3 ms·

Carful when assuming how a lab leak must have unfolded, there’s many possibilities. A single worker gets infected/accidentally releases multiple variants, slop

by Retric 2y ago

Carful when assuming how a lab leak must have unfolded, there’s many possibilities. A single worker gets infected/accidentally releases multiple variants, sloppy worker messing up twice doesn’t seem that crazy. A lab leak is also consistent with an infection person visiting a location that experienced a separate variant. And that’s just a few options there’s also things like an intentional leak followed by another intentional leak etc. I’ve read that the lab was intentionally set near that wet market, so there being overlap like this doesn’t seem extraordinary.

DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
This is how conspiracy theories become unfalsifiable. You're now positing that a lab worker got infected with multiple variants (which wouldn't exist in the lab, by the way, since they would work with cloned virus), then traveled across town and spread the virus at the market. The evidence all points towards a spillover (two, actually) at the market, but you can always make the lab leak theory ever more convoluted to keep it alive.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  Why do you believe that lab workers only work with cloned viruses? Do you know the exact nature of the research that was going on there? Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely. There's a good chance that the lack of safety was in the culture and not just one careless person. In November and December, several Wuhan Institute personnel were reporting unknown illnesses and took standard precautions (weeks of isolation) over it. It sounds like they weren't equipped to deal with a class of pathogens that they were working with.
  - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
    > Do you know the exact nature of the research that was going on there? We actually have a very good idea of what research was going on there. The groups in question publish their research, give talks at international conferences, upload the viruses they discover to US databases, talk with colleagues abroad, etc. We have a very good picture of what they were working on, and every indication is that they didn't have any virus closely related to SARS-CoV-2. > Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely. If that were the case, you'd see the outbreak centered on the lab. It wasn't. It was centered on the market, on the other side of town. So you have to start making implausible - and obviously motivated - assertions that two different lab workers went and infected people at the market, without infecting any of their colleagues or anyone else along the way.
    - pclmulqdq 2y ago
      > If that were the case, you'd see the outbreak centered on the lab. It wasn't. It was centered on the market, on the other side of town. So you have to start making implausible - and obviously motivated - assertions that two different lab workers went and infected people at the market, without infecting any of their colleagues or anyone else along the way. There literally was an outbreak among lab workers in November to December of 2019. Many of them got sick with something that looks vaguely like COVID and quarantined over it - this is a standard precaution when you work around weird pathogens. Social media from these workers was suppressed when they talked about getting sick. Chinese whistleblowers discussed this at the time. I'm frankly surprised you haven't seen any of this evidence given your interest in the subject. And we only know about the research they published, not what goes unpublished. That includes various kinds of failed research, research that someone did for fun and wouldn't make it past ethics boards (a not-infrequent problem for this type of virus research), and research that was done under the table to nefarious ends.
      - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
        > There literally was an outbreak among lab workers in November to December of 2019. No, there wasn't. The 1st Trump administration leaked a rumor to the press that three workers got a respiratory virus sometime in the winter in 2019. Even if true, that's completely uninteresting. A large percentage of Earth's population gets any number of respiratory viruses every winter. I have no idea where you're getting the rest of the details that you're claiming ("looks vaguely like COVID," "quarantined over it," etc.). They're not even in the Trump administration's leaks, and I suspect you're getting them from the online rumor mill. > And we only know about the research they published, not what goes unpublished. We actually know much more than what gets published. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology regularly go and give talks at international conferences. There are visiting scientists at the WIV from other countries, including the United States. WIV scientists upload RNA sequences that they gather in the field to US-based gene-sequence databases. This wasn't secret research. It was out in the open. They would have had no reason at all to conceal the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 if they had had it. Yet there's no indication whatsoever that they had it. Everything we know indicates that they were just as clueless about the virus when the outbreak began as everyone else.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- pja 2y ago
