3 ms·

I'm looking forward to reading your book. As a former microbiologist / biochemist with a fair amount of knowledge about what is possible in terms of gain-of-fu

I'm looking forward to reading your book. As a former microbiologist / biochemist with a fair amount of knowledge about what is possible in terms of gain-of-function research, and with a fair amount of experience reading technical research papers and a long-standing interest in both environmental and infectious microbiology and virology, the discussion of origins of the virus in the literature really seemed shady during the first six months of the pandemic. In particular, the early flood of 'data' about potential links to pangolins and a supposed bat-pangolin cross-breeding event, which was discredited pretty quickly, indicated that someone was trying to muddy the waters. Past natural outbreaks involving these kinds of cross-species jumps (MERS and camels for example) had a a long-term natural history, they didn't just appear wholly formed out of the blue, and the natural reservoirs were quickly identified[1, 2] [1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/middle-east-respiratory-syndrome-coronavirus-(mers-cov) https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/middle-east... [2] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/20/8/14-0596_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/20/8/14-0596_article The failure to identify any such natural source of the virus within six months despite intensive searches really put the Wuhan lab leak theory back on the front burner, and the fact that the Lancet and Nature op-eds proclaiming a 'natural source' were organized by those linked to providing U.S. funding to the Wuhan lab was another huge red flag. When it became clear that the funds sent to Wuhan were intended to continue a branch of research (gain-of-function with respiratory viral pathogens) that the U.S. government had severely restricted in 2014[3], well... [3] https://www.science.org/content/article/us-halts-funding-new-risky-virus-studies-calls-voluntary-moratorium https://www.science.org/content/article/us-halts-funding-new... Clearly both some elements of the US government's academic funding wing and of the Chinese government have a deeply vested interest in not allowing an open and independent inquiry into the actual source of the pandemic. This only encourages future similar outbreaks - as it really seems that there may be literally hundreds of wild-type animal viruses that can be turned into human pathogens by selective modification of their cell-surface-protein binding capabilities via techniques such as CRISPR etc. International bans on this kind of research (including an inspection regime as with nuclear non-proliferation treaties) really make sense.

jacquesm 5y ago
"The failure to identify any such natural source of the virus within six months despite intensive searches really put the Wuhan lab leak theory back on the front burner" We have had to look for the reservoir animal for Ebola for decades before having a viable candidate. On that scale six months is a very short time.
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  The failure to identify a natural reservoir does throw a lot of doubt onto the 'wet market-origin' theory, since some close variants should have existed in some of the animals there and none were found. If on the other hand the virus was one collected from a remote location and transported to the lab for further study and possible modification, as part of a well-intentioned research effort, and then accidentally escaped (by infection of lab techs, visitors, etc. most likely), that would be an understandable situation.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    It doesn't, really. All it takes is a single individual animal to carry a virus. The assumption that all of the individuals of a species harbor the virus is faulty, it could well be a small fraction of a rare animal, in fact the difficulty of locating the reservoir is strong evidence for that. Sticking to Ebola for the moment: even though there were major suspicions that a species of bat was responsible for Ebola it took a very long time to identify which species and how Ebola managed to transit the continent and to pop up in different places. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71226-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71226-0 Reservoir animals can be very hard to determine with certainty. Note also that the reservoir animal itself need not have been present in the wet market for this to have worked, it is enough that a pig or some other suitable amplifier host got infected which then passed it to humans. In that case too, you'd see a small number of animals, possibly even a single individual, carry live virus. And given the nature of the wet markets you can be pretty sure that any such evidence was erased before COVID even had a name. Until there is hard evidence for a lab leak I will chalk it up to a possibility, but a remote one. And if and when the reservoir animal is found I'm sure that too will be discounted by the proponents of the lab leak theory, who seem to have their bullet-proof fix already in the works: in that case the claim is that the virus was first sampled from an individual of the reservoir animal species and moved to the lab from where it leaked. So we likely will never see the end of that, but that doesn't mean that any of it is true. Which is a problem with many conspiracy theories, they tend to be inherently un-falsifiable which allows them to stick around forever. The way in which one of the authors of the book effortlessly integrated new knowledge that invalidated the premise of the book into an altered version of the same - instead of admitting they got it wrong - is a very nice example of that.

jacquesm 5y ago

"The failure to identify any such natural source of the virus within six months despite intensive searches really put the Wuhan lab leak theory back on the front burner" We have had to look for the reservoir animal for Ebola for decades before having a viable candidate. On that scale six months is a very short time.

photochemsyn 5y ago
The failure to identify a natural reservoir does throw a lot of doubt onto the 'wet market-origin' theory, since some close variants should have existed in some of the animals there and none were found. If on the other hand the virus was one collected from a remote location and transported to the lab for further study and possible modification, as part of a well-intentioned research effort, and then accidentally escaped (by infection of lab techs, visitors, etc. most likely), that would be an understandable situation.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  It doesn't, really. All it takes is a single individual animal to carry a virus. The assumption that all of the individuals of a species harbor the virus is faulty, it could well be a small fraction of a rare animal, in fact the difficulty of locating the reservoir is strong evidence for that. Sticking to Ebola for the moment: even though there were major suspicions that a species of bat was responsible for Ebola it took a very long time to identify which species and how Ebola managed to transit the continent and to pop up in different places. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71226-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71226-0 Reservoir animals can be very hard to determine with certainty. Note also that the reservoir animal itself need not have been present in the wet market for this to have worked, it is enough that a pig or some other suitable amplifier host got infected which then passed it to humans. In that case too, you'd see a small number of animals, possibly even a single individual, carry live virus. And given the nature of the wet markets you can be pretty sure that any such evidence was erased before COVID even had a name. Until there is hard evidence for a lab leak I will chalk it up to a possibility, but a remote one. And if and when the reservoir animal is found I'm sure that too will be discounted by the proponents of the lab leak theory, who seem to have their bullet-proof fix already in the works: in that case the claim is that the virus was first sampled from an individual of the reservoir animal species and moved to the lab from where it leaked. So we likely will never see the end of that, but that doesn't mean that any of it is true. Which is a problem with many conspiracy theories, they tend to be inherently un-falsifiable which allows them to stick around forever. The way in which one of the authors of the book effortlessly integrated new knowledge that invalidated the premise of the book into an altered version of the same - instead of admitting they got it wrong - is a very nice example of that.