"Lab-made" still encompasses the whole of GoF research. That is, a virus can appear to have naturally evolved but have been evolved in lab under conditions by which it develops quicker, more efficiently, etc. If the virus was manufactured through some means then it was, by definition, lab-made. Even if it doesn't imply base-pair level manipulation by humans themselves.
It has been clear for ~1 year that not only did the NIH fund some GoF research it also funded research by a lab that was researching this exact virus. It is also clear that the Obama administration early on tried to kill this type research because it's glaringly obvious its extremely dangerous.
It is so unlikely such a novel, effective, and dangerous virus was created through bats sharing the same cave that it's not even worth considering. Similarly evolved viruses in nature rarely reach global pandemic levels. Even SARS v1 was weak in comparison. This all being said though, by the nature of GoF research, it would be impossible to tell anyway. At least as far as the MSM is concerned.
The only question now, I think, is malevolence. It's more likely a researcher was infected in the sub-par lab in Wuhan and brought it home than it is to be any of the cover stories given in the beginning: pangolin soup, BBQ bats, or what have you. I doubt the leak was malicious. I am certain the leak was from the lab. Finally, this isn't a new occurrence. This has happened several times here in the US and thankfully it was caught it time to stop it because we don't have a population density near what China has and the standard we hold our labs to makes carelessness with such research extremely hard to do.
I'm not old enough to remember first-hand but I have a friend (and mentor) who does, and this is the kind of thing that people used to say about AIDS, that it's not possible that such a horrible and lethal disease could arise spontaneously in nature. So in the early days of the AIDS epidemic many people invented all sorts of stories about how HIV was created by humans. It was a bioweapon that escaped the lab, it was created specifically to target gays, it was created to remind people that sex is only for reproduction...
Back then also, the conspiracy theories circulated in the press because the media figured they'd have a field day kicking up a shit storm and then sitting back and pretending they're only doing their job objectively presenting both sides of the "debate".
Then, as now, people also denied the existence of HIV completely, or denied that it was lethal, or denied that taking the few early treatments that could prolongue life was beneficial, or thought that the treatments caused AIDS. It's déja-vu all over again.
So not only there is a very strong prior for zoonotic origin of lethal pandemics, there is also a very strong prior for people coming up with all sorts of fanciful stories to explain the appearance of new diseases. Anyone who understands anything about how the human mind works and how it tends to tangle up itself in its own unconscious biases should proceed very carefully, if what one wants is to know the truth (rather than role-play an interesting fantasy of human-caused pandemic).
Btw, it's no joke: the norm throughout history was to ascribe disease to conscious agency, for example, the spirits of the dead, or evil sorcerers. See for example what people made of kuru:
And as I understand it, that's the "serial passage" possibility they discuss in the recently publicized papers.
The wet market theory is also then a lab made one, since putting sick Bata and pangolins and whatever together can promote viruses jumping species.
Flu is mostly a lab made virus by this definition too. Put people close to chickens, and you help people catch new flu variants
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop...
So is it really that crazy to think they made a chimera of two "random isolates"? David Relman didn't think so:
> 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
Of course the opportunities for a lab accident aren't limited to genetic engineering. SARS-CoV-2 could be a naturally-evolved virus, but one that was sitting harmlessly in a remote cave until WIV researchers collected it. SARS-CoV-2 could also be naturally-evolved, and spread to some hapless villager who then made a day trip to Wuhan; but the point is that we don't know, and all options require investigation until we do.
Of course it's possible to describe a physically possible route to sampling, lab accident, and infection. Anyone can come up with these just-so stories. Professors too! Making a chimera of random isolates is crazy story. It's incredibly annoying to mess with 30kb RNA viruses. You have no idea. That's just not how a skilled practitioner would go about asking these questions. There's a reason most work on these things are in characterized strains.
These stories remain ludicrous when compared with the unambiguous epidemiological evidence for zoonosis that we have in hand. You're simultaneously alleging this tight collaboration between western scientists and WIV, but positing that somehow all these western scientists were in the dark about a conspiracy to do this massive amount of work without our knowledge, or an active conspiracy on the part of a significant percentage of western virology to hide it. All in a field that before the pandemic was a completely undramatic backwater of science!
