4 ms·

Earlier in the pandemic I read a report talking about the possibility of the virus being something they sampled, and that it leaked when they accessed the sampl

by audunw 4y ago

Earlier in the pandemic I read a report talking about the possibility of the virus being something they sampled, and that it leaked when they accessed the sample presumably to start sequencing/analyzing it. The theory was that it was a virus they'd have sampled from immunocompromised miners working in the same caves that the bats with the most closely related viruses inhabit. They had some references to a report with something like that happening some time prior. It's so far the only theory I've read that seems to match the evidence. The evidence doesn't seem to indicate that it was engineered, or that it was a product of gain of function research on animals. I think there would have been more solid evidence pointing in that direction by now, if that was the case. They would have published something related to it, or non-Chinese researchers connected to the lab would have known something. Yet there's no evidence of any related animal resorvoir, and the virus was very well adapted to humans from the very start. And everything points to the virus passing through the lab somehow. Those things put together seems to point at them having sampled a virus that already made the jump to humans, and that somehow during the sampling, or retrieving the sample from storage, the virus escaped.

lamontcg 4y ago
There's many thousands more contact between bats and humans involved in mining (literally how RaTG13 and the Mojiang mine, bat guano collection for farming and just tourism: https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-rejects-who-investigation-hubei-wildlife-tourists-enjoy-enshi-bat.htm https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-r... There's a lot of economic activity in China that is close to bat habitats and there's evidence that cross reactivity to sarbecoviruses exists in a significant amount in rural china. The researchers collecting samples were a very tiny slice of the human-to-bat-virus exposure that is going on in China all the time. And we know that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't last very long on surfaces, it isn't transmitted by fomites. It needs to be aerosolized and breathed in. It isn't likely that the researchers were collecting live viable virus in the samples that they brought back to the lab. What they were sequencing was overwhelmingly going to be "dead" mRNA. The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened. They didn't start spreading it around their apartment building, they didn't infect people in restaurants, didn't infect elderly relatives who wound up in the hospital, etc. It makes "more" sense that they deliberately genetically engineered the virus and released it in the wet market entirely on purpose.
- tripletao 4y ago
  > The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened. Except that SARS-CoV-2's epidemiological dynamics are well-known to be overdispersed? Almost all lineages die out, and a few explode due to repeated super-spreader events. It's therefore unlikely that the first cluster will be discovered at the site of introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 was presumably first introduced to other continents at airports and seaports; but that's not where the first clusters were found.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    Explain the coincidence of why it happened to be in a wet market and not a restaurant or other gathering where people congregate. Just happened to be the one place to make it look exactly like zoonosis and extraordinarily similar to SARS-1.
    - tripletao 4y ago
      If you think SARS-CoV-2 arose naturally in the same city as the world's biggest laboratory collection of sarbecoviruses (which I do agree is possible), then you must agree that weird coincidences do happen sometimes? A wet market is crowded and poorly-ventilated, so it's a great place for a respiratory virus to spread, regardless of how it got introduced. There's also the question of ascertainment bias, whether cases were found in the wet market simply because that's where the authorities looked. I assume you've seen those endless debates, which seem basically unresolvable to me given the limited information available.
      - lamontcg 4y ago
        The pandemic happening in the same city as WIV isn't really that much of a coincidence. The virus needed a large densely packed city to really take off. Wuhan is the biggest city in central China. The catchment area around Wuhan for where a virus would follow the animal trade to the city is probably large. Wuhan is also a good candidate for a centrally located lab. That only seems like a 5-10% low probability chance, which happens (it is also the second time it happened in China and the first time looked like this one, only it hit Guangzhou where there was no lab). The infected lab worker causing exactly one massive superspreading event in the wet market without infecting anyone else, making it look exactly like zoonotic spillover, without leaving any other contacts around Wuhan is much less believable to me. That sounds like a thousand to one odds or much worse.

by audunw 4y ago

lamontcg 4y ago

There's many thousands more contact between bats and humans involved in mining (literally how RaTG13 and the Mojiang mine, bat guano collection for farming and just tourism: https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-rejects-who-investigation-hubei-wildlife-tourists-enjoy-enshi-bat.htm https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-r... There's a lot of economic activity in China that is close to bat habitats and there's evidence that cross reactivity to sarbecoviruses exists in a significant amount in rural china. The researchers collecting samples were a very tiny slice of the human-to-bat-virus exposure that is going on in China all the time. And we know that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't last very long on surfaces, it isn't transmitted by fomites. It needs to be aerosolized and breathed in. It isn't likely that the researchers were collecting live viable virus in the samples that they brought back to the lab. What they were sequencing was overwhelmingly going to be "dead" mRNA. The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened. They didn't start spreading it around their apartment building, they didn't infect people in restaurants, didn't infect elderly relatives who wound up in the hospital, etc. It makes "more" sense that they deliberately genetically engineered the virus and released it in the wet market entirely on purpose.

tripletao 4y ago
> The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened. Except that SARS-CoV-2's epidemiological dynamics are well-known to be overdispersed? Almost all lineages die out, and a few explode due to repeated super-spreader events. It's therefore unlikely that the first cluster will be discovered at the site of introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 was presumably first introduced to other continents at airports and seaports; but that's not where the first clusters were found.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  Explain the coincidence of why it happened to be in a wet market and not a restaurant or other gathering where people congregate. Just happened to be the one place to make it look exactly like zoonosis and extraordinarily similar to SARS-1.
  - tripletao 4y ago
    If you think SARS-CoV-2 arose naturally in the same city as the world's biggest laboratory collection of sarbecoviruses (which I do agree is possible), then you must agree that weird coincidences do happen sometimes? A wet market is crowded and poorly-ventilated, so it's a great place for a respiratory virus to spread, regardless of how it got introduced. There's also the question of ascertainment bias, whether cases were found in the wet market simply because that's where the authorities looked. I assume you've seen those endless debates, which seem basically unresolvable to me given the limited information available.
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      The pandemic happening in the same city as WIV isn't really that much of a coincidence. The virus needed a large densely packed city to really take off. Wuhan is the biggest city in central China. The catchment area around Wuhan for where a virus would follow the animal trade to the city is probably large. Wuhan is also a good candidate for a centrally located lab. That only seems like a 5-10% low probability chance, which happens (it is also the second time it happened in China and the first time looked like this one, only it hit Guangzhou where there was no lab). The infected lab worker causing exactly one massive superspreading event in the wet market without infecting anyone else, making it look exactly like zoonotic spillover, without leaving any other contacts around Wuhan is much less believable to me. That sounds like a thousand to one odds or much worse.