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Most of the "evidence" against lab-leak is just weird insinuation. Speculation about how the virus wasn't created wholly synthetically: nobody is seriously arg

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.
    - mikeyouse 4y ago
      You do realize that your two points are in direct contradiction? You're mad at the author for not pointing out the WIV (Which had 0 confirmed cases anywhere near it until much later in the pandemic which is what the two bottom charts are referring to) but then you also grant that it looks like the market was the center of spread? In any case, they directly address this; > Importantly, even pneumonia cases that had no association whatsoever with the market (no work, travel, visits, or contacts there) still centered around the Huanan market and could not have been subject to ascertainment bias. The market was the only place in Wuhan where early cases had a clear association. There are no other epidemiological links to any other place in the city, other clusters only started forming later in Jan-Feb (Weibo data, shown above) and became more representative of the city’s population density. > It is worth mentioning here that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (the alleged ‘escape’ laboratory working on CoVs, not shown in map) is located on the other side of the Yangtze River, South West of the Dong Hu lake, more than 16km away from the Huanan market, and no sickness clusters of cases were shown anywhere close in December 2019. As for: > 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. You still need to explain how there are two distinct lineages at the market among the first cases! Picking and choosing one data point to be skeptical of is useless, the totality of the evidence needs to be weighed.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Is each theory equal in terms of probability based on the evidence? That's much more important than stating that both could be true
  - pb9494 4y ago
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - kristjansson 4y ago
      GIGO
- acdha 4y ago
  > I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth. Either theory is perfectly viable given the evidence we currently have. This has been extensively investigated by scientists - it’d be a career making move if you could prove something that juicy! - but the problem is that the conclusions aren’t completely certain but rather comparing probability & the limited evidence to conclude that the lab leak hypothesis is increasingly unlikely. That doesn’t make the news and it especially won’t convince conspiracy theorists when there’s a raging political battle.
  - thereddaikon 4y ago
    Scientists aren't going to prove lab leak one way or the other because the evidence isn't going to be in the virus itself. The for or against lies with the lab and the staff working there and the PRC is not going to allow an open and honest investigation to either prove or discount it. So unless it can be proven to have come from somewhere else, you are likely never going to settle whether it was lab leak.
    - mikeyouse 4y ago
      But we've pretty much established that it was a virus of natural origin - all of our molecular techniques leave signs, so an honest discussion would foreclose that possibility. That doesn't eliminate the possibility that it was a natural virus which had been collected and subsequently escaped due to bad lab technique but the former is too attractive a conspiracy theory to let go..
      - cameldrv 4y ago
        This is not true. Ralph Baric developed (and patented) a seamless technique to assemble coronaviruses in 2002 [1]. Baric was a close collaborator of the Coronavirus group at WIV. Since then there has been even more progress. Since 2015 or so it's been possible to "print" DNA of any sequence. In fact as COVID started to spread in China and the sequence was released, a Swiss lab used this technology to print the genome of SARS2, inject it into some yeast cells, and voila, you have the virus. They wrote this up in Nature [2]. If you wanted to change a naturally sampled virus using this technique, say, to insert a Furin site, swap out an RBD, whatever, you can literally do it with a text editor and copy and paste. [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7279327B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7279327B2/en [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2294-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2294-9
- ethbr0 4y ago
  > and I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth Not to be glib, but what would be a legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth? That this plausibly could have been of natural origin would seem to override any value in discerning where it actually came from. If it was a lab leak, "Oops." We hastened it occuring naturally by some amount of time. Lots of people died, but that would have happened in an inevitable spillover event anyway, albeit farther in the future. If it wasn't a lab leak, well there we are. Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? Increase biocontainment protocols? Okay, so we've made human-origin less likely. We still have to deal with naturally-occurring in the future.
  - est31 4y ago
    You raise good points, but note that not everyone is rational here. Covid has in fact shown irrational so many people are, even in the 21st century. If it were discovered to be a lab leak from something previously discovered in the wild, especially from a NIH funded lab, hell would break lose and it would hurt many aspects of biological and medical research.
    - ETH_start 4y ago
      If authorities decide based on political considerations to not investigate a mistake that led to millions of deaths and tens of millions more lives destroyed, they lose an enormous amount of credibility in the eyes of the public. Full integrity is the only chance we have of having a healthy political atmosphere where the public can trust the establishment.
