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The only thing I find somewhat frustrating about this is that lab leak is nearly impossible to disprove. Because even if you can convince folks that the science

The only thing I find somewhat frustrating about this is that lab leak is nearly impossible to disprove. Because even if you can convince folks that the science shows it was natural in origin, that still doesn't mean it wasn't being studied in a lab somewhere. I agree with the other commenter who says that "it's a good idea to review and possibly improve biolab safety protocols and also to end wet markets as the latter were obviously a biohazard even before the pandemic." I see at least some discussion of the former, but almost none of the latter. Is there anything we can do about wet markets? Use trade negotiations as leverage? I don't even see a discussion.

mdgrech23 3y ago
Asking another culture to their way? Could luck w/ that. There's nothing stopping us from bringing it up but I can't picture a diplomat hinging a deal on wet markets.
jghn 3y ago
I had some relatives ask me about this at the time. My work is tangential to the biological sciences so sometimes they think I know things I don't :) I always chose my words carefully. To them, when they'd ask me if it was a "lab leak" they always meant something untoward was happening at the lab. Researchers studying artificial superbugs, etc. But there's a very big difference between "natural phenomena that found its way to a lab and then out" and "artificial phenomena created in a lab and then out". So I'd respond with things like "probably not man-made", which they often took as me saying not a "lab leak". EDIT: to be more clear about the point I was raising, I was agreeing with the parent's point. Some of this language is politically/socially charged, and one needs to take that into account when discussing the matter.
- baja_blast 3y ago
  But lots of aspects and features of SARS-CoV2 point to it being a natural virus with a human specific furin cleavage site inserted into it. In fact it looks almost exactly what you would expect from the type of experiments outlines in the DEFUSE Proposal https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop... The fact that the location happens to be in the exact location proposed in experiments and commonly used in virology, and the fact that SARS-CoV2 binds to Human ACE2 more efficiently than any other species really stands out: > Spike protein exhibited the highest binding to human (h)ACE2 of all the species tested. . . > These findings show that the earliest known SARS-CoV-2 isolates were surprisingly well adapted to bind strongly to human ACE2, helping explain its efficient human to human respiratory transmission https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8225877/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8225877/ > Our observations suggest that by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV. However, no precursors or branches of evolution stemming from a less human-adapted SARS-CoV-2-like virus have been detected https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1 Not to mention that it's absurd to think that such an infectious virus would have been circulating in Raccoon Dogs or Civets and just simply disappear after the first human was infected with zero traces to be found. Like when humans passed covid to white tailed deer that did not stop the virus from circulating in humans. Are we supposed to just accept SARS-CoV2 spillover was the result of an "Immaculate Infection">?
Enginerrrd 3y ago
>The only thing I find somewhat frustrating about this is that lab leak is nearly impossible to disprove. I don't think that's really true and I think that statement comes from ignorance of the volume of work done in epidemiology and public health. Lots of natural spillover events have been pretty well figured out in the past through contact tracing and finding animal reservoirs with plausible proximity to index patients and stuff like that. When that much evidence piles up, it'd be pretty unscientific to conclude a lab-leak occurred. In this case though, a lab-leak remains a fairly plausible possibility. Natural spillover does too! We don't (and we may never) really have definitive evidence either way, but there are good reasons to suspect both.
- elicash 3y ago
  I'll obviously disagree my statements come from ignorance! I think our views are nearly perfectly aligned, in fact. We're talking about a rhetorical difference with me saying "disprove" versus what you called "plausible proximity." But I don't think we disagree about anything.
  - Enginerrrd 3y ago
    Perhaps it is indeed a semantic argument then, it's just there's a big difference between assigning truth probabilities of 55% natural to 45% lab-leak vs. 98% natural to 2% lab. While in the latter case, it hasn't technically been "disproved", it pretty much has. And for many previous spillovers (NIPAH, HENDRA, ebola, various hauntavirus outbreaks, etc.) It's very definitive that it was indeed natural spillover. So basically I think it is indeed possible to disprove a lab-leak in many many cases. There remain several oddities about COVID that haven't led to that sort of truth probability. However, I still think it's possible we could shift those probabilities with COVID, particularly if the CCCP weren't being so shady about the whole thing above and beyond their usual lack of transparency. (Taking the genetic db offline, policy changes regarding lab safety etc.)
