24 ms·

I’m not convinced by the new lab leak debunking

358 points by maxutility 5y ago

hnplj 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jules 5y ago
The number of early cases connected to the market could be partly confirmation bias -- you detect an early case at the market, and then start to investigate everyone connected to the market, and surprise! almost all of the cases you find are connected to the market.
maxutility 5y ago
The article (by Matt Yglesias) is more nuanced than the title may suggest. Here’s a quote that gets at the gist of the piece: “The evidence really does show pretty clearly that there were one or more superspreader events at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. I just don’t think that’s really what the lab leak debate is about; it’s about why there was a superspreader event at the market. Did an infected animal pass it to people there or did a person who got infected at the lab pass it to people there?”
- bediger4000 5y ago
  Thank you for including the "by Matt Yglesias". Yglesias periodically admits to trolling, but as near as I can tell, also wants to be taken Very Seriously sometimes. I personally think he comes too close to "trolling" a lot of the time he wants to be taken Very Seriously, so I have to be careful when reading his takes. I would advise other people to also read Matt Yglesias carefully to decide if he's trolling in any given article.
  - _dain_ 5y ago
    poisoning the well
  - xxpor 5y ago
    I can't recall an actual article where he's trolling. That's more of a twitter thing.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    I know we're not supposed to ask why people are downvoted but I'd be fascinated to know why you were downvoted. I like Matt Yglesias, I think his Very Serious work is usually at least interesting, and I find some of his trollish witticisms very appealing. But I think you've hit the nail on the head; he creates a sort of Poe's Law situation around his own work because of them. In this case I think he's overreaching a little. But then I also think the lab leak theory was discredited and avoided partly from well-meaning applications of the wrong reasons, because even if you make a serious review of it as a professional accident, the Wrong People will definitely like and share your work for their own awful/vile/violent reasons. And nobody wants to be part of that.
  - jeffmh 5y ago
    While I am an Yglesias fan, I don’t think your take is unfair. Matt often describes himself as a professional take-haver, and admits to trying to put out somewhat contrarian takes on topics. One of my favorite recent columns of his was a love letter to the “Slatepitches” that Slate.com used to be known for, as an example of unique voice and differentiation in mainstream media that may be going by the wayside in the age of social media: “ Slate had a whole editorial style that was based around provocative — some would say trolly — articles and up-is-down theses. At its best, Slate championed unpopular causes and provoked fantastic debates. At its worst, Slate seemed to be deliberately stretching to come up with indefensible ideas.” https://www.slowboring.com/p/slatepitch?s=r https://www.slowboring.com/p/slatepitch?s=r
    - KennyBlanken 5y ago
      > Slate.com used to be known for, as an example of unique voice and differentiation in mainstream media that may be going by the wayside in the age of social media: “ Slate had a whole editorial style that was based around provocative — some would say trolly — articles and up-is-down theses. How the hell is that unique either in "MSM" or online media? He basically just described Gawker, BoingBoing, DailyKos, and a slew of other "hot take" sites. In terms of traditional media, every city has the garbage tabloid-level paper.
- dluan 5y ago
  I would not take anything Matt Yglesias says seriously, at all.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    Why?
    - PCGamer_Empath 5y ago
      I genuinely thought Matt Yglesias was a satirist until recently. It's entirely possible that I'm not the first one to infer that from his "professional take haver" persona (which I thought was a caricature.) I don't have a strong opinion about him as a journalist in general because I'm not intimately familiar with most of his work, but I found this particular article kind of underwhelming. It reads as a direct extension of the title, Breaking News: Local Man Feels Unconvinced About COVID Origins... like, okay? It comes across a bit navel-gazing to frame a "News" piece as an update on one's personal opinion, especially considering doing so provides the author cover to say "Well I was just riffing!" later if he happens to be conclusively disproved.
- 3np 5y ago
  Why would those be mutually exclusive? Ie it could have originated in the lab, somehow got out into the local environment, and then started spreading in the market through an infected animal.
  - jeffmh 5y ago
    I think your comment is in keeping with Matt’s point, that virus spread among humans or animals at the Wuhan seafood market doesn’t on its own contradict the possibility of a lab leak.
    - FabHK 5y ago
      Yes. Some more quotes might clarify: > These papers fill in some interesting details about the early outbreak at the market in Wuhan where the epidemic was first identified, but they don’t identify an intermediate host species that caught the virus from bats and then spread it to humans. Nor do they identify a precursor virus in a population of wild bats that lives near Wuhan or near farms supplying the Wuhan market. They show that the virus was introduced to the market at some point, but that could have been by humans who got the bug at a lab. > And so we’re left with the exact same dueling origin theories: it would be an odd coincidence for a lab-leaked virus to have its first big super-spreading event at a live animal market, but it would also be an odd coincidence for a devastating zoonotic coronavirus plague to occur in a city that happened to host a lab doing research on coronaviruses. It’s a genuinely weird situation. > And that is the Covid-19 origin puzzle in a nutshell: how did a bat virus from a cave in Yunnan end up hundreds of miles away in Wuhan? ... > It’s thanks to the hard work and diligent efforts of those WIV researchers that we know about Bat RaTG13. But this work also offers an explanation for how a bat virus could have traveled 700 miles from rural Yunnan to Wuhan: it was transported years ago by virus researchers. > So did the virus travel from Yunnan to Hubei a second time in an unrelated voyage, this time bound for the seafood market rather than the virus lab? Or did it travel from the lab to the market? > [...] the evidence is all consistent with the theory that a human got the virus at the lab, brought it to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and triggered a super-spreading event at the market (potentially infecting raccoon dogs along with humans).
pbiggar 5y ago
Here's a rebuttal to this by one of the authors of the paper: https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1499406148251754497 https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/14994061482517544...
- timr 5y ago
  This is not a "rebuttal". This is terrible. Rasmussen asserts things she could not possibly know (e.g. the Wuhan lab did not have "the fucking virus" -- we don't know what they had or did not have, because the Chinese government is not exactly being forthright on the matter), and focuses on a corner of the article (a side debate about RaTG13 and the physical proximity of it to Wuhan), while completely brushing off the core argument of the piece: the authors of these papers have not demonstrated that the early infections at the market came from animals. That's the whole ballgame. Rasmussen spends a lot of words setting up and knocking down straw men, but there's nothing else here. To make it worse, she is rude, dismissive, profane and needlessly aggressive. As a former researcher, if a high-profile reporter published a piece questioning my research in a polite and civil manner, I'd like to think I'd be mature enough to engage with that person constructively in a public forum.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    Not sure if you read it, but in the New York Magazine article by Nicholson Baker [0], that the rest of the press really hammered them for publishing, there is one bit that I still find really persistently interesting. He's talking about the lab's lead coronavirus researcher, Shi Zhengli: Could this new virus, she wondered, have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records and found no exact matches. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink for days.” If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab. It's reminiscent of the idea that the CIA were so jumpy about the JFK and RFK assassinations not because they know they did them, but that their fingers were in so many pies with so many undesirables that they didn't know they weren't involved. I don't think we'll ever know for sure, and I think it's a vanishingly unlikely idea that there was any malice. But an accidental escape? There are viruses named after accidental escapes. They happen. [0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
Jerry2 5y ago
If anyone wants to go down the "lab leak" rabbit hole, check out Charles Rixey's Substack [1]. He's assembled a massive database of articles and a complete timeline of events [2] that lead to COVID-19 pandemic. He's one of the members of DRASTIC which is a loose group of researchers looking into the "lab leak" hypothesis. [3][4][5] Even Moderna's CEO Stephane Bancel does not discount it and say's "it's possible" after researchers found a genetic sequence in SARS-CoV-2 virus which was patented by Moderna three years prior to pandemic. [6] [1] https://prometheusshrugged.substack.com/ https://prometheusshrugged.substack.com/ [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353547700_SARS-CoV-2_Origins_Research_Reference_Project_-_20220115 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353547700_SARS-CoV-... [3] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRASTIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRASTIC [5] https://drasticscience.com/ https://drasticscience.com/ [6] https://youtu.be/YcgE-5a1Ztc?t=436 https://youtu.be/YcgE-5a1Ztc?t=436
- doopy1 5y ago
  What's their verdict on the probability that it's a lab leak?
- wh313 5y ago
  I find it suspicious that very few of these "researchers" seem to even have any expertise in virology. Furthermore, very few of them seem to even have a PhD in their respective fields, nor any significant institutional affiliations. Two of them at least have research profiles, but their fields of expertise are in microbiology and nitrogen fixation, which have very little to do with virology or pathology. Their primary mode of publication also seems to be ArXiV and ResearchGate, which doesn't go through peer review, so there is no good way to verify their findings. Calling these people researchers would be equivalent to calling your average software developer a physicist. [1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=LLlFfdUAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=LLlFfdUAAAAJ... [2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=YWuJkRsAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=YWuJkRsAAAAJ...
rossdavidh 5y ago
"But we should keep in mind that the virologists publishing papers downplaying the possibility of a lab leak are not disinterested parties in this. The political context is a debate about regulating virus labs, and it’s hardly shocking that a large segment of the virus lab community doesn’t like that idea." This, I think, is the crux of our problem. Almost anyone who knows enough about the field to have an informed opinion, is involved enough to have an incentive to convince the world that it was not their profession, that unleashed this. Scientists are human, not demons but also not angels. It would be hard to convince yourself, that your profession was responsible for this. We should listen to what they have to say, but not expect them to be dispassionate and unbiased investigators of the question.
- FredPret 5y ago
  I know nothing about virology, so I have this question: why do it? What is the loss if we shut down all virology? They do gain of function research, breeding deadlier viruses, and then what? Do they use this to pre-develop vaccines?
  - rossdavidh 5y ago