  - incrudible 4y ago
    You underestimate the time value of not having a pandemic today, as opposed to perhaps hundreds of years in the future. Serial passage through humanized mice is not exactly something that happens in nature.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      That is a substantial value, to be sure. But I also look at it the other way: COVID was perhaps the smallest scale event that could produce fundamental change in the way we (as in, humans) approach biodefense and disease control. If we needed a wakeup call, better to have it now than ~2100, when we're estimated to reach peak population + continued concentration in cities.
bayesian_horse 4y ago
You don't understand biology. It is possible to date the divergence of genomes using a genetic clock. So they know if those spike proteins had been recombinated. Serial passage in mice can't be ruled out but is quite out there. Lots of theories can't be completely ruled out, but wild speculation like that is not very productive. For the lab-leak theory to be true, a "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) has to somehow make it into a lab undetected. Additionally and alternatively scientists have to undergo something like this "serial mice passage". Which is not proven that it could work. And then they would need to somehow let the virus escape through an accident even though they knew it could be dangerous. And it would have to accidentally be able to infect Humans extremely well (which is a tall ask still). It's just... highly improbable.
- pbreit 4y ago
  Less probable than such a coronavirus originating in Wuhan of all places?
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    The WIV was in Wuhan due to the proximity of coronaviruses and other bat-borne diseases like rhabdovirusus.. this line of logic is akin to blaming shark research centers in South Africa for nearby attacks.
    - emmelaich 4y ago
      I don't think so? The bats are generally from Southern China, Laos, Cambodia, .. Nowhere near Wuhan.
      - mikeyouse 4y ago
        There are tons of horseshoe bats in Hubei, that particular misunderstanding needs to go away.
        mikeyouse 4y ago
peteradio 4y ago
Don't fall into the trap of taking the opposite stance of bad arguments.
arinlen 4y ago
> Most of the "evidence" against lab-leak is just weird insinuation. Trying to refute evidence rejecting a theory is not equivalent to proving a theory, though. It's just broken reasoning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_conclusion_from_a_negative_premise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_conclusion_from_a_...
trasz 4y ago
I'm sorry, this is totally tangential to the topic, but... between all those versions optimised to bind to this and recombined with that - how do you manage all those changes? Do you have something resembling commits and branches?
scotty79 4y ago
That's the problem with lab-leak theory that it's basically unfalsifiable. No matter how strong evidence you gather against it you can always dismiss it with ease.
- kaitaincps 4y ago
  Ditto for zoonosis. The problem is that people treat the zoonotic transfer hypothesis as some kind of default, the incumbent to which we must defer in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary. This is a mistake, given the proximity to the WIV and the nature of the work being done there. If the pandemic had started in some remote village nowhere near a lab this line of argument would be far more compelling.
  - scotty79 4y ago
    To disprove zoonotic origin it would be sufficient for one person to step out and say "I made covid" and present a sample very similar to originally discovered covid strain and maybe some documentation regarding his experiments. It would immediately disprove theory of zoonotic origin of covid. Nothing like that is possible for lab-leak theory. Even catching animal that has a virus very close to original form of covid wouldn't disprove lab-leak theory because lab-leakers would just say that the animal just got covid from humans. As for validity of zoonotic origin hypothesis it's a default because every virus ever that troubled us came to us from other species of animals without any additional technological assistance from us. Unless you count hunting, cooking or husbandry a technological assistance. It's now very well known that coronaviruses have huge variability, are able to mutate quicly and cross barriers of species so it's overwhelmingly more likely that sars-cov-2 came to us without any technological intervention. We have no idea where the pandemic started. Only where it was noticed. Vast majority of covid cases give only flu-like symptoms. First cases might have happened in some village that had too few people to notice any spike in severe cases. Only when a person from the village visited market of a densely populated city and thousands of people got infected so that tens of them started landing in the city hospital the whole thing had a chance of getting noticed.
    - 4y ago
wesleywt 4y ago
All of this post is pure speculation with zero evidence to support it.
KaiserPro 4y ago
The biggest single reason against the lab leak is this: Its really fucking hard to reliably grow human virus. Yes, the Wuhan lab does it, but for like ~10 strains. It takes years of planning, and lots of money. Its not like you can easily hide that kinda shit. Its not like you can dump the virus into a Petri dish, shove it in a incubator and have done with it. You need hosts and proxies. And guess what? something that replicates well in hosts doesn't replicate in humans. Not only that, there is a strong chance you have to modify the hosts to better accept the virus. Also, its not like SARS-like virus is rare. MERS is relatively recent. MERS didn't catch on because you are very symptomatic.

