20 ms·

i don't understand why the so-called "lab leak theory" of origin for sars-cov2 is treated as some sort of conspiracy theory. it is completely plausible, and thi

• gennarro 5y ago
  Presumably people are being more careful now. Would like to see some sort of news or legislation about this but I’m sure it’s unlikely.
  • dylan604 5y ago
    And what kind of legislation would tickle your fancy? Intentional release is already legislated against. How do you legislate the prevention of accidents? Are you specifically talking about disclosure? I can get on board with that, but I'd be shocked if there's not already legislation around that. Now, the crux, whatever legislation you come up with, how does that apply to a foreign country?
    • tombert 5y ago
      I know basically nothing about foreign policy at all, but just in the "tombert thought experiment" land I'm going to give my "asshole opinion" [1]. ----------- > Now, the crux, whatever legislation you come up with, how does that apply to a foreign country? Conceivably couldn't we do some kind of trade agreement/embargo on countries that don't follow a minimum level of disclosure/safety protocol? E.g. if country A is shown to have covered up a massive lab leak, we impose some kind of tariff on them for N days. Obviously there are no easy solutions to problems like this, but I think that would be the place I start, because obviously US law doesn't really apply to places outside of the US; the only thing we could do (at least the only thing that I could think of) that's even close to punitive enforcement would be to apply leverage. [1] "Opinions are like assholes; everyone's got one and most of them stink"
      • dylan604 5y ago
        >Conceivably couldn't we do some kind of trade agreement/embargo Imagine, if you will, a scenario where one country is manufacturing such a large percentage of products so that an embargo would cause massive disruptions to pretty much everyone everywhere. Now imagine that country being the suspect in a situation where the punishment is that very embargo. What do you do?
    • merpnderp 5y ago
      Well for starters, the reason a lot of this research was pushed to China was congress had grown tired of finding ways to punish the CDC for lab leaks and mistakes here in the US. It was only recently that the CDC had been allowed to restart a lot of its more dangerous research. So how about the US stop funding dangerous research regardless of where it is at? Either the lab leak was true and this was a self-inflicted wound, or it was highly suspicious and uselessly dangerous research, as it didn't help us stop the pandemic.
      • dylan604 5y ago
        But in very weird round about way, it did allow us to see that mRNA technology is viable. So, happy little accident? Apologies to Bob.
        • nsxwolf 5y ago
          I used to think Mission:Impossible 2 was ridiculous, now it's one of my favorites.
    • lelanthran 5y ago
      > And what kind of legislation would tickle your fancy? Intentional release is already legislated against. How do you legislate the prevention of accidents? That's a ridiculous line of reasoning: legislation helps mitigate accidents all the time. Pilots don't want their bird to fall out of the sky, and yet legislation around pilot training, practices and certification limited the number of accidents.
      • dylan604 5y ago
        That same logic also applies to automobiles. You must be licensed to drive, yet accidents happen daily/hourly accross the country. Fatal accidents are frequent. Laws will not save you 100% of the time. Your logic is flawed on the ridiculous side.
        • lelanthran 5y ago
          > That same logic also applies to automobiles. You must be licensed to drive, yet accidents happen daily/hourly accross the country. Fatal accidents are frequent. Laws will not save you 100% of the time. Your logic is flawed on the ridiculous side. It sounds like you're claiming that removing the requirement for drivers licenses would not change the percentage of accidents per driver. Are you?
  • redog 5y ago
    > Presumably people are being more careful now Probably so, but just like hollywood and guns.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• jokethrowaway 5y ago
  It's politics. China needed to buy some time so that there wouldn't be pressure for sanctions due to covid, so all the Chinese shills started calling it a conspiracy theory.
  • edgyquant 5y ago
    I don’t think so. Not that I believe it’s impossible it originated in China from a lab accident, I think you should have proof before claiming that but okay. But when people started claiming it came from China they weren’t doing so off of hard evidence or being rational. They were doing so because of xenophobia and nationalist pride and it’s just easier to blame these problems on an other than it is to believe shit happens. Now this year there have been more scientific minded people who have proposed a pretty rational set of circumstances that it could have came from China, but 1. These circumstances are not proven and are little more than a hunch of what could be, and 2. The type of people who push the “Chinavirus” rhetoric aren’t those same scientific minds thinking rationally and instead they’ve had their opinion slightly verified by more recent understanding (again, slightly, because there is no proof.)
    • systemvoltage 5y ago
      > But when people started claiming it came from China they weren’t doing so off of hard evidence or being rational. Here is the NIH director being asked uncomfortable questions and being completely irrational: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRZE-SJShkE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRZE-SJShkE This comment summarizes it better than I can: > I'm curious why Dr. Collins believes so strongly that a lab leak was unlikely, that is his reasoning, given that he states SARS had leaked on at least a couple different occasions resulting in some deaths, yet was quickly contained. The non-answer to this question, or his reference to an investigation into the intermediary, which he admits has not yet been found and will take much time, are insufficient to address the elephant in the room. It's frustrating hearing "trust the experts and bureaucracy" when throughout the interview so many instances of incompetence and failure exist in history. The question needs to be asked regarding gain of function and yet Mr. Collins is more concerned about the reputation of the scientific community. Both are important, but how can we have a public conversation without probing Senators like Rand Paul? "Public" conversations within the scientific community are referenced by Dr. Collins as well as the achievements of the Human Genome Project, but I don't understand how he can be so defensive of public figures' reputations. Again, how are we to have conversations and trust when the bureaucrats and scientific community don't communicate answers to these huge problems! Excuse us, Mr. Collins, but we just had a major pandemic and this current version of SARS was not contained and you can say you wish China were more forthcoming, but perhaps those three instances of gain of function research in the flu versus your woeful insufficient in my opinion defense of a natural gain of function and leak in the case of SARS covid-2, at least deserves some respectful, humble conversation. Labeling Senators as playing politics is not helpful since, in regards to Dr. Paul, what alternative to asking questions do you propose to serve the public interest? (This is coming from someone who read Dr. Collins book "DNA The Language of Life" having enjoyed this book as one of the best on the topic of science and faith.) I am sure the Director of NIH didn't get to this position with incompetence. Good men are being turned into a hot mess. I would still trust NIH but they really need to clean up. I want to hold CDC and NIH more accountable than say some lunatic saying "China virus" on Parlor.
