The updated epilogue now discusses three significant new developments since the publication of the hardback that are being hotly debated in the comments here. The first was the discovery of a virus in a bat in Laos that is slightly more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than the virus studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology; but both are still not the progenitor of the pandemic. The second is detailed information about how prominent western virologists, who had privately thought the virus was likely manipulated in a laboratory, began to instead tell the public that no lab-based scenario was plausible. The third is a trio of conflicting studies about whether the Huanan seafood market was the site of a natural spillover of the virus from animals to people or just the site of a human superspreader event in December 2019.
As with the hardcover, half of our earnings from the book have gone/will go to charity.
2. Does the available evidence lean towards a market origin?
Some experts have asserted that there is dispositive evidence that the virus jumped from animals to people at the Wuhan Huanan market. However, their analysis failed to take into account the realities in the early days of the pandemic. Without access to the methodology and actual data collected by investigators in Wuhan, their interpretation unfortunately falls prey to ascertainment bias. Please see this thread for details: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1499794942012579843
At the moment, US intelligence, the WHO SAGO advisory group, and many top virologists and experts find both natural and lab origin hypotheses plausible and deserving of investigation. The evidence does not lean so strongly towards one hypothesis or the other that we can assume one as the default truth.
3. Can scientists manipulate and genetically engineer naturally found viruses without leaving a trace? In other words, can the genome of the virus tell us its recent history?
We describe the seamless genetic engineering capabilities developed in the years leading up to the pandemic in VIRAL. Due to advanced technologies, it is no longer always possible to use the genome of a virus to distinguish between a natural pathogen vs one that has spent time in a laboratory. Even top coronavirologists, including Ralph Baric who collaborated with the Wuhan scientists, have said that the only way to know is to look at the Wuhan lab records. You can also read my twitter thread: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1493733086089121794
Even the presence of the furin cleavage site insertion that is unique to the pandemic virus and is indeed what makes it a highly infectious pandemic virus is not “dispositive evidence” of either a natural or lab origin. Please see our peer-reviewed analysis here: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/39/1/msab327/6426085
4. Why does the lab leak hypothesis encompass so many different scenarios by which research activities could lead to the emergence of the pandemic virus?
A natural spillover hypothesis also encompasses several different scenarios, e.g., bat direct transmission to people in natural habitats, bat to people in markets, bat to farmed animals or wildlife to people in nature, at farms or market, etc.
This doesn’t mean that a natural or lab origin are insinuations. It just means we are lacking so much key evidence that it’s not possible to pin down an exact mechanism by which the virus emerged in the Wuhan human population.
5. Does finding close relatives of the pandemic virus in bats, e.g., in Laos, mean that its origin is natural?
No, because viruses that escape from labs were also ultimately derived from nature and we know that scientists in Wuhan had been collecting viruses from across 8 countries (China and SE Asia) where the closest relatives to the pandemic virus have been found. Please see the graphic in this tweet: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1522117270612451335
6. Is there anything to do about finding the origin of Covid-19 now? Isn’t it a dead end? And is that why interest is waning?
There is plenty to do to investigate the origin of Covid-19 using sources and data that exist outside of China. Please see a recent peer-reviewed letter in PNAS: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2202769119
It is very surprising to me that these feasible routes of inquiry have not been explored more than 2 years into the pandemic.
7. Have infected animals on sale at the Huanan market been found? Was there any evidence that SARS-like viruses were circulating in the Wuhan animal trading community before the emergence of Covid-19?
8. Regardless of the origin of Covid-19, shouldn’t the focus be on making sure there is more oversight and regulation of current and future pathogen research?
I agree and wish that we didn’t need to prove the origin of this pandemic to motivate scientific leaders to better regulate risky pathogen work. I have been dedicating efforts to this cause since last year and hope to be able to share some exciting news later this year.
thank you for doing the work that some others are seemingly afraid to touch! There are many fair-weather scientists, but researchers who consider all credible leads and data, no matter the popularity or political implications of the results, are much rarer.
I have two questions:
1. There were genome sequences removed from the 'Sequence Read Archive', at the request of Chinese scientists.¹ It was later portrayed by US authorities as something that commonly happens. As a layperson I'm curious if that's true and it's a regular occurrence that researchers in another country ask for data to be deleted from the archive. That seems odd.
2. In case you read Chinese, do you know about that Wuhan Institute of Virology job ad where they were looking for a researcher to study coronaviruses in bats, which was posted on their website a few weeks before the outbreak became known? I saw this myself in the very early days of the pandemic, possibly before people in the West were even aware that there was a serious outbreak in Wuhan. At the time I didn't think much of it, but then 2 or 3 days later they first deleted that ad, then the whole board and when I visited today I found their entire website has been completely reworked. Have you seen this and do you know if it was saved anywhere? Not that the job opening itself seemed suspicious and it's well known this sort of research was done there, but I just found it odd they would try to hide it.
