12 ms·

There are many variations of the "lab leak" theory for Covid-19. For example: 1. Was the sample found or engineered? Or found then engineered? 2. Was it a del

by cletus 5y ago

There are many variations of the "lab leak" theory for Covid-19. For example: 1. Was the sample found or engineered? Or found then engineered? 2. Was it a deliberate leak or accidental? Here are some open questions that haven't been answered or examined (at least publicly) to a sufficient degree: 1. If Covid-19 jumped from an animal species to humans, possibly through another animal, then why hasn't it been found in the wild? For example, SARS was relatively quickly found in the wild. To date there's been no equivalent discovery of the lineage of human-transmissible Covid-19. An alternative theory, that Covid-19 spread to humans at a wet market, would strongly suggest that Covid-19 would be found in the wild; 2. The Chinese had a database of Covid strains that was taken offline in late 2019. To the best of my knowledge, no independent third-party has been able to examine the contents of this database and see if it relates to Covid-19; 3. Covid-19 seems to be related to bat coronavirus strains from hundreds of miles away. How was the jump made? Through what species? and 4. We don't really know who Patient Zero was. None of this adds up to positive evidence of any variation of the "lab leak" theory but given that there is no alternative theory that holds up to serious scrutiny or doesn't have serious flaws or unanswered questions, it has to stay in the running. My suspicion is the Chinese government doesn't know either but, more importantly, they don't want to know because absolutely no good can come from that becoming public. There is literally no upside. This applies on the individual level too. If you're a manager of a lab or even just a lab technician, do you really want to be held responsible, even just in the public eye, for "starting" Covid-19? God, no. That may well be bad for you, your family, the government and countless others. So there's a concerted effort to not know. And the WHO's response to all this has been utterly anemic from the early days of the pandemic where China's pronouncements were taken at face value to the late joint investigation with laughably narrow frames of reference.

