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The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

107 points by aliasEli 5y ago

jfktkrkfk 5y ago
In 10 years China will be the foremost global superpower. I would urge everyone to be very carefully in their criticism of China or support of Taiwan. Remember that what you say on the Internet can live forever. People are being cancelled for far less. And China will not cancel in the way the West cancels. Instead of being fired, be prepared for your whole life to be destroyed, and maybe you being even imprisoned if you step in Asia (see Hong Kong security law). So think before voicing support for lab leak theory, especially if you are science adjacent.
- garmaine 5y ago
  China can't imprison people outside of its own borders.
  - tomp 5y ago
    Why not? It certainly could under the “foremost superpower” scenario... like the US can today (e.g. Assange, McAffe, Meng Wanzhou (Huawei CFO), ...
    - i_have_an_idea 5y ago
      Even if so, I think it is a bit far fetched to image that China will go after pseudoanonymous commenters from 10 years plus in past on an American internet forum.
      - adventured 5y ago
        There's going to be more criticism of China in the next 10 years than in the past 30 years combined, as their power continues to expand. It's going to be an ocean of criticism. China will have to go after a couple hundred million people. It's silly, to put it mildly.
        jfktkrkfk 5y ago
        You underestimate the power of AI and social credit like tools. Now add human-free justice systems and block lists to the mix.
        willis936 5y ago
        Ridiculous. Software isn't magic. Hell, it's barely even impressive. Persecuting 100 million people outside your borders requires one thing: power. If China invades every nation and dissolves every other government then they can commit genocide on every other people. Until then, it's just one poster's deranged fantasy. Good luck with any of that post-Manhattan Project.
        garmaine 5y ago
        It’s the Roko’s basilisk, China superpower edition.
  - jfktkrkfk 5y ago
    Wrong: > Since 2017, it says, at least 695 Uyghurs have been detained or deported to China from 15 countries. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jun/25/beijing-using-its-financial-muscle-to-target-uyghurs-living-abroad-report https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jun/25/b...
    - garmaine 5y ago
      I’m not a PRC citizen.
  - VortexDream 5y ago
    It can, at the very least, harass and threaten people outside their borders, as is already done today in many Western countries against Chinese/Russian/Saudi-Arabian/Belarussian/etc dissidents living abroad. Modern democracies are wholly ill-equipped to deal with modern authoritarian governments and the means they have and are willing to use.
- i_have_an_idea 5y ago
  weird that you'd create an account to post something that basically amounts to a threat of retribution, in case someone posts something bad about China.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  No, I don't think I will. Self-censoring just in case one of the most oppressive governments might get powerful enough to get you? That's the first step to making this a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- jo123hn 5y ago
  The Lab Leak Hypothesis itself is not criticism of China, and it’s very important that we get to the bottom of it! If it turns out to be true we need to learn from it before we leak something much deadlier. You’re advocating for self-censorship of an important topic, based on the assumption that in 10 years a new global superpower will arise and start punishing those that discussed the hypothesis. It makes no sense to me. Unscientific and overly cautious!
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    The problem with China is that they consider everything that's not unconditionally positive automatically as criticism.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  How is this not just a crap take on Roko's Basilisk?
  - 0-_-0 5y ago
    It's still much more realistic than Roko's Basilisk :)
- Someone 5y ago
  In 20 years, China will start to feel the effects of rapid population aging caused by its one-child policy. Compare https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2041/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2... or https://www.populationpyramid.net/western-europe/2041/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/western-europe/2041/ with https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2041/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2041/ China’s challenge is to grow GDP per capita fast enough to handle that.
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    In 20 years, it will be such an economic powerhouse (its megacities at least), to attract significant amount of young people from neighboring countries or ie Africa. You have half a billion mostly poor people in South east asia alone. They will do what western Europe is doing for decades - brain drain the smart poor from previously enslaved regions to sustain at least some young demographics to support badly designed social systems. Its like printing money to get out of state debt - you let the consequences be solved by next generation(s), if required.
pmoriarty 5y ago
"Ever since the SARS outbreak of 2002-03, after all, paper after paper and countless popular pieces have warned that, sooner or later, nature would produce the next big SARS." In 1995 Laurie Garrett warned about how the world could be brought to its knees by another airborne flu-like illness in "The Coming Plague".[1] The first SARS and avian flu and swine flu, and CJD and mad cow disease were just more warnings that humans were continuing to play russian roulette with the way they were living with an using animals. Virologists knew this and warned about this, but the rest of the world chose to ignore them. As things return to "normal" for the parts of the world lucky enough to get vaccinated it's likely that we're going to return to sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that this could never happen again, especially if we believe SARS 2 was created by humans instead of being just another natural disease... with probably a bunch more waiting in the wings. [1] - https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balance/dp/0140250913 https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balan...
- pjc50 5y ago
  > especially if we believe SARS 2 was created by humans instead of being just another natural disease Here's the thing: if we knew the answer definitively to the lab-leak question, how would it change the pandemic response? The things we need to do to combat the virus remain the same.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    For the current pandemic yes, but we could start banning all gain of function research to make another one less likely. And increase lab safety measures.
    - pmoriarty 5y ago
      Since virtually every disease comes from nature and not from labs, the thing that would really make a big difference is stopping encroaching on animal habitats and distancing ourselves from animals (including stopping the eating of animals).. not to mention massive increases in funding to virology and way better pandemic planning.
aritmo 5y ago
It's kinda obvious that the 'lab leak theory' was created just to attack China.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  No, COVID-19 came from Wuhan, regardless of theory. The CCP banned domestic air travel from Wuhan to other cities in China early in the pandemic, so the CCP knew at the highest levels where it came from. The various crematoria in Wuhan worked around the clock for months.
- corty 5y ago
  Of course the theory is used that way, it fits nicely into various political arguments. But that doesn't influence the veracity of the lab leak theory either way. Looking at the article, it also uses weak arguments to support its thesis: "She first takes aim at the popular version of the lab leak theory that posits that Covid was taken from nature and escaped in its wild form. The problem with that scenario, she told me, is that a swab from a bat contains very little infectious virus. Each bat weighs less than half an ounce, and each sample is basically a Q-tip swiped briefly over a bat’s mouth or anus. These samples are stored in vials in the freezer; they’re not likely to spill or leak, the way disaster movies have primed us to suppose." The real-world counter-argument to this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marburg_virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marburg_virus Lab leaks do happen, and all researchers in those labs do have an interest to play down the danger and cover things up to continue working.
  - aliasEli 5y ago
    There is some evidence that they had live bats in the laboratory. This would make sense, bats are quite different from other mammals, and it seems very likely that some bat viruses can not be cultivated in standard cell cultures.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    Marburg is a different virus. Coronaviruses infection very much depends on the size of viral load. It's not like ebola where single micro droplet is enough.
redis_mlc 5y ago
When looking at all of the facts, it's almost certain corona came from the WIV corona lab. The virologists who claimed otherwise in early 2020 have financial conflicts of interest if funding was cut, or if they were banned from the lab by the CCP. You can see the same CCP influence over WHO and the WHO "investigation." What hasn't been explained is why WIV deleted all their corona DNA sequences from the NIH database (some have been partially recovered.) Their claim is that their excel was taken down for computer security reasons, but the NIH database is separate. Normally NIH deletions are only done for "mistakes." Australian media have been investigating hard since early 2020 (they were not subject to TDS or racial shaming) and are basically one source away from connecting all the dots between the US, Australia and Chinese involvement in corona and GoF. COVID-19 is an international conspiracy involving numerous virologists who travel between multiple countries, partly to evade GoF restrictions in their home countries. (If you recall the CCP saying that the virus came from the US, I believe they were referring to the funding source. The CCP says a mixture of transparent statements and PR, but often there is a kernel of truth in their message.)
_huayra_ 5y ago
