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I have family that have worked on developing NBC equipment for the military. The first thing they said when covid was spreading was that it was most likely from

I have family that have worked on developing NBC equipment for the military. The first thing they said when covid was spreading was that it was most likely from a lab. That was before anyone in the news was saying that. So an independent first-look assessment by someone with experience, followed by later finding out that there was in fact a lab there, has me heavily leaning towards it being true. But it doesn't really change anything unless there's hard proof. Even with hard proof, do you think China would pay for anything? I don't think so.

therealpygon 2y ago
You should realize experience in a tangentially related field and there being a lab somewhere in the area is not the same as insight and evidence. That’s like saying that if a new flu came out of Atlanta, the fact the CDC is there proves it came from a lab, and must be true because someone’s janitor cousin who worked there one summer said it was true. “Low confidence” means that there is a lack of evidence and the statement is ambiguous; that it could be completely true, or completely false. The only lower confidence would be direct evidence that it is outright false. Given, as you said, how nearly impossible it would be to prove true, wouldn’t you think it equally nearly impossible to prove false? Believe what you want, but even the CIA doesn’t lean on the side of you being right.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  If something very like smallpox, thought eradicated, suddenly showed up in some random town, it might be surmised that maybe some animal reservoir for it somehow slipped through the gaps. But if that random town happened to be Atlanta, home of the CDC, known to have some of the few samples of smallpox to still exist, then the relative chance of a lab leak must be thought higher. That's basic Bayesian reasoning. It doesn't prove anything but pretending the proximity to a relevant lab doesn't shift the odds at all is absurd.
  - ioulaum 2y ago
    Smallpox, yes. But another SARS variant (even a somewhat more aggressive one)... Obviously, it's not impossible. But, there were even RNA samples from Covid found in other countries, months before Covid really spread in China. I imagine the main problem with the superspreader event there was more that enough people ended up in the same hospital, and thus it was easier to identify that Covid was a distinct virus. If it was crawling around in a less dense population, its spread would've been meh, and the hospitals might not even notice the spike much.
- NeutralCrane 2y ago
  > That’s like saying that if a new flu came out of Atlanta, the fact the CDC is there proves it came from a lab, and must be true because someone’s janitor cousin who worked there one summer said it was true. Well in this case it’s more like if if a new flu burst onto the scene with the following all being true: - the epicenter of the outbreak being within a few miles of the CDC - the CDC working specifically on gain of function for new strains of the flu - the CDC being cited in whistleblower reports to the outbreak for poor safety and security protocols in the years prior to the outbreak - inability to find the natural reservoir the virus crossed over from, despite years of searching in the biggest virus hunt in human history - the closest naturally occurring relative of the virus being found in bats that are only native in areas hundreds of miles away (in this analogy, something like the upper Midwest), that also happen to be among the species of bats being studied by the lab at the CDC - several CDC employees being among the earliest discovered cases, so early that they occurred before the disease was even picked up in the radar and were only discovered when searching for the earliest cases - the US government preventing any none government health officials in or out of the area of the infection for several weeks after the outbreak - the sole other identified potential outbreak location, the wet market nearby, was completely sterilized by the US government within the first two weeks of the outbreak, over the protests of international investigators who hadn’t yet been given access to it, thereby preventing them from ever being able to confirm or deny if it was the actual ground zero of the outbreak. “Low confidence” doesn’t mean there is a lack of evidence, it means there is a lack of direct evidence. Problem is there is a lack of direct evidence for any alternative theory as well. There is, however, and overwhelming about of circumstantial evidence supporting the lab leak. The CIA isn’t going to issue accusations like this without a smoking bullet, which they will never have. The reality is that had this occurred under any other administration, the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t be so taboo. But Trump is a serial conspiracy theorist and pugilistic nationalist, so the second he floated it everyone on the left, which includes much in academia, immediately disputed it in a knee jerk reaction, despite not having much evidence either way. Since then what evidence exists has increasingly supported the lab leak theory, but many are walking back from entrenched positions. If this had happened when Obama was president I don’t think anyone would be pushing back on this with the evidence that exists.
  - 2y ago
- giantg2 2y ago
  Actually, it's more difficult to prove a wild origin than a lab origin, because labs have papertrails and witnesses. I never said I was right. I said it makes a lot of sense and I believe it's probably true. This is the sort of thing that neither of us can prove to the other at this point. You seem awfully aggressive to prove something though.
  - Sabinus 2y ago
    >because labs have papertrails and witnesses If you have access to the labs. Second hand information and extremely delayed visits to labs in a one party state are a whole other matter.
  - myvoiceismypass 2y ago
    Chinese lab paper trails are as trustworthy as Trump’s toilet paper roll trails if we are being honest.
    - Slava_Propanei 2y ago
      [dead]
- Enginerrrd 2y ago
  There's a paper from 2014 that tried to estimate the annual chance of a pandemic from a lab leak. They estimated it at 2%. I assumed they overestimated a bit for effect and put it at around 1%. Pandemics have historically happened somewhere around ever 100 years. What's that annual probability? 1%. So if you knew NOTHING else, from a bayesian standpoint, if you have to differentiate a once in a 100 year spillover or a lab leak, you would put it at 50/50. Now add in the fact that the outbreak occurred right next to a BSL lab. Now add in the fact that this lab specialized in the exact type of virus that caused the pandemic. Now add in the fact that lab workers at that lab got hospitalized with respiratory symtpoms in November. Now add in the fact that China responded with tons of secrecy, pulled down their genomic database of known viruses in their Wuhan lab, Xi issued a proclamation in February that they were revamping safety at BSL labs to prevent leaks, and that the virus in question is remarkably similar to one they found in 2013 thousands of miles away, and add the fact that there was a proposal to modify cornaviruses to have a furan cleavage site to perform gain of function research and that the COVID virus has just such a furan cleavage site, and this virus emerged remarkably well adapted to humans very very quickly. Now how about the fact that China pushed the wet market theory even after they'd figured out that probably wasn't the case? Now add in the fact that China let SARS escape from the lab TWICE in the previous decade. How does that affect your truth value? All the facts above push the probalistic truth value toward a lab leak. There are a few facts that push it back a little the other way, but there aren't very many that I've found.