• asdff 5y ago
  Because there is a whole contingent of people who take the argument in bad faith for xenophobic reasons and there is not a lot of solid evidence in this case to argue in good faith beyond "theoretically possible."
  • School-Cotton 5y ago
    Whether unsavory people believe in something has zero bearing on whether it's true.
    • Loughla 5y ago
      That's sort of covered by the second half, though >and there is not a lot of solid evidence in this case to argue in good faith beyond "theoretically possible." Also, bad faith arguments tend to be posited on the fact that they are incorrect. Otherwise they would just be arguments.
    • fragmede 5y ago
      Unfortunately, the unsavory people don't live in a vacuum separate from us. If it ends up being true, then it's true, and whomever is President at the time will do what they can do. If it ends up being false, however, the people (generally Asian Americans) who have been maimed, or killed by those unsavory people in the meanwhile don't get an undo. Continued discussion with no new real evidence, like the situation with Hillary Clinton's emails, is propaganda, pure and simple.
      • boppo1 5y ago
        I dunno, I always though the lab leak theory was less racist than laying blame at the feet of the dietary habits of low-income chinese.
        • systemvoltage 5y ago
          Which was also based on equal amounts of flaky evidence guided by the people that didn't want to associate themselves to the acting President at the time and his party. These people left truth behind, butchered science, eroded trust and sacrificed their integrity. In tough times, our leadership didn't stand up for the truth. I think the society would be far better off if we completely cut out politics and make it super boring. Relentless push to put behind this tribal warfare and serve the truth, however uncomfortable it may be. Lex Fridman's interview with the NIH director was eye-opening. They're acting like children. Of course, you can't see how unpopular it was because Youtube has hidden the dislikes. The cocktail of Big Tech + ruling party is equally as scary to me as Trumpism.
• mjfl 5y ago
  The people smart enough to conduct investigations into this know that the only outcomes will be harsher restrictions on lab research stateside without much consequences for China, and thus they are unmotivated.
  • siva7 5y ago
    This is the unfortunate truth on the psychological side. There is simply no motivation to push the lab leak theory for those scientists involved. Not for the chinese because that would be their death sentence and not for the outside world because funding and restrictions will get a lot harsher. On the other side everyone can live with the other theories because they imply more research funding and no one has to die for political reasons.
    • Supermancho 5y ago
      > Not for the chinese because that would be their death sentence I don't believe it would affect "the Chinese" at all, other than spending time to ladle out a new dose of conditioning for their own public.
      • meibo 5y ago
        Maybe they meant the death sentence for the team of scientists working on coronavirus research at the Wuhan virology lab, that surely must have had to make some kind of statement to the Chinese state if it did exist. I’m sure they have the greatest interest to leave the rest of the country and world in the dark.
  • Ambolia 5y ago
    We should have leashed very short both politicians and virologists after this disaster, but the blame game has been shifted very skillfully at every point, from anybody worrying about a pandemic, to anybody not worrying about it, to your neighbor who wears the mask wrong, to three guys in the middle of desert who didn't take the vaccine, while nobody with power ever answers about anything.
• adt2bt 5y ago
  If I had to guess, it's something along these lines (again I'm just guessing, these are general social sentiments that I observed over the past 2 years): 1. Trump mismanaged the pandemic, this resulted in cognitive dissonance amongst his supporters. (they like him but their brain doesn't like the feeling that it was wrong) 2. A 'convenient' explanation to avoid this dissonance is COVID is a Chinese bio-weapon. They (big bad China) released COVID to make Trump look bad and to kill Americans. 3. Liberals, seeing through this, push back on this generally unsubstantiated claim (at the time and potentially even now) that COVID is a bio-weapon. In the eyes of most, Liberals have taken the side of 'COVID is a natural random mutation, not a lab leak'. 4. Now whether or not it's a lab leak or natural is a political game, where your team wins depending on where the facts finally lie (or if you can manufacture enough support for your 'side'). 5. See: Rand Paul v Fauci in various senate hearings about gain-of-function research and funding for a Wuhan lab & generally liberals trying not to talk about it because it would be another example of them 'lying' in the eyes of conservatives (think 'masks don't help' but alllll over again).
  • School-Cotton 5y ago
    Spot on. Nearly everything these days gets shoehorned into the insane US culture war, including the origins of Covid.
    • dnautics 5y ago
      I don't buy this, obviously not an unbiased sample, but most individual liberals I know are on board with it being a lab leak. Can't necessarily say that about 'liberal leadership class' in the US, though.
      • adt2bt 5y ago
        (GP here) I generally agree with this. It's why I wrote 'in the eyes of most'. IMO liberals are bad at defining their own opinions in the court of public opinion, and often are viewed as !Conservative, even if their views are more nuanced.
      • 5y ago
• 1270018080 5y ago
  The bottom tier of society REALLY wants it to be out of malice.
  • edgyquant 5y ago
    It’s like religion in the ancient days. When a plague or earthquake hit people didn’t understand (didn’t want to understand) that these are the effects of a giant mechanical system and not the fault of anyone. The ancients created gods to justify these things, modern people blame the great other. If you were French in the 1890s you’d love to blame any societal tragedy on Germans, if you were German in the 20s you’d be blaming France, etc.
