This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1]
This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world. We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.
My understanding of the author's central thesis is this: the US, despite its world-class virology and disease study labs, regularly has lapses in procedure that regularly lead to situations in which the public might be exposed. Given that this is happening in our own backyard, we might reasonably expect countries of similar status (like China) to experience similar lapses.
That reads as reasonable to me, but raises a subsequent question: if these lapses are so common and so many countries possess the capacity for serious mistakes, why don't we see more regular outbreaks (if not full-blown pandemics) caused by labs? In other words, what makes COVID special? I didn't find a satisfactory answer to the latter question in the article.
It's my (uninformed, uneducated) opinion that the severity of the author's claims don't correspond to the reality of the last few national and international disease crises (AIDS, Ebola, Zika, COVID). Which isn't to say that we should absolutely dismiss the possibility that COVID originated in a lab, only that claims that it did amount to currently unsubstantiated claims about COVID's special status among other recent pandemics.
Peter Daszak, member of the WHO Covid origins team, was also the project lead for the US funded gain of function research of novel coronaviruses that was going on at the Wuhan BSL4 lab.
There is historical precedent of authorities blaming local meat markets to cover up a lab leak.
Peter Daszak was also signatory to this weird paper "in support of Chinese scientists".
> We sign this statement in solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China who continue to save lives and protect global health during the challenge of the COVID-19 outbreak. We are all in this together, with our Chinese counterparts in the forefront, against this new viral threat. The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.
Scary piece of propaganda, considering it was China who started rumours and misinformation, and tying the lab leak hypothesis to not supporting health professionals. All-in-all, a grave conflict of interest for a supposed objective investigation into the origins.
I'm not a virologist but every TWiV episode I listened to, there was convincing talk about natural reservoirs being the most likely source of the virus.
AFAIR they also expect similar events to happen increasingly all over the world due to side effects of the climate crisis and global heating.
That we’re finally seeing some mainstream discussion around this hypothesis should not change the scary fact that months ago governments, scientists and media happily and immediately rejected it as a xenophobic conspiracy theory. The messaging and subsequent ease at which public opinion was influenced should make everyone pause and think hard about other ways they might be being manipulated.
It's amazing how much ridicule I took for seriously suggesting this theory last year. My friends twisted and exaggerated the extent of my claims (implying I thought it was an intentional action on China's part, or an engineered virus, and not a result of mundane research + accidental containment failure), and called me a crazy conspiracy theorist.
I had been reading every journal article I could get my hands on about the virus since February, but of course how could my interpretation be trustworthy? I'm no expert, or anything. If something I read in a journal article contradicted something on the news, the latter always seemed to "win".
After all that, now that the lab thing is on the mainstream news, I'm afraid to even bring it up with my friends. They can figure it out for themselves.
The same reflexive denial happened on HN. Yet the lab leak theory has always been consistent with the situation. It's also always been the best fit to the behaviour we've seen from the various actors.
Yes, it's interesting, but ultimately pointless. This kind of manipulation is very easy if you get everyone onboard. Once something is politically unpopular enough, everyone will swear on an <insert holy book of choice here> that they disbelieve it (even if they secretly believe it). So really, your friends perhaps believed the lab theory, but if someone spouts politically unpopular opinions like that, they will seek to bring you into alignment or else distance themselves from you, all without revealing that they believe it also.
I just chipped into the debate on Wikipedia where it is still regarded as a xenophobic conspiracy theory which I think is a shame as open discussion there would be useful.
At the time most of what I was hearing wasn't an accidental leak but that they intentionally released it which feels like it crosses over into the xenophobic conspiracy territory. Things also get shaded by who is actually suggesting the idea and we'd had 4 years of China scapegoating in the US.
That's the problem with people. They hate Trump so much that when he says up, they say down. I also hate Trump, but will call a spade a spade whenever it needs to be done. The CCP's behavior with this was very suspect. And look who benefitted and who lost from it.
