Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed (opens in new tab)

> Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future.

China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I think it’s silly to presume CCP engineered a virus as part of some warfare strategy, or even to vilify/sanction them for a lab leak if it indeed was the cause (mistakes happen). However, CCP’s resistance to a proper thorough study of the origins of COVID is IMO not exactly appropriate.

Active research was taking place in the vicinity of suspected ground zero. Lab escapes happen—there are well-documented cases of the original SARS virus leaking from a lab in Beijing in 2004 (killing at least one person). Why was this time such a scenario discarded as so ridiculously impossible at first, and is still considered “extremely unlikely”? Is it politics?

[0] https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-...

Btw, I don't think we can ever find out the truth. It's been over a year, and China has all the time to clean up and conceal every piece of evidence. The WHO scientific team's visit to Wuhan is no difference to investigating a murder scene a year after the event, with the murderer living in it all that time. Nothing but a joke.

not that outbreak. US stopped doing that GoF research and funded it in those Wuhan labs instead - basically like any other outsourcing of environmentally dangerous manufacturing/etc. to China. My pet conspiracy theory is that as part of that GoF the virus was tested on humans there - say some prisoners happily volunteering for a couple weeks break from hard labor to spend it in a nice hospital with a "flu".

And if the virus had totally natural - accidental freak of Nature - origin, why would you give 4 year prison to a journalist who was covering the beginning of the pandemic in Wuhan?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/12/28/china-h...

The suppression of any information is totally in-line with some deep f&ck-up and/or government potentially looking very bad if real picture sees the light of day. Even Chernobyl wasn't suppressed to that degree.

And that, more than anything else, is why we should be suspicious of "exotic" theories like human intervention. It's an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary proof. You seem to be arguing the opposite, when Occam is clear that we should be betting on natural evolution.

But China knew about the virus in 2019 and kept it quiet. They silenced scientists. China is complicit in this pandemic and should pay reparations.

In general, yes. In this case, no so much.

The feart that it could happen here is why the USA restricted gain of function research in 2014. And only reopened it in 2017 with stricter safety controls.

If China had made the same policy decisions, would COVID-19 have become much less likely? That's an important question to answer. Whether or not it DID happen that way, as a planet we need a more consistent way to evaluate such risks.

Then why hide information and prevent world-wide collaboration then?

Social scoring, mass surveillance, the Great Firewall, forced labor, harvesting organs from healthy people, Uyghur genocide, Falun gong murders, Tiananmen square massacre...

And actively trying to cover up every crisis, torturing and murdering anyone who speaks up. From environmental disasters to COVID-19 to party corruption.

So there are only two alternatives, and we just need to compare which sounds more likely? Or could it be that you exclude about a million other alternatives here, while also ignoring that just a little bit more information about context often makes unlikely scenarios more likely and vice versa?

Not arguing any of the theories here, just looking at the approach. The first task might not be to make assumptions, but to understand the situation better.

Or China can start to be more honest if it does not want to be demonized.

China is actively engaging in genocide and nobody wants to even speak up about it because "cultural differences". I think we should much rather be scared of running even more cover for them, than less cover for them. They already have enough people white knighting for them.

Western companies are demonizing the west for profit, and running cover for china for profit, just another example of how capitalism always wins.

All of this is sickening and it needs to stop now.

People really need to stop and think, because next time that lab could be in your country. With icebergs and permafrost melting, you can bet there's going to be more pandemics in the pipeline. This really isn't a time for people's crass and nihilistic takes on foreign governments, science, or even your own government. When you leave room for people and systems to screw up, then things get better; if you're hypercritical then all you incentivise is the burying of evidence and lies.

I think it was western scientists like Peter Daszak who suppressed lab leak theory in fear that their research will be demonized forever.

It wasn't CCP who called everyone consipiracy theorists it was Peter Daszak and co [1]. I don't understand how he can be the WHO investigator of his own lab [2].

1. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/947620

2. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4119101

It’s obvious in hindsight that what you say is likely true, but there is no feasible political route for the CCP to take blame, as their lives would be at stake due to unrest.

