Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2021/03/22/why-covid-lab-leak-theory-wuhan-shouldnt-dismissed-column/4765985001/

by ruaraidh • 5 years ago

1167 936 5 years ago

eu.usatoday.com

Scoundreller• 5 years ago

I’m sure everyone here can appreciate the difference between development and manufacturing.

While I agree that it’s extremely unlikely that a lab developed this virus, it’s far more plausible for one to have manufactured it.

brippalcharrid2• 5 years ago

What makes you think it's "extremely unlikely" that this virus was developed in a lab, and who do you think you're agreeing with?

“It was very unlikely that anything could escape from such a place,” Ben Embarek said during the Feb. 9 WHO press conference, citing the team’s discussions with Wuhan lab officials about their safety protocols and audits. “If you look at the history of lab accidents, these are extremely rare events.”
Yet lab accidents aren’t rare.
What’s rare are accidents causing documented outbreaks. But those have happened, including in 2004 when two researchers at a lab in Beijing unknowingly became infected with another type of SARS coronavirus, sparking a small outbreak that killed one person.
In the weeks since leaving Wuhan, the WHO’s team has been questioned about its independence and depth, including by the Biden administration, amid media reports that China denied the team access to raw data on possible COVID-19 cases that were identified during the earliest part of the outbreak.
“We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement last month. “It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government.”

Why is the distinction between development and manufacturing relevant here? Have you read the article?

Simulacra2• 5 years ago

While I agree with your statement, please do not insinuate or ask if the commenter has read the article. It is against the rules. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

0-_-0• 5 years ago

For anyone who wants to set their Bayesian priors to estimate the probability of a lab leak I recommend this list:

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.

offby37years• 5 years ago

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology is one of only two BSL–4 labs in China.

robin212• 5 years ago

BSL-4 level lab put into operation in January 2018

And only 2 years later we have an outbreak

AdamJacobMuller2• 5 years ago

Lab 257 is an amazing book about germ research labs. It fascinated me both with how hard it is to contain diseases under ideal conditions (lab 257 was on an island miles from anything inhabited) and how poor of a job people who should have known better, the actual virologists and people with MDs, did at containing diseases they were researching.

https://www.amazon.com/Lab-257-Disturbing-Governments-Labora...

Warning: this book is non-fiction and is scary.

ceejayoz4• 5 years ago

Warning: this book is non-fiction and is scary.

It may be scary, but it's not non-fiction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_257#Discredited_consp...

A discredited 2004 book entitled Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory fueled the conspiracy theories. Archived specimens show that Lyme disease was endemic well before the establishment of Plum Island laboratory. Additionally, Lyme disease was never a topic of research at Plum Island, according to the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Agriculture.

astura2• 5 years ago

That book is a work of fiction. The summary on Amazon itself is incredibly laughable (Plum island is not "unmarked on most maps").

koheripbal13• 5 years ago

Also important to remember that the WIV had ongoing research in bat coronaviruses. Now that isn't unusual after SARS, but it does slightly make the theory more plausible.

throwawaysea7• 5 years ago

Also, the Obama administration banned gain of function research broadly due to "biosafety incidents" at federal research labs in the US. The announcement explicitly called out research on SARS: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/10/17/doing-d...

ricksunny4• 5 years ago

further priors-updating: SARS escaped from the lab 4 times - Once each in Singapore and Taiwan, and yes twice in Beijing:

https://twitter.com/mattwridley/status/1351198664950128641?s...

https://gillesdemaneuf.medium.com/the-good-the-bad-and-the-u...

benlumen• 5 years ago

Related - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26389690 (In 2018, US Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan Lab - politico.com)

neonate• 5 years ago

Also - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25640323 (The Lab Leak Hypothesis - nymag.com)

Pyramus12• 5 years ago

Please check the actual cables before jumping to conclusions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26447042

neartheplain• 5 years ago

“If you actually read the cables [...]”

Link?

EMM_3862• 5 years ago

MIT Technology Review, last week:

"Did the coronavirus leak from a lab? These scientists say we shouldn’t rule it out."

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/18/1021030/coronavi...

Simulacra2• 5 years ago

I think it's possible the virus leaked from a lab in China, but it's also possible it was transmitted in the wild a la "wet markets". Either way, regrettably due to Chinese propaganda and tight controls on speech and the press, it is highly unlikely the world will get an open and honest investigation from the Chinese government. The PRC simply cannot be trusted, which sadly has added immense fuel to all conspiracy theories involving that nation.

I think the Wuhan/COVID/Coronavirus can be compared to the Soviet government's response to Chernobyl. Great efforts were made to keep a lid on that disaster from the people, and the world, until it was too great to ignore. Granted, a long time ago, but it's an example of what a totalitarian government (like China) might do in the face of such catastrophe.

AnimalMuppet• 5 years ago

My own idea is a combination of the two. I wonder if it leaked out of the lab by a lab employee trying to make some money on the side by selling lab animals to the wet market. (Note well: This is just my "seems kind of plausible" guess. I have no actual evidence to support it. And no, it's not actually "my own" idea - I heard it suggested by someone, who also had no evidence that I recall.)

PicassoCTs• 5 years ago

半混蛋 So you say, it was the janitor, with dead lab animals, in the wet market, making some surplus money?

I assumed it was the gardener, in the dining room, with the hatchet..

Its almost as if the whole human species could not be trusted with dangerous tools and regularly drops the ball.