PicassoCTs 5y ago
The whole gain of function boost was created to prevent a 2nd SARS and was shifted to china, as funding dried up, the further the event wandered into the "distant" past. Covid is neither a bioweapon nor a step-ladder for totalitarians worldwide. Its simply necessary un-bribeable politics and change, despite systemic dysfunction. That massive turn-around in society we need, we always demand and secretly fear, its upon us now and no lobbyist can put that djinn permanently back into the bottle. One variant and we are back into our walls, condemned to bread and games and the realization, that infinite growth is unnecessary. So compared to the massive disaster ahead, with billions of dead, this is quite a gentle steering maneuver. Sure those who are mentally not agile enough to travel to this different world currently born, well they will stay behind and swept away with the refugee crisis yet to come. The rest of us - we will stay peaceful, although loosing it all, with just a cellphone to dream and play on in some tattered tent. And this is the best outcome, and if you weight the future billions against the current million dead, even a moral one. Now downvote, the advocate of benevolent diabolo.
- canaus 5y ago
  What do you mean by massive disaster ahead? Are you stating there is a massive disaster ahead, or COVID has steered us into a direction that adverts that?
  - VyperCard 5y ago
    Climate catastrophe?
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      clathrate gun hypothesis is now mainstream? I'm not sure everyone only talks about climate change as if it's about as rapid as an asteroid impact. Yes, climate is an issue, but unnecessary hyperbole only seeds more distrust, just as denying that masks help in the beginning damaged credibilty of COVID-19 related information later on.
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    Think he/she is referring to climate change. COVID is a good way to gain a mental understanding of what to expect when climate change finally hits as it will be much worse. I do think the odds of "billions" of dead is one of the less likely outcomes but maybe millions yes.
    - swader999 5y ago
      There's no end of humanity scenario for climate change.
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        Where was that claim levied?
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      How do you exactly compare extremely slow, glacial environmental changes on geological timescales to a pathogen that engulfed the entire world in weeks? What can anyone gain from such a comparison except baseless soundbites intended for fear mongering?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
alevskaya 5y ago
CS people always underestimate the difficulty of this stuff. I used to be a genetic engineer: Even in the best of times doing real field science on the lineage analysis of sars-cov-2 would take many many years. In a time of acute political hostility it will take much longer. You argue it's just political expediency not to look, when the truth is that it is brutally difficult work to "prove" any exact zoonotic sequence even if the political will is there in abundance. (It took a ~decade for sars-1, and the story's still a bit unclear with ebola.) The global scientific community does want to figure this out, but the lab-leak circus has made the job infinitely harder. We do know of very close sarbecovirus relatives in Yunnan and Laos. Given the early epidemiological nexus of the wet markets there is every reason to believe this arose out of a reservoir in the fur or meat industry... but given the amount of animal culling that has occurred, it could be a real challenge to figure out the exact intermediate host, especially given the enormously broad mammalian host range of sars-cov-2 and the number of animal species commonly sold in those wet markets.
- xyzzy21 5y ago
  The enormous set of circumstantial evidence combined with Occam's Razor pretty much rules out anything with the wet market. The world is well beyond that at this point.
- himinlomax 5y ago
  It wouldn't be hard, from a technical or scientific point of view, to give access to the labs' files to an independent commission of inquiry. That's what democracies do, but obviously not communist dictatorships. If there was a leak, it could be easily found, and if there wasn't, while the absence of evidence would not be definite proof, it would lower the plausibility for the hypothesis.
  - vkou 5y ago
    > It wouldn't be hard, from a technical or scientific point of view, to give access to the labs' files to an independent commission of inquiry. And if those files are shared, and nothing is found, you'd just move the goalposts, and claim the data was doctored. Supposing the lab was not at fault - what incentive is there for anyone to attract a bunch of media attention, and possibly lose face, in order to vindicate themselves in an inquiry that won't actually change anyone's mind? > That's what democracies do, but obviously not communist dictatorships. Democracies also hold inquiries over and over again until they get the political results they want. How many Benghazi commissions have we had, by now? [1] How many people changed their mind thanks to them? [2] [1] Ten. [2] To a rough approximation, zero.
Imnimo 5y ago
>If Covid-19 jumped from an animal species to humans, possibly through another animal, then why hasn't it been found in the wild? For example, SARS was relatively quickly found in the wild. On the other hand, Ebola's animal reservoir remains uncertain. The implication of the question is that all animal reservoirs are easily and quickly discovered, but just because that's true for some examples doesn't mean its universally true, and doesn't mean that lack of a known animal reservoir is strong evidence against the existence of one.
mrkramer 5y ago
Long story short; if lab leak happened CCP will never admit it and if US intelligence community has some information or evidence of the lab leak they will keep it classified for decades. I can't wait to read news papers in 2039 and find out the true origin of Covid-19 pandemic.
- cmmeur01 5y ago
  Or it was a US lab and we will never release the records al la JFK.
- quincyjarmes 5y ago
  We all know what's going on - CCP intentionally released covid to strengthen their military position vis-a-vis other modern nations. China has such a large population that they can field an army even with half the population in bed with covid. Mao made this clear in a conversation decades ago. Someone suggested that a nuclear war might start. Mao essentially replied he had no fear of nuclear war, since afterwards China would still have more people than the rest of the world and that afterwards China would be the dominant power. Decades later the CCP decided to flip the switch, release covid (which is less destructive than nuclear war but very disruptive) and see what happens. Its like the Hittite biowarfare: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3914314&page=1 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3914314&page=1 Who knows what they'll release next.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  Or I would think if we did have that truth, more likely hodl until Xi does something aggressive and we need to rally public sentiment towards action.