As someone who is out of the loop on this and only a basic understanding, it seems very peculiar that scientists were so quickly to just jump on the "it must be bats and a wet market" thing so early on despite the Wuhan lab being right there. It's like when some out-of-control company creates a superfund site through gross negligence of industrial byproduct handling and then goes "idk cancer gonna cancer. you can't link that to us!".
- emilgouliev 5y ago
  “When HIV/AIDS emerged in the 1980s, it was alleged, with a little Soviet help, that the virus had been developed in an American lab. Between Washington’s inaction on the epidemic and its sordid past of shady experiments, proponents said the theory couldn’t be dismissed out of hand. After many early cases of tick-borne Lyme disease were first identified around Long Island Sound, it was deemed too much of a coincidence that the U.S. military’s Plum Island animal research lab sat on an island in the sound itself. When SARS emerged in 2003, so did fears of the severe acute respiratory syndrome’s unnatural origin. “It’s a very unusual outbreak,” bioweapons expert Ken Alibek told the New York Times at the time. “It’s hard to say whether it’s deliberate or natural.” One Russian scientist posited that “the propagation of the atypical pneumonia may well be caused by a leak of a combat virus grown in Asian bacteriological weapons labs.” And in recent years, efforts to eradicate Ebola have been hobbled by attacks on health care workers motivated, at least in part, by a belief that the virus is man-made.” https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab-leak-theory-doesnt-hold-up-covid-china/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab-leak-theory-doesnt-... This literally happens every goddamn time. Natural explanation is simpler.
  - goldenkey 5y ago
    You want to use a razor to shave a bear. Simplicity is not enough to favor a belief model. Machine Learning has shown us that large complex models can perform much better at providing the ground truths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor Razor's aren't scientifically rigorous theorems. Feel free to use them but don't argue by them in a public forum, it's disingenuous to truth.
lmm 5y ago
The article opens by pooh-poohing the idea that three WIV researchers with flu-like symptoms in November might have had Covid-19, then a couple of paragraphs later asserts that it's well-known that Covid-19 was already circulating in Wuhan in November. Isn't there a contradiction there? How widely accepted is the notion that Ebola is a bat virus? The last I heard (which was a while ago) the leading theory was a simian reservoir. > What we’re left with is this: If the WIV had a secret strain (or strains) at least 99 percent similar to Covid-19, it got that raw material from the wild. That would mean there’s at least one wild virus that’s at least 99 percent similar to Covid-19 somewhere in nature, where humans had contact with it at least once. So far, it hasn’t been found, but it’s got to be out there, whether Covid is 100 percent natural or human-tweaked. So, given that Covid (or its direct ancestor) must exist in nature, it’s more likely that it got out naturally (like SARS and MERS) than that it took an undetectable detour through a secure biolab. Is this really true? Everyone acknowledges that WIV researchers (quite openly and properly) sought out new coronavirus strains, including expeditions into remote mountains etc. to look for bat caves and take samples from bats that would probably never have otherwise had contact with humans. Everyone acknowledges that WIV cultured cells from its samples and worked closely with them under what were, at least in retrospect, inadequate (BSL-2) safety precautions. For a virus that we're all agreed must originate with a bat in a remote cave somewhere to get to a human, yes this is a more complex route than one lost bat biting a farmer or something. But I'm not sure it's really so much less plausible that humans who deliberately collected, studied, and worked closely with this virus for many man-hours might have slipped up once. (We will probably never know for sure what happened - another thing that everyone acknowledges is that the PRC government destroyed a lot of potentially relevant evidence. On balance I think a purely natural origin is probably most likely, but I do think that the people who dogmatically shouted down any lab leak theory come off a lot worse than those who kept, and keep, an open mind)
- simonh 5y ago
  On the first point, they're just saying that 3 people seeing a doctor about flu symptoms at that time of year is not unusual (most Chinese routinely go to hospitals for any medical treatment), and that even if they did have Covid instead of flu they might have got it outside the lab. There were people in Wuhan with Covid back then, but there were a lot more people with flu. The odds that any given three people with flu symptoms in Wuhan at that time actually had covid was still very small. On the route into humans, I'm no expert but as I understand it while these viruses are found in bats the most likely route to humans is via another mammal intermediate such as a pangolin or cat. The reasons for this seems to be that bats are just too small and the virus load too thin to pose a threat to humans. So bat to human is very unlikely, but bat to cat is more plausible, and then cat (etc) to human also more plausible. I've no way to validate if that's accurate. It really is all numbers games though. All we can say is what is more or less likely, and I think that's all the article is trying to explain.
Synaesthesia 5y ago
As far as I'm concerned it's largely irrelevant, because the real question is how the governments all handled the Covid crisis, once it was out in the open.
- drclau 5y ago
  I wouldn't go as far as to say it's completely irrelevant. If it was a leak, we will want guarantees that another leak is not possible (ie. better safety, or downright stop dangerous research, such as gain of function). It's all about reducing risks.
  - zamalek 5y ago
    So: assume that a leak can happen all the time, find out how, and fix it. Red team/blue team your virus lab. This blamelaying is complete nonsense, and is a huge waste of funds across multiple regions.
    - _-david-_ 5y ago
      You have to know who is to blame in order to know how it escaped. If we don't know how this leak happened we can't fix it.
- ChemSpider 5y ago
  Not really. Once thing the lab leak theory would explain is that why the virus was so unexpectedly infective right from the start (adapted to human tissue e. g. via passage in humanized mice). In that sense, I hope that it was a lab leak. It will be better for us humans.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    There's nothing unique about covid spreading to humans. It infects various species very easily. Cats, dogs, ferrets. It wasn't uniquely adapted to humans in the beginning. Humans are just more connected species than for example panthers. As it grew to pandemic levels it spawned mutations slightly more adapted to humans.
rdxm 5y ago
This is the best assessment to date I've seen. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-function-risky-bat-virus-engineering-links-america-to-wuhan/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
ChemSpider 5y ago
"Bats being bats..." What about the undeniable fact that China (the government) is blocking all international research into the origin of Covid. Is that only China being China?
- scotty79 5y ago
  Yes? They even mention it in the article about SARS and MERS approach before natural origin was estabilished.
ricksunny 5y ago
The authors of the original Lancet letter (Daszak included) just came out with a similarly-toned new one in the same publication - with 3 of their co-signers from last year now having dropped out of it: https://twitter.com/franciscodeasis/status/1412224920537513986?s=21 https://twitter.com/franciscodeasis/status/14122249205375139...
- aliasEli 5y ago
  Link to the new letter in the lancet: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01419-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
- hanklazard 5y ago
  > On Feb 19, 2020, we, a group of physicians, veterinarians, epidemiologists, virologists, biologists, ecologists, and public health experts from around the world, joined together to express solidarity with our professional colleagues in China.1 Unsubstantiated allegations were being raised about the source of the COVID-19 outbreak and the integrity of our peers who were diligently working to learn more about the newly recognised virus, SARS-CoV-2, while struggling to care for the many patients admitted to hospital with severe illness in Wuhan and elsewhere in China. This is such an odd way to discuss an issue of finding the truth. This first paragraph of the article seems to intentionally try to create a sense of sympathy for the Chinese scientists against whom “unsubstantiated allegations” were being leveled. Of course we should all feel bad for well-intentioned people being thrown into the controversy of the pandemic origins, but this is not about shielding people from difficult circumstances—this is about finding truth so that we can minimize the risk that this ever happens again.
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
Huh, the second sentence of the article made me doubt how good it is... > Last spring, the media accurately reported the scientific consensus that Covid (also known as SARS CoV-2) is a natural virus [...] To be pedantic: No, lady, Covid is the disease, and the virus is SARS-CoV-2. Like AIDS and HIV (disease and virus respectively). It's a little thing, but accuracy in journalism is still important (or is it just me?).
- 0-_-0 5y ago
  Additionally: 1. There wasn't a consensus, some scientists disagreed 2. A natural virus can leak from a lab Also, a reminder that biosecurity incidents are common, there were about 17 in the last decade [0]. Just (natural) 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...
  - JohnTHaller 5y ago
    > 1. There wasn't a consensus, some scientists disagreed Consensus means "general agreement", it doesn't mean unanimous. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consensus https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consensus
    - whatthesmack 5y ago
      There wasn't general agreement either. There was a propaganda piece architected by Peter Daszak (Leader of EcoHealth Alliance, who Fauci's NIAID contracted with for gain-of-function research at WIV after Obama banned it), signed by a few scientists, and The Lancet published. The "general agreement" many folks may be thinking of is the general agreement amongst mainstream and social media that a lab leak shouldn't even be investigated and anybody that suggested doing so was a maniac.
