If you click on the link in the thread, there's an editor's note clarifying that this paper is being used to prop up dodgy claims, for which there's no evidence.
The main issue I have with the 'lab leak' theory is that I haven't seen much evidence one way or another. Hitchens' razor applies- what can be stated without evidence can be as easily dismissed without evidence. I personally don't see any issue with the idea of this escaping from a lab (a friend who used to work at the CDC told me some rather scary stories about working there), but there's no serious evidence it was the case here.
On the other hand, many people would like it to be true, because it feeds into a conspiracy narrative. People can't believe things like global, deadly viral pandemics can occur naturally, even though they do.
I think it's important to set aside the question of weather Covid was made in a lab. For the sake of argument let's say it was not. There were proposals to do the kind of experimental work that would have created a virus very much like Covid-19. Those who wrote the proposal and shopped it around for funding probably considered it relatively harmless to do, both in a lab, and should it accidentally get out (it's just a corona virus after all).
The fact remains that there are people out there who want to make stuff like that in a lab. That kind of "work" needs to stop.
Thats what I take away from Covid whether it came from a lab or not, it very well could have given what goes on in labs. The fact that a lab leak is highly plausible is the problem, not the truth of it happening in this case.
If by some weird accident of history the research wasn't the actual cause of the virus-- it's just an accident. The problem was that we setup a situation where if it wasn't human originated, it's only a fluke.
There is also no evidence that it came from animals directly.
Given that there are really only two plausible hypotheses, and nondirect evidence of either, we have to speculate based on circumstantial evidence.
And if one hypothesis is floated around the media, we need to raise the other one as well.
I'll also point out that some people don't like to believe that there can be global media conspiracies, even though there are (cf. "masks don't work unless you're a trained medical professional" propaganda at the beginning).
Why do we have to speculate? If both hypotheses are plausible, should it make a significant difference for the measures we take which one is actually true? If evidence comes out showing which hypothesis is true, does it suddenly make the other one retroactively less plausible? I mean, it would be interesting to know what really happened, but it doesn’t change all that much.
It does. Knowing what caused this should be important, so it doesn't happen again.
If it happens naturally and randomly, there's nothing we can do. If it was a lab leak, maybe some special precautions should be taken, or such things should not be done in labs with iffy security practices... or maybe even not done at all.
Many workplace (and general) safety rules were written because someone has died doing something (now considered) against the rules. Killing a few millions of people and stoping the planets economy for almost two years seems like a terrible cost of some research gone bad.
> Knowing what caused this should be important, so it doesn't happen again
I really don't see that. If it is really true that both options are indistinguishably plausible, then what do you in response to this one event is absolutely meaningless. The next event could as likely come from "the other source", or from a new entirely one you don't even know about.
Your only reasonable option _in any case_ is to just strengthen your protection from both potential sources.
Suppose you are investigating a plane crash, and the evidence points to a possible uncontained engine failure, which apparently was caused by previously-undetected metal fatigue. The evidence, however, also almost entirely fits a bird strike. It doesn't really matter if you eventually find it was a bird strike, or not. Your engineers really think the metal fatigue could have brought down the plane? You are going to increase metal fatigue inspections, birds or not. And viceversa.
> both options are indistinguishably plausible, then what do you in response to this one event is absolutely meaningless.
How is it “absolutely meaningless” if you can narrow the chance of happening of the one you have control over? Is a global pandemic is a rare occurrence already don’t you make it more rare if you mitigate the risk of one of the possible sources?
What is absolutely meaningless is _which_ was the cause of this one particular event, since both clauses are almost equally plausible. I am obviously not claiming that the best course of action is not to mitigate anything; I am claiming that the best course of action is the same irregardless of the particular cause of this one event.
No doubt, but if the catalyst for the folks involved to take that best course of action is a global public revelation that governments and scientists had a hand in this either by irresponsible experimentation or lax safety over dangerous experimentation then it’s not meaningless.
> If it happens naturally and randomly, there's nothing we can do.
Some people say the main progress of civilization is the ability to do things about forces which were previously seen as natural and random.
> If it was a lab leak, maybe some special precautions should be taken,
Do you mean like making sure the labs follow certain biohazard handling standards and procedures? Which they currently have to do to maintain their certifications/ratings?
We don't have to prove that covid was a lab leak to review the procedures. Likewise, we don't have to prove that covid was natural and random (I am glad you separated those two, by the way) before reviewing how we handle food safety and animal transportation measures.
Nontheless, noting and acknowledging that a worldwide pandemic was actually caused from a lab leak would certinaly drive stricter regulation and higher adherence to procedures.
Conversely, a strong belief that it wasn't a lab leak would, of course, reduce the pressure to implement changes to safety protocols.
In theory everyone would react in a way which optimally reduces risk, but in practice acknowledgement of an incident drives significantly different behaviour.
Right, but I believe that this bias created by knowing the actual outcome for a single instance is much too strong, and we should rather strive to reduce that bias. In that light, the effort expended in continued speculation about the actual truth seems mostly wasted and misdirected energy to me.
> Do you mean like making sure the labs follow certain biohazard handling standards and procedures? Which they currently have to do to maintain their certifications/ratings?
Part of the lab leak claim is that the 2018 experiments mentioned in the tweet were done in a BSL2 lab even though they required BSL3 or 4.
> I'll also point out that some people don't like to believe that there can be global media conspiracies, even though there are (cf. "masks don't work unless you're a trained medical professional" propaganda at the beginning).
That's not a conspiracy, that's just common shared knowledge.
> "masks don't work unless you're a trained medical professional"
Putting aside the phrasing, which I take to be something like "unless you follow procedures and have new masks often etc".
In the beginning this was the narrative because there was a shortage of masks, or because of plain ignorance.
Masks are not perfect, but they were effective, which is why they are still mandatory in some contexts.
If one can ignore the bizarre political associations that formed in the US regarding masks, it is difficult to argue that the effort of wearing a mask is not worth it. Even if, as I said before, they are far from perfect.
> In the beginning this was the narrative because there was a shortage of masks, or because of plain ignorance.
Maybe I missed something, but I don't remember ever hearing "masks don't work unless you're a medical professional" (outside of later revisionist accounts by the right-wing "COVID isn't real and this is all a vast conspiracy" crowd); I mostly remember hearing "initial findings show that masks seem to be effective, but supplies are so short that we should ensure that our medical responders have access to them, so please don't go out and panic-buy them like you've been doing with toilet paper."
The more conspiracy minded started parsing "please don't go out and panic-buy them like you've been doing with toilet paper" as "you don't need masks" almost immediately. It was dumb when it happened, it's still dumb today. I'm sure at least one talking head said something to that effect but that was not actually the consensus message.
"Don't buy these masks unless you're a medical professional" ≠ "Masks don't work unless you're a medical professional."
To my knowledge, to this day, there are still exactly zero RCTs showing that masks were ever effective against COVID, and at least two major RCTs whose results indicate they are not very effective (there was no statistically significant benefit to masking). If, after two years of a world-wide pandemic, the best evidence we can put forth are low-quality observational studies which explicitly state they cannot show causation, then maybe it's time to stop blindly repeating the mantra that masks are effective.
