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For those with a bit more background in the sciences, there's an increasingly massive amount of evidence to support Zoonotic origin. Philipp Markolin has a goo

For those with a bit more background in the sciences, there's an increasingly massive amount of evidence to support Zoonotic origin. Philipp Markolin has a good rundown: https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-gof-laboratory?s=w https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g... Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing (e.g. whether it's a natural virus that escaped or an engineered one, how different lineages showed up at the market, which lab it allegedly escaped from since the WIV campus is much further from the market compared to the CCDC, etc etc). China is a bad actor and definitely contributed to the conspiracy madness around the virus by being so shut-down and performing such a half-assed investigation but unfortunately they would have done the same whether the virus came to be via the same animal trade that caused the last SARS outbreak or if there was some secret Wuhan project.

johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
Thank you for posting this. WHO-China report found that COVID almost certainly came out of China and the market is just the amplifying venue. It's the racist and xenophobic groups that are trying to incite hatred against China by spreading propaganda.
- honkdaddy 4y ago
  You post this viewpoint all the time, I've seen you comment it before. Which report are you referring to exactly?
- aksss 4y ago
  China gives its critics plenty to work with. And, no, critics of China are not automatically or even likely racist and xenophobic.
  - treeman79 4y ago
    Guide to politics. If you don’t support A. This means you are B,C,D…Z.
  - msla 4y ago
    > And, no, critics of China are not automatically or even likely racist and xenophobic. Especially since some people refuse to distinguish between people talking about the PRC and people talking about people of Chinese ethnicity. It's an obvious enough tactic once you're looking for it, but damn if it can't throw a smoke grenade into the discussion.
- trhway 4y ago
  Hard to see lab-leak as intrinsically anti-China giving that it was NIH financing those GoF experiments which produced the coronavirus in Wuhan. That same story for example is pushed in Russia, who is making friends with China, as anti-American. So basically the story is interpreted as anti-something depending on your political orientation.
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    To be clear - the NIH never financed any GoF experiments in Wuhan. There was a proposal that was never funded, and even in that proposal, the GoF work would happen in Baric's North Carolina lab.
    - trhway 4y ago
      To be clear - during 2014-2019 NIH actually paid $3.6M to EcoHealth Alliance under the grants clearly specifying the coronavirus GoF experiments in Wuhan with the "Human subjects included" checked. EcoHealth naturally kept about 75% of it as "commission/management fee/whatever" because conducting those experiments at BSL2 in Wuhan was much cheaper than the original experiments in US at BSL3+ (in those original experiments they were able to increase virality of the deadly, yet low viral original SARS by inserting spike protein to allow for ACE2 based cell entry - the hallmark of the coronavirus - and after that the research was moved to Wuhan https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-function-risky-bat-virus-engineering-links-america-to-wuhan/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...). It was the 2018 proposal for additional money - EcoHealth naturally trying to double dip - for those GoF experiments in Wuhan to insert very human specific gene sequences into the coronavirus which was rejected as "Hell no, that is too risky!" by .. wait for it ... DARPA. Well as DARPA rejected it was still funded after that by the Fauci's NIAID. And the rest is history - in November 2019 the coronavirus magically "naturally" jumped onto humans supposedly in the Wuhan market a thousand kilometers from the natural habitat of its closest natural siblings. We are all free to choose our Morpheus' pill, blue or red :)
      - mikeyouse 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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jiveturkey42 4y ago
MilnerRoute 4y ago
I feel like Unherd's article is actually misstating things. For example, "no infected animal on sale in the market or elsewhere in China has been found..." In fact, Bloomberg reported: "Disease detectives arriving from Beijing on the first day of 2020 ordered environmental samples to be collected from drains and other surfaces at the market. Some 585 specimens were tested, of which 33 turned out to be positive for SARS-CoV-2... All but two of the positive specimens came from a cavernous and poorly-ventilated section of the market's western wing, where many shops sold animals." The Unherd article also claims: "There is no evidence of exposure to SARS-like viruses among Wuhan market traders prior to the Covid outbreak." But CNN reported: Research helped [Michael] Worobey come up with a map of the earliest cases that clusters them all around the market. "That so many of the more than 100 COVID-19 cases from December with no identified epidemiologic link to Huanan Market nonetheless lived in its direct vicinity is notable and provides compelling evidence that community transmission started at the market," he wrote.... "The virus didn't come from some other part of Wuhan and then get to Huanan market. The evidence speaks really quite strongly to the virus starting at the market and then leaking into the neighborhoods around the market.... So many of the early cases were tied to this one Home Depot-sized building in a city of 11 million people, when there are thousands of other places where it would be more likely for early cases to be linked to if the virus had not started there."" https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/18/health/covid-origins-market-theory/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/18/health/covid-origins-market-t... Interestingly Worobey actually signed a letter demanding the lab leak theory be investigated. But he now believes there's -- in his words -- "a big red flashing arrow pointing at Huanan Market as the most likely place the pandemic started."
- dekhn 4y ago
  The unherd article just advertising for the author's book. This is a cry for attention.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  Yep. Ridley and Chan wrote their book when the lab leak idea was vaguely more plausible, but even then it really overstated the evidence. It's aged very poorly.
- 4y ago
walrus01 4y ago
> China is a bad actor and definitely contributed to the conspiracy madness around the virus by being so shut-down and performing such a half-assed investigation It definitely seems that the default reaction of any authoritaian/police-state environment like mainland China is to clamp down on things and restrict information whether or not it's necessary. One needs to only look at the many examples of various scandals/disasters that have gone very briefly viral on Chinese language social media before the censors get to them (often within 8-12 hours of the breaking news) before everything gets deleted.
- bragr 4y ago
  >whether or not it's necessary The thing is they've studied the revolutions of 89 and the more recent ones too. They know they don't know what will be the thing that will finally get people out in the streets so they clamp down on everything. Who could know before hand that Mohamed Bouazizi setting himself on fire would trigger the Tunisian revolution, and that that would help trigger the Arab Spring? China is very worried about potential Mohamed Bouazizis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi
- robonerd 4y ago
  > It definitely seems that the default reaction of any authoritaian/police-state environment like mainland China is to clamp down on things and restrict information whether or not it's necessary. That tactic loses them the benefit of the doubt across the board. As long as their default reaction is to suppress everything, my default assumption is that they're guilty of every accusation they suppress.
  - remram 4y ago
    That's fair but doesn't help us find out what happened though.
richm31415 4y ago
harshreality 4y ago