I'm afraid we'll never know the truth though, China would never admit it was a lab leak.

August 2019 - "Vape flu" appears in the US.

October 2019 - World Military Games in Wuhan, 300 US military men and women attend.

November 2019 - SAR-COV2 appears in Wuhan.

Let's not discount this sequence of events as well.

The problem I have is that China isn't interested in investigating the start of the pandemic. They've thrown away their wastewater samples, there's some evidence WHO found of SARS-CoV-2 spreading locally prior to December 2019, but no backtesting of any samples. Nobody seems to be looking at the bats in Hubei for sarbecoviruses.

By blocking study of the zoonotic origin of the pandemic, they can use the theory it was imported in food for domestic propaganda. For external propaganda they're happy to have conspiracy theories flying about this lab leak theory creating a "firehose of falsehoods" and distractions. They can rely on American scientists to get engaged with the conspiracy theory and debunk it, wasting their efforts and then they can use that also for domestic propaganda.

Meanwhile nobody gets fucking outraged that China isn't properly investigating the origin of the virus and isn't aggressively looking at the bats in Hubei and any animal farms in the surrounding area. My suspicion is that animal farms (like minks) functioned as a bioreactor that had many opportunities to spillover from bats and then the close contact allowed it to spread well and mutate to optimize it for a more human-like ACE2 receptor, then the mink contact with humans allowed multiple spillover events until it started to spread epidemically in humans.

"In 2014, after a series of accidents involving mishandled pathogens at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the NIH announced that it would stop funding gain-of-function research into certain viruses — including influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) — that have the potential to unleash a pandemic or epidemic if they escaped from the lab. Some researchers said the broad ban threatened necessary flu-surveillance and vaccine research."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00210-5

p.s. The US NIH did ultimately stop funding that research locally, but continued funding it in Wuhan. Including the exact type of virus we're dealing with now.

It's purposely evolving diseases to spread faster or be more dangerous, for the sake of research. As I understand, it's at least a bit controversial. So maybe there's not as much of it going on as other research? If so, there probably wouldn't be as much opportunity for it to escape. But now that it has (per the hypothesis), it's ready to be very contagious right out of the gate. Thus, pandemic.

I would expect such a case to make the headlines, but it's quite possible it would be quietly swept under the carpet. How well known was Reston back when it happened? If that didn't make the news, would a lab-originated outbreak?

With COVID, a worker could get infected, hide the exposure out of fear/shame, never show any symptoms... and yet start a pandemic.

With a low-probability high-impact event like a global pandemic, near misses are the only indicator you have until the one time it does go catastrophically wrong.

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak

The official cover-up initially was blaming the outbreak on contaminated meat from a wet market.

However in my opinion, chinese governments (esp. lower levels) like to lower the severity of any issue / risks and they like to repress / solve the issue with local power until it is solved or gets too big. The central gov that like to hide wrongdoings aren't helping either.

In case of covid, they either underrate the severity or tried to suppress the outbreak locally, which they failed and it already spread too wide enough to be contained.

If covid outbreak happened in europe or us, I believe it'll spread almost the same, albeit slower and you'll knew faster since it'll be in news faster.

That also makes the biological warfare scenario less likely — armies like to control where the bomb goes.

The other factor to discount this conjecture is that if you hear about covid as a biological weapon, it’s less likely to be true as it would potentially expose research in other places. If China is doing this, the US, Russia and others are too.

Perhaps it is not special. One might as well ask what was special about a coin that lands heads three times in a row in its first three flips.

So the answer to "What makes COVID special?" is possibly "We failed our pandemic save."

I did some research during the early stages of the West African Ebola epidemic, when a lot of people were asking why, instead of the usual sporadic, self-limiting outbreaks of the past, we were seeing something larger and different. As it turns out, if you use the parameters people estimated from the older, smaller outbreaks, there's a small but not breathtakingly so probability of a very large epidemic. It's sort of the null hypothesis for pandemics.