m0zg 5y ago
The leak might have been accidental, but allowing it to spread was definitely not accidental. Most people in the West don't realize that this is not China's first full-scale run-in with SARS. They had similar, but local pandemic over a decade ago. Ask a Chinese person who was there, they'll tell you - the similarities are quite profound. Back then it stayed local. This time it was allowed to escape. I'll let you fill in the blanks as to "cui bono". We won't really know who made the decisions and how it was done for another 50 years. Maybe we'll get to know by the time FDA releases vaccine testing data.
- Fomite 5y ago
  SARS "Didn't stay local". The canonical super-spreading event was in Hong Kong, and it killed 81 people in Taiwan, 43 people in Canada, 33 people in Singapore, and caused cases in the U.S., France, Sweden, etc. Indeed, the reason the vaccine was developed so swiftly for SARS-CoV-2 is because people (including my one time graduate advisor) could see that after the emergence of both SARS and MERS that it was unlikely the world was done with epidemic cornaviruses.
  - m0zg 5y ago
    At a minimum, according to my Chinese source, Beijing was also affected (though Shanghai was not). They had to wear masks, sanitize, distance, close schools, economy tanked, etc. It lasted for about a year and we never heard much about it, much as today we're being told that China only had 4,636 COVID deaths. That is, what you saw in other countries hardly even qualifies as an epidemic, unlike what my friend saw in China itself. Wisely, the Chinese government appointed the same guy as last time to deal with the pandemic, but the dude is now 85 years old, so my friend is not sure what they're going to do next time. Ironically, we also appointed "the same guy", but our guy is so inept he let swine flu run completely unchecked and kill tens of thousands of people (a performance he tried but failed to repeat when he, in the beginning of the pandemic told the US public "there's no need to wear masks"). He's also famous for telling people that AIDS can spread through "household contact" [1], and for suggesting that people take a fast tracked drug (AZT) as an AIDS prophylactic which was later found to have severe side effects [2]. Does this remind anyone of anything? How he managed to last 30+ years in the government given this "track record" is a mystery to me. And if you believe stats coming out of China, you might also be interested in some Louisiana swamp land I have available for sale. [1] https://news.yahoo.com/video-resurfaces-fauci-warning-household-180945365.html https://news.yahoo.com/video-resurfaces-fauci-warning-househ... [2] https://aep.lib.rochester.edu/node/49111 https://aep.lib.rochester.edu/node/49111
outworlder 5y ago
It would be great to hear "this is why this thing didn't come from the lab: these are the strains under research, it doesn't match what was found. These are the security measures we have in place, here's all the audit data. WHO, please validate." That would be helpful. Not this "yeah, we have this lab in the same area, why are you asking? It's fine. No you can't look, that's disrespectful." This is fishy. Even if this pathogen specifically, didn't come from the lab, someone somewhere messed up(or is doing something messed up right now) and don't want people poking around.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Or they simply don't have data to prove conclusively it was not leaked, because it wasn't logged correctly. And being a paranoid communist autocracy, they'll naturally take the "limit information" approach over "release everything and let external parties determine a verdict".
- baq 5y ago
  China will not, if possible, willingly put itself in a position which admits any likelihood of losing face. If they couldn't rule out the possibility themselves and/or cover up completely that it was in fact a leak, they won't let anyone in - not because it happened, but because it might have.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    That reasoning is so, so, so weak. 'This might embarrass us so you can't look' is _not_ a valid defense; anyone who says it is can be assumed to be complicit. If it 'might' have happened, then there needs to be an investigation. We're talking about millions dead worldwide, and tens of trillions in damages. Inequality has spiked and second-order deaths may well outnumber direct COVID-19 deaths already. And years on we haven't had an investigation into the single most likely source - that's insane, dangerous, divisive and inexcusable.
    - baq 5y ago
      This is China we're talking about. Fear of losing face is a deeply rooted cultural thing. It isn't a valid defense... in the west.
34679 5y ago
https://wildlife.org/wild-deer-contract-coronavirus/ https://wildlife.org/wild-deer-contract-coronavirus/
labster 5y ago
> My suspicion is the Chinese government doesn't know either but, more importantly, they don't want to know because absolutely no good can come from that becoming public. There is literally no upside. Sure, the airplane crashed and a lot of people died, but what good can come of the reason becoming public? There is literally no upside because that side got destroyed in the crash. Or we can be rational and find out how we can prevent these disasters in the future.
dboreham 5y ago
There was a giant fish that we managed to not know about for thousands of years until one washed up onto the feet of a marine biologist...
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  If it’s the coelacanth, they were known to local fishermen. They nicknamed them “king of the sea.”
  - dboreham 5y ago
    Presumably the people who collect bat poop from caves are aware they're full of dangerous viruses..
rel2thr 5y ago
What do you mean by ‘found in the wild’? Covid has been found in wild deer populations and in various animals in zoos
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  They presumably mean an animal reservoir in China that predates the pandemic. Zoos are obviously a case of human to animal transmission, not animal to human. That said, we don’t know where Ebola hangs out between outbreaks, and we’ve been trying for decades. It’s clearly hard.
hcknwscommenter 5y ago