    One use is to have understanding of how viruses work, so that you can accurately predict spread. If we assume that SARS and MERS (both coronaviruses that seem nearly certain _not_ to have been made in labs) required a knowledge of how coronaviruses work, then a lab doing the general kind of work that was done in Wuhan is real. For example, we already knew that the spike protein was critical in reproduction of the covid-19 virus, whereas we might not have known as much about that if we had no virology labs (I'm not an expert in the field, I might be wrong here). But, for any particular line of research, your question is still a valid one. Is this particular research likely to have a payoff worth the (inevitably non-zero) risk? The issue is how (and who) to make that decision.
- morelisp 5y ago
  As opposed to journalists, who would never keep an exciting story running despite weak evidence.
roenxi 5y ago
So something that has entered the discourse of HN [0] is that there is a large PR industry that powers the corporate press. That is where a lot of the money comes from which decides what & how things get covered. Something I think is plausible is that they've figures out a technique for controlling the narrative in the internet age where they take the range of opinions in a group with positions they don't like, identify a really wild one, debunk it, then tar the whole group with that opinion. I'm not thinking any particular group, although I'm guessing it is deployed against literally all political protests. The technique really needs a well known name. I doubt that is happening for lab-leak stuff since nobody is making money off it (and if the Chinese government cares they can just restrict access to info). But it is really interesting to note how difficult it was to restart the conversation once the lab leak theory was "debunked", so I'm sure the technical people who want to control the narrative took note. It was a nice clear example of how the dynamics come together. [0] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- car_analogy 5y ago
  > The technique really needs a well known name. The weak-man fallacy: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...
  - iratewizard 5y ago
    This fallacy might be useful in a debate, but it's useless in real life. It tells us to ignore basic pattern recognition in favor of treating everyone as an individual, despite our brain's hardware being incapable of effectively doing so. There exist for everyone a hypothetical black man on a spectrum from Ice Cube in "Are We There Yet" to Ice Cube in "Straight outta Compton". If you see this hypothetical person coming towards you, you will feel uncomfortable because your reptile brain wants you keep you alive. Everyone's lived experience is different. Everyone is entitled to a version of Ice Cube that scares them and the freedom to not associate with the people who they don't trust. Everyone is entitled to think a self-diagnosed mental disorder is disgusting and steals light from the actually afflicted.
tootie 5y ago
"it would also be an odd coincidence for a devastating zoonotic coronavirus plague to occur in a city that happened to host a lab doing research on coronaviruses" Uh, no it's not a coincidence at all. It was doing coronavirus research because SARS-1 was known to have jumped from bats to humans in China and Wuhan had a lot of bats near human population. China (and everybody else) had spent decades on high alert for another bat-born coronavirus variant and it was considered a very likely source of the next pandemic. So, they dedicated a ton of resources to studying exactly that. It would be like expressing shock at the coincidence of war breaking out in the exact spot where two opposing armies have been pointing guns at each other for 20 years.
- burnished 5y ago
  They do point out that there are no discovered precursors in the bat populations of that region.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Some confused logic here. You can't have a war without two opposing armies. So places where war breaks out are limited to only locations with two opposing armies in position. You might have, say, 5 such places in the world, but a war starts in only one of them. The probability of war is O(0.2) across that set of locations. The probability is O(0) in all other locations. If war breaks out you wouldn't marvel at the coincidence because having two armies was a prerequisite. Now, you can have a virus pandemic originate anywhere there are large numbers of humans (too sparse a population and it doesn't spread far). You don't need a virus lab in order to begin a pandemic. There is a theory that you could start a pandemic with a virus lab. In order to have a lab-originated pandemic you do need a lab at your location or origin. Therefore it's a coincidence that a non-lab-originated pandemic began in a city with a lab. It's not a coincidence that a lab-originated pandemic began in a city with a lab. So if you had a lab-originated pandemic you would not be surprised that there is a lab at the location of origin. You can not however conclude that if a pandemic originated in a city that has a lab then it must have been a lab-originated pandemic. There's no probabilistic link between those two known facts. Causation only goes one way.
prirun 5y ago
Online "news" has gotten to the same point with me as TV "news": I basically don't believe anything anymore ... it's all just noise. One thing might make more sense to me personally, but if the power-that-be have decided that's not the "right" thing, then I'm labeled a conspiracy theorist. So I just believe what makes sense to me. I'm probably wrong as often as right, but that would be true if I tried to make sense out of today's news too.
- sb057 5y ago
  If some event doesn't have a direct personal effect on you, it's probably nothing you need to know about or be concerned with. If it does have a direct personal effect on you, you'll find out about it without being told.
- tootie 5y ago
  I mean, that's a really bad position to take. You can't evaluate news based on the medium. Evaluate based on the credibility of the source. MSM reporting on COVID has been very consistent and very accurate. Almost all of the mis and disinformation is coming from political sources or unqualified opinionators. If you just follow the most obvious sources like the NY Times, BBC, NPR and the like, you'd be right over 95% of the time.
- calumetregion 5y ago
  Media is and has always been propaganda. All of it. You have to start from there to make sense of the world. We ran into trouble at some point with critical thinking. I believe prosperity and comfort for three generations in the West may have led to this type of thing by default, unfortunately. To flip it around...you can also make an argument that PR and propaganda itself has led to prosperity and comfort. Or at least it was something to do that filled time and created some cool apps and fashions. Which is awesome until you realize you're not safe from war.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    > Media is and has always been propaganda. All of it. You have to start from there to make sense of the world. How does any amount of critical thinking get around this, assuming it is true? If you hear the same bit of news a dozen different ways from many outlets, it must be true? If all media is propaganda, you can't trust anything that you have not experienced personally.
lil_dispaches 5y ago
Downplaying the lab leak is dangerous, because it is the difference between an accident and mass murder. I think the best evidence for a lab leak is common sense. https://dispatchito.substack.com/p/the-strongest-evidence-of-lab-genesis https://dispatchito.substack.com/p/the-strongest-evidence-of...
- titzer 5y ago
  > I think the best evidence for a lab leak is common sense. The best "evidence" for Newtonian physics (as opposed to General Relativity) is common sense. Common sense is not evidence.
  - lil_dispaches 5y ago
    Evidence is not proof. There is lots of evidence. A hypothesis is not a theory. Being loose with language and concepts is dangerous.
    - titzer 5y ago
      Evidence is facts and information, not vague feelings, no matter how "common sense" it seems. You couldn't convict someone in a court of law with common sense, nor support a scientific theory with common sense. You need this external thing in the world that exists outside your mind. We have the word evidence to mean that external thing that exists outside your mind.
      - lil_dispaches 5y ago
        Is there somehow more evidence of natural origin than lab leak? By common sense, this is what I mean: the strain of coronavirus that caused covid-19 was very strong, much stronger than any previous strain, and we have seen many. Common sense says we have seen all the strains Nature could throw at us already, and none have been that deadly. So common sense leads to looking for evidence i new light, in new places. Also, evidence is not fact. Evidence is anything. Evidence was O.J. Simpson's hand didn't fit the glove. That was weak evidence, but that turned into "proof", via not-guilty verdict. Even proof is not fact (there are no facts lol). Evidence is anything you can find to solve the crime. After you collect evidence, you go through it at piece together the story. Read a book yo.
MikeGale 5y ago
On this issue I suggest figuring it out for yourself. Look into the technology a bit and decide. This issue illustrates that public pronouncements and published material can be misinformation and opposite to the obvious truth. Great ways to identify liars for yourself.
- jmull 5y ago
  Crackpot logic
dataflow 5y ago
I just couldn't take the "research" seriously when I read this: > They said they found no support for an alternate theory that the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. No support? Really? Not just "weak" support, but not a single shred of support whatsoever? So it's just a hoax? There's a long article going into what would be otherwise some very strange and implausible coincidences [1] surrounding the issue for those curious. Surely unbiased research into the topic would deem these to be worthy of at least some cursory mentions (and ideally, some debunking)? Moreover, this might be an interesting read: In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet. [...] During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory. [2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 [2] 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...
- asojfdowgh 5y ago
  Coincidences arn't evidence though, Coincidences don't need to be debunked
  - pauldenton 5y ago
    If you want to dismiss the connection between pieces of evidence, you need an argument. Not just calling them a coincidence and dismissing the connection out of hand.
  - esperent 5y ago
    Enough coincidences absolutely do need to be debunked. I'm not sure that's the case here, but talking in the abstract - if you start to see tens or hundreds of well documented coincidences, there comes a point at which you can no longer reasonably dismiss them.
FabHK 5y ago
Is that the complete article? Or does it continue (for subscribers) after this paragraph? > But you could also draw a map focused on the human cases that would have shown a cluster in the other corner. And certainly the evidence is all consistent with the theory that a human got the virus at the lab, brought it to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and triggered a super-spreading event at the market (potentially infecting raccoon dogs along with humans).
- jeffmh 5y ago
  That paragraph is around two thirds of the way through the full post that subscribers see.
_robbywashere 5y ago
There will likely never be a smoking gun. But provocative reasons for globally felt tragedies are always fodder for conspiracy theories. Have fun!
nullc 5y ago
How does this not mention project defuse, the NIAID funded EcoHealth Alliance research program taking place in wuhan which sought to: 1. Study immune boosting drugs in bats. 2. Take bat corona virus and 'predict' how it can become infectious to humans by incubating it in humanized tissues until it thrives in them, and if that is insufficient directly modifying it to insert a human-specific furin cleavage into the viruses genetic code for the spike protein (as this is an already known barrier to human infectiousness). 3. Inoculate wild bats against human infectious corona viruses by administering drugs to boost their immune system and exposing them to the viruses developed in the prior phase. Sars-cov-2's primary functional difference from its nearest known wild ancestor is exactly the cleavage proposed in defuse. However, defuse proposed studying a different wild virus than the ancestor of sars-cov-2. The nearest known wild ancestor of sars-cov-2 is the virus the same researchers were working with immediately before the project proposal for defuse. DARPA had declined to fund the project, with the view that it violated the US government moratorium on funding gain-of-function research ( https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/3012?r=18 https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/301... ). NIH has taken the view that this project was not gain-of-function research because the particular virus they were experimenting on could already infect humans (just not particularly well) and because they were directed to pause research and report if they found a ten fold increase in infectivity (the researchers seemingly failed to do so, but did eventually report when they hit a 10,000 fold increase in apparent viral load). https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop...