Most of the "evidence" against lab-leak is just weird insinuation. Speculation about how the virus wasn't created wholly synthetically: nobody is seriously arguing it was, or it wouldn't be SARS-family. Arguments that the spike protein binding domain wasn't synthetically engineered: it didn't have to be. It could have been serial passage in humanized mice, considering that's what Daszak and co had literally proposed years before the outbreak. Arguments that because the original SARS-CoV-2 wasn't perfectly optimized to bind to ACE2, it obviously didn't come from a lab: Obvious nonsense. Why would you expect serial passage through a small number of humanized mice be as effective at optimizing binding to ACE2 as an epidemic sweeping through tens, then hundreds of millions of humans? The Laos expedition is interesting, but having only just skimmed it I'm not yet convinced it means anything. Any samples with very similar spike proteins collected AFTER SARS-CoV-2 became an epidemic could indicate that SARS-CoV-2 had recombined with existing bat coronaviruses, rather than being a zoonotic source of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. The sloppiness and drumbeat nature of these anti-lab-leak essays makes me not trust them. The lab-leak argument is speculative, sure, but we've sent people to prison for murder based on speculative inferences from circumstantial evidence; meanwhile, none of the arguments against lab-leak are solid.
- rzz3 4y ago
  Very well put. One thing I’d add, is that this entire debate regarding the lab leak hypothesis is entirely politicized, and I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth. Either theory is perfectly viable given the evidence we currently have.
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    That doesn't mean each are equally likely.. hence the huge section in the article I linked about bayesian priors.
    - byecomputer 4y ago
      I sort of lost faith in the article's willingness to take lab leak seriously when they threw this map up[0] and inexplicably did not label where the Wuhan Institute of Virology is on it. For reference[1]. [0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8a301509-8308-462a-8119-b13c861075e8_640x613.jpeg https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_... [1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market,+Fazhan+Ave,+Jianghan+District,+Wuhan,+Hubei,+China/Wuhan+Institute+of+Virology,+CAS:+Hubei+Engineering+and+Technology+Research+Center+for+Viral+Diseases,+44+%E5%B0%8F%E6%B4%AA%E5%B1%B1%E4%B8%AD%E5%8C%BA+Wuchang+District,+Wuhan,+Hubei,+China,+430071/@30.608929,114.2829193,12z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x342eaeb553b58fd7:0x355ff7d1fe8e8fb7!2m2!1d114.2622935!2d30.6165888!1m5!1m1!1s0x342ea56945e84d71:0x402ec92fd18fef96!2m2!1d114.3508524!2d30.5391912!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market,+Fazha... It's not at all far-fetched to think the virus piggybacked 10 miles before finding a nice home for itself at a wet market, after which it went gangbusters and infected lots of people. Obviously the virus proliferated in the market, but that doesn't necessarily make the market the origin. The two bottom 'Weibo data' maps from the first link show clusters on both sides of the rivers and also very close to the lab. That's just the most obvious bit of bias, but I'm confident that article isn't being as fair-handed as it's pretending to be.
kneel 4y ago
>Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing No it's pretty easy to see that they're pointing towards GoF research performed at Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab very proximal to the origin of the outbreak. The intercept has done a great job FOIA'ing chains of emails showing real concerns with the veracity of a lab leak. https://theintercept.com/2022/01/12/covid-origins-fauci-redacted-emails/ https://theintercept.com/2022/01/12/covid-origins-fauci-reda...
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  You do realize that in opposition to my point about it being weird insinuation, you posted a bunch of weird insinuation promoted by some of the dimmest people in congress? There was a legitimate debate in 2020 about the origin of the virus, which the emails "released" by the House adequately demonstrate. Now nearly all of the people in those emails have updated their priors to favor zoonosis, which is given as evidence of conspiracy instead of just people learning more about a novel virus.
  - ChemSpider 4y ago
    > all of the people in those emails have updated their priors to favor zoonosis, According the to released FOIA'ed emails, these scientists changed their mind within 1-2 days from "wow, could really be a lab leak" to "lab leak is a conspiracy theory" - why that? None of them can explain what made them change their mind on this short time frame in spring 2020. Was there new knowledge? A break thru experiment? They refuse to say.
    - _jal 4y ago
      So, more weird insinuation. Got it.
      - epistasis 4y ago
        You are downvoted, but it appears to me that you are accurate in your assessment. I haven't followed this debate much, but every time I look I to it I see weird insinuations, misrepresentations, and "obvious" assertions that are not in any way obvious. It seems like a gigantic waste of time, like debating creationists. I'll wait for my scientific peers to blow the whistle if any of the claims have credibility.
tomp 4y ago
What's your explanation for the fact that Moderna patented the very specific 19-nucleotide sequence that codes Sars-COV-2 furin cleavage site in 2018?
- culi 4y ago
  Uhhh do you think it MIGHT have something to do with the fact that Sars-COV-1 had already caused an outbreak and the WHO already had already placed these viruses on their watchlist of viruses with the most potential to cause a pandemic... EDIT: > The SARS-related coronavirus was one of several viruses identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2016 as a likely cause of a future epidemic in a new plan developed after the Ebola epidemic for urgent research and development before and during an epidemic towards diagnostic tests, vaccines and medicines. This prediction came to pass with the COVID-19 pandemic. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/after-ebola-a-blueprint-emerges-to-jump-start-r-d/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/after-ebola-... EDIT2: The research effort to predict future outbreaks evolved into some really cool stuff like this: https://spillover.global/ranking-comparison/ https://spillover.global/ranking-comparison/ Inevitably one of these will result in another outbreak and inevitably there will have been a lab trying to study it in preparation and inevitably another big-brain is gonna find some patent or paper that predates the outbreak and use it as "evidence" for their conspiracy
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  Just think about what you're claiming here with this silly question. You honestly think Moderna patented a sequence multiple years ago, and then what, shared their research with the Chinese to unleash a virus and create demand for a vaccine they hadn't invented yet? Why in the world would they patent it before that? It's literally the dumbest nonsense. A more direct refutation though is that the authors were extremely out of their depth and didn't remotely understand the results from their BLASTing. The moderna sequence is the reverse complement and doesn't even encode proteins. In the DNA repair context for which Moderna the patent covers, it codes for a specific (Non FCS protein) and can even be found in birds. Did Moderna invent birds too? https://twitter.com/emmecola/status/1468569894245572612 https://twitter.com/emmecola/status/1468569894245572612 https://twitter.com/MGerdol/status/1496130768854212624 https://twitter.com/MGerdol/status/1496130768854212624
mw888 4y ago
This is garbage appeal to authority designed to make people embarrassed to hold an opposite view. I learned nothing from your comment and was simply told to trust this source you hid any arguments behind. It’s not fostering discussion and it’s strawmanning those you disagree with.
- dekhn 4y ago
  The fundamental premise here is that most people who are arguing about COVID origins simply don't understand enough about known factual biology to make informed arguments. The appeal to authority is important because, in the case where we're not particularly knowledgeable, we should use authorities as guidance on how to reason. I agree with what the parent said although I wouldn't say the evidence is "overwhelming". The important point is: China's government is so secretive we can't tell if they were intentionally covering something up, or just destroying all the evidence without any knowledge of what it said, to avoid people speculating from the documents.
  - dariusj18 4y ago
    Another important fact. China has everything to lose from cooperation and nothing to gain. An unfortunate reality in geopolitics is to give no control to other countries of your own fate. If they were to grant access and attempt to be completely forthcoming, how are they to know that some group wouldn't attempt to fabricate evidence or muddy the waters further.
  - tootie 4y ago