Are you willfully trying to propagate this idea? It seems like you must be, because there is a deluge of studies showing the effectiveness of masks - and the nuance and complexity of that statement. Throwing on a thin cloth mask that doesn't seal well doesn't do much of anything. Putting on an N95, well-fitted mask definitely helps tremendously. That you think there are "exactly zero" studies indicates you aren't even looking. Please look and stop trying to sit in your echo chamber.
Right, and fitted N95s are not safe for prolonged wear.
There are exactly zero RCTs that suggest that masks are effective, the parent comment is correct. The single RCT that claims effectiveness was on hamsters.
Completely missing from pro-mask discourse is potential impact of large-scale masking on children. Developmental delays are starting to pop up, and previous public health advocates for masking are starting to turn course.
Your first two statements are just wrong, shockingly so after over 2 years where you could have educated yourself and decided not to.
Your last statement is definitely something we need to look into, but I think the development delays are probably minimal (speaking as a parent of a kid that wore masks at a critical age), but I think the social isolation was far more significant.
"The study linked surgical masks with an 11% drop in risk, compared with a 5% drop for cloth."
The cloth results were statistically insignificant, meaning indistinguishable from noise. The surgical mask results barely passed the statistical significance test, but lose that significance as soon as the data are stratified by age.
Your response should be a comedic parody, yet, sadly, you are actually being serious. It's a depressing reflection on the state of the world.
I said there are zero RCTs, a type of study that can establish causation, and you respond, "there are lots of mask studies! You just aren't looking!" Your response literally contradicts nothing that I said. I even linked a BMJ-published opinion lamenting the fact that there are a lot of mask studies, but they are mostly low-quality. I'm going to guess you didn't bother reading it.
Not to mention that you tell me there is a deluge of studies showing the effectiveness of masks, but you can't even be bothered to cite one yourself. Lastly, you accuse me of sitting in an echo chamber, an accusation that is beyond baseless. What else would you be willing to accuse me of without a shred of evidence?
Your response is just another example that people don't follow the scientific method; they are driven by ideology and tribalism.
I guess it's possible you don't actually know the difference, but what you linked isn't a research paper or study; it's a news article! And it's factually incorrect. It cites the Bangladesh RCT, which I am well aware of already. The trial results showed little to no statistically significant benefit to masking: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360320982_The_Bangl...
"A very large trial, whose results were published in Science, carried out in Bangladesh between 2020 and 2021 has been widely acclaimed as providing the most convincing evidence yet that masks work in reducing Covid-19 transmission and infections. However, the media grossly exaggerated the authors' own conclusions, and sceptical researchers have identified weaknesses in various aspects of the trial and statistical analysis which cast doubts on the significance of the results."
"However, their pre-analysis plan to measure results for “each decade” of age ranges shows no statistically significant effects among people aged 18–29, 30–39, 40–49, and 70+. Furthermore, they excluded this breakdown from their paper and relegated it to a supplement."
"One especially illuminating finding, which would be funny were it not a reflection of just how far science has fallen, is that purple cloth masks showed no advantage over going maskless, but red cloth masks did. Red cloth masks, in fact, showed higher 'efficacy' than surgical masks."
One of us two is at odds with reality. That may be true. But here's a hint. It's not me. When you're done with your baseless and tribalistic accusations of my "agenda", maybe you can humble yourself enough to learn something today.
You do you, but I've enjoyed not even getting the slightest cold for the last couple years that I might just keep masking in a lot of public spaces for the foreseeable future. It's anecdata for sure, but my experience seems to suggest that masks can help protect against airborne transmissible viral infections.
For more anecdata, pretty much everyone in my extended contacts that has chosen to relax their masking posture has gotten covid at some point since. Those that continue stricter protocols get sick less, bet it colds covid or flu.
I haven't heard about any surgeons giving up wearing masks in the operating room. Wonder why...
I do wonder if there are long-term affects from sheltering our immune systems for extended periods.
Now, I’m still in favor of wearing masks in some particularly high-risk places. And absolutely supported masks in the earlier days (until vaccines were readily available & common).
But by not getting exposure to the regular tiny amounts of bacteria and viruses that float around from other people (our body deals with quickly and we never feel sick), do we know anything about the long term affects of that on the immune system? Genuinely curious because I couldn’t find anything.
> I haven't heard about any surgeons giving up wearing masks in the operating room. Wonder why...
Those masks are as much about blocking blood spurts from the patient as they are about blocking spit from the doctor. They're not meant for blocking airborne viruses either way.
The fact that we were strongly told no and then yes with equal conviction is sufficient to demonstrate the point, regardless of whether masks work. Whether intentionally or not, media and governments can mislead in an in effect coordinated fashion.
(Note there is a straw-man counterargument where one might say “so they changed their mind as evidence evolved, that’s allowed”. But the information was presented as established and factual in both cases. We have always been at war with Eastasia.)
>(Note there is a straw-man counterargument where one might say “so they changed their mind as evidence evolved, that’s allowed”. But the information was presented as established and factual in both cases. We have always been at war with Eastasia.)
My friend, if you expect immediate inerrancy from everyone dealing with global-scale novel viruses, then I think you'll find that you'll _always_ be disappointed (or, more likely given your 1984 reference, you'll _always_ be the "victim" of another imagined conspiracy).
I do hope your friends, family, and coworkers afford you more space to learn, grow, and change (and that you practice doing so!) than you afford to others.
> My friend, if you expect immediate inerrancy from everyone dealing with global-scale novel viruses
The point is that if they are not certain then they should make it clear they are not certain. We were told very confidently that masks didn't work, that using them was nothing more than superstition. We are now told equally confidently that they do work. The establishment, taken as a whole, is extremely, dangerously overconfident.
I don't think they were confident, but they thought they needed to pretend to be confident. Consider it the side effect of presumably competent scientists spending too much time with politicians and PR departments.
And that's why they ended up seeming like liars, and can't be trusted.
Well it's not just seeming - they actually were liars, about the degree of confidence. As you said, too much time with politicians and PR professional liars!
It’s fine to make mistakes, especially in a fluid, developing situation. And it is precisely therefore we shouldn’t dress up our hypothesises as fact.
The actors here presented mask dictates as gospel. They were either wrong when anti-mask or wrong when pro-mask, but somehow conveyed absolute confidence in both cases. This is very harmful for the public discourse and for the reputation of the authorities during a time when reputation was paramount.
It’s okay not to know everything, just be honest about it.
The experts did NOT state it as fact. Pretty much ever. They couched it in terms as best they knew. If you want to argue that people consuming that and spreading that info put it in bad terms, you can, but I think that's a poor argument in general.
I disagree that people were spreading it in bad terms, if by that you mean the general public. Just look at what the officials actually said. Here’s March 2020:
> “You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a health care provider,” Surgeon General Jerome Adams said.
England’s chief medical officer, same month:
> Prof Whitty said: “In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that.”
Dr Fauci:
> “Right now, in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, an immunologist and a public face of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, on CBS’ “60 Minutes” earlier this month. He, like the others, suggested that masks could put users at risk by causing them to touch their face more often.
The WHO advised against it (to your point they did couch their language so much that it wasn’t even clear what they were really advising [1]).
And these are just the ones I could find quickly right now. From memory, the message was even stronger than this and even proliferated in this very forum. There was a time when you kind of had to duck and speak quietly if you wanted to bring up the idea that maybe this anti-mask thing wasn’t settled fact.