Regarding your answer to 8, how important is gain of function research in the virology eco-system, is there sufficient reason amongst the powers that be within the discipline (that is, well-known researchers, leaders of departments or labs, funders and program managers, etc) to be wary of a funding cut for this research that they might be biased in dismissing the idea of a lab leak?
My analogy is in particle physics, the idea of supersymmetry is incredibly popular amongst the super start researchers, heads of parts of CERN, funding agencies, etc, that very few in the field are willing to admit the lack of evidence for supersymmetry at the LHC is in fact a crisis for the field after how many billions have been spent on the supercollider. My question is, is gain of function that important or popular in the field of virology? Why can't they just admit it's dangerous and chuck it, will enough of them suffer if they were to do so?
Hey Alina, thanks for contributing so much to the discussion.
One thing that always made me balk was this interview on CCTV which shows researchers collecting bat samples (feces etc) while seemingly skimping on PPE and admitting to getting bit by the wild animals and having a clear skin reaction all the way back in 2017 [1] - Do you have any comment on that in particular? Supposedly these are researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology but all I have to go by on that notion is some news from Taiwan and the New York Post, since I don't speak Chinese this video is a little harder for me to personally verify...
Hej Alina! Thanks for being open with having an economic interest in this topic being dragged out into the open again.
> It is very surprising to me that these feasible routes of inquiry have not been explored more than 2 years into the pandemic.
It's not too surprising to me. International diplomacy works like this. With a more general picture in mind, specific topics often need to be swept under the rug. Otherwise international relations between any two countries would be constantly in shambles and we'd long have seen WW3, WW4 and WW5.
Note that I'm not advocating for any of this hush-hush. I'd also like to know what happened. But that's just not how international diplomacy works. In this particular case, if WHO wants continued support from China, then you need to carefully balance what and how you criticize. Nobody is helped if China leaves the WHO or next time doesn't even tell anybody that a pandemic is coming for fear of being bullied for this kind of thing. I'm sure the responsible bodies (lab people) will learn their lesson and be more careful going forward. That's the only thing we can hope for nonetheless. It's unrealistic to think China would be punished and all their labs shut down. This won't happen.
For those with a bit more background in the sciences, there's an increasingly massive amount of evidence to support Zoonotic origin. Philipp Markolin has a good rundown:
Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing (e.g. whether it's a natural virus that escaped or an engineered one, how different lineages showed up at the market, which lab it allegedly escaped from since the WIV campus is much further from the market compared to the CCDC, etc etc).
China is a bad actor and definitely contributed to the conspiracy madness around the virus by being so shut-down and performing such a half-assed investigation but unfortunately they would have done the same whether the virus came to be via the same animal trade that caused the last SARS outbreak or if there was some secret Wuhan project.
I think understanding the origin is important, but I also understand why it wasn't a media fixation during the pandemic itself.
1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic
2) Unlike the nuclear analogy in the article, pandemic virus outbreaks happen naturally, and fairly frequently. Combined with the huge increase in global travel, when one does happen it can be around the world in every airport before anyone has even identified it.
So in the big picture this type of outbreak seems inevitable, not anomalous or inherently preventable.
Understanding the origin, either by cross-species origination or a laboratory containment breach, is indeed important and significant and should be pursued, but I also understand why the search for that answer isn't at the top of the 24-hour news cycle.
> 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic
I have the opposite opinion.
If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread. That could have saved millions of lives.
We spent the first several months of the pandemic under the belief that it wasn't airborne. This ended up being false.
If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe and continuing without appropriate safeguards puts us at great risk.
> I also understand why it wasn't a media fixation during the pandemic itself.
You list some reasons, and I have in my mind a different reason.
There was a media blackout on the lab leak hypothesis because China put the kibosh on it, and since the US is dependent on Chinese exports for healthcare, PPE, defense and other critical supply lines, we did not want to piss them off.
Direction to the media for this blackout came from the US State Dept, and Mike Pompeo confirmed as much in semi-public comments that I will link if I ever find them again.
Concerning number 1) that is doesn’t change the Consequence I agree, but the response I thoroughly disagree unless you means strictly short term.
Came or not from a lab, SynBio and gain of functions experiments have the potential of re-doing this of way worse.
So basically the only truly important response that is not damage containment is to prevent this from happening (or happen again).