kazinator 5y ago
The lab leak hypothesis and the seafood market hypotheses are not necessarily in conflict. If a lab made a boo boo with a virus sample, they could cover up the institution's own infections, and purposely get some people sick at the market to make it look like it started there.
- dahdum 5y ago
  Sure, but there plenty of more likely scenarios that require no malice or conspiracy.
  - kazinator 5y ago
    I'm only pointing out (one possible) way in which two hypotheses are not conflicting. If any such a way exists, then the hypotheses cannot be regarded as mutually exclusive. It is an error of reasoning to consider the lab leak and seafood market hypotheses to be competing and mutually exclusive. I find it extremely plausible that in the event of a lab leak, there would be some kind of cover up. And that there has been a cover up of something is obvious.
duckfruit 5y ago
Worth bearing in mind that the author has himself admitted to and apologized for factual errors in his article that could change some of his conclusions. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1499465032547061767?s=21 https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1499465032547061767?...
- ChemSpider 5y ago
  "Factual error" is a strong word for a minor issue. It does not change anything - because no one knows what viri were in the lab. And "China" refuses to share any data about it e. g. the missing virus database.
  - SantalBlush 5y ago
    Please god, someone just give me a single piece of evidence of a lab leak so I can run with it and decry the corruption of mainstream media. Nevermind any evidence to the contrary; it's plausible that there could be a conflict of interest, therefore I can throw all of that evidence in the trash. Something something Occam's razor.
ChemSpider 5y ago
" it would be an odd coincidence for a lab-leaked virus to have its first big super-spreading event at a live animal market," A good explanation for this that "used" (and thus infected) lab animals were sold at the market. Anyone who has ever been to China would not be surprised by this happening.
martingoodson 5y ago
Why is this being discussed now? Matt Yglesias has publicly admitted that this piece is flawed. This is critically important context that is being missed by everyone in this discussion: ‘…SIGNIFICANT factual error in my newsletter.’ ‘…we knew specifically that RaTG13 samples had been brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and studied there. That is not the case for this Laos virus. To me that discovery really does meaningfully detract from the plausibility of the lab leak story and I apologize — I simply missed this when it came out and failed to update my views.‘ https://mobile.twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1499467534202028033 https://mobile.twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1499467534202...
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  I love Matt Yglesias, but he is very savvy when it comes to riding the waves of Twitter interest. I chalk this up to that; he’s seeing how interested people are, he wants to talk about it, but his most interesting take is marginally conspiratorial. My reaction to this is, “Oh, Matt…” and moving on. I hope this doesn’t become his norm, and I really think he’s too grounded generally.
- elefanten 5y ago
  That doesnt change any of the most salient points of this saga: Virology research community is coming across shady and untrustworthy. And thats a bigger problem.
  - SantalBlush 5y ago
    It actually does change the most salient points of this saga.
- breck 5y ago
  I have not been following too closely, but it came out from the EcoHealth docs that bat samples were also being sent from Laos to Wuhan. Source (Nov 2021, not sure if my info is out of date): https://twitter.com/mattwridley/status/1462659372421718019 https://twitter.com/mattwridley/status/1462659372421718019 Which would mean that the article's argument stands, stronger.
bell-cot 5y ago
The important part: > ...the boring truth is that we don’t know where Covid-19 came from, we probably aren’t going to find out, and very little of consequence actually hinges on the answer. [emphasis mine] > Of course, politically it’s a big deal. The case for stricter supervision of virus-related lab ... Pandemics caused by new infectious diseases were a ~regular thing long before humans had labs studying viruses. Experts familiar with coronaviruses had been sounding alarm bells since the SARS outbreak of 2002-2003. It's d*mn obvious that local government officials in China completely botched the initial response, then a huge number of other government officials botched their own responses, all over the world. The endless arguments about "who's at fault" for COVID-19...my biggest take-away from them is that the world is really disfunctional, and there's minimal interest in making the future any better. Happily for me, I'm rather old, and probably won't be around for most of really bad years that the average HN'er will have to live through.
Comevius 5y ago
As far as I know there is no peer-reviewed research, or research done by virologists or epidemiologists that supports the lab leak theory. It's being pushed on social media by an internet activist group called DRASTIC. They are laying the cloak and dagger act thick, denying that there are good-faith investigations into the theory. Contrary to what they say however most of the world isn't interested in covering up the alleged conspiracy, it's just that the investigations are not at all conclusive. As a data scientist you can nudge things around until you find the pattern you are looking for, but virologists and epidemiologists must take their jobs much more seriously.
- SantalBlush 5y ago
  But there is a popular quote from Upton Sinclair that goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it," which basically means I can ignore what any professional says and claim they just have a conflict of interest. It works great.
  - shlant 5y ago
    yea it's frustrating how many people I've engaged with who lead with the "well who funded the study?" question before even looking at anything. It screams confirmation bias to me (the question is almost never applied equally to all information)
paulpauper 5y ago
This is like the Kennedy assassination. there is the official narrative, and at the same time other alternative narratives that the govt. will never entertain but are still also possible. You're never going to see a NYTs or WSJ headlines that says "lab leak confirmed by Whitehouse". It will always be something in the air.
- tim333 5y ago
  There was this, not that it amounted to much https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/donald-trump-coronavirus-chinese-lab-claim https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/donald-trump...
dukeofdoom 5y ago
This investigative journalists talking about US built biolabs in Ukraine. Now getting destroyed by Russia. https://twitter.com/RealGeorgeWebb1/status/1498661515360153605 https://twitter.com/RealGeorgeWebb1/status/14986615153601536... https://twitter.com/RealGeorgeWebb1 https://twitter.com/RealGeorgeWebb1 The world is a corrupt place.
hnplj 5y ago
ilaksh 5y ago
People are living in a fairy tale. Whether intentional or accidental lab leak, or accidental market incident, the effect has been the same. Covid-19 will be viewed historically as the Hiroshima of biowarfare. And actually biowarfare will be viewed in the future as a slightly less uncivilized alternative to nuclear warfare. Although they will be both be in the same category of horrible weapons to be avoided in general, nuclear will be seen as somewhat less evolved and more horrific. Especially, it is likely that Chinese will view biowarfare as a regrettable but necessary tactic, and again less destructive than nuclear warfare. The efficient production and distribution of vaccines or treatment is now a national security issue. The extreme political polarization is also now a security issue because it is blocking the efficient distribution of vaccines. For the American-led western coalition to maintain its dominance, there is an urgent need to either completely change the paradigm from one where overt force is generally accepted, or develop new effective weapons, such as space-based. Biowarfare is pretty much a non-starter for the west. What I keep hoping, probably quite unrealistically, is that we will have a new international citizen-led paradigm that supercedes nation-states and their brutal strategic operations. In my mind, global security boils down to merging the different information streams that various political factions tend to push to one extreme or another and even deliberately disconnect from each other.
thisrod 5y ago
I'm a bit disappointed that people with little connection to Asia are still making a big fuss about wet markets and exotic animals. In March 2020, it was natural for people to leap to conclusions, because the only thing anyone knew about the coronavirus was that it "came from" a Wuhan market with weird animals. Weird is socially relative. You eat pigs and pat dogs. Billions of people think that's weird and a bit gross. Fair enough, seeing how many diseases people have caught from them. Animals can carry germs that are dangerous to people. Wash your hands after you touch them. Objectively, a wet market is just a slaughterhouse. Here's what, in 2022, you should deduce from the fact that the first large coronavirus outbreak occurred in a slaughterhouse: coronavirus outbreaks occur in slaughterhouses. Obviously some animal carried the virus to the Wuhan market. It's very likely that animal was human, because of all the species there, only humans are known to catch the virus. Even if you found an infected pangolin, you'd have to suspect it caught the virus from its handlers.
- civilized 5y ago
  You say that 1. Pigs and dogs frequently transmit diseases to humans. 2. SARS-CoV-2 was "very likely" carried to the Wuhan market by humans, since only humans are "known" to catch the virus among species present at the market. I don't understand why you are so confident in #2 given #1? If animals frequently transmit diseases to humans, why would we assume this did not happen in the Wuhan market case? Have all species present at the market been exhaustively tested and proven not to contract or transmit the virus? That would be news to me. All I know is it's been reported that many species traded at the market are known to harbor coronaviruses. And what exactly is your theory of the origin? Surely the virus came from somewhere, and didn't just suddenly appear in humans without a source?
- ngc248 5y ago
  >>> I'm a bit disappointed that people with little connection to Asia are still making a big fuss about wet markets and exotic animals. Well people with little connection to Asia got corona, heck almost everyone across the world got corona and Asia, particularly wuhan's wet market has the first documented cases. So someone not connected to Asia making a big fuss is ok
cf141q5325 5y ago
The really depressing part is that the research project in question (where they introduced a furin cleave site into a coronavirus) has been known since early 2020. Newsweek had the link to the research project on the NiH website in March. And not just are they still stonewalling https://theintercept.com/2022/02/20/nih-coronavirus-research-wuhan-redacted/ https://theintercept.com/2022/02/20/nih-coronavirus-research... but the person in charge of the ecohealth alliance project in question is the leading source for any "debunking" of the lab leak hypothesis. Peter Daszak. Who also lead the WHO mission into figuring out the origins in China. This is a conflict of interests. Something Daszak has experience with, when he didnt disclose his in the first lancet paper painting lab leak as racist conspiracies. A paper he orchestrated and a conflict of interest the Lancet later acknowledged. There is an unwillingness to have a rational conversation about the likelihood of the furin cleavage site mutation occurring naturally with no trace in nature vs it escaping from a lab where we know such modifications were made to coronaviruses. Simply because Daszak said a lab leak was impossible and Fauci (Whos NiH funded the project) denied that Daszaks work was even gain of function research. And that has been enough for 2 years. edit: They have had the possibility for two years to actually debunk this by simply releasing what sequence project was working on. Its a publicly funded project btw. They havent and they apparently wont.
- WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
huffmsa 5y ago
> it would be an odd coincidence for a lab-leaked virus to have its first big super-spreading event at a live animal market, Not really if the market is literally next door. The infected lab worker goes over to do their after work shopping for a few days in a row and you've got your outbreak.
AndyNemmity 5y ago
In January 2020 there was discussion on Chinese Social Media about lab conditions at the plant, and that it came from there. There were multiple quality sources about it. There ended up being a crackdown on discussion about this from China with several people being taken away. I've always considered that a reasonable and boring explanation for the source, and I've seen no reason to update that point of view.
- zaik 5y ago
  Chinese government would crackdown on this discussion whether true or not.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    ... That doesn't exonerate them. Like, at all. It's weird that so many make this point as if it matters. Just because someone lies all the time, doesn't mean you don't INVESTIGATE them when something happens and they are implicated in the deaths of millions of people. Their failure to cooperate in investigation is a black mark against them regardless of how many other black marks they have. Is that so hard to grok?
bArray 5y ago
> The Times made a heat map that ignores the human cases and just plots the stall samples (I’m not totally sure why would you do that?), and then the finger points really squarely at a specific stall that sold live animals. This would ignore the fact that testers would over-sample points of interest. If you got some positive tests in some location, you concentrate your probing there. You would need to also display the probing density. Unfortunately I cannot see all of the article, it's not ideal that pay-to-read articles are posted here.
mdoms 5y ago
I just don't understand why people feel so strongly about this issue, nor why so many people are so confident in their belief. Both theories are plausible. We will never know which one is correct. And it doesn't matter either way. Nothing would change given certainty one way or another. It's a pointless discussion which has spilled enough ink and consumed enough brain cycles.
- mdoms 5y ago
  Perhaps someone could respond instead of downvoting me.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    The WIV was studying novel coronaviruses. American scientists called it unsafe in 2018. In 2019 a pandemic broke out a mouse-journey from its door. Millions of people died, and the lab has escaped independent investigation for over two years. It's weird that you don't see how that's relevant. For all the ink and brain-cycles, there's STILL gain of function research happening in metropolis areas, and if another pandemic broke out beside one there'd STILL be no process for investigating them. That's fucking BATTY.
rvba 5y ago
There are sources that claim that 300 yards from the we market there was a chinese virology inatitute building. Why this was never followed up baffles me.
twobitshifter 5y ago
Any details on how the researchers completed this detailed stall by stall mapping of the wet market and why it took this many years to be released? Back in the beginning of the pandemic, no animals at the wet market had tested positive and we were told that it was just in the humans at the market. They were seeing COVID on surfaces at the market at that time, but had opposite conclusions. > A number of early cases of the outbreak in Wuhan were tied to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. *Later*, researchers took environmental samples that suggested the virus had landed on surfaces in the market. But in the period since, tissue samples from the market's animals have revealed no trace of the virus. For the virus to jump from animals to humans, the animals have to actually be carrying it. >"None of the animals tested positive. So since January, this has not actually been particularly conclusive. But this has developed into a narrative," he said. Carlson said his colleagues in China have been careful and precise in their work, publishing data according to international regulations that any scientist anywhere in the world can examine, and that strongly supports the conclusion that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market wasn't the source of the virus. https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-did-not-start-at-wuhan-wet-market.html https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-did-not-start-at-wuhan-...
deleted 5y ago
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lamontcg 5y ago
> Over time, three basic issues emerged with this theory. No one has been able to identify: > A specific infected animal at the South China Seafood Market Won't ever happen now because they sterilized the market as a containment action almost immediately. With SARS-CoV-1 the virus wasn't as virulent and researchers were able to study it at the market where the pandemic originated. By acting fast to try to contain it, they erased any evidence of it. > An intermediate reservoir population in Hubei who were infected with a close relative of SARS-CoV-2 (pangolins were initially suspected but never confirmed) Any animal now observed to have SARS-CoV-2 in mainland China will have a high probability that humans gave the virus to it. That makes it difficult to track down which species was the intermediate animal without a time machine. > And that is the Covid-19 origin puzzle in a nutshell: how did a bat virus from a cave in Yunnan end up hundreds of miles away in Wuhan? Same problem with SARS-CoV-1 where the closest related bat virus is WIV1 which was isolated in 2013 (ten years after that outbreak) from bats in Hubei but which wound up causing an outbreak in wet markets about 700 miles away in Guangdong. RaTG13 is also separated by several decades of evolution from SARS-Cov-2, you can't close that gap with any experiment in a lab without a massive serial passage experiment through many millions of animals. And the really problematic issue for the lab leak theory is that it looks like Lineage A and B were separate spillover events of different variants.
lazyeye 5y ago
This is a great example of what would be obvious to a 10 year old (natural virus leaking from a lab) yet we've seen endless lies and distortions from the media and intelligentsia trying to obsfucate the idea. I dont understand how anyone can have anything other than utter contempt for the media and associated "experts".
- mandmandam 5y ago
  > I dont understand how anyone can have anything other than utter contempt for the media and associated "experts". Neither do I, but I suspect the answer comes down to the exploitation of human flaws such as tribalism, fear, overwhelm, and the systematic fucking of the education system.
ksec 5y ago
My simple question would be, if it was really a lab leak, wouldn't you expect the people working in lab to be infected first? Or is this assumption flawed? If so why? The two new preprint papers (“The Huanan market was the epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 emergence” and “SARS-CoV-2 emergence very likely resulted from at least two zoonotic events”), only trace back to December 2019. Why no go back further? Considering the "unknown" virus stated even in November and possibly October.
- tim333 5y ago
  Could have been one person at the lab got infected, stayed home when feeling ill, passed it on to family etc. There was a real covid lab leak in Taiwan by the way https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/taiwan-investigates-covid-lab-leak-scientist-tests-positive-bite-infected-mouse/ https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/taiwan-investigates-covid-lab... No one actually caught it off the researcher that time.
  - ksec 5y ago
    Ah. Thank You. Because if it started in November, very likely October, and possibly in September. I thought it would have started with those working in the Lab first. I still dont know why every report are pin-pointing at the December Date. I thought it is rather misleading.
    - tim333 5y ago
      I think the cases officially recorded by the Chinese start in December but all the scientific projections think it's earlier see eg. https://mobile.twitter.com/ydeigin/status/1500235709508198400 https://mobile.twitter.com/ydeigin/status/150023570950819840...
      - ksec 5y ago
        They stopped all flight to Wuhan by 10th of November [1] ( even if the notice said 15 ). That was when they knew it was serious enough. Chatter of unknown "Lung Diseases" was already spreading by end of October on WeChat. [1] https://www.hongkongpost.hk/en/about_us/whats_new/notices/index_id_798.html https://www.hongkongpost.hk/en/about_us/whats_new/notices/in...
rr808 5y ago
I'm pretty sure if there were a bunch of dead bats/mice/monkeys coming out of the lab it wouldn't be unexpected for some to turn up in the local market. Its worth reading about the Smallpox outbreak in the UK, where it was being studied in a university building with poor security. These things aren't secure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbreak_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbreak_in_the_...
cosmiccatnap 5y ago
Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
I’m not convinced by the bioweapon debunking either for that matter. But I can see how legitimate research can be made to look like weapons research and vice versa, so I have no idea how one would go about with either proving or disproving it.
wesleywt 5y ago
I still don't understand: 1. How you would prove this? 2. That it matters until you can prove it happened Lab safety does matter though. Signed -> Me a lab scientist.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  1. - You'd investigate the god damn lab, immediately. Failing to do this is equivalent to admitting it came from the lab. If I go into the kitchen and the cookie jar is empty, and there's a trail of crumbs leading to my kids bed, and the kid has stolen the CCTV tape from the kitchen that night and won't let me see it, do I then still have to prove that the kid ate the cookies? 2. Yes, it fucking matters. Millions of people died, and there were warnings about the safety of that lab the year before the outbreak. There are still people doing GOF research in ultra-densely populated cities, and we've had no discussion of accountability or oversight of such labs. That's insanity on an ultra-dense level. Signed -> IDGAF who you are.
- tim333 5y ago
  1. There are various possible ways. Maybe a whistleblower. Maybe it's in the lab database they still won't show. Maybe the research is detailed in EcoHealths emails they still won't show. etc. 2. We should probably improve on the two most likely sources - lab or wet market.
hakdbha 5y ago
maxutility 5y ago
As the person who originally posted this to HN, after reading some of the refutations of Matt Y’s piece (the OP), I’ve come to believe the evidence for zoonotic origin is stronger than Matt Y gives credit for. One short rebuttal I found particularly understandable to a layperson comes from a prominent economist (not a virologist), pointing out a few considerations that Matt’s piece appears to give insufficient credence to: https://www.themoneyillusion.com/case-closed-2/ https://www.themoneyillusion.com/case-closed-2/ There’s also the twitter thread by one of the original research article coauthors, but I actually found that harder to evaluate as a layperson. In particular: 1. Matts piece may overweight how much of a coincidence the virus emerging in Wuhan was if it were zoonotic 2. Matt’s piece may underweight the coincidence of emerging at a live animal market if it were a lab leak 3. Matt’s piece underweights the finding that the market hosted both the original A and B variants
eggy 5y ago
The lab is only 27 km from the wet market along two main arteries. How about the idea a compromised lab worker went to the wet market on the way home, or for a prepared lunch and it spread to the general population that way?
tim333 5y ago
One recent find that makes me doubt the debunking: >doctors in Wuhan said that unless pneumonia cases were linked to the Huanan market, they did not meet Wuhan Municipal Health Commission standards and were often not reported or counted. https://mobile.twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1499566651343360009 https://mobile.twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/149956665134336000...