You have two #1's, and 2 #2's, so it's a bit hard to respond to any of those clearly. I will first address the second #1, and note that your point is very hard to understand here. COVID-19 has been found in multiple places "in the wild." It's been found in racoon dogs, which were known to be sold at the Wuhan wet market. It even seems to be endemic in certain geographic areas of the U.S. deer population now, which makes me think this thing is never going away. Regarding your point #3, I think 100s of miles for an animal reservoir of a closely related virus, where the animal is capable of flight, is not so far? Regarding your point #4, I just don't get it. Yes, we don't know who patient zero is. Are you trying to imply that patient zero is being obfuscated by the government for some nefarious reason? Regarding your first point #1, as a (former) protein engineer, I can assure you that viral engineering is just not a thing. It is not currently possible according to the brightest minds to just engineer a virus to have any particular infectious biological behavior in a host. Generally, we can engineer viruses to knockout core functions and thereby weaken them or render them non-replicative or non-infective. Sometimes we can engineer viruses to change their tropism (the cells they infect). But taking say a bat virus and combining with a different virus (SARS?), adding a few key mutations, and ending up with a weapon or something is just science fiction. Could we use directed evolution? Maybe, but you can't just apply some sort of selective pressure in a cell culture that is applicable to actual human infectivity/morbidity/etc. IMO The only "lab leak" hypothesis that makes any sense at all, was that someone just **ked up, the dice rolled horribly badly (like the worst outcome out of 10^64 possible outcomes), and it all went pear shaped. But it's a lot more likely an infected racoon dog at the wet market scratched or breathed on someone.
- dnautics 5y ago
  > IMO The only "lab leak" hypothesis that makes any sense at all, was that someone just *ked up, the dice rolled horribly badly (like the worst outcome out of 10^64 possible outcomes), and it all went pear shaped. This is really not that unlikely. Probably someone designed something like 2^10-ish different recombinant grafts from related coronaviruses, with various design parameters, and the selective pressure was "oh it was actually infectious enough to infect the careless postdoc pulling the 100 hour workweek". Surely 1 out of 2^10 is likely to be more transmissible than the parent bat strain. These days (aka 10 years ago) with molecular biology, 2^6 is not unreasonable to do by hand, by a well-trained undergrad intern, in three months. Oh and hey... out of 2^6 we discovered one GOF with higher normalized output than its parent. Citation (disclaimer, I supervised the intern, so it's possible I'm a three-sigma-above-median intern manager): https://bmcbiochem.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2091-15-10 https://bmcbiochem.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2...
jacquesm 5y ago
1: such things can take time. Sometimes decades. 2: which proves what? 3: all coronavirus strains are related, that's why they have that common element in their name 4: we have some pretty good candidates though. https://time.com/6121482/first-covid-19-case-wuhan-wet-market/ https://time.com/6121482/first-covid-19-case-wuhan-wet-marke...
EdwardDiego 5y ago
I lean towards the accidental lab escape theory, given the work the Wuhan lab was known to be doing, while only being a level 3 lab, and that the first cases originated in a nearby market, it feels like it satisfies Occams shaving implement. As for why there were no previous wild outbreaks, that I can't answer,except that the people who found the origins of SARS in horseshoe bats in Yunnan didn't find the virus itself, but rather it's genetics spread across diverse strains of coronaviruses in one cave, with analysis showing the varying strains could mix. [1] So, maybe Covid-19 is an amalgam of a novel coronavirus that was being studied, that had never reached the level of serious illness in the wild to be distinguishable from a common cold, and another coronavirus it met in Wuhan, whether in the lab or in the dense population, and became far more potent. And of course, there's the allegations of gain of function work in the Wuhan lab. I agree that we'll never know the truth, the CCP would never accept the loss of face of it was their researchers who accidentally unleashed it.
ricksunny 5y ago
So, a good book just came out last week by a MIT-Harvard Broad Institute genomics scientist that outlines all the lab leak vs zoonotic evidence (right up till the Pasteur Institute Laos study - whose underlying data wasn’t public in time for printing). Covers everything else we know so far - all about furin cleavage, the market-based arguments, and especially the ‘DEFUSE’ grant application document to DARPA. It’s titled Viral and it’s written by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley (he was the author of ‘How Innovation Works’.)
- pineaux 5y ago
  What's the verdict?
Pyramus 5y ago
> None of this adds up to positive evidence of any variation of the "lab leak" theory but given that there is no alternative theory that holds up to serious scrutiny or doesn't have serious flaws or unanswered questions, it has to stay in the running. There is a very strong alternative theory that the virus evolved in human-animal interactions in fur farming. China is the biggest fur producer outside the EU, which results in very similar incentives to not properly investigate. Denmark culled its whole mink population after human-mink transmission and the evolution of the cluster 5 variant [2]. [1] https://www.republik.ch/2021/06/05/herr-drosten-woher-kam-dieses-virus https://www.republik.ch/2021/06/05/herr-drosten-woher-kam-di... [German] [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_5
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
5. A wild strain would have spit out many new variants early on as it mutates to become accustomed to us. >None of this adds up to positive evidence of any variation of the "lab leak" theory but given that there is no alternative theory that holds up to serious scrutiny or doesn't have serious flaws or unanswered questions, it has to stay in the running. The virus derives from somewhere. If wild, we would have known it was wild. It's not wild anymore, that boat has moved on. So where else? Now that we know it was a lab leak because of good old occams razor. We can look at the very quick response to label lab leak as a conspiracy theory. Who pushed that. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095418/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095418/ How did Trump of all people blame a lab leak in wuhan so quickly as well? Trump didn't know there was a lab there. >My suspicion is the Chinese government doesn't know either but, more importantly, they don't want to know because absolutely no good can come from that becoming public. There is literally no upside. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep... A wuhan lab in china received money from the US government to do gain of function research on coronaviruses and they started using the variant that is 96% similar to covid only a few years before. The american politicians who at exactly the same time they started doing this work warned that safety at the wuhan lab was poor. If it was a lab leak, why then is the person responsible for covid publishing about it like they didnt know. The exact person who is responsible. That's because it's a leak. It's not intentional.
gilbetron 5y ago
> 1. If Covid-19 jumped from an animal species to humans, possibly through another animal, then why hasn't it been found in the wild? For example, SARS was relatively quickly found in the wild. To date there's been no equivalent discovery of the lineage of human-transmissible Covid-19. An alternative theory, that Covid-19 spread to humans at a wet market, would strongly suggest that Covid-19 would be found in the wild; It took about 13 years to discover the source of SARS: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9