    • opportune 5y ago
      Yeah. There are still plenty of people in modern times that want a singular scapegoat for an accident. And even people who think natural disasters are a result of god punishing us for allowing people to be homosexual
  • dpbriggs 5y ago
    Who's the bottom tier of society?
• rsynnott 5y ago
  Well, there's not much evidence for it. And, honestly, there's arguably an aspect of wishful thinking to it. "This was the result of a leak" is much less scary than "this just showed up", because in the leak scenario, the next one probably _could_ be stopped through better procedures, whereas the entirely natural scenario... well, there are some precautions that can be taken, but good luck preventing exiting new viruses from showing up from time to time.
  • torstenvl 5y ago
    Closest known relatives of virus behind COVID-19 found in Laos https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2 The NIAID claimed that it didn't fund research into BANAL-52 and similar. "the closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 . . . were not studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant" https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/coronavirus-bat-research https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/coronavirus-ba... However, that was recently revealed to be extremely unlikely, since bat coronavirus samples were in fact collected from Laos, where BANAL-52 was located. Even more suspiciously, the Laos genetic samples disappeared from the WIV database in late 2019. https://wap.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/wuhan-scientists-were-studying-laos-bat-viral-samples-before-covid-report-121112201019_1.html https://wap.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/wu...
  • postalrat 5y ago
    So what's the harm in accepting it was a lab leak? You might end up with better procedures?
    • kspacewalk2 5y ago
      Better for whom? Certainly not for the labs. It's far better for the labs to draw their own conclusions from the leak, privately, at their own pace. Also, there's a significant financial disincentive: funding for gain of function research will be severely impacted by recognizing the lab leak as the most plausible explanation.
      • 5y ago
• tshaddox 5y ago
  Has a virus ever leaked from a lab whose existence (or ability to transmit along humans) had not previously been known? Surely the vast majority of new human-infecting viruses have been novel mutations that happened naturally.
• wwweston 5y ago
  Because it's almost inherently conspiracy fodder, true or not. It tickles the part of human psychology that looks for threat agents, rather than just threats. Lots of us here on the more analytical side might have trouble understanding that fully, especially if we relate to Fauci's early 2020 statements which more or less amount to "it doesn't really matter which plausible origin turns out to be the case, either way the task in front of us is to figure out how to mitigate the damage and address the virus." It could have been a lab leak. It could have been (and now looks more likely to have been [0][1]) natural spillover from increasing contact with zoonotic reservoirs. What's the difference? The answer to that question on a practical level is re-thinking safety protocols for related research (and perhaps a conversation about the risks of conducting viral research vs the risks of viral ignorance). On a less practical level, though, the answer is that it prompts inhabiting a narrative where they key issue is human threat agents. The irony is that many of the people who choose that as the most important thing to pay attention seem slower to consider how human threat agents might use that narrative. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/11/18/coronavirus-origins-wuhan-market-animals-science-journal/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/11/18/coronavirus... [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/why-many-scientists-say-unlikely-sars-cov-2-originated-lab-leak https://www.science.org/content/article/why-many-scientists-...
  • zimbatm 5y ago
    Imagine if a policeman was saying the same thing about a crime; why investigate, finding the culprit is only conspiracy fodder, let's only take care of the victims. Not investigating, and hiding the truth is what gives room for conspiracies to grow. Also how can we better understand and prevent pandemics whithout understanding where they come from. Wasn't the coronavirus research lab founded on that premise?
    • akavel 5y ago
      I don't find the parallel good. Trying to invent a better one, I thought I'd say the coronavirus situation is IMO more like a question of whether, say, some particular volcano's explosion was natural, or human-induced. As such, one can either focus on generally being more prepared against volcano explosions, or focus on trying to find a person among volcano researchers and tourists who may have done something to tickle the volcano to explode. I mean, it's sure also not a perfect analogy; but how I see it, focusing on preparedness and handling of a situation that does happen naturally from time to time for sure, sounds to me like a sensible choice to focus effort into. With that said, totally, if there's some possibility it might have been human-induced, it makes sense to try and track and prevent it in the future; thing is, me personally, and I would risk theorizing that also many other people, am strongly afraid of such approach too quickly and too easily turning into a witch-hunt, anti-XYZ propaganda, and stirring hate by unscrupulous people - with scapegoating seemingly socially much easier to turn towards, than tiresome and "boring" epidemologic preparedness and discipline.
• Giorgi 5y ago
  It is Hacker News trope really, more and more evidence mounts that it was indeed - a lab leak, there has been lengthy research reports from journalists on this matter, but Hacker News remains in doubt. Which is strange, one kind of expects Hackers to weight everything and see if theory withholds scrutiny. Same thing happens with that ultrasound attack against US diplomates in Cuba, Hacker news users claim it was just grasshopers while more and more evidence mounts it was a Russian attack.
  • wwweston 5y ago
    > more and more evidence mounts that it was indeed - a lab leak Perhaps you mean "less and less evidence"? https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/11/18/coronavirus-origins-wuhan-market-animals-science-journal/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/11/18/coronavirus... https://www.science.org/content/article/why-many-scientists-say-unlikely-sars-cov-2-originated-lab-leak https://www.science.org/content/article/why-many-scientists-...
    • Giorgi 5y ago
      No I mean more and more evidence: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/16/politics/biden-intel-review-covid-origins/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/16/politics/biden-intel-revi... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-lab-leak-theory-of-covids-origin-is-not-totally-irrational/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-lab-leak-theo... https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/25/timeline-how-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-suddenly-became-credible/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/25/timeline-...