358 points by maxutility 5y ago

hnplj 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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jules 5y ago

The number of early cases connected to the market could be partly confirmation bias -- you detect an early case at the market, and then start to investigate everyone connected to the market, and surprise! almost all of the cases you find are connected to the market.

maxutility 5y ago

The article (by Matt Yglesias) is more nuanced than the title may suggest. Here’s a quote that gets at the gist of the piece: “The evidence really does show pretty clearly that there were one or more superspreader events at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. I just don’t think that’s really what the lab leak debate is about; it’s about why there was a superspreader event at the market. Did an infected animal pass it to people there or did a person who got infected at the lab pass it to people there?”

bediger4000 5y ago
Thank you for including the "by Matt Yglesias". Yglesias periodically admits to trolling, but as near as I can tell, also wants to be taken Very Seriously sometimes. I personally think he comes too close to "trolling" a lot of the time he wants to be taken Very Seriously, so I have to be careful when reading his takes. I would advise other people to also read Matt Yglesias carefully to decide if he's trolling in any given article.
- _dain_ 5y ago
  poisoning the well
- xxpor 5y ago
  I can't recall an actual article where he's trolling. That's more of a twitter thing.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  I know we're not supposed to ask why people are downvoted but I'd be fascinated to know why you were downvoted. I like Matt Yglesias, I think his Very Serious work is usually at least interesting, and I find some of his trollish witticisms very appealing. But I think you've hit the nail on the head; he creates a sort of Poe's Law situation around his own work because of them. In this case I think he's overreaching a little. But then I also think the lab leak theory was discredited and avoided partly from well-meaning applications of the wrong reasons, because even if you make a serious review of it as a professional accident, the Wrong People will definitely like and share your work for their own awful/vile/violent reasons. And nobody wants to be part of that.
- jeffmh 5y ago
  While I am an Yglesias fan, I don’t think your take is unfair. Matt often describes himself as a professional take-haver, and admits to trying to put out somewhat contrarian takes on topics. One of my favorite recent columns of his was a love letter to the “Slatepitches” that Slate.com used to be known for, as an example of unique voice and differentiation in mainstream media that may be going by the wayside in the age of social media: “ Slate had a whole editorial style that was based around provocative — some would say trolly — articles and up-is-down theses. At its best, Slate championed unpopular causes and provoked fantastic debates. At its worst, Slate seemed to be deliberately stretching to come up with indefensible ideas.” https://www.slowboring.com/p/slatepitch?s=r https://www.slowboring.com/p/slatepitch?s=r
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    > Slate.com used to be known for, as an example of unique voice and differentiation in mainstream media that may be going by the wayside in the age of social media: “ Slate had a whole editorial style that was based around provocative — some would say trolly — articles and up-is-down theses. How the hell is that unique either in "MSM" or online media? He basically just described Gawker, BoingBoing, DailyKos, and a slew of other "hot take" sites. In terms of traditional media, every city has the garbage tabloid-level paper.
dluan 5y ago
I would not take anything Matt Yglesias says seriously, at all.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Why?
  - PCGamer_Empath 5y ago
    I genuinely thought Matt Yglesias was a satirist until recently. It's entirely possible that I'm not the first one to infer that from his "professional take haver" persona (which I thought was a caricature.) I don't have a strong opinion about him as a journalist in general because I'm not intimately familiar with most of his work, but I found this particular article kind of underwhelming. It reads as a direct extension of the title, Breaking News: Local Man Feels Unconvinced About COVID Origins... like, okay? It comes across a bit navel-gazing to frame a "News" piece as an update on one's personal opinion, especially considering doing so provides the author cover to say "Well I was just riffing!" later if he happens to be conclusively disproved.
3np 5y ago
Why would those be mutually exclusive? Ie it could have originated in the lab, somehow got out into the local environment, and then started spreading in the market through an infected animal.
- jeffmh 5y ago
  I think your comment is in keeping with Matt’s point, that virus spread among humans or animals at the Wuhan seafood market doesn’t on its own contradict the possibility of a lab leak.
  - FabHK 5y ago
    Yes. Some more quotes might clarify: > These papers fill in some interesting details about the early outbreak at the market in Wuhan where the epidemic was first identified, but they don’t identify an intermediate host species that caught the virus from bats and then spread it to humans. Nor do they identify a precursor virus in a population of wild bats that lives near Wuhan or near farms supplying the Wuhan market. They show that the virus was introduced to the market at some point, but that could have been by humans who got the bug at a lab. > And so we’re left with the exact same dueling origin theories: it would be an odd coincidence for a lab-leaked virus to have its first big super-spreading event at a live animal market, but it would also be an odd coincidence for a devastating zoonotic coronavirus plague to occur in a city that happened to host a lab doing research on coronaviruses. It’s a genuinely weird situation. > And that is the Covid-19 origin puzzle in a nutshell: how did a bat virus from a cave in Yunnan end up hundreds of miles away in Wuhan? ... > It’s thanks to the hard work and diligent efforts of those WIV researchers that we know about Bat RaTG13. But this work also offers an explanation for how a bat virus could have traveled 700 miles from rural Yunnan to Wuhan: it was transported years ago by virus researchers. > So did the virus travel from Yunnan to Hubei a second time in an unrelated voyage, this time bound for the seafood market rather than the virus lab? Or did it travel from the lab to the market? > [...] the evidence is all consistent with the theory that a human got the virus at the lab, brought it to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and triggered a super-spreading event at the market (potentially infecting raccoon dogs along with humans).

pbiggar 5y ago

Here's a rebuttal to this by one of the authors of the paper: https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1499406148251754497 https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/14994061482517544...

timr 5y ago
This is not a "rebuttal". This is terrible. Rasmussen asserts things she could not possibly know (e.g. the Wuhan lab did not have "the fucking virus" -- we don't know what they had or did not have, because the Chinese government is not exactly being forthright on the matter), and focuses on a corner of the article (a side debate about RaTG13 and the physical proximity of it to Wuhan), while completely brushing off the core argument of the piece: the authors of these papers have not demonstrated that the early infections at the market came from animals. That's the whole ballgame. Rasmussen spends a lot of words setting up and knocking down straw men, but there's nothing else here. To make it worse, she is rude, dismissive, profane and needlessly aggressive. As a former researcher, if a high-profile reporter published a piece questioning my research in a polite and civil manner, I'd like to think I'd be mature enough to engage with that person constructively in a public forum.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  Not sure if you read it, but in the New York Magazine article by Nicholson Baker [0], that the rest of the press really hammered them for publishing, there is one bit that I still find really persistently interesting. He's talking about the lab's lead coronavirus researcher, Shi Zhengli: Could this new virus, she wondered, have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records and found no exact matches. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink for days.” If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab. It's reminiscent of the idea that the CIA were so jumpy about the JFK and RFK assassinations not because they know they did them, but that their fingers were in so many pies with so many undesirables that they didn't know they weren't involved. I don't think we'll ever know for sure, and I think it's a vanishingly unlikely idea that there was any malice. But an accidental escape? There are viruses named after accidental escapes. They happen. [0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...

Jerry2 5y ago

If anyone wants to go down the "lab leak" rabbit hole, check out Charles Rixey's Substack [1]. He's assembled a massive database of articles and a complete timeline of events [2] that lead to COVID-19 pandemic. He's one of the members of DRASTIC which is a loose group of researchers looking into the "lab leak" hypothesis. [3][4][5] Even Moderna's CEO Stephane Bancel does not discount it and say's "it's possible" after researchers found a genetic sequence in SARS-CoV-2 virus which was patented by Moderna three years prior to pandemic. [6] [1] https://prometheusshrugged.substack.com/ https://prometheusshrugged.substack.com/ [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353547700_SARS-CoV-2_Origins_Research_Reference_Project_-_20220115 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353547700_SARS-CoV-... [3] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRASTIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRASTIC [5] https://drasticscience.com/ https://drasticscience.com/ [6] https://youtu.be/YcgE-5a1Ztc?t=436 https://youtu.be/YcgE-5a1Ztc?t=436

doopy1 5y ago
What's their verdict on the probability that it's a lab leak?
wh313 5y ago
I find it suspicious that very few of these "researchers" seem to even have any expertise in virology. Furthermore, very few of them seem to even have a PhD in their respective fields, nor any significant institutional affiliations. Two of them at least have research profiles, but their fields of expertise are in microbiology and nitrogen fixation, which have very little to do with virology or pathology. Their primary mode of publication also seems to be ArXiV and ResearchGate, which doesn't go through peer review, so there is no good way to verify their findings. Calling these people researchers would be equivalent to calling your average software developer a physicist. [1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=LLlFfdUAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=LLlFfdUAAAAJ... [2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=YWuJkRsAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=YWuJkRsAAAAJ...

rossdavidh 5y ago

"But we should keep in mind that the virologists publishing papers downplaying the possibility of a lab leak are not disinterested parties in this. The political context is a debate about regulating virus labs, and it’s hardly shocking that a large segment of the virus lab community doesn’t like that idea." This, I think, is the crux of our problem. Almost anyone who knows enough about the field to have an informed opinion, is involved enough to have an incentive to convince the world that it was not their profession, that unleashed this. Scientists are human, not demons but also not angels. It would be hard to convince yourself, that your profession was responsible for this. We should listen to what they have to say, but not expect them to be dispassionate and unbiased investigators of the question.