The power of "lab-leak" isn't its strength as an evidence-backed scientific hypothesis, it's its power as a compelling work of fiction, and I doubt any amount of hard evidence will kill it.
The damage it does is distracting us from the unregulated wild-meat and fur industries that were the overwhelmingly likely cauldron for evolving these strains (as in SARS-1!). If we yet again fail to shut down those sources, we risk another pandemic just like this happening again in a few decades. That's where international attention and pressure should be applied, not this cockamamie distraction.
Whole post is quite interesting despite author alluding from time to time to lab leak being likely.
What I got from it is that lab leak is entirely possible but there are at least few indications that it would require mixture of ineptitude and pointless cunningness.
And that natural origin is superbly likely because coronavirus are just amazing melting pot where same exact mutations popup in multiple unrelated species.
https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
From https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22734496/genetic-engineer....
So yes, your claim is false.
> Editors’ note, [30] March 2020: We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.
And from "The Scientist":
> Update (March 11, 2020): On social media and news outlets, a theory has circulated that the coronavirus at the root of the COVID-19 outbreak originated in a research lab. Scientists say there is no evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from a lab.
And an obligatory link to SA's recent post on the phrase "no evidence": https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...
A GRANT PROPOSAL written by the U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance and submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provides evidence that the group was working — or at least planning to work — on several risky areas of research. Among the scientific tasks the group described in its proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, was the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the insertion of a tiny part of the virus known as a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. Of particular interest was a type of cleavage site able to interact with furin, an enzyme expressed in human cells.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
There's more evidence that it's lab made.
https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
> WIV is a dual research institution. What that means is there's been military research done by PLA at WIV. Ecohealth Alliance is a front for two different things: 1. outsource risky pathogens experiments, which is done by NIH, NIAID and other organizations 2. spying on Chinese military operations at WIV, which is done by US military and intelligence organizations. That's why Daszak is intricately linked to US administration and has been untouchable so far. EHA has been essentially voilating NIH grant terms and denied NIH requests to submit all the experiments data. That explains US govt's reluctance to have a proper investigation.
I am in no way claiming there's any evidence to it, especially EHA is partially funded by US intelligence operation. You be the judge.
Unfortunately there's no evidence it didn't escape from a lab either, but there are many strong indications that it did.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-coronavirus-lab-leak-v...
Nope, there really aren't. We're now finding more and more naturally-evolved viruses in cave-dwelling bats that share plenty of features with SARS-CoV2, including the 'weird' features everyone was talking about at the beginning of the pandemic. All it really takes is to go and look for them. Occam's razor says this virus too is just one of many.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29927990
Top scientists believed COVID leaked from Wuhan lab but feared going public: Emails
Totally unrelated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_ZDQKq2F08
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biNxl7tiVSY [video]
Also, how are you going to get every non-target vaccinated before the virus shows up?
What you’re saying makes absolutely no sense.
and with less mortality and milder symptoms.
This line of thinking wasn't yet authorised by the US government so it must be fake news until approved.
That's why it is important that this is NOT about establishing historical truth with evidence. If it was human-made, we would realistically never find evidence.
The only thing that counts here is whether it is a plausible scenario or not. I do think there is evidence that this is a plausible scenario, which means that we should act to prevent something like this from happening in the future. Completely regardless whether there was a actual lab leak in the past or not.
I just hope that if this is man made we have learned something to prevent this happening again.
How hard would it be for someone to do this on purpose?
not without stopping travel at least
COVID-19 launched us so far into the post-truth world that I'm afraid there's no way back.
Edit: Yes, the initial pandemic virus most likely leaked from WIV lab in Wuhan. Whether it was engineered and whether it was intentional are different questions.
So it could be that pandemic info obstruction by China in the beginning was related to that regardless of how the virus emerged.
> Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of to one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine.