My understanding is most other countries don't have wet markets like China does. Even if a virus escapes, it may not have access to the hosts it needs truly become problematic.

https://twitter.com/mattwridley/status/1351198664950128641?s...

https://gillesdemaneuf.medium.com/the-good-the-bad-and-the-u...

https://www.amazon.com/Lab-257-Disturbing-Governments-Labora...

Warning: this book is non-fiction and is scary.

> We sign this statement in solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China who continue to save lives and protect global health during the challenge of the COVID-19 outbreak. We are all in this together, with our Chinese counterparts in the forefront, against this new viral threat. The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339367143_Statement...

Scary piece of propaganda, considering it was China who started rumours and misinformation, and tying the lab leak hypothesis to not supporting health professionals. All-in-all, a grave conflict of interest for a supposed objective investigation into the origins.

https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1292819714935271424

I'm not a virologist but every TWiV episode I listened to, there was convincing talk about natural reservoirs being the most likely source of the virus.

AFAIR they also expect similar events to happen increasingly all over the world due to side effects of the climate crisis and global heating.

I had been reading every journal article I could get my hands on about the virus since February, but of course how could my interpretation be trustworthy? I'm no expert, or anything. If something I read in a journal article contradicted something on the news, the latter always seemed to "win".

After all that, now that the lab thing is on the mainstream news, I'm afraid to even bring it up with my friends. They can figure it out for themselves.

It's a bit annoying that so many adults continue to mix up speculation with real evidence, and make up their minds based on gut feelings. That is not to say governments shouldn't put pressure on China to be more transparent, of course they should. But judging from the actual information available, the virus most likely jumped from an animal to humans due to the bad conditions of wet markets in China.

While China is to blame for such markets, people need to bear in mind that the same can happen in many other places where animals are farmed closely together with humans. Even if it was true, the Wuhan lab theory would unfortunately distract from this real problem.

And this sounds like a reasonable possibility to be explored. Accidents happen. Lapses in procedures happen.

The problem is that early on, and still in some circles, lab related equates to malicious bio-weapon and/or China purposely attempting to destroy the world. It's important to separate the two, and hopefully this is a cautionary tale for all labs to review their policies and procedures.

So, its not quite as simple as a collection mistake.

I think that's true, but it ignores the possibility that the WIV was working with new viruses with unpublished genomes. The WIV routinely organized expeditions to remote bat caves to collect samples. There's naturally some delay between sampling, sequencing, and publishing, no conspiracy required. For example, RaTG13, the closest known animal virus to SARS-CoV-2, was collected by the WIV in 2013 but published only after the start of the pandemic.

The WIV had a private database of viral genomes; but they took it offline in September 2019, they say due to hacking attempts. They haven't brought it back up, and the WHO has declined to ask for a copy.

SARS-CoV-2 certainly could be a naturally-evolved virus first transmitted from an animal to a non-scientist human. It could also be a naturally-evolved virus collected and accidentally released by the WIV, or a recombinant of multiple such viruses, or the descendant of such a virus after serial passaging. Nothing in Andersen's argument distinguishes any of these possibilities.

But don't trust me; check out Marc Lipsitch's Twitter feed today, or David Relman's article:

> Some have argued that a deliberate engineering scenario is unlikely because one would not have had the insight a priori to design the current pandemic virus (3). This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory.

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29246

This isn't a conspiracy theory, and it's not even a fringe viewpoint anymore. It's just a reasonable step in investigating the yet-unknown origin of what could be the worst industrial accident in human history.

from the article you linked to:

> Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.

You're the one spreading FUD, intentionally misinterpreting the original article and making up a fake argument that "lab leak" hypothesis somehow contradicts "natural origin" and implies that the virus was "designed". (If I understand the article correctly, "purposefully manipulated" means "genetically manipulated", not "gain of function".) Flagged.

Furthermore, the WHO's own team admitted recently that they were simply not equipped to do any kind of forensic investigation of the lab (https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/world-health-organizat...):

> [Dominic Dwyer, a medical virologist at New South Wales Health Pathology in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the WHO team] says that the team didn’t see anything during its visits to suggest a lab accident. “Now, whether we were shown everything? You can never know. The group wasn’t designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practice.”