Honestly beside fringe groups I don’t see any initiatives happening, if it was up to me I’d kick gain of function experiments into the same realm as chemical weapons.
> 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic
What??? I honestly expect more from HN readers than blatant china-apologists.
OF COURSE it changes the consequences! We tell China to hand over all research and distribute it to scientists around the world so that research doesn’t start from ground 0. If it could have accelerated understanding of the virus by several months, imagine how many lives could have been saved!
Instead China deleted all their files and kept quiet. They literally don’t care about millions of deaths.
I guess I'm more cynical, maybe even conspiratorial. My theory is that NIH was possibly, even if indirectly, contributing funding to the research that caused the outbreak, and that the major corporate media networks are there to shill for the establishment forces in the government and hushed this story as not to humiliate Fauci and the NIH.
I've seen Rand Paul credibly grilling Fauci on this issue a number of times and each time, the propaganda machine on reddit came out to damage control for Fauci.
The larger problem, beyond whether we funded this or not, whether or not it was a bat, is that the media and leaders in the government have repeatedly shown themselves to be completely undeserving of trust and so you're left guessing what the truth is with whatever limited information you have access to.
I don't even think it's that different from nuclear. The fact that Iraq had no WMDs (and I have doubts that anybody in the intelligence community really thought they did) got swept under the rug too, after a ton of civilian deaths there and military deaths on both sides. People just make stuff up and then it's too late.
Your "no priority" stance doesn't hold ground if the article is to be believed. The lab leak theory wasn't just low on the agenda, it was actively avoid altogether.
We already had intense media speculation about the source of the virus at the start of the pandemic because _people wanted to know_. It would have been nice to have a proper investigation at the start of the pandemic as they may have caught evidence before it could have been destroyed.
Thank you for posting this. We know that COVID couldn't have come from China. It came to China through frozen meat packages. WHO-China report already stated that fact. Dr. Fauci also believes that.
The only reason we can't find evidence because other countries wouldn't collaborate, for obvious reasons. Racists are trying to blame China because of lack of competence of their leaders.
Wasn't SARS-1 stopped largely with contact tracing? You're saying that understanding the origin of the virus does not help the production of a vaccine in any way?
Whatever toy gain of function research someone is doing in a lab vastly pales in comparison to the enormous gain of function 'experiment' we are right now performing worldwide with the continued high transmission rate of COVID-19.
Look at what variants like Omicron BA.5 and BA.4 have evolved into, they are quite possibly the most infectious and dangerous air spread pathogens known to man. These didn't come from a lab, we cooked them up by dropping all mitigations and pretending the pandemic was over instead of quashing this virus for good.
As someone in tech, what bothers me is all the attention AI gets for possible ethical problems, while biologists are doing some pretty scary experiments with potentially large-scale negative consequences, and they've gotten relatively little attention.
There's no proof of "gain of function" experiments at all or specifically linked to Sars-Cov-2. It is heavily unlikely that such an experiment would switch a virus from un-pandemic-able to pandemic-able. The mechanisms to do that are entirely theoretical.
So it's not clear at all that gain of function would have been able to create a Virus like Sars-Cov-2 out of a hypothetical bat virus. And there is no evidence any such research has been going on. Nor is there any evidence the virus has passed through the Wuhan lab in question at all.
A lab specialized in investigating Coronaviruses in the city where the first outbreak was, is at least suspicious imo. The fact that the Chinese authorities weren't exactly helpful (to my knowledge) in debunking the lab-leak hypothesis is extra suspicious. But then again, if they really would have wanted to cover it up, they might have looked for another city to point to as the source of the outbreak, I don't know how feasible that would have been though.
There is an episode of Lex Fridman's Podcast with Jamie Metzl on the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K78jqx9fx2I
Metzl is highly confident of a lab-leak. However, lab-leak doesn't require that the virus has been tampered with and I somewhat agree that is important to know if the virus escaped due to inadequate lab safety.
The unfortunate fact is that the only plausible consequence of a public acceptance (by government officials) of the lab-leak hypothesis, is that funding for research into viruses would get a lot more restrictive. Maybe not less funding, but it would go to far fewer labs, which have the highest levels of containment.
The profession which knows enough to settle this question, thus has a massive conflict of interest. We cannot expect bankers to say that the response to the GFC should be to break up banks. We cannot expect generals after a war to say that they screwed up. We cannot expect intelligence agencies to say that they should have less power and more oversight. Scientists are human, they want to keep their job and not have to move to another city to do it.
What is actually going to happen, is nothing, until and unless a second lab leak kills a lot of people.