- native_samples 5y ago
forcry 5y ago
>'Evidence Strongly Favors The Lab Origin': GOP-Called Medical Witness Discusses COVID-19 Genesis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbbJaaMG7Bs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbbJaaMG7Bs
nickdothutton 5y ago
Skimmed the article but failed to see any evidence for a zoonotic origin. Did I miss it?
- kryz 5y ago
  There is no real case made for zoonotic origin in this article. The tone of the article exhibits some bias and spurious logic in the support of a zoonotic origin
- lamontcg 5y ago
  https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.22.427830v3 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.22.427830v3 https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698 https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00709-1.pdf https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00709-1.pdf
- paulddraper 5y ago
  The evidence is that it's happened before so it could again. It's not like there's a paper trail. The best you can say is that the virus looked very similar between species, so a natural jump is plausible.
rob_c 5y ago
It doesn't have to have been engineered to have escaped. Why this convolution keeps happening is beyond me, we "know" this isn't a bio-superweapon. Taking this as read, either: Researchers at the lab failed to spot something like this in the wild, in an area where they were looking for this. So, failed to raise the alarm appropriately with acceptable transparency. or, Researcher work at the lab led to the collection of this from bats and some set of unknown situations led to it getting into the populace. So, caused the disaster they were trying to prevent/research. Either way it's clear China reacted as-if this was the end of days. Which is understandable given the nature of the work going on inside the lab The fact that everyone involved seems to have thrown up barriers into a sensible discussion on this is unfortunate and renders most conversations mute such that we'll probably never know how bad it was.
- mikem170 5y ago
  Didn't the article cover the scenarios you mentioned? The article said that the lab's normal job was to look for new bat viruses, and that it's pretty hard to get infected from a qtip swabbed over a bats anus stored in a stabilizing solution. The bottom line is that the evidence we have at this time points to nature as the most probable origin, and it's not unusual for it to take many years to figure these things out.
  - forcry 5y ago
    >The bottom line is that the evidence we have at this time points to nature as the most probable origin.. Some scientists think otherwise, quite strongly in the opposite direction, it seems.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeW5sI-R1Qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeW5sI-R1Qg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbbJaaMG7Bs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbbJaaMG7Bs
    - mikem170 5y ago
      I found this link [0] that seems to debunk, in a lot of detail, the congressional testimony of these two physicists on the specifics of their claims for evidence of gain of function manipulation in the gentic sequence of covid-19. That jives with another source [1] that explained, amongst other things, that there's genetic evidence covid-19 evolved in animals with intact immune systems, not in a lab. [0] https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/06/11/cggcgg-the-latest-new-old-wrinkle-in-the-covid-19-lab-leak-conspiracy-theory/ https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/06/11/cggcgg-the-latest... [1] https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3 https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3
aerosmile 5y ago
The minute the PRC government destroyed the evidence, they lost the presumption of innocence. Let's also remember - we're dealing with very smart people who very well knew the price they were paying by not cooperating with the international community, and yet that path seemed more attractive than just "coming clean." I wonder what the judicial system would have to say if a murder was committed in my house, and there was evidence that I destroyed the evidence. Also, I don't have an alibi, and have multiple prior felonies. Would that be enough to put me in jail again?
- eloff 5y ago
  Yes, the cover up and hostility towards the lab leak hypothesis may actually be the strongest evidence for it. Which is to say, not much. But we have no evidence for the natural origin story, and it's a somewhat strange coincidence that the initial outbreak was near a lab studying these very same kinds of viruses. Granted you might put such a lab in places where there are lots of bat viruses to be found, but that's still a much, much larger area than the city of Wuhan. The closest known wild virus came from a source 800 miles away. Draw a circle over a map of China including both Wuhan and that bat cave and you can see that quite clearly. Combine that with the fact that Sars cov1 escaped labs in China to infect researchers not once, but at least twice, and the Bayesian calculation swings heavily to the lab leak hypothesis.
  - mikem170 5y ago
    Did you know that there's been evidence pointing to an origin 600 miles south of Wuhan [0], based on sampled early cases and genetic sequencing? [0] 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-...
    - codewench 5y ago
      It's worth noting that the paper this article is based on is somewhat contested. For example "There are several serious flaws with their findings and interpretation." [1] "The authors’ misinterpretation of MJNs fosters misconceptions, inaccuracies, and misrepresentations of fundamental phylogenetic principles."[2] [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/23/12522 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/23/12522 [2] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/23/12518 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/23/12518
rossdavidh 5y ago
The real motive behind most of these kind of articles: "...loose talk about a lab leak elevates tensions between China and the United States, undermining the collaborative research we need to understand this pandemic and prevent the next one." Translation: "please shut up about this, it doesn't matter now and we need to get China calmed down, and this talk is making them defensive and therefore uncooperative." The rest of the article is mostly just FUD to try to provide a plausible excuse for ignoring the obvious fact that China is covering up, so that raises the possibility that there is a mistake for them to cover up. I would prefer the truth to be brought out. But, I have to admit, it may be that the "let's just pretend we don't realize they screwed up" policy is in fact the wiser one.
- jstrong 5y ago
  agree with your read on the article but not on your conclusion. in general, I don't think fudging the truth for strategic reasons ever turns out well in the long run, mostly because, we're not smart enough to anticipate what the long run impact of our strategic lying will be. secondly, the strategy itself, going out of our way, up to and including hiding the causes of a global pandemic, in order to avoid ever hurting china's feelings, just does not seem viable to me at all.
- _cs2017_ 5y ago
  I do think many people who write on this topic have a conscious or unconscious bias in favor of the natural origin hypotehsis. You provided one example of such bias. Here's a couple more: - Chinese nationalists (although they rarely author publications outside of China) - people who expressed strong opinion on this matter a year ago (based on the information they had then), and now don't like to admit they were wrong even in the face of new evidence. - people who think the lab origin hypothesis is an example of anti-Chinese racism, and therefore take the opposite the side to fight racism. On the other hand, I would argue that even more people who write on this topic outside of China are biased in favor of the lab origin hypothesis. This is because many groups of people would (consciously or subconsciously) like to use this opportunity to blame the Beijing government for this huge disaster. Examples: - those who dislike the communist ideology (e.g., those whose loved ones died to wars with the communists, or those who just dislike authoritarianism on general principles) - those of China's neighbors who dislike the Beijing government's aggressive policy towards them (India, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam) - those who dislike the Chinese in general, for racist reasons - Americans who don't want to see China surpass the US in global power These biases are present even among journalists and scientists, since many of them cannot (or don't even bother trying to) separate their feelings as regular people from their role as unbiased reporters or researchers. Overall, this means it's very hard to take seriously anything written on this topic. Perhaps I would tend to trust: - An expert who has been consistently friendly to Bejing but argues in favor of the lab origin hypothesis; or - An expert who has been consistently unfriendly to Beijing but argues in favor the natural origin hypothesis. One of the rare examples of such people is Jeffrey Sachs, who chairs the Lancet Covid-19 origins commission. He has been at least somewhat friendly to Beijing (well as friendly as you can be in the West without committing a professional suicide). And yet, he says that there's at least enough evidence that both hypotheses are worth pursuing (that is, that it's not 100% obvious that it was a natural origin). Unfortunately, he's not an expert on this topic (he's an economist). Still, I would follow his comments with interest. https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/finding-the-origins-of-covid19-by-jeffrey-d-sachs-2021-06?barrier=accesspaylog https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/finding-the-origin...
tonfreed 5y ago
China refuses to allow research into the origin of the virus and blames whoever is pissing them off that day. I don't think it's beyond reason to think, in a country where officials routinely fudge numbers to avoid jail time, that someone covered their ass for too long and now it's the entire CCP's problem. This article looks like it's just running cover because, idk, GOP evil I guess.
jkingsbery 5y ago
