I had personally decided by April 2020 that there was sufficient information for me to believe that Covid was a lab-enhanced pathogen that was accidentally released by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. My "source" was mainly common sense (the simplest solution is usually the right one, and guilty people doth protest too much), an understanding of probability (there is a lab studying the pathogen right next to the wet market which an authoritarian regime claims was the source), and an unbiased reading of history (like looking at 2001 articles on CNN about the last time SARS leaked from a lab).
For better or worse, I'm not a policymaker, so my opinion is meaningless and would have had no outcome on what "we" could have done differently (aside: I dislike this kind of rhetoric that shifts the blame to the amorphous "we" rather than the specific policymakers with names and titles who "we" should be blaming and holding responsible for their failures). But I've at least saved some sanity by listening to my gut instincts instead of subjecting myself to the whiplash that would have come with a world view determined by appeals to authority.
It seems this is more and more necessary these days - if you rely on authority as a heuristic for truth, your reality can shift under you at the whims of politicians who manipulate it for their own selfish reasons. It's best to stay above the fray. Sure, gut instinct can be wrong, but when I'm not a policymaker and only need to be concerned with my own health and well-being, the consequences of incorrect critical thinking are usually less bad than the consequences of trusting the wrong authority. I will continue to prioritize my "gut feeling" - informed by critical reading of publicly available data, and careful triangulation of the motives and biases of stakeholders in the current political reality - over any blessed truth that "we" have anointed as "consensus."
75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. Isn't the simplest solution that COVID also came from animals? Just because it was a bad one doesn't make it less likely. Where did smallpox come from? Polio? Spanish flu?
Is it strange that the lab was near the wet market where it supposedly started? There are about 40,000 wet markets in China as of 2019. It might be more strange if it was nowhere near a wet market. It's a little bit like a psychic helping the police saying "the body will be found near water." Fantastic, most humans live near water.
>Isn't the simplest solution that COVID also came from animals?
No, you don't get to leave information out of consideration and call your conclusions the simplest theory. Most viruses are from animal spillovers. Also SARS has been leaked from labs on more than one occasion.
>It might be more strange if it was nowhere near a wet market.
It's not strange that it was near a wet market. It is strange that it was near a lab studying coronaviruses that was at least thinking of doing GoF research of the kind needed to create COVID-19 if indeed it was created.
The spillover theory leaves too many unexplained coincidences for it to be the simplest theory.
And yet it happened to spillover in a wet market in a city with the premier coronavirus research labs in the country. It also happened to happen far away from where these types of viruses originate. There are only a handful of labs in the county that do this type of research and WIV is the top one.
So why did not not appear in a wet market in Yunnan or Guangdong?
We've had two spillovers now of sarbecoviruses and the first one hit a completely unrelated city. The other one happened in Wuhan, which is the biggest city in central China and its "catchement area" is probably fairly wide around it.
It does appear that they spillover in wet markets in big cities.
The level of coincidence here may look like rolling a 1d20 two times and the second time getting a natural 1.
> The level of coincidence here may look like rolling a 1d20 two times and the second time getting a natural 1.
Or a more related and much bigger coincidence: a man was killed by a nerve agent in what appeared to be a targeted attack on the home of a Russian defector approximately 10 miles from the UK's main lab studying nerve agents. Which is a similar distance between the Wuhan lab and wet market, though the UK version is a rural backwater rather than a major regional capital. Sometimes relative geographical proximity coincidences are just that. (if you think there's something to the geographic proximity of Porton Down to the Salisbury poisonings, you have to try to explain away an even more remarkable coincidence that two Russians protected by the Russian government took a very short holiday to 'see the cathedral' and somehow stumbled into the same boring suburb the nerve agent was left in on the same day. And the decision of presumed target Sergei Skripal to live there... )
Wuhan would look like less of a coincidence if it had been accompanied by a characteristic Chinese coverup "the researchers have retired and wish to spend their time not talking to the media" rather than something very uncharacteristic of a Chinese government coverup (scientific papers releasing data on origins which unconnected non-Chinese virologists and epidemiologists generally find credible) or if China had been way out ahead rather than miles behind in their vaccine efforts.