      • wwweston 5y ago
        If you read the links I've posted, you'll note at least two things about them: 1) They include observation from figures who started open to the idea that the lab leak hypothesis was plausible enough to explore, but have concluded that it's unlikely (and explain why) 2) They are more recent
        • 5y ago
• OwlsParlay 5y ago
  It's plausible, sure, but it'll never be proven, especially at this distance.
• tunesmith 5y ago
  Because the stupiderati immediately jump from that to it being deliberate. It makes it very hard to talk about in an open community.
  • merpnderp 5y ago
    Wouldn't the type of heated rhetoric you used be part of why it is difficult to talk about?
    • tunesmith 5y ago
      Fine, referring to them as "stupiderati" was over the line. But generally, it is the people who hear "lab leak" and immediately jump to the conclusion that it was 100% deliberate that make it difficult to talk about.
      • SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
        I think the entire attitude of a “them” that can be labeled that way is indicative of the sort of heated rhetoric that makes it hard to discuss things. One could’ve made this entirely blameless by simply describing the behavior without using an amorphous them. Think of it like blameless discussion of a program during a war room scenario.
• sleepysysadmin 5y ago
  >i don't understand why the so-called "lab leak theory" of origin for sars-cov2 is treated as some sort of conspiracy theory. it is completely plausible, and things like this have happened in the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak), not due to malice but due to incompetence. It's remarkable how quickly they settled on bats and everything but this was misinformation that would get you banned from various american tech companies. It's also remarkable how quickly they moved to shutdown many discussions. The lab leak only months earlier from Canada where a chinese national shipped viruses to wuhan. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/chinese-researcher-escorted-from-infectious-disease-lab-amid-rcmp-investigation-1.5211567 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/chinese-researcher-e... There's no evidence of coronavirus being involved at all with the canadian lady, but they sure did call it conspiracy theory and shutdown talks quick. Throw this in context of a pissing match with China and Canada. https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/26/china/meng-wanzhou-china-arrival-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/26/china/meng-wanzhou-china-arri... and China in return arresting and putting Canada diplomats on death row. I think lots of answers came along from fauci's emails. All of these are not coincidences and China is probably not the source of covid. Hence why there was such a quick reaction to blame china. Blame Canada!
  • __turbobrew__ 5y ago
    > where a chinese national shipped viruses to wuhan No where in the linked article does it say that Dr. Xiangguo Qiu shipped viruses to Wuhan. NMLs lips have been sealed and there was never a reason given why they were dismissed. Going as far as saying that they were shipping viruses to wuhan is baseless speculation. A more recent article from CBC had more up to date details than the article you linked: https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6090188 https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6090188
    • sleepysysadmin 5y ago
      >No where in the linked article does it say that Dr. Xiangguo Qiu shipped viruses to Wuhan. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/canadian-scientist-sent-deadly-viruses-to-wuhan-lab-months-before-rcmp-asked-to-investigate-1.5609582 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/canadian-scientist-s... >All of this has led to conspiracy theories linking the novel coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, Canada's microbiology lab, and the lab in Wuhan. There's no evidence that coronavirus was involved with this lady. >NMLs lips have been sealed and there was never a reason given why they were dismissed. Going as far as saying that they were shipping viruses to wuhan is baseless speculation. Like, Wuhan is certainly involved. It's possible coronavirus was already at wuhan and they used these canadian viruses for the 'gain of function' stuff. Oh it's much better than that. Those government officials have outright defied orders requiring them to disclose this information. Even better, we all know how strong unions and such are. They came out originally fighting for this lady and then suddenly they stopped altogether. No fight at all. And where did this lady go? She has been missing... Even better? Early on in covid Indian universities looked at the covid make up and found that it wasn't a natural virus. A natural virus would have been spitting out many new variants early on. They made some predictions about where those gain of function points would have been from. But then the censors came along and shut them down.
• notacoward 5y ago
  Nobody associates it with a conspiracy theory just because it gets mentioned. That happens because the people most aggressively pushing it online often make that association themselves. In between demands for expensive new investigations, they often veer off into talk of Dasczak is part of a vast gain-of-function underground and Fauci is helping them cover it up, and Big Pharma is pushing vaccines because they can't make a profit from ivermectin, and something something about discouraging masks at the start of the pandemic, and mask/vaccine mandates are somehow part of a plot to destroy America, and so on ad nauseam. Seen plenty of it right here. Such people might be a small minority of the people who think we should look more closely at virus research standards, but they're an incredibly visible minority and their stridency causes the whole issue to be framed in conspiracy-theory terms.
  • dnautics 5y ago
    What? Unless I'm mistaken, There is no GOF underground with Dasczak, it's very above ground (to be clear, the NIH didn't fund GOF on SARS-Cov2, just on... adjacent viruses). Don't know if Fauci is covering it up, but he certainly hasn't stepped forward to condemn Dasczak, even though the NIH already has condemned EcoHealthAllicance. It's also kind of insane that Dasczak was a lead signatory to the "this is not a lab leak" opinion piece without disclosing a MAJOR conflict of interest. He should have stayed out of it.
  • merpnderp 5y ago
    If you don't think a lot of people died early on in the US because the Surgeon General went on TV and said masks were basically useless for the average person, with every talk/news show running pieces about how you'd just touch a doorknob then your eye, and thus are more likely to get infected by wearing a mask, then you either can't remember what happened or are ideologically driven.
    • lazyasciiart 5y ago
      But that's totally irrelevant to where the virus came from, unless you're arguing that there's a massive global conspiracy.
• TeeMassive 5y ago
  For the same reason we were influenced to used COVID-19 as a name rather the presumed geographical place of origin as is traditionally done.