Even if they were appropriately equipped for such an investigation, what's the use when China had blocked their visits until a year later, when they've had ample time to cover any evidence. The whole situation is highly suspicious, from the initial suppression of news reports of the virus, to delaying international lab visits, to the deletion of studies from that Wuhan lab (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13701168/covid-cover-up-china-...).

Also it refused fiercely to let foreign experts in to investigate, which is also hard to explain other than something MUST be hidden at all costs.

Smallpox is also naturally originating virus. That doesn't prohibit it from leaking from a lab.

>However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.

The fact that covid's features are found in nature seems a weak argument to disprove lab involvement.

On the other hand covid seems well adapted to humans which could have come about by serial passage in a lab. Perhaps they were doing something like in vivo characterisation of spillover risk as mentioned in Daszak's grant application for the WIV?

Or something like:

>We performed in vivo experiments in transgenic (human ACE2 expressing) mice and civets in 2018 and 2019 in the Institute’s biosafety laboratory. The viruses we used were bat SARSr-CoV close to SARS-CoV. (Shi Zhengli)

?

I think that it is at least somewhat likely that it was the result of the lab's activities, but your assertion here has a huge dose of selection bias.

If the virology labs studying coronaviruses were placed randomly around the world, you'd be correct - but they're not. They're placed near locations where novel coronaviruses have crossed the species barrier in the past, and where they are likely to do so in the future.

It would be equivalent to say that lighthouses cause ships to run aground, because many teams when ships run aground it's near a lighthouse.

CDC and other US government officials, on the other hand, must ratchet up their criticism of China as well as WHO. I agree with you there. It's alarming that there are so few PR ramifications for China. From the looks of it, either their unsanitary bushmeat consumption got the world sick, or their irresponsible laboratory containment procedures did. Both are a reflection of China's culture, and were only exacerbated by authoritarian crackdown upon the early warnings issued by Chinese medical professionals. The US government shouldn't defend bad practices and systemic problems in the name of multilateral cooperation. That variety of ethical blindness forgives bad faith from our counterparts and damages our hegemony.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296...

I mean, yeah, five out of 6 cited experts have ties to EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has funding ties to one of the two virology labs in Wuhan, but that's, like, just a coincidence. If it wasn't, I'm sure NPR would mention it.

And then Peter Daszak himself went to Wuhan with WHO team to investigate and didn't find anything conclusive. Peter fucking Daszak. You're not going to tell me that someone who was interviewed and cited on this subject by NPR, CNN, CBS, Slate, Democracy Now, Washing Post and The Guardian could be full of shit, right?

/s

And people making the really odd responses below. They're, not saying it, but insinuating that the lab would be where there is lots of bat coronavirus? The lab is in the city of Wuhan. A city with a population of 11 million people. This isn't some rural town.

There was a lab that studied this type of coronavirus, had published papers on it. And in a country the size of the USA had an outbreak within just a few miles from that lab. Then the govt came and refused to let anyone outside investigate.

To me that leads pretty strongly that it was an accidental lab leak. And they weren't able to control the spread.

My hopeful opinion is that this leads to more stringent worldwide rules for reporting leaks, and checking of safety practices to avoid this happening again

Now I was aware of some reports (nothing official or confirmed) that the Wuham lab was broken into in the summer of 2019.

Interestingly enough their was a lot of political tension at that time involving Hong Kong.

I'm also mindful how China has been rather good at sweeping things under carpets.

So I could speculate how things played out in a way that fits events, but without any smoking gun - it would be just speculation and joining dots that may or may not of been there.

Though even if it was something along the lines of what I'm thinking happened (animal activists with HK connections being politically motivated/manipulated and possibly no idea what type of lab it was beyond they may be hurting animals), the lab was researching virus's from the wild - seeing how they mutate and progress in an effort to see what lays ahead.

So lab event or no lab event - this virus was already in existence in some form and was not a case of if, but when.

One thing I do know, it sure did shine a spotlight upon how connected the World is and also how fragile many supply lines are.