  - AngryData 2y ago
    To me it barely moves the needle, specifically because as you have said we have found other remarkably similar viruses in the past. We have known about coronaviruses for almost 100 years, and we have been studying them due to their dangers for atleast 60 years, and it has likely existed since before humans could be called human. And it has been shown to be a highly virulent numerous times in many different forms. No matter how low the chances of winning the lottery, when literally billions of people are playing it daily, it is only of matter of when, not if, it turns into something more dangerous. Now none of that comes anywhere near proving anything, but the fact that we have had multiple coronavirus infections in the past, many of which have come dangerously close to pandemic level infections, makes a natural occurrence seem the most likely source. On top of all that, even if it did come from a lab, why does that matter? A handful of extra lottery tickets were sold and someone won from that pool. This isn't some bioweapon modified virus purposefully bred from a farm of human subjects, you would never be able to get away with such a program in a large publicly known virology lab and we aren't knowledgeable enough in viral genetics to make something like that without testing it on farms of people. There are no markers indicating engineering it in any way that we are actually capable of. And worst case it is something a mere handful of unguided generations away from a sample that was pulled from the public already and the lab got "lucky" with a random mutation on a petri dish they were studying.
- gtgvdfc 2y ago
  In fact, if a new flu came out from Atlanta I would immediately suspect an Emory grad student working in the CDC labs. (Not to knock Emory students, I love them, but Emory has a relationship with the CDC and grad students can be cavalier)
throwawaymaths 2y ago
there's a 19 bp sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade). now an exact match of that length isn't impossible, but which is more likely? that this managed to be exactly correct on accident? or some grad student was told to just copypasta every furin cleavage site in the database into a GOF library and surprise surprise the most virulent form that became a pandemic came from the sequence that is engineered to be efficient. any scientist that has any molecular biology wet experience will tell you this is exactly what they would have done (though us researchers would probably not have pulled from the patented BLAST sequences, since that selector is turned off by default by the NCBI)
- cyberax 2y ago
  > there's a 19 bp sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent Sigh. Here's the first line from the patent: "The present invention provides a cDNA of a severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus". You don't think that two coronaviruses just might have similar structural proteins?
  - ak217 2y ago
    No. The patent in question: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9587003B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9587003B2/en The article: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.3389/fviro.2022.834808/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.33... The sequence (reverse complemented) matches positions 2751-2733 of sequence ID 11652 attached to the patent: https://seqdata.uspto.gov/seqdetail?docId=US09587003B2&publicationNo=09587003&seqId=11652 https://seqdata.uspto.gov/seqdetail?docId=US09587003B2&publi... - as the other person said, it's located in the S1/S2 furin cleavage site, and produces no BLAST hits outside the SARS-CoV-2 lineage. It's not entirely clear to me when the sequence was incorporated into the patent - it doesn't look like it was in the first revision. But it looks like it was added before 2020. The whole theory still has gaps (even if we assume someone was searching specifically within that patent, what would a screen look like to single out that sequence? It would have to be very high throughput and use very sophisticated modeling), but it's interesting.
myvoiceismypass 2y ago
If I said I had cousins that were bankers, I am not sure that it would make me more credible to talk about finance. I mean - to the people who care about expertise.
ioulaum 2y ago
If SARS-Cov-2 was from a lab, what about the original SARS? Generally though, China is somewhat better suited to producing pandemics, because they have a larger and more dense population within which a disease can spread.
- kergonath 2y ago
  > If SARS-Cov-2 was from a lab, what about the original SARS? And MERS. It’s not like coronaviruses causing epidemics were very surprising at the time.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  SARS-1 was found in wild animals, had a long period in which it adapted to human hosts instead of being immediately well adapted, didn't have any weird artificial looking RNA sequences, and didn't emerge right next to a lab experimenting on coronaviruses. Interestingly it was also clearly airborne and able to spread long distances in aerosols moved by air currents. Investigators traced those air flows in some cases to explain movements of the virus. Yet despite being literally called SARS-2 the WHO and other self-declared sources of expertise all denied that this was possible, and attacked people who pointed out that it was. The desire for lockdowns and masks to be perceived as credible outweighed prior experience with similar viruses, turning those who tried to learn from history into pariahs.
gtgvdfc 2y ago
I had a Chinese colleague in January of '20 saying it was obviously a leak. I hadn't even heard of Wuhan before, and he told me there is a bio lab there.
- echoangle 2y ago
  And what does that tell you? I could probably find 10 people in every country on earth that claim COVID-19 originated in a lab there. I don’t think being Chinese is a good qualification for determining where COVID-19 came from.
  - gtgvdfc 2y ago
    You're right of course. This gentleman works in a US national lab, graduated top of his class in a top Chinese school and has friends that, at the time, worked in the Wuhan lab. He, while very proud of being Chinese, was very critical of what he perceived his countrymen's lax safety standards. Myself, I can't judge that as I am not Chinese or an experimentalist so I deferred to his expertise and experience.
ksec 2y ago
>That was before anyone in the news was saying that. May be in the west? It was certainly well publicised in other regions.