by cletus 5y ago

PicassoCTs 5y ago

The whole gain of function boost was created to prevent a 2nd SARS and was shifted to china, as funding dried up, the further the event wandered into the "distant" past. Covid is neither a bioweapon nor a step-ladder for totalitarians worldwide. Its simply necessary un-bribeable politics and change, despite systemic dysfunction. That massive turn-around in society we need, we always demand and secretly fear, its upon us now and no lobbyist can put that djinn permanently back into the bottle. One variant and we are back into our walls, condemned to bread and games and the realization, that infinite growth is unnecessary. So compared to the massive disaster ahead, with billions of dead, this is quite a gentle steering maneuver. Sure those who are mentally not agile enough to travel to this different world currently born, well they will stay behind and swept away with the refugee crisis yet to come. The rest of us - we will stay peaceful, although loosing it all, with just a cellphone to dream and play on in some tattered tent. And this is the best outcome, and if you weight the future billions against the current million dead, even a moral one. Now downvote, the advocate of benevolent diabolo.

canaus 5y ago
What do you mean by massive disaster ahead? Are you stating there is a massive disaster ahead, or COVID has steered us into a direction that adverts that?
- VyperCard 5y ago
  Climate catastrophe?
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    clathrate gun hypothesis is now mainstream? I'm not sure everyone only talks about climate change as if it's about as rapid as an asteroid impact. Yes, climate is an issue, but unnecessary hyperbole only seeds more distrust, just as denying that masks help in the beginning damaged credibilty of COVID-19 related information later on.
- nebula8804 5y ago
  Think he/she is referring to climate change. COVID is a good way to gain a mental understanding of what to expect when climate change finally hits as it will be much worse. I do think the odds of "billions" of dead is one of the less likely outcomes but maybe millions yes.
  - swader999 5y ago
    There's no end of humanity scenario for climate change.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      Where was that claim levied?
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    How do you exactly compare extremely slow, glacial environmental changes on geological timescales to a pathogen that engulfed the entire world in weeks? What can anyone gain from such a comparison except baseless soundbites intended for fear mongering?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

alevskaya 5y ago

CS people always underestimate the difficulty of this stuff. I used to be a genetic engineer: Even in the best of times doing real field science on the lineage analysis of sars-cov-2 would take many many years. In a time of acute political hostility it will take much longer. You argue it's just political expediency not to look, when the truth is that it is brutally difficult work to "prove" any exact zoonotic sequence even if the political will is there in abundance. (It took a ~decade for sars-1, and the story's still a bit unclear with ebola.) The global scientific community does want to figure this out, but the lab-leak circus has made the job infinitely harder. We do know of very close sarbecovirus relatives in Yunnan and Laos. Given the early epidemiological nexus of the wet markets there is every reason to believe this arose out of a reservoir in the fur or meat industry... but given the amount of animal culling that has occurred, it could be a real challenge to figure out the exact intermediate host, especially given the enormously broad mammalian host range of sars-cov-2 and the number of animal species commonly sold in those wet markets.

xyzzy21 5y ago
The enormous set of circumstantial evidence combined with Occam's Razor pretty much rules out anything with the wet market. The world is well beyond that at this point.
himinlomax 5y ago
It wouldn't be hard, from a technical or scientific point of view, to give access to the labs' files to an independent commission of inquiry. That's what democracies do, but obviously not communist dictatorships. If there was a leak, it could be easily found, and if there wasn't, while the absence of evidence would not be definite proof, it would lower the plausibility for the hypothesis.
- vkou 5y ago
  > It wouldn't be hard, from a technical or scientific point of view, to give access to the labs' files to an independent commission of inquiry. And if those files are shared, and nothing is found, you'd just move the goalposts, and claim the data was doctored. Supposing the lab was not at fault - what incentive is there for anyone to attract a bunch of media attention, and possibly lose face, in order to vindicate themselves in an inquiry that won't actually change anyone's mind? > That's what democracies do, but obviously not communist dictatorships. Democracies also hold inquiries over and over again until they get the political results they want. How many Benghazi commissions have we had, by now? [1] How many people changed their mind thanks to them? [2] [1] Ten. [2] To a rough approximation, zero.