That's not true, there were plenty of mainstream media reports of these suspicions and the vast majority of them were correctly pointing out the same as they are pointing out today, namely that there is no concrete evidence for the theory and it therefore remains speculation. We would presumably know more if journalists from all over the world could report freely from China, but realistically speaking their work possibilities are limited there.
It's a bit annoying that so many adults continue to mix up speculation with real evidence, and make up their minds based on gut feelings. That is not to say governments shouldn't put pressure on China to be more transparent, of course they should. But judging from the actual information available, the virus most likely jumped from an animal to humans due to the bad conditions of wet markets in China.
While China is to blame for such markets, people need to bear in mind that the same can happen in many other places where animals are farmed closely together with humans. Even if it was true, the Wuhan lab theory would unfortunately distract from this real problem.
I found this to be an extremely engaging read and compelling story.
TLDR; The likelihood of it being lab related is high. The likelihood of it being directly malicious low.
My Take form reading it: The lab in question needed to collect bats for research. A person who collected the bats did so with insufficient safety and is likely patient 0.
> TLDR; The likelihood of it being lab related is high. The likelihood of it being directly malicious low.
And this sounds like a reasonable possibility to be explored. Accidents happen. Lapses in procedures happen.
The problem is that early on, and still in some circles, lab related equates to malicious bio-weapon and/or China purposely attempting to destroy the world. It's important to separate the two, and hopefully this is a cautionary tale for all labs to review their policies and procedures.
I agree that the leak was likely accidental. That said, I think you gloss over the fact that Gain of Function Research (artificial selection) was certainly taking place inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that US intelligence has concluded that the WIV was engaging in classified research for the Chinese military, unbeknownst to the rest of the world.
So, its not quite as simple as a collection mistake.
Based on your takeaway, I'm looking for this to convince me that it's more likely that it's a researcher caught it first than anyone else handling bats.
This article is written by a journalist who is clearly knowledgeable about safety practices and mistakes in US labs, but does not consider the extensive knowledge we have about the sequence of SARS-COV2. The preponderance of evidence supports a natural origin of the virus.
This is no way exonerates the Wuhan government from possible culpability—indeed government officials did deliberately suppress information—but this investigative opinion doesn’t pass scientific muster. Misinformation.
In roughest form, Andersen is saying "SARS-CoV-2 doesn't closely resemble any existing known virus, so it wasn't produced by genetic manipulation of existing known viruses".
I think that's true, but it ignores the possibility that the WIV was working with new viruses with unpublished genomes. The WIV routinely organized expeditions to remote bat caves to collect samples. There's naturally some delay between sampling, sequencing, and publishing, no conspiracy required. For example, RaTG13, the closest known animal virus to SARS-CoV-2, was collected by the WIV in 2013 but published only after the start of the pandemic.
The WIV had a private database of viral genomes; but they took it offline in September 2019, they say due to hacking attempts. They haven't brought it back up, and the WHO has declined to ask for a copy.
SARS-CoV-2 certainly could be a naturally-evolved virus first transmitted from an animal to a non-scientist human. It could also be a naturally-evolved virus collected and accidentally released by the WIV, or a recombinant of multiple such viruses, or the descendant of such a virus after serial passaging. Nothing in Andersen's argument distinguishes any of these possibilities.
But don't trust me; check out Marc Lipsitch's Twitter feed today, or David Relman's article:
> Some have argued that a deliberate engineering scenario is unlikely because one would not have had the insight a priori to design the current pandemic virus (3). This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory.
This isn't a conspiracy theory, and it's not even a fringe viewpoint anymore. It's just a reasonable step in investigating the yet-unknown origin of what could be the worst industrial accident in human history.
> Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
You're the one spreading FUD, intentionally misinterpreting the original article and making up a fake argument that "lab leak" hypothesis somehow contradicts "natural origin" and implies that the virus was "designed". (If I understand the article correctly, "purposefully manipulated" means "genetically manipulated", not "gain of function".) Flagged.