  These labs were putting coronavirus samples into a forcing environment that drove evolutionary development towards the goal they wanted to study. Creating new lineages of the virus that differed from the original was the entire point! Given that, it’s plausible that sloppy lab handling procedures led to someone being infected with multiple different viruses that were present in the same part of the lab. None of this proves the lab leak hypothesis of course, but a lab worker being infected with multiple variants simultaneously (or separately) is a perfectly plausible outcome.
  - Vecr 2y ago
    Doesn't have to be the same person either. A sloppy work safety culture is contagious.
- shakow 2y ago
  TBF, the idea of two zoonosis event, at the same, and virtually at the same time, do not rank very higher in the probability scale either.
  - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
    Multiple zoonosis events is actually exactly what you expect from natural spillover. If the virus is spreading in farmed animals, it will have many chances to spill over into humans. In fact, this is exactly what happened with the original SARS in 2002. It's striking how similar the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak is to the original SARS outbreak. Almost every detail of the spillover is identical: unknown coronavirus emerges at market in major Chinese city selling wild animals.
    - shakow 2y ago
      But SARS outbreak was from a single strain, wasn't it? It's not the “two zoonosis” that I find to be low-probability, it's the “two zoonosis of two different strains at the same place & time”.
      - mikeyouse 2y ago
        The two Covid strains were closely related with only a few mutations difference between them. As you’d expect if eg two different raccoon dogs were infected with the same virus and one of the lineages was preferred.
        pclmulqdq 2y ago
        You would expect, as was the case with SARS, that we would then find the population of infected animals. That did not happen with COVID, and in fact when we went looking, the closest virus in a wild population was a bat coronavirus located 1000 miles away.
        DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
wk_end 2y ago
> I’ve read that the lab was intentionally set near that wet market... That seems unlikely, given that - per Wikipedia - the WIV opened in 1956 and the wet market opened in 2002.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 2y ago
  I doubt they are actually related but it’s something I read presumably because: “Wuhan Branch of the CAS.[4] Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it was founded in 1956 and opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory[5] in 2018.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology There was also a separate BSL-2 facility that moved right before the outbreak which also got news coverage due to the timing. But I think that was more confusion as they shouldn’t be working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility.
  - wk_end 2y ago
    They in fact were working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility, which is another thing that helps make the lab leak hypothesis more plausible. E.g. from Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-leak https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-... Baric testified that he had specifically warned Shi Zhengli that the WIV’s critical coronavirus research was being conducted in labs with insufficient biosafety protections. When he urged her to move the work to a more secure biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) lab, he testified that she did not heed his recommendation. Because the WIV continued to perform coronavirus research at what he considers an inappropriately low biosafety level, Baric said of a laboratory accident, “You can’t rule that out…. You just can’t.”
    - maeil 2y ago
      Similarly: In 2004, nine people were infected with Sars and one person died after two researchers were separately exposed to the virus while working at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing. In November 2019, just a month before the first confirmed case of Covid-19, more than 6,000 people in north-west China were infected with brucellosis, a bacterial disease with flu-like symptoms, after a leak at a vaccine plant. [1] The Chinese facility hosts one of no more than six BSL-4 labs in the world that had been conducting contentious “gain of function” research on bat-related pathogens before the pandemic, according to Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University [1] Just given the above, the statistical likelihood of coincidence is so absurdly low it alone means there needs to be overwhelming evidence to the opposite to overcome it. At no point has this been the case. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/a0badd5d-4d88-4a3b-b019-61c6d8275caa https://www.ft.com/content/a0badd5d-4d88-4a3b-b019-61c6d8275...