  • ceejayoz 5y ago
    There are lots of “traditionally done” things that turn out not to be great. There are some good examples of the issues with naming viruses geographically in this article. https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/28/us/disease-outbreaks-coronavirus-naming-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/28/us/disease-outbreaks-coronavi...
    • TeeMassive 5y ago
      Your article says absolutely nothing about the geographical naming causing the prejudice against minorities and it doesn't make sense that the place of origin, which is of public notoriety, would either be forgotten or is the cause of the prejudice anyway.
• callmeal 5y ago
  >i don't understand why the so-called "lab leak theory" of origin for sars-cov2 is treated as some sort of conspiracy theory. Because wildlife->human is a lot more plausible than that. Consider for instance a novel mutation that arises from [0], transmitted to humans and is coincidentally discovered near a lab that was researching this disease. Would that also be considered a 'lab leak'? https://www.wbur.org/npr/1054224204/how-sars-cov-2-in-american-deer-could-alter-the-course-of-the-global-pandemic https://www.wbur.org/npr/1054224204/how-sars-cov-2-in-americ...
  • Ambolia 5y ago
    Lab leak doesn't mean modified virus, and yeah those types of bats don't exist anywhere near Wuhan except inside that lab.
• kipchak 5y ago
  Pretty much everyone involved stands to lose from it proving to be true that a lab leak occurred. China looks bad, the CDC/US looks bad, researchers look bad, EcoHealth Alliance looks bad[1], the lancelet looks bad.[2] Heck even politifact and factcheck.org reported the idea as debunked for the first year or so, and Facebook for around the same time took down content with that angle.[3] It would also likely result in a backlash against interest in GOF research in general. The only group that stands to benefit are those who benefit by making those groups look bad, who will also unfortunately exaggerate their claims for greater effect. [1]https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656 https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656 [2]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... [3]https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-man-made-491053 https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-...
  • sauwan 5y ago
    I was with you up to here: >The only group that stands to benefit are those who benefit by making those groups look bad I mean, collectively as humans we stand to benefit from knowing what happened so we can make more informed cost benefit decisions in the future about conducting risky research (if that's what happened). There's going to be quite a bit more externalizing risk while "privatizing" (even if it's nation states) gains in the future with bio-engineering, so these conversations should be had.
    • colpabar 5y ago
      > I mean, collectively as humans we stand to benefit from knowing what happened so we can make more informed cost benefit decisions in the future about conducting risky research (if that's what happened). You're not wrong, but I think what you're missing is that the risky research was funded (in part) by the us federal government, and no one voted for that in the first place. So even if we were all enlightened, what could we change? So many people still don't even know that there was a lab studying coronaviruses in wuhan.
      • 5y ago
• LatteLazy 5y ago
  Because it's completely untestable and short of someone "admitting" it we will never know for sure. So whether you believe it or not depends entirely on you're prejudices. I'm prejudiced not to but others may feed differently. And it makes absolutely no difference at all. You still need a vaccine, you still need lockdowns and quarantines and to manage your healthcare. And we should all be taking action on China whether it's incompetence (around food hygiene) or incompetence (around bio hazard management). This is why I hate the whole Lab Leak thing. It's people "straining out a knat and swallowing a camel". It's a distraction and it unnecessarily complicates messaging and discussion that can be pretty vital.
  • nsxwolf 5y ago
    It absolutely makes a difference, because we need to stop this from happening again. We can't just accept that labs are going to continue to release dangerous viruses and then just deal with the effects every time.
    • LatteLazy 5y ago
      The issue here is China. My evidence for this is that this keeps happening in China (SARS etc). So if it's lab leak, the problem isn't the US or Russia or Butan doing lab work. It's China doing lab work insecurely. And if it's a food hygiene thing, it's not a world food hygiene thing, it's a Chinese food hygiene thing. So the action here is to sanction the fuck out of China. And that is true whether it's lab leaked or zoonotic or any other unimaginable source.
      • fullstackchris 5y ago
        Uh... are you forgetting about a thing called H1N1? Granted, it wasn't as dangerous as COVID, but that originated in the good ol' US of A. I wouldn't be so quick to jump to harsh ideas just for the sake of it - this could have happened in any country really - all you need is human interaction with animals and enough time.
  • himinlomax 5y ago
• zionic 5y ago
  Also the emails saying things like "this could do to virology what chernobyl did to nuclear science". They know their cushy careers and research grants are gone if they normalize the lab leak.
  • throwawaygh 5y ago
    > They know their cushy careers and research grants are gone if they normalize the lab leak. These sorts of comments on HN are always fascinating to me. Scientific researchers make $20K/yr for 6 years of their 20s, often working 60 hour - 80 hour weeks. If they are successful, around the age of 30 they will then make between $40K and $60K in a temporary, term-limited position (post-doc). This might repeat several times -- each more stressful than the last -- until they land a permanent job. Still working like dogs the whole time, btw. That final permanent job, which very few will ever actually get, probably pays between $60K and $100K. A very lucky few among the lucky few might make up to $200K by the time they turn 40, but most will never surpass $150K in their lives. My undergrad mentees all make $160K+ as 22 year olds, often get to $300K pretty quickly, and will max out in the >$500K range some time in their 30s. Software folks accusing life scientists of getting fat off of research grant money is really something else.
    • chipotle_coyote 5y ago
      I've often found that when people take a "follow the money, man" position on an argument, they are not in fact following the money. e.g., the arguments I used to see against anthropogenic global warming based on essentially the same idea you're pushing back on -- that it was a fraud perpetrated by climate scientists so they'd keep raking in the donations and grants. When I inquired as to why "follow the money" wouldn't in fact suggest far greater skepticism of oil companies in the debate, I never got much of a response.