The virus can be of a natural origin and still be leaked from a lab. Virology labs study copies of viruses regularly through various techniques (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gain_of_function_research). People keep conflating the possibility of an engineered virus with the possibility of a lab leak. They don't have to go together.
> [Dominic Dwyer, a medical virologist at New South Wales Health Pathology in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the WHO team] says that the team didn’t see anything during its visits to suggest a lab accident. “Now, whether we were shown everything? You can never know. The group wasn’t designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practice.”
Even if they were appropriately equipped for such an investigation, what's the use when China had blocked their visits until a year later, when they've had ample time to cover any evidence. The whole situation is highly suspicious, from the initial suppression of news reports of the virus, to delaying international lab visits, to the deletion of studies from that Wuhan lab (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13701168/covid-cover-up-china-...).
I recall China passed an urgent law at lightening speed to enforce safe practice in the bio-virus-labs across the nation a few weeks after the outbreak. It might tell you something.
Also it refused fiercely to let foreign experts in to investigate, which is also hard to explain other than something MUST be hidden at all costs.
>However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.
The fact that covid's features are found in nature seems a weak argument to disprove lab involvement.
On the other hand covid seems well adapted to humans which could have come about by serial passage in a lab. Perhaps they were doing something like in vivo characterisation of spillover risk as mentioned in Daszak's grant application for the WIV?
Or something like:
>We performed in vivo experiments in transgenic (human ACE2 expressing) mice and
civets in 2018 and 2019 in the Institute’s biosafety laboratory. The viruses we used were bat
SARSr-CoV close to SARS-CoV. (Shi Zhengli)
This has honestly been my unbiased opinion since essentially day 1. I believe that the release was almost certainly a complete accident, but there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus. The denialists, including the WHO and CDC and everyone else, need to get real and own up to what happened and figure out how to stop it from happening again. This has nothing to do with the PRC or anyone or anywhere else, it could have happened at any biological facility in the world and will eventually happen again somewhere unless scientific honesty and cooler heads prevail.
> there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus.
I think that it is at least somewhat likely that it was the result of the lab's activities, but your assertion here has a huge dose of selection bias.
If the virology labs studying coronaviruses were placed randomly around the world, you'd be correct - but they're not. They're placed near locations where novel coronaviruses have crossed the species barrier in the past, and where they are likely to do so in the future.
It would be equivalent to say that lighthouses cause ships to run aground, because many teams when ships run aground it's near a lighthouse.
Sometimes diplomacy means you smile when you don't want to smile. WHO has to play politics until we get this virus under control (ie, vaccines distributed worldwide). If WHO blames China now, in the thick of things, it would damage the world's ability to further study the origins of the virus and the results of Chinese research. Chinese vaccines are being used and studied in many countries worldwide and that is a good thing. Apart from the obvious benefits of those vaccines, better access to data gives us an inactivated vaccine counterfactual with which to evaluate the mRNA and protein subunit vaccines.
CDC and other US government officials, on the other hand, must ratchet up their criticism of China as well as WHO. I agree with you there. It's alarming that there are so few PR ramifications for China. From the looks of it, either their unsanitary bushmeat consumption got the world sick, or their irresponsible laboratory containment procedures did. Both are a reflection of China's culture, and were only exacerbated by authoritarian crackdown upon the early warnings issued by Chinese medical professionals. The US government shouldn't defend bad practices and systemic problems in the name of multilateral cooperation. That variety of ethical blindness forgives bad faith from our counterparts and damages our hegemony.
I mean, yeah, five out of 6 cited experts have ties to EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has funding ties to one of the two virology labs in Wuhan, but that's, like, just a coincidence. If it wasn't, I'm sure NPR would mention it.
And then Peter Daszak himself went to Wuhan with WHO team to investigate and didn't find anything conclusive. Peter fucking Daszak. You're not going to tell me that someone who was interviewed and cited on this subject by NPR, CNN, CBS, Slate, Democracy Now, Washing Post and The Guardian could be full of shit, right?
