My occam's razor thoughts. Most bad viri have origins from humans using animals for food. Aids from bushmeat, 1918 pandemic is thought to be from birds, same with the common flu. Just look at the latest bird flu sweeping the world, this one isn't affecting humans, but yet another pandemic from raising animals for food.
Most people want to blame a lab, but the obvious answer is more likely imo.
Like you say, we couldn’t even do GoF when HIV and pandemic influenza became a thing. Why take seriously the feeble efforts of humans to recreate evolution in a lab when the real thing has demonstrated it’s terrifying effectiveness many many times?
Consider the following scenarios from a Bayesian perspective:
- an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city
- an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city with a virus lab
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor and has a furin cleavage site (not present in RaTG13, SARS, or other similar coronaviruses) occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor, and is funded by a group (EcoHealth) which has filed grant applications for research that attempts to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like bat coronaviruses
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor and has a furin cleavage site (not present in RaTG13, SARS, or other similar coronaviruses) occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor, and is funded by a group (EcoHealth) which has filed grant applications for research that attempts to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like bat coronaviruses, and multiple years later no animal reservoir of this novel coronavirus has been found, despite the massive incentives for this. In fact they seemingly haven't even been able to fake it by infecting some wild animals deliberately and claiming that they found the zoonotic origin.
From a Bayesian perspective, it's difficult-to-impossible to evaluate the probability of these events without in-depth knowledge of genetics and/or epidemiology, and they could easily be highly correlated.
The alternative explanation to the lab leak is that the lab was studying factors like infection through ACE2 and furin cleavage sites because they were things considered likely to happen on their own, and were worth preparing for. Studying and preparing for possible mutations is what gain-of-function research is for.
Also, half of the bullets sound like filler. "An outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city" is definitely filler, and I'd estimate that P( "outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses" | "an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city with a virus lab" ) is probably not that far from 1.00.
And at the end you seem to be proposing the fact that they haven't faked a zoonotic origin is evidence that it was lab-created? That sounds backwards.
When faced with sourceless, pointless suffering, there's not much else to do than clean up the mess and prepare for if it comes back. A person or group of people to blame gives them someone to direct their anger at. If there's a villain, then it's possible to get revenge. People are motivated to create and believe explanations that give them someone to blame, so such explanations deserve more skepticism than others.
The creeping escalation is fun and dramatic, but here it's mainly serving to puff up the amount of evidence at hand.
Sure. P(lab leak origin | last bullet) = P(last bullet | lab leak) * P(lab leak) / P(last bullet). There isn't much evidence to constrain each term, and your post doesn't make any attempt to estimate them, but let's make some stuff up. The values change a lot if you take P(lab leak) to be any lab leak, or specifically a modified RaTG13 from WIV.
Let's go with the more specific scenario. Then P(last bullet | WIV lab leak scenario) becomes P(outbreak | WIV lab leak &c.) because we've conditioned on everything but the outbreak part. I'll guess this is 0.001, which is generous because it's very unlikely for a mere exposure to turn into a pandemic. Exposures to natural potentially pandemic viruses happen every day, most don't become a pandemic. P(WIV lab leak scenario) is difficult. There are a lot of different lab leak scenarios that could have happened instead, but we also don't care that much about trivial differences. Let's be really generous and say P(WIV lab leak scenario) = 0.25 because it's one of I think 4 plausible covid origin sites in Wuhan. Probably it should be lower because it's plausible that Wuhan was only the site of the first superspreader event, not the origin. And let's say P(outbreak) = 0.2 because we seem to get a potential pandemic every 5 years or so. Then P(WIV origin | outbreak) = 0.00125.
There are all sorts of problems with my analysis of course. Even if I haven't made any mistakes, the numbers I conjured up are entirely unconvincing. With only one datum, we have hardly any objective support for our probability estimates, and Bayesian analysis only gives a semblance of objectivity to our prior opinions.
Edit: I have no desire to support either side here, just to point out that probabilistic reasoning doesn't help much here. Whatever happened, happened, regardless of how (un)likely it was.
RaTG13 is not the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2. Full stop.
Other, more closely related viruses have recently been found in nature (by a French team in Laos). That immediately 100% rules out all the conspiracy theories that have to do with RaTG13.
I'll also just mention that Wuhan happens to have wet markets where wild animals were sold until the end of 2019. The initial outbreak was clustered around a market that is known to have sold wild animals that are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. That market is on the opposite side of the city (and it's a big city, about the size of NY) from the WIV.
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs where the closet natural resivoir sharing a similar bat virus population is between 800 miles (Yunnan province) or > 1000 miles (Laos)
There are many variants of Occam's razor, but one commonality among them is that it is for comparing hypotheses that predict the same data (namely, the the simpler one should be preferred).