> WIV officials told the investigators that serum samples for all staff and students in the bat coronavirus group subsequently tested negative for Covid antibodies. We have only their word to go on because the lab hasn’t been independently audited... Why has the lab not been independently audited? If I was going to make a case against someone making an error, saying "well, that group said they didn't make an error" seems like a bad argument. > The first human case of Covid could have been infected hundreds of miles away, perhaps closer to the horseshoe bat caves of southern China. Have we found such a person? > You can get on the fast train in Wuhan and be in Guandong Province, the home of the original SARS outbreak, in under four hours. If someone had been in Guandong, and taken a train to Wuhan, it seems to me that the early cases would not have been so concentrated in Wuhan, for two reasons: 1) if Wuhan is really all that accessible by different means of transportation, you'd expect people would just as easily take it from Wuhan to other places, and 2) presumably, the fast train doesn't just stop in Wuhan (Google says it's 1000 km away), meaning an infected person on the train could easily have infected someone else on the train who got off in between. Honest question: is that not how the spread of disease would work? > There is no evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or anyone else, ever had any strain that similar to Covid-19. Again, that's what we're trying to figure out. You can't take the thing we're trying to figure out as evidence one way or the other, that's Begging the Question (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question) > Given that Covid (or its direct ancestor) must exist in nature, it’s more likely that it got out naturally (like SARS and MERS) than that it took an undetectable detour through a secure biolab. I don't understand this jump. Most people I've read arguing that the lab leak theory is possible agree that there must be some base virus in nature. The question is, what is the more likely path from that natural virus to the COVID outbreak, through a lab or through some other animal (or animals)? I understand the argument that we didn't find the transmission chain for SARS or MERS or Ebola for years, but why does asserting it started in nature lead to the conclusion it therefore had a natural path? This again seems like the author is trying to prove a conclusion using the conclusion. > The fact that China is being secretive about Covid-19 isn’t evidence for any particular theory. When SARS came out, I don't remember the Chinese government blaming Italian frozen food or athletes at an international athletics competition for SARS. I don't remember them promising people that it's not transmittable between humans, or that it's not a big deal. I think simply saying "China is being secretive" is not looking at the whole picture. > All theories of the origins of Covid-19 should be investigated, including lab origin theories. We should go wherever the science takes us. This seems right to me. We can't make bricks without clay though.
watertom 5y ago
Full disclosure: I do not think this virus was engineered I do not think this was deliberately released I do think the Chinese were studying this virus in the lab, not engineering it, but studying it. I do think it was the result of a lab accident, a technician tried to cover up an accident/carelessness in order to avoid getting punished or fired, normal human behavior. HOW DID THE CHINESE KNOW THEY HAD A NEW VIRUS WHEN THEY ONLY HAD A HANDFUL OF CASES???????? Covid-19 presents like the flu, without a test you don't can't know if it's the flu or Covid-19, but the Chinese knew they had a new virus in late Nov, early Dec when there were only a handful of cases. HOW DID THEY KNOW??? The only way to tell if you've got something new is because: a) unique symptoms b) a statistically significant increase in cases c) a statistically significant number of deaths In the early day of Covid-19 you had none of these present, with only a handful of cases NOBODY WOULD HAVE SUSPECTED ANYTHING WAS AMISS. I can see it now, "Hey, I'm thinking that we have these flu cases, in flu season, and there isn't anything remarkable about the cases but I think they are the result of a new virus, so we should raise a red flag and swing the government into action." Highly unlikely. There is one other way that you know you've got something new: d) you know something that no one else knows, like there was a lab accident. How did the Chinese know they had something new, when they had no evidence or indication that something new was circulating? This is the only question that needs to be answered. Nothing else. If there isn't a reasonable and logical answer to how the Chinese knew they had a new virus with only a few cases that looked just like the flu, and no other information, then it stands to reason they knew something else. What I think happened. A lab tech had an accident or was careless, and exposed themselves to the virus they were studying in the lab. The tech didn't report the incident because they didn't want to be punished or fired. The tech incorrectly assumed that everything was fine, but then got sick. Then when some other lab workers got sick, the safety people at the lab got involved and they learned what really happened, and they pushed the panic button, quietly. The rest is history.
- jandrese 5y ago
  From what I understand they knew because there was a lot more than a handful of cases. The government was suppressing the news because that's what you do when you have bad news in an authoritarian state. Remember the early news from doctors who were trying to understand what was going on and were getting censored by the government? They had to form an underground information exchange until the problem finally got so big (and spread internationally) that they couldn't pretend anymore. IMHO, this discussion about the lab is a distraction from the real discussion we should be having. The one about suppressing discussion between doctors who are merely reporting on what they're seeing and delaying the worldwide response as a result. Even today the CCPs official numbers on COVID infections in China are extremely unlikely. They claim to have had fewer cases than even New Zealand. Clearly there is political influence being exerted over the official figures.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
agentofoblivion 5y ago
Who is this author and as the lay public, can we trust the authoritative tone she takes? Basic clicking around shows she's a journalist, not a scientist, and has written articles e.g., highlighting the medical struggles of Jordan Peterson with statements about him like: > His stern ethos of self-help and bootstrapping has made him a darling of the so-called intellectual dark web, and a gateway drug for countless budding right-wingers who have stumbled upon one of his lectures on YouTube. (https://newrepublic.com/article/156829/happened-jordan-peterson https://newrepublic.com/article/156829/happened-jordan-peter...) It seems too much of a coincidence that another member of "the so-called intellectual dark web" is perhaps the most recognizable proponent of the Lab Leak Theory. She also writes for The Nation, which is unapologetically leaning pretty hard to the left. In other words, I question both her motives and authority.
jandrese 5y ago
The evidence is sadly too thin to make a definitive call one way or the other at this point. We may never know. But at the same time I have to wonder how much it matters? It's the difference between telling some researchers to double-check their containment procedures vs. not? I think it's extremely unlikely that this was an intentional attack from CCP on their own people. It wasn't a Uyghur town as far as I know, and even so containment was nearly impossible so it's a dumb idea anyway. So the only two plausible theories is it was either a natural source or an unintentional lab leak. At the end of the day it doesn't matter that much which one was true, the response is about the same. Maybe on the extreme end the lab could be shut down and its work moved elsewhere. People are wasting an enormous amount of energy arguing over this.
spfzero 5y ago
To make the argument that, because in the past the transmission from animal to human happened in nature, that in the present it could only happen there, implies that your assumptions stay constant. Things have changed since Ebola 50 years ago and Sars1 20 years ago. For one thing, millions of dollars have been invested in gain-of-function research. There are many more labs, many times more investigators and projects running. These scientists are working to create the characteristics in viruses that make them more deadly and more infectious. Also, today powerful new bio-engineering tools are available, in the past 10 years especially. Today the situation is different, since there are now new pathways for a deadly virus to come into being. I don't think anyone can argue that the number of dangerous viruses being studied in laboratories around the world is the same now as it was 20 years ago. If you want to argue against a lab-leak today, you really need to argue that the BSL-rated laboratories are perfectly leak-proof.
ab7675226 5y ago
"WIV officials told the investigators that serum samples for all staff and students in the bat coronavirus group subsequently tested negative for Covid antibodies. We have only their word to go on because the lab hasn’t been independently audited, but if that’s true,..." My goodness, that statement from the essay is missing critical context. The lab hasn't been independently audited because the CCP refused permission for any independent inspections. And yes, you are allowed to take into account their refusal to allow inspections when making a judgement on whether the CCP is covering up a lab-leak.
ab7675226 5y ago
"Rasmussen notes another major piece of new evidence against a lab origin: If Covid-19 were invented as part of a benevolent gain-of-function experiment, the goal would be to make it more transmissible, or more lethal to people, in order to study that strain in the lab. But when current strains of Covid-19 are cultured in cells in the laboratory, the virus tends to mutate fast and become less contagious to humans. " The author presents the mutation history as an argument against a 'benevolent gain-of-function experiment.' But the key word there is 'benevolent.' And it is there on purpose. Let me formalize this: Set(gain-of-function experiments) - Set(benevolent gain-of-function experiments) => Set(non-benevolent gain-of-function experiments). So if it was a lab leak from a gain-of-function experiment, it is, according to Rasmussen, a lab leak from a biowarfare gain-of-function experiment.