It's not that the origin story is not important, it's not that people don't care, it's that it is a distraction.
It doesn't help solve the crisis.
The article makes the comparison with a nuclear bomb. This is a bad comparison. If we were attacked by a sentient creature, we could reason with it and mitigate further damage or escalation.
In the case of a virus, it's good to know to prevent future pandemics maybe, and there is an academic interests, but it doesn't help with the current situation.
Based on what China's reaction to the source-chasing-efforts, I have no doubt it is where this is originated.
Wuhan is a huge city with the only lab on earth that works with SARS, virus-leak is not uncommon in China over the years(including SARS-1 that was leaked a few times but was contained quickly), after COVID China issued lots of new policies including stricter lab management, and new leadership from military to be in charge of Wuhan lab, and hide the initial samples of COVID, and started a diplomatic propaganda to paint USA as the virus maker.
The lab-leak hypothesis is meta-scientific. When it was first tossed around, the lab leak hypothesis generated two predictions:
1. We would find evidence that someone was doing experiments on furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses.
2. We would find that the furin cleavage site matched a known sequence.
We did not find 2, which should have been easy to find. Eventually, we found 1, since a rejected DARPA grant proposal affiliated with the lab in Wuhan emerged.
Then, we found 2!! with a plausible explanation of why no one had found it earlier -- you had to turn on "patented sequence search" on NCBI blast, which is turned off by default. An easy mistake to make. As a professional biochemist for a decade I had no idea that blast had a patent sequence search, much less that it was turned off by default (which, btw is a sensible setting).
The scientific method says given a model it should make independent predictions (ideally unlikely) which are later verified. The evidence for a lab leak should be considered relatively strong.
>We co-authored a book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, on this topic in 2021 and it proved to be an odd experience. Eschewing speculation and sticking to what we could prove, we delved deep into the evidence and wove together the threads that linked bat viruses from southern China or Southeast Asia with an outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019. We concluded that it was impossible to be sure yet, but two theories were plausible: spillover from an animal to a person at a market, or an accident in a laboratory or during a research field trip.
> Our book received praise from readers: we received letters and emails from senior scientists, politicians, businessmen, journalists, and others commending it as a non-fiction whodunnit.
>All that was gratifying. But it stood in marked contrast to the reaction in much of the media. CNN invited us on to discuss the book then cancelled at the last minute — at the behest of their health editor. The BBC simply ignored the book altogether, as did the other mainstream US and UK networks.
If the lab leak hypothesis is proven beyond all doubt, then it embarrasses China.
Embarrassing one of the world's superpowers is broadly seen as an undesirable thing to do.
Ergo, scientists producing findings backing up the hypothesis will find plenty of opponents whose first and only job is to discredit them in any way possible, from denying their papers publication (looking at you, ResearchGate) to publicly attacking them on social media (Dr. Malone).
Lab leak theory is never going to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. For that to happen, Chinese government would need to cooperate. And it is almost an axiom that they won’t, if it has a slight chance of making them look bad.
> Reviews were mostly bad — in both senses of the word. That is to say, they were highly critical and inaccurate. In some cases, the authors said things that made clear they had not read the book but had made up their minds to dislike it. Not one but two virologists told us on Twitter that the book was full of lies — and that they had not read it. An odd thing for anybody to admit to, especially a scientist.
If you call yourself a "scientist" you have an ethical duty to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Perhaps not in the formal sense of a doctor's Hippocratic oath, but in the tradition of Galileo and Copernicus.
I dig it because it's like a summary of half of the Marvel movies, where the protagonists spend the entire adventure solving a problem they caused themselves.
Like, without the Thanos thingy, iron man is not a bloody hero, he is a villain. He is responsible for so much death and destruction it's not even funny. Black Mamba, killer. Black panther ? Maintains in place a political system that clearly allows any psychopath to access absolute power. Hulk, a time bomb. Thor ? He let his genocidal brother of the hook as soon as he is nice for 2 minutes. Spiderman ? Give an deadly bot swarm to the first father figure that smiles at him. Dr Strange ? Accept the request to GHB the planet and almost destroys it because a kid ask for it for 30 seconds.
It's a well known trope in sups stories, but for some reasons a lot of viewers really believes they are heroes. Even as a kid I though Batman was stupid for spending times fighting one criminal at a time with all his money.
Now, we are seeing a lot of this in today's IRL world.
Progress is saving you by giving you drugs for all the diseases it increases: diabetes, cancer, obesity, hormonal dysfunctions, etc. It's giving you a car so that you can you can go work in a remote place you would never have to work to without progress. It gives you software to organize your day to fit all the thing you would not have to do without progress.