> My friend, if you expect immediate inerrancy from everyone dealing with global-scale novel viruses, then I think you'll find that you'll _always_ be disappointed (or, more likely given your 1984 reference, you'll _always_ be the "victim" of another imagined conspiracy).
When public policy is based on it, people are threatened with jail, forceably removed from outdoor open-air sporting events and denied basic services, yeah - you sure as hell better not be wrong about it.
When people in the street yell at you and call you a murderer for not wearing a mask outside in the sunshine (this happened to me) - yeah, you don't get to go back later and say "oops, my bad".
When the government exercises extraordinary emergency powers by executive fiat without legislative support to impose masking rules - they had better have damned good science to back it up.
In this case, the science simply didn't exist.
It's a strawman argument to claim "numerous studies show effectiveness of masking" as I've seen several people argue in this discussion.
The only relevant studies are those that evaluate the effectiveness of universal masking, since that's what the public policy dictated.
Universal masking policy was a knee-jerk response to some early studies and models that over estimated the risk of asymptomatic transmission. However, regardless of the new science that demonstrated that asymptomatic transmission was incredibly rare, the authorities refused to change the guidance.
Where was the science that justified the arbitrary and utterly performative rules put in place for restaurants? (wear a mask to walk three meters from the front door to the table, but it's ok to take it off when you're at the table)
Or the painfully performative masking of news people, in a studio by themselves, wearing a mask. Or wearing a mask alone in a car. Or on a walk outside. Or on a video conference for work.
Masks quickly stopped being about science very early on and quickly became nothing more than a flag for showing political alliance with the utter nonscientific nonsense of cloth masks and the overnight development of "fashion masks".
Forcing this on children was especially painful to watch. Children, who will never follow proper masking protocols and who are happy to trade their batman mask for their friend's spiderman mask...
> do hope your friends, family, and coworkers afford you more space to learn, grow, and change (and that you practice doing so!) than you afford to others.
I do hope that this entire episode and the bumbling, unscientific, incoherent and political face-saving response from the government makes you take a second look at blanket, authoritarian policy in the future.
Universal masking was the public health equivalent of the TSA. Illusory safety at best, with very little demonstrable effectiveness to justify the intrusion and restrictions put in place.
While maybe we do not have the gold standard study, I think it was the right decision, given how little inconvenience masks have, for the much bigger benefit of reducing Covid risks.
It isn't a conspiracy. Conspiracy implies planning and plotting. That was just decentralized media figures deciding to copy each other's opinions, because there's safety in numbers and group think, and because dissent sticks out and gets attacked.
If you still think we have decentralized media figures simply copying each other...when all your media companies air the same advertisements from the same pharmaceutical companies, it's no surprise that they would all take the same opinions. Speaking for American media only. They might not be conspiring with each other, but they are certainly are taking orders from the same places.
This doesn't cover the other news epidemic we have of state intel actors propping up media conglomerates as a matter of foreign policy. Specifically in Ukraine, and I'm only referencing this as it's probably the most recent example- the US is currently offering grants to organizations in Ukraine right now [0], this actually doesn't seem very nefarious. It's been going on for quite some time however. This article [1] goes into details about various factchecking organizations that worked in Ukraine to promote and minimalize the extreme sides of far right orgs in Ukraine since before the Russian invasion. StopFake is specifically called out, an organization that was previously hosted by our very own spokeswoman for the now defunct Ministry of Truth, Nina Jankowicz. And we know Taiwan does it, via Epoch Times, Russia does it with Russia Times, and various other state actors use more sophisticated methods. Before I dropped off most social media, it was obvious seeing Chinese propaganda being pushed, oftentimes through New York Times opinion pieces. Israel and China are probably two of the more sophisticated state actors, up there with the US intel agencies.
tldr: nothing is real, most media is carefully curated to shape your opinions and culture, not to inform you.
> They might not be conspiring with each other, but they are certainly are taking orders from the same places.
I don't see enough evidence for this claim.
The simpler explanation is that they're lazy (as most humans are) and scared to dissent (as most humans are), therefore they don't bother doing original work that challenges the accepted wisdom and they copy each other.
I do have some evidence for this. Within hours of the Amber Heard judgement came down, identical false claims about the judgement were blasted across all major news sites. I am rather confident that there was no nefarious plot here, because the stakes were so low and didn't involve powerful actors, and because non-US news outlets parroted the same fake news. Is there some secret clandestine organization doing this, coordinating with US and non-US news sources, on a story of no political significance? I saw the fake news get manufactured in front of my eyes. What happened was there was a viral tweet that created the fake claim, then one journalist picked up on it, and then all the other journalists copied that one journalist, because that's lower effort and safer than doing a thorough job.
Occam's razor + hanlon's razor.
> This article [1] goes into details about various factchecking organizations that worked in Ukraine to promote and minimalize the extreme sides of far right orgs in Ukraine since before the Russian invasion.
Lol, very few people are minimizing Azov or other far-right groups in Ukraine. Everyone knows they're a huge problem (albeit they are a problem that is caused by Russia's invasion in 2014 - Ukraine, being much smaller, doesn't have the luxury of picking and choosing who is allowed to fight, given the imminent threat of further invasion from a larger neighbor). They are mostly just countering the Kremlin's propaganda that Ukraine is run by drug-addicted banderites and that Azov, a fairly small unit, is representative of the entire military and political leadership. The Russian propaganda around this was insane, helped along by treacherous US crypto fascists, and so hypocritical given that neo-Nazi views are more widely subscribed inside Russia than in Ukraine according to Pew polling, and given that the head of Wagner (whom Putin has shaken hands with) is an open neo-nazi with SS tattoos on his neck, and given that Pushilin has been seen awarding a medal to an open neo-nazi, and given that Putin himself is a literal fascist compared to the democratically elected Zelenskyy.
> Lol, very few people are minimizing Azov or other far-right groups in Ukraine. Everyone knows they're a huge problem
Your response to the USA spearheading propaganda efforts to support far right neo-nazi's is- 1) they failed and 2) russian nazi's are worse.
My problem is with the fact that the US did it at all, whether we agree or disagree on the success of that operation isn't part of my point.
As for media being driven by conspiring forces, I agree that they are lazy and scared to dissent, but this doesn't account for everything. I'm not going to take the time to prove that right now. If you truly believe the media organizations are benign, just lazy and conformists, then I doubt I can change your mind anyways.
> albeit they are a problem that is caused by Russia's invasion in 2014
Unrelated, they were an organization that existed long before Russia's invasion, and they arguably played a crucial role in ensuring that the peaceful Euromaiden protests turned bloody. This goes back to CIA Operation ANYFACE, and subsequent Western intervention during the Cold War and after the fall of the USSR to combat Russian influence.
> Your response to the USA spearheading propaganda efforts to support far right neo-nazi's is- 1) they failed and 2) russian nazi's are worse.
No, my response is that (1) it's an insane unsupported conspiracy theory, (2) which misdirects from the actual fascist dictatorship that uses gaslighting and DARVO to trick conspiracy minded fools into thinking that actually the democratically elected centrists over in Ukraine are the real fascists.
Consider this. STOPFAKE, an alleged arm of US pro-fascist propaganda, whitewashes C14 by calling it a "community organization", yet the U.S. State Department classifies C14 as a "nationalist hate group". Why would the U.S. State Department do that if the goal of the US led conspiracy (which presumably involves the U.S. State Department) is to paint these groups as heroes? The claims are internally inconsistent and self-refuting.