Lab leaks are enough of a known phenomenon not to be ruled out as wildly improbable, but the coincidence of the virus that leaks out of the Wuhan lab happening to be one they hadn't documented and happening to plausibly spread from an epicentre which contained the other most likely vector for the transmission of zoonotic viruses in Wuhan sounds... pretty much as big as the coincidence of a zoonotic virus being in the same major city as a lab for studying zoonotic transmissions of similar viruses prevalent in that large region.
> Or a more related and much bigger coincidence: a man was killed by a nerve agent in what appeared to be a targeted attack on the home of a Russian defector approximately 10 miles from the UK's main lab studying nerve agents.
That's a good one, I'm going to have to try to remember that.
But it's not, the head of the WIV even stated how unexpected it was for a SARS outbreak to happen in Wuhan and area not endemic to SARS like coronaviruses. If they wanted to be near the source they should have built it in Yunnan or even Guangdong where the last one broke out.
The lab is there for the same reason there are labs in Boston or NYC. Proximity to major research institutions
I mean the original appearance, thousands of years ago, when it definitely was not a lab leak. The point is that our worst viruses have come from nature, likely zoonotic sources.
Simplest given the known facts I think. I mean all viral pandemics in the past have come from nature. However in this case where everyone agrees it came from a bat coronavirus, the nearest similar viruses were in nature 600km+ away or at the WIV 10km away. If natural you'd have to explain how it covered that distance without infecting people en route. Also why no infected animals were found. Also the WIV lab was advertising for coronavirus researcher on its job page at the time of breakout so obviously that stuff was going on.
I'm "agnostic" whether it's lab leak or natural/from the market, but I'd like to ask how you can be certain that your gut feeling is right? I think to be certain is to be ignorant/dismiss other possibilites, and confirmation bias doesn't help in that regard, you start dismissing evidence that don't conform to your "gut feeling". I also shook my head at all the scientists that loudly proclaimed that "I'm certain it can't be from a lab, it's natural!" (A scientist should be aware, that like in a math exam, if they can be certain of something, they need to show proof/show the work!), but I'm not going to prescribe motives like a Bill Gates + Rotschild + pharma industry conspiracies behind these scientists proclaiming this. Although I am curious what did motivate them to make these very non-scientific proclamations.
If you ask me why the Chinese authorities were secretive, I can come up with many theories, it could've been a lab leak, yes, but it could also be them wanting to save face rather than face the embarassment of admitting the virus started there (is there anything to be embarassed about, or is the CCP, like many political bodies, full of men with grade-school level emotions?), heck their internal propaganda blames the US, saying they brought in the virus through the Wuhan 2019 Military World Games. Or the Chinese refusals could be them not wanting foreign organizations looking around their labs. Heck, if a virus started in Atlanta and the WHO said some their investigators from many countries, including China and Russia, would like to inspect the CDC lab there, Americans would probably scream the same amount...
Well, I suppose I'm "agnostic," too. That's my point. I have no need to be certain one way or the other, so it's better to have "good enough" confidence, which I prefer to get from a (well-informed!) "gut feeling," rather than delegating my confidence metrics to some authority who can deliver me the latest proclamations of truth from on high.
Did it actually impact me in any way to decide whether I thought a natural or lab origin was more likely? No, probably not. But I'm an avid internet commenter and so naturally I spent time reading and posting about this stuff.
But there is one tangible benefit to the time I invest in researching controversies like this when the news story first breaks: I can save time in the future when the narrative changes, by skimming stories to see if they contain new information or merely reframe existing data. At least, that's how I justify the amount of time I spent reading about this stuff in 2020...
Fun fact, I created this pseudononymous HN account to post wrongthink about Covid origins - one of my first posts [0] about it was flagged (and unflagged about a year later when I complained about it in a similar comment to this one).