The lab-leak hypothesis has been suppressed because it is a politically unauthorized thought.
If the hypothesis is investigated and proven true, powerful people stand to face justice, which is of course unacceptable to these very people, and so the idea has been banned by way of media silence and by way of association with other unauthorized politics, i.e. with those who are right of center.
One thing I've noticed as a result of the pandemic: there are many people who think that Listening to Experts is the same thing as Doing Science. Everyone who has strong feelings about the lab leak hypothesis (in either direction) would do well to remember the Litany of Tarski:
If SARS-COV-2 escaped from the WIV,
I desire to believe that SARS-COV-2 escaped from the WIV;
If SARS-COV-2 did not escape from the WIV,
I desire to believe that SARS-COV-2 did not escape from the WIV;
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
Just because the CDC or some other experts say it didn't happen doesn't mean it didn't. Just because Fox or some other conspiracy theorist says it did happen doesn't mean it did.
With the lack of any really strong unequivocal data supporting any real hypothesis, I think people got tired of arguing about it and recognized that throwing around huge claims with massive implications was probably irresponsible.
If a claim has massive implications, then it would be even more irresponsible to not recognize that possibility. The world can't learn from the past if we're not able to even consider what might have happened in the past.
[+] [-] ayjchan|3 years ago|reply
I’m going to answer some of the questions that have come up in the comments.
1. Are Chan and Ridley selling a book?
Yes, the updated paperback comes out in the US next week: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/viral-matt-ridleyalin...
The updated epilogue now discusses three significant new developments since the publication of the hardback that are being hotly debated in the comments here. The first was the discovery of a virus in a bat in Laos that is slightly more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than the virus studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology; but both are still not the progenitor of the pandemic. The second is detailed information about how prominent western virologists, who had privately thought the virus was likely manipulated in a laboratory, began to instead tell the public that no lab-based scenario was plausible. The third is a trio of conflicting studies about whether the Huanan seafood market was the site of a natural spillover of the virus from animals to people or just the site of a human superspreader event in December 2019.
As with the hardcover, half of our earnings from the book have gone/will go to charity.
2. Does the available evidence lean towards a market origin?
Some experts have asserted that there is dispositive evidence that the virus jumped from animals to people at the Wuhan Huanan market. However, their analysis failed to take into account the realities in the early days of the pandemic. Without access to the methodology and actual data collected by investigators in Wuhan, their interpretation unfortunately falls prey to ascertainment bias. Please see this thread for details: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1499794942012579843
At the moment, US intelligence, the WHO SAGO advisory group, and many top virologists and experts find both natural and lab origin hypotheses plausible and deserving of investigation. The evidence does not lean so strongly towards one hypothesis or the other that we can assume one as the default truth.
I personally think the available evidence points towards a lab origin but would not go as far as to say that there is dispositive evidence of it. Please see these 2 threads: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1524394197738049537 https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1539745736807616513
3. Can scientists manipulate and genetically engineer naturally found viruses without leaving a trace? In other words, can the genome of the virus tell us its recent history?
We describe the seamless genetic engineering capabilities developed in the years leading up to the pandemic in VIRAL. Due to advanced technologies, it is no longer always possible to use the genome of a virus to distinguish between a natural pathogen vs one that has spent time in a laboratory. Even top coronavirologists, including Ralph Baric who collaborated with the Wuhan scientists, have said that the only way to know is to look at the Wuhan lab records. You can also read my twitter thread: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1493733086089121794
Even the presence of the furin cleavage site insertion that is unique to the pandemic virus and is indeed what makes it a highly infectious pandemic virus is not “dispositive evidence” of either a natural or lab origin. Please see our peer-reviewed analysis here: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/39/1/msab327/6426085
4. Why does the lab leak hypothesis encompass so many different scenarios by which research activities could lead to the emergence of the pandemic virus?
A natural spillover hypothesis also encompasses several different scenarios, e.g., bat direct transmission to people in natural habitats, bat to people in markets, bat to farmed animals or wildlife to people in nature, at farms or market, etc.
This doesn’t mean that a natural or lab origin are insinuations. It just means we are lacking so much key evidence that it’s not possible to pin down an exact mechanism by which the virus emerged in the Wuhan human population.
5. Does finding close relatives of the pandemic virus in bats, e.g., in Laos, mean that its origin is natural?
No, because viruses that escape from labs were also ultimately derived from nature and we know that scientists in Wuhan had been collecting viruses from across 8 countries (China and SE Asia) where the closest relatives to the pandemic virus have been found. Please see the graphic in this tweet: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1522117270612451335
6. Is there anything to do about finding the origin of Covid-19 now? Isn’t it a dead end? And is that why interest is waning?