These wet-market are such a medieval relic and all just because of superstitious nonsense about refrigerated food being bad for your chi.

Homeopathy, TMC and how those shamanistic practices are all called wherever by whomever kill. 2.7 million so far...

Even worser, when you think about all those other "tech" miracles enlightenment zealots insist humanity can be entrusted. We blow a nuclear power plant every ten years, drop the vials like they are hot, but hey more power into each pocket.

Cant wait for the first long-range flying car, getting hacked and used in a remote attack. That surely will be the day, someone will admit that tech is limited,not by what can be done, but by who gets to wield it.

Makes one wonder though, that day i entrusted that vital system for millions, to that upstream repo.. was i the janitor that day..

michaelmrose• 5 years ago

This is an extremely poor theory formulated by blindly speculating and then skipping the step where one gathers evidence for or against or even considers whether the idea even makes sense in theory.

Nobody would sell lab animals from a virology lab to markets to eat. The consequences are obvious, animals would be accounted for, the risk would be extremely high to the persons future, and the profits small.

It's the kind of ideas you find on racist conspiracy theory blogs and you shouldn't share it here.

daly• 5 years ago

For expert opinion on this subject listen to actual virologists. They do a podcast about 2-3 times a week.

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/

ciupicri• 5 years ago

So I should listen to all podcasts?

wolfram74• 5 years ago

Podcasts run on a given domain run by domain experts are certainly a good step above, epistemologically speaking, than a lot of news source on said domain. Obviously you can't be 100% sure any statement about the physical world is true, so you know, believe what you want.

TearsInTheRain• 5 years ago

Their main argument in the podcast is that the scientist in the lab says that they were not working on this virus and "even with the central control of china there is no way they could keep that secret". That argument is not going to hold a lot of water with people

coliveira3• 5 years ago

That argument is not going to hold a lot of water with people

Yeah, because people prefer to hold their pet conspiracy theories.

ekianjo5• 5 years ago

"even with the central control of china there is no way they could keep that secret"

Funny, we have thousands of people in certain countries in three letters organizations who can keep secrets just fine.

jacknews• 5 years ago

They don't cite any evidence to refute a lab accident, and the 'clubby' atmosphere raises suspicion that they dismiss the possibility on the grounds that 'we're all professionals, free to say what we want, free from government coercion, etc', but perhaps that does not reflect reality.

refenestrator7• 5 years ago

There's no evidence to refute, though, besides the fact that the lab exists. It's pure speculation either way.

Graffur3• 5 years ago

Something that has been exposed a lot during this pandemic: expert opinions

ekianjo5• 5 years ago

Oh yeah, how reliable the experts were all along during this pandemic. We should be so glad we had them from day 1.

pretendscholar• 5 years ago

Could you summarize their arguments rather than drop a content bomb and run away? Its really lazy and unproductive.

hfjfktkrkf3• 5 years ago

Ok then. Let's watch TWiV 615, where they interview Peter Daszak, the virologist which headed the recent WHO origin seeking mission in China.

Listen to him talk about how easy is to modify coronaviruses in labs and how they are actually doing this, mixing and matching viruses at 29:50:

Well, coronaviruses are pretty good... you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot what happens in a coronavirus. Zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can bulid a protein, and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this, insert into the backbone of another virus, and do some work in the lab, so you can get more predictive, when you find a sequence.

https://youtu.be/IdYDL_RK--w

kangnkodos• 5 years ago

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_257#Discredited_consp...

ceejayoz4• 5 years ago

Archived specimens show that Lyme disease was endemic well before the establishment of Plum Island laboratory.
Additionally, Lyme disease was never a topic of research at Plum Island, according to the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Agriculture.

These are facts, too, in your link. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

AdamJacobMuller2• 5 years ago

You should read the actual book, because it addresses both of these points.

crx07• 5 years ago

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.

Ancapistani• 5 years ago

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.

SpicyLemonZest4• 5 years ago

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.

Are they? I'm not aware of this trend, or of any other major species barrier crossings in Hubei. (If you're thinking of the original SARS, that started in Guangdong, two provinces to the south.)

is-ought• 5 years ago

Can you link to something that proves this is the criteria used for lab placement?

goatinaboat2• 5 years ago

were placed randomly around the world, you'd be correct - but they're not. They're placed near locations

The world’s foremost institute for tropical medicine is in London, England. So that debunks that idea.

garmaine9• 5 years ago

Wuhan is around thousand kilometers away from where this virus supposedly originated from.

But the Wuhan lab did receive samples in 2019 from miners who died in 2012 from an infection of a novel coronavirus that resulted in symptoms very similar to COVID-19.

https://nypost.com/2020/08/15/covid-19-first-appeared-in-chi...

That’s a complete coincidence though and you’re bigoted for thinking there could possibly be a connection! /s

angio2• 5 years ago

Another selection bias is that we can't say if the virus originated there, but only that it was first detected there. Even if it originated in the countryside hundreds of miles away it makes sense it was detected only after it spread to a city with the labs to discover the virus.

autokad2• 5 years ago

china has 100 cities with over a million people in them. Only one has a lab specializing in corona virus research.

goatcode2• 5 years ago

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.