107 points by aliasEli 5y ago

In 10 years China will be the foremost global superpower. I would urge everyone to be very carefully in their criticism of China or support of Taiwan. Remember that what you say on the Internet can live forever. People are being cancelled for far less. And China will not cancel in the way the West cancels. Instead of being fired, be prepared for your whole life to be destroyed, and maybe you being even imprisoned if you step in Asia (see Hong Kong security law). So think before voicing support for lab leak theory, especially if you are science adjacent.

garmaine 5y ago
China can't imprison people outside of its own borders.
- tomp 5y ago
  Why not? It certainly could under the “foremost superpower” scenario... like the US can today (e.g. Assange, McAffe, Meng Wanzhou (Huawei CFO), ...
  - i_have_an_idea 5y ago
    Even if so, I think it is a bit far fetched to image that China will go after pseudoanonymous commenters from 10 years plus in past on an American internet forum.
    - adventured 5y ago
      There's going to be more criticism of China in the next 10 years than in the past 30 years combined, as their power continues to expand. It's going to be an ocean of criticism. China will have to go after a couple hundred million people. It's silly, to put it mildly.
      - jfktkrkfk 5y ago
        You underestimate the power of AI and social credit like tools. Now add human-free justice systems and block lists to the mix.
        willis936 5y ago
        Ridiculous. Software isn't magic. Hell, it's barely even impressive. Persecuting 100 million people outside your borders requires one thing: power. If China invades every nation and dissolves every other government then they can commit genocide on every other people. Until then, it's just one poster's deranged fantasy. Good luck with any of that post-Manhattan Project.
        garmaine 5y ago
        It’s the Roko’s basilisk, China superpower edition.
- jfktkrkfk 5y ago
  Wrong: > Since 2017, it says, at least 695 Uyghurs have been detained or deported to China from 15 countries. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jun/25/beijing-using-its-financial-muscle-to-target-uyghurs-living-abroad-report https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jun/25/b...
  - garmaine 5y ago
    I’m not a PRC citizen.
- VortexDream 5y ago
  It can, at the very least, harass and threaten people outside their borders, as is already done today in many Western countries against Chinese/Russian/Saudi-Arabian/Belarussian/etc dissidents living abroad. Modern democracies are wholly ill-equipped to deal with modern authoritarian governments and the means they have and are willing to use.
i_have_an_idea 5y ago
weird that you'd create an account to post something that basically amounts to a threat of retribution, in case someone posts something bad about China.
alpaca128 5y ago
No, I don't think I will. Self-censoring just in case one of the most oppressive governments might get powerful enough to get you? That's the first step to making this a self-fulfilling prophecy.
jo123hn 5y ago
The Lab Leak Hypothesis itself is not criticism of China, and it’s very important that we get to the bottom of it! If it turns out to be true we need to learn from it before we leak something much deadlier. You’re advocating for self-censorship of an important topic, based on the assumption that in 10 years a new global superpower will arise and start punishing those that discussed the hypothesis. It makes no sense to me. Unscientific and overly cautious!
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  The problem with China is that they consider everything that's not unconditionally positive automatically as criticism.
BoxOfRain 5y ago
How is this not just a crap take on Roko's Basilisk?
- 0-_-0 5y ago
  It's still much more realistic than Roko's Basilisk :)
Someone 5y ago
In 20 years, China will start to feel the effects of rapid population aging caused by its one-child policy. Compare https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2041/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2... or https://www.populationpyramid.net/western-europe/2041/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/western-europe/2041/ with https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2041/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2041/ China’s challenge is to grow GDP per capita fast enough to handle that.
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  In 20 years, it will be such an economic powerhouse (its megacities at least), to attract significant amount of young people from neighboring countries or ie Africa. You have half a billion mostly poor people in South east asia alone. They will do what western Europe is doing for decades - brain drain the smart poor from previously enslaved regions to sustain at least some young demographics to support badly designed social systems. Its like printing money to get out of state debt - you let the consequences be solved by next generation(s), if required.

pmoriarty 5y ago

"Ever since the SARS outbreak of 2002-03, after all, paper after paper and countless popular pieces have warned that, sooner or later, nature would produce the next big SARS." In 1995 Laurie Garrett warned about how the world could be brought to its knees by another airborne flu-like illness in "The Coming Plague".[1] The first SARS and avian flu and swine flu, and CJD and mad cow disease were just more warnings that humans were continuing to play russian roulette with the way they were living with an using animals. Virologists knew this and warned about this, but the rest of the world chose to ignore them. As things return to "normal" for the parts of the world lucky enough to get vaccinated it's likely that we're going to return to sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that this could never happen again, especially if we believe SARS 2 was created by humans instead of being just another natural disease... with probably a bunch more waiting in the wings. [1] - https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balance/dp/0140250913 https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balan...

pjc50 5y ago
> especially if we believe SARS 2 was created by humans instead of being just another natural disease Here's the thing: if we knew the answer definitively to the lab-leak question, how would it change the pandemic response? The things we need to do to combat the virus remain the same.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  For the current pandemic yes, but we could start banning all gain of function research to make another one less likely. And increase lab safety measures.
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    Since virtually every disease comes from nature and not from labs, the thing that would really make a big difference is stopping encroaching on animal habitats and distancing ourselves from animals (including stopping the eating of animals).. not to mention massive increases in funding to virology and way better pandemic planning.

aritmo 5y ago

It's kinda obvious that the 'lab leak theory' was created just to attack China.

redis_mlc 5y ago
No, COVID-19 came from Wuhan, regardless of theory. The CCP banned domestic air travel from Wuhan to other cities in China early in the pandemic, so the CCP knew at the highest levels where it came from. The various crematoria in Wuhan worked around the clock for months.
corty 5y ago
Of course the theory is used that way, it fits nicely into various political arguments. But that doesn't influence the veracity of the lab leak theory either way. Looking at the article, it also uses weak arguments to support its thesis: "She first takes aim at the popular version of the lab leak theory that posits that Covid was taken from nature and escaped in its wild form. The problem with that scenario, she told me, is that a swab from a bat contains very little infectious virus. Each bat weighs less than half an ounce, and each sample is basically a Q-tip swiped briefly over a bat’s mouth or anus. These samples are stored in vials in the freezer; they’re not likely to spill or leak, the way disaster movies have primed us to suppose." The real-world counter-argument to this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marburg_virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marburg_virus Lab leaks do happen, and all researchers in those labs do have an interest to play down the danger and cover things up to continue working.
- aliasEli 5y ago
  There is some evidence that they had live bats in the laboratory. This would make sense, bats are quite different from other mammals, and it seems very likely that some bat viruses can not be cultivated in standard cell cultures.
- scotty79 5y ago
  Marburg is a different virus. Coronaviruses infection very much depends on the size of viral load. It's not like ebola where single micro droplet is enough.

redis_mlc 5y ago

When looking at all of the facts, it's almost certain corona came from the WIV corona lab. The virologists who claimed otherwise in early 2020 have financial conflicts of interest if funding was cut, or if they were banned from the lab by the CCP. You can see the same CCP influence over WHO and the WHO "investigation." What hasn't been explained is why WIV deleted all their corona DNA sequences from the NIH database (some have been partially recovered.) Their claim is that their excel was taken down for computer security reasons, but the NIH database is separate. Normally NIH deletions are only done for "mistakes." Australian media have been investigating hard since early 2020 (they were not subject to TDS or racial shaming) and are basically one source away from connecting all the dots between the US, Australia and Chinese involvement in corona and GoF. COVID-19 is an international conspiracy involving numerous virologists who travel between multiple countries, partly to evade GoF restrictions in their home countries. (If you recall the CCP saying that the virus came from the US, I believe they were referring to the funding source. The CCP says a mixture of transparent statements and PR, but often there is a kernel of truth in their message.)