    • Noumenon72 5y ago
      Your analysis should start with the people who got the final permanent job, as those are the ones whose careers are at risk. And your comparison of a "cushy career" should be compared to the median American, who earns $36K, not the extreme outliers you mentor. $60K to $100K for high-status intellectual work is something most people would cling onto.
• sobkas 5y ago
  I don't know how to think about this article https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-risky-virus-research-in-wuhan https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-r... It looks bad
• hiddencost 5y ago
  Most of the people pushing the lab leak hypothesis have the specific goal of fomenting anti China sentiment. Trump ignored covid despite the extensive advice of experts and then tried to distract from his failure by trying to foment war with China. This argument is an extension of that.
  • s5300 5y ago
    Probably more so trying to distract from the fact he’s over $200m in debt to the CCP. Wouldn’t want anybody looking too deeply into that.
  • kspacewalk2 5y ago
    What Trump believes or uses for his political gain does not magically become incorrect by virtue of being believed or used by Trump. I don't think you're trying to suggest anything as silly as that, but still worth explicitly pointing out. Trumpian tempests should remain in a teapot of their own, and lab leak theory should be discussed on its own merit. Xenophobia innuendos and "but Trump" dog whistles are unhelpful in sussing out the truth.
    • rootusrootus 5y ago
      > What Trump believes or uses for his political gain does not magically become incorrect by virtue of being believed or used by Trump. OTOH, I will tell you that I definitely look at what my daughter says with a far more critical eye than I do what my son says, because my daughter has a track record of lying and my son does not.
• api 5y ago
  Everyone I've seen discussing it treats it as possible. The "conspiracy theory" part comes in when people claim or speak as if it's proven when it absolutely is not. There is no smoking gun evidence for it, but it can't be ruled out either. That in itself is kind of scary though. It means a lab leak could happen silently and we may never correctly attribute it.
• mcculley 5y ago
  Also the U.S. Army lost control of some anthrax in 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks
  • sterlind 5y ago
    that whole saga was so fascinating. the culprit ended up (likely) being one of the scientists involved, with the motive of justifying funding into anthrax research. because of the incredibly low mutation rate of anthrax, they couldn't identify the strain by DNA testing. they had to do new science to fingerprint strains based on the quantities of different populations in the samples vs. the bottles - an investigation the culprit himself was involved in. as they uncovered the flask responsible and the very limited number of people who could get their hands on it, the attacker killed himself.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Jerry2 5y ago
  By cherry-picking that particular lab leak, you're making it look like this only happens in 'other' countries. Plenty of lab leaks have happened right here in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
• TTPrograms 5y ago
  If the lab leak was real, covering it up to the extent they did requires a literal conspiracy (not to mention hypothetical function gain research). In the absence of concrete evidence, it is quite literally a conspiracy theory.
  • varjag 5y ago
    There is no evidence of animal host transmission either. Does it make it literally a conspiracy theory too?
    • TTPrograms 5y ago
      Do you believe animals literally conspired to transmit to humans? I believe what you're describing is rather "the coordinated malevolent animal transmission theory".
      • varjag 5y ago
        What does it even supposed to mean? The lab theory is not that humans conspired to spread the virus, but it happened due to negligence. What's happening then is a cover-up, not a conspiracy. Cover-up is the default mode of handling failure in an aspiring Communist state. When a major accident happens that can be covered up, it will be covered up. The above mentioned Sverdlovsk outbreak was presented as natural as well: the official culprit was cough a wet market nearby cough. Took 13 years and the dissolution of USSR to admit the cover-up.
    • thedorkknight 5y ago
      I mean... if you think the animals actually maliciously conspired I suppose
      • varjag 5y ago
        Do you really suppose the lab theory is Wuhan virologists conspiring to spread the virus?
• bedhead 5y ago
  [flagged]
  • himinlomax 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure there was a conspiracy. Not a conspiracy to create a pandemic, but a conspiracy to hide an accident due to incompetence. Not all conspiracies are myths, just consider Watergate: there was a conspiracy to hide Nixon's shenanigans. The only difference is that one happened in a dictatorship while the other happened in a democracy with a free press.
    • bedhead 5y ago
      Oh I agree, at a bare minimum there's nothing even remotely wacky about the lab leak theory. I'm just explaining why half the country has counterintuitively decided to brand it as lunatic fringe conspiracy rather than it being self-evidently plausible if not likely.
  • bufferoverflow 5y ago
    You pretty much nailed it. The left is so deranged in their hatred, they can't consider that this explanation isn't just plausible, but very likely.
    • knownjorbist 5y ago
      The irony in this statement is palpable. You're so obviously ready to confirm your priors that you'll actively go out of your way to avoid other plausible explanations.
      • dekhn 5y ago
        I'm a democrat and I definitely think a lot of left-leaning scientists really made themselves look like idiots by saying that claiming China had a lab leak was "racist". It was always a reasonable (IE, not impossible or even extremely unlikely) hypothesis, and only some of the people who suggested it were doing so out of racial hatred for China.
• cardosof 5y ago
  I don't understand why lab leak isn't, like, the first or most important investigative line. It's just a matter of asking and checking - thoroughly - every person and every machine involved with the lab in that timeframe. After all, "the disease is the same name as the lab!" [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8
  • ayngg 5y ago
    iirc it is because it heavily implicates both Peter Daszak, who was the head of the UN investigation of the Lab Leak theory, who orchestrated the Lancet letter denouncing the Lab Leak theory, who has now been shown to have conducted gain of function research on bat coronaviruses at the WIV, and Fauci who provided funding for this through Daszak's EcoHeath Alliance and NHAID after there was some sort of restriction on that kind of research stateside. On top of that China is completely uncooperative with the effort and wouldn't provide any evidence to implicate themselves.