I subscribe to this theory. I didn't subscribe to it originally because it seemed to dystopian. However on reading the recent politico article (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...) really changed my opinion about it. To be clear I think it would have been an accident at a Chinese government lab that was underfunded and overworked. Seems to me like the likeliest candidate. I don't think the current US administration wants to point the finger at the Chinese government since it will cause a lot public anger. That and the Chinese government most certainly covered all their tracks by now.
This is as well my strongly held belief, and the most likely cause.
And people making the really odd responses below. They're, not saying it, but insinuating that the lab would be where there is lots of bat coronavirus? The lab is in the city of Wuhan. A city with a population of 11 million people. This isn't some rural town.
There was a lab that studied this type of coronavirus, had published papers on it. And in a country the size of the USA had an outbreak within just a few miles from that lab. Then the govt came and refused to let anyone outside investigate.
To me that leads pretty strongly that it was an accidental lab leak. And they weren't able to control the spread.
My hopeful opinion is that this leads to more stringent worldwide rules for reporting leaks, and checking of safety practices to avoid this happening again
I don't really have a stake in this, and no real idea how plausible the lab accident theory is.
That said, don't you think that the location of a lab like that would be highly correlated with the location of dangerous natural viral reservoir? Or put another way, if you wanted to study zoonotic viruses, wouldn't you put your lab in a place like that?
I've done security audits and related consulting work upon research labs in my past and the biggest issue they had was - extremist animal activists.
Now I was aware of some reports (nothing official or confirmed) that the Wuham lab was broken into in the summer of 2019.
Interestingly enough their was a lot of political tension at that time involving Hong Kong.
I'm also mindful how China has been rather good at sweeping things under carpets.
So I could speculate how things played out in a way that fits events, but without any smoking gun - it would be just speculation and joining dots that may or may not of been there.
Though even if it was something along the lines of what I'm thinking happened (animal activists with HK connections being politically motivated/manipulated and possibly no idea what type of lab it was beyond they may be hurting animals), the lab was researching virus's from the wild - seeing how they mutate and progress in an effort to see what lays ahead.
So lab event or no lab event - this virus was already in existence in some form and was not a case of if, but when.
One thing I do know, it sure did shine a spotlight upon how connected the World is and also how fragile many supply lines are.
> there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus
Why not? Wuhan is the 43rd largest city in the world. Meanwhile, the earliest cases of CoVid were all connected to the same wet market. Doesn't that have a higher probability being the origin?
I'm not sure that this virus even behaves in this way where a BSL-4 worker could become infected. What we know now is that you need a concentration of virus particles over time in order to come down with the disease (in other words, you are most likely to catch it drinking in your friends living room for 4 hours with an infected person, than in a grocery store where an infected person might cough on you in line but there is no long term exposure). I can't imagine where there is a situation in a lab environment where you would have the equivalent of an infected person drinking beer with you for hours in terms of exposure. Even a rip in your PPE wouldn't expose you to very much particulate compared with an infected person spitting in your face conversationally for hours.
The other thing to note is this virus hops to new species super fast. its already in pretty much every mammal we interact with now. You going to tell me this super fast spreading - super species hoping virus was waiting in a cave somewhere and never spread?
This reminds me of the conspiracy theory book, Lab 257. There was a lab on Plum Island in the Long Island Sound that studied infectious diseases.
If you trace back the spread of Lyme disease in time, you get two points. One in Connecticut, and one on Long Island, where workers got on the boats to Plum Island.
The lab was studying diseases similar to Lyme disease at the time.
All those are facts.
The conspiracy theory is that Lyme disease was accidentally released by that lab.
I remember reading this article in the WP a year ago which seemed to conflate viral escape with bioengineering and imply that lack of the latter implies lack of the former:
"Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked"
I look forward to seeing this article being retracted and taken offline, banned from being posted on social media, the author fired, and seeing people "cancelled" for sharing this article anywhere.