Why not? Wuhan is the 43rd largest city in the world. Meanwhile, the earliest cases of CoVid were all connected to the same wet market. Doesn't that have a higher probability being the origin?

not buying it.

All that said I think it is really unlikely and a pointless effort as government bureaucracies wouldn’t be able to even formulate a reaction to an intentional or even accidental release so I think we will not try too hard to imply that for political reasons.

What better place to put a lab studying bat viruses than near a place where they originate?

That's a pretty frequent occurrence.

The chair of the WHO (Tedros Adhanom) [1] was a communist rebel (Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front) fighter in north africa and his career has been sponsored and guided by China for this reason.

They won't suppress findings made internally because it would be too hard to cover up - but they will 'do the least' with respect to finding answers.

Only the US has enough power and wherewithal to even try to do something, but they'll be kept out direct, so it boils down to how sophisticated the US clandestine efforts are in China.

My completely speculative guess is that US operating ability in China is 'really bad' and that they've already barked up that tree and found nothing conclusive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tedros_Adhanom

https://jglobalbiosecurity.com/articles/10.31646/gbio.41/

If it came from somewhere else, why wasn’t the outbreak noticed there first, is the million dollar question. It requires some serious mental gymnastics at this point to believe it didn’t originate in that lab. The only real question is if it was released deliberately.

"Did the coronavirus leak from a lab? These scientists say we shouldn’t rule it out."

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/18/1021030/coronavi...

> Additionally, Lyme disease was never a topic of research at Plum Island, according to the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Agriculture.

These are facts, too, in your link. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Then we shouldn't be doing _gain of function_ research on the types of viruses that can cause these outbreaks.

> Maybe it was an accident at a sloppy lab, ok, so labs on the other side of the planet in sovereign countries we do not control might make mistakes. We should get better at responding fast to save lives.

What's the cost-benefit analysis for running the lab in the first place? Was any of it's research used in producing the vaccine? If it's all about saving lives, can't we be mad at both the lacking response and the laboratory at the same time?

> I don't care where it came from [...] We should get better at responding fast and saving lives (my opinion).

Those two goals seem in conflict with each other. Good offense is something we should aspire too.. but that doesn't mean we should entirely ignore defense as well.

I think you're wrestling with a strawman here, no one's arguing the inverse. But in any investigation (arson, murder, etc.) the details do matter -- where, how, what weapon, when, and so on.

Yet we've just spent the last year proving that biological warfare will be potentially more deadly than chemical or even nuclear warfare.

Decades ago we banned research into those other weapons and implemented international treaties and inspection regimes.

Even the possibility that this could have been a lab leak should scare the whole world and motivate a massive reform of these labs and the experiments people are conducting.

I hope the people in power don't share your complacency.

In particular, if true that it 'leaked' ... it's not like other nations are leaking pathogens which kill millions and cause 5 Trillion in destruction. It would literally change the geostrategic equation overnight and be seminal, defining world event certainly bigger than 9/11. On the scale of a WW.

If it was quasi-intentional (this is definitely not true, but since you speculated...) then it would be an act of war and the most damaging attack on the US (and other nations) ever. The US and the world would have to go to war with China over this. (Again this surely is not the case).

All while the US/EU/Rest of Word 'get better' at the above.

You should care about knowing where it came from if you want to save lives.

Compensation for damage inflicted, for one thing? If a country is inept at handling deadly viruses, tries to handle them anyway and in result causes millions of deaths and trillions of dollars worth of financial loss, they should be liable for the damage they've done?

If the whole pandemic could’ve been avoided, that’s part of getting better at this.

If your goal is not good governance, but getting re-elected by your base, that is not something you need to optimize for.

Like so let's try to stop it happening again.

Talk about that will you?

Which scientific community are you referring to? There are countless scientists who have been arguing against the risks of gain of function research for many years. Why are pro-gain of function scientists deathly silent now about the supposed benefits of their research?