FredPret 5y ago
I know nothing about virology, so I have this question: why do it? What is the loss if we shut down all virology? They do gain of function research, breeding deadlier viruses, and then what? Do they use this to pre-develop vaccines?
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  One use is to have understanding of how viruses work, so that you can accurately predict spread. If we assume that SARS and MERS (both coronaviruses that seem nearly certain _not_ to have been made in labs) required a knowledge of how coronaviruses work, then a lab doing the general kind of work that was done in Wuhan is real. For example, we already knew that the spike protein was critical in reproduction of the covid-19 virus, whereas we might not have known as much about that if we had no virology labs (I'm not an expert in the field, I might be wrong here). But, for any particular line of research, your question is still a valid one. Is this particular research likely to have a payoff worth the (inevitably non-zero) risk? The issue is how (and who) to make that decision.
morelisp 5y ago
As opposed to journalists, who would never keep an exciting story running despite weak evidence.

roenxi 5y ago

So something that has entered the discourse of HN [0] is that there is a large PR industry that powers the corporate press. That is where a lot of the money comes from which decides what & how things get covered. Something I think is plausible is that they've figures out a technique for controlling the narrative in the internet age where they take the range of opinions in a group with positions they don't like, identify a really wild one, debunk it, then tar the whole group with that opinion. I'm not thinking any particular group, although I'm guessing it is deployed against literally all political protests. The technique really needs a well known name. I doubt that is happening for lab-leak stuff since nobody is making money off it (and if the Chinese government cares they can just restrict access to info). But it is really interesting to note how difficult it was to restart the conversation once the lab leak theory was "debunked", so I'm sure the technical people who want to control the narrative took note. It was a nice clear example of how the dynamics come together. [0] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

car_analogy 5y ago
> The technique really needs a well known name. The weak-man fallacy: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...
- iratewizard 5y ago
  This fallacy might be useful in a debate, but it's useless in real life. It tells us to ignore basic pattern recognition in favor of treating everyone as an individual, despite our brain's hardware being incapable of effectively doing so. There exist for everyone a hypothetical black man on a spectrum from Ice Cube in "Are We There Yet" to Ice Cube in "Straight outta Compton". If you see this hypothetical person coming towards you, you will feel uncomfortable because your reptile brain wants you keep you alive. Everyone's lived experience is different. Everyone is entitled to a version of Ice Cube that scares them and the freedom to not associate with the people who they don't trust. Everyone is entitled to think a self-diagnosed mental disorder is disgusting and steals light from the actually afflicted.

tootie 5y ago

"it would also be an odd coincidence for a devastating zoonotic coronavirus plague to occur in a city that happened to host a lab doing research on coronaviruses" Uh, no it's not a coincidence at all. It was doing coronavirus research because SARS-1 was known to have jumped from bats to humans in China and Wuhan had a lot of bats near human population. China (and everybody else) had spent decades on high alert for another bat-born coronavirus variant and it was considered a very likely source of the next pandemic. So, they dedicated a ton of resources to studying exactly that. It would be like expressing shock at the coincidence of war breaking out in the exact spot where two opposing armies have been pointing guns at each other for 20 years.

burnished 5y ago
They do point out that there are no discovered precursors in the bat populations of that region.
dboreham 5y ago
Some confused logic here. You can't have a war without two opposing armies. So places where war breaks out are limited to only locations with two opposing armies in position. You might have, say, 5 such places in the world, but a war starts in only one of them. The probability of war is O(0.2) across that set of locations. The probability is O(0) in all other locations. If war breaks out you wouldn't marvel at the coincidence because having two armies was a prerequisite. Now, you can have a virus pandemic originate anywhere there are large numbers of humans (too sparse a population and it doesn't spread far). You don't need a virus lab in order to begin a pandemic. There is a theory that you could start a pandemic with a virus lab. In order to have a lab-originated pandemic you do need a lab at your location or origin. Therefore it's a coincidence that a non-lab-originated pandemic began in a city with a lab. It's not a coincidence that a lab-originated pandemic began in a city with a lab. So if you had a lab-originated pandemic you would not be surprised that there is a lab at the location of origin. You can not however conclude that if a pandemic originated in a city that has a lab then it must have been a lab-originated pandemic. There's no probabilistic link between those two known facts. Causation only goes one way.

prirun 5y ago

Online "news" has gotten to the same point with me as TV "news": I basically don't believe anything anymore ... it's all just noise. One thing might make more sense to me personally, but if the power-that-be have decided that's not the "right" thing, then I'm labeled a conspiracy theorist. So I just believe what makes sense to me. I'm probably wrong as often as right, but that would be true if I tried to make sense out of today's news too.

sb057 5y ago
If some event doesn't have a direct personal effect on you, it's probably nothing you need to know about or be concerned with. If it does have a direct personal effect on you, you'll find out about it without being told.
tootie 5y ago
I mean, that's a really bad position to take. You can't evaluate news based on the medium. Evaluate based on the credibility of the source. MSM reporting on COVID has been very consistent and very accurate. Almost all of the mis and disinformation is coming from political sources or unqualified opinionators. If you just follow the most obvious sources like the NY Times, BBC, NPR and the like, you'd be right over 95% of the time.
calumetregion 5y ago
Media is and has always been propaganda. All of it. You have to start from there to make sense of the world. We ran into trouble at some point with critical thinking. I believe prosperity and comfort for three generations in the West may have led to this type of thing by default, unfortunately. To flip it around...you can also make an argument that PR and propaganda itself has led to prosperity and comfort. Or at least it was something to do that filled time and created some cool apps and fashions. Which is awesome until you realize you're not safe from war.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > Media is and has always been propaganda. All of it. You have to start from there to make sense of the world. How does any amount of critical thinking get around this, assuming it is true? If you hear the same bit of news a dozen different ways from many outlets, it must be true? If all media is propaganda, you can't trust anything that you have not experienced personally.

lil_dispaches 5y ago

Downplaying the lab leak is dangerous, because it is the difference between an accident and mass murder. I think the best evidence for a lab leak is common sense. https://dispatchito.substack.com/p/the-strongest-evidence-of-lab-genesis https://dispatchito.substack.com/p/the-strongest-evidence-of...

titzer 5y ago
> I think the best evidence for a lab leak is common sense. The best "evidence" for Newtonian physics (as opposed to General Relativity) is common sense. Common sense is not evidence.
- lil_dispaches 5y ago
  Evidence is not proof. There is lots of evidence. A hypothesis is not a theory. Being loose with language and concepts is dangerous.
  - titzer 5y ago
    Evidence is facts and information, not vague feelings, no matter how "common sense" it seems. You couldn't convict someone in a court of law with common sense, nor support a scientific theory with common sense. You need this external thing in the world that exists outside your mind. We have the word evidence to mean that external thing that exists outside your mind.
    - lil_dispaches 5y ago
      Is there somehow more evidence of natural origin than lab leak? By common sense, this is what I mean: the strain of coronavirus that caused covid-19 was very strong, much stronger than any previous strain, and we have seen many. Common sense says we have seen all the strains Nature could throw at us already, and none have been that deadly. So common sense leads to looking for evidence i new light, in new places. Also, evidence is not fact. Evidence is anything. Evidence was O.J. Simpson's hand didn't fit the glove. That was weak evidence, but that turned into "proof", via not-guilty verdict. Even proof is not fact (there are no facts lol). Evidence is anything you can find to solve the crime. After you collect evidence, you go through it at piece together the story. Read a book yo.

MikeGale 5y ago

On this issue I suggest figuring it out for yourself. Look into the technology a bit and decide. This issue illustrates that public pronouncements and published material can be misinformation and opposite to the obvious truth. Great ways to identify liars for yourself.

jmull 5y ago
Crackpot logic

dataflow 5y ago

I just couldn't take the "research" seriously when I read this: > They said they found no support for an alternate theory that the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. No support? Really? Not just "weak" support, but not a single shred of support whatsoever? So it's just a hoax? There's a long article going into what would be otherwise some very strange and implausible coincidences [1] surrounding the issue for those curious. Surely unbiased research into the topic would deem these to be worthy of at least some cursory mentions (and ideally, some debunking)? Moreover, this might be an interesting read: In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet. [...] During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory. [2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 [2] 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...

asojfdowgh 5y ago
Coincidences arn't evidence though, Coincidences don't need to be debunked
- pauldenton 5y ago
  If you want to dismiss the connection between pieces of evidence, you need an argument. Not just calling them a coincidence and dismissing the connection out of hand.
- esperent 5y ago
  Enough coincidences absolutely do need to be debunked. I'm not sure that's the case here, but talking in the abstract - if you start to see tens or hundreds of well documented coincidences, there comes a point at which you can no longer reasonably dismiss them.

FabHK 5y ago

Is that the complete article? Or does it continue (for subscribers) after this paragraph? > But you could also draw a map focused on the human cases that would have shown a cluster in the other corner. And certainly the evidence is all consistent with the theory that a human got the virus at the lab, brought it to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and triggered a super-spreading event at the market (potentially infecting raccoon dogs along with humans).

jeffmh 5y ago
That paragraph is around two thirds of the way through the full post that subscribers see.

_robbywashere 5y ago

There will likely never be a smoking gun. But provocative reasons for globally felt tragedies are always fodder for conspiracy theories. Have fun!

nullc 5y ago

How does this not mention project defuse, the NIAID funded EcoHealth Alliance research program taking place in wuhan which sought to: 1. Study immune boosting drugs in bats. 2. Take bat corona virus and 'predict' how it can become infectious to humans by incubating it in humanized tissues until it thrives in them, and if that is insufficient directly modifying it to insert a human-specific furin cleavage into the viruses genetic code for the spike protein (as this is an already known barrier to human infectiousness). 3. Inoculate wild bats against human infectious corona viruses by administering drugs to boost their immune system and exposing them to the viruses developed in the prior phase. Sars-cov-2's primary functional difference from its nearest known wild ancestor is exactly the cleavage proposed in defuse. However, defuse proposed studying a different wild virus than the ancestor of sars-cov-2. The nearest known wild ancestor of sars-cov-2 is the virus the same researchers were working with immediately before the project proposal for defuse. DARPA had declined to fund the project, with the view that it violated the US government moratorium on funding gain-of-function research ( https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/3012?r=18 https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/301... ). NIH has taken the view that this project was not gain-of-function research because the particular virus they were experimenting on could already infect humans (just not particularly well) and because they were directed to pause research and report if they found a ten fold increase in infectivity (the researchers seemingly failed to do so, but did eventually report when they hit a 10,000 fold increase in apparent viral load). https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop...

kazinator 5y ago

The lab leak hypothesis and the seafood market hypotheses are not necessarily in conflict. If a lab made a boo boo with a virus sample, they could cover up the institution's own infections, and purposely get some people sick at the market to make it look like it started there.

dahdum 5y ago
Sure, but there plenty of more likely scenarios that require no malice or conspiracy.
- kazinator 5y ago
  I'm only pointing out (one possible) way in which two hypotheses are not conflicting. If any such a way exists, then the hypotheses cannot be regarded as mutually exclusive. It is an error of reasoning to consider the lab leak and seafood market hypotheses to be competing and mutually exclusive. I find it extremely plausible that in the event of a lab leak, there would be some kind of cover up. And that there has been a cover up of something is obvious.

duckfruit 5y ago

Worth bearing in mind that the author has himself admitted to and apologized for factual errors in his article that could change some of his conclusions. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1499465032547061767?s=21 https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1499465032547061767?...

