanized way of life has crossed a threshold and we should expect this regularly. That's a much tougher problem to solve ... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394771
- silicon2401 5y agoThis is a great example of why I find comments like "who cares" disingenuous. A good faith question would sincerely ask who cares, and why it's significant. The comment you replied to was essentially a discussion-shutdown attempt, but as you showed, there are very legitimate reasons to care.
- gumby 5y agoNot at all: while a rhetorical “who cares” is indeed an attempt to claim the entire discussion worthless, the actual question I explicitly called out, “who are the people who care and what are their motivations” is precisely not a conversation stopper. And the reply (to which you reply) expanded the scope a bit, which was interesting.
- danhak 5y ago> 1. It was definitely zoonotic, and suggestions otherwise are racist conspiracy theories. How is the zoonotic hypothesis (“virus originated in Chinese wet market” / “due to Chinese dietary practices”) any less racist?
- raphlinus 5y agoRacism is, I guess, technically orthogonal to one's belief on the lab leak issue, but correlates pretty strongly. I bring it up because it is having an effect, especially in the US - attacks against Asian Americans are way up - and we might be able to do something about it. By contrast, knowing the origins of Covid doesn't, in fact, have a lot of relevance to preparedness against the next pandemic. Both spillover and biosecurity incidents happen regularly enough that we really need to protect against both. If the CCP is lying about lab leak and covering it up, that has political implications but not really public health. It's also, I think, digging deeper into this to explore trustworthiness of news sources. Mainstream sources haven't done a good job, mostly parroting conventional wisdom (as they will do). Social media has been worse, often a source of plain misinformation (in either direction). Real science journalists have done a good job, but people don't pay much attention to them, and in many cases what they write has been distorted and misrepresented (see [1] for a recent and relevant example). [1]: https://twitter.com/amymaxmen/status/1400648773169156097 https://twitter.com/amymaxmen/status/1400648773169156097
- rovolo 5y agoIt depends on how you characterize the zoonotic transfer: - "Came from bats": "People in China ate bats" vs "Bats poop on things livestock/humans eat" - "Came from the wetmarket": "Chinese wetmarkets are uniquely disgusting" vs "most wetmarkets are scaled up farmer's markets"
- ncmncm 5y agoThere are some more-or-less new facts. 1. The virus that WIV identified as closest to ours is identically the virus that the miners caught in 2013. It was renamed for what were described as administrative reasons, but the 2013 events were not mentioned in connection with it. 2. Several (3?) WIV employees were sick with Covid19-like symptoms in November 2019. WIV tried to cover this up. If there are coverups by Chinese and US officials, they seem to be trying to cover up different things. Neither fact bears much on whether the jump occurred in or out of a lab, without more information than we have. Useful information would include details of the infection(s) in Nov 2019.
- EMM_386 5y agoThere is a lot of science out there that shows how Covid-19 appears to have specific qualities that make the lab leak theory very plausible. I don't want to get into the weeds with all of this, but here's just one scientific paper among many investigating the actual structure: The genetic structure of SARS-CoV-2 does not rule out a laboratory origin [PDF] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bies.202000240 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bies.2020002... This is the exact sort of stuff you would see with "gain of function" research.
- bigpumpkin 5y agoDang, why is this flagged off the front page when articles favoring lab leaks are always kept on it?
- jokoon 5y agoA biologist told me "it doesn't really matter, the virus is there anyways", and she is right. I don't think learning how the virus appeared will help. It will only allow countries to put responsibility on china, which is only a geopolitical concern.
- inciampati 5y agoThe zoonotic origin claim for Covid-19 is in the news, but it is fact free. A fact: all SARS-CoV-2 sequences fit into a phylogeny with a common ancestor in Wuhan in October/November 2019. Another fact: we have not found the intermediate host or natural viral reservoir from which this virus arose. These are pretty intense facts. We would need a lot of other facts to make the zoonotic origin claim hold water.