_huayra_ 5y ago

As someone who is out of the loop on this and only a basic understanding, it seems very peculiar that scientists were so quickly to just jump on the "it must be bats and a wet market" thing so early on despite the Wuhan lab being right there. It's like when some out-of-control company creates a superfund site through gross negligence of industrial byproduct handling and then goes "idk cancer gonna cancer. you can't link that to us!".

emilgouliev 5y ago
“When HIV/AIDS emerged in the 1980s, it was alleged, with a little Soviet help, that the virus had been developed in an American lab. Between Washington’s inaction on the epidemic and its sordid past of shady experiments, proponents said the theory couldn’t be dismissed out of hand. After many early cases of tick-borne Lyme disease were first identified around Long Island Sound, it was deemed too much of a coincidence that the U.S. military’s Plum Island animal research lab sat on an island in the sound itself. When SARS emerged in 2003, so did fears of the severe acute respiratory syndrome’s unnatural origin. “It’s a very unusual outbreak,” bioweapons expert Ken Alibek told the New York Times at the time. “It’s hard to say whether it’s deliberate or natural.” One Russian scientist posited that “the propagation of the atypical pneumonia may well be caused by a leak of a combat virus grown in Asian bacteriological weapons labs.” And in recent years, efforts to eradicate Ebola have been hobbled by attacks on health care workers motivated, at least in part, by a belief that the virus is man-made.” https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab-leak-theory-doesnt-hold-up-covid-china/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab-leak-theory-doesnt-... This literally happens every goddamn time. Natural explanation is simpler.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  You want to use a razor to shave a bear. Simplicity is not enough to favor a belief model. Machine Learning has shown us that large complex models can perform much better at providing the ground truths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor Razor's aren't scientifically rigorous theorems. Feel free to use them but don't argue by them in a public forum, it's disingenuous to truth.

lmm 5y ago

The article opens by pooh-poohing the idea that three WIV researchers with flu-like symptoms in November might have had Covid-19, then a couple of paragraphs later asserts that it's well-known that Covid-19 was already circulating in Wuhan in November. Isn't there a contradiction there? How widely accepted is the notion that Ebola is a bat virus? The last I heard (which was a while ago) the leading theory was a simian reservoir. > What we’re left with is this: If the WIV had a secret strain (or strains) at least 99 percent similar to Covid-19, it got that raw material from the wild. That would mean there’s at least one wild virus that’s at least 99 percent similar to Covid-19 somewhere in nature, where humans had contact with it at least once. So far, it hasn’t been found, but it’s got to be out there, whether Covid is 100 percent natural or human-tweaked. So, given that Covid (or its direct ancestor) must exist in nature, it’s more likely that it got out naturally (like SARS and MERS) than that it took an undetectable detour through a secure biolab. Is this really true? Everyone acknowledges that WIV researchers (quite openly and properly) sought out new coronavirus strains, including expeditions into remote mountains etc. to look for bat caves and take samples from bats that would probably never have otherwise had contact with humans. Everyone acknowledges that WIV cultured cells from its samples and worked closely with them under what were, at least in retrospect, inadequate (BSL-2) safety precautions. For a virus that we're all agreed must originate with a bat in a remote cave somewhere to get to a human, yes this is a more complex route than one lost bat biting a farmer or something. But I'm not sure it's really so much less plausible that humans who deliberately collected, studied, and worked closely with this virus for many man-hours might have slipped up once. (We will probably never know for sure what happened - another thing that everyone acknowledges is that the PRC government destroyed a lot of potentially relevant evidence. On balance I think a purely natural origin is probably most likely, but I do think that the people who dogmatically shouted down any lab leak theory come off a lot worse than those who kept, and keep, an open mind)

simonh 5y ago
On the first point, they're just saying that 3 people seeing a doctor about flu symptoms at that time of year is not unusual (most Chinese routinely go to hospitals for any medical treatment), and that even if they did have Covid instead of flu they might have got it outside the lab. There were people in Wuhan with Covid back then, but there were a lot more people with flu. The odds that any given three people with flu symptoms in Wuhan at that time actually had covid was still very small. On the route into humans, I'm no expert but as I understand it while these viruses are found in bats the most likely route to humans is via another mammal intermediate such as a pangolin or cat. The reasons for this seems to be that bats are just too small and the virus load too thin to pose a threat to humans. So bat to human is very unlikely, but bat to cat is more plausible, and then cat (etc) to human also more plausible. I've no way to validate if that's accurate. It really is all numbers games though. All we can say is what is more or less likely, and I think that's all the article is trying to explain.

Synaesthesia 5y ago

As far as I'm concerned it's largely irrelevant, because the real question is how the governments all handled the Covid crisis, once it was out in the open.

drclau 5y ago
I wouldn't go as far as to say it's completely irrelevant. If it was a leak, we will want guarantees that another leak is not possible (ie. better safety, or downright stop dangerous research, such as gain of function). It's all about reducing risks.
- zamalek 5y ago
  So: assume that a leak can happen all the time, find out how, and fix it. Red team/blue team your virus lab. This blamelaying is complete nonsense, and is a huge waste of funds across multiple regions.
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    You have to know who is to blame in order to know how it escaped. If we don't know how this leak happened we can't fix it.
ChemSpider 5y ago
Not really. Once thing the lab leak theory would explain is that why the virus was so unexpectedly infective right from the start (adapted to human tissue e. g. via passage in humanized mice). In that sense, I hope that it was a lab leak. It will be better for us humans.
- scotty79 5y ago
  There's nothing unique about covid spreading to humans. It infects various species very easily. Cats, dogs, ferrets. It wasn't uniquely adapted to humans in the beginning. Humans are just more connected species than for example panthers. As it grew to pandemic levels it spawned mutations slightly more adapted to humans.

rdxm 5y ago

This is the best assessment to date I've seen. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-function-risky-bat-virus-engineering-links-america-to-wuhan/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...

ChemSpider 5y ago

"Bats being bats..." What about the undeniable fact that China (the government) is blocking all international research into the origin of Covid. Is that only China being China?

scotty79 5y ago
Yes? They even mention it in the article about SARS and MERS approach before natural origin was estabilished.

ricksunny 5y ago

The authors of the original Lancet letter (Daszak included) just came out with a similarly-toned new one in the same publication - with 3 of their co-signers from last year now having dropped out of it: https://twitter.com/franciscodeasis/status/1412224920537513986?s=21 https://twitter.com/franciscodeasis/status/14122249205375139...

aliasEli 5y ago
Link to the new letter in the lancet: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01419-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
hanklazard 5y ago
> On Feb 19, 2020, we, a group of physicians, veterinarians, epidemiologists, virologists, biologists, ecologists, and public health experts from around the world, joined together to express solidarity with our professional colleagues in China.1 Unsubstantiated allegations were being raised about the source of the COVID-19 outbreak and the integrity of our peers who were diligently working to learn more about the newly recognised virus, SARS-CoV-2, while struggling to care for the many patients admitted to hospital with severe illness in Wuhan and elsewhere in China. This is such an odd way to discuss an issue of finding the truth. This first paragraph of the article seems to intentionally try to create a sense of sympathy for the Chinese scientists against whom “unsubstantiated allegations” were being leveled. Of course we should all feel bad for well-intentioned people being thrown into the controversy of the pandemic origins, but this is not about shielding people from difficult circumstances—this is about finding truth so that we can minimize the risk that this ever happens again.

bellyfullofbac 5y ago

Huh, the second sentence of the article made me doubt how good it is... > Last spring, the media accurately reported the scientific consensus that Covid (also known as SARS CoV-2) is a natural virus [...] To be pedantic: No, lady, Covid is the disease, and the virus is SARS-CoV-2. Like AIDS and HIV (disease and virus respectively). It's a little thing, but accuracy in journalism is still important (or is it just me?).