But if a lighthouse manufactured coral reefs, and the coral reefs on which ships were running aground displayed features of those that a given lighthouse manufactured, it might be more accurate.

esja22• 5 years ago

Wuhan is nowhere near the caves where these bat viruses have been found. It's over 1800 kilometres to Southwest Yunnan, for example.

gregwebs3• 5 years ago

China is a big country. Wuhan is 900km away from the bat caves that are believed to be the breeding ground for these viruses.

tripletao15• 5 years ago

People keep saying this, but it's not true; SARS-like viruses haven't been found in nature near Wuhan. In the words of Dr. Shi herself:

We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.

https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli...

ch4s32• 5 years ago

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?

bpodgursky2• 5 years ago

Not really. The lab is in a major city, and imported samples from all over China (and the rest of the world).

The hypothesized bat in question, if it was really a wet-market outbreak, was imported from hundreds of miles away.

loveistheanswer6• 5 years ago

If we have no say in whether or not scientists should be creating super viruses (a.k.a. weapons of mass destruction), I'd prefer they do so somewhere like Antarctica or on a space station, not in the middle of a city.

abecedarius• 5 years ago

The claim I've read is that the bats live thousands of miles away. We shouldn't need to speculate.

ch4s32• 5 years ago

After giving this a few hours of thought, I now think it's all most likely a coincidence base on presently available evidence, for what that's worth.

minblaster• 5 years ago

If I wanted to study zoonotic viruses, I would put labs in places filled with universities or government agencies focused on disease, like Boston, Atlanta, Maryland.

Tell me about that lab in the Congo again.

totalZero2• 5 years ago

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.

echelon3• 5 years ago

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.

The US relies on Chinese manufacturing. If trade ends, the West will suffer. Consumer and industrial goods can't be built, which could incredibly damage the economy.

Manufacturing is shifting to other countries - Vietnam, India, etc. It's been driven by rising costs in China, but we're seeing an acceleration to de-risk the supply chain. TSM is being asked to build fabs in the US. Slowly, the most strategic pieces are being maneuvered.

China is building up its navy to protect itself. If they lose the South China Sea, they could be blockaded and starved of energy, resources, and food. They're building to reach parity with the US Navy or even outgun it, and they're trying to stall long enough that they can win should there be an encounter.

The US and its allies are ramping up criticism of China, and you can see it in diplomatic activity, news, and social media. The rhetoric will grow until they're ready to shift from soft negotiations to taking a hard line.

The game is being played right now.

hetspookjee2• 5 years ago

I don't understand why WHO is selling it's creditiblity in trade for politics. What is there to gain? Perhaps I am too short sighted but I cannot believe that this is ever the right compromise to take.

I also don't understand why they even had the slighest faith in a reliable investigation. After all these months of pushing back on researching accessing the site, they still bowed to their whims. How does this help the argument that it's better to just suck it up?

One thing I am really interested in to read more on is a historians analysis of the parallels one can draw from the period rising up to World War 2, and more importantly, how the rest of the world acted back then. When Germany was dissolving all their democratic processes, and started labellling jews, what did the rest of the world do? What did their neighbours do? Did they just happily keep on conducting business?

I have read slightly into it, but placing the responses of the countries at that time in the right context really requires some solid knowledge of history. If anyone knows interesting articles to read about the responses of the world during that time: I'm very interested.

goatinaboat2• 5 years ago

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

If it came from somewhere else, why wasn’t the outbreak noticed there first, is the million dollar question. It requires some serious mental gymnastics at this point to believe it didn’t originate in that lab. The only real question is if it was released deliberately.

roywiggins4• 5 years ago

Because winter is flu season, and most of the time the symptoms are impossible to distinguish, even when you're looking?

Sure, China has way more public health capacity than it used to, but we know that COVID can spread silently in a community for a month without anyone noticing, even when we are looking. It happened in California and Seattle in January 2020. Why wouldn't that have happened in, say, rural China in October?

Aunche2• 5 years ago

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?

x3n0ph3n3• 5 years ago

Evidence points to it _not_ being from the wet markets in China:

https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-did-not-start-at-wuhan-...

lixtra• 5 years ago

the earliest cases of Covid were all connected to the same wet market.

This claim has less weight if China does not share the raw data.

[1] https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/who-experts-want-more-data-f...

tossaway12321• 5 years ago

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

echelon3• 5 years ago

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

A leak that results in 2.7 million worldwide deaths will not result in "more stringent worldwide rules for reporting leaks". It would result in economic reparations and possibly war.

Leak or not, it's in China's interest to prevent the blame from falling on them. The narrative here is an incredibly powerful geopolitical tool.

asdff• 5 years ago

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.

pmiller24• 5 years ago

That's a good point. I have a hard time as well believing anyone who was even coming close to following BSL-4 protocols would get infected with this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#Biosafety_leve...

Zenst2• 5 years ago

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.

kmeisthax• 5 years ago

Molecular dating studies place a hard limit on index cases at October 2019. Anything earlier and the virus should have mutated more than it has.

Someone who broke into a Wuhan coronavirus research lab in summer 2019 and broke containment of our hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 precursor virus samples would have been infected too early for our timeline.

colllectorof• 5 years ago

Look, dude, leading experts have looked at this claim and said there is nearly zero chance this has was a lab leak:

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?