• MilnerRoute 5y ago
  > ...the so-called "lab leak theory" of origin for sars-cov2 That isn't what this article is about. I thought the article actually did a real public service by moving the discussion beyond whether Covid did or didn't emerge from the Wuhan market. Because either way, it's much much more important to say, "how could we, in the future, prevent the scenario of a lab leak from happening." It keeps the discussion focused on what's important.
• bufferoverflow 5y ago
  Not only it is plausible, it's very very likely. What are the odds that a lab that works on gain of function of Corona viruses is the exact place where the epidemic started?
  • chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    The "exact place" the epidemic was discovered is in Wuhan, which is also where the lab is. That's a correlation, and clearly worth investigating, but it's not in and of itself proof. I was originally dismissive of the "lab leak hypothesis", in no small part because of how quickly it got caught up in politics. I'm less so now, but I do think it's important to remember that when we ask "how likely is it that a novel coronavirus epidemic would start in a city that also has a laboratory working with novel coronaviruses and it just be a coincidence," the answer may be "not very" if the city with the laboratory is the size of, say, Frederick, Maryland (78,000), but "maybe more than you think" if it's the size of New York City (8.8M). The lab leak idea bears further investigation, but "authorities have been too dismissive of that" shouldn't lead us to assume "well, it was obviously a lab leak."
    • Someone 5y ago
      Also: how many laboratories working with novel coronaviruses are there in the world? How concentrated are they? I don’t know the answer, but it could well be that a significant fraction of the population of China (or the USA) lives in a city with such a lab, making it not too unlikely that the first patient will be found in such a city.
      • RC_ITR 5y ago
        Wikipedia has a list of all the biosafety level 4 facilities. The answer is around 30 active sites that deal with threats as serious as the Wuhan facility. Of those, less than half work on viruses, and even fewer do GOF work. So not that many. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#Biosafety_level_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#Biosafety_leve... EDIT: and to address your implication, China has 2 such facilities, Wuhan and Harbin (a metro area of 10mn)
• cryptonector 5y ago
  Malice is also completely plausible. Biowarfare is like chemical and nuclear warfare, it's not new, it has been used before, and it probably will be used again.
  • darkerside 5y ago
    Hanlon's Razor says, never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. In this case, the malice explanation demands stupidity because it was released in their own city. Not sure what Hanlon would say about that.
    • notahacker 5y ago
      Not to mention the stupidity of developing what would surely be the least useful bioweapon in history (most people of fighting age get mild and brief symptoms or no symptoms, but it's infectious enough to get back to your own population and kill similar proportions of your own vulnerable before you figure out how to deal with it)
    • cryptonector 5y ago
      The topic was what is plausible. > In this case, the malice explanation demands stupidity because it was released in their own city. Lenin said that "if for the sake of Communism it is necessary for us to destroy 9/10ths of the people, we must not hesitate". Tito killed 1% of his country's population. Stalin killed or starved 20 million. Mao killed or starved 60 million. Pol Pot killed or starved 25% of his country's population.
    • hoseja 5y ago
      Hanlon's Razor is only applicable to individuals IMO.
      • GuB-42 5y ago
        I guess you never worked in a big company... When everyone thinks the other guy is responsible for something and no one really is, when promotion is mainly determined by office politics, when departments that should work together compete with each other, you get levels of stupidity that is difficult to achieve by an individual. Government entities tend to be even worse. At least companies have a clear goal they can always refer to: profit. Governments follow the whims of the political ideas of the moment.
• k4c9x 5y ago
  It never really was. Reasonable conversations were being had, just not on polarized platforms. People's knee-jerk reactions to downvoting and "cancelling" every thing that mentioned it, in good faith or bad, last year was a direct response to the powers-that-were choosing the "China did it (maybe on purpose)" narrative to misdirect peoples anger and frustration. If those same people would have said things like "obviously, it's _possible_ it was leaked from a lab, we're going to work on finding that out and let you know what we find as we do. In the mean time, here's what we're going to do about the immediate problems we're facing..." and ended it there, there wouldn't have been any backlash. That's what going on now, and that's why this post (good or bad, I can't say, I can't access it) wasn't flagged into oblivion the second it hit the front page.
  • UnFleshedOne 5y ago
    When one slightly orange tinted guy can effectively ban discussion of any topic on all platforms by vaguely mentioning it, the problem is not that guy, it is everybody else.
  • musicale 5y ago
    > It never really was. Reasonable conversations were being had, just not on polarized platforms Does "polarized platforms" include the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Lancet? https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-media-called-the-lab-leak-story-a-conspiracy-theory-now-its-prompted-corrections--and-serious-new-reporting/2021/06/10/c93972e6-c7b2-11eb-a11b-6c6191ccd599_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-media-cal...
• mackal 5y ago
  I think part of the push back from the lab leak theory is that it's often accompanied by lab created and leaked. I'm far from an expert, but from what I understand, there are 0 signs it was lab created. Now isolated from the wild in a lab and then leaked is still considered possible, but they just don't know.
• bewaretheirs 5y ago
  Marburg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Marburg_virus_outbreak_in_West_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Marburg_virus_outbreak_in...) is another notable lab leak. Might be a better match in some ways as it was a previously unknown pathogen, from a previously unknown family of viruses, isolated only after several lab workers got sick.
  • dls2016 5y ago
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/ “ The World Health Organization has confirmed that breaches of safety procedures on at least two occasions at one of Beijing's top virology laboratories were the probable cause of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) there last month, which infected nine people, one of whom died.” It even happened with a coronavirus in China before!