> USA spearheading propaganda efforts
More DARVO. The US has been trying to respond to Russian propaganda efforts. What Putin is doing is out of Hilter's propaganda playbook for Sudetenland and Poland. If you knew anything about Putin's election interference in 2016, and about how Xi and Putin are weaponizing social media against the US population, and about the Kremlin's propaganda campaign to portray Ukraine as a fascist threat so as to have a justification for the invasion, you would perhaps not automatically assume such a cynical position. That doesn't mean that such efforts haven't sometimes failed, of course, in fact I'd be surprised if they had a perfect track record. But failures and mistakes don't mean that anti-propaganda efforts are themselves concerted propaganda.
> 1) they failed
This is a variation of the No True Scotsman fallacy. No evidence to the contrary is deemed sufficient because the conspiracy theory is this amorphous thing that has to be true regardless of how well it is falsified by counterexamples.
> Unrelated, they were an organization that existed long before Russia's invasion
More DARVO. They were nascent at best and had no institutional acknowledgement (and let's not forget that pre-Maidan was a pro-Russian government, so to the extent that Azov was a thing pre-2014, the blame for that goes on their shoulders). Then Russia invaded, and that forced a change in the status quo out of necessity and made eliminating far-right paramilitary groups pragmatically infeasible. Ukraine doesn't have the luxury of picking and choosing who can fight to defend their small population.
> I'm not going to take the time to prove that right now.
If someone alleges a conspiracy theory and doesn't present compelling evidence, it can be safely dismissed.
> That was just decentralized [governments] deciding to copy each other's opinions, because there's safety in numbers and group think, and because dissent sticks out and gets attacked.
And "consent" to shutdowns were manufactured by policy makers inside governments paying media companies to promote their policies. It was a concerted effort.
Where have I heard this kind of reasoning before? Oh yes, I remember:
There is no direct evidence for god not existing. Given that there are only two possible hypothesis, that he exists and that he doesn’t, we need to teach both sides to children, and the case for a 4000 year old planet with dinosaur bones buried to confuse scientists must be taught at equal level!
Couldn’t a contributor to the lack of evidence be that the CCP blocked a lot of discovery from being conducted, and didn’t release enough information? We’re never going to know due to that alone. Obviously the optics would be really bad if they showed evidence that they leaked it accidentally.
>Hitchens' razor applies- what can be stated without evidence can be as easily dismissed without evidence
Say mr X was seen at the crime scene at 10 am, he also knew the victim and lots of people have seen them fight a week ago, the victim had just came out of the bank with 20k$ in cash in a bag, mr X who's broke have been seen driving a car a month after the crime worth 18k$.
There is no evidence mr X killed the victim, but he probably did it.
Your argument removes probability, we have many coincidences linked to the lab leak theory, we don't have a 100% evidence that supports it, so we can assume it probably leaked from the lab, maybe it didn't, and since we can't quantify it with precision and a certain negligible error margin, we can use a language where probably happened means >50% and maybe happened means <50%.
A woman can safely assume her husband is cheating if she catches him flirting with girls online, find a different long hair on his coat everytime he travels for work, etc.
The problem is that none of the circumstantial evidence for a lab leak is remotely as convincing as your hypothetical.
And most of it tends to be spun. Read the linked thread and note how many times the author throws out terms like "much more likely to be lab-generated" without evidence. We don't know any of that. We have very limited understanding of wild pathogen evolution in general. Likewise the "1000 miles from bat viruses" thing is spun. We don't know that either! We just know what we measured, not what we didn't.
And you can spin it the other way, anyway: we know that the presumptive covid ancestor was at least as close as 1000 miles, on the same continent and within easy travel distance of a migratory flying species. It's true, that if the closest relative was in Argentina, that getting it to Wuhan would require a lot of weird argument. But from Yunnan? Seems not unreasonable.
People continue to bang this hypothesis, and... it's not a bad hypothesis really. But the reason consensus among experts is behind natural evolution is that natural evolution remains a clearly better hypothesis. I know that's upsetting to people who want to believe the lab theory for whatever reason, but it is and remains the truth. Until someone finds better evidence, the lab leak is going to remain a popular conspiracy theory only.
Then you'll need to educate me on the what you think distinction is. The linked tweet thread asserts both: that the virus was manufactured in the WIV and that it leaked by accident. There are stronger (and even less well grounded) ideas in the broader conspiracist community asserting that it was the result of bioweapons research, and sometimes even that it was deliberately released. Ebright himself doesn't truck with any of that nonsense.
- lab leak: researchers catch infected bat; at the laboratory, bat bites researcher; researcher gets COVID
- lab made: researchers modify a virus, and produce SARS-CoV-2; the latter escapes the laborary (in one way or another)
The importance of the lab leak hypothesis is that it doesn't need any conspiracy (a researcher being bitten is nothing strange in itself), but still implies unsafe practices and bad faith by the institutions involved.
> Likewise the "1000 miles from bat viruses" thing is spun. We don't know that either! We just know what we measured, not what we didn't.
That's not "spun", that's science. You're positing a COVID teapot that we have no evidence for. In a scientific context, it's not spin to omit stating "based on all available empirical evidence" after every assertion.
> In a scientific context, it's not spin to omit stating "based on all available empirical evidence" after every assertion.
No, that's a fallacy. If I find an apple on the ground at the supermarket, it is evidence that there are apples at the supermarket. It is not evidence that there are no apples at my friend's home where I found no apples. I just didn't check the refrigerator.
The linked thread says, precisely, "Wuhan--a city 1,000 miles from nearest wild bats with SARS-like coronaviruses". And that is not correct.
If I were saying "bats in southern China with SARS-like viruses are evidence that there are no bats closer to Wuhan with SARS-like coronaviruses", I would be committing the fallacy that you're accusing me of. But that's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying that there's no evidence of any bats closer to Wuhan with SARS-like coronaviruses. And I'm saying that, while it's indeed possible that these hypothetical bats exist - just as it's "possible" that COVID was transmitted to Wuhan via a teapot halfway between here and Mars; that COVID unicorns exist on an undiscovered island somewhere and one sneezed particularly hard and its germs ended up in Wuhan; or that COVID spontaneously formed one day on the apples in your friend's refrigerator in Wuhan - it's, again, not spin for a scientist to refrain from couching everything in uncertainty because of the infinite evidenceless hypotheticals that might disprove it; this is how every single positive statement in science functions. It is indeed correct, scientifically speaking, that there are no apples at your friend's home where you found no apples [based on all available empirical evidence]. And it is indeed correct, scientifically speaking, that Wuhan is 1,000 miles away from the nearest wild bats with SARS-like coronaviruses [based on all available empirical evidence].
> I'm saying that there's no evidence of any bats closer to Wuhan with SARS-like coronaviruses
That's not all you're saying, though. You're extrapolating from that fact to argue that bats closer to Wuhan with SARS-like coronaviruses are therefore unlikely to be present.[1] And no, that's not correct. Viruses span continent-wide gaps all the time, we don't need any special evidence to cite that as a possibility.
[1] Or more specifically, that they're less likely to be present than a man-made descendent. This is how you can spot a poorly justified argument. You're skipping a step and inserting an assumption in exactly the way you need to address a hole in your argument. Again, I pointed out upthread how I can spin exactly the same facts in the opposite direction (IMHO more convincingly, though logically no more sound).