- jghn 3y ago
  The problem here is what does "lab leak" mean. Obviously at its core it means that the virus was stored at the lab and then found its way out somehow. However, to many people in the world it has other implications. And thus discussion around it needs to be careful. For instance there's an enormous difference between "virus was 100% as found in nature, stored in lab, leaked" and "virus was 100% synthetic, stored in lab, leaked". And of course the real answer in a lab leak scenario is likely somewhere in the middle. But when discussing the matter, one needs to take care to understand what "lab leak" *means* to the people on the other side of the conversation.
epgui 3y ago
I think people need to have a more reasonable expectation of what is knowable. It's very much against human nature to accept uncertainty, but here it's the adult thing to do. Currently the best working hypothesis is the natural origin, but that doesn't mean we have certainty around what the origin is. We need to stop bickering over unproductive questions.
metalspot 3y ago
> nearly impossible to disprove lab leak is dead simple to disprove. all you have to do is find an animal that you can infect with covid and will spread it and you have your proof. many people have been spending a lot of money for years trying to do this and the longer they continue to fail the higher the probability of lab leak becomes.
- elicash 3y ago
  I think you misunderstood my comment. In that scenario, it still wouldn't rule out the possibility of a lab leak, since like I said they still could have been studying that natural origin inside of a lab.
  - metalspot 3y ago
    > still wouldn't rule out the possibility of a lab leak but finding an animal that can spread covid with a plausible story for how it cross over to humans in wuhan is a threshold that has not been crossed yet. if anyone could meet that threshold test it would be treated as proof of natural origin. but supposing that it was a natural virus that came from an animal in the lab at wuhan then it would be very easy for people with access to that information to identify the natural source, and since that has not happened, it means the virus is either from a natural source that was not in the lab, or it was created in the lab. the longer time that passes without finding a natural source outside the lab the more likely it is that it was created in the lab.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      > the longer time that passes without finding a natural source outside the lab the more likely it is that it was created in the lab. This is not correct. It may well be that the evidence existed but was lost. The idea that biology will just sit around and wait until we catch up with it is fundamentally mistaken. Some things happen just once and that's that. Some things happen all the time and you can observe them as they happen. Some things leave ample evidence. Biology is not a static system, it isn't a computer program and it isn't a piece of hardware. Your 'bug' may simply not be reproducible even if it in fact did occur just once.
tripletao 3y ago
> The only thing I find somewhat frustrating about this is that lab leak is nearly impossible to disprove. A population of animals infected with virus genetically ancestral to the earliest human infections would absolutely disprove any theories of genetic engineering. For example, the discovery of BANAL-20 has pretty strongly excluded any theories that SARS-CoV-2's spike evolved in hACE2 mice (but not that the spike evolved naturally and was used in a laboratory recombinant, as in the unfunded DEFUSE proposal). Such a population wouldn't absolutely disprove theories of research-related spillover without lab manipulation of the virus (e.g., a researcher sampling bat caves gets infected in the field). It would significantly weaken those though, especially if that population was far from any known pre-pandemic sampling trips. In the previous two coronavirus spillovers (SARS-1, MERS), animals (palm civets and raccoon dogs, camels) infected with virus near-identical to the human virus were discovered within about a year. For MERS we also see genomic evidence of multiple spillovers, separated by an evolutionary distance that makes cryptic zoonotic spread essentially certain. For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting. That was the goal of the original pangolin papers; but that turned out to be multiple reports all derived from the same batch of smuggled pangolins, making it much more likely that humans infected those pangolins in the same way that many humans infected their housecats. The absence of that evidence doesn't mean SARS-CoV-2 is certainly of unnatural origin; the zoonotic path for some unquestionably natural viruses (e.g. Ebola) is still unknown. It's not what anyone expected, though. > Is there anything we can do about wet markets? Reckless agricultural practices need to be stopped. The West is guilty too; there's less taste for exotic mammals here, but routine use of antibiotics in healthy animals may be remembered as a crime against humanity. That's a lot harder than stopping a tiny subset of government-funded research with no clear benefits, though. So it seems reasonable to me to work first on that much more achievable goal.
Ferret7446 3y ago
Why are we trying to disprove it when it is by far the most likely possibility?

