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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 lineag

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.
  - himinlomax 5y ago
    > And if those files are shared, and nothing is found, you'd just move the goalposts, and claim the data was doctored. Really? That's what you're going for? Would you be insulting me the same way if the suspicion was on, say, a private laboratory in the United States? Would you imply that I'm a conspiracy theorist nutjob if I were to demand an inquiry? Should we stop all trials because there's always some people who refuse to believe the verdict even it was reasonable when the trial was obviosly fair? How is this situation different? It seems to me that you're the one who's exhibiting the same kind of denial and mental gymnastic as the average 911 or JFK truther. I'm not a biologist, I'm an engineer with training in industrial safety and I've studied industrial accidents long before this happened. Industrial accidents happen. They happen less and are less deadly in industries where risk is taken seriously and where open access to information and public oversight is present. The debate on gain of function research that has been revealed to have happened before this pandemic, whether such research happened in Wuhan or not, shows to me that not only was risk not taken seriously enough by the virology community as whole, but that open debate and oversight was almost entirely absent.
timr 5y ago
> 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... I can make the same argument for lab origin: "given the early epidemiological nexus of a government virology laboratory in the same city as the index cases, many of whom worked at the lab..." The rest of your comment boils down to "science is hard and often ambiguous"...which it is, but is not an argument either way, and certainly not a reason to leap to one conclusion or the other. BTW: the close relatives in Yunnan and Laos aren't actually that close. But it all depends on how you define "close", which just begs the original question. I wouldn't call the known relatives dispositive.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  including the strain from the outbreak that the batwoman published in 2015 or so? That one was supposedly the closest.
- alevskaya 5y ago
  An epidemiological nexus is much smaller than an entire city and the details of the early cases matter. Aside from the contact-tracing, investigators were able to get positive PCR recovery of sars-cov-2 from -environmental samples- at the wet markets, indicating an incredible degree of contamination there. If the nexus were in fact WIV we'd expect a very different pattern of early cases (eg conference travel - a lot of researchers from WIV were at a Nipah conference in Singapore just before the outbreak!) You could of course argue that the authorities just covered up any damning links, but the early outbreak was pretty chaotic and information wasn't well controlled... and in any case at that point we're not longer capable of arguing based on any evidence at all. My point is simply that a lack of fully verified lineage analysis is completely unsurprising and not at all evidence in favor of conspiracy. I used to engineer viruses... By natural standards the Laos samples are extremely close - the mosaicity of coronaviruses in these bats complicate matters - but likely within a decade of a common ancestor to sars-cov-2. Closer than any other sample that we know WIV were working with beforehand (again, people claim they were hiding what they were doing, except there was no reason whatsoever to do so before the pandemic). Though "not close" for sure in the sense that even if they did have these strains, you would never evolve sars-cov-2 from them in a dish, there simply wouldn't be enough passages to do so. And that's sort of the point - the evolutionary "risk surface area" of zoonosis is many orders of magnitude larger than this nutty lab-leak idea, and we know that these coronaviruses jump all the time from close animal contacts, having caused two other epidemics in the last 20 years...
outworlder 5y ago
The technical difficulties don't really matter because that's not the actual problem. The problem is that even access to the data that's required has been denied. Independent audits have been denied.
- vkou 5y ago
  Let me raise a counter-question. Who was patient zero for COVID-19 in the United States, where did they travel from, and where did they travel to? When did the first case arrive in the country? Why isn't access to this data available? Why would access to this data be denied? Why isn't the United States sharing this information with independent auditors? With its journalists? With the world? Is there an ulterior motive to this secrecy? If the US can't, or refuses to figure out who its patient zero was, why do you expect China to be more successful at this sort of endeavor? Perhaps it's because figuring these sorts of things out is a little bit harder than one might think.
  - arsome 5y ago
    I think you're missing the point, the US does not have direct access to databases that could be related to these facts and yet suddenly took them offline.
    - Terry_Roll 5y ago
      Actually the US and the wider world has had access to this sort of stuff because peer review means sharing knowledge. https://thevirginiastar.com/2021/06/07/american-higher-education-has-deep-ties-to-ecohealth-alliance-wuhan-institute-of-virology/ https://thevirginiastar.com/2021/06/07/american-higher-educa... Covid is a fart in a room and China was first smeller so first stinker. Waste water samples from other countries show it was around months before China went official so were those other country's just keeping quiet? Besides, its not like you can stamp Made in China, Made in US on viruses so Covid is resigned to the conspiracy theory books, and even if someone came forward to own up that it was some state biological weapon, the country in question can just play the mental health card on the whistle-blower. Very few people can afford to step out of line because it would put their family at risk and even if they could afford, there is always the getting knocked over by a bus risk. So many ways Covid can be plausibly spun, its probably just best to keep abreast of the news, reduce risks where possible and get on with life so you don't have any regrets or at least have lived life as fully as humanly possible however that might be.
DantesKite 5y ago
None of your points disconfirm bullet point (2), which by itself is a political act.
Fomite 5y ago
This. This shit is hard. And expensive. And involves a hell of a lot of travel, which has been exceedingly difficult during this pandemic. We're still fleshing out the animal hosts for MERS.
bee_rider 5y ago
Well I've always heard that DNA is like the source code for life, so why not do $git blame coronavirus.js I assume it is javascript for obvious reasons.
chrismcb 5y ago
I don't think anyone is underestimating the difficulty. Even if we had boots on the ground one day 1 we might not know more than we do now. But NOT having boots on the ground at all, is negligence. For a year it was verboten to discuss the possibility of a lab leak. It was deemed fake news... If it is so difficult, then how did they KNOW? The answer was, no one knew, but it was still forbidden to discuss it That is the problem here. The fact that lab leaks have occurred, and that ground zero appears to be near one of the only labs researching this... Well that is enough suspicion to investigate. But apparently that was crazy talk.
iratewizard 5y ago
Aren't you the guy who claimed to have 20 years of experience engineering viruses, then someone checked your linkedin to call your bluff? Did you take your website link off your profile so you can pretend to be important?
trevelyan 5y ago
BANAL-52 is 96.8% identical to SARS-CoV-2. That is not particularly close. You need to get above 99% to even come close to zoonotic origin on this. We also know that coronavirus samples from bats from Laos were shipped to WIV. Those samples have not been released. Hardly require decades to release that sort of data.
epiphanitus 5y ago
Thanks for your comment, I appreciate your willingness to share a contrarian perspective. Question, how would a virus that spreads primarily indoors and rarely spreads outdoors accumulate enough viral load over enough hosts to spill over into humans? It seems like this would be difficult in an open-air wet market.
deleted 5y ago
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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.
- himinlomax 5y ago
  > And if those files are shared, and nothing is found, you'd just move the goalposts, and claim the data was doctored. Really? That's what you're going for? Would you be insulting me the same way if the suspicion was on, say, a private laboratory in the United States? Would you imply that I'm a conspiracy theorist nutjob if I were to demand an inquiry? Should we stop all trials because there's always some people who refuse to believe the verdict even it was reasonable when the trial was obviosly fair? How is this situation different? It seems to me that you're the one who's exhibiting the same kind of denial and mental gymnastic as the average 911 or JFK truther. I'm not a biologist, I'm an engineer with training in industrial safety and I've studied industrial accidents long before this happened. Industrial accidents happen. They happen less and are less deadly in industries where risk is taken seriously and where open access to information and public oversight is present. The debate on gain of function research that has been revealed to have happened before this pandemic, whether such research happened in Wuhan or not, shows to me that not only was risk not taken seriously enough by the virology community as whole, but that open debate and oversight was almost entirely absent.