No, I'm not saying that. Please don't put words in my mouth. I haven't said a single thing here about "a man-made descendent", or whether those bats are "likely" to be present or not. I haven't even said that I agree with Ebright or believe in any kind of lab-leak scenario. All I've said is that your accusation of "spin" - because Ebright simply stated what all existing evidence points to, that the closest candidate bats are 1000 miles away, is the case without qualification - is based on a misunderstanding of how science works. Until there is evidence to the contrary - and there currently is not - it is entirely normal, conventional, and scientific - and not spin! - to state the facts as demonstrated by all the available evidence as facts. In particular, when you say, "we just know what we measured, not what we didn't" - yes, that is science, not intellectual dishonesty.
That said, I'll bite: if there are bats with SARS-like coronaviruses closer to Wuhan, I suspect that the folks in Wuhan who've spent the past 15-20 years studying SARS-like bat coronaviruses, "sampling thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across China" [0], probably would have discovered the ones right on their doorstep, more probably than ones further afield. So sure, yes, I'd wager they're not all that likely (though not impossible)! But, again, that's neither here nor there to my overall point, which is that your accusation of spin on Ebright's part is unfounded and scientifically illiterate.
> Ebright simply stated what all existing evidence points to, that the closest candidate bats are 1000 miles away
You added the word "candidate". I agree with what you wrote. Your framing doesn't imply an incorrect conclusion, though it also lacks any rhetorical punch (probably the reason Ebright skipped it) since we don't have any "candidate" leak evidence either. Good job.
I don't think that's correct, for the simple reason that if those papers existed the (sigh) pro-leak folks would be linking them everywhere. Virology isn't exactly a trillion dollar field, we're not going out and sequencing every virus in every species. The Yunnan cave made news and was well-studied because someone stumbled on a SARS-related virus there, that says nothing about where that virus went later.
Those papers don't exist for the simple reason that "interesting" bats don't live there.
You might want to consider that while R H Ebright can be offensive and distateful, he has been banging this drum for 20 years and is generally very careful when he makes a factual statement.
I don't know how the law works where you live, but in my country, 'probably did it' isn't enough for a conviction. Even then, this isn't some spurious made up court trial, and the probabilities you're working with are easily inflated to suit the narrative you want.
Conspiracy theorists will always say they have enough evidence for their theory, of course.
There's a difference between "not enough for conviction" (meaning, more investigation needed) and the whole system (from authorities, mainsteam media to social network bans) turning against anyone who even dares mention the lab leak hypothesis.
Concepts like “innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” are more about protecting people’s individual liberties than establishing a baseline about whether or not to believe something.
Individual liberty equalling counting for criminal law, not civil law nor morals in effect in a society or community. E.g. in a club in San Francisco you might be checked before entry to prove you do not possess a knife or gun. Whereas in a club on the beach near Rotterdam anything goes. In the case someone gets stabbed or shot in the club in San Francisco its unlikely they passed security. Whereas in the Rotterdam example such boundary does not exist.
> I don't know how the law works where you live, but in my country, 'probably did it' isn't enough for a conviction. Even then, this isn't some spurious made up court trial, and the probabilities you're working with are easily inflated to suit the narrative you want.
One should not apply standards of a criminal trial to verification of a scientific hypothesis. The results can be quite disastrous as the case of Giordano Bruno can attest [0].
Ah yes, the weaponization of stigma. Want to shut down critical thinking? Use words like kook, nut, conspiracy theorist, racist, etc. You're basically gaslighting people.
Most journals require more evidence than what passes as such in a court of law. On the say-so of a dog can amount to evidence in some courts. Specifically talking about K9s granting reasonable cause to search a vehicle or premises, even if the science behind it is not supportive.
Yeah sure I need to bring you mathematical irrefutable proof that some event happened, but you can just call me a conspiracy theorist or whatever new words go with it today: racist, sexist, religious, bigot, homophobe, transphobe, etc. with 0 evidence.
But in science at least you always should test against the null hypothesis, and that is purposefully not done here like in many other "conspiracy theories". Note I'm not saying that the lab leak is necessarily a conspiracy theory or that it can not be true, I'm simply talking about the way of arguing. The way a lot of conspiracy arguments are being constructed is that they take a number of events which seem relatively improbable if regarded from general experience and then use that as proof because "it's impossible for these events to happen at the same time". However, looking in detail at the number of events occurring events actually become very probable (I mean there have been several instances of people winning the lottery twice).
You forget the part where mr X went to a bar and asked patrons if anyone wants to rob and kill the victim (darpa grant proposal), but was told to get lost.
implies people conspired to create a pandemic. Which detracts from the first point of it being a lab-leak.
> what can be stated without evidence can be as easily dismissed without evidence
So we should never develop a hypothesis? Given the lack of any indicators lending support to any of the plausible hypotheses put forward, I think its fair game to discuss the lab leak version.
If you recall in the early days of the pandemic, the lab-leak theory become a politically divisive one in the US, pitting right against left for no good reason other than the fact that the "other side" held an undesirable view. It was labeled as a conspiracy theory, incorrectly. It is very simply, a theory, and it should be discussed on par with any other theory.
There isn’t enough evidence to convict, so to speak, but the one place that could easily disprove the lab leak claim is the same place desperately stonewalling and destroying evidence. Acting guilty doesn’t mean your guilty, but something nefarious went on in that lab. To the point where they would rather fire bomb the entire lab than answer questions or provide documents.
>On the other hand, many people would like it to be true, because it feeds into a conspiracy narrative.
I wonder how many such people would exist if there wasn’t such a massive media and big tech push to silence anyone discussing lab leak. At peak manipulation you were labeled a racist for discussing lab leak and permanently banned from most (all?) big tech platforms.
I can't agree with this anymore. For some reason, this lab isn't allowed to be inspected and investigated thoroughly. So there is something wrong, likely, it's where COVID19 came from or else, why not just allow an investigation team in to remove all doubts.
Not allowing investigation is not necessary conspiracy to cover up known evidence. It might just be an admission that there is a nonzero chance there is evidence there... and if the world finds that, there could be dire consequences if people decide China should be held liable.
Glasnost is not standard policy in China and they have very strong reasons not to change that for reasons which have nothing to do with what did or didn't happen in the Wuhan lab. In the unlikely event the CCCP has complete certainty about what happened which completely exonerates the lab, they still wouldn't want to release anything other than controlled media briefings. If you start allowing international observers in every time you say something wasn't your fault, people can draw some much stronger inferences when you don't...
(Not to mention that there's little reason to believe the higher reaches of the CCCP know the answer to the question of whether there's any evidence any better than the average person. They're not virologists, and if evidence of lab malpractice exists the virologists aren't exactly incentivised to incriminate themselves by sharing it with them)
It’s not just stonewalling an investigation. It’s outright destruction of files and documents so that an investigation literally cannot happen. Wiping servers, destroying emails, shredding files, burning samples. These are things that don’t necessarily implicate you in guilt, but make you look guilty.
It’s just kind of rich for people to grandstand and say “there’s no evidence to support this theory” when the evidence that may support it has been systematically destroyed. There is enough circumstantial evidence to warrant a search, and if this lab situation had unfolded in the US the lab would have been searched.