mdgrech23 3y ago

Asking another culture to their way? Could luck w/ that. There's nothing stopping us from bringing it up but I can't picture a diplomat hinging a deal on wet markets.

jghn 3y ago

I had some relatives ask me about this at the time. My work is tangential to the biological sciences so sometimes they think I know things I don't :) I always chose my words carefully. To them, when they'd ask me if it was a "lab leak" they always meant something untoward was happening at the lab. Researchers studying artificial superbugs, etc. But there's a very big difference between "natural phenomena that found its way to a lab and then out" and "artificial phenomena created in a lab and then out". So I'd respond with things like "probably not man-made", which they often took as me saying not a "lab leak". EDIT: to be more clear about the point I was raising, I was agreeing with the parent's point. Some of this language is politically/socially charged, and one needs to take that into account when discussing the matter.

baja_blast 3y ago
But lots of aspects and features of SARS-CoV2 point to it being a natural virus with a human specific furin cleavage site inserted into it. In fact it looks almost exactly what you would expect from the type of experiments outlines in the DEFUSE Proposal https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop... The fact that the location happens to be in the exact location proposed in experiments and commonly used in virology, and the fact that SARS-CoV2 binds to Human ACE2 more efficiently than any other species really stands out: > Spike protein exhibited the highest binding to human (h)ACE2 of all the species tested. . . > These findings show that the earliest known SARS-CoV-2 isolates were surprisingly well adapted to bind strongly to human ACE2, helping explain its efficient human to human respiratory transmission https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8225877/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8225877/ > Our observations suggest that by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV. However, no precursors or branches of evolution stemming from a less human-adapted SARS-CoV-2-like virus have been detected https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1 Not to mention that it's absurd to think that such an infectious virus would have been circulating in Raccoon Dogs or Civets and just simply disappear after the first human was infected with zero traces to be found. Like when humans passed covid to white tailed deer that did not stop the virus from circulating in humans. Are we supposed to just accept SARS-CoV2 spillover was the result of an "Immaculate Infection">?

Enginerrrd 3y ago

>The only thing I find somewhat frustrating about this is that lab leak is nearly impossible to disprove. I don't think that's really true and I think that statement comes from ignorance of the volume of work done in epidemiology and public health. Lots of natural spillover events have been pretty well figured out in the past through contact tracing and finding animal reservoirs with plausible proximity to index patients and stuff like that. When that much evidence piles up, it'd be pretty unscientific to conclude a lab-leak occurred. In this case though, a lab-leak remains a fairly plausible possibility. Natural spillover does too! We don't (and we may never) really have definitive evidence either way, but there are good reasons to suspect both.

elicash 3y ago
I'll obviously disagree my statements come from ignorance! I think our views are nearly perfectly aligned, in fact. We're talking about a rhetorical difference with me saying "disprove" versus what you called "plausible proximity." But I don't think we disagree about anything.
- Enginerrrd 3y ago
  Perhaps it is indeed a semantic argument then, it's just there's a big difference between assigning truth probabilities of 55% natural to 45% lab-leak vs. 98% natural to 2% lab. While in the latter case, it hasn't technically been "disproved", it pretty much has. And for many previous spillovers (NIPAH, HENDRA, ebola, various hauntavirus outbreaks, etc.) It's very definitive that it was indeed natural spillover. So basically I think it is indeed possible to disprove a lab-leak in many many cases. There remain several oddities about COVID that haven't led to that sort of truth probability. However, I still think it's possible we could shift those probabilities with COVID, particularly if the CCCP weren't being so shady about the whole thing above and beyond their usual lack of transparency. (Taking the genetic db offline, policy changes regarding lab safety etc.)
jghn 3y ago
The problem here is what does "lab leak" mean. Obviously at its core it means that the virus was stored at the lab and then found its way out somehow. However, to many people in the world it has other implications. And thus discussion around it needs to be careful. For instance there's an enormous difference between "virus was 100% as found in nature, stored in lab, leaked" and "virus was 100% synthetic, stored in lab, leaked". And of course the real answer in a lab leak scenario is likely somewhere in the middle. But when discussing the matter, one needs to take care to understand what "lab leak" *means* to the people on the other side of the conversation.

