Maybe my reading comprehension is low, but I read the entire interview and it revealed no evidence whatsoever. Just supposition.
Please, by all means, educate us all how the lab leak hypothesis has been strong for awhile now. Because as far as I am aware, it has been more or less proven the closest we can get to the origins of COVID-19 is that Wuhan Fish Market, where all kinds of people were working and shopping in close proximity to all kinds of animals in astoundingly unsanitary conditions, and it is entirely typical for a virus to emerge in this kind of environment since every other virus outbreak, epidemic and pandemic in the history of the Earth originated from people living and working in close proximity to animals.
I will appreciate the time you take to actually support your argument, if it can actually be supported with actual evidence, which I strongly doubt.
There basically is no evidence of a natural origin. No ancestors strains have been found and it's very likely the virus was spreading before the wet market. The evidence for a lab leak is circumstantial, however.
Uh, thanks for the link, but better if you'd just spell it out so it can be examined and responded to here. I'm not going to respond to a link.
> There basically is no evidence of a natural origin.
Except, I suppose, for the mountains of historical evidence that every virus ever had natural origins in people in close proximity to animals, exactly like the Wuhan Fish Market, where all of the first infections were found in proximity and not across the river near the Wuhan lab, and that in the last 80 years there have been a dozens and dozens of serious lab leaks of virulent and contagious agents that have never even led to an outbreak, let alone a global pandemic.
So circumstantial evidence just isn't going to cut any mustard here. There was talk of a smoking gun... I suppose it was just talk, because it appears the actual smoking gun is the Wuhan Fish Market.
> Uh, thanks for the link, but better if you'd just spell it out so it can be examined and responded to here. I'm not going to respond to a link.
If you don't want to spend even a basic amount of time to learn about a topic, then you're not worth debating with. Vanity Fair is a reputable source that spent a large amount of time researching the role of EcoHealth Alliance in the possible engineering of the virus at WIV. What possible discourse could we have if you only want to make hand-waving arguments rather than debate specific facts?
If you're not willing to make any arguments of your own supporting your position, but expect links to speak for you, then you are not debating and your position remains unsupported.
1) Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, was involved with viral research at the WIV. He received a grant from the NIH titled "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence." The grant was for $3.7 million. $600,000 went to the WIV who was a key collaborator in the work. The grant was controversial and was suspended in July 2020.
2) At the beginning of the pandemic, Daszak organized a letter in the Lancet that sought to present the lab-leak hypothesis as a groundless and destructive conspiracy theory. Daszak was later dismissed from the Lancet's COVID-19 commission for refusing to share progress reports from his research grant.
3) Daszak's grant set off alarm bells in 2016 when he filed a progress report that stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012. The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide.
4) Obama put a moratorium on gain-of-function research, but Daszak continued his work, stating that SARS-like chimeras from the completed experiment were exempt from the moratorium, because the strains used had not previously been known to infect humans. He also pointed to a 2015 research paper in which scientists had infected humanized mice with the same strains, and found that they were less lethal than the original SARS virus. This chimeric work took place at the WIV. Declassified intelligence stated that the Chinese military had also been working with civilian scientists at the WIV since 2017.
5) Needing funding, Daszak and his collaborators (EcoHealth Alliance and scientists at WIV) applied for a DARPA grant in 2017. In the leaked proposal, there was "a plan to examine SARS-like bat coronaviruses for furin cleavage sites and possibly insert new ones that would enable them to infect human cells." This is particularly notable because the COVID-19 virus has a unique furin cleavage site. The grant application proposed to collect bat samples from caves in Yunnan Province, transport them to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, extract and manipulate the viruses they contain, and use them to infect mice with humanized lungs. It would then map high-risk areas for bats harboring dangerous pathogens and treat test caves with substances to reduce the amount of virus they were shedding. The contract was “never awarded because of the horrific lack of common sense.” DARPA viewed the EcoHealth Alliance as a middle-man willing to travel to China, and nothing more.
6) As COVID-19 started spreading in 2019, to Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC at the time, it seemed not only possible but likely that the virus had originated in a lab. “I personally felt it wasn’t biologically plausible that [SARS CoV-2] went from bats to humans through an [intermediate] animal and became one of the most infectious viruses to humans,” he told Vanity Fair.
7) Early on in the pandemic, Fauci organized a small group of scientists to quell the lab-leak theory despite privately having similar concerns in emails obtained via FOIA requests. Dr. Robert Redford urged investigation of a possible lab leak days before Fauci's meeting occurred. Part of Fauci's group was scientist Kristian Andersen, who would later publish a preprint implicating the wet market as the sole origin of the virus.