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.
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    You do realize that your two points are in direct contradiction? You're mad at the author for not pointing out the WIV (Which had 0 confirmed cases anywhere near it until much later in the pandemic which is what the two bottom charts are referring to) but then you also grant that it looks like the market was the center of spread? In any case, they directly address this; > Importantly, even pneumonia cases that had no association whatsoever with the market (no work, travel, visits, or contacts there) still centered around the Huanan market and could not have been subject to ascertainment bias. The market was the only place in Wuhan where early cases had a clear association. There are no other epidemiological links to any other place in the city, other clusters only started forming later in Jan-Feb (Weibo data, shown above) and became more representative of the city’s population density. > It is worth mentioning here that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (the alleged ‘escape’ laboratory working on CoVs, not shown in map) is located on the other side of the Yangtze River, South West of the Dong Hu lake, more than 16km away from the Huanan market, and no sickness clusters of cases were shown anywhere close in December 2019. As for: > 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. You still need to explain how there are two distinct lineages at the market among the first cases! Picking and choosing one data point to be skeptical of is useless, the totality of the evidence needs to be weighed.
themitigating 4y ago
Is each theory equal in terms of probability based on the evidence? That's much more important than stating that both could be true
- pb9494 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kristjansson 4y ago
    GIGO
acdha 4y ago
> I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth. Either theory is perfectly viable given the evidence we currently have. This has been extensively investigated by scientists - it’d be a career making move if you could prove something that juicy! - but the problem is that the conclusions aren’t completely certain but rather comparing probability & the limited evidence to conclude that the lab leak hypothesis is increasingly unlikely. That doesn’t make the news and it especially won’t convince conspiracy theorists when there’s a raging political battle.
- thereddaikon 4y ago
  Scientists aren't going to prove lab leak one way or the other because the evidence isn't going to be in the virus itself. The for or against lies with the lab and the staff working there and the PRC is not going to allow an open and honest investigation to either prove or discount it. So unless it can be proven to have come from somewhere else, you are likely never going to settle whether it was lab leak.
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    But we've pretty much established that it was a virus of natural origin - all of our molecular techniques leave signs, so an honest discussion would foreclose that possibility. That doesn't eliminate the possibility that it was a natural virus which had been collected and subsequently escaped due to bad lab technique but the former is too attractive a conspiracy theory to let go..
    - cameldrv 4y ago
      This is not true. Ralph Baric developed (and patented) a seamless technique to assemble coronaviruses in 2002 [1]. Baric was a close collaborator of the Coronavirus group at WIV. Since then there has been even more progress. Since 2015 or so it's been possible to "print" DNA of any sequence. In fact as COVID started to spread in China and the sequence was released, a Swiss lab used this technology to print the genome of SARS2, inject it into some yeast cells, and voila, you have the virus. They wrote this up in Nature [2]. If you wanted to change a naturally sampled virus using this technique, say, to insert a Furin site, swap out an RBD, whatever, you can literally do it with a text editor and copy and paste. [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7279327B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7279327B2/en [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2294-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2294-9
ethbr0 4y ago
> and I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth Not to be glib, but what would be a legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth? That this plausibly could have been of natural origin would seem to override any value in discerning where it actually came from. If it was a lab leak, "Oops." We hastened it occuring naturally by some amount of time. Lots of people died, but that would have happened in an inevitable spillover event anyway, albeit farther in the future. If it wasn't a lab leak, well there we are. Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? Increase biocontainment protocols? Okay, so we've made human-origin less likely. We still have to deal with naturally-occurring in the future.
- est31 4y ago
  You raise good points, but note that not everyone is rational here. Covid has in fact shown irrational so many people are, even in the 21st century. If it were discovered to be a lab leak from something previously discovered in the wild, especially from a NIH funded lab, hell would break lose and it would hurt many aspects of biological and medical research.
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    If authorities decide based on political considerations to not investigate a mistake that led to millions of deaths and tens of millions more lives destroyed, they lose an enormous amount of credibility in the eyes of the public. Full integrity is the only chance we have of having a healthy political atmosphere where the public can trust the establishment.
- incrudible 4y ago
  You underestimate the time value of not having a pandemic today, as opposed to perhaps hundreds of years in the future. Serial passage through humanized mice is not exactly something that happens in nature.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    That is a substantial value, to be sure. But I also look at it the other way: COVID was perhaps the smallest scale event that could produce fundamental change in the way we (as in, humans) approach biodefense and disease control. If we needed a wakeup call, better to have it now than ~2100, when we're estimated to reach peak population + continued concentration in cities.