AzzieElbab2• 5 years ago

The WHO and Peter Daszak also said they weren’t given enough access to develop any deliberate conclusions.

xdavidliu2• 5 years ago

I have no strong opinions on this matter, but I'm having difficulty understanding the sarcasm here. Can someone translate for me? Is the un-sarcastic version of parent's argument that most of the claims against this being a leak were put forth by a single organization, EcoHealth Alliance, which has an agenda for convincing people that this is not a leak?

esja22• 5 years ago

You're also forgetting that these people are scientists. Scientists only look at the facts and are completely unbiased - they aren't like normal humans, who might be worried about their entire livelihoods being cancelled (or worse) if the world realises their research is too dangerous to exist. And scientists who work for political organisations are the most unbiased of all. /s

hootbootscoot2• 5 years ago

"Look, dude," RNA mutates due to many environmental factors. It's why living organisms typically now use DNA and only short-term usage of RNA for copying purposes, certainly not as the primary data store.

RNA mutations mimicking proteins are precisely how a non-living entity can, like a bike-thief trying combinations randomly, unlock the lipid or protein sheaths on animal cells and gain direct access to the inputs of a genetic reproduction machine inside the cell.

So, aside from the fact that these folks only have some circumstantial evidence and woo to suggest a lab hypothesis, (not EVEN a theory, not EVEN a hypothesis, nay, mere speculation with a vested political axe to grind, hello) and that fact that all factual evidence of how all previous cross-species virus hops occurred point to this being a relatively common occurence (1918 avian-porcine-human connection occurred in Kansas by the way, not "Spanish")

umm sure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_hydrolysis

boringg7• 5 years ago

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.

esja22• 5 years ago

I'd also assign a small but non-zero probability to the US not wanting to point the finger because they prefer the scenario where the general population comes to believe that the lab accident was responsible, but no hard evidence is ever produced.

Why? Because it seems like US institutions and people (right up to Fauci) were involved in this research and may not want the domestic blowback.

Conveniently the CCP don't want a paper trail either.

I'd be pretty sure the various scenarios have already been gamed out in both countries.

Edit: Not sure why this is being downvoted, but just in case it’s a reflex because I mentioned Fauci: yes, he was head of NIAID, and yes, the NIH did fund this type of research at the WIV. The grants are public information.

pmiller24• 5 years ago

What about that article convinced you? All I saw was some concern about safety protocols 2 years before the outbreak, some content free insinuations, and a whole lot of "we don't have any evidence."

It's not a crazy theory by any means, but, if it happened, then there's evidence. So, where is the evidence? Literally, where is there any actual evidence it happened?

DiogenesKynikos9• 5 years ago

The Politico article is extremely dishonest. Josh Rogin has been claiming for a year now that US diplomats raised red flags about the WIV's safety. He wrote an article to this effect a year ago, based on diplomatic cables he had seen. Then the Washington Post obtained the full cables, and it turned out that Rogin had seriously mischaracterized them. They do not claim that the WIV has unsafe practices - only that its newest lab is still (2 years before officially opening) training personnel and can't yet run at full capacity. It asks the US government to continue its training program for WIV scientists. Yet Rogin continues to misrepresent the cables.

soperj5• 5 years ago

I'm confused, do you think SARS was also escaped from the lab, or just COVID?

wnoise• 5 years ago

Covid is the COrona VIrus Disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is somewhat, but not extremely closely related to the SARS-CoV-1 virus, which caused the original SARS disease.

autokad2• 5 years ago

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?

not buying it.

drran2• 5 years ago

You may want to read this article:

https://jglobalbiosecurity.com/articles/10.31646/gbio.41/

codezero3• 5 years ago

My favorite conspiracy theory bend on this is that it’s the best place to intentionally release it too, especially if WIV is absolutely not studying anything like COVID-19 because it looks so appealing to dig into the bio safety level four lab, but there’s probably nothing there so it will be eventually dismissed.

All that said I think it is really unlikely and a pointless effort as government bureaucracies wouldn’t be able to even formulate a reaction to an intentional or even accidental release so I think we will not try too hard to imply that for political reasons.

jariel2• 5 years ago

The WHO will never look where they don't want the answer to be found and will actively work against it.

The chair of the WHO (Tedros Adhanom) [1] was a communist rebel (Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front) fighter in north africa and his career has been sponsored and guided by China for this reason.

They won't suppress findings made internally because it would be too hard to cover up - but they will 'do the least' with respect to finding answers.

Only the US has enough power and wherewithal to even try to do something, but they'll be kept out direct, so it boils down to how sophisticated the US clandestine efforts are in China.

My completely speculative guess is that US operating ability in China is 'really bad' and that they've already barked up that tree and found nothing conclusive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tedros_Adhanom

throwawaysea7• 5 years ago

I'm also waiting for people to admit that the dubious ban of Zero Hedge from Twitter (later reinstated) for bringing up this theory and "doxxing" the lab head was all made in bad faith (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/01/twitter...). It's crazy how words like "doxxing" can lose all coherent meaning and be used to describe this blog post, where they simply posted the publicly listed information of the public face of the lab, fully visible from the Wuhan lab's own website. This authoritarian act of censorship and the biased news media coverage that followed led to further censorship, where discussions exploring the possibility of accidental lab leaks were banned on places like Medium or other social media. This is why free speech matters as a fundamental principle and this is why we must hold all tech platforms accountable to protect free speech.

nl• 5 years ago

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.

What better place to put a lab studying bat viruses than near a place where they originate?