• Gunax 5y ago
  Sorry to grand-stand a bit, but I think the narrative is missing the point of the 'lab leak theory'. The 'lab leak' is actually a bit of a misnomer. What they really mean is that it was created/modified/bred intentionally, versus just being discovered in some bat cave or whatever. It's not the leaking per se that is what worries people--it's the idea that this has a human-created origin. It's an experiment or weapon which was accidentally leaked to the world.
• alexvoda 5y ago
  Because people get polarized and are incapable of nuance. It's important to remember what some of the lab leak theories have said: - that it is a engineered bioweapon - that it is genetically altered to contain parts of HIV - that it was intentionally released during the 2019 military games Once in a camp it is difficult to accept nuance.
• TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  I think to some extent our media has developed an attitude towards inconvenient ideas that they are conspiracies. They can't discuss stuff like that without emphasizing how totally not true they are. I am not saying it is or isn't true but that the media will tend to suggest inconvenient stuff is not true.
• beervirus 5y ago
  There are some thoughts you just aren’t allowed to think, lest you be labeled a trump-supporting nazi racist.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• elif 5y ago
  NYT treating it like a conspiracy theory is consistent with their editorial deference to official government narratives.
  • p49k 5y ago
    NYT and others were reluctant to talk about the lab leak theory because Trump put them in an impossible position by constantly stirring up racial tensions regarding COVID. His actions led to real violence against Asian Americans and promoting the lab leak would have furthered it. We could have easily been able to have an open conversation about the lab leak possibility if we had proper leadership at the time. The first thing Bush did after 9/11 was go on TV and essentially say to everyone: “hey, don’t be racist towards Muslim Americans because of this attack; they are fellow Americans and have nothing to do with this” and it was largely effective. (Not that I'm praising Bush as a president, but this specific act was an instance of good leadership)
• bediger4000 5y ago
  The pushback on the lab leak theory happens because proponents of the lab leak theory are pushing that theory in bad faith. If there's a lab leak, then they can excuse mis-handling of the USA COVID response.
  • secondcoming 5y ago
    What about the mishandling that occurred elsewhere in the world? Trump was only president of America.
    • bediger4000 5y ago
      What about it? The excuse-seekers aren't looking to wave away Sweden's mishandling, for example.
• newaccount2021 5y ago
  Simple: MSM cast it as a whacko theory because Trump suggested it
• seventytwo 5y ago
  Yeah… all hypotheses are “completely plausible” until they’re not. Plausibility is a starting point, not an answer.
  • dekhn 5y ago
    no, the set of all hypotheses taken together form a distribution (determined by the prior probability). For example, if you proposed that space aliens delivered COVID to us, I would say that is lower probability than any lab leak because we have zero evidence for space aliens, and it's certainly not required to explain anything about COVID that we've observed.
    • seventytwo 5y ago
      Entirely pedantic and missing my point.
• freyir 5y ago
  We can’t talk about the lab leak theory for the same reason a third of the country refuses to get vaccinated: it became a politicized issue somewhere along the way, at which point people’s brains turn off and their emotions and tribalism take over.
• Fomite 5y ago
  A couple reasons, from the perspective of an infectious disease epidemiologist who isn't particularly a fan of Gain of Function studies: 1) "The lab leak theory" is actually a collection of theories, from the fairly reasonable possibility of an accidental release as part of a lab accident down to a engineered Chinese bioweapon. What any individual means by "lab leak" tends to be whatever is serving their political purposes as the time, and they borrow evidence from each other in a way that's really flawed, etc. 2) There's a lot of personal attacks built into the evidence - whether or not Ralph Baric is a likable guy, for example, fed into a lot of whether or not his lab was "involved". 3) A lot of the advocates for the lab leak hypothesis don't come from epidemiology/public health/virology, but from the intelligence community, the tech world, etc. who tended to reach for "Oh, it's obviously this..." and who reacted poorly to the idea that it might not be that simple and straightforward. Both sides of that exchange burned a lot of good will with each other early on enough that the engagement has, I think, spiraled somewhere not particularly productive. 4) It got coopted by crackpots and conspiracy theorists, as well as those interested in abdicating their own role in the pandemic. 5) The biggest reason, in my mind, is that it is a "fast" solution that gets a lot of press, and for which the alternative explanation - the one that has been true for the last two coronavirus outbreaks - is something that will take the better part of decades to resolve, if it ever does. It's also by and large not relevant for the current state of the pandemic. That creates the sense that there's a whole mountain of evidence behind it, when in reality it's a theory that is going to be rather difficult and expensive to falsify, one way or the other.
• Nasrudith 5y ago
  It is trope-y enough to lend some suspicion. That is most conspiracy theories are about some sort of "reassuring" narrative that it takes evil people who you already expect to create big problems. As opposed to the world being a chaotic uncontrolled and uncontrollable place. That isn't hard disproof of course but it is a resemblance to other conspiracy theories. The lab leak theor(y/ies) (is a/ are) "the hoofprints may have come from zebras" sort of situation - possible but not the most likely in absense of other evidence.
  • hoseja 5y ago
    You're near a watering hole in southern Africa.
• jrm4 5y ago
  Add to this how fabricated the "wet-market" theory just feels. Perhaps it may be a viable theory, but it smells like such BS, the kind of bad-but-effective theory you know you could get away with thanks to classic "ooh weird foreigner food racism." No one's going to stop to ask, uh, why NOW?
  • corinroyal 5y ago
    Doesn't seem fabricated to me. Zoonotic disease transmission is the norm. Add population growth, rampant development encroaching on habitats, stresses and migrations due to climate disaster, and the "why now?" seems pretty obvious.
• whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  Because it was useful politically for the media to treat it that way. They had one goal and this was something that needed to be done to achieve that goal.