8) Later, a scientist Jesse Bloom created a pre-print paper that investigated the disappearance of viral genetic sequences mentioned in early SARS-CoV-2 papers. The NIH had deleted these at the request of the WIV. Bloom invited Fauci and NIH director Francis Collins to discuss the paper. Collins invited outside biologist Kristian Andersen (mentioned above) to the meeting. Andersen was aggressive during the meeting and said it was the right of the WIV to deleted their samples. Andersen had access to the preprint server, and offered to entirely delete the paper or to revise it "in a way that would leave no record that this had been done." Fauci responded to this by saying: "Just for the record, I want to be clear that I never suggested you delete or revise the pre-print."
That's the general gist of the circumstantial evidence. The tl;dr is the U.S. (and likely the Chinese military) was funding gain-of-function research on this exact type of virus at the WIV. Those involved with the project have been the quickest to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak while simultaneously refusing to share their research. There also isn't enough evidence to conclude a natural origin as a similar virus has not been found in the wild. The furin cleavage site, in particular, is unique to COVID-19, and this was the specific target of gain-of-function research at WIV.
Well done. Thank you. Certain to be a best seller and too box office smash regardless of any relation to the actual cause of the pandemic. My cursory examination suggests this evidence is unfalsifiable, but I like it all the more.
You sound like you've decided long ago. But, when 6M+ people die of a virus that happened to originate near a sloppily-run virology lab with lead scientists making $30,000 who just happen to be researching gain-of-function on the same virus, it's natural to expect that some people will at least want to know more. Right? Not even circumstantial evidence is enough to go down that path?
Except that it is a high tech modern laboratory with stringent protocols, and while there have been dozens of lab leaks from other labs working on contagions that have escaped those labs, in a 100 years of these kinds of labs existing, there has never even been a serious outbreak, let alone an epidemic or pandemic.
And, repeating myself, the stunningly vast amount of historical evidence that viruses always come from animals, and always, in all known cases, first infect humans because they're working and living in close proximity to animals.
And that every other outbreak, epidemic and pandemic in the history of the Earth developed this way, and there being a wet market in Wuhan with the densest amount of infections and all of the initial infections within blocks on all sides of that market, and surprisingly few around the Wuhan Virology Lab...
So you are correct that I knew a long time ago the pandemic had to have started at that unsanitary wet market where the craziest live animals are bought and sold, and the pandemic could not possibly have been caused by a leak from the Wuhan Virology Lab that caused COVID-19.
Now, if it had ever happened before, ever, that a lab leak caused an outbreak, I might reconsider. But it's never happened, even with dozens of viable leaks of contagions. But pandemics have always been caused by the same thing throughout history, always always always and never otherwise (are you hearing me?), which is people close to animals. That's it. That's all there needs to be. That is the simplest explanation, and it is rational and it doesn't take 50 unlikely events in a row to have happened. That wet market is, or at least was, a reactor for a global pandemic.
Give it a read over some coffee. There's some other good deepdives by some biotechies as well, it'll take me a bit to get my brain to cough back up the magic query to get back to the articles in question.
I think it is worth having a gander at a list of pandemics that were caused by people living and working in close proximity to animals.
Antonine Plague, 165
Plague of Justinian, 541
Japanese Smallpox Epidemic, 735
Black Death, 1346
Mexico Small Pox Epidemic, 1519
Cocoliztli epidemic, 1576
Italian Plague, 1629
Naples Plague, 1656
Persian Plague, 1772
Cholera Global Pandemic, 1846
Third Plague Epidemic, 1855
Russia Typhus Epidemic, 1918
Spanish Flu, 1918
Influenza Pandemic, 1957
Hong Kong Flu, 1968
HIV,AIDS, 1981
All that is necessary to explain the COVID-19 pandemic is that wet market in Wuhan. No other explanation fits all the evidence, and no other explanation is necessary.
It would be suspicious if China never behaved this way, but China always behaves this way. Always. It also would go miles if we could identify any other significant outbreak caused by a lab leak, because regardless of the hedging on that page, it is not at all clear it is possible a lab leak could cause a pandemic. We take it for granted as obvious, but it simply is not, because it has never occurred before. Also, if that wet market didn't exist, entertaining the lab leak hypothesis might be rational, but even without the wet market, if it never existed, it is more likely the first human infection was caused by a wild animal rather than a lab leak. Except the wet market did exist with astoundingly unsanitary conditions along with many species of wild animals for sale and in close contact with people, and the location includes a bat infestation to boot, and someone got bit by a bat there.
I think it is just crazy and crazier to even remotely consider the Wuhan Institute of Virology over the wet market. The wet market is a tight and reasonable explanation. For it to have been WIV, we need a whole string of unlikely events.