That's a pretty frequent occurrence.

traveler01• 5 years ago

It's very possible and shouldn't be dismissed at all. But we will never know since the CCP has already covered its tracks (not saying it was on purpose, but a clearly an accident covered by the CCP).

mancerayder4• 5 years ago

How soon before stuff like this is marked as misinformation if it isn't coming from established media outlets? You know, dangerous conspiracy theories, and all that. Real world consequences, etc. and so forth.

wallawe• 5 years ago

Are you saying an opinion piece stating that we should leave open the possibility of a leak is misinformation? That doesn't make any sense.

hn_throwaway_994• 5 years ago

Not OP, but I'm assuming he was arguing that, given that the major social media platforms have said they will remove any Covid information that is misleading, would they even allow posts like this "suggesting the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak is plausible".

Note Facebook has previously explicitly banned posts "falsely claiming the virus is man-made". Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/02/08/965390755/facebook-widens-ban...

bedhead• 5 years ago

I guess you haven’t been paying attention to what’s happening with tech companies who get to control types of media.

mancerayder4• 5 years ago

No, I was echoing the mainstream media and many articles - including on this very site - pushing and wishing and demanding a crackdown on misinformation. And I sarcastically asked the crowd whether this article means only mainstream media outlets are allowed, permitted, to suggest conspiracies.

0xcafecafe• 5 years ago

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).

loveistheanswer6• 5 years ago

While I would trust the worldwide scientific community for covid origin theories

Which scientific community are you referring to? There are countless scientists who have been arguing against the risks of gain of function research for many years. Why are pro-gain of function scientists deathly silent now about the supposed benefits of their research?

jMyles• 5 years ago

I had the same thought. Maybe it's just the crowd I run with, but criticism of gain-of-function research (certainly including informed speculation of a lab escape for this coronavirus) seem very mainstream to me.

jtdev4• 5 years ago

That’s curious. I wonder if the frozen seafood origin hypothesis holds any merit, or if it’s just an attempt by the CCP to divert attention from what seems to be the far more likely lab leak hypothesis... I’m inclined to believe that the CCP is being disingenuous.

dang13• 5 years ago

Please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN—especially on divisive topics. The guidelines are clear on this, and we ban accounts that break them repeatedly. Given that we've had to warn you half a dozen times now, it's time for you to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this.

jtdev4• 5 years ago

My apologies, I was simply trying to make a sarcastic observation regarding the ridiculousness of one of the CCP's bogus explanations for the virus origin.

Graffur3• 5 years ago

As someone else who has been unfairly flagged on this thread, I will stand up for jtdev. A quick scan of their profile and posts show they have been here 2-3 years. They have a small number of on topic submissions about CEOs, technologies and science. Their posts are normal enough. There's the obvious theme that they're not in the Woke club though.

waynesonfire• 5 years ago

This is definitely not my area of expertise but:

role of furin cleavage site in covid:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-020-0184-0

"In fact, no influenza virus with a furin cleavage site has ever been found in nature,"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7435492/

Where did this mutation come from?

bugzz• 5 years ago

It's never been found in an influenza virus in nature, but covid isn't an influenza virus. Is this never found in coronaviruses in nature?

tshaddox• 5 years ago

From that second link:

Although they only emerge under artificial conditions in influenza viruses, these furin cleavage sites are found within several branches of the coronavirus family tree. However SARS‐CoV‐2 is the only lineage B coronavirus found with one, and the only other coronaviruses known to have them are only at most 60% identical to this novel coronavirus.

wahern• 5 years ago

"Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses", https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...

duxup2• 5 years ago

I wouldn't dismiss it.

I just haven't seen any evidence of it that I think 'proves' it.

roywiggins4• 5 years ago

Serious coronaviruses have jumped into people like, twice in the last 20 years entirely naturally[0], and so many more people have contact with animals outside of labs than within labs (orders of magnitude!), that it seems much more likely that SARS-CoV-2 jumped the same way than any lab-leak idea. Like, it's physically possible, and it would be important to know if that's what happened- people shouldn't dismiss it!- but I don't know how much it should be entertained as a real likelihood.

[0] natural insofar as humans intruding onto wildlife is natural

sudosysgen2• 5 years ago

Serious cornaviruses jumped into people probably dozens of times in the last 20 years, and caused 3 epidemics, not two.

wrnr• 5 years ago

The link between the Wuhan lab and the virus is circumstantial, sure it's strange the virus shows up in a city with the only level 4 biolab in China where they research corona viruses, but only if the virus did originate from Wuhan. I don't think we know all the corona viruses in the wild and who was patient zero was.

koheripbal13• 5 years ago

Well it doesn't help that they've blocked the investigation.

tantalor2• 5 years ago

Easy answer: it's impossible to prove a negative.

In this case, that the lab was not responsible.

Delk• 5 years ago

You can't prove it, but apparently you can try to find evidence to see if it seems likely:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200317175442.h...

tantalor2• 5 years ago

It can be both! The lab could have mishandled a natural specimen, causing first human infection.

bootlooped2• 5 years ago

How do we prove that accused people are not guilty of crimes then?

stonogo2• 5 years ago

In the US courts system, we do not. People are presumed innocent, and the burden of proof is on the prosecution.

tim33311• 5 years ago

We may find proof of a zoonotic origin away from the lab.

kneel2• 5 years ago

IMO it's very likely to have originated in a lab leak. It doesn't matter much however since there is no evidence, and any evidence of such will likely be covered up.