timr 5y ago

> 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... I can make the same argument for lab origin: "given the early epidemiological nexus of a government virology laboratory in the same city as the index cases, many of whom worked at the lab..." The rest of your comment boils down to "science is hard and often ambiguous"...which it is, but is not an argument either way, and certainly not a reason to leap to one conclusion or the other. BTW: the close relatives in Yunnan and Laos aren't actually that close. But it all depends on how you define "close", which just begs the original question. I wouldn't call the known relatives dispositive.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
inter_netuser 5y ago
including the strain from the outbreak that the batwoman published in 2015 or so? That one was supposedly the closest.
alevskaya 5y ago
An epidemiological nexus is much smaller than an entire city and the details of the early cases matter. Aside from the contact-tracing, investigators were able to get positive PCR recovery of sars-cov-2 from -environmental samples- at the wet markets, indicating an incredible degree of contamination there. If the nexus were in fact WIV we'd expect a very different pattern of early cases (eg conference travel - a lot of researchers from WIV were at a Nipah conference in Singapore just before the outbreak!) You could of course argue that the authorities just covered up any damning links, but the early outbreak was pretty chaotic and information wasn't well controlled... and in any case at that point we're not longer capable of arguing based on any evidence at all. My point is simply that a lack of fully verified lineage analysis is completely unsurprising and not at all evidence in favor of conspiracy. I used to engineer viruses... By natural standards the Laos samples are extremely close - the mosaicity of coronaviruses in these bats complicate matters - but likely within a decade of a common ancestor to sars-cov-2. Closer than any other sample that we know WIV were working with beforehand (again, people claim they were hiding what they were doing, except there was no reason whatsoever to do so before the pandemic). Though "not close" for sure in the sense that even if they did have these strains, you would never evolve sars-cov-2 from them in a dish, there simply wouldn't be enough passages to do so. And that's sort of the point - the evolutionary "risk surface area" of zoonosis is many orders of magnitude larger than this nutty lab-leak idea, and we know that these coronaviruses jump all the time from close animal contacts, having caused two other epidemics in the last 20 years...