therealpygon 2y ago

You should realize experience in a tangentially related field and there being a lab somewhere in the area is not the same as insight and evidence. That’s like saying that if a new flu came out of Atlanta, the fact the CDC is there proves it came from a lab, and must be true because someone’s janitor cousin who worked there one summer said it was true. “Low confidence” means that there is a lack of evidence and the statement is ambiguous; that it could be completely true, or completely false. The only lower confidence would be direct evidence that it is outright false. Given, as you said, how nearly impossible it would be to prove true, wouldn’t you think it equally nearly impossible to prove false? Believe what you want, but even the CIA doesn’t lean on the side of you being right.

lupusreal 2y ago
If something very like smallpox, thought eradicated, suddenly showed up in some random town, it might be surmised that maybe some animal reservoir for it somehow slipped through the gaps. But if that random town happened to be Atlanta, home of the CDC, known to have some of the few samples of smallpox to still exist, then the relative chance of a lab leak must be thought higher. That's basic Bayesian reasoning. It doesn't prove anything but pretending the proximity to a relevant lab doesn't shift the odds at all is absurd.
- ioulaum 2y ago
  Smallpox, yes. But another SARS variant (even a somewhat more aggressive one)... Obviously, it's not impossible. But, there were even RNA samples from Covid found in other countries, months before Covid really spread in China. I imagine the main problem with the superspreader event there was more that enough people ended up in the same hospital, and thus it was easier to identify that Covid was a distinct virus. If it was crawling around in a less dense population, its spread would've been meh, and the hospitals might not even notice the spike much.
NeutralCrane 2y ago
> That’s like saying that if a new flu came out of Atlanta, the fact the CDC is there proves it came from a lab, and must be true because someone’s janitor cousin who worked there one summer said it was true. Well in this case it’s more like if if a new flu burst onto the scene with the following all being true: - the epicenter of the outbreak being within a few miles of the CDC - the CDC working specifically on gain of function for new strains of the flu - the CDC being cited in whistleblower reports to the outbreak for poor safety and security protocols in the years prior to the outbreak - inability to find the natural reservoir the virus crossed over from, despite years of searching in the biggest virus hunt in human history - the closest naturally occurring relative of the virus being found in bats that are only native in areas hundreds of miles away (in this analogy, something like the upper Midwest), that also happen to be among the species of bats being studied by the lab at the CDC - several CDC employees being among the earliest discovered cases, so early that they occurred before the disease was even picked up in the radar and were only discovered when searching for the earliest cases - the US government preventing any none government health officials in or out of the area of the infection for several weeks after the outbreak - the sole other identified potential outbreak location, the wet market nearby, was completely sterilized by the US government within the first two weeks of the outbreak, over the protests of international investigators who hadn’t yet been given access to it, thereby preventing them from ever being able to confirm or deny if it was the actual ground zero of the outbreak. “Low confidence” doesn’t mean there is a lack of evidence, it means there is a lack of direct evidence. Problem is there is a lack of direct evidence for any alternative theory as well. There is, however, and overwhelming about of circumstantial evidence supporting the lab leak. The CIA isn’t going to issue accusations like this without a smoking bullet, which they will never have. The reality is that had this occurred under any other administration, the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t be so taboo. But Trump is a serial conspiracy theorist and pugilistic nationalist, so the second he floated it everyone on the left, which includes much in academia, immediately disputed it in a knee jerk reaction, despite not having much evidence either way. Since then what evidence exists has increasingly supported the lab leak theory, but many are walking back from entrenched positions. If this had happened when Obama was president I don’t think anyone would be pushing back on this with the evidence that exists.