Being culpable for a disaster on this scale would be unprecedented in the economic reparations, so much so that we'll likely never find the origins.

duxup2• 5 years ago

Being culpable for a disaster on this scale would be unprecedented in the economic reparations

I duno if that would ever really happen. I think much like a lot of things, concerns about Uyghurs it would just dissolve into the diplomatic and economic seas.

ekianjo5• 5 years ago

Being culpable for a disaster on this scale would be unprecedented in the economic reparations

True. And not just economic reparations, you can imagine diplomatic relations and all would be severely impacted.

theptip2• 5 years ago

it's very likely to have originated in a lab leak

What evidence is informing this belief? i.e. what is your model for assigning "P>0.5" to the probability here? For example do you think the SARS outbreak circa 2002 was also a lab escape?

kneel2• 5 years ago

You misquoted me, I said 'IMO...'

I've worked in several labs, created several viruses (non-pathogenic) myself. People are careless, did you read the article?

Johnny555• 5 years ago

I think that's how so many conspiracy theories spread. "IMO, I think it's very likely that the moon landings were faked. It doesn't matter since there is no evidence of the fake landings and any evidence of such will likely be covered up, like the way they got scientists to pretend that there are retroreflectors on the moon".

As long as people believe that evidence is covered up, then they can believe anything.

airhead969• 5 years ago

It's easier to believe in a grand conspiracy to make one seem special and part of a tribe than accept the banality, incompetence, chaos, and coincidences of reality.

lettergram• 5 years ago

If I recall correctly, Fauci’s org funded gain of function research on corona viruses.

https://asiatimes.com/2020/04/why-us-outsourced-bat-virus-re...

Surely they’ve been receiving reports on progress, if so I’m sure there could be a match.

Similarly, I believe there were scientists in India who determined the capsule which deploys the virus into cells looks exactly the same as the HIV mechanism.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Scientists-slam-Ind...

This kinda matches people testing positive for HIV in an Australian vaccine trial:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/world/australia/uq-corona...

softwaredoug• 5 years ago

New coronavirus pandemics like this aren’t novel. It’s thought many of the boring common cold coronaviruses we don’t think much of started as an outbreak sometime in the past crossing animal-human boundaries

One common cold coronavirus that circulates around had a common ancestor in 1890. Suspiciously timed with the Russian “Flu” pandemic of 1890-1891[1]

(Not that we can just discount the Wuhan lab theory, but a naturally occurring pandemic like this not that weird historically)

1 - https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-the-coronavir...

loveistheanswer6• 5 years ago

New coronavirus pandemics like this are novel. Not because it's a coronavirus, but because of how highly adapted and highly transmissible it has been since it was first "discovered". Other such viral outbreaks in recent decades were not nearly as transmissible

tamaharbor• 5 years ago

Like John Lennon sang, “All I want is the truth, just give me some truth”. Very hard to come by these days, especially if it has anything to do with ‘The Orange Man’.

loveistheanswer6• 5 years ago

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak

jtdev4• 5 years ago

I can't believe that Mr. Daszak is on the origins team... nothing like letting the accused do the investigation.

musha68k• 5 years ago

Interesting pointer there but his answer on the issue seems plausible as well. Apparently they were "just fishing for funding":

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.

loveistheanswer6• 5 years ago

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.

In no way whatsoever does that detract from a potential lab leak. The vast majority of viruses used in gain of function research are taken from natural reservoirs.

2-tpg11• 5 years ago

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.

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.

Leary2• 5 years ago

The virus acquired the traits that made it infectious to humans either through natural selection or bio-engineering.

If it was through natural selection, then it was likely such virus was going to cause a pandemic whether it was leaked by the lab or not, since presumably there's a natural reservoir of the virus.

tbenst9• 5 years ago

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.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

garmaine9• 5 years ago

I think you are confusing “lab leak” with “lab manufactured.”

karmasimida2• 5 years ago

Why would it be more feasible this virus is leaked from the lab other than some wild animals from the market itself?

Either can be equally believable yet impossible to prove.

tbenst9• 5 years ago

On the contrary. A leak implies that something was contained. Notwithstanding the complete lack of evidence for a leak—and one could waste a lifetime trying to disprove claims that have no evidence-if of natural origin, the virus was already infecting animals and/or people.

SpaceRaccoon5• 5 years ago

You are indeed misunderstanding the point.

Smallpox is also naturally originating virus. That doesn't prohibit it from leaking from a lab.

tbenst9• 5 years ago

The author is irresponsibility propagating a conspiracy theory and elevating its status in the public’s mind.

I’m a bioscientist. It’s frustrating to respond with evidence and in good faith, and be downvoted by those who simply disagree. But sadly it appears that the loudest voice prevails over reason.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00599-7

synergy203• 5 years ago

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.

notsobig3• 5 years ago

"urgent law at lightning speed" is unnecessary and extreme bias. It might tell me something if you included a source.

A rational actor would take the opportunity to do this regardless of whether or not the source was known at the time. If it were even a possibility, you would hope they would use the outbreak as a reminder to take containment practices as seriously as possible.

Whether or not to allow foreign investigators is a political decision. Maybe they calculated it would appear as an admission of guilt or incompetence.

esja22• 5 years ago

They also sent a Major General from the PLA to take over the lab. She since led the team which developed the Chinese vaccine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Wei_(medical_scientist)

tomp• 5 years ago

Misinformation.

