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The best writeup I've seen is actually this twitter thread from the WNYC science reporter, Nsikan Akpan (himself a phd in biology). The gist being that while la

• siva7 5y ago
  Again, this writeup is more about the bioengineering hypothesis while embarak states another theory. in it‘s current state the term lab leak has almost become meaningless
  • derbOac 5y ago
    I think equating the lab leak hypothesis with climate change denial also caused me to tune out. It's just not acting in good faith. I also feel like if he's serious about it, he would produce something other than a tweet thread, at least a real blog post with links to papers he refers to. Otherwise it's hard for me to take them any more seriously than anyone else who handwaves about papers. It would be nice to see something like that with good faith opportunities for people to respond and counterrespond but I'm skeptical about it happening. There's also a sense that I have from reading stuff like that and others that we should treat the peer-reviewed academic paper trail as somehow the state of things, rather than looking at the evidence on its own terms. I don't mean anything conspiratorial about that, just that it's almost like they expect there to be some peer-reviewed paper out there from China that shows how they would have engineered it if they had, as if that's realistic at all. That's not even getting into what you mention, which is the possibility nothing was engineered and there was a leak.
    • refenestrator 5y ago
      You're asking people to prove a negative and then you're upset when they can't? It's impossible to disprove but both SARS and Bird Flu crossed over from animals in Southern China so there's no reason it must have come from the lab, either. Right now we have zero evidence either way, just people speculating mostly based on their pre-existing opinions of the Chinese state.
  • mike00632 5y ago
    That's the problem with these conspiracy theories, though, right? They are unfalsifiable by design. A scientific hypothesis would be testable. For example, "Did the COVID-19 virus come from a lab?" would be falsifiable if the COVID-19 virus didn't share the base genetic sequence of typical viruses tested in a lab. Lo and behold, the COVID-19 virus doesn't have the genetic signature of viruses in labs. Therefore the conspiracy theory is more convoluted to include vastly more participants in a complex web of motives resulting in a theory that is less falsifiable and plays into every possible prejudice a laymen could have about geopolitics, money, race and national governments. We've seen lab leaks and this is supposedly different because it's not disclosed and numerous other reasons making it hard to prove. We know about lab made viruses which this is supposedly different because it somehow looks like a virus of zoonotic origin. We've seen the Chinese government cover up embarrassing situations but this is different because there was heavy involvement from American researchers and American public educational institutions and they are in on the cover up too for some reason. We've seen the US government dislose previously classified information but this is different because all of the government officials who say they saw classified information about a lab leak (and were in a position to declassify said information) did not accompany their accusations with gathered intelligence. At some point we should recognize that these necessary mental gymnastics put the theory well into crank territory.
    • JPKab 5y ago
      There is currently zero evidence to support a zoonotic origin. It took 9 months to find the source of MERS (camels). It took 14 months to find the origin of SARS1 (bats). What evidence do you have that this was transmitted from an animal carrier? What mammal in China (it's not like there are that many mammal species living in the Wuhan metropolitan area) has been identified that easily catches COVID? The answer is zero. The most likely explanation for this, which fits with all the other circumstantial data, is that the zoonotic origin was a genetically engineered mouse with human ACE2 receptors lining it's lungs. Note that I'm saying the mouse was genetically engineered, not the virus itself. The virus could easily evolve to infect humans by repeatedly exposing the humanized mice to the original, completely natural origin bat viruses. Calling out "mental gymnastics" when you are acting as if it's a pure coincidence that a bat virus pandemic originated in a city containing the world's leading bat-borne virus research facility is the height of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. And before you say that the lab is in Wuhan because that's where the viruses are, no, it's not. The viruses historically have emerged in Yunnan province, in remote caves 1000 KM away from Wuhan.
  • tootie 5y ago
    No it covers the entire spectrum of theories. You have to follow the thread it's like 50 tweets long. He talks about bioengineering, gain of function, serial passage and direct animal to lab to public.
• JPKab 5y ago
  Lab leak and lab engineered are not the same thing. The SARS1 virus escaped from a lab many years after the original outbreak (via accidentally being put in a fridge reserved for inactive virus and being examined under electron microscope, infecting employee), and it wasn't engineered at all. It was 100% natural origin. I have ZERO doubt in my mind that natural viruses have leaked from US labs in the past, and were covered up. Can't prove it of course. Superpowers don't admit to these kinds of things. Belief that this wasn't leaked from a lab requires a dismissal of a huge chain of improbable coincidences, and it's much easier to believe when you are part of a community of scientists who will undoubtedly have funding up-ended when people figure out they were at fault. Not unlike what happened to the field of nuclear energy after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The international virology community knows this.