You know... as happened only a few months earlier to people who wrote similar articles and discussed similar theories with very similar hypotheses, but who were NOT writing for a certain publication of a certain leaning.
I also look forward to being down voted and told why "it's totally different now".
Should we care a lot about the safety and security of places where dangerous infectious diseases are studied? sure!
I think we should care A LOT MORE about our [apparent total lack of] ability to quickly deploy effective public health responses to new infectious diseases (regardless of their source).
Maybe it was an accident at a sloppy lab, ok, so labs on the other side of the planet in sovereign countries we do not control might make mistakes. We should get better at responding fast to save lives.
Maybe it was a sinister bio-terrorism plot. We should get better at responding fast to save lives. Bio-terror/warfare plan looks a whole lot like a good public health plan IMO.
Maybe gasp it really was from bats or something. We should get better at responding fast to save lives. This stuff DOES happen.
Maybe s/.*/I don't care where it came from/g. We should get better at responding fast and saving lives (my opinion).
While the headline talks about covid, I found other bits of the article scary. For instance the supposed lax handling of pathogens like smallpox. While I would trust the worldwide scientific community for covid origin theories, I cannot look past the egregious safety violations reported in the article (if true).
Seems like the only consensus is that the origin was (lab-leak || zoonotic). Given the unlikelihood of ever knowing the true origin story, future epidemic mitigation efforts should just assume both causes. History is rich with examples of both.
Mainstream media shouting "discredited", "already debunked!", "fringe", "conspiracy theory", "xenophobic" in unison last time Tom Cotton brought this up was a sign for me that there is actually something to investigate here.
I remember that a year ago, such conversations would get a person banned/shadowbanned from Twitter, FB and other media sources. I wonder how many lives were lost unnecessarily because of censorship.
The problem is that this is a too rational theory. Not enough of a conspiracy (these people prefer to think it was released on purpose to control global population etc). The other end of the spectrum the rationalists and scientists fear that they may go down a slippery conspiracy slope so they dismiss it the first moment another fellow scientist says so. Then the politicians don't want this hot potato in their hands, it could cause global wars economic or otherwise and half the planet resenting the other.
My conspiracy theory is that, if the virus intentionally or unintentionally escaped from that lab, and the CDC,CIA, whatever, etc already know this, probably everyone prefers to shut up and deny it, because otherwise it might lead to a war with china and it would be a lot worse for everyone.
Theory? Isn't that even an expected result? The virus started in the exact city where one of the top labs in the world. This was either a breach of higienisation protocols or intentional. Of course, claiming it was intentional is a conspiracy theory and likely won't be able to be proven ( even less likely as some doctors were knowingly suicided ).
China ended 2019 in a huge crisis and 2020 as the number one world economy. Quite a dramatic change for a year, no?
[+] [-] gregwebs|5 years ago|reply
This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world. We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.resea...
[+] [-] woodruffw|5 years ago|reply
That reads as reasonable to me, but raises a subsequent question: if these lapses are so common and so many countries possess the capacity for serious mistakes, why don't we see more regular outbreaks (if not full-blown pandemics) caused by labs? In other words, what makes COVID special? I didn't find a satisfactory answer to the latter question in the article.
It's my (uninformed, uneducated) opinion that the severity of the author's claims don't correspond to the reality of the last few national and international disease crises (AIDS, Ebola, Zika, COVID). Which isn't to say that we should absolutely dismiss the possibility that COVID originated in a lab, only that claims that it did amount to currently unsubstantiated claims about COVID's special status among other recent pandemics.
[+] [-] 0-_-0|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
For example, the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) escaped from the lab twice, both in 2003 and 2004.
[+] [-] loveistheanswer|5 years ago|reply
There is historical precedent of authorities blaming local meat markets to cover up a lab leak.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
[+] [-] 2-tpg|5 years ago|reply
> We sign this statement in solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China who continue to save lives and protect global health during the challenge of the COVID-19 outbreak. We are all in this together, with our Chinese counterparts in the forefront, against this new viral threat. The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339367143_Statement...