That may be so, but if the pandemic was caused by a lab leak, we should have seen a concentration of infections surrounding the WIV, and at least on that side of the river. But instead, we see a concentration of the initial infections surrounding the wet market on the other side of the river. So the lab leak hypothesis simply does not fit the evidence.
Biolabs and genetic engineering are very recent developments for humans. It would not have been a possible orgin in the past but it is very possible now.
You are mistaken. Bacteria and viruses have been under serious study in modern labs since the 1930s. Since that time there have been dozens and dozens of leaks of contagions. And bioengineering has existed since the early 1970s.
The effort here is to try to show how unique the WIV is. But it isn't unique, it is a typical virology lab, just like all the other modern virology labs.
There's really nothing there. But the Wuhan Fish Market is certainly ground zero for the pandemic, the infections maps prove it, and the unsanitary conditions at that wet market with people in close proximity to live wild animals is all that is needed to explain the pandemic. It is the simplest explanation. Nothing else is required to cause a pandemic other than people in close proximity to animals, and we know this because every other outbreak, epidemic and pandemic in the history of the Universe was caused in precisely the same way.
Excellent display of Sealioning [1] there as I literally shared a link with many articles (from the same publication) that make a strong case for the lab leak origin theory.
I originally completely rejected the lab leak as conspiracy theory to anyone who brought it up, but my opinion has been swayed by several revelations.
To summarize from the wider internet [x]:
- EcoHealth DARPA proposal (DEFUSE)
- HVAC Failures identified at Wuhan prior to Nov 2019
- U.S. intel 3 Wuhan lab researchers ill with COVID like symptoms Nov 2019
- Drastic increase in Wuhan Lab security posture after HVAC failure
- Removal of Wuhan virus databases after HVAC failure
- Request of removal of viral genes from NIH databases
- The various released email documents of internal discussions at NIH
- The unnatural characteristics of the sequence that hint at possible lab origin
The rejected EcoHealth Alliance DARPA documents literally call for the creation of a novel COVID virus with similar features as COVID-19.
Even if it wasn't engineered they were collecting bat coronoviruses there and leaks from labs are not unheard of and have happened in the past at various facilities.
That paints a pretty common sense compelling argument to me.
We currently do not know for sure which is the case but at this point in time the scales tip towards lab for me and the word "strong" is valid. I respect your disagreement though.
I asked for evidence once. That is not sealioning. But I do appreciate you taking the time to at least list the talking points of the lab leak hypothesis.
And now I see how this is a lot of circumstantial evidence, as reported earlier. But the problem is, even taking all these observations together and accepting them as evidence at face value, they can not explain the lack of or minority of or low density of infections surrounding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, nor can they explain the preponderance of and high density of infections tightly surrounding the Wuhan Fish Market.
Perhaps someone got infected at the lab, put on a hazmat suit, went shopping at the fish market, and removed their helmet there? Occam's Razor obliterates this idea as too complicated when a far simpler explanation is, like an elephant in the room, sitting in plain site, which is that SARS-CoV-2, like every other known virus ever, initially infected people in close proximity to animals in unsanitary conditions, neatly explaining the dense bloom of initial infections surrounding that market.
It's just my strong opinion, but I am flabbergasted that lab leak hypothesizers are so stubborn to ignore the way things have always happened, and there being such a good fit sitting right there at the market. They'd rather construct an unlikely scenario, a scenario that has never occurred before in 100 years of microbiology labs, of a thousand things going wrong to explain how the virus leaked from a modern and high tech virology lab.
Spreading happens at high density areas. Origin is not the same as spreading.
I totally agree with your final sentiment if I ignored all the new revelations. In light of those revelations, that I am not sure you have investigated, it becomes increasingly hard maintain wet market as primary source.
The wet market stands out as the most likely culprit, because conditions existed there that are identical to what conditions we would expect a pandemic to arise from, because every other pandemic ever was caused in the same way in the same conditions, all of them, not just some, every single pandemic known was caused by conditions precisely, exactly like those found at the wet market. And, again, there have been dozens of lab leaks where contagions escaped labs, and as of yet, none have caused any pandemic, not even outbreaks.
So first of all, you need to prove it is even possible a lab leak could cause a pandemic. Because you are assuming that, and it certainly is not clear that is the case. In fact, all evidence points to the contrary... because it has never ever happened. Not ever, not even once in 100 years.
There’s a first time for everything, right? Don’t you think that it’s a pretty big coincidence that out of all the wet markets in the world, COVID-19 started in the one in a city with a major coronavirus research lab?
That's a lie. One counter example is there will be no first time that we get more energy out of a machine than we put in, because Conservation of Energy forbids this. But there are an infinite number of counter-examples to prove your statement is false.