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.

tbenst9• 5 years ago

If you’re open hearing new information and revising your position, please consider listening to the podcast from Nature that I linked to in another comment. It’s not controversial nor misleading to say that [edit: much of] the scientific community views the “lab leak” hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. The main segment starts around 6:30.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00599-7

Edit: wanted to highlight that, while the Lancet and other publications have highlighted the mainstream views that “lab leak” is a conspiracy theory, that there is a prominent minority of scientists that disagree: https://undark.org/2021/03/17/lab-leak-science-lost-in-polit...

throwawaysea7• 5 years ago

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.

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-...).

tripletao15• 5 years ago

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.

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.

tbenst9• 5 years ago

Thank you for this thoughtful post! I learned something and would like to revise my opinion. Also came across this excellent article that covers some of the scientific discussion: https://undark.org/2021/03/17/lab-leak-science-lost-in-polit....

I now think the lab leak hypothesis is worth considering, and regret labeling as a conspiracy theory, although I maintain the characterization that the lab leak hypothesis is frequently found alongside other conspiracy theories.

I also would maintain that the current consensus is that SARS-COV-2 came from natural spillover, and the leak hypothesis is a minority opinion, but one held by credible scientists with well-thought arguments and therefore worth considering. I wish the original article would cite this work.

s5300• 5 years ago

Not to go too off topic - but out of curiosity, wouldn't you consider something like the four pests campaign to be a much worse industrial accident in human history? Or is that stretching the definition of industrial a bit much.

SiempreViernes3• 5 years ago

Well, we do have statements from the WIV that none of their samples closely match the earliest SARS-CoV-2, but we can just assume they are just outright lying, right?

So, except for the fact that you must believe WIV did all these experiments in total secrecy (so that nobody outside heard of it while visiting, etc) and now won't admit to having done them, it's not a conspiracy theory.

tim33311• 5 years ago

From that paper's conclusion:

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)

coliveira3• 5 years ago

Except that experts have visited Wuhan and never found evidence of the theory proposed in this article. I think it is time to stop spreading even more disinformation about this deadly disease. If the US government had taken the virus seriously as the Chinese did, we most certainly wouldn't be in this situation.

garmaine9• 5 years ago

When did experts ever visit the labs in question?

koheripbal13• 5 years ago

China blocked investigators from going to Wuhan Institute of Virology.

coliveira3• 5 years ago

This is a conspiration theory, it doesn't matter how much the investigators do, they'll aways say that China is still hiding something.

sasaf5• 5 years ago

If the Chinese government had taken this virus seriously from the beginning the world wouldn't be in this situation.

weibing• 5 years ago

"I have heard so many news about a guy winning more than 100 millions from Powerball. I couldn't image that it won't happen to me in the future." That's my translation of this article.

temp89642• 5 years ago

Wow. Why every comment questioned your argument is downvoted or even dead?

is-ought 34 minutes ago [dead] [–]
Can you link to something that proves this is the criteria used for lab placement?

How is this even dead? It's only asking for a reference.

SpicyLemonZest4• 5 years ago

This is, unfortunately, one of the issues that's been extraordinarily moralized. I've encountered more than a few people who argue that questions about the lab leak theory are inherently bad faith.

enchiridion4• 5 years ago

Maybe, I'm more inclined to believe it's some classic astroturfing.

HN will normally answer questions in good faith, even controversial ones.

btilly3• 5 years ago

Clearly there are a bunch of people voting down anything that is too critical of China.

WHY there are a bunch of people voting that down I leave to others to speculate. But I'm going to vote up any verifiable factual statements that have been voted down.

Fricken• 5 years ago

There are no pertinent facts anywhere in this thread. There are no pertinent facts available. We just don't know, and likely won't ever know.

dang13• 5 years ago

HN has plenty of people who feel strongly on both sides of this issue. In my experience there are many more on your side than the other (probably by an order of magnitude)—certainly the number of times I've had to moderate comments breaking the site guidelines on China-related topics is over 10x lopsided, and no we're not looking to moderate one side more than the other. (Just the unpleasantness of being accused of ugly prejudice from every conceivable angle is enough to make one scrupulous to the point of paranoia about this.)

Each side is utterly convinced that the other side dominates the site and is sinisterly manipulating/astroturfing the community. None of these feelings is based on any reality that I've ever been able to observe. It's all imagination driven by emotion. When it comes to this topic, the main impression I gets from trying to keep this place in some semblance of guidelines-respecting order is one of mass-psychological, tribally motivated insanity.

chc3• 5 years ago

Can you link to something that proves this is only asking for a reference?

That's what the comment sounded like to me, and why I downvoted it. It does not come across to me as a good-faith request for a reference, and more like an attempt to DOS the conversation, similar to a Gish gallop. For example, it's asking for a specific link that constitutes proof of a general observation of tendency. That doesn't scream "reasonable request."

SpicyLemonZest4• 5 years ago

I don't see how any conversation could work under the standard you're proposing. The original comment was based on a wild assertion about the geographical placement of virology labs; no argument or evidence was offered, and it's not clear to me that there's any real trend it's referring to. If it's unreasonable to ask for a more detailed explanation of the assertion or specific evidence in favor of the assertion, how are people supposed to engage?

ajkjk• 5 years ago

It's not that wanting sources is bad, but a plausible-sounding claim may as well be argued against by providing sources to the contrary, or defend by providing sources in support. Demanding rigorous proof of an intuitive claim is not a good way to argue against it.

dang13• 5 years ago

That comment was killed by software, similarly to how comments by banned accounts are killed. It was later vouched for by other users, which unkilled it.