Probably not the comparison you want to make. If your door blew open in a strong wind one day and a bunch of CP flew out of it and around town, you probably wouldn't have a choice, no matter how convincing your story of the previous tenant being a sicko was.
If CP were to be compared to virus, then all households would have some.
New virus emerge naturally all the time, the same cannot be said for CP.
Also things can go wrong just due to bad luck. Someone's home caught fire doesn't necessary mean they are committing insurance fraud; majority of them will be genuine accidents.
> Hitchens' razor applies- what can be stated without evidence can be as easily dismissed without evidence.
I think the problem is that there is very little evidence exists for the other explanations - and an absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
The lack of non-circumstantial evidence for the "Lab Leak" theory can be partially explained by the fact that China blocked investigations within the lab until 2021, and there are obvious and strong geopolitical reasons why they would want to destroy evidence if the 'lab leak' theory WAS true. This is from a country already known to perform cover-ups.
So this is the problem - if the hypothesis was true, any biological evidence would have most likely been intentionally destroyed, which means we can't really apply 'Hitchens Razor'.
US officials also have the strong incentives to muddy the waters for lab-leak. I mean, if true, we likely funded it since Fauci's NIH was giving millions in grant money to Daszak/EcoHealth Alliance, which was studying bat corona viruses and arguing with the government over their gain of function research.
Not only that but tensions are already high with China; you really want to collapse that wave function? I'm pretty OK with that not being public knowledge.
Is it getting better or worse if we wait? Right now China probably wouldn't dare invade Taiwan, whereas in ten years they probably will. So yes, now is the right time to find out whether they're willing to cooperate with the rule-based international community or not.
There's evidence of novel coronaviruses occurring in mammals and then infecting people — "In May [2021], researchers reported that two coronaviruses in dogs recombined in Malaysia. The result was a hybrid that infected eight children."
There's evidence of "vendors selling live mammals, including raccoon dogs, hog badgers, and red foxes, immediately before the COVID-19 pandemic" at a Wuhan market.
There's "Multiple positive samples … from one stall known to have sold live mammals, and the water drain proximal to this stall, as well as other sewerages and a nearby wildlife stall on the southwest side of the market, tested positive for SARS-CoV-2."
> If you click on the link in the thread, there's an editor's note clarifying that this paper is being used to prop up dodgy claims, for which there's no evidence.
Note that the addendum to the paper was added in March 2020, when Peter Daszak and many others directly associated with the Wuhan Institute were working covertly[0] to destroy any rational or scientific debate about the origins of covid. The Lancet letter was published on 7 March 2020.
[0] Daszak and many of the other co-signers to the Lancet letter which "strongly condemned conspiracy theories” declared no conflicts of interest.
> Daszak made strenuous efforts to hide [...] that the signatories to the letter had any connection to EcoHealth Alliance or the Wuhan Institute
That's a strange thing to argue given that Peter Daszak's position within EcoHealth Alliance is public and well-known, and he signed the letter publicly.
His extended conflict statement isn't exactly a smoking gun either:
Daszak acted unethically regardless of the actual truth of the lab leak hypothesis.
His actions were a self serving attempt to muddy the waters on investigation of the virus origin, and may have prevented conclusive proof one way or the other from ever emerging. I doubt Daszak himself knows for sure. But if there is a risk that you are responsible, why not try cover it up anyway. Just in case?
> On the other hand, many people would like it to be true, because it feeds into a conspiracy narrative.
I think this is missing Occam's razor - many people believe it because they've seen more evidence that it is true than the reverse, but they aren't necessarily good at judging evidence.
It doesn't make much difference either way. Given the number of people in the world, it seems likely we're going to see similar waves of disease in the future. The Asia-Pacific region has been on high alert for exactly this happening for 20 years, this could easily be a 1 in 40 years pandemic or worse as the world keeps getting smaller. And if it is even half plausibly a lab leak then given where tech is up to it takes one lab anywhere with bad safety standards - this is almost a level of risk that is hitherto outside the human experience.
>but there's no serious evidence it was the case here
I mean, the furan cleavage site certainly counts as evidence of a potential modification if it hasn't been observed in any of the natural coronaviruses and inserting it in the position it is was the subject of a grant proposal just a couple of years prior, at the institute in close proximity to the outbreak.
There's also the fact that US intelligence leaked that a couple of workers at WIV were hospitalized with COVID-like symptoms in November, before the outbreak was otherwise detected which is an unusual event for working-aged people. That is an extremely suspicious timing and location of an unusual event in more than one person, though we don't have confirmation of the causative agent.
Also, while we're back into speculative evidence, I found the behavior of the Chinese government was very suspicious throughout.
I found it very interesting that there was a nation-wide initiative in China toward enhancing lab safety at BSL labs which was rolled out relatively quietly a few months into the pandemic. They also pulled their viral genetic database offline after the outbreak. Non-transparency is expected, but a couple of those actions seem more damning.
I feel like this isn't publicised enough. The lab leakers are louder and people definitely seem to want it to be true more than natural origins and they are not being honest in their attempts to dismiss these papers.
The 'counter' is incredibly weak sauce and she's been rebutted several times. Again, as I said, if you just ignore rebuttals you can keep acting like you have a point.
The second post is a scurrilous and nasty smear job from a thoroughly unpleasant individual and I'm quite appalled you posted it. Shameful.
The "two lineages" argument has been grossly oversold. They're just two SNPs apart, making it near-impossible to distinguish whether they evolved in animals (implying two introductions into humans) or in humans (after one introduction). If they were more different, then we could exclude evolution in humans, since it's unlikely the virus could spread for that long without causing enough sickness and death for someone to have noticed earlier. With just two SNPs, that's much harder--SARS-CoV-2 picks up something around 1/3 of an SNP per transmission, so it's not even that unlikely that the lineages formed in a single human-to-human transmission (p ~ 1/9). It's also possible that an intermediate lineage existed but went extinct before it could be sampled, as most lineages do.
Pekar et al. do some complicated phylogenetic modeling that purports to show the MRCA in humans is too recent for a single introduction. That result is unintuitive, and I believe their model is highly suspect, per my comments and links at
I agree that "of course nobody knows", and so do Ebright and Chan; they are careful to assert only that further investigation is required, if necessary by subpoena (e.g. for any sequencing data potentially containing early genomes of SARS-CoV-2, whether as the deliberate target or from contamination like those Antarctic soil samples).
The author of the thread that you're praising does not though; she considers the question closed, and has viciously attacked those calling for such investigation, including Chan, whom she called "an intellectually dishonest, manipulative conspiracist". (Ebright gets rather unpleasant himself, so perhaps one could excuse her behavior to him as tit for tat; but Chan does not.) I find both those attacks and the overselling of Pekar's result to be deeply unfortunate. Don't you?
agree with some of your statement, not with your sentiment. I find your comment slightly off topic. I asked the original commenter if they read the thread, because they answered with a link to a horribly weak rebuttal of the first paper and a even worse personal attack on the author of the tweets.
so I should care if she attacks somebody "viciously" yet not if she is attacked in an even worse manner? Interesting.
In your comment, you linked to Pekar's paper. You said that after reading it, you found a natural cause more plausible. I've also read that paper, and I'm much less convinced. That's what I wanted to discuss, and I don't see how it's off-topic. If anything I wrote came across as a defense of Ebright's tone or any aspect of that Thacker piece, then I expressed myself unclearly; for the avoidance of doubt, I think they're bad too.