I think that people can easily develop a misplaced sense of humanitarian responsibility where they are under the impression that they are called to serve a higher purpose and that they feel as though they are beholden to use their power and influence to prioritise (for instance) pacifism and internationalism above the public search for knowledge, where these have the potential to conflict. There can also be a sense in which the scientific establishment pursues its own independent, technocratic public policy. We have seen the huge amount of political power and influence wielded by high-ranking members of the scientific establishment, and no doubt the stakes were raised for this by the fact that it was an election year.

Did you know the CCP arrested the first doctor sounding the alarm about COVID? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382

Did you know viruses have escaped from labs before? It is a known risk.

You can say the evidence is not conclusive and you would be right. But it's far from "speculative nonsense."

One wonders if you would be similarly skeptical of claims relating to COVID's cause being something much more speculative and vague... say, global anthropogenic climate change, for example. I'm sure you'd be pumping the brakes just as hard on any speculation to that effect, right? ;-)

For one people actually believe Chinese's numbers, something no Chinese national will ever do.

China is a totalitarian country, they have the monopoly of the press. That means official numbers are not real numbers because if you go against the official numbers you just dissapear. You can not compare numbers given in a free press country against numbers being given by a totalitarian country.

That happened for decades with Soviet Russia, while Lenin and Stalin made tens of millions of people die of starvation, their official numbers were fantastic. They even exported grain.

There is no evidence because China made impossible for scientists to study the origin of COVID for almost a year. They closed their laboratories and removed all possible evidence with bleach.

1. Warn the world, lock your borders down, suffer economic damage whilst the rest of the world will prevent your citizens from entering their countries and can prepare for a proper response. Experience a setback on the stage of geopolitics and a loss of soft power.

2. Don't warn the world, suppress free flow of information, impose internal travel bans to stop the virus from spreading within your country, let your citizens carry the virus to the rest of the world, be the party with asymmetrical information advantage, exploit the situation to further strengthen your position on the global chessboard of geopolitics and expand your soft power.

What people in the West tend to forget is that Chinese strategic thinking is older than most Western civilisations. Chinese rulers study Chinese philosophy deeply, whereas Western rulers have little philosophical education. Chinese rulers think fundamentally different from Western rulers and have asymmetrical information advantage in politics as well: hardly anyone in the West really understands Chinese philosophy as it requires you to learn the language to grasp it fully; but it is easy to understand what motivates Western politics.

This situation reminds me of one of the Thirty-Six Stratagems.

Disturb the water and catch a fish (渾水摸魚／混水摸魚)

Create confusion and exploit it to further one's own goals.

Second of all, what country has ever prevented its own citizens from leaving the country because of an outbreak? The Hubei lockdown was already the most dramatic response by a government in modern history to an outbreak. A province with 60 million people was put strict lockdown. Almost nobody was let out of the province, and people were told to stay in their homes.

This is absolutely not true. Lab invented was debunked, lab escaped was not.

Have a read: https://project-evidence.github.io/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-...

It's less what new information has come to light, and more what hasn't. For MERS and for the original SARS, the proximal animal hosts were identified within about a year. For SARS-CoV-2, we haven't found that yet. (See my comment history if you're thinking pangolins; they're pretty much abandoned.)

So a year later, despite the considerable effort spent looking for evidence of natural zoonotic origin, we still have nothing. We also have no evidence of lab origin, but that investigation has been thoroughly obstructed--for example, the WIV's private database of viruses went offline in September 2019, and any reporter who approaches the mine where SARS-CoV-2's nearest known relative (RaTG13) was discovered gets turned away by Chinese police.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/05/coronavir...

I'll give you that Nature is steadfastly on the zoonotic side of things. But even Nature News journo has retweeted the USAtoday article:

https://twitter.com/NidhiSubs/status/1374002441780391940?s=2...

Someone did note a shift in WP's coverage, which is interesting to me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127197

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26129052

[0] natural insofar as humans intruding onto wildlife is natural

The thing is that whether this came from a lab or not is of limited relevance. Viruses have been hopping from animal hosts from humans for a while and if anything this one was late and long expected. Either way the kind of preparations we need to make for future events are the same.