    There's also a bias in the other direction that people have a natural inclination to desire something to blame for misfortune. Covid being a natural disaster is so distasteful and unsettling because it means there's nothing we can do about it. It's the same rationale people use to try to blame the president for high gas prices or personal tragedy on god's will. It's comforting to have an explanation. China already has a bad reputation for safety and honesty that they are an easy target.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    A layman can have explained the pieces at play and how they should work together, that allows the layman to point out logical inconsistencies while taking for granted they do not understand all the low level bits and pieces.
elif 4y ago
What makes you put on evidence in quotes? The deletion of the bat coronavirus database at Wuhan institute of virology prior to the pandemic is an undisputed and central fact. Your quotation marks do nothing to diminish this fact alone's inherent demand that Occam's razor be inverted.
- rzz3 4y ago
  Sure, but Occam’s is a logical shortcut, not a method of scientific conclusion. I personally suspect a lab leak origin, but I can’t say I have conclusive evidence. I just find it extremely likely based on a myriad of circumstantial evidence, and a lack of any conclusive evidence of natural origin.
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    I find it extremely unlikely given what I know about biology and how viruses and epidemiology works. Lack of transparency in China is no proof, it's standard operating procedure. They'll try to CYA even if they didn't do anything wrong, maybe especially then. The simplest and most probable way the pandemic started really is the way pandemics usually start: by a pathogen jumping from an animal species to Humans, without passing through a lab whatsoever.
    - nescioquid 4y ago
      Like rzz3, I am suspicious of a lab leak (but reserve judgement). You say the lab leak is unlikely, but do you know better than the WHO? From the article: > In this we are in line with the US government, the G7, the World Health Organisation and the general public, all of whom are on record as saying that they think a leak from a Wuhan virology lab is a strong possibility that deserves to be investigated. The latest WHO report two weeks ago confirms this, saying that it is important “to evaluate the possibility of the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into the human population through a laboratory incident”. China's behavior is suspicious, but as you point out there could be any number of reasons for this. However, that's hardly a basis for exoneration. In either case, China's behavior is surely a confounding factor in understanding what actually happened.
gojomo 4y ago
Overfocusing on the market cluster is an error. First, because viruses travel easily – so even if 100% of early cases were around the market, it could have reached the market via a lab worker. And second, early overemphasis on the market cluster caused authorities to search for every case there, and ignore cases elsewhere – just as in the US, authorities missed early community spread because they didn't even consider/test people who hadn't recently returned from China. If the crossover was zoonotic, and didn't involve EcoHealth/WIV/etc institutional actions, it should've been possible to find intermediate hosts, or viruses, in an earnest search. Instead of finding those - in any of the hypothesized animals, anywhere from bat caves to Wuhan – we've instead found yet another bat virus that's closer-to-SARS-CoV-2 (BANAL) in exactly the Laotian caves where EcoHealth was collecting hundreds of viruses to bring to Wuhan (& elsewhere) for study and gain-of-function-enhancement. Researchers were routinely making such viruses more human-adapted, and researchers had specifically had sought money to add the same 'furin cleavage' functionality that a BANAL-like virus needed to become SARS-CoV-2. It's not just China that was suspiciously half-assed in the early days, when the evidence either way for lab-leak or zoonosis could have been clearer. Fauci & Collins at the NIH were suspiciously half-assed too, & sent a clear message to everyone dependent on US federal research funding: "don't entertain this speculation if you want to be on our team". Fauci was energetic in sending that message even when he was still downplaying the risk & saying masks couldn't help. That is: they were prioritizing narrative control over either investigation or pandemic control. Very fishy!
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  Both of your points are directly and conclusively addressed in the post.. > First, because viruses travel easily – so even if 100% of early cases were around the market, it could have reached the market via a lab worker There were two distinct lineages at the market with a cluster of positive environmental samples in the wild animal section. I would love to hear a plausible theory on how two unrelated lineages came to be present there after human-human transmission. > And second, early overemphasis on the market cluster caused authorities to search for every case there, and ignore cases elsewhere – just as in the US, authorities missed early community spread because they didn't even consider/test people who hadn't recently returned from China. Not remotely true. I'd encourage you to read this paper: https://zenodo.org/record/6299600#.YjSWqDUxmUk https://zenodo.org/record/6299600#.YjSWqDUxmUk
bayesian_horse 4y ago
Of course it is zoonotic in origin. Otherwise it wouldn't have been novel. Viruses don't appear from thin air.
jahewson 4y ago
That's a very well researched article you link to, but assumptions are tricky things: > The fact that there were two distinct lineages early on is of critical importance, as this could imply a hidden community transmission for months (lineage A could’ve evolved into lineage B) before the outbreak at the Huanan market. Alternatively, the two lineages could have evolved in an animal reservoir from a shared MRCA before separately jumping into humans at the market. Option one is compatible with a lab leak scenario, option two is not. Option two assumes that the lab had only one lineage of the virus - but it collected samples out in the wild and could easily have collected both together, mixed and stored them, and leaked them together. So the wonderfully detailed analysis rests on this assumption.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  > Option two assumes that the lab had only one lineage of the virus - but it collected samples out in the wild and could easily have collected both together, mixed and stored them, and leaked them together. So the wonderfully detailed analysis rests on this assumption. They were two lineages of the same virus, commonly seen in repeated spillover transmission. Explain specifically how you think they would "leak" both of them together - because the theory in your comment eliminates the option of an infected worker spreading the lab virus.
  - kaitaincps 4y ago
    No it doesn't. There is a single leak, which mutates into a second strain through community transmission over a period of a few months. That's it.
    - mikeyouse 4y ago
      The two lineages were both present in some of the first infections at the Market in early December 2019 and in environmental samples taken at the market in mid December. They couldn't have circulated for “a few months” because in that time, literally tens of thousands of cases would have been reported. So you’d have to have a two SNP mutation from one of the first infected people in the world that would go on to infect basically everyone else in the world since Lineage B was reported first but soon died out. It’s not impossible (nothing really is) but would be extremely unlikely.
vfclists 4y ago
Doesn't the article have a table of contents? What happened to plain HTML documents with a table of contents at the top that enables to get an idea of the structure of the document and jump back and forth between the sections?
nraynaud 4y ago
And saying that China would have an interest in spreading the virus seems fishy to me too, they almost decapitated the Communist Party by having a giant dinner at the onset of the pandemic.
hedora 4y ago
Two things are clear: 1) If it was a lab leak, it was from a well-documented collaboration between American and Chinese biological weapons researchers. 2) It's extremely likely a leak like this will occur in the future, since these sorts of weapons programs are common. I don't see why most people should care if it was a leak or not. It doesn't have any impact on (2) moving forward.
- imiric 4y ago
  > It doesn't have any impact on (2) moving forward. Of course it does. If we know how the leak happened, we can increase safety measures to avoid it happening again in the same way. How is this not obvious? A peculiar thing about humans is that we can learn from our mistakes. That doesn't happen if we try to pretend there was no mistake to begin with.