Have you looked at Pekar's full model, as set out mostly in the supplementary materials? This isn't any standard molecular clock approach. It's a byzantine stack of plausible but somewhat arbitrary assumptions, ending in a simulated phylogenetic tree. The shape of that tree with one introduction doesn't match the shape of the actual tree constructed from the earliest real samples in Wuhan, so Pekar concludes there were two introductions. But I'm not aware that such an approach has ever made a successful prediction, and there's no circumstance in any field where I can imagine trusting a model of such complexity without validation. Their sensitivity analysis is meaningless, varying some irrelevant parameters but keeping what seems intuitively like the main determinant of that shape (the connectivity of their contact network) fixed.
You are correct that Alina Chan's thread doesn't address that aspect of Pekar's argument. Others have though, per the Twitter threads I linked. What do you think?
Ah I expected to get downvoted into oblivion, I know it's a cliche to say it but HN isn't what it once was.
A key point to take away is that the fact there are 2 lineages means that lab leak is super unlikely. It would require somebody from the lab to come to the same relatively small market to give lineage A, then somebody else who got infected through a totally different evolutionary route at the lab to happen to come to the market just after and both to not spread it anywhere else.
Of course lab leakers are working hard to try to deny this or claim the data is wrong or yada yada. It's an ongoing battle and they have several highly dedicated 'independent scientists' (lol) working on it seemingly 24/7.
> Of course lab leakers are working hard to try to deny this or claim the data is wrong or yada yada. It's an ongoing battle and they have several highly dedicated 'independent scientists' (lol) working on it seemingly 24/7.
I think the downvotes are because of this type of statement, which suggests that people who have read the papers, and thought about the conflicting evidence, and finally come to a conclusion that differs from your viewpoint, dislike the implication that they are simply nutty conspiracy-theorists tirelessly and obsessively working to undermine rational science.
You do realise there are countless people who have 'read the papers and thought about the conflicting evidence' about climate change right?
The reality is unfortunately that these people ARE nutty conspiracy theorists. They are not 'thinking about the papers' and providing a reasonable push back, they're reiterating long debunked points (did you read the thread I posted?).
Ebright already claimed the papers were scientific fraud until he thought better and deleted the tweet. This is the kind of person you're dealing with.
I'm not going to both-sides something which now has very clear evidence in one direction and not a shred of evidence in the other, I'm sorry I'm just not.
Hacker news of old would be more open to that. Again,this is why I no longer post here.
The two lineages are literally just two SNPs apart. SARS-CoV-2 averages ~1/3 of an SNP per human-to-human transition, so ~1/9 of such transmissions generate "two lineages" at least that different. So intuitively, it seems easy to believe those lineages could have evolved in just a few weeks of early cryptic (unsampled) human spread.
Pekar et al. did some complicated modeling that purports to establish that the MRCA in humans is so recent that the two lineages must have arisen in animals, implying two introductions into humans. I believe that's highly suspect though, per my explanation and links at
They aren’t mutually exclusive though right? We can say the initial outbreak was from the wet market. Does that mean the virus itself is of 100% natural origin?
What I saw is that it started in SW Indonesia, in a jungle near the coast, in 2008. That was its first appearance:
covid-19 origin's
i see this coronavirus first originated in South West India
And first jumped to human in coastal Bengkulu/West Sumatra in Indonesia
I'll try to get time on these events
end of 2008: origination in SW india near Mangalore
1Q2013: first jumps to humans in BGK/WSU indonesia after an animal outbreak on the coast in late 2012
first substantial human outbreak: Mid 2013 slightly inland from outbreak location.
but of course there's no political capital to be made by blaming these poor places ....
feel kind of sad to consider how much of the crazy blame game is actually driven by knowledge, desire for truth and competence, and how much of it is just driven by political competition....i guess the motivation doesn't matter...the result matters. the output is not about truth it's about politics and narrative ... so sad....
The problem is there are really only two contenders for Covid origins: lab origin (I much prefer this label than "lab leak") and zoonotic origin.
Zoonotic origin is the obvious choice. As a general rule, nature is way better at evolving pathogens than humans are. The problem with this theory is we haven't yet found the wild population from which Covid originated. Now this can take time, sometimes years. But for SARS/MERS this was established relatively quickly. The other problem is the bats widely thought responsible were hundreds of miles away from Wuhan.
Since Covid has entered certain wild animal populations it's possible we'll never know.
That leaves us with lab origin. Lack of evidence for anything else is not positive proof for lab origin of course. But lab origin hasn't been ruled out either.
There are lots of variations on lab origin theories. Deliberate release, accidental release, naturally-occuring pathogen, gain-of-function reserach, the authorities knew, the authorities didn't know, etc. Given the asymptomatic nature of Covid I personally think that if this is the origin, accidental release is the most likely cause.
So what evidence supports this? The CCP's failure to cooperate with WHO investigations is a big one. Right at the beginning, WHO fell in too quickly with China's narrative too. Plus China did punish the doctor who originally raised the alarm about a novel coronavirus (who later died from Covid).
I personally think it's way more likely that China doesn't want to know if it was lab origin rather than they're covering it up. Like there's literally no upside to finding out. Every level of the government doesn't want to know or be the one responsible for screwing something up. It's a bit like the Columbia space Shuttle disaster where it was suspected a foam tile damaged the shuttle but using satellites to image the shuttle met with internal NASA resistance. Part of that was there was nothing they could do but also people just don't want to know sometimes.
Another issue: the missing coronavirus database that China had that was taken offline in late 2019. Weird timing. Again, no proof of anything. Perhaps it's changed now but as of last year this hasn't been examined by anyone in the West (like the WHO).
> But for SARS/MERS this was established relatively quickly
It wasn't for SARS though. It took 14 years to identify the theoretical native reservoir in bats (ironically the result of the bat coronavirus study programmes the lab-leak hypothesis centres on) in a different province from the SARS outbreak. Civets were identified early on as the probable intermediate animal although the links with the Tanuki are arguably stronger, and we don't know how, why or where the interspecies crossover happened. So basically the same origin debate, without any of the political intrigue.
If there was a popular theory that the SARS epidemic had started as a result of a lab had collected bat coronaviruses, manipulated them and leaked them, there would arguably be less evidence against it
For me, the primary evidence of lab origin has always been statistical in nature. I have read that there are thousands of wet markets across Asia. So when Covid shows up at one near an institute studying similar viruses instead of one of the thousands of other wet markets, Occam’s razor says it came from there. When we can’t find source animals nearby zoonotic origin requires a much more complex chain of events.
My assumption from close to the beginning has been that most likely, some low-level employee at the institute considered it a job perk to take animals he was supposed to have euthanized and cremated and sell them to a vendor at a market he had connections to for a few yuan.
Does this prove lab origin? No. But barring compelling evidence otherwise it makes lab origin the most likely cause.
The danger here is the birthday paradox. If it emerged at some other wet market, we would be attaching significance to some other city landmark to drive our alternate hypothesis.
> But for SARS/MERS this was established relatively quickly.
And for HIV or took close to a decade, so let’s see where we are in 2030. The argument “we haven’t found it after 2 years so it must not exist” borders conspiracy theory.
Actually many people would like it to be false for personal profit or just human mentality. It's another ballpark of seriousness if that wasn't brought up by mother nature.