I lived alone, stayed isolated, kept healthy and exercised, took reasonable precautions while outside, and... because this is what you're really asking... chose not to get any vaccination, because data by July 2021 showed its effectiveness waned after three months and I had no plans within the next six months to interact with any crowds or expose myself to another individual for more than fifteen minutes. Then in December 2021, Omicron became the dominant strain, with much lower risk than previous strains, so I decided there was no sense introducing unknown variables associated with a vaccine for diminishing protection against a strain of a virus that presented risks I felt personally comfortable with accepting. (At some point I was also of the opinion that Omicron itself was an engineered strain, but I had stopped paying sufficient attention by that point to have much confidence in that opinion.)
I never felt any need to tell others what decisions they should make, and I understood my circumstances gave me relatively rare affordances of being able to remain isolated for long periods of time. Had those circumstances changed, maybe my decision regarding vaccination would have changed too. But by the time of Omicron, any risk analysis I made seemed to lead to the same conclusion that vaccination was not worthwhile, and if anything, that I should hope to contract the Omicron strain since it might confer the most effective immunity, with the lowest risk of complications, against future strains of the virus.
As of today, as far as I'm aware, I've never contracted any strain of COVID-19. Knock on wood.
Interestingly, you did much the same thing I did despite my belief that the virus arose naturally (seemed reasonable since viruses have risen naturally for give or take a billion years). I practiced the extreme social distancing for about a year since the vaccines were not available and wore KN95 masks the rare and brief times I was indoors with anyone else. I did start getting the vaccines at some point in 2021 though I was hardly in a rush and then pretty much dropped most precautions in March 2022 figuring that 2 years was about as much as I wanted to do. And then I finally got a confirmed covid case in April of this year which left me pretty weak but functional for about 36 hours and then it passed. I do think that getting a vaccine now and again probably kept the illness mild, but I suppose who can say - I certainly recommend them to people based on my experience. While I have a friend who was practically laid out by the innoculation, all I got was a little soreness.
> Interestingly, you did much the same thing I did despite my belief that the virus arose naturally
Except they decided not to get the injection (so called 'vaccination'), while you did. That's a crucial difference in the eyes of most (on both sides) so I wouldn't agree that they did 'much the same thing' as you.
I don't either and this is coming from a 4x vaxxed who (I'll shamefully admit) was part of the crowd who shamed everyone who didn't get the vaccine.
I still think if you live in a big city or any dense living arrangements, medical field, interacting with the immunocompromised, etc. you 100% should be getting it. But I now recognize if you wanted to roleplay lumberjack living alone in the woods or had a rural lifestyle it really isn't as important.
In 2020 Luc Montagnier identified Covid-19 as a lab creation and predicted that, because the original strain was unnatural, later strains would be less problematic as the virus reverted to its true (less problematic) nature. In contrast, the public health conversation was about a permanent threat and how much worse can it get and generally government running around hair-on-fire.
Maybe the initial quarantine recommendation would have been the same--or even stronger-- but the pandemic impacted all aspects of life everywhere, and elements of that would have been different. EcoHealth would be a bad dream, no one would be running interference for Fauci. Vaccinations would have been a different conversation, because this would have been recognized as a temporary threat.
How does the virus have a "true nature", and why would it revert to it?
My understanding is that that viruses are well known to become more infectious and less symptomatic as they mutate over time. The reason for this is that causing the host to quickly hole up reduces the chance of replication.
Unfortunately Luc's hypothesis was not explored because, as you will see from googling his name, he became the topic of debunking and adhomenim. And maybe some of his views on other topics were wrong, but his comments on this subject have aged well.
After an hour of googling I finally found a reference to his original hypothesis.
"According to him, the altered elements of this virus are eliminated as it spreads: “Nature does not accept any molecular tinkering, it will eliminate these unnatural changes and even if nothing is done, things will get better, but unfortunately after many deaths.”"
But this is just magical thinking, some variation of the naturalistic fallacy. Nature absolutely will accept molecular tinkering if it provides an evolutionary advantage.