But in the case of COVID-19 lab escape versus zoonotic origin, the latter doesn't predict that the Chinese government and EcoHealth Alliance would attempt a coverup of the virus origins, so we really aren't talking about two hypothesis that explain the (same) data, and therefore this isn't really an appropriate candidate for the application of Occam's razor.
Chinese government will coverup even if China's lab is not the virus origin. Because their goal is to have a better image of the party.
To say it in other words, politicians will bullshit the populace in any case, they do not care if what they're saying is true or false as long as it makes them look better
mardifoufs|3 years ago
jupp0r|3 years ago
https://theprint.in/science/lab-leak-is-the-biggest-suspect-...
ImaCake|3 years ago
voldacar|3 years ago
- an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city
- an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city with a virus lab
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor and has a furin cleavage site (not present in RaTG13, SARS, or other similar coronaviruses) occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor, and is funded by a group (EcoHealth) which has filed grant applications for research that attempts to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like bat coronaviruses
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor and has a furin cleavage site (not present in RaTG13, SARS, or other similar coronaviruses) occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor, and is funded by a group (EcoHealth) which has filed grant applications for research that attempts to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like bat coronaviruses, and multiple years later no animal reservoir of this novel coronavirus has been found, despite the massive incentives for this. In fact they seemingly haven't even been able to fake it by infecting some wild animals deliberately and claiming that they found the zoonotic origin.
I could go on and on but I think you get my point
a_shovel|3 years ago
The alternative explanation to the lab leak is that the lab was studying factors like infection through ACE2 and furin cleavage sites because they were things considered likely to happen on their own, and were worth preparing for. Studying and preparing for possible mutations is what gain-of-function research is for.
Also, half of the bullets sound like filler. "An outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city" is definitely filler, and I'd estimate that P( "outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses" | "an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city with a virus lab" ) is probably not that far from 1.00.
And at the end you seem to be proposing the fact that they haven't faked a zoonotic origin is evidence that it was lab-created? That sounds backwards.
When faced with sourceless, pointless suffering, there's not much else to do than clean up the mess and prepare for if it comes back. A person or group of people to blame gives them someone to direct their anger at. If there's a villain, then it's possible to get revenge. People are motivated to create and believe explanations that give them someone to blame, so such explanations deserve more skepticism than others.
The creeping escalation is fun and dramatic, but here it's mainly serving to puff up the amount of evidence at hand.
jpeloquin|3 years ago
Let's go with the more specific scenario. Then P(last bullet | WIV lab leak scenario) becomes P(outbreak | WIV lab leak &c.) because we've conditioned on everything but the outbreak part. I'll guess this is 0.001, which is generous because it's very unlikely for a mere exposure to turn into a pandemic. Exposures to natural potentially pandemic viruses happen every day, most don't become a pandemic. P(WIV lab leak scenario) is difficult. There are a lot of different lab leak scenarios that could have happened instead, but we also don't care that much about trivial differences. Let's be really generous and say P(WIV lab leak scenario) = 0.25 because it's one of I think 4 plausible covid origin sites in Wuhan. Probably it should be lower because it's plausible that Wuhan was only the site of the first superspreader event, not the origin. And let's say P(outbreak) = 0.2 because we seem to get a potential pandemic every 5 years or so. Then P(WIV origin | outbreak) = 0.00125.
There are all sorts of problems with my analysis of course. Even if I haven't made any mistakes, the numbers I conjured up are entirely unconvincing. With only one datum, we have hardly any objective support for our probability estimates, and Bayesian analysis only gives a semblance of objectivity to our prior opinions.
Edit: I have no desire to support either side here, just to point out that probabilistic reasoning doesn't help much here. Whatever happened, happened, regardless of how (un)likely it was.
toomim|3 years ago
DiogenesKynikos|3 years ago
Other, more closely related viruses have recently been found in nature (by a French team in Laos). That immediately 100% rules out all the conspiracy theories that have to do with RaTG13.
I'll also just mention that Wuhan happens to have wet markets where wild animals were sold until the end of 2019. The initial outbreak was clustered around a market that is known to have sold wild animals that are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. That market is on the opposite side of the city (and it's a big city, about the size of NY) from the WIV.
relaxing|3 years ago
OrvalWintermute|3 years ago
- an outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs where the closet natural resivoir sharing a similar bat virus population is between 800 miles (Yunnan province) or > 1000 miles (Laos)
snapcaster|3 years ago
virissimo|3 years ago
But in the case of COVID-19 lab escape versus zoonotic origin, the latter doesn't predict that the Chinese government and EcoHealth Alliance would attempt a coverup of the virus origins, so we really aren't talking about two hypothesis that explain the (same) data, and therefore this isn't really an appropriate candidate for the application of Occam's razor.
tryauuum|3 years ago
To say it in other words, politicians will bullshit the populace in any case, they do not care if what they're saying is true or false as long as it makes them look better
temp8964|3 years ago
bigyellow|3 years ago
[deleted]