Scary piece of propaganda, considering it was China who started rumours and misinformation, and tying the lab leak hypothesis to not supporting health professionals. All-in-all, a grave conflict of interest for a supposed objective investigation into the origins.
[+] [-] jtdev|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] musha68k|5 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1292819714935271424
I'm not a virologist but every TWiV episode I listened to, there was convincing talk about natural reservoirs being the most likely source of the virus.
AFAIR they also expect similar events to happen increasingly all over the world due to side effects of the climate crisis and global heating.
[+] [-] asmint3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nav_Panel|5 years ago|reply
I had been reading every journal article I could get my hands on about the virus since February, but of course how could my interpretation be trustworthy? I'm no expert, or anything. If something I read in a journal article contradicted something on the news, the latter always seemed to "win".
After all that, now that the lab thing is on the mainstream news, I'm afraid to even bring it up with my friends. They can figure it out for themselves.
[+] [-] esja|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phendrenad2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtkwe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomopining|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 13415|5 years ago|reply
It's a bit annoying that so many adults continue to mix up speculation with real evidence, and make up their minds based on gut feelings. That is not to say governments shouldn't put pressure on China to be more transparent, of course they should. But judging from the actual information available, the virus most likely jumped from an animal to humans due to the bad conditions of wet markets in China.
While China is to blame for such markets, people need to bear in mind that the same can happen in many other places where animals are farmed closely together with humans. Even if it was true, the Wuhan lab theory would unfortunately distract from this real problem.
[+] [-] hayst4ck|5 years ago|reply
I found this to be an extremely engaging read and compelling story.
TLDR; The likelihood of it being lab related is high. The likelihood of it being directly malicious low.
My Take form reading it: The lab in question needed to collect bats for research. A person who collected the bats did so with insufficient safety and is likely patient 0.
[+] [-] matwood|5 years ago|reply
And this sounds like a reasonable possibility to be explored. Accidents happen. Lapses in procedures happen.
The problem is that early on, and still in some circles, lab related equates to malicious bio-weapon and/or China purposely attempting to destroy the world. It's important to separate the two, and hopefully this is a cautionary tale for all labs to review their policies and procedures.
[+] [-] pageandrew|5 years ago|reply
So, its not quite as simple as a collection mistake.
[+] [-] 8note|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbenst|5 years ago|reply
This is no way exonerates the Wuhan government from possible culpability—indeed government officials did deliberately suppress information—but this investigative opinion doesn’t pass scientific muster. Misinformation.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
[+] [-] tripletao|5 years ago|reply
I think that's true, but it ignores the possibility that the WIV was working with new viruses with unpublished genomes. The WIV routinely organized expeditions to remote bat caves to collect samples. There's naturally some delay between sampling, sequencing, and publishing, no conspiracy required. For example, RaTG13, the closest known animal virus to SARS-CoV-2, was collected by the WIV in 2013 but published only after the start of the pandemic.
The WIV had a private database of viral genomes; but they took it offline in September 2019, they say due to hacking attempts. They haven't brought it back up, and the WHO has declined to ask for a copy.
SARS-CoV-2 certainly could be a naturally-evolved virus first transmitted from an animal to a non-scientist human. It could also be a naturally-evolved virus collected and accidentally released by the WIV, or a recombinant of multiple such viruses, or the descendant of such a virus after serial passaging. Nothing in Andersen's argument distinguishes any of these possibilities.
But don't trust me; check out Marc Lipsitch's Twitter feed today, or David Relman's article:
> Some have argued that a deliberate engineering scenario is unlikely because one would not have had the insight a priori to design the current pandemic virus (3). This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29246
This isn't a conspiracy theory, and it's not even a fringe viewpoint anymore. It's just a reasonable step in investigating the yet-unknown origin of what could be the worst industrial accident in human history.