0-_-0 5y ago
Additionally: 1. There wasn't a consensus, some scientists disagreed 2. A natural virus can leak from a lab Also, a reminder that biosecurity incidents are common, there were about 17 in the last decade [0]. Just (natural) 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...
- JohnTHaller 5y ago
  > 1. There wasn't a consensus, some scientists disagreed Consensus means "general agreement", it doesn't mean unanimous. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consensus https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consensus
  - whatthesmack 5y ago
    There wasn't general agreement either. There was a propaganda piece architected by Peter Daszak (Leader of EcoHealth Alliance, who Fauci's NIAID contracted with for gain-of-function research at WIV after Obama banned it), signed by a few scientists, and The Lancet published. The "general agreement" many folks may be thinking of is the general agreement amongst mainstream and social media that a lab leak shouldn't even be investigated and anybody that suggested doing so was a maniac.
native_samples 5y ago

forcry 5y ago

>'Evidence Strongly Favors The Lab Origin': GOP-Called Medical Witness Discusses COVID-19 Genesis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbbJaaMG7Bs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbbJaaMG7Bs

nickdothutton 5y ago

Skimmed the article but failed to see any evidence for a zoonotic origin. Did I miss it?

kryz 5y ago
There is no real case made for zoonotic origin in this article. The tone of the article exhibits some bias and spurious logic in the support of a zoonotic origin
lamontcg 5y ago
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.22.427830v3 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.22.427830v3 https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698 https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00709-1.pdf https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00709-1.pdf
paulddraper 5y ago
The evidence is that it's happened before so it could again. It's not like there's a paper trail. The best you can say is that the virus looked very similar between species, so a natural jump is plausible.

rob_c 5y ago

It doesn't have to have been engineered to have escaped. Why this convolution keeps happening is beyond me, we "know" this isn't a bio-superweapon. Taking this as read, either: Researchers at the lab failed to spot something like this in the wild, in an area where they were looking for this. So, failed to raise the alarm appropriately with acceptable transparency. or, Researcher work at the lab led to the collection of this from bats and some set of unknown situations led to it getting into the populace. So, caused the disaster they were trying to prevent/research. Either way it's clear China reacted as-if this was the end of days. Which is understandable given the nature of the work going on inside the lab The fact that everyone involved seems to have thrown up barriers into a sensible discussion on this is unfortunate and renders most conversations mute such that we'll probably never know how bad it was.

mikem170 5y ago
Didn't the article cover the scenarios you mentioned? The article said that the lab's normal job was to look for new bat viruses, and that it's pretty hard to get infected from a qtip swabbed over a bats anus stored in a stabilizing solution. The bottom line is that the evidence we have at this time points to nature as the most probable origin, and it's not unusual for it to take many years to figure these things out.
- forcry 5y ago
  >The bottom line is that the evidence we have at this time points to nature as the most probable origin.. Some scientists think otherwise, quite strongly in the opposite direction, it seems.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeW5sI-R1Qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeW5sI-R1Qg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbbJaaMG7Bs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbbJaaMG7Bs
  - mikem170 5y ago
    I found this link [0] that seems to debunk, in a lot of detail, the congressional testimony of these two physicists on the specifics of their claims for evidence of gain of function manipulation in the gentic sequence of covid-19. That jives with another source [1] that explained, amongst other things, that there's genetic evidence covid-19 evolved in animals with intact immune systems, not in a lab. [0] https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/06/11/cggcgg-the-latest-new-old-wrinkle-in-the-covid-19-lab-leak-conspiracy-theory/ https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/06/11/cggcgg-the-latest... [1] https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3 https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3

aerosmile 5y ago

The minute the PRC government destroyed the evidence, they lost the presumption of innocence. Let's also remember - we're dealing with very smart people who very well knew the price they were paying by not cooperating with the international community, and yet that path seemed more attractive than just "coming clean." I wonder what the judicial system would have to say if a murder was committed in my house, and there was evidence that I destroyed the evidence. Also, I don't have an alibi, and have multiple prior felonies. Would that be enough to put me in jail again?

eloff 5y ago
Yes, the cover up and hostility towards the lab leak hypothesis may actually be the strongest evidence for it. Which is to say, not much. But we have no evidence for the natural origin story, and it's a somewhat strange coincidence that the initial outbreak was near a lab studying these very same kinds of viruses. Granted you might put such a lab in places where there are lots of bat viruses to be found, but that's still a much, much larger area than the city of Wuhan. The closest known wild virus came from a source 800 miles away. Draw a circle over a map of China including both Wuhan and that bat cave and you can see that quite clearly. Combine that with the fact that Sars cov1 escaped labs in China to infect researchers not once, but at least twice, and the Bayesian calculation swings heavily to the lab leak hypothesis.
- mikem170 5y ago
  Did you know that there's been evidence pointing to an origin 600 miles south of Wuhan [0], based on sampled early cases and genetic sequencing? [0] 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-...
  - codewench 5y ago
    It's worth noting that the paper this article is based on is somewhat contested. For example "There are several serious flaws with their findings and interpretation." [1] "The authors’ misinterpretation of MJNs fosters misconceptions, inaccuracies, and misrepresentations of fundamental phylogenetic principles."[2] [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/23/12522 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/23/12522 [2] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/23/12518 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/23/12518

rossdavidh 5y ago

The real motive behind most of these kind of articles: "...loose talk about a lab leak elevates tensions between China and the United States, undermining the collaborative research we need to understand this pandemic and prevent the next one." Translation: "please shut up about this, it doesn't matter now and we need to get China calmed down, and this talk is making them defensive and therefore uncooperative." The rest of the article is mostly just FUD to try to provide a plausible excuse for ignoring the obvious fact that China is covering up, so that raises the possibility that there is a mistake for them to cover up. I would prefer the truth to be brought out. But, I have to admit, it may be that the "let's just pretend we don't realize they screwed up" policy is in fact the wiser one.

jstrong 5y ago
agree with your read on the article but not on your conclusion. in general, I don't think fudging the truth for strategic reasons ever turns out well in the long run, mostly because, we're not smart enough to anticipate what the long run impact of our strategic lying will be. secondly, the strategy itself, going out of our way, up to and including hiding the causes of a global pandemic, in order to avoid ever hurting china's feelings, just does not seem viable to me at all.
_cs2017_ 5y ago
I do think many people who write on this topic have a conscious or unconscious bias in favor of the natural origin hypotehsis. You provided one example of such bias. Here's a couple more: - Chinese nationalists (although they rarely author publications outside of China) - people who expressed strong opinion on this matter a year ago (based on the information they had then), and now don't like to admit they were wrong even in the face of new evidence. - people who think the lab origin hypothesis is an example of anti-Chinese racism, and therefore take the opposite the side to fight racism. On the other hand, I would argue that even more people who write on this topic outside of China are biased in favor of the lab origin hypothesis. This is because many groups of people would (consciously or subconsciously) like to use this opportunity to blame the Beijing government for this huge disaster. Examples: - those who dislike the communist ideology (e.g., those whose loved ones died to wars with the communists, or those who just dislike authoritarianism on general principles) - those of China's neighbors who dislike the Beijing government's aggressive policy towards them (India, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam) - those who dislike the Chinese in general, for racist reasons - Americans who don't want to see China surpass the US in global power These biases are present even among journalists and scientists, since many of them cannot (or don't even bother trying to) separate their feelings as regular people from their role as unbiased reporters or researchers. Overall, this means it's very hard to take seriously anything written on this topic. Perhaps I would tend to trust: - An expert who has been consistently friendly to Bejing but argues in favor of the lab origin hypothesis; or - An expert who has been consistently unfriendly to Beijing but argues in favor the natural origin hypothesis. One of the rare examples of such people is Jeffrey Sachs, who chairs the Lancet Covid-19 origins commission. He has been at least somewhat friendly to Beijing (well as friendly as you can be in the West without committing a professional suicide). And yet, he says that there's at least enough evidence that both hypotheses are worth pursuing (that is, that it's not 100% obvious that it was a natural origin). Unfortunately, he's not an expert on this topic (he's an economist). Still, I would follow his comments with interest. https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/finding-the-origins-of-covid19-by-jeffrey-d-sachs-2021-06?barrier=accesspaylog https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/finding-the-origin...

tonfreed 5y ago

China refuses to allow research into the origin of the virus and blames whoever is pissing them off that day. I don't think it's beyond reason to think, in a country where officials routinely fudge numbers to avoid jail time, that someone covered their ass for too long and now it's the entire CCP's problem. This article looks like it's just running cover because, idk, GOP evil I guess.