ChemSpider 5y ago
"Factual error" is a strong word for a minor issue. It does not change anything - because no one knows what viri were in the lab. And "China" refuses to share any data about it e. g. the missing virus database.
- SantalBlush 5y ago
  Please god, someone just give me a single piece of evidence of a lab leak so I can run with it and decry the corruption of mainstream media. Nevermind any evidence to the contrary; it's plausible that there could be a conflict of interest, therefore I can throw all of that evidence in the trash. Something something Occam's razor.

ChemSpider 5y ago

" it would be an odd coincidence for a lab-leaked virus to have its first big super-spreading event at a live animal market," A good explanation for this that "used" (and thus infected) lab animals were sold at the market. Anyone who has ever been to China would not be surprised by this happening.

martingoodson 5y ago

Why is this being discussed now? Matt Yglesias has publicly admitted that this piece is flawed. This is critically important context that is being missed by everyone in this discussion: ‘…SIGNIFICANT factual error in my newsletter.’ ‘…we knew specifically that RaTG13 samples had been brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and studied there. That is not the case for this Laos virus. To me that discovery really does meaningfully detract from the plausibility of the lab leak story and I apologize — I simply missed this when it came out and failed to update my views.‘ https://mobile.twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1499467534202028033 https://mobile.twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1499467534202...

TameAntelope 5y ago
I love Matt Yglesias, but he is very savvy when it comes to riding the waves of Twitter interest. I chalk this up to that; he’s seeing how interested people are, he wants to talk about it, but his most interesting take is marginally conspiratorial. My reaction to this is, “Oh, Matt…” and moving on. I hope this doesn’t become his norm, and I really think he’s too grounded generally.
elefanten 5y ago
That doesnt change any of the most salient points of this saga: Virology research community is coming across shady and untrustworthy. And thats a bigger problem.
- SantalBlush 5y ago
  It actually does change the most salient points of this saga.
breck 5y ago
I have not been following too closely, but it came out from the EcoHealth docs that bat samples were also being sent from Laos to Wuhan. Source (Nov 2021, not sure if my info is out of date): https://twitter.com/mattwridley/status/1462659372421718019 https://twitter.com/mattwridley/status/1462659372421718019 Which would mean that the article's argument stands, stronger.

bell-cot 5y ago

The important part: > ...the boring truth is that we don’t know where Covid-19 came from, we probably aren’t going to find out, and very little of consequence actually hinges on the answer. [emphasis mine] > Of course, politically it’s a big deal. The case for stricter supervision of virus-related lab ... Pandemics caused by new infectious diseases were a ~regular thing long before humans had labs studying viruses. Experts familiar with coronaviruses had been sounding alarm bells since the SARS outbreak of 2002-2003. It's d*mn obvious that local government officials in China completely botched the initial response, then a huge number of other government officials botched their own responses, all over the world. The endless arguments about "who's at fault" for COVID-19...my biggest take-away from them is that the world is really disfunctional, and there's minimal interest in making the future any better. Happily for me, I'm rather old, and probably won't be around for most of really bad years that the average HN'er will have to live through.

Comevius 5y ago

As far as I know there is no peer-reviewed research, or research done by virologists or epidemiologists that supports the lab leak theory. It's being pushed on social media by an internet activist group called DRASTIC. They are laying the cloak and dagger act thick, denying that there are good-faith investigations into the theory. Contrary to what they say however most of the world isn't interested in covering up the alleged conspiracy, it's just that the investigations are not at all conclusive. As a data scientist you can nudge things around until you find the pattern you are looking for, but virologists and epidemiologists must take their jobs much more seriously.

SantalBlush 5y ago
But there is a popular quote from Upton Sinclair that goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it," which basically means I can ignore what any professional says and claim they just have a conflict of interest. It works great.
- shlant 5y ago
  yea it's frustrating how many people I've engaged with who lead with the "well who funded the study?" question before even looking at anything. It screams confirmation bias to me (the question is almost never applied equally to all information)

paulpauper 5y ago

This is like the Kennedy assassination. there is the official narrative, and at the same time other alternative narratives that the govt. will never entertain but are still also possible. You're never going to see a NYTs or WSJ headlines that says "lab leak confirmed by Whitehouse". It will always be something in the air.

tim333 5y ago
There was this, not that it amounted to much https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/donald-trump-coronavirus-chinese-lab-claim https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/donald-trump...

dukeofdoom 5y ago

This investigative journalists talking about US built biolabs in Ukraine. Now getting destroyed by Russia. https://twitter.com/RealGeorgeWebb1/status/1498661515360153605 https://twitter.com/RealGeorgeWebb1/status/14986615153601536... https://twitter.com/RealGeorgeWebb1 https://twitter.com/RealGeorgeWebb1 The world is a corrupt place.

hnplj 5y ago

ilaksh 5y ago

People are living in a fairy tale. Whether intentional or accidental lab leak, or accidental market incident, the effect has been the same. Covid-19 will be viewed historically as the Hiroshima of biowarfare. And actually biowarfare will be viewed in the future as a slightly less uncivilized alternative to nuclear warfare. Although they will be both be in the same category of horrible weapons to be avoided in general, nuclear will be seen as somewhat less evolved and more horrific. Especially, it is likely that Chinese will view biowarfare as a regrettable but necessary tactic, and again less destructive than nuclear warfare. The efficient production and distribution of vaccines or treatment is now a national security issue. The extreme political polarization is also now a security issue because it is blocking the efficient distribution of vaccines. For the American-led western coalition to maintain its dominance, there is an urgent need to either completely change the paradigm from one where overt force is generally accepted, or develop new effective weapons, such as space-based. Biowarfare is pretty much a non-starter for the west. What I keep hoping, probably quite unrealistically, is that we will have a new international citizen-led paradigm that supercedes nation-states and their brutal strategic operations. In my mind, global security boils down to merging the different information streams that various political factions tend to push to one extreme or another and even deliberately disconnect from each other.

thisrod 5y ago

I'm a bit disappointed that people with little connection to Asia are still making a big fuss about wet markets and exotic animals. In March 2020, it was natural for people to leap to conclusions, because the only thing anyone knew about the coronavirus was that it "came from" a Wuhan market with weird animals. Weird is socially relative. You eat pigs and pat dogs. Billions of people think that's weird and a bit gross. Fair enough, seeing how many diseases people have caught from them. Animals can carry germs that are dangerous to people. Wash your hands after you touch them. Objectively, a wet market is just a slaughterhouse. Here's what, in 2022, you should deduce from the fact that the first large coronavirus outbreak occurred in a slaughterhouse: coronavirus outbreaks occur in slaughterhouses. Obviously some animal carried the virus to the Wuhan market. It's very likely that animal was human, because of all the species there, only humans are known to catch the virus. Even if you found an infected pangolin, you'd have to suspect it caught the virus from its handlers.

civilized 5y ago
You say that 1. Pigs and dogs frequently transmit diseases to humans. 2. SARS-CoV-2 was "very likely" carried to the Wuhan market by humans, since only humans are "known" to catch the virus among species present at the market. I don't understand why you are so confident in #2 given #1? If animals frequently transmit diseases to humans, why would we assume this did not happen in the Wuhan market case? Have all species present at the market been exhaustively tested and proven not to contract or transmit the virus? That would be news to me. All I know is it's been reported that many species traded at the market are known to harbor coronaviruses. And what exactly is your theory of the origin? Surely the virus came from somewhere, and didn't just suddenly appear in humans without a source?
ngc248 5y ago
>>> I'm a bit disappointed that people with little connection to Asia are still making a big fuss about wet markets and exotic animals. Well people with little connection to Asia got corona, heck almost everyone across the world got corona and Asia, particularly wuhan's wet market has the first documented cases. So someone not connected to Asia making a big fuss is ok

cf141q5325 5y ago

The really depressing part is that the research project in question (where they introduced a furin cleave site into a coronavirus) has been known since early 2020. Newsweek had the link to the research project on the NiH website in March. And not just are they still stonewalling https://theintercept.com/2022/02/20/nih-coronavirus-research-wuhan-redacted/ https://theintercept.com/2022/02/20/nih-coronavirus-research... but the person in charge of the ecohealth alliance project in question is the leading source for any "debunking" of the lab leak hypothesis. Peter Daszak. Who also lead the WHO mission into figuring out the origins in China. This is a conflict of interests. Something Daszak has experience with, when he didnt disclose his in the first lancet paper painting lab leak as racist conspiracies. A paper he orchestrated and a conflict of interest the Lancet later acknowledged. There is an unwillingness to have a rational conversation about the likelihood of the furin cleavage site mutation occurring naturally with no trace in nature vs it escaping from a lab where we know such modifications were made to coronaviruses. Simply because Daszak said a lab leak was impossible and Fauci (Whos NiH funded the project) denied that Daszaks work was even gain of function research. And that has been enough for 2 years. edit: They have had the possibility for two years to actually debunk this by simply releasing what sequence project was working on. Its a publicly funded project btw. They havent and they apparently wont.