My understanding on this was that doctors local to Wuhan noticed a surprising and sudden uptick in pneumonia that did not respond to antibiotics. The Chinese government managed this badly[1]. Your timeline doesn't reflect how things happened at the time - there was a "slowly" (over two months?) growing problem in Wuhan that locals noticed and authorities suppressed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_2019%E2%80...

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets...

In December there were reports of an uptick of people dying of pneumonia. When they did CT scans, they saw that their lungs had glassy nodules which was not normal. This was the way that they identified something new was spreading.

tl;dr: mNGS [1]

Longer answer as I think you may need to be mansplained because you wrote a long post which could be answered by a simple Google search and Wikipedia article:

Step 1: Doctor wonder why their patients were so sick, looks like infection but no pathogens identified, this is actually not that rare as there are many obscure pathogens even for experienced doctors.

Step 2: Patients agrees to pay for mNGS. Nurse draw their blood, send to lab.

Step 3: mNGS matches every DNA "pieces" from the patients' blood against a database. One of those pieces matched the original SARS with about 90% similarity.

Step 4: Chaos in the lab, the hospital and the government.

Step 5: "We've detected a new virus"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_metagenomic_sequencin...

Want to add that I highly recommend the frontline doc it has so much great reporting that gives the background needed here.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets...

This is because you don't know how pathology works and what technologies (specifically sequencing) are available to identify pathogens of unknown origin.

Really drove me nuts how early on everyone, everyone was working overtime to try and dismiss the possibility that this was some sort of lab leak. I’m sorry but the way China went absolutely DEFCON 1 (welding people into their apartments, blocking the roads out of town, nightly fumigations of public spaces) within a short period of time strongly suggests that they had a “oh crap, _that thing we were working on got out_” moment. Never understood why people were so eager to dismiss this possibility.

2. I only think a thorough investigation is not possible because the Chinese government is not going to allow that such a honest investigation to occur.

3. If a flowerpot fell from a balcony and killed your loved one, you wouldn't care if it was intentionally thrown, negligently left there, or simply a freak act of god? I think almost everyone cares about the cause of this event. If not for reasons of closure and blame, for reasons of understanding and improving out future actions.

2. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We should also acknowledge that an investigation much earlier on could have happened if it were not for Chinese government obstructionism and cover-ups.

3. Why do you not care about where it came from? The allegation at hand is that China's irresponsible scientific experimentation "created" this virus (intentional oversimplification) and allowed it to leak. If the truth never comes out, and China is never held accountable, the same thing could happen again. Why is your sole interest the global response to the pandemic as opposed to the missteps that caused the pandemic in the first place?

This isn't a theory, unfortunately, but since it requires self reflection it will never be a popular story in the US media. I admit I have seen it discussed in print several times.

It's not mental acrobatics. It's pragmatism and empathy.

No acrobatics necessary.

When was Science about prescribing blame?

Please don't take HN threads on these lame meta tangents. They never go anywhere interesting, and people invariably just imagine scenarios that confirm whatever they already believe and get even more upset about it.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544490.

WHY there are a bunch of people voting that down I leave to others to speculate. But I'm going to vote up any verifiable factual statements that have been voted down.

That's what the comment sounded like to me, and why I downvoted it. It does not come across to me as a good-faith request for a reference, and more like an attempt to DOS the conversation, similar to a Gish gallop. For example, it's asking for a specific link that constitutes proof of a general observation of tendency. That doesn't scream "reasonable request."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200317175442.h...

That's what China would be expected to do:

(1) if it knew the Wuhan lab leak theory was correct,

(2) if it knew zoonotic transmission was correct.

(3) if it had no idea what was going on.

(4) if it wasn't a lab leak but a deliberate biological weapons test that went wrong, and they has engineered both their overt argument and the lab leaks story as layers of cover.

So, no, their behavior here tells us nothing.

From what I've heard on Chinese social media, there are a bunch of plausible sounding theories.

For a lot of jobs in China, it's expected that there's moderate incompetence or grift.

For example, say the lab has a bunch of extra animal samples (mice, bats, w/e). Someone in the cleaning staff could make a few extra $ by selling those samples to a wholesaler at the local wetmarket (to be turned into dogfood, etc.); maybe they only meant to sell the clean samples, but got things mixed up.