AzzieElbab 4y ago
What happened to zoonotic hypothesis? Any updates? Was culprit identified by means other than Bayesian reasoning?
jameset 4y ago
Definitely not true. There is lots of circumstantial evidence for research-related origin but no dispositive evidence for zoonotic or research related Orion. And Markolin… well… not worth your time
cannabis_sam 4y ago
Since you don’t even mention Daszak, while regurgitating the position he established years ago, you are per definition arguing in bad faith. Please, for the love of us all, stop attacking humanity..
trashtester 4y ago
Here is a hypothesis that fits the data perfectly (but that could have a somewhat low prior): - A poor studen has discovered that there is a demand in the wet market for bats. - The student works at a lab that either has an in-house breeding area for presumably healthy bats, or that buy such bats from an external vendor. - The student sees the opportunity for some extra income by selling some of those bats to the local wet market - By some accident, one or more of the bats sold have been infected with some of the virusues being studied at the labratory. Edit: A variation of the above idea would be if some bat-specialist (someone with skills for catching, keeping or transporting bats were working both the for virology institute AND for the wet market). This person could have, in some way, facilitated transfer of a virus from the institute to the wet market. There is probably a number of such possible ways to associate the lab with the wet market, simply based on the two having a shared interest in bats.
- riyadparvez 4y ago
  I've heard it from someone who was in China after the pandemic emerged. Apparently some Chinese people believe exactly that. Some of the lab animals were sold to the wet market. And that's how the virus jumped from animal to host. Although evidence is scant. Then again it's China.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    Now, IF this is true, it would also explain why it seems that the government is trying to cover up what happened at the institute. If this hypothesis were to be true, it might cause China/the CCP to lose face more than many other alternatives, as such corruption could be seen as a weakness of the current system.
- rcpt 4y ago
  The prior might be higher than you think https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/47531/did-a-chinese-researcher-sell-his-lab-animals-to-street-food-vendors https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/47531/did-a-chi...
  - 4y ago
mc32 4y ago
The WHO called for further investigation into the lab leak theory which means they have not dismissed it and believe it deserves a proper investigation.
- imiric 4y ago
  It's hardly relevant what the WHO says or does in this discussion. They've shown themselves to be biased and untrustworthy on more than one occasion.
europabound 4y ago
Two reviews of Markolins work are worth reading before you take it seriously: https://twitter.com/EmaNymton90/status/1540235304854032385?s=20&t=ttngCLLw2AaXbuXu8r412g https://twitter.com/EmaNymton90/status/1540235304854032385?s... https://twitter.com/gdemaneuf/status/1507092599945166849?s=20&t=ttngCLLw2AaXbuXu8r412g https://twitter.com/gdemaneuf/status/1507092599945166849?s=2...
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  Ah yes, reviews written by the eminently qualified "Not my name" spelled backwards and a data analyst for a bank... I'll pass.
kaitaincps 4y ago
One thing I would point out here: Shi Zhengli is the principal bat-borne sarbecovirus researcher at the WIV. When the pandemic first came to light, the first thought Shi Zhengli had was, "Oh my goodness! That might have have come from our lab! Let's investigate! I wonder if the municipal health authority has got it wrong. I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China." Zhengli goes on to report that she was apparently enormously relieved to discover that so far as she could tell, the outbreak had not come from her lab. All well and good, but... When she was told about the nature of the epidemic, and the kind of virus it was, why was Shi Zhengli's first instinct that it might have leaked from her lab? Don't you think this is curious? What does she know that made her turn to that possibility immediately? Why didn't she simply assume, like most others, that it was some new natural pathogen arising from zoonotic transfer?
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  You'd have to ask her -- but all of the initial reasons that everyone was unsure also apply to her. There was a novel bat coronavirus pandemic near where her lab studies bat coronaviruses - why wouldn't that be your first thought?
  - kaitaincps 4y ago
    She’s a scientist and a bat virus expert. One would expect her mind to gravitate towards what she saw as being the most plausible explanation. If a zoonotic jump had been overwhelmingly probable, why would the news have triggered the kind of reaction she later reported having? Bear in mind that your analysis is predicated on the falsehood that the WIV had been set up in Wuhan because that was a bat virus hotspot. So you’ll need to revisit that line of reasoning.
- mike_d 4y ago
  > "I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China" Which in itself is an extremely odd statement, to the point I think it might have been taken out of context or mistranslated. If it was going to happen anywhere, Wuhan was one of the most likely candidates - to the point they built the lab there to do the research.
lazyeye 4y ago
In terms of a natural (non-engineered) virus leaking from inside a lab (zoonotic transmission can happen either side of a wall), how is the current evidence pointing in one direction? Not sure where the "weird insinuation" is?
Xorakios 4y ago
That is an excellent article and, as the authors say in the first paragraph, lengthy and informative. The combination of Chinese secrecy and Trump demanding that they pay reparations have poisoned a lot of discussions. But come on, a novel bat virus exploding from the world's main research facility about bat viruses that was first reported by a doctor from a hospital in the same city with symptoms from the wife of a researcher at the Wuhan facility? That's a lot of coincidences. And Jethro Gibbs doesn't believe in coincidences ;)
- ellopoppit 4y ago
  >symptoms from the wife of a researcher at the Wuhan facility I'm interested to confirm this, do you know what their name is/was or where I could find more information on this?
  - Xorakios 4y ago
    https://nypost.com/2021/05/27/state-dept-investigator-ridiculous-to-say-covid-was-natural/ https://nypost.com/2021/05/27/state-dept-investigator-ridicu... And not Shi Zhengli, that is not the wet market worker, but people are blaming her for just questioning official narrative.
PhilippMarkolin 4y ago
More and more, I find that lableak (which started with genuine scientific uncertainty) is not driven by genuine curiosity or scientific inquiry, but by the strength of it's emotional narrative. Lableakers like Alina Chan started as maybe genuine, maybe opportunistic scientific dissidents who got boosted into the spotlight by conspiratorial-thinking prone rightwing networks. They build and got caught up in echo chambers that for years now created their own self-sealing reality. However, we know today that the scientific evidence turned out to be entirely one-sided for a natural spillover event and not a lableak, which is why the 'cover ups' have to get bigger and bigger, include independent scientists all over the world, and the establishment, and mainstream journalists etc. and the actual evidence is not much talked about anymore in lableak conspiracy land. Their problem lies entirely with the evidence already available, and no amount of evidence that is 'missing' can remedy that fact. We can happily grant a 100% leak rate from the WIV, and it would not move the needle on zoonotic origin any more. We can grant perfect cover-ups and secret viruses, and it would not suddenly make the available evidence square with a lableak scenario. That is the reality. And all lableak proponents have been doing is to distract from it.
- inquirerGeneral 4y ago
  Thank you for showing how you started with zero genuine curiosity or scientific inquiry, instead opting for a total dismissal and refusal to actually consider the possibility. It is not that you had any reason to believe she was wrong. There is far more evidence for it than what Alina has shown. Have you read the WSJ's constant updates on this story? They have singlehandedly pressured China and the WHO into re-looking into the situation--the only reason nothing has come of it (yet) is they are stalling for any final answers (again). The "lableak cannot be real" proponets are the least scientific people around. I almost put you in the same group as a Flat Earther, a Young Earth Creationist, and a Scientologist. You're a little better, maybe.

johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago

Thank you for posting this. WHO-China report found that COVID almost certainly came out of China and the market is just the amplifying venue. It's the racist and xenophobic groups that are trying to incite hatred against China by spreading propaganda.

honkdaddy 4y ago
You post this viewpoint all the time, I've seen you comment it before. Which report are you referring to exactly?
aksss 4y ago
China gives its critics plenty to work with. And, no, critics of China are not automatically or even likely racist and xenophobic.
- treeman79 4y ago
  Guide to politics. If you don’t support A. This means you are B,C,D…Z.
- msla 4y ago
  > And, no, critics of China are not automatically or even likely racist and xenophobic. Especially since some people refuse to distinguish between people talking about the PRC and people talking about people of Chinese ethnicity. It's an obvious enough tactic once you're looking for it, but damn if it can't throw a smoke grenade into the discussion.
trhway 4y ago
Hard to see lab-leak as intrinsically anti-China giving that it was NIH financing those GoF experiments which produced the coronavirus in Wuhan. That same story for example is pushed in Russia, who is making friends with China, as anti-American. So basically the story is interpreted as anti-something depending on your political orientation.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  To be clear - the NIH never financed any GoF experiments in Wuhan. There was a proposal that was never funded, and even in that proposal, the GoF work would happen in Baric's North Carolina lab.
  - trhway 4y ago
    To be clear - during 2014-2019 NIH actually paid $3.6M to EcoHealth Alliance under the grants clearly specifying the coronavirus GoF experiments in Wuhan with the "Human subjects included" checked. EcoHealth naturally kept about 75% of it as "commission/management fee/whatever" because conducting those experiments at BSL2 in Wuhan was much cheaper than the original experiments in US at BSL3+ (in those original experiments they were able to increase virality of the deadly, yet low viral original SARS by inserting spike protein to allow for ACE2 based cell entry - the hallmark of the coronavirus - and after that the research was moved to Wuhan https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-function-risky-bat-virus-engineering-links-america-to-wuhan/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...). It was the 2018 proposal for additional money - EcoHealth naturally trying to double dip - for those GoF experiments in Wuhan to insert very human specific gene sequences into the coronavirus which was rejected as "Hell no, that is too risky!" by .. wait for it ... DARPA. Well as DARPA rejected it was still funded after that by the Fauci's NIAID. And the rest is history - in November 2019 the coronavirus magically "naturally" jumped onto humans supposedly in the Wuhan market a thousand kilometers from the natural habitat of its closest natural siblings. We are all free to choose our Morpheus' pill, blue or red :)
    - mikeyouse 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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jiveturkey42 4y ago

MilnerRoute 4y ago

I feel like Unherd's article is actually misstating things. For example, "no infected animal on sale in the market or elsewhere in China has been found..." In fact, Bloomberg reported: "Disease detectives arriving from Beijing on the first day of 2020 ordered environmental samples to be collected from drains and other surfaces at the market. Some 585 specimens were tested, of which 33 turned out to be positive for SARS-CoV-2... All but two of the positive specimens came from a cavernous and poorly-ventilated section of the market's western wing, where many shops sold animals." The Unherd article also claims: "There is no evidence of exposure to SARS-like viruses among Wuhan market traders prior to the Covid outbreak." But CNN reported: Research helped [Michael] Worobey come up with a map of the earliest cases that clusters them all around the market. "That so many of the more than 100 COVID-19 cases from December with no identified epidemiologic link to Huanan Market nonetheless lived in its direct vicinity is notable and provides compelling evidence that community transmission started at the market," he wrote.... "The virus didn't come from some other part of Wuhan and then get to Huanan market. The evidence speaks really quite strongly to the virus starting at the market and then leaking into the neighborhoods around the market.... So many of the early cases were tied to this one Home Depot-sized building in a city of 11 million people, when there are thousands of other places where it would be more likely for early cases to be linked to if the virus had not started there."" https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/18/health/covid-origins-market-theory/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/18/health/covid-origins-market-t... Interestingly Worobey actually signed a letter demanding the lab leak theory be investigated. But he now believes there's -- in his words -- "a big red flashing arrow pointing at Huanan Market as the most likely place the pandemic started."

dekhn 4y ago
The unherd article just advertising for the author's book. This is a cry for attention.
mikeyouse 4y ago
Yep. Ridley and Chan wrote their book when the lab leak idea was vaguely more plausible, but even then it really overstated the evidence. It's aged very poorly.
4y ago

walrus01 4y ago

> China is a bad actor and definitely contributed to the conspiracy madness around the virus by being so shut-down and performing such a half-assed investigation It definitely seems that the default reaction of any authoritaian/police-state environment like mainland China is to clamp down on things and restrict information whether or not it's necessary. One needs to only look at the many examples of various scandals/disasters that have gone very briefly viral on Chinese language social media before the censors get to them (often within 8-12 hours of the breaking news) before everything gets deleted.

bragr 4y ago
>whether or not it's necessary The thing is they've studied the revolutions of 89 and the more recent ones too. They know they don't know what will be the thing that will finally get people out in the streets so they clamp down on everything. Who could know before hand that Mohamed Bouazizi setting himself on fire would trigger the Tunisian revolution, and that that would help trigger the Arab Spring? China is very worried about potential Mohamed Bouazizis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi
robonerd 4y ago
> It definitely seems that the default reaction of any authoritaian/police-state environment like mainland China is to clamp down on things and restrict information whether or not it's necessary. That tactic loses them the benefit of the doubt across the board. As long as their default reaction is to suppress everything, my default assumption is that they're guilty of every accusation they suppress.
- remram 4y ago
  That's fair but doesn't help us find out what happened though.

richm31415 4y ago

harshreality 4y ago

Most of the "evidence" against lab-leak is just weird insinuation. Speculation about how the virus wasn't created wholly synthetically: nobody is seriously arguing it was, or it wouldn't be SARS-family. Arguments that the spike protein binding domain wasn't synthetically engineered: it didn't have to be. It could have been serial passage in humanized mice, considering that's what Daszak and co had literally proposed years before the outbreak. Arguments that because the original SARS-CoV-2 wasn't perfectly optimized to bind to ACE2, it obviously didn't come from a lab: Obvious nonsense. Why would you expect serial passage through a small number of humanized mice be as effective at optimizing binding to ACE2 as an epidemic sweeping through tens, then hundreds of millions of humans? The Laos expedition is interesting, but having only just skimmed it I'm not yet convinced it means anything. Any samples with very similar spike proteins collected AFTER SARS-CoV-2 became an epidemic could indicate that SARS-CoV-2 had recombined with existing bat coronaviruses, rather than being a zoonotic source of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. The sloppiness and drumbeat nature of these anti-lab-leak essays makes me not trust them. The lab-leak argument is speculative, sure, but we've sent people to prison for murder based on speculative inferences from circumstantial evidence; meanwhile, none of the arguments against lab-leak are solid.