[+] [-] tomp|5 years ago|reply
from the article you linked to:
> Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
You're the one spreading FUD, intentionally misinterpreting the original article and making up a fake argument that "lab leak" hypothesis somehow contradicts "natural origin" and implies that the virus was "designed". (If I understand the article correctly, "purposefully manipulated" means "genetically manipulated", not "gain of function".) Flagged.
[+] [-] throwawaysea|5 years ago|reply
Furthermore, the WHO's own team admitted recently that they were simply not equipped to do any kind of forensic investigation of the lab (https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/world-health-organizat...):
> [Dominic Dwyer, a medical virologist at New South Wales Health Pathology in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the WHO team] says that the team didn’t see anything during its visits to suggest a lab accident. “Now, whether we were shown everything? You can never know. The group wasn’t designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practice.”
Even if they were appropriately equipped for such an investigation, what's the use when China had blocked their visits until a year later, when they've had ample time to cover any evidence. The whole situation is highly suspicious, from the initial suppression of news reports of the virus, to delaying international lab visits, to the deletion of studies from that Wuhan lab (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13701168/covid-cover-up-china-...).
[+] [-] synergy20|5 years ago|reply
Also it refused fiercely to let foreign experts in to investigate, which is also hard to explain other than something MUST be hidden at all costs.
[+] [-] SpaceRaccoon|5 years ago|reply
Smallpox is also naturally originating virus. That doesn't prohibit it from leaking from a lab.
[+] [-] tim333|5 years ago|reply
>However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.
The fact that covid's features are found in nature seems a weak argument to disprove lab involvement.
On the other hand covid seems well adapted to humans which could have come about by serial passage in a lab. Perhaps they were doing something like in vivo characterisation of spillover risk as mentioned in Daszak's grant application for the WIV?
Or something like:
>We performed in vivo experiments in transgenic (human ACE2 expressing) mice and civets in 2018 and 2019 in the Institute’s biosafety laboratory. The viruses we used were bat SARSr-CoV close to SARS-CoV. (Shi Zhengli)
?
[+] [-] garmaine|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crx07|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ancapistani|5 years ago|reply
I think that it is at least somewhat likely that it was the result of the lab's activities, but your assertion here has a huge dose of selection bias.
If the virology labs studying coronaviruses were placed randomly around the world, you'd be correct - but they're not. They're placed near locations where novel coronaviruses have crossed the species barrier in the past, and where they are likely to do so in the future.
It would be equivalent to say that lighthouses cause ships to run aground, because many teams when ships run aground it's near a lighthouse.
[+] [-] totalZero|5 years ago|reply
CDC and other US government officials, on the other hand, must ratchet up their criticism of China as well as WHO. I agree with you there. It's alarming that there are so few PR ramifications for China. From the looks of it, either their unsanitary bushmeat consumption got the world sick, or their irresponsible laboratory containment procedures did. Both are a reflection of China's culture, and were only exacerbated by authoritarian crackdown upon the early warnings issued by Chinese medical professionals. The US government shouldn't defend bad practices and systemic problems in the name of multilateral cooperation. That variety of ethical blindness forgives bad faith from our counterparts and damages our hegemony.
[+] [-] colllectorof|5 years ago|reply
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296...
I mean, yeah, five out of 6 cited experts have ties to EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has funding ties to one of the two virology labs in Wuhan, but that's, like, just a coincidence. If it wasn't, I'm sure NPR would mention it.
And then Peter Daszak himself went to Wuhan with WHO team to investigate and didn't find anything conclusive. Peter fucking Daszak. You're not going to tell me that someone who was interviewed and cited on this subject by NPR, CNN, CBS, Slate, Democracy Now, Washing Post and The Guardian could be full of shit, right?
/s
[+] [-] boringg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tossaway12321|5 years ago|reply
And people making the really odd responses below. They're, not saying it, but insinuating that the lab would be where there is lots of bat coronavirus? The lab is in the city of Wuhan. A city with a population of 11 million people. This isn't some rural town.