- 2y ago
giantg2 2y ago
Actually, it's more difficult to prove a wild origin than a lab origin, because labs have papertrails and witnesses. I never said I was right. I said it makes a lot of sense and I believe it's probably true. This is the sort of thing that neither of us can prove to the other at this point. You seem awfully aggressive to prove something though.
- Sabinus 2y ago
  >because labs have papertrails and witnesses If you have access to the labs. Second hand information and extremely delayed visits to labs in a one party state are a whole other matter.
- myvoiceismypass 2y ago
  Chinese lab paper trails are as trustworthy as Trump’s toilet paper roll trails if we are being honest.
  - Slava_Propanei 2y ago
    [dead]
Enginerrrd 2y ago
There's a paper from 2014 that tried to estimate the annual chance of a pandemic from a lab leak. They estimated it at 2%. I assumed they overestimated a bit for effect and put it at around 1%. Pandemics have historically happened somewhere around ever 100 years. What's that annual probability? 1%. So if you knew NOTHING else, from a bayesian standpoint, if you have to differentiate a once in a 100 year spillover or a lab leak, you would put it at 50/50. Now add in the fact that the outbreak occurred right next to a BSL lab. Now add in the fact that this lab specialized in the exact type of virus that caused the pandemic. Now add in the fact that lab workers at that lab got hospitalized with respiratory symtpoms in November. Now add in the fact that China responded with tons of secrecy, pulled down their genomic database of known viruses in their Wuhan lab, Xi issued a proclamation in February that they were revamping safety at BSL labs to prevent leaks, and that the virus in question is remarkably similar to one they found in 2013 thousands of miles away, and add the fact that there was a proposal to modify cornaviruses to have a furan cleavage site to perform gain of function research and that the COVID virus has just such a furan cleavage site, and this virus emerged remarkably well adapted to humans very very quickly. Now how about the fact that China pushed the wet market theory even after they'd figured out that probably wasn't the case? Now add in the fact that China let SARS escape from the lab TWICE in the previous decade. How does that affect your truth value? All the facts above push the probalistic truth value toward a lab leak. There are a few facts that push it back a little the other way, but there aren't very many that I've found.
- AngryData 2y ago
  To me it barely moves the needle, specifically because as you have said we have found other remarkably similar viruses in the past. We have known about coronaviruses for almost 100 years, and we have been studying them due to their dangers for atleast 60 years, and it has likely existed since before humans could be called human. And it has been shown to be a highly virulent numerous times in many different forms. No matter how low the chances of winning the lottery, when literally billions of people are playing it daily, it is only of matter of when, not if, it turns into something more dangerous. Now none of that comes anywhere near proving anything, but the fact that we have had multiple coronavirus infections in the past, many of which have come dangerously close to pandemic level infections, makes a natural occurrence seem the most likely source. On top of all that, even if it did come from a lab, why does that matter? A handful of extra lottery tickets were sold and someone won from that pool. This isn't some bioweapon modified virus purposefully bred from a farm of human subjects, you would never be able to get away with such a program in a large publicly known virology lab and we aren't knowledgeable enough in viral genetics to make something like that without testing it on farms of people. There are no markers indicating engineering it in any way that we are actually capable of. And worst case it is something a mere handful of unguided generations away from a sample that was pulled from the public already and the lab got "lucky" with a random mutation on a petri dish they were studying.
gtgvdfc 2y ago
In fact, if a new flu came out from Atlanta I would immediately suspect an Emory grad student working in the CDC labs. (Not to knock Emory students, I love them, but Emory has a relationship with the CDC and grad students can be cavalier)