Another commenter pointed out that, for a while, the virus became more dangerous over time, not less. And the extent to which COVID has become less dangerous over time (which probably has as much to do with widespread immunity either via vaccination or prior infection, along with the fact that most people particularly vulnerable to COVID have already died), there's no indication that it had anything to do with undo'ing any kind of "unnatural change" - in particular, the furin cleavage site that's one of the more likely candidates for being "unnatural" is still there.
So no, I wouldn't say his comments on the subject have aged particularly well.
Everything is relative, and Luc's view has aged better than authoritative admonitions that the virus might never moderate in severity.[1] I mean, Luc was a Nobel prize winner in this field. His ideas were creative, sure, but magical? It's not hard to see the logic-- these kinds of molecules subside in evolution because they didn't arise from evolution in the first place. I mean, his opinion was a first take when the world was Cloroxing bananas, There's more info now, but this still is an example of how the conversation may have gone differently had governments taken the view that lab-origin was viable.
If the virus was reverting to its "true nature" or "undoing" molecular tinkering, then I would expect to see a clear pattern of progress/equilibration towards a specific strain. That doesn't appear to be the case; the virus is continually branching out into a host of sub lineages, some of which are more transmissible, some more virulent, some less affected by vaccines.
It's a rule of thumb that variants which are more transmissible and less virulent are more likely to succeed over time, and I remember discussing this with people early in the pandemic. By no means does this provide credence for a lab leak hypothesis.
I think "magical" is quite an accurate description of the idea that even viruses have a "true nature" that they will revert to. That's some Plato-level adherence to the rigidity of nature.
> because the original strain was unnatural, later strains would be less problematic as the virus reverted to its true (less problematic) nature
Is it possible for someone to speed up this process in a lab somewhere, like South Africa, and release the less problematic version to the public to achieve the herd immunity quicker?
I doubt it. However, luckily for us someone has already invented called a vaccine that is far safer and plays a similar role in achieving herd immunity ; )
There are curious aspects of Omicron's emergence – more closely related to older less-circulating strains, many adaptations bursting onto scene all at once – that make people think that even if the original Wuhan strains weren't lab-creations, Omicron was – as a natural & contagious 'vaccine' against worse variants.
If it was developed in lab, presumably there would be a substantial amount of information available on it. Lab notes, testing results, transmission rates, all sorts of things we had to discover in the wild.
We could have used that data to make progress on a vaccine (and adjust our overall response) much, much faster.
How and why would they have that kind of data available if the virus only existed in the lab? At most they could have had computer simulations, but no real data.
The only information they would have had is the DNA sequence, but that was rapidly sequenced anyway, and design of the original vaccines followed in short order. What took time was testing and manufacturing the vaccines, but none of this would have been accelerated even if the lab theory were true and if they had any data on the details of the virus.
This whole discussion is ultimately useless, and the people pushing for it were never interested in finding solution, but only in finding someone to blame, which has no impact on the outcome.
> How and why would they have that kind of data available if the virus only existed in the lab? At most they could have had computer simulations, but no real data.
I'm not a virologist, but this doesn't make sense to me. If we work under the assumption that this was a lab-made virus that leaked, then they plainly must have actually created it. What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate real data?
Even in the unlikely scenario where they made it, stuck it on a shelf, and did nothing: they could share information about how it was created, which would give insight into it's potential current and future behavior.
> The only information they would have had is the DNA sequence, but that was rapidly sequenced anyway, and design of the original vaccines followed in short order.
This isn't true. They would have information on how it was created, any work that they had done to devise a vaccine for it, and any other data they had accumulated on it.
> This whole discussion is ultimately useless, and the people pushing for it were never interested in finding solution, but only in finding someone to blame, which has no impact on the outcome.
It's not useless at all. If it turns out to be true, there are plenty of meaningful ramifications:
1. In the pursuit of stopping fake news and propaganda, real information from whistleblowers and researchers was suppressed and careers were ended. It would be a useful lesson in free speech and the open exchange of ideas.
2. It shows there are clearly deficiencies in these labs. Inspections could be more frequent, standards could be raised, all sorts of changes could be made to prevent it from happening again.
3. And, yes, if there is someone or some entity worthy of blame, they should be blamed. Why should their fault be hand-waved?