But it might be more like: "Yet another hurricane cause by weather." Not really a story, since they all have been. The opposite, though, that'd be a real story: "Hurricane not caused by weather!"

Listen to him talk about how easy is to modify coronaviruses in labs and how they are actually doing this, mixing and matching viruses at 29:50:

> Well, coronaviruses are pretty good... you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot what happens in a coronavirus. Zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can bulid a protein, and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this, insert into the backbone of another virus, and do some work in the lab, so you can get more predictive, when you find a sequence.

https://youtu.be/IdYDL_RK--w

is that true though? Aren't a lot of diseases being worked on in labs without the means to cure them yet

If we can establish that a lab leak lead to a worldwide pandemic, we'd place much more importance on lab security and better handling procedures.

If it was naturally spread then we'd look at the feasibility of reducing the chances of this happening again, like improving sanitation of wet markets, implementing regulations, or even banning them entirely.

Frankly the notion of it not mattering to someone how covid came to be is absurd.

If you don't want something to happen again, you first need to understand the circumstances that lead to it.

If China knows and is hiding it, I'm still not clear what that changes. They'll still know to improve their safety practices

> “It was very unlikely that anything could escape from such a place,” Ben Embarek said during the Feb. 9 WHO press conference, citing the team’s discussions with Wuhan lab officials about their safety protocols and audits. “If you look at the history of lab accidents, these are extremely rare events.”

> Yet lab accidents aren’t rare.

> What’s rare are accidents causing documented outbreaks. But those have happened, including in 2004 when two researchers at a lab in Beijing unknowingly became infected with another type of SARS coronavirus, sparking a small outbreak that killed one person.

> In the weeks since leaving Wuhan, the WHO’s team has been questioned about its independence and depth, including by the Biden administration, amid media reports that China denied the team access to raw data on possible COVID-19 cases that were identified during the earliest part of the outbreak.

> “We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement last month. “It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government.”

Why is the distinction between development and manufacturing relevant here? Have you read the article?

https://asiatimes.com/2020/04/why-us-outsourced-bat-virus-re...

Surely they’ve been receiving reports on progress, if so I’m sure there could be a match.

Similarly, I believe there were scientists in India who determined the capsule which deploys the virus into cells looks exactly the same as the HIV mechanism.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Scientists-slam-Ind...

This kinda matches people testing positive for HIV in an Australian vaccine trial:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/world/australia/uq-corona...

What evidence is informing this belief? i.e. what is your model for assigning "P>0.5" to the probability here? For example do you think the SARS outbreak circa 2002 was also a lab escape?

As long as people believe that evidence is covered up, then they can believe anything.

True. And not just economic reparations, you can imagine diplomatic relations and all would be severely impacted.

I duno if that would ever really happen. I think much like a lot of things, concerns about Uyghurs it would just dissolve into the diplomatic and economic seas.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If a child insists you have cooties (the fictitious ones, not lice) do you fight them to the bitter end?

You can never prove definitively that you don't since, of course they're not real, and the child gets to define the criteria for having them "oh you can't see cooties with a microscope, only I can!"

It's not about implying the Wuhan lab did release the vaccine, but it's about realizing chasing a conclusion that is not falsible is never going to give you a scientific conclusion.

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Most of the current lab leak theories revolve around:

> But it’s also possible that SARS-CoV-2 evolved naturally in the wild before it was brought into a lab to be studied, only to subsequently escape.

At the end of the day you're saying the one thing you can freely observe indicates it was not man-made, but due to factors you can never observe (with an extremely closed country with a government structure that strongly discourages a mistake like this ever being properly attributed even if there wasn't immense pressure to not have this come out as the case)

Well when it comes to pinning blame on a country for releasing a virus that leads to a pandemic, "if it quacks like a duck" doesn't pass does it?

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Why not spend energy looking at how we went from a virus shutting down a city in mainland China to 500k deaths in the US and all the mistakes made along the way there rather than chasing the equivalent of saying another kid gave us cooties on purpose...