throwawaymaths 2y ago

there's a 19 bp sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade). now an exact match of that length isn't impossible, but which is more likely? that this managed to be exactly correct on accident? or some grad student was told to just copypasta every furin cleavage site in the database into a GOF library and surprise surprise the most virulent form that became a pandemic came from the sequence that is engineered to be efficient. any scientist that has any molecular biology wet experience will tell you this is exactly what they would have done (though us researchers would probably not have pulled from the patented BLAST sequences, since that selector is turned off by default by the NCBI)

cyberax 2y ago
> there's a 19 bp sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent Sigh. Here's the first line from the patent: "The present invention provides a cDNA of a severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus". You don't think that two coronaviruses just might have similar structural proteins?
- ak217 2y ago
  No. The patent in question: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9587003B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9587003B2/en The article: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.3389/fviro.2022.834808/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.33... The sequence (reverse complemented) matches positions 2751-2733 of sequence ID 11652 attached to the patent: https://seqdata.uspto.gov/seqdetail?docId=US09587003B2&publicationNo=09587003&seqId=11652 https://seqdata.uspto.gov/seqdetail?docId=US09587003B2&publi... - as the other person said, it's located in the S1/S2 furin cleavage site, and produces no BLAST hits outside the SARS-CoV-2 lineage. It's not entirely clear to me when the sequence was incorporated into the patent - it doesn't look like it was in the first revision. But it looks like it was added before 2020. The whole theory still has gaps (even if we assume someone was searching specifically within that patent, what would a screen look like to single out that sequence? It would have to be very high throughput and use very sophisticated modeling), but it's interesting.

myvoiceismypass 2y ago

If I said I had cousins that were bankers, I am not sure that it would make me more credible to talk about finance. I mean - to the people who care about expertise.

ioulaum 2y ago

If SARS-Cov-2 was from a lab, what about the original SARS? Generally though, China is somewhat better suited to producing pandemics, because they have a larger and more dense population within which a disease can spread.

kergonath 2y ago
> If SARS-Cov-2 was from a lab, what about the original SARS? And MERS. It’s not like coronaviruses causing epidemics were very surprising at the time.
mike_hearn 2y ago
SARS-1 was found in wild animals, had a long period in which it adapted to human hosts instead of being immediately well adapted, didn't have any weird artificial looking RNA sequences, and didn't emerge right next to a lab experimenting on coronaviruses. Interestingly it was also clearly airborne and able to spread long distances in aerosols moved by air currents. Investigators traced those air flows in some cases to explain movements of the virus. Yet despite being literally called SARS-2 the WHO and other self-declared sources of expertise all denied that this was possible, and attacked people who pointed out that it was. The desire for lockdowns and masks to be perceived as credible outweighed prior experience with similar viruses, turning those who tried to learn from history into pariahs.

gtgvdfc 2y ago

I had a Chinese colleague in January of '20 saying it was obviously a leak. I hadn't even heard of Wuhan before, and he told me there is a bio lab there.

echoangle 2y ago
And what does that tell you? I could probably find 10 people in every country on earth that claim COVID-19 originated in a lab there. I don’t think being Chinese is a good qualification for determining where COVID-19 came from.
- gtgvdfc 2y ago
  You're right of course. This gentleman works in a US national lab, graduated top of his class in a top Chinese school and has friends that, at the time, worked in the Wuhan lab. He, while very proud of being Chinese, was very critical of what he perceived his countrymen's lax safety standards. Myself, I can't judge that as I am not Chinese or an experimentalist so I deferred to his expertise and experience.

ksec 2y ago

>That was before anyone in the news was saying that. May be in the west? It was certainly well publicised in other regions.