bayesian_horse 4y ago

You don't understand biology. It is possible to date the divergence of genomes using a genetic clock. So they know if those spike proteins had been recombinated. Serial passage in mice can't be ruled out but is quite out there. Lots of theories can't be completely ruled out, but wild speculation like that is not very productive. For the lab-leak theory to be true, a "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) has to somehow make it into a lab undetected. Additionally and alternatively scientists have to undergo something like this "serial mice passage". Which is not proven that it could work. And then they would need to somehow let the virus escape through an accident even though they knew it could be dangerous. And it would have to accidentally be able to infect Humans extremely well (which is a tall ask still). It's just... highly improbable.

pbreit 4y ago
Less probable than such a coronavirus originating in Wuhan of all places?
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  The WIV was in Wuhan due to the proximity of coronaviruses and other bat-borne diseases like rhabdovirusus.. this line of logic is akin to blaming shark research centers in South Africa for nearby attacks.
  - emmelaich 4y ago
    I don't think so? The bats are generally from Southern China, Laos, Cambodia, .. Nowhere near Wuhan.
    - mikeyouse 4y ago
      There are tons of horseshoe bats in Hubei, that particular misunderstanding needs to go away.
      - mikeyouse 4y ago

peteradio 4y ago

Don't fall into the trap of taking the opposite stance of bad arguments.

arinlen 4y ago

> Most of the "evidence" against lab-leak is just weird insinuation. Trying to refute evidence rejecting a theory is not equivalent to proving a theory, though. It's just broken reasoning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_conclusion_from_a_negative_premise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_conclusion_from_a_...

trasz 4y ago

I'm sorry, this is totally tangential to the topic, but... between all those versions optimised to bind to this and recombined with that - how do you manage all those changes? Do you have something resembling commits and branches?

scotty79 4y ago

That's the problem with lab-leak theory that it's basically unfalsifiable. No matter how strong evidence you gather against it you can always dismiss it with ease.

kaitaincps 4y ago
Ditto for zoonosis. The problem is that people treat the zoonotic transfer hypothesis as some kind of default, the incumbent to which we must defer in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary. This is a mistake, given the proximity to the WIV and the nature of the work being done there. If the pandemic had started in some remote village nowhere near a lab this line of argument would be far more compelling.
- scotty79 4y ago
  To disprove zoonotic origin it would be sufficient for one person to step out and say "I made covid" and present a sample very similar to originally discovered covid strain and maybe some documentation regarding his experiments. It would immediately disprove theory of zoonotic origin of covid. Nothing like that is possible for lab-leak theory. Even catching animal that has a virus very close to original form of covid wouldn't disprove lab-leak theory because lab-leakers would just say that the animal just got covid from humans. As for validity of zoonotic origin hypothesis it's a default because every virus ever that troubled us came to us from other species of animals without any additional technological assistance from us. Unless you count hunting, cooking or husbandry a technological assistance. It's now very well known that coronaviruses have huge variability, are able to mutate quicly and cross barriers of species so it's overwhelmingly more likely that sars-cov-2 came to us without any technological intervention. We have no idea where the pandemic started. Only where it was noticed. Vast majority of covid cases give only flu-like symptoms. First cases might have happened in some village that had too few people to notice any spike in severe cases. Only when a person from the village visited market of a densely populated city and thousands of people got infected so that tens of them started landing in the city hospital the whole thing had a chance of getting noticed.
  - 4y ago

wesleywt 4y ago

All of this post is pure speculation with zero evidence to support it.

KaiserPro 4y ago

The biggest single reason against the lab leak is this: Its really fucking hard to reliably grow human virus. Yes, the Wuhan lab does it, but for like ~10 strains. It takes years of planning, and lots of money. Its not like you can easily hide that kinda shit. Its not like you can dump the virus into a Petri dish, shove it in a incubator and have done with it. You need hosts and proxies. And guess what? something that replicates well in hosts doesn't replicate in humans. Not only that, there is a strong chance you have to modify the hosts to better accept the virus. Also, its not like SARS-like virus is rare. MERS is relatively recent. MERS didn't catch on because you are very symptomatic.