There is plenty to do to investigate the origin of Covid-19 using sources and data that exist outside of China. Please see a recent peer-reviewed letter in PNAS: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2202769119
And my thread on it: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1527381169729425410
It is very surprising to me that these feasible routes of inquiry have not been explored more than 2 years into the pandemic.
7. Have infected animals on sale at the Huanan market been found? Was there any evidence that SARS-like viruses were circulating in the Wuhan animal trading community before the emergence of Covid-19?
No. I recommend reading my medium post for more details: https://ayjchan.medium.com/a-response-to-the-origins-of-sars...
8. Regardless of the origin of Covid-19, shouldn’t the focus be on making sure there is more oversight and regulation of current and future pathogen research?
I agree and wish that we didn’t need to prove the origin of this pandemic to motivate scientific leaders to better regulate risky pathogen work. I have been dedicating efforts to this cause since last year and hope to be able to share some exciting news later this year.
[+] [-] trompetenaccoun|3 years ago|reply
thank you for doing the work that some others are seemingly afraid to touch! There are many fair-weather scientists, but researchers who consider all credible leads and data, no matter the popularity or political implications of the results, are much rarer.
I have two questions:
1. There were genome sequences removed from the 'Sequence Read Archive', at the request of Chinese scientists.¹ It was later portrayed by US authorities as something that commonly happens. As a layperson I'm curious if that's true and it's a regular occurrence that researchers in another country ask for data to be deleted from the archive. That seems odd.
2. In case you read Chinese, do you know about that Wuhan Institute of Virology job ad where they were looking for a researcher to study coronaviruses in bats, which was posted on their website a few weeks before the outbreak became known? I saw this myself in the very early days of the pandemic, possibly before people in the West were even aware that there was a serious outbreak in Wuhan. At the time I didn't think much of it, but then 2 or 3 days later they first deleted that ad, then the whole board and when I visited today I found their entire website has been completely reworked. Have you seen this and do you know if it was saved anywhere? Not that the job opening itself seemed suspicious and it's well known this sort of research was done there, but I just found it odd they would try to hide it.
¹ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01731-3
[+] [-] noobermin|3 years ago|reply
Regarding your answer to 8, how important is gain of function research in the virology eco-system, is there sufficient reason amongst the powers that be within the discipline (that is, well-known researchers, leaders of departments or labs, funders and program managers, etc) to be wary of a funding cut for this research that they might be biased in dismissing the idea of a lab leak?
My analogy is in particle physics, the idea of supersymmetry is incredibly popular amongst the super start researchers, heads of parts of CERN, funding agencies, etc, that very few in the field are willing to admit the lack of evidence for supersymmetry at the LHC is in fact a crisis for the field after how many billions have been spent on the supercollider. My question is, is gain of function that important or popular in the field of virology? Why can't they just admit it's dangerous and chuck it, will enough of them suffer if they were to do so?
[+] [-] jamal-kumar|3 years ago|reply
One thing that always made me balk was this interview on CCTV which shows researchers collecting bat samples (feces etc) while seemingly skimping on PPE and admitting to getting bit by the wild animals and having a clear skin reaction all the way back in 2017 [1] - Do you have any comment on that in particular? Supposedly these are researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology but all I have to go by on that notion is some news from Taiwan and the New York Post, since I don't speak Chinese this video is a little harder for me to personally verify...
[1] https://youtu.be/MNkyeUZHUoU
[+] [-] wildmanx|3 years ago|reply
Hej Alina! Thanks for being open with having an economic interest in this topic being dragged out into the open again.
> It is very surprising to me that these feasible routes of inquiry have not been explored more than 2 years into the pandemic.
It's not too surprising to me. International diplomacy works like this. With a more general picture in mind, specific topics often need to be swept under the rug. Otherwise international relations between any two countries would be constantly in shambles and we'd long have seen WW3, WW4 and WW5.
Note that I'm not advocating for any of this hush-hush. I'd also like to know what happened. But that's just not how international diplomacy works. In this particular case, if WHO wants continued support from China, then you need to carefully balance what and how you criticize. Nobody is helped if China leaves the WHO or next time doesn't even tell anybody that a pandemic is coming for fear of being bullied for this kind of thing. I'm sure the responsible bodies (lab people) will learn their lesson and be more careful going forward. That's the only thing we can hope for nonetheless. It's unrealistic to think China would be punished and all their labs shut down. This won't happen.
[+] [-] rkagerer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeyouse|3 years ago|reply
https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g...
Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing (e.g. whether it's a natural virus that escaped or an engineered one, how different lineages showed up at the market, which lab it allegedly escaped from since the WIV campus is much further from the market compared to the CCDC, etc etc).
China is a bad actor and definitely contributed to the conspiracy madness around the virus by being so shut-down and performing such a half-assed investigation but unfortunately they would have done the same whether the virus came to be via the same animal trade that caused the last SARS outbreak or if there was some secret Wuhan project.
[+] [-] stetrain|3 years ago|reply
1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic
2) Unlike the nuclear analogy in the article, pandemic virus outbreaks happen naturally, and fairly frequently. Combined with the huge increase in global travel, when one does happen it can be around the world in every airport before anyone has even identified it.
So in the big picture this type of outbreak seems inevitable, not anomalous or inherently preventable.
Understanding the origin, either by cross-species origination or a laboratory containment breach, is indeed important and significant and should be pursued, but I also understand why the search for that answer isn't at the top of the 24-hour news cycle.
[+] [-] ShannonLimiter|3 years ago|reply
I have the opposite opinion.
If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread. That could have saved millions of lives.
We spent the first several months of the pandemic under the belief that it wasn't airborne. This ended up being false.
If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe and continuing without appropriate safeguards puts us at great risk.
[+] [-] hammock|3 years ago|reply
You list some reasons, and I have in my mind a different reason.
There was a media blackout on the lab leak hypothesis because China put the kibosh on it, and since the US is dependent on Chinese exports for healthcare, PPE, defense and other critical supply lines, we did not want to piss them off.
Direction to the media for this blackout came from the US State Dept, and Mike Pompeo confirmed as much in semi-public comments that I will link if I ever find them again.
edit: this isn't the source I was thinking of, and it fingers the IC not State. I will keep looking https://www.newsweek.com/mike-pompeo-intel-officials-wuhan-l...
[+] [-] Trufa|3 years ago|reply
Came or not from a lab, SynBio and gain of functions experiments have the potential of re-doing this of way worse.
So basically the only truly important response that is not damage containment is to prevent this from happening (or happen again).
Honestly beside fringe groups I don’t see any initiatives happening, if it was up to me I’d kick gain of function experiments into the same realm as chemical weapons.
[+] [-] remflight|3 years ago|reply
What??? I honestly expect more from HN readers than blatant china-apologists.
OF COURSE it changes the consequences! We tell China to hand over all research and distribute it to scientists around the world so that research doesn’t start from ground 0. If it could have accelerated understanding of the virus by several months, imagine how many lives could have been saved!
Instead China deleted all their files and kept quiet. They literally don’t care about millions of deaths.
[+] [-] user3939382|3 years ago|reply
I've seen Rand Paul credibly grilling Fauci on this issue a number of times and each time, the propaganda machine on reddit came out to damage control for Fauci.
The larger problem, beyond whether we funded this or not, whether or not it was a bat, is that the media and leaders in the government have repeatedly shown themselves to be completely undeserving of trust and so you're left guessing what the truth is with whatever limited information you have access to.
[+] [-] daxfohl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fleddr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpbriggs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johndfsgdgdfg|3 years ago|reply
The only reason we can't find evidence because other countries wouldn't collaborate, for obvious reasons. Racists are trying to blame China because of lack of competence of their leaders.
[+] [-] 127|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] theptip|3 years ago|reply
Even if this one wasn’t a lab leak, the next one very well could be. The risk/reward profile of that sort of research is insanely unfavorable.
[+] [-] qbasic_forever|3 years ago|reply
Look at what variants like Omicron BA.5 and BA.4 have evolved into, they are quite possibly the most infectious and dangerous air spread pathogens known to man. These didn't come from a lab, we cooked them up by dropping all mitigations and pretending the pandemic was over instead of quashing this virus for good.
[+] [-] dehrmann|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayesian_horse|3 years ago|reply
So it's not clear at all that gain of function would have been able to create a Virus like Sars-Cov-2 out of a hypothetical bat virus. And there is no evidence any such research has been going on. Nor is there any evidence the virus has passed through the Wuhan lab in question at all.
[+] [-] azekai|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andai|3 years ago|reply
>A lab worker was bitten and infected by a mouse infected with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant at a high-biosecurity facility in Taipei.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
[+] [-] xadhominemx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sixQuarks|3 years ago|reply
This is why free speech is important, it is impossible to rely on “fact checkers”.
[+] [-] WithinReason|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
Biosecurity incidents are shockingly common.