Please don't take HN threads on these lame meta tangents. They never go anywhere interesting, and people invariably just imagine scenarios that confirm whatever they already believe and get even more upset about it.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544490.

temp89642• 5 years ago

Please don't take HN threads on these lame meta tangents.

I genuinely don't understand what you are talking about.

Now am I being offensive or breaking some rules I am not aware of?

pnathan2• 5 years ago

I have three perspectives here I want to share.

(1) Let's address the glass windows in our own house first and tighten the US policies and culture. Secrecy is not a good idea here. Without even reflecting on Covid, it is clear the author has been dealing with this a while, and the US needs to improve. I am reminded of discussions on the old '50s/'60s nuclear culture...

(2) A year later, it may not be possible for the most honest, the most painstaking, the most independent reconstruction of the Wuhan lab events to properly track what occurred. Nor would it be per se politically doable. It might, however, be feasible for the Chinese official position to commit to an enhanced tightening of policies and culture around lab handling of specimens, in light of current events and looking forward.

(3) To a first approximation (the same one where Pi = 3), I don't care if Covid comes from a lab, a bat, a pig, or a chicken. I care that there are dead people, and that there was massive dysfunction globally & in a multipartisan way in the response, leading to more dead and disabled people...

pageandrew6• 5 years ago

1. The virus did not originate in our own house. Seems like a deflection to say we should focus on ourselves when we're starting at evidence that Chinese missteps could have caused a global pandemic that has killed millions and upended life for billions.

2. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We should also acknowledge that an investigation much earlier on could have happened if it were not for Chinese government obstructionism and cover-ups.

3. Why do you not care about where it came from? The allegation at hand is that China's irresponsible scientific experimentation "created" this virus (intentional oversimplification) and allowed it to leak. If the truth never comes out, and China is never held accountable, the same thing could happen again. Why is your sole interest the global response to the pandemic as opposed to the missteps that caused the pandemic in the first place?

carols10cents• 5 years ago

1. Even if this particular virus didn't originate in our own house, if we want to demand openness and security from other countries, we in the US should start by being open with records of accidents and enhanced measures to prevent future accidents.

soperj5• 5 years ago

Would you then say that irresponsibly treating the virus within the US & other western countries actually caused the pandemic to be bigger than it should have been?

DigiDigiorno• 5 years ago

1. I think this perspective is basically "Whataboutism the US house...", Whataboutism aside, the US does examine and iteratively improve standards...but either way, we aren't talking about that house.

2. I only think a thorough investigation is not possible because the Chinese government is not going to allow that such a honest investigation to occur.

3. If a flowerpot fell from a balcony and killed your loved one, you wouldn't care if it was intentionally thrown, negligently left there, or simply a freak act of god? I think almost everyone cares about the cause of this event. If not for reasons of closure and blame, for reasons of understanding and improving out future actions.

pnathan2• 5 years ago

we aren't talking about that house.

My ability to pressure the Chinese government is remarkably limited compared to my ability to pressure my Senator, which is also not large - on a good day.

China isn't a transparent society - on a good day, either. That's facts.

There is also what might be called diplomatic pragmatism, a realpolitik. So, let's fix what we can fix, and make a point of not being a fricking embarrassment if we ask other governments to come clean.

edit: The problem here is several-fold. (1) There's opacity that is over Wuhan, and time does not help this; the Chinese government (at some levels) tried to cover it up. There may not be evidence any more of what happened. Ordinary time shuffling may have removed it. Period. The author is experienced at observing the open society's sloppiness with these sorts of accidents, and thinks there's at least a plausible case that it may have been released.

(2) The open society's ability to pressure China into being fully cooperative is partially conditioned on its reputation and soft power at demonstrating how good things can be. Which, it has not been.

(3) I am really really not in a meaningful position to call for changes to happen outside of a very limited location. That is because I am a citizen of the USA, resident in WA state. So. I would like to see the USA clean up its act; I would particularly like WA to clean it up. I can most effectively contact officials, etc, and attend meetings & interest groups in relation to this sort of event. This is not whataboutism, this is dealing with the parts of the world I can affect.

(4) If Covid was released from a military/research lab because someone goofed on a security protocol, what does that matter to me, compared to someone who got sneezed on by an animal? Seriously. I don't think it matters in the wash. Health systems have to be resilient to novel pathogens, regardless of the etiology of patient zero.

asmint3• 5 years ago

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.

Nav_Panel2• 5 years ago

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.

brabel• 5 years ago

Just in case you didn't understand what the article was saying: "Labs in Wuhan might not have played any role in the origin of the pandemic. But a year later, no source has been found, and the world deserves a thorough, unbiased investigation of all plausible theories that is conducted without fear or favor."

It did NOT say the virus was definitely released from a lab. It did NOT present any evidence it was. All the article said was that given the author's experience with labs like this, she thinks the chances the virus escaped are not as remote as the scientists investigating it claim it is. That's all! Your theory might be correct, but as of now, you have no reason to think you've been vindicated.

EDIT: author is a woman, so fixed pronoun.

jhokanson2• 5 years ago

Agreed. However my reaction when first hearing about the lab leak (middle of last year?) was that the leak stories were meant to be malicious/propaganda against China. I didn't take any of this seriously until an article in Politico a week or two ago.

But here's the kicker. Let's say this was a lab leak and as a reporter (which I'm not) I thought the evidence was good enough to warrant reporting. I'm not sure I would share it. The previous occupant of the white house did a great disservice in giving this whole thing a racially charged tone. I'm genuinely scared by