epgui 3y ago

I think people need to have a more reasonable expectation of what is knowable. It's very much against human nature to accept uncertainty, but here it's the adult thing to do. Currently the best working hypothesis is the natural origin, but that doesn't mean we have certainty around what the origin is. We need to stop bickering over unproductive questions.

metalspot 3y ago

> nearly impossible to disprove lab leak is dead simple to disprove. all you have to do is find an animal that you can infect with covid and will spread it and you have your proof. many people have been spending a lot of money for years trying to do this and the longer they continue to fail the higher the probability of lab leak becomes.

elicash 3y ago
I think you misunderstood my comment. In that scenario, it still wouldn't rule out the possibility of a lab leak, since like I said they still could have been studying that natural origin inside of a lab.
- metalspot 3y ago
  > still wouldn't rule out the possibility of a lab leak but finding an animal that can spread covid with a plausible story for how it cross over to humans in wuhan is a threshold that has not been crossed yet. if anyone could meet that threshold test it would be treated as proof of natural origin. but supposing that it was a natural virus that came from an animal in the lab at wuhan then it would be very easy for people with access to that information to identify the natural source, and since that has not happened, it means the virus is either from a natural source that was not in the lab, or it was created in the lab. the longer time that passes without finding a natural source outside the lab the more likely it is that it was created in the lab.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    > the longer time that passes without finding a natural source outside the lab the more likely it is that it was created in the lab. This is not correct. It may well be that the evidence existed but was lost. The idea that biology will just sit around and wait until we catch up with it is fundamentally mistaken. Some things happen just once and that's that. Some things happen all the time and you can observe them as they happen. Some things leave ample evidence. Biology is not a static system, it isn't a computer program and it isn't a piece of hardware. Your 'bug' may simply not be reproducible even if it in fact did occur just once.

tripletao 3y ago

> The only thing I find somewhat frustrating about this is that lab leak is nearly impossible to disprove. A population of animals infected with virus genetically ancestral to the earliest human infections would absolutely disprove any theories of genetic engineering. For example, the discovery of BANAL-20 has pretty strongly excluded any theories that SARS-CoV-2's spike evolved in hACE2 mice (but not that the spike evolved naturally and was used in a laboratory recombinant, as in the unfunded DEFUSE proposal). Such a population wouldn't absolutely disprove theories of research-related spillover without lab manipulation of the virus (e.g., a researcher sampling bat caves gets infected in the field). It would significantly weaken those though, especially if that population was far from any known pre-pandemic sampling trips. In the previous two coronavirus spillovers (SARS-1, MERS), animals (palm civets and raccoon dogs, camels) infected with virus near-identical to the human virus were discovered within about a year. For MERS we also see genomic evidence of multiple spillovers, separated by an evolutionary distance that makes cryptic zoonotic spread essentially certain. For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting. That was the goal of the original pangolin papers; but that turned out to be multiple reports all derived from the same batch of smuggled pangolins, making it much more likely that humans infected those pangolins in the same way that many humans infected their housecats. The absence of that evidence doesn't mean SARS-CoV-2 is certainly of unnatural origin; the zoonotic path for some unquestionably natural viruses (e.g. Ebola) is still unknown. It's not what anyone expected, though. > Is there anything we can do about wet markets? Reckless agricultural practices need to be stopped. The West is guilty too; there's less taste for exotic mammals here, but routine use of antibiotics in healthy animals may be remembered as a crime against humanity. That's a lot harder than stopping a tiny subset of government-funded research with no clear benefits, though. So it seems reasonable to me to work first on that much more achievable goal.

Ferret7446 3y ago

Why are we trying to disprove it when it is by far the most likely possibility?