Imnimo 5y ago

>If Covid-19 jumped from an animal species to humans, possibly through another animal, then why hasn't it been found in the wild? For example, SARS was relatively quickly found in the wild. On the other hand, Ebola's animal reservoir remains uncertain. The implication of the question is that all animal reservoirs are easily and quickly discovered, but just because that's true for some examples doesn't mean its universally true, and doesn't mean that lack of a known animal reservoir is strong evidence against the existence of one.

mrkramer 5y ago

Long story short; if lab leak happened CCP will never admit it and if US intelligence community has some information or evidence of the lab leak they will keep it classified for decades. I can't wait to read news papers in 2039 and find out the true origin of Covid-19 pandemic.

cmmeur01 5y ago
Or it was a US lab and we will never release the records al la JFK.
quincyjarmes 5y ago
We all know what's going on - CCP intentionally released covid to strengthen their military position vis-a-vis other modern nations. China has such a large population that they can field an army even with half the population in bed with covid. Mao made this clear in a conversation decades ago. Someone suggested that a nuclear war might start. Mao essentially replied he had no fear of nuclear war, since afterwards China would still have more people than the rest of the world and that afterwards China would be the dominant power. Decades later the CCP decided to flip the switch, release covid (which is less destructive than nuclear war but very disruptive) and see what happens. Its like the Hittite biowarfare: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3914314&page=1 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3914314&page=1 Who knows what they'll release next.
dillondoyle 5y ago
Or I would think if we did have that truth, more likely hodl until Xi does something aggressive and we need to rally public sentiment towards action.

m0zg 5y ago

The leak might have been accidental, but allowing it to spread was definitely not accidental. Most people in the West don't realize that this is not China's first full-scale run-in with SARS. They had similar, but local pandemic over a decade ago. Ask a Chinese person who was there, they'll tell you - the similarities are quite profound. Back then it stayed local. This time it was allowed to escape. I'll let you fill in the blanks as to "cui bono". We won't really know who made the decisions and how it was done for another 50 years. Maybe we'll get to know by the time FDA releases vaccine testing data.

Fomite 5y ago
SARS "Didn't stay local". The canonical super-spreading event was in Hong Kong, and it killed 81 people in Taiwan, 43 people in Canada, 33 people in Singapore, and caused cases in the U.S., France, Sweden, etc. Indeed, the reason the vaccine was developed so swiftly for SARS-CoV-2 is because people (including my one time graduate advisor) could see that after the emergence of both SARS and MERS that it was unlikely the world was done with epidemic cornaviruses.
- m0zg 5y ago
  At a minimum, according to my Chinese source, Beijing was also affected (though Shanghai was not). They had to wear masks, sanitize, distance, close schools, economy tanked, etc. It lasted for about a year and we never heard much about it, much as today we're being told that China only had 4,636 COVID deaths. That is, what you saw in other countries hardly even qualifies as an epidemic, unlike what my friend saw in China itself. Wisely, the Chinese government appointed the same guy as last time to deal with the pandemic, but the dude is now 85 years old, so my friend is not sure what they're going to do next time. Ironically, we also appointed "the same guy", but our guy is so inept he let swine flu run completely unchecked and kill tens of thousands of people (a performance he tried but failed to repeat when he, in the beginning of the pandemic told the US public "there's no need to wear masks"). He's also famous for telling people that AIDS can spread through "household contact" [1], and for suggesting that people take a fast tracked drug (AZT) as an AIDS prophylactic which was later found to have severe side effects [2]. Does this remind anyone of anything? How he managed to last 30+ years in the government given this "track record" is a mystery to me. And if you believe stats coming out of China, you might also be interested in some Louisiana swamp land I have available for sale. [1] https://news.yahoo.com/video-resurfaces-fauci-warning-household-180945365.html https://news.yahoo.com/video-resurfaces-fauci-warning-househ... [2] https://aep.lib.rochester.edu/node/49111 https://aep.lib.rochester.edu/node/49111

outworlder 5y ago

It would be great to hear "this is why this thing didn't come from the lab: these are the strains under research, it doesn't match what was found. These are the security measures we have in place, here's all the audit data. WHO, please validate." That would be helpful. Not this "yeah, we have this lab in the same area, why are you asking? It's fine. No you can't look, that's disrespectful." This is fishy. Even if this pathogen specifically, didn't come from the lab, someone somewhere messed up(or is doing something messed up right now) and don't want people poking around.