>I'm not a virologist, but this doesn't make sense to me. If we work under the assumption that this was a lab-made virus that leaked, then they plainly must have actually created it. What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate real data?
I am a virologist. It also doesn't make sense to me.
There's so much data that would have been helpful. If only the DNA sequence mattered, we wouldn't have the field of virology.
Data such as rate of evolution would have been hugely important in stategizing the vaccine and could have saved thousands of lives. Data on transmission, even in animal models could also have saved lives. Structural information may have been available. Antibodies and antibody binding information may have already been available which would help in identifying conserved structural motifs for vaccine development.
We don't know how long they had it, what data they had available (if it's a chimera, data from multiple viruses might have been relevant), but saying nothing would have changed is insane. That's like saying there was no point to the SARS research over the last 3 years, because we already had the sequence after a couple days.
They worked with it because they had a question they were trying to answer. That question probably had relevance to human health, and they probably had data from trying to answer that question.
> If we work under the assumption that this was a lab-made virus that leaked, then they plainly must have actually created it. What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate real data?
Assuming experiments had been completed by then they'd have, what, some figures for how infectious it was in humanized mice. Maybe months down the line they'd've written a paper showing that this splice made it 40% +/-25% more infectious than the strain it was derived from or whatever. So yes, there would be data, but it's hard to imagine it would be a meaningful data compared to what was already being measured with a) humans rather than mice, and more importantly b) orders of magnitude larger sample sizes.
> This isn't true. They would have information on how it was created,
The how would be that they ran up that DNA sequence and inserted it into a blank virus. There's nothing that knowing "how it was created" tells you that you don't already know from the DNA sequence.
> any work that they had done to devise a vaccine for it
> Re: most of this: an actual virologist has responded and explained the data that would have typically been collected and how it would have helped.
I think they're looking at the best case scenario. Yes, if people were studying the virus then they were hoping to learn something about its effects on humans. But whatever experiments they were performing were presumably in-progress rather than complete, and the odds that they were working on antibodies or the like are pretty narrow.
> Says who? If they lied about accidentally releasing it, why wouldn’t they lie about what they were doing with it in the first place?
What they were working on was public record dating back to years before there was any reason to hide anything. And it makes very little sense to work on a vaccine for a virus that doesn't exist in the wild.
> What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate real data?
I think you're conflating the data existing vs the data being public. My wife has a PhD in psychology. She did research at a state school using US gov't grants. The only "data" available is the papers they wrote and presented. I don't expect a virology lab to be any less protective - in fact I expect them to be more.
Closing the borders wouldn't have been seen as racist, it would have identified as a valid tool to stop the spread, and we would have had an extra 2 months early on in the pandemic preventing the spread in a major way.
The first thing we would have done would have been to put an immediate halt to all "gain of function" research - including all of the "gain of function" research that is currently ongoing (that Fauci and his ilk insist isn't really "gain of function" research). This would include severe penalties for those who funneled money to third party researchers. Instead, the global health authorities peddled the absurd "wet market" hypothesis and continue(d) to pour money into "gain of function" research that makes another lab leak inevitable (at some point).
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Being unwilling to enforce something is not the same as being incapable of enforcing something, and stopping complex state-level research(especially nuclear) is something the US has been doing in many countries for decades. It's why so few countries have advanced bio/nuclear weapons. Your comparison makes no sense.
This comment is laden with rhetoric, but, to address your point regardless: 'military arms' are widely available. The equipment and knowledge to perform advanced virology work is not. It's much simpler to restrict.
I'm referring to the gain of function research currently being funded by the US government. We funded the gain of function research in Wuhan through the Eco Health Alliance. I don't mean to suggest we have any power to stop other countries from engaging in this dangerous research, but certainly we can stop being a party to it (and likely would have stopped if people knew there was a strong possibility that Covid resulted from a lab leak instead of a "wet market").
We could stop this research in it's tracks if the US government forced journals to not only refuse to publish dangerous research but also report the researchers to the authorities. Once you remove this incentive the whole demand and motivation for such reckless research collapses.