outworlder 5y ago

The technical difficulties don't really matter because that's not the actual problem. The problem is that even access to the data that's required has been denied. Independent audits have been denied.

vkou 5y ago
Let me raise a counter-question. Who was patient zero for COVID-19 in the United States, where did they travel from, and where did they travel to? When did the first case arrive in the country? Why isn't access to this data available? Why would access to this data be denied? Why isn't the United States sharing this information with independent auditors? With its journalists? With the world? Is there an ulterior motive to this secrecy? If the US can't, or refuses to figure out who its patient zero was, why do you expect China to be more successful at this sort of endeavor? Perhaps it's because figuring these sorts of things out is a little bit harder than one might think.
- arsome 5y ago
  I think you're missing the point, the US does not have direct access to databases that could be related to these facts and yet suddenly took them offline.
  - Terry_Roll 5y ago
    Actually the US and the wider world has had access to this sort of stuff because peer review means sharing knowledge. https://thevirginiastar.com/2021/06/07/american-higher-education-has-deep-ties-to-ecohealth-alliance-wuhan-institute-of-virology/ https://thevirginiastar.com/2021/06/07/american-higher-educa... Covid is a fart in a room and China was first smeller so first stinker. Waste water samples from other countries show it was around months before China went official so were those other country's just keeping quiet? Besides, its not like you can stamp Made in China, Made in US on viruses so Covid is resigned to the conspiracy theory books, and even if someone came forward to own up that it was some state biological weapon, the country in question can just play the mental health card on the whistle-blower. Very few people can afford to step out of line because it would put their family at risk and even if they could afford, there is always the getting knocked over by a bus risk. So many ways Covid can be plausibly spun, its probably just best to keep abreast of the news, reduce risks where possible and get on with life so you don't have any regrets or at least have lived life as fully as humanly possible however that might be.

DantesKite 5y ago

None of your points disconfirm bullet point (2), which by itself is a political act.

Fomite 5y ago

This. This shit is hard. And expensive. And involves a hell of a lot of travel, which has been exceedingly difficult during this pandemic. We're still fleshing out the animal hosts for MERS.

bee_rider 5y ago

Well I've always heard that DNA is like the source code for life, so why not do $git blame coronavirus.js I assume it is javascript for obvious reasons.

chrismcb 5y ago

I don't think anyone is underestimating the difficulty. Even if we had boots on the ground one day 1 we might not know more than we do now. But NOT having boots on the ground at all, is negligence. For a year it was verboten to discuss the possibility of a lab leak. It was deemed fake news... If it is so difficult, then how did they KNOW? The answer was, no one knew, but it was still forbidden to discuss it That is the problem here. The fact that lab leaks have occurred, and that ground zero appears to be near one of the only labs researching this... Well that is enough suspicion to investigate. But apparently that was crazy talk.

iratewizard 5y ago

Aren't you the guy who claimed to have 20 years of experience engineering viruses, then someone checked your linkedin to call your bluff? Did you take your website link off your profile so you can pretend to be important?

trevelyan 5y ago

BANAL-52 is 96.8% identical to SARS-CoV-2. That is not particularly close. You need to get above 99% to even come close to zoonotic origin on this. We also know that coronavirus samples from bats from Laos were shipped to WIV. Those samples have not been released. Hardly require decades to release that sort of data.

epiphanitus 5y ago

Thanks for your comment, I appreciate your willingness to share a contrarian perspective. Question, how would a virus that spreads primarily indoors and rarely spreads outdoors accumulate enough viral load over enough hosts to spill over into humans? It seems like this would be difficult in an open-air wet market.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]