There was a lab that studied this type of coronavirus, had published papers on it. And in a country the size of the USA had an outbreak within just a few miles from that lab. Then the govt came and refused to let anyone outside investigate.
To me that leads pretty strongly that it was an accidental lab leak. And they weren't able to control the spread.
My hopeful opinion is that this leads to more stringent worldwide rules for reporting leaks, and checking of safety practices to avoid this happening again
[+] [-] ch4s3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zenst|5 years ago|reply
Now I was aware of some reports (nothing official or confirmed) that the Wuham lab was broken into in the summer of 2019.
Interestingly enough their was a lot of political tension at that time involving Hong Kong.
I'm also mindful how China has been rather good at sweeping things under carpets.
So I could speculate how things played out in a way that fits events, but without any smoking gun - it would be just speculation and joining dots that may or may not of been there.
Though even if it was something along the lines of what I'm thinking happened (animal activists with HK connections being politically motivated/manipulated and possibly no idea what type of lab it was beyond they may be hurting animals), the lab was researching virus's from the wild - seeing how they mutate and progress in an effort to see what lays ahead.
So lab event or no lab event - this virus was already in existence in some form and was not a case of if, but when.
One thing I do know, it sure did shine a spotlight upon how connected the World is and also how fragile many supply lines are.
[+] [-] Aunche|5 years ago|reply
Why not? Wuhan is the 43rd largest city in the world. Meanwhile, the earliest cases of CoVid were all connected to the same wet market. Doesn't that have a higher probability being the origin?
[+] [-] asdff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] autokad|5 years ago|reply
not buying it.
[+] [-] benlumen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kangnkodos|5 years ago|reply
If you trace back the spread of Lyme disease in time, you get two points. One in Connecticut, and one on Long Island, where workers got on the boats to Plum Island.
The lab was studying diseases similar to Lyme disease at the time.
All those are facts.
The conspiracy theory is that Lyme disease was accidentally released by that lab.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_257#Discredited_consp...
[+] [-] musicale|5 years ago|reply
"Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...
[+] [-] kiawe_fire|5 years ago|reply
You know... as happened only a few months earlier to people who wrote similar articles and discussed similar theories with very similar hypotheses, but who were NOT writing for a certain publication of a certain leaning.
I also look forward to being down voted and told why "it's totally different now".
[+] [-] hospadar|5 years ago|reply
Should we care a lot about the safety and security of places where dangerous infectious diseases are studied? sure!
I think we should care A LOT MORE about our [apparent total lack of] ability to quickly deploy effective public health responses to new infectious diseases (regardless of their source).
Maybe it was an accident at a sloppy lab, ok, so labs on the other side of the planet in sovereign countries we do not control might make mistakes. We should get better at responding fast to save lives.
Maybe it was a sinister bio-terrorism plot. We should get better at responding fast to save lives. Bio-terror/warfare plan looks a whole lot like a good public health plan IMO.
Maybe gasp it really was from bats or something. We should get better at responding fast to save lives. This stuff DOES happen.
Maybe s/.*/I don't care where it came from/g. We should get better at responding fast and saving lives (my opinion).
[+] [-] 0xcafecafe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp|5 years ago|reply
Seems like the only consensus is that the origin was (lab-leak || zoonotic). Given the unlikelihood of ever knowing the true origin story, future epidemic mitigation efforts should just assume both causes. History is rich with examples of both.
[+] [-] jsnk|5 years ago|reply
- https://archive.vn/TG8zN#selection-999.29-999.84
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...
- https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-conspiracy-theories/
- https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/483354-sen-cotton-repeat...
- https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/republican-senat...
- https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/18/politics/tom-cotton-coronavir...
- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tom-cotton-coronavirus-china_...
- https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/baseless-conspiracy-theori...
[+] [-] g42gregory|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arisAlexis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] midrus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lanevorockz|5 years ago|reply
China ended 2019 in a huge crisis and 2020 as the number one world economy. Quite a dramatic change for a year, no?