[+] [-] mathieubordere|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] affgrff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rossdavidh|3 years ago|reply
The profession which knows enough to settle this question, thus has a massive conflict of interest. We cannot expect bankers to say that the response to the GFC should be to break up banks. We cannot expect generals after a war to say that they screwed up. We cannot expect intelligence agencies to say that they should have less power and more oversight. Scientists are human, they want to keep their job and not have to move to another city to do it.
What is actually going to happen, is nothing, until and unless a second lab leak kills a lot of people.
[+] [-] fguerraz|3 years ago|reply
It doesn't help solve the crisis.
The article makes the comparison with a nuclear bomb. This is a bad comparison. If we were attacked by a sentient creature, we could reason with it and mitigate further damage or escalation.
In the case of a virus, it's good to know to prevent future pandemics maybe, and there is an academic interests, but it doesn't help with the current situation.
[+] [-] synergy20|3 years ago|reply
Wuhan is a huge city with the only lab on earth that works with SARS, virus-leak is not uncommon in China over the years(including SARS-1 that was leaked a few times but was contained quickly), after COVID China issued lots of new policies including stricter lab management, and new leadership from military to be in charge of Wuhan lab, and hide the initial samples of COVID, and started a diplomatic propaganda to paint USA as the virus maker.
[+] [-] throwawaymaths|3 years ago|reply
1. We would find evidence that someone was doing experiments on furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses.
2. We would find that the furin cleavage site matched a known sequence.
We did not find 2, which should have been easy to find. Eventually, we found 1, since a rejected DARPA grant proposal affiliated with the lab in Wuhan emerged.
Then, we found 2!! with a plausible explanation of why no one had found it earlier -- you had to turn on "patented sequence search" on NCBI blast, which is turned off by default. An easy mistake to make. As a professional biochemist for a decade I had no idea that blast had a patent sequence search, much less that it was turned off by default (which, btw is a sensible setting).
The scientific method says given a model it should make independent predictions (ideally unlikely) which are later verified. The evidence for a lab leak should be considered relatively strong.
[+] [-] kernal|3 years ago|reply
> Our book received praise from readers: we received letters and emails from senior scientists, politicians, businessmen, journalists, and others commending it as a non-fiction whodunnit.
>All that was gratifying. But it stood in marked contrast to the reaction in much of the media. CNN invited us on to discuss the book then cancelled at the last minute — at the behest of their health editor. The BBC simply ignored the book altogether, as did the other mainstream US and UK networks.
The mainstream media is the enemy
[+] [-] mr_gibbins|3 years ago|reply
Embarrassing one of the world's superpowers is broadly seen as an undesirable thing to do.
Ergo, scientists producing findings backing up the hypothesis will find plenty of opponents whose first and only job is to discredit them in any way possible, from denying their papers publication (looking at you, ResearchGate) to publicly attacking them on social media (Dr. Malone).
[+] [-] YeBanKo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cupertino95014|3 years ago|reply
If you call yourself a "scientist" you have an ethical duty to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Perhaps not in the formal sense of a doctor's Hippocratic oath, but in the tradition of Galileo and Copernicus.
[+] [-] khazhoux|3 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8&t=178s
[+] [-] BiteCode_dev|3 years ago|reply
Like, without the Thanos thingy, iron man is not a bloody hero, he is a villain. He is responsible for so much death and destruction it's not even funny. Black Mamba, killer. Black panther ? Maintains in place a political system that clearly allows any psychopath to access absolute power. Hulk, a time bomb. Thor ? He let his genocidal brother of the hook as soon as he is nice for 2 minutes. Spiderman ? Give an deadly bot swarm to the first father figure that smiles at him. Dr Strange ? Accept the request to GHB the planet and almost destroys it because a kid ask for it for 30 seconds.
It's a well known trope in sups stories, but for some reasons a lot of viewers really believes they are heroes. Even as a kid I though Batman was stupid for spending times fighting one criminal at a time with all his money.
Now, we are seeing a lot of this in today's IRL world.
Progress is saving you by giving you drugs for all the diseases it increases: diabetes, cancer, obesity, hormonal dysfunctions, etc. It's giving you a car so that you can you can go work in a remote place you would never have to work to without progress. It gives you software to organize your day to fit all the thing you would not have to do without progress.
Ok, it's tongue in cheek. I love progress.
But still.
[+] [-] walls|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danesparza|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OrvalWintermute|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VoodooJuJu|3 years ago|reply
If the hypothesis is investigated and proven true, powerful people stand to face justice, which is of course unacceptable to these very people, and so the idea has been banned by way of media silence and by way of association with other unauthorized politics, i.e. with those who are right of center.
[+] [-] booleandilemma|3 years ago|reply
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