rzz3 4y ago
Very well put. One thing I’d add, is that this entire debate regarding the lab leak hypothesis is entirely politicized, and I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth. Either theory is perfectly viable given the evidence we currently have.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  That doesn't mean each are equally likely.. hence the huge section in the article I linked about bayesian priors.
  - byecomputer 4y ago
    I sort of lost faith in the article's willingness to take lab leak seriously when they threw this map up[0] and inexplicably did not label where the Wuhan Institute of Virology is on it. For reference[1]. [0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8a301509-8308-462a-8119-b13c861075e8_640x613.jpeg https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_... [1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market,+Fazhan+Ave,+Jianghan+District,+Wuhan,+Hubei,+China/Wuhan+Institute+of+Virology,+CAS:+Hubei+Engineering+and+Technology+Research+Center+for+Viral+Diseases,+44+%E5%B0%8F%E6%B4%AA%E5%B1%B1%E4%B8%AD%E5%8C%BA+Wuchang+District,+Wuhan,+Hubei,+China,+430071/@30.608929,114.2829193,12z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x342eaeb553b58fd7:0x355ff7d1fe8e8fb7!2m2!1d114.2622935!2d30.6165888!1m5!1m1!1s0x342ea56945e84d71:0x402ec92fd18fef96!2m2!1d114.3508524!2d30.5391912!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market,+Fazha... It's not at all far-fetched to think the virus piggybacked 10 miles before finding a nice home for itself at a wet market, after which it went gangbusters and infected lots of people. Obviously the virus proliferated in the market, but that doesn't necessarily make the market the origin. The two bottom 'Weibo data' maps from the first link show clusters on both sides of the rivers and also very close to the lab. That's just the most obvious bit of bias, but I'm confident that article isn't being as fair-handed as it's pretending to be.

kneel 4y ago

>Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing No it's pretty easy to see that they're pointing towards GoF research performed at Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab very proximal to the origin of the outbreak. The intercept has done a great job FOIA'ing chains of emails showing real concerns with the veracity of a lab leak. https://theintercept.com/2022/01/12/covid-origins-fauci-redacted-emails/ https://theintercept.com/2022/01/12/covid-origins-fauci-reda...

mikeyouse 4y ago
You do realize that in opposition to my point about it being weird insinuation, you posted a bunch of weird insinuation promoted by some of the dimmest people in congress? There was a legitimate debate in 2020 about the origin of the virus, which the emails "released" by the House adequately demonstrate. Now nearly all of the people in those emails have updated their priors to favor zoonosis, which is given as evidence of conspiracy instead of just people learning more about a novel virus.
- ChemSpider 4y ago
  > all of the people in those emails have updated their priors to favor zoonosis, According the to released FOIA'ed emails, these scientists changed their mind within 1-2 days from "wow, could really be a lab leak" to "lab leak is a conspiracy theory" - why that? None of them can explain what made them change their mind on this short time frame in spring 2020. Was there new knowledge? A break thru experiment? They refuse to say.
  - _jal 4y ago
    So, more weird insinuation. Got it.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      You are downvoted, but it appears to me that you are accurate in your assessment. I haven't followed this debate much, but every time I look I to it I see weird insinuations, misrepresentations, and "obvious" assertions that are not in any way obvious. It seems like a gigantic waste of time, like debating creationists. I'll wait for my scientific peers to blow the whistle if any of the claims have credibility.

tomp 4y ago

What's your explanation for the fact that Moderna patented the very specific 19-nucleotide sequence that codes Sars-COV-2 furin cleavage site in 2018?

culi 4y ago
Uhhh do you think it MIGHT have something to do with the fact that Sars-COV-1 had already caused an outbreak and the WHO already had already placed these viruses on their watchlist of viruses with the most potential to cause a pandemic... EDIT: > The SARS-related coronavirus was one of several viruses identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2016 as a likely cause of a future epidemic in a new plan developed after the Ebola epidemic for urgent research and development before and during an epidemic towards diagnostic tests, vaccines and medicines. This prediction came to pass with the COVID-19 pandemic. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/after-ebola-a-blueprint-emerges-to-jump-start-r-d/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/after-ebola-... EDIT2: The research effort to predict future outbreaks evolved into some really cool stuff like this: https://spillover.global/ranking-comparison/ https://spillover.global/ranking-comparison/ Inevitably one of these will result in another outbreak and inevitably there will have been a lab trying to study it in preparation and inevitably another big-brain is gonna find some patent or paper that predates the outbreak and use it as "evidence" for their conspiracy
mikeyouse 4y ago
Just think about what you're claiming here with this silly question. You honestly think Moderna patented a sequence multiple years ago, and then what, shared their research with the Chinese to unleash a virus and create demand for a vaccine they hadn't invented yet? Why in the world would they patent it before that? It's literally the dumbest nonsense. A more direct refutation though is that the authors were extremely out of their depth and didn't remotely understand the results from their BLASTing. The moderna sequence is the reverse complement and doesn't even encode proteins. In the DNA repair context for which Moderna the patent covers, it codes for a specific (Non FCS protein) and can even be found in birds. Did Moderna invent birds too? https://twitter.com/emmecola/status/1468569894245572612 https://twitter.com/emmecola/status/1468569894245572612 https://twitter.com/MGerdol/status/1496130768854212624 https://twitter.com/MGerdol/status/1496130768854212624

mw888 4y ago

This is garbage appeal to authority designed to make people embarrassed to hold an opposite view. I learned nothing from your comment and was simply told to trust this source you hid any arguments behind. It’s not fostering discussion and it’s strawmanning those you disagree with.

dekhn 4y ago
The fundamental premise here is that most people who are arguing about COVID origins simply don't understand enough about known factual biology to make informed arguments. The appeal to authority is important because, in the case where we're not particularly knowledgeable, we should use authorities as guidance on how to reason. I agree with what the parent said although I wouldn't say the evidence is "overwhelming". The important point is: China's government is so secretive we can't tell if they were intentionally covering something up, or just destroying all the evidence without any knowledge of what it said, to avoid people speculating from the documents.
- dariusj18 4y ago
  Another important fact. China has everything to lose from cooperation and nothing to gain. An unfortunate reality in geopolitics is to give no control to other countries of your own fate. If they were to grant access and attempt to be completely forthcoming, how are they to know that some group wouldn't attempt to fabricate evidence or muddy the waters further.
- tootie 4y ago
  There's also a bias in the other direction that people have a natural inclination to desire something to blame for misfortune. Covid being a natural disaster is so distasteful and unsettling because it means there's nothing we can do about it. It's the same rationale people use to try to blame the president for high gas prices or personal tragedy on god's will. It's comforting to have an explanation. China already has a bad reputation for safety and honesty that they are an easy target.
- peteradio 4y ago
  A layman can have explained the pieces at play and how they should work together, that allows the layman to point out logical inconsistencies while taking for granted they do not understand all the low level bits and pieces.