jkingsbery 5y ago

> WIV officials told the investigators that serum samples for all staff and students in the bat coronavirus group subsequently tested negative for Covid antibodies. We have only their word to go on because the lab hasn’t been independently audited... Why has the lab not been independently audited? If I was going to make a case against someone making an error, saying "well, that group said they didn't make an error" seems like a bad argument. > The first human case of Covid could have been infected hundreds of miles away, perhaps closer to the horseshoe bat caves of southern China. Have we found such a person? > You can get on the fast train in Wuhan and be in Guandong Province, the home of the original SARS outbreak, in under four hours. If someone had been in Guandong, and taken a train to Wuhan, it seems to me that the early cases would not have been so concentrated in Wuhan, for two reasons: 1) if Wuhan is really all that accessible by different means of transportation, you'd expect people would just as easily take it from Wuhan to other places, and 2) presumably, the fast train doesn't just stop in Wuhan (Google says it's 1000 km away), meaning an infected person on the train could easily have infected someone else on the train who got off in between. Honest question: is that not how the spread of disease would work? > There is no evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or anyone else, ever had any strain that similar to Covid-19. Again, that's what we're trying to figure out. You can't take the thing we're trying to figure out as evidence one way or the other, that's Begging the Question (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question) > Given that Covid (or its direct ancestor) must exist in nature, it’s more likely that it got out naturally (like SARS and MERS) than that it took an undetectable detour through a secure biolab. I don't understand this jump. Most people I've read arguing that the lab leak theory is possible agree that there must be some base virus in nature. The question is, what is the more likely path from that natural virus to the COVID outbreak, through a lab or through some other animal (or animals)? I understand the argument that we didn't find the transmission chain for SARS or MERS or Ebola for years, but why does asserting it started in nature lead to the conclusion it therefore had a natural path? This again seems like the author is trying to prove a conclusion using the conclusion. > The fact that China is being secretive about Covid-19 isn’t evidence for any particular theory. When SARS came out, I don't remember the Chinese government blaming Italian frozen food or athletes at an international athletics competition for SARS. I don't remember them promising people that it's not transmittable between humans, or that it's not a big deal. I think simply saying "China is being secretive" is not looking at the whole picture. > All theories of the origins of Covid-19 should be investigated, including lab origin theories. We should go wherever the science takes us. This seems right to me. We can't make bricks without clay though.

watertom 5y ago

Full disclosure: I do not think this virus was engineered I do not think this was deliberately released I do think the Chinese were studying this virus in the lab, not engineering it, but studying it. I do think it was the result of a lab accident, a technician tried to cover up an accident/carelessness in order to avoid getting punished or fired, normal human behavior. HOW DID THE CHINESE KNOW THEY HAD A NEW VIRUS WHEN THEY ONLY HAD A HANDFUL OF CASES???????? Covid-19 presents like the flu, without a test you don't can't know if it's the flu or Covid-19, but the Chinese knew they had a new virus in late Nov, early Dec when there were only a handful of cases. HOW DID THEY KNOW??? The only way to tell if you've got something new is because: a) unique symptoms b) a statistically significant increase in cases c) a statistically significant number of deaths In the early day of Covid-19 you had none of these present, with only a handful of cases NOBODY WOULD HAVE SUSPECTED ANYTHING WAS AMISS. I can see it now, "Hey, I'm thinking that we have these flu cases, in flu season, and there isn't anything remarkable about the cases but I think they are the result of a new virus, so we should raise a red flag and swing the government into action." Highly unlikely. There is one other way that you know you've got something new: d) you know something that no one else knows, like there was a lab accident. How did the Chinese know they had something new, when they had no evidence or indication that something new was circulating? This is the only question that needs to be answered. Nothing else. If there isn't a reasonable and logical answer to how the Chinese knew they had a new virus with only a few cases that looked just like the flu, and no other information, then it stands to reason they knew something else. What I think happened. A lab tech had an accident or was careless, and exposed themselves to the virus they were studying in the lab. The tech didn't report the incident because they didn't want to be punished or fired. The tech incorrectly assumed that everything was fine, but then got sick. Then when some other lab workers got sick, the safety people at the lab got involved and they learned what really happened, and they pushed the panic button, quietly. The rest is history.

jandrese 5y ago
From what I understand they knew because there was a lot more than a handful of cases. The government was suppressing the news because that's what you do when you have bad news in an authoritarian state. Remember the early news from doctors who were trying to understand what was going on and were getting censored by the government? They had to form an underground information exchange until the problem finally got so big (and spread internationally) that they couldn't pretend anymore. IMHO, this discussion about the lab is a distraction from the real discussion we should be having. The one about suppressing discussion between doctors who are merely reporting on what they're seeing and delaying the worldwide response as a result. Even today the CCPs official numbers on COVID infections in China are extremely unlikely. They claim to have had fewer cases than even New Zealand. Clearly there is political influence being exerted over the official figures.

deleted 5y ago

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agentofoblivion 5y ago

Who is this author and as the lay public, can we trust the authoritative tone she takes? Basic clicking around shows she's a journalist, not a scientist, and has written articles e.g., highlighting the medical struggles of Jordan Peterson with statements about him like: > His stern ethos of self-help and bootstrapping has made him a darling of the so-called intellectual dark web, and a gateway drug for countless budding right-wingers who have stumbled upon one of his lectures on YouTube. (https://newrepublic.com/article/156829/happened-jordan-peterson https://newrepublic.com/article/156829/happened-jordan-peter...) It seems too much of a coincidence that another member of "the so-called intellectual dark web" is perhaps the most recognizable proponent of the Lab Leak Theory. She also writes for The Nation, which is unapologetically leaning pretty hard to the left. In other words, I question both her motives and authority.

jandrese 5y ago

The evidence is sadly too thin to make a definitive call one way or the other at this point. We may never know. But at the same time I have to wonder how much it matters? It's the difference between telling some researchers to double-check their containment procedures vs. not? I think it's extremely unlikely that this was an intentional attack from CCP on their own people. It wasn't a Uyghur town as far as I know, and even so containment was nearly impossible so it's a dumb idea anyway. So the only two plausible theories is it was either a natural source or an unintentional lab leak. At the end of the day it doesn't matter that much which one was true, the response is about the same. Maybe on the extreme end the lab could be shut down and its work moved elsewhere. People are wasting an enormous amount of energy arguing over this.

spfzero 5y ago

To make the argument that, because in the past the transmission from animal to human happened in nature, that in the present it could only happen there, implies that your assumptions stay constant. Things have changed since Ebola 50 years ago and Sars1 20 years ago. For one thing, millions of dollars have been invested in gain-of-function research. There are many more labs, many times more investigators and projects running. These scientists are working to create the characteristics in viruses that make them more deadly and more infectious. Also, today powerful new bio-engineering tools are available, in the past 10 years especially. Today the situation is different, since there are now new pathways for a deadly virus to come into being. I don't think anyone can argue that the number of dangerous viruses being studied in laboratories around the world is the same now as it was 20 years ago. If you want to argue against a lab-leak today, you really need to argue that the BSL-rated laboratories are perfectly leak-proof.

ab7675226 5y ago

"WIV officials told the investigators that serum samples for all staff and students in the bat coronavirus group subsequently tested negative for Covid antibodies. We have only their word to go on because the lab hasn’t been independently audited, but if that’s true,..." My goodness, that statement from the essay is missing critical context. The lab hasn't been independently audited because the CCP refused permission for any independent inspections. And yes, you are allowed to take into account their refusal to allow inspections when making a judgement on whether the CCP is covering up a lab-leak.

ab7675226 5y ago

"Rasmussen notes another major piece of new evidence against a lab origin: If Covid-19 were invented as part of a benevolent gain-of-function experiment, the goal would be to make it more transmissible, or more lethal to people, in order to study that strain in the lab. But when current strains of Covid-19 are cultured in cells in the laboratory, the virus tends to mutate fast and become less contagious to humans. " The author presents the mutation history as an argument against a 'benevolent gain-of-function experiment.' But the key word there is 'benevolent.' And it is there on purpose. Let me formalize this: Set(gain-of-function experiments) - Set(benevolent gain-of-function experiments) => Set(non-benevolent gain-of-function experiments). So if it was a lab leak from a gain-of-function experiment, it is, according to Rasmussen, a lab leak from a biowarfare gain-of-function experiment.