> The Wuhan CDC laboratory moved on 2nd December 2019 to a new location near the Huanan market.
SARS-CoV-2 had already been circulating for months before Dec. 2019 in Wuhan near the wet market. And therein lies the rub, that this is not remotely compelling evidence a lab leak could have caused COVID-19. In fact, it is impossible, because, again, the virus had already been circulating right there for at least a few months prior to this. But nice try.
>>> explain the lack of or minority of or low density of infections surrounding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, nor can they explain the preponderance of and high density of infections tightly surrounding the Wuhan Fish Market.
OK, how about a lab person took it out of the lab and released it at the market?
> OK, how about a lab person took it out of the lab and released it at the market?
Well, you're going to need to identify that individual and their exact means, motive, and opportunity for causing a global pandemic. That is how we solve crimes.
Except that Occam's Razor eliminates that possibility as unlikely because it is much simpler explanation that COVID-19 was caused by the conditions exactly like those found at the wet market, just like every other outbreak, epidemic and pandemic ever. So you're going to have a bit of difficulty identifying an individual that never existed and, even if they did, has no compelling motive.
Except that it is a far more complicated explanation than simply accepting that the unsanitary conditions at the wet market with multiple species of wild animals in close proximity to people neatly explains all the evidence.
This isn't any critique of this particular comment, but I feel like you are ignoring the known dynamics of Sars-cov-2. R_0 is dependent on population density around the person infected. An infected person walking down the street for miles amounts to very little R_0, until they enter a crowded sphere.
Also, are you aware that there already have been lab leaks of similar nature [0]? Whether they go on to mature into a pandemic is a matter of state handling. You seem to dismiss the mechanism entirely just because it hasn't ever spread past a certain point.
You are vastly understating the importance of this, that not just the first infection, all of the initial infections were in close proximity to the Wuhan Fish Market.[1] It's like no one wants to see what is right in front of their face, as though a conspiracy and unlikely leak from a lab is so much more attractive than boring old how-every-other-virus-ever originated.
I think you're conflating the location of origin with the actual development of the virus. A location is step 0 in understanding how the virus developed.
Well, this is a new topic altogether, but I will try to respond to your straw man. The virus jumped species, possibly more than twice. It is possible the actual origin of the virus is in fact the Wuhan Fish Market, but it is just as likely the initial origin of SARS-CoV-2 could have been some in some bat in some cave in China hundreds of miles from Wuhan.
But it speaks volumes that the location of the origin of the global pandemic, not the virus itself, compelling appears to have been in an area within a few blocks surrounding the Wuhan Fish Market on all sides.
If the origin of SARS-CoV-2 was in fact the Wuhan lab, that someone at the lab got infected and walked out of that lab, then we should absolutely expect to see the vast majority of the initial infections around the area of the Wuhan lab, and not the Wuhan Fish Market. But the density of cases surrounding the lab looks no different from other areas of Wuhan not surrounding the Wuhan Fish Market.
So it seems pretty obvious, regardless of what was studied at the lab, even if they were studying SARS-CoV-2 itself, that something at the Wuhan Fish Market caused the pandemic. And that something is and has to be lots of wild animals in cages and people working there in unsanitary conditions. You see, there are standards and protocols in place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but there is nothing remotely resembling that at the fish market across the river. So it would be difficult to explain and highly unlikely, even if they had samples of SARS-CoV-2 at the lab, how it escaped and infected so many people initially around the market instead of the lab. The lab leak hypothesis does not explain nor even address this discrepancy, but the Wuhan Fish Market theory absolutely does.
>>> someone at the lab got infected and walked out of that lab
I suspect non-China intelligence/spooks influenced or compelled a worker in the lab to release it. Would have made China look really bad, but it went too far.
> Well, this is a new topic altogether, but I will try to respond to your straw man
Not a strawman, my point was contained in the original comment you replied to. ("WHO is still investigating how it actually developed")
In regards to the rest of your comment and the discrepancy between the case density around the market location in comparison to the lab, I'm sure you can think of many reasons why this evidence isn't conclusive.
Please, by all means, educate us all how the lab leak hypothesis has been strong for awhile now. Because as far as I am aware, it has been more or less proven the closest we can get to the origins of COVID-19 is that Wuhan Fish Market, where all kinds of people were working and shopping in close proximity to all kinds of animals in astoundingly unsanitary conditions, and it is entirely typical for a virus to emerge in this kind of environment since every other virus outbreak, epidemic and pandemic in the history of the Earth originated from people living and working in close proximity to animals.
I will appreciate the time you take to actually support your argument, if it can actually be supported with actual evidence, which I strongly doubt.