elif 4y ago

What makes you put on evidence in quotes? The deletion of the bat coronavirus database at Wuhan institute of virology prior to the pandemic is an undisputed and central fact. Your quotation marks do nothing to diminish this fact alone's inherent demand that Occam's razor be inverted.

rzz3 4y ago
Sure, but Occam’s is a logical shortcut, not a method of scientific conclusion. I personally suspect a lab leak origin, but I can’t say I have conclusive evidence. I just find it extremely likely based on a myriad of circumstantial evidence, and a lack of any conclusive evidence of natural origin.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  I find it extremely unlikely given what I know about biology and how viruses and epidemiology works. Lack of transparency in China is no proof, it's standard operating procedure. They'll try to CYA even if they didn't do anything wrong, maybe especially then. The simplest and most probable way the pandemic started really is the way pandemics usually start: by a pathogen jumping from an animal species to Humans, without passing through a lab whatsoever.
  - nescioquid 4y ago
    Like rzz3, I am suspicious of a lab leak (but reserve judgement). You say the lab leak is unlikely, but do you know better than the WHO? From the article: > In this we are in line with the US government, the G7, the World Health Organisation and the general public, all of whom are on record as saying that they think a leak from a Wuhan virology lab is a strong possibility that deserves to be investigated. The latest WHO report two weeks ago confirms this, saying that it is important “to evaluate the possibility of the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into the human population through a laboratory incident”. China's behavior is suspicious, but as you point out there could be any number of reasons for this. However, that's hardly a basis for exoneration. In either case, China's behavior is surely a confounding factor in understanding what actually happened.

gojomo 4y ago

Overfocusing on the market cluster is an error. First, because viruses travel easily – so even if 100% of early cases were around the market, it could have reached the market via a lab worker. And second, early overemphasis on the market cluster caused authorities to search for every case there, and ignore cases elsewhere – just as in the US, authorities missed early community spread because they didn't even consider/test people who hadn't recently returned from China. If the crossover was zoonotic, and didn't involve EcoHealth/WIV/etc institutional actions, it should've been possible to find intermediate hosts, or viruses, in an earnest search. Instead of finding those - in any of the hypothesized animals, anywhere from bat caves to Wuhan – we've instead found yet another bat virus that's closer-to-SARS-CoV-2 (BANAL) in exactly the Laotian caves where EcoHealth was collecting hundreds of viruses to bring to Wuhan (& elsewhere) for study and gain-of-function-enhancement. Researchers were routinely making such viruses more human-adapted, and researchers had specifically had sought money to add the same 'furin cleavage' functionality that a BANAL-like virus needed to become SARS-CoV-2. It's not just China that was suspiciously half-assed in the early days, when the evidence either way for lab-leak or zoonosis could have been clearer. Fauci & Collins at the NIH were suspiciously half-assed too, & sent a clear message to everyone dependent on US federal research funding: "don't entertain this speculation if you want to be on our team". Fauci was energetic in sending that message even when he was still downplaying the risk & saying masks couldn't help. That is: they were prioritizing narrative control over either investigation or pandemic control. Very fishy!

mikeyouse 4y ago
Both of your points are directly and conclusively addressed in the post.. > First, because viruses travel easily – so even if 100% of early cases were around the market, it could have reached the market via a lab worker There were two distinct lineages at the market with a cluster of positive environmental samples in the wild animal section. I would love to hear a plausible theory on how two unrelated lineages came to be present there after human-human transmission. > And second, early overemphasis on the market cluster caused authorities to search for every case there, and ignore cases elsewhere – just as in the US, authorities missed early community spread because they didn't even consider/test people who hadn't recently returned from China. Not remotely true. I'd encourage you to read this paper: https://zenodo.org/record/6299600#.YjSWqDUxmUk https://zenodo.org/record/6299600#.YjSWqDUxmUk

bayesian_horse 4y ago

Of course it is zoonotic in origin. Otherwise it wouldn't have been novel. Viruses don't appear from thin air.

jahewson 4y ago

That's a very well researched article you link to, but assumptions are tricky things: > The fact that there were two distinct lineages early on is of critical importance, as this could imply a hidden community transmission for months (lineage A could’ve evolved into lineage B) before the outbreak at the Huanan market. Alternatively, the two lineages could have evolved in an animal reservoir from a shared MRCA before separately jumping into humans at the market. Option one is compatible with a lab leak scenario, option two is not. Option two assumes that the lab had only one lineage of the virus - but it collected samples out in the wild and could easily have collected both together, mixed and stored them, and leaked them together. So the wonderfully detailed analysis rests on this assumption.

mikeyouse 4y ago
> Option two assumes that the lab had only one lineage of the virus - but it collected samples out in the wild and could easily have collected both together, mixed and stored them, and leaked them together. So the wonderfully detailed analysis rests on this assumption. They were two lineages of the same virus, commonly seen in repeated spillover transmission. Explain specifically how you think they would "leak" both of them together - because the theory in your comment eliminates the option of an infected worker spreading the lab virus.
- kaitaincps 4y ago
  No it doesn't. There is a single leak, which mutates into a second strain through community transmission over a period of a few months. That's it.
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    The two lineages were both present in some of the first infections at the Market in early December 2019 and in environmental samples taken at the market in mid December. They couldn't have circulated for “a few months” because in that time, literally tens of thousands of cases would have been reported. So you’d have to have a two SNP mutation from one of the first infected people in the world that would go on to infect basically everyone else in the world since Lineage B was reported first but soon died out. It’s not impossible (nothing really is) but would be extremely unlikely.

vfclists 4y ago

Doesn't the article have a table of contents? What happened to plain HTML documents with a table of contents at the top that enables to get an idea of the structure of the document and jump back and forth between the sections?

nraynaud 4y ago

And saying that China would have an interest in spreading the virus seems fishy to me too, they almost decapitated the Communist Party by having a giant dinner at the onset of the pandemic.

hedora 4y ago

Two things are clear: 1) If it was a lab leak, it was from a well-documented collaboration between American and Chinese biological weapons researchers. 2) It's extremely likely a leak like this will occur in the future, since these sorts of weapons programs are common. I don't see why most people should care if it was a leak or not. It doesn't have any impact on (2) moving forward.

imiric 4y ago
> It doesn't have any impact on (2) moving forward. Of course it does. If we know how the leak happened, we can increase safety measures to avoid it happening again in the same way. How is this not obvious? A peculiar thing about humans is that we can learn from our mistakes. That doesn't happen if we try to pretend there was no mistake to begin with.