ethbr0 5y ago
Or they simply don't have data to prove conclusively it was not leaked, because it wasn't logged correctly. And being a paranoid communist autocracy, they'll naturally take the "limit information" approach over "release everything and let external parties determine a verdict".
baq 5y ago
China will not, if possible, willingly put itself in a position which admits any likelihood of losing face. If they couldn't rule out the possibility themselves and/or cover up completely that it was in fact a leak, they won't let anyone in - not because it happened, but because it might have.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  That reasoning is so, so, so weak. 'This might embarrass us so you can't look' is _not_ a valid defense; anyone who says it is can be assumed to be complicit. If it 'might' have happened, then there needs to be an investigation. We're talking about millions dead worldwide, and tens of trillions in damages. Inequality has spiked and second-order deaths may well outnumber direct COVID-19 deaths already. And years on we haven't had an investigation into the single most likely source - that's insane, dangerous, divisive and inexcusable.
  - baq 5y ago
    This is China we're talking about. Fear of losing face is a deeply rooted cultural thing. It isn't a valid defense... in the west.

34679 5y ago

https://wildlife.org/wild-deer-contract-coronavirus/ https://wildlife.org/wild-deer-contract-coronavirus/

labster 5y ago

> My suspicion is the Chinese government doesn't know either but, more importantly, they don't want to know because absolutely no good can come from that becoming public. There is literally no upside. Sure, the airplane crashed and a lot of people died, but what good can come of the reason becoming public? There is literally no upside because that side got destroyed in the crash. Or we can be rational and find out how we can prevent these disasters in the future.

dboreham 5y ago

There was a giant fish that we managed to not know about for thousands of years until one washed up onto the feet of a marine biologist...

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
If it’s the coelacanth, they were known to local fishermen. They nicknamed them “king of the sea.”
- dboreham 5y ago
  Presumably the people who collect bat poop from caves are aware they're full of dangerous viruses..

rel2thr 5y ago

What do you mean by ‘found in the wild’? Covid has been found in wild deer populations and in various animals in zoos

ceejayoz 5y ago
They presumably mean an animal reservoir in China that predates the pandemic. Zoos are obviously a case of human to animal transmission, not animal to human. That said, we don’t know where Ebola hangs out between outbreaks, and we’ve been trying for decades. It’s clearly hard.

hcknwscommenter 5y ago

You have two #1's, and 2 #2's, so it's a bit hard to respond to any of those clearly. I will first address the second #1, and note that your point is very hard to understand here. COVID-19 has been found in multiple places "in the wild." It's been found in racoon dogs, which were known to be sold at the Wuhan wet market. It even seems to be endemic in certain geographic areas of the U.S. deer population now, which makes me think this thing is never going away. Regarding your point #3, I think 100s of miles for an animal reservoir of a closely related virus, where the animal is capable of flight, is not so far? Regarding your point #4, I just don't get it. Yes, we don't know who patient zero is. Are you trying to imply that patient zero is being obfuscated by the government for some nefarious reason? Regarding your first point #1, as a (former) protein engineer, I can assure you that viral engineering is just not a thing. It is not currently possible according to the brightest minds to just engineer a virus to have any particular infectious biological behavior in a host. Generally, we can engineer viruses to knockout core functions and thereby weaken them or render them non-replicative or non-infective. Sometimes we can engineer viruses to change their tropism (the cells they infect). But taking say a bat virus and combining with a different virus (SARS?), adding a few key mutations, and ending up with a weapon or something is just science fiction. Could we use directed evolution? Maybe, but you can't just apply some sort of selective pressure in a cell culture that is applicable to actual human infectivity/morbidity/etc. IMO The only "lab leak" hypothesis that makes any sense at all, was that someone just **ked up, the dice rolled horribly badly (like the worst outcome out of 10^64 possible outcomes), and it all went pear shaped. But it's a lot more likely an infected racoon dog at the wet market scratched or breathed on someone.