• jcranberry 5y ago
  The New Yorker had an article in the discussion and interviewed two scientists, Stanford microbiologist David Relman and UNC virologist Ralph Baric, who signed the letter to WHO which was published in Science magazine. https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/the-sudden-rise-of-the-coronavirus-lab-leak-theory https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/the-sudden-... The two scientists seemed to think that although a lab leak origin is possible the natural origin story is more likely.
  • JPKab 5y ago
    Again, there is no identifiable difference between a virus harvested from guano in a cave that later leaks from a lab sample and the same virus if transmitted to a human. Nobody is saying this virus was engineered in this thread. It appears to me to be a deliberate psychological trick of lumping people who claim the virus leaked from a lab (by far the most probable cause) with people who say the virus was an engineered bioweapon (insane, nonsensical crazy talk). The entire virology community is dependent on government funding, and they have massive conflicts of interest. I work with academics all day every day, and far too many gradually turn into mealy-mouthed bureaucrats, doing and saying whatever it takes to chase their next juicy grant, abusing and exploiting graduate students all along the way.
    • stvswn 5y ago
      Wait, you're still overgeneralizing. There's the chance that it was a naturally occurring virus that wasd being stored in a lab (like RaTG13, it's closest known cousin). Then, there's the chance that it was manipulated in lab experiments by well-meaning scientists hoping to learn more about coronavirus transmission to humans (which I think is most likely, considering the behavior of the WIV, but far from certain). Finally, there's the chance that it was deliberately leaked as a bioweapon (doesn't make sense to me). I totally agree that there are massive conflicts of interest, including the implication of being blacklisted from Chinese data sources for one's career and the chance that there simply won't be any funding in the future if the public believes that the research field itself is to blame.
  • stvswn 5y ago
• stvswn 5y ago
  The thread's entire premise is that lab leakers are only speculating while there is in fact direct evidence of natural origins. What direct evidence of natural origins is he referring to? Kristian Andersen's argument in his oft-cited paper seems to be that the spike proteins are effective at infecting humans in a novel way, and that if he were engineering an infections coronavirus he would have designed it differently, therefore it's unlikely that it was bioengineered. Beyond that, they tend to point out that "there is no evidence" of a lab leak -- ignoring many pieces of evidence along the way, even if they are circumstantial, including the workers at the WIV contracting a dangerous disease w/ COVID-like symptoms in Fall 2019, the sudden disappearance of the WIV genome sequence database before the first publicly known cases, and the suspicious renaming of the RaTG13 virus sample (the closest known to COVID-19 genetically) in WIV literature. I feel perpetually gaslit but some of these scientists. The argument seems to go as follows: it is most reasonable to suspect a zoonotic transfer, even without direct evidence, because a community of scientists with clear conflicts of interest tell us so -- but we are supposed to dismiss the circumstantial evidence of a lab leak because the only satisfactory evidence would be if a smoking gun were found in the WIV records (and everyone knows that they won't be). The idea that it has natural origins stems from recent experience with SARS and MERS, but of course that doesn't mean much of anything at all -- those experience inform both theories. One should also consider the 1977 flu pandemic which was confirmed to have been related to a live vaccine trial done by the Chinese military -- information which was suppressed at the time by the WHO for fear of losing cooperation with China and Russia. Origins aside, it is not disupted that the NIH through the NIAID and EcoHealth alliance were funding research into coronaviruses that was being done at the WIV, and that the data related to that research used to be readily available but now is suppressed by the Chinese government, exactly at the same time that we are experiencing a pandemic that the research was hoping to forestall. Isn't that alone troubling? Are the scientists in this community expressing any trouble with that fact, or are we meant to believe that we are conspiratorial nuts if we bring up China's behavior in any context?
  • nosianu 5y ago
    > The thread's entire premise is that lab leakers are only speculating while there is in fact direct evidence of natural origins. This is not either/or at all! It can be both completely natural AND also have escaped from a lab. Pretending that lab == bio-engineered is a disingenuous distraction. For the given purpose of that lab them having a lot of naturally occurring viruses is to be expected, since that is the basis of what they are supposed to research. A lot of people have pointed that out, why do you keep touting that distraction that paints anyone serious about the lab leak question as a conspiracy nut unwilling to look at the evidence? Natural origin is accepted and does not contradict the lab escape hypothesis at all.