AzzieElbab 4y ago

What happened to zoonotic hypothesis? Any updates? Was culprit identified by means other than Bayesian reasoning?

jameset 4y ago

Definitely not true. There is lots of circumstantial evidence for research-related origin but no dispositive evidence for zoonotic or research related Orion. And Markolin… well… not worth your time

cannabis_sam 4y ago

Since you don’t even mention Daszak, while regurgitating the position he established years ago, you are per definition arguing in bad faith. Please, for the love of us all, stop attacking humanity..

trashtester 4y ago

Here is a hypothesis that fits the data perfectly (but that could have a somewhat low prior): - A poor studen has discovered that there is a demand in the wet market for bats. - The student works at a lab that either has an in-house breeding area for presumably healthy bats, or that buy such bats from an external vendor. - The student sees the opportunity for some extra income by selling some of those bats to the local wet market - By some accident, one or more of the bats sold have been infected with some of the virusues being studied at the labratory. Edit: A variation of the above idea would be if some bat-specialist (someone with skills for catching, keeping or transporting bats were working both the for virology institute AND for the wet market). This person could have, in some way, facilitated transfer of a virus from the institute to the wet market. There is probably a number of such possible ways to associate the lab with the wet market, simply based on the two having a shared interest in bats.

riyadparvez 4y ago
I've heard it from someone who was in China after the pandemic emerged. Apparently some Chinese people believe exactly that. Some of the lab animals were sold to the wet market. And that's how the virus jumped from animal to host. Although evidence is scant. Then again it's China.
- trashtester 4y ago
  Now, IF this is true, it would also explain why it seems that the government is trying to cover up what happened at the institute. If this hypothesis were to be true, it might cause China/the CCP to lose face more than many other alternatives, as such corruption could be seen as a weakness of the current system.
rcpt 4y ago
The prior might be higher than you think https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/47531/did-a-chinese-researcher-sell-his-lab-animals-to-street-food-vendors https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/47531/did-a-chi...
- 4y ago

mc32 4y ago

The WHO called for further investigation into the lab leak theory which means they have not dismissed it and believe it deserves a proper investigation.

imiric 4y ago
It's hardly relevant what the WHO says or does in this discussion. They've shown themselves to be biased and untrustworthy on more than one occasion.

europabound 4y ago

Two reviews of Markolins work are worth reading before you take it seriously: https://twitter.com/EmaNymton90/status/1540235304854032385?s=20&t=ttngCLLw2AaXbuXu8r412g https://twitter.com/EmaNymton90/status/1540235304854032385?s... https://twitter.com/gdemaneuf/status/1507092599945166849?s=20&t=ttngCLLw2AaXbuXu8r412g https://twitter.com/gdemaneuf/status/1507092599945166849?s=2...

mikeyouse 4y ago
Ah yes, reviews written by the eminently qualified "Not my name" spelled backwards and a data analyst for a bank... I'll pass.

kaitaincps 4y ago

One thing I would point out here: Shi Zhengli is the principal bat-borne sarbecovirus researcher at the WIV. When the pandemic first came to light, the first thought Shi Zhengli had was, "Oh my goodness! That might have have come from our lab! Let's investigate! I wonder if the municipal health authority has got it wrong. I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China." Zhengli goes on to report that she was apparently enormously relieved to discover that so far as she could tell, the outbreak had not come from her lab. All well and good, but... When she was told about the nature of the epidemic, and the kind of virus it was, why was Shi Zhengli's first instinct that it might have leaked from her lab? Don't you think this is curious? What does she know that made her turn to that possibility immediately? Why didn't she simply assume, like most others, that it was some new natural pathogen arising from zoonotic transfer?

mikeyouse 4y ago
You'd have to ask her -- but all of the initial reasons that everyone was unsure also apply to her. There was a novel bat coronavirus pandemic near where her lab studies bat coronaviruses - why wouldn't that be your first thought?
- kaitaincps 4y ago
  She’s a scientist and a bat virus expert. One would expect her mind to gravitate towards what she saw as being the most plausible explanation. If a zoonotic jump had been overwhelmingly probable, why would the news have triggered the kind of reaction she later reported having? Bear in mind that your analysis is predicated on the falsehood that the WIV had been set up in Wuhan because that was a bat virus hotspot. So you’ll need to revisit that line of reasoning.
mike_d 4y ago
> "I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China" Which in itself is an extremely odd statement, to the point I think it might have been taken out of context or mistranslated. If it was going to happen anywhere, Wuhan was one of the most likely candidates - to the point they built the lab there to do the research.

lazyeye 4y ago

In terms of a natural (non-engineered) virus leaking from inside a lab (zoonotic transmission can happen either side of a wall), how is the current evidence pointing in one direction? Not sure where the "weird insinuation" is?

Xorakios 4y ago

That is an excellent article and, as the authors say in the first paragraph, lengthy and informative. The combination of Chinese secrecy and Trump demanding that they pay reparations have poisoned a lot of discussions. But come on, a novel bat virus exploding from the world's main research facility about bat viruses that was first reported by a doctor from a hospital in the same city with symptoms from the wife of a researcher at the Wuhan facility? That's a lot of coincidences. And Jethro Gibbs doesn't believe in coincidences ;)

ellopoppit 4y ago
>symptoms from the wife of a researcher at the Wuhan facility I'm interested to confirm this, do you know what their name is/was or where I could find more information on this?
- Xorakios 4y ago
  https://nypost.com/2021/05/27/state-dept-investigator-ridiculous-to-say-covid-was-natural/ https://nypost.com/2021/05/27/state-dept-investigator-ridicu... And not Shi Zhengli, that is not the wet market worker, but people are blaming her for just questioning official narrative.

PhilippMarkolin 4y ago

More and more, I find that lableak (which started with genuine scientific uncertainty) is not driven by genuine curiosity or scientific inquiry, but by the strength of it's emotional narrative. Lableakers like Alina Chan started as maybe genuine, maybe opportunistic scientific dissidents who got boosted into the spotlight by conspiratorial-thinking prone rightwing networks. They build and got caught up in echo chambers that for years now created their own self-sealing reality. However, we know today that the scientific evidence turned out to be entirely one-sided for a natural spillover event and not a lableak, which is why the 'cover ups' have to get bigger and bigger, include independent scientists all over the world, and the establishment, and mainstream journalists etc. and the actual evidence is not much talked about anymore in lableak conspiracy land. Their problem lies entirely with the evidence already available, and no amount of evidence that is 'missing' can remedy that fact. We can happily grant a 100% leak rate from the WIV, and it would not move the needle on zoonotic origin any more. We can grant perfect cover-ups and secret viruses, and it would not suddenly make the available evidence square with a lableak scenario. That is the reality. And all lableak proponents have been doing is to distract from it.

inquirerGeneral 4y ago
Thank you for showing how you started with zero genuine curiosity or scientific inquiry, instead opting for a total dismissal and refusal to actually consider the possibility. It is not that you had any reason to believe she was wrong. There is far more evidence for it than what Alina has shown. Have you read the WSJ's constant updates on this story? They have singlehandedly pressured China and the WHO into re-looking into the situation--the only reason nothing has come of it (yet) is they are stalling for any final answers (again). The "lableak cannot be real" proponets are the least scientific people around. I almost put you in the same group as a Flat Earther, a Young Earth Creationist, and a Scientologist. You're a little better, maybe.