What kind of evidence do you need? This paper is full of evidence that if you combine the probability of each event happening, the probability that it was accidental is really small. So the burden of probability should be to prove that it wasn't leaked which isn't proven after 3 years.
it's not just personal profit, I mean if it's true how would you react to it? Putting aside how it would affect research, it also would make many people including such in power blame China for it. Which would be a political nightmare not just for China but also US, EU, etc.
So if any secret service has proof it was a leak you can be sue they wait until there is a major conflict with China. Like e.g. because China attacking Taiwan before the US/EU become more independent of TSMC. Through at that point of time there is also a lot of insensitive to just make up a "proof". So the public probably will never know for sure.
Although you can find a Bayesian answer for this which I am not qualified to calculate, it's irrelevant. The most pressing issue is not to dismiss it as zero probability as has been until know because it is viewed as a conspiracy. Even if the probability is very small we have to dig in deeper to prevent the next catastrophe.
Can we prevent a volcano erupting? No. Can we prevent a lab leak? Yes. I wonder why people are soooo resistant to this idea and make up a myriad bad arguments.
If you say there's no evidence for something, what does that mean? Are we talking about something without positive verification, or that there is evidence the opposite is true.
If you are witness to a cover-up, that's not a signal that "no evidence" is a good position to take.
There is evidence they lied about what they were doing. What does that say about the probability of the existence of positive evidence?
They aren't covering up something that would make them look innocent I'll tell you that.
WRT policy, it doesn't matter where the leak actually occured. We should treat both scenarios are likely and plan accordingly. If the next leak does come from a lab, it's obvious the Chinese will cover it up anyway.
> If you say there's no evidence for something, what does that mean?
Back in the 70's, when the Pentagon was concerned that the Soviets were up to something, they would sometimes say in response to a world event that "And we have no evidence that the Soviets are behind this"-- as tongue in cheek "proof" of how clever the Soviets were about hiding their tracks.
<edit> to expand-- this was a standing joke which was useful for reducing workplace stress, not often a serious claim </edit>
> The main issue I have with the 'lab leak' theory is that I haven't seen much evidence one way or another.
MY main issue is that we even have to consider it. We have plenty of horrific diseases studied in labs that could (and do) escape at times but are very much worth studying. Designing new ones should not be a thing.
> many people would like it to be true, because it feeds into a conspiracy narrative
And many people would like it to be false, because they don't want a) public uproar about what sort of activites go on in these labs, b) fear of losing money, c) embarrassment
> People can't believe things like global, deadly viral pandemics can occur naturally
Isn't that what most people believe? To me it seems people can't just believe all of this was not a coincidence at all, artificial hyped through oligopoly media, not even as deadly as advertised, and just another bamboozle to keep everyone in their hamster wheels.
Here's some evidence: if you fart in an elevator, it stinks, but if you fart outdoors, not so much.
Viruses, as opposed to farts, don't smell, but otherwise they are similar. If someone coughs outdoors, the aerosols containing the viral particles just spread around and soon their concentration becomes negligible. If someone coughs, or just breathes indoors, the aerosols spread, but if the space is not very large, their concentration will stay elevated, enough to infect other people.
With this preamble out of the way, what is the hypothetical scenario where the pandemic starts in the market? Covid does not spread from dead meat, it's an airborne disease. Was there some live bat (or pangolin) that was sneezing in some enclosed space, and some people acquired the virus there? A google search shows links with evidence to the contrary ([1], [2]).
Here's and NY Times article [3] that's arguing for the non-lab-leak origin, but you'll notice they are using misdirection (e.g. "dozens of species that can carry pathogens that infect humans" -> ok, this says nothing specific about Covid, but is written to prime the reader to think Covid was among those pathogens).
Overall, the simplest explanation is that one lab worker acquired the disease from aerosols in the lab produced by the lab mice infected with the virus. The worker then left the lab and stopped here and there (home too) and left aerosols that some other people inhaled. Whenever it was outdoors, the aerosols did not cause infections, but sometimes when it was indoors, they did. Is it possible that that person went to the market nearby to have lunch or dinner and coughed or sneezed while indoors, and some of the market workers, or co-diners got infected? It does not sound outrageous.
You can envision tons of plausible scenarios with an initial lab worker getting infected, but you need to get into contorted scenarios to cook up a theory where some bats from a few thousand kilometers away get transported to Wuhan and fail to infect anyone on their way, then the disease explodes like a bomb in Wohan, and then nobody is able to find evidence of those live bats being sold in that market.
“I was quite convinced of the lab leak myself until we dove into this very carefully and looked at it much closer,” Andersen said. “Actually, the data points to this particular market.”
I read your link, and except for words, I see not explanation why the market hypothesis is more likely. Just "I thought that, and now I think this".
The rest of the article says that the reports were deemed by the WHO to be "inconclusive". And what else do you expect? Conclusive evidence for the lab-leak hypothesis should be hyper-ultra-uber strong, because its consequences could potentially be requests for trillions of dollars of reparations. Evidence for the market hypothesis doesn't need to be as strong, this alternative would make quite a lot of people quite happy, but for some reason no clear evidence was found.
In the article they claim the possibility for contagion via frozen food was deemed "possible". This is total BS. Covid is an airborne disease. We've all lived for more than 2 years with it, and most HN readers probably read for thousands of hours about Covid. The claim that you can get Covid from food is preposterous. Of course, if you intentionally want to get it, you can get it, so one cannot rule it out, but deeming this "possible" is clearly just based on politics. It should be deemed "possible, but highly improbable".
So, no, I don't see a plausible scenario where the wildlife is the source of the disease. I can see a lab worker contracting the virus in the lab, and then going to lunch to the market, and then the disease spreading from there. But not from wildlife, because there were no documented cases of live bats or live pangolins being sold in that market.
I guess you are saying that because it was illegal, the Government couldn't find out if it happened. Something like Captain Renault in Casablanca being shocked that gambling was happening around there [1].
"The sale of wild animals without permits in China carries severe penalties involving steep fines and imprisonment. The tick study that documented the sale of illegal animals in the Huanan market observed, however, that the sellers were not too concerned about law enforcement, and that plainly illegal animals were openly sold. It is unclear whether any of the animal traders engaged in illegal wildlife commerce have been since found, fined or punished. The swift clear-out of the market may have been intended to protect them as well as the law-enforcement officers and local politicians who had looked the other way."
I assume "vendors were selling live mammals, including raccoon dogs, hog badgers, and red foxes, immediately before the COVID-19 pandemic" and that was illegal and — at various levels of city and regional government — well known to be happening.
I guess "The animals on these farms (nearly 1 million) were rapidly released, sold, or killed in early 2020…" because those involved in the illegal trade did not wish to be held responsible for a repeat of SARS-CoV-1.
It’s more akin to you being paranoid than anything else. It’s like myths, dragons and sea monsters came about. No, it was our flagship it’s unsinkable it must be the kraken!
The main issue I have with the 'lab leak' theory is that I haven't seen much evidence one way or another. Hitchens' razor applies- what can be stated without evidence can be as easily dismissed without evidence. I personally don't see any issue with the idea of this escaping from a lab (a friend who used to work at the CDC told me some rather scary stories about working there), but there's no serious evidence it was the case here.
On the other hand, many people would like it to be true, because it feeds into a conspiracy narrative. People can't believe things like global, deadly viral pandemics can occur naturally, even though they do.