dnautics 5y ago
> IMO The only "lab leak" hypothesis that makes any sense at all, was that someone just *ked up, the dice rolled horribly badly (like the worst outcome out of 10^64 possible outcomes), and it all went pear shaped. This is really not that unlikely. Probably someone designed something like 2^10-ish different recombinant grafts from related coronaviruses, with various design parameters, and the selective pressure was "oh it was actually infectious enough to infect the careless postdoc pulling the 100 hour workweek". Surely 1 out of 2^10 is likely to be more transmissible than the parent bat strain. These days (aka 10 years ago) with molecular biology, 2^6 is not unreasonable to do by hand, by a well-trained undergrad intern, in three months. Oh and hey... out of 2^6 we discovered one GOF with higher normalized output than its parent. Citation (disclaimer, I supervised the intern, so it's possible I'm a three-sigma-above-median intern manager): https://bmcbiochem.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2091-15-10 https://bmcbiochem.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2...

jacquesm 5y ago

1: such things can take time. Sometimes decades. 2: which proves what? 3: all coronavirus strains are related, that's why they have that common element in their name 4: we have some pretty good candidates though. https://time.com/6121482/first-covid-19-case-wuhan-wet-market/ https://time.com/6121482/first-covid-19-case-wuhan-wet-marke...

EdwardDiego 5y ago

I lean towards the accidental lab escape theory, given the work the Wuhan lab was known to be doing, while only being a level 3 lab, and that the first cases originated in a nearby market, it feels like it satisfies Occams shaving implement. As for why there were no previous wild outbreaks, that I can't answer,except that the people who found the origins of SARS in horseshoe bats in Yunnan didn't find the virus itself, but rather it's genetics spread across diverse strains of coronaviruses in one cave, with analysis showing the varying strains could mix. [1] So, maybe Covid-19 is an amalgam of a novel coronavirus that was being studied, that had never reached the level of serious illness in the wild to be distinguishable from a common cold, and another coronavirus it met in Wuhan, whether in the lab or in the dense population, and became far more potent. And of course, there's the allegations of gain of function work in the Wuhan lab. I agree that we'll never know the truth, the CCP would never accept the loss of face of it was their researchers who accidentally unleashed it.

ricksunny 5y ago

So, a good book just came out last week by a MIT-Harvard Broad Institute genomics scientist that outlines all the lab leak vs zoonotic evidence (right up till the Pasteur Institute Laos study - whose underlying data wasn’t public in time for printing). Covers everything else we know so far - all about furin cleavage, the market-based arguments, and especially the ‘DEFUSE’ grant application document to DARPA. It’s titled Viral and it’s written by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley (he was the author of ‘How Innovation Works’.)

pineaux 5y ago
What's the verdict?

Pyramus 5y ago

> None of this adds up to positive evidence of any variation of the "lab leak" theory but given that there is no alternative theory that holds up to serious scrutiny or doesn't have serious flaws or unanswered questions, it has to stay in the running. There is a very strong alternative theory that the virus evolved in human-animal interactions in fur farming. China is the biggest fur producer outside the EU, which results in very similar incentives to not properly investigate. Denmark culled its whole mink population after human-mink transmission and the evolution of the cluster 5 variant [2]. [1] https://www.republik.ch/2021/06/05/herr-drosten-woher-kam-dieses-virus https://www.republik.ch/2021/06/05/herr-drosten-woher-kam-di... [German] [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_5

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

5. A wild strain would have spit out many new variants early on as it mutates to become accustomed to us. >None of this adds up to positive evidence of any variation of the "lab leak" theory but given that there is no alternative theory that holds up to serious scrutiny or doesn't have serious flaws or unanswered questions, it has to stay in the running. The virus derives from somewhere. If wild, we would have known it was wild. It's not wild anymore, that boat has moved on. So where else? Now that we know it was a lab leak because of good old occams razor. We can look at the very quick response to label lab leak as a conspiracy theory. Who pushed that. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095418/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095418/ How did Trump of all people blame a lab leak in wuhan so quickly as well? Trump didn't know there was a lab there. >My suspicion is the Chinese government doesn't know either but, more importantly, they don't want to know because absolutely no good can come from that becoming public. There is literally no upside. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep... A wuhan lab in china received money from the US government to do gain of function research on coronaviruses and they started using the variant that is 96% similar to covid only a few years before. The american politicians who at exactly the same time they started doing this work warned that safety at the wuhan lab was poor. If it was a lab leak, why then is the person responsible for covid publishing about it like they didnt know. The exact person who is responsible. That's because it's a leak. It's not intentional.

gilbetron 5y ago

> 1. If Covid-19 jumped from an animal species to humans, possibly through another animal, then why hasn't it been found in the wild? For example, SARS was relatively quickly found in the wild. To date there's been no equivalent discovery of the lineage of human-transmissible Covid-19. An alternative theory, that Covid-19 spread to humans at a wet market, would strongly suggest that Covid-19 would be found in the wild; It took about 13 years to discover the source of SARS: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9