by Retric 2y ago

DiogenesKynikos 2y ago

This is how conspiracy theories become unfalsifiable. You're now positing that a lab worker got infected with multiple variants (which wouldn't exist in the lab, by the way, since they would work with cloned virus), then traveled across town and spread the virus at the market. The evidence all points towards a spillover (two, actually) at the market, but you can always make the lab leak theory ever more convoluted to keep it alive.

pclmulqdq 2y ago
Why do you believe that lab workers only work with cloned viruses? Do you know the exact nature of the research that was going on there? Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely. There's a good chance that the lack of safety was in the culture and not just one careless person. In November and December, several Wuhan Institute personnel were reporting unknown illnesses and took standard precautions (weeks of isolation) over it. It sounds like they weren't equipped to deal with a class of pathogens that they were working with.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
  > Do you know the exact nature of the research that was going on there? We actually have a very good idea of what research was going on there. The groups in question publish their research, give talks at international conferences, upload the viruses they discover to US databases, talk with colleagues abroad, etc. We have a very good picture of what they were working on, and every indication is that they didn't have any virus closely related to SARS-CoV-2. > Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely. If that were the case, you'd see the outbreak centered on the lab. It wasn't. It was centered on the market, on the other side of town. So you have to start making implausible - and obviously motivated - assertions that two different lab workers went and infected people at the market, without infecting any of their colleagues or anyone else along the way.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    > If that were the case, you'd see the outbreak centered on the lab. It wasn't. It was centered on the market, on the other side of town. So you have to start making implausible - and obviously motivated - assertions that two different lab workers went and infected people at the market, without infecting any of their colleagues or anyone else along the way. There literally was an outbreak among lab workers in November to December of 2019. Many of them got sick with something that looks vaguely like COVID and quarantined over it - this is a standard precaution when you work around weird pathogens. Social media from these workers was suppressed when they talked about getting sick. Chinese whistleblowers discussed this at the time. I'm frankly surprised you haven't seen any of this evidence given your interest in the subject. And we only know about the research they published, not what goes unpublished. That includes various kinds of failed research, research that someone did for fun and wouldn't make it past ethics boards (a not-infrequent problem for this type of virus research), and research that was done under the table to nefarious ends.
    - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
      > There literally was an outbreak among lab workers in November to December of 2019. No, there wasn't. The 1st Trump administration leaked a rumor to the press that three workers got a respiratory virus sometime in the winter in 2019. Even if true, that's completely uninteresting. A large percentage of Earth's population gets any number of respiratory viruses every winter. I have no idea where you're getting the rest of the details that you're claiming ("looks vaguely like COVID," "quarantined over it," etc.). They're not even in the Trump administration's leaks, and I suspect you're getting them from the online rumor mill. > And we only know about the research they published, not what goes unpublished. We actually know much more than what gets published. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology regularly go and give talks at international conferences. There are visiting scientists at the WIV from other countries, including the United States. WIV scientists upload RNA sequences that they gather in the field to US-based gene-sequence databases. This wasn't secret research. It was out in the open. They would have had no reason at all to conceal the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 if they had had it. Yet there's no indication whatsoever that they had it. Everything we know indicates that they were just as clueless about the virus when the outbreak began as everyone else.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pja 2y ago
These labs were putting coronavirus samples into a forcing environment that drove evolutionary development towards the goal they wanted to study. Creating new lineages of the virus that differed from the original was the entire point! Given that, it’s plausible that sloppy lab handling procedures led to someone being infected with multiple different viruses that were present in the same part of the lab. None of this proves the lab leak hypothesis of course, but a lab worker being infected with multiple variants simultaneously (or separately) is a perfectly plausible outcome.
- Vecr 2y ago
  Doesn't have to be the same person either. A sloppy work safety culture is contagious.
shakow 2y ago
TBF, the idea of two zoonosis event, at the same, and virtually at the same time, do not rank very higher in the probability scale either.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
  Multiple zoonosis events is actually exactly what you expect from natural spillover. If the virus is spreading in farmed animals, it will have many chances to spill over into humans. In fact, this is exactly what happened with the original SARS in 2002. It's striking how similar the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak is to the original SARS outbreak. Almost every detail of the spillover is identical: unknown coronavirus emerges at market in major Chinese city selling wild animals.
  - shakow 2y ago
    But SARS outbreak was from a single strain, wasn't it? It's not the “two zoonosis” that I find to be low-probability, it's the “two zoonosis of two different strains at the same place & time”.
    - mikeyouse 2y ago
      The two Covid strains were closely related with only a few mutations difference between them. As you’d expect if eg two different raccoon dogs were infected with the same virus and one of the lineages was preferred.
      - pclmulqdq 2y ago
        You would expect, as was the case with SARS, that we would then find the population of infected animals. That did not happen with COVID, and in fact when we went looking, the closest virus in a wild population was a bat coronavirus located 1000 miles away.
        DiogenesKynikos 2y ago

wk_end 2y ago

> I’ve read that the lab was intentionally set near that wet market... That seems unlikely, given that - per Wikipedia - the WIV opened in 1956 and the wet market opened in 2002.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Retric 2y ago
I doubt they are actually related but it’s something I read presumably because: “Wuhan Branch of the CAS.[4] Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it was founded in 1956 and opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory[5] in 2018.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology There was also a separate BSL-2 facility that moved right before the outbreak which also got news coverage due to the timing. But I think that was more confusion as they shouldn’t be working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility.
- wk_end 2y ago
  They in fact were working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility, which is another thing that helps make the lab leak hypothesis more plausible. E.g. from Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-leak https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-... Baric testified that he had specifically warned Shi Zhengli that the WIV’s critical coronavirus research was being conducted in labs with insufficient biosafety protections. When he urged her to move the work to a more secure biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) lab, he testified that she did not heed his recommendation. Because the WIV continued to perform coronavirus research at what he considers an inappropriately low biosafety level, Baric said of a laboratory accident, “You can’t rule that out…. You just can’t.”
  - maeil 2y ago
    Similarly: In 2004, nine people were infected with Sars and one person died after two researchers were separately exposed to the virus while working at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing. In November 2019, just a month before the first confirmed case of Covid-19, more than 6,000 people in north-west China were infected with brucellosis, a bacterial disease with flu-like symptoms, after a leak at a vaccine plant. [1] The Chinese facility hosts one of no more than six BSL-4 labs in the world that had been conducting contentious “gain of function” research on bat-related pathogens before the pandemic, according to Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University [1] Just given the above, the statistical likelihood of coincidence is so absurdly low it alone means there needs to be overwhelming evidence to the opposite to overcome it. At no point has this been the case. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/a0badd5d-4d88-4a3b-b019-61c6d8275caa https://www.ft.com/content/a0badd5d-4d88-4a3b-b019-61c6d8275...