The article claims multiple researchers got sick. I mean, we can posit that this wouldn't ring any alarm bells... but if they have any competence at all, it should've rung some alarm bells and resulted in more testing. And if we'd developed tests for this in November, it wouldn't have been spreading undetected for months.
Yep, can confirm this took me by surprise when working with chinese colleagues in our company. Eg. I would read someone's out-of-message saying "OoO, going to hospital today" and be freaking out. But then they would be just out for couple days sick leave for fever or something. Only after like 3rd time that happening it clicked to me that 'hospital' for them means something completely different than I would have thought.
Whether that is just a misunderstanding of language or actual difference in healthcare system I never thought about.
So typically they have a "fever ward" and you will go there and receive an IV of Tylenol or something similar. I would be surprised if they didn't call that "hospitalisation". You are admitted, given a bed, a chart... not sure what else you'd call it.
Not censored millions upon millions of posts discussing the idea, for one thing. The conversation and narrative was warped, and a lot of people are now rather extremely divorced from the reality around this issue.
Gain of function research would have been examined much more closely, and with the origins known we may have had much less fumbling around protocols for containment, such as knowing much sooner that it was airborne.
I believe many people likely died as a consequence of this mass deception, and its ripple effects. And many more might die yet, if we don't reign in irresponsible bio research.
Please explain the connection you see to extra deaths. Because as I see it, nothing about how governments responded to this was conditional on COVID having occurred naturally; social distancing and mask use would still have been the correct response even if we knew with certainty that it leaked from a lab, and I see no reason why the early blunders like recommending against masking or over-emphasizing hand sanitizer would've been any different.
Why, for example, would we have known much sooner that it was airborne?
You are correct. I guess people can't handle that. This is from the article, it tracks with your sentiment:
Said Metzl, “Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different. The time has come for a full accounting.”
Are we actually claiming that "Virus leak from scary china" would've gotten people to wear masks more or isolate more, versus "Virus killing people keeps spreading?" Or am I missing the point?
I think it would have. A huge portion of early deniers (generally people of a conservative disposition) were in the "it's just a flu" camp. I think "scary virus from China" would have made those people stop and think "there's no telling WHAT this thing could do!"
I think you're understanding the point. Consider what you would call an average Trump supporter. Consider what they would think if Trump declared "This China flu isn't a normal flu. The Chinese designed it in a lab and now it's out in the world. I urge every American to wear masks and get vaccinated to stop this Chinese flu."
How do you think the average Trump supporter would respond to that? Now consider what would have happened if he went all out and said the Chinese released it on purpose? It's scary to think that if he pushed the bioweapon angle it's likely that Republicans would have been lining up for vaccines and the other side taking the advice of Jenny McCarthy and refusing it.
There is so much wrong with how the pandemic was handled and the #1 things were making it a political issue, using xenophobia as a reason to not implement effective policies, and not treating it like the medical emergency that it was.
That doesn't track with their sentiment at all? "Our national and global conversation would have been dramatically different" is not the same as "many fewer people would have died".
Any response to your question is hypothetical at this point (disclaimer) so here's my hypothetical explanation of how conversation would have led to less deaths:
A lot of people believed the lab leak "consipracy theory", but Fauci and company were so adamant to contradict the "conspiracy theorists" that it practically destroyed those people's willingness to heed any of the CDC directives.
Of course I can only say anecdotally violating CDC guidelines results in more deaths, but that's the gist of my hypothetical.
Certainly, a weird coincidence that many of the people worried about it being a lab leak early on, also had downplayed it and practice little caution to avoid getting it.
If we knew it was from a lab much of the confusion over H2H transmission, Airborne transmission, asymptomatic infections would have been known much earlier. We would have take the correct measure earlier and saved lives.
Almost certainty, the population already had a sense about the spread of natural viruses and their dangers—whether valid or not. Launched from a lab is a different ballgame altogether and not having experienced the problem before people would have been much more wary.
I'm curious - if we knew in March 2020 that covid came from a lab, what _would_ we have done differently?