WaxedChewbacca 5y ago

huffmsa 5y ago

> it would be an odd coincidence for a lab-leaked virus to have its first big super-spreading event at a live animal market, Not really if the market is literally next door. The infected lab worker goes over to do their after work shopping for a few days in a row and you've got your outbreak.

AndyNemmity 5y ago

In January 2020 there was discussion on Chinese Social Media about lab conditions at the plant, and that it came from there. There were multiple quality sources about it. There ended up being a crackdown on discussion about this from China with several people being taken away. I've always considered that a reasonable and boring explanation for the source, and I've seen no reason to update that point of view.

zaik 5y ago
Chinese government would crackdown on this discussion whether true or not.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  ... That doesn't exonerate them. Like, at all. It's weird that so many make this point as if it matters. Just because someone lies all the time, doesn't mean you don't INVESTIGATE them when something happens and they are implicated in the deaths of millions of people. Their failure to cooperate in investigation is a black mark against them regardless of how many other black marks they have. Is that so hard to grok?

bArray 5y ago

> The Times made a heat map that ignores the human cases and just plots the stall samples (I’m not totally sure why would you do that?), and then the finger points really squarely at a specific stall that sold live animals. This would ignore the fact that testers would over-sample points of interest. If you got some positive tests in some location, you concentrate your probing there. You would need to also display the probing density. Unfortunately I cannot see all of the article, it's not ideal that pay-to-read articles are posted here.

mdoms 5y ago

I just don't understand why people feel so strongly about this issue, nor why so many people are so confident in their belief. Both theories are plausible. We will never know which one is correct. And it doesn't matter either way. Nothing would change given certainty one way or another. It's a pointless discussion which has spilled enough ink and consumed enough brain cycles.

mdoms 5y ago
Perhaps someone could respond instead of downvoting me.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  The WIV was studying novel coronaviruses. American scientists called it unsafe in 2018. In 2019 a pandemic broke out a mouse-journey from its door. Millions of people died, and the lab has escaped independent investigation for over two years. It's weird that you don't see how that's relevant. For all the ink and brain-cycles, there's STILL gain of function research happening in metropolis areas, and if another pandemic broke out beside one there'd STILL be no process for investigating them. That's fucking BATTY.

rvba 5y ago

There are sources that claim that 300 yards from the we market there was a chinese virology inatitute building. Why this was never followed up baffles me.

twobitshifter 5y ago

Any details on how the researchers completed this detailed stall by stall mapping of the wet market and why it took this many years to be released? Back in the beginning of the pandemic, no animals at the wet market had tested positive and we were told that it was just in the humans at the market. They were seeing COVID on surfaces at the market at that time, but had opposite conclusions. > A number of early cases of the outbreak in Wuhan were tied to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. *Later*, researchers took environmental samples that suggested the virus had landed on surfaces in the market. But in the period since, tissue samples from the market's animals have revealed no trace of the virus. For the virus to jump from animals to humans, the animals have to actually be carrying it. >"None of the animals tested positive. So since January, this has not actually been particularly conclusive. But this has developed into a narrative," he said. Carlson said his colleagues in China have been careful and precise in their work, publishing data according to international regulations that any scientist anywhere in the world can examine, and that strongly supports the conclusion that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market wasn't the source of the virus. https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-did-not-start-at-wuhan-wet-market.html https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-did-not-start-at-wuhan-...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lamontcg 5y ago

> Over time, three basic issues emerged with this theory. No one has been able to identify: > A specific infected animal at the South China Seafood Market Won't ever happen now because they sterilized the market as a containment action almost immediately. With SARS-CoV-1 the virus wasn't as virulent and researchers were able to study it at the market where the pandemic originated. By acting fast to try to contain it, they erased any evidence of it. > An intermediate reservoir population in Hubei who were infected with a close relative of SARS-CoV-2 (pangolins were initially suspected but never confirmed) Any animal now observed to have SARS-CoV-2 in mainland China will have a high probability that humans gave the virus to it. That makes it difficult to track down which species was the intermediate animal without a time machine. > And that is the Covid-19 origin puzzle in a nutshell: how did a bat virus from a cave in Yunnan end up hundreds of miles away in Wuhan? Same problem with SARS-CoV-1 where the closest related bat virus is WIV1 which was isolated in 2013 (ten years after that outbreak) from bats in Hubei but which wound up causing an outbreak in wet markets about 700 miles away in Guangdong. RaTG13 is also separated by several decades of evolution from SARS-Cov-2, you can't close that gap with any experiment in a lab without a massive serial passage experiment through many millions of animals. And the really problematic issue for the lab leak theory is that it looks like Lineage A and B were separate spillover events of different variants.

lazyeye 5y ago

This is a great example of what would be obvious to a 10 year old (natural virus leaking from a lab) yet we've seen endless lies and distortions from the media and intelligentsia trying to obsfucate the idea. I dont understand how anyone can have anything other than utter contempt for the media and associated "experts".

mandmandam 5y ago
> I dont understand how anyone can have anything other than utter contempt for the media and associated "experts". Neither do I, but I suspect the answer comes down to the exploitation of human flaws such as tribalism, fear, overwhelm, and the systematic fucking of the education system.

ksec 5y ago

My simple question would be, if it was really a lab leak, wouldn't you expect the people working in lab to be infected first? Or is this assumption flawed? If so why? The two new preprint papers (“The Huanan market was the epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 emergence” and “SARS-CoV-2 emergence very likely resulted from at least two zoonotic events”), only trace back to December 2019. Why no go back further? Considering the "unknown" virus stated even in November and possibly October.

tim333 5y ago
Could have been one person at the lab got infected, stayed home when feeling ill, passed it on to family etc. There was a real covid lab leak in Taiwan by the way https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/taiwan-investigates-covid-lab-leak-scientist-tests-positive-bite-infected-mouse/ https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/taiwan-investigates-covid-lab... No one actually caught it off the researcher that time.
- ksec 5y ago
  Ah. Thank You. Because if it started in November, very likely October, and possibly in September. I thought it would have started with those working in the Lab first. I still dont know why every report are pin-pointing at the December Date. I thought it is rather misleading.
  - tim333 5y ago
    I think the cases officially recorded by the Chinese start in December but all the scientific projections think it's earlier see eg. https://mobile.twitter.com/ydeigin/status/1500235709508198400 https://mobile.twitter.com/ydeigin/status/150023570950819840...
    - ksec 5y ago
      They stopped all flight to Wuhan by 10th of November [1] ( even if the notice said 15 ). That was when they knew it was serious enough. Chatter of unknown "Lung Diseases" was already spreading by end of October on WeChat. [1] https://www.hongkongpost.hk/en/about_us/whats_new/notices/index_id_798.html https://www.hongkongpost.hk/en/about_us/whats_new/notices/in...

rr808 5y ago

I'm pretty sure if there were a bunch of dead bats/mice/monkeys coming out of the lab it wouldn't be unexpected for some to turn up in the local market. Its worth reading about the Smallpox outbreak in the UK, where it was being studied in a university building with poor security. These things aren't secure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbreak_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbreak_in_the_...

cosmiccatnap 5y ago

Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago

I’m not convinced by the bioweapon debunking either for that matter. But I can see how legitimate research can be made to look like weapons research and vice versa, so I have no idea how one would go about with either proving or disproving it.

wesleywt 5y ago

I still don't understand: 1. How you would prove this? 2. That it matters until you can prove it happened Lab safety does matter though. Signed -> Me a lab scientist.

mandmandam 5y ago
1. - You'd investigate the god damn lab, immediately. Failing to do this is equivalent to admitting it came from the lab. If I go into the kitchen and the cookie jar is empty, and there's a trail of crumbs leading to my kids bed, and the kid has stolen the CCTV tape from the kitchen that night and won't let me see it, do I then still have to prove that the kid ate the cookies? 2. Yes, it fucking matters. Millions of people died, and there were warnings about the safety of that lab the year before the outbreak. There are still people doing GOF research in ultra-densely populated cities, and we've had no discussion of accountability or oversight of such labs. That's insanity on an ultra-dense level. Signed -> IDGAF who you are.
tim333 5y ago
1. There are various possible ways. Maybe a whistleblower. Maybe it's in the lab database they still won't show. Maybe the research is detailed in EcoHealths emails they still won't show. etc. 2. We should probably improve on the two most likely sources - lab or wet market.

hakdbha 5y ago

maxutility 5y ago

As the person who originally posted this to HN, after reading some of the refutations of Matt Y’s piece (the OP), I’ve come to believe the evidence for zoonotic origin is stronger than Matt Y gives credit for. One short rebuttal I found particularly understandable to a layperson comes from a prominent economist (not a virologist), pointing out a few considerations that Matt’s piece appears to give insufficient credence to: https://www.themoneyillusion.com/case-closed-2/ https://www.themoneyillusion.com/case-closed-2/ There’s also the twitter thread by one of the original research article coauthors, but I actually found that harder to evaluate as a layperson. In particular: 1. Matts piece may overweight how much of a coincidence the virus emerging in Wuhan was if it were zoonotic 2. Matt’s piece may underweight the coincidence of emerging at a live animal market if it were a lab leak 3. Matt’s piece underweights the finding that the market hosted both the original A and B variants

eggy 5y ago

The lab is only 27 km from the wet market along two main arteries. How about the idea a compromised lab worker went to the wet market on the way home, or for a prepared lunch and it spread to the general population that way?

tim333 5y ago

One recent find that makes me doubt the debunking: >doctors in Wuhan said that unless pneumonia cases were linked to the Huanan market, they did not meet Wuhan Municipal Health Commission standards and were often not reported or counted. https://mobile.twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1499566651343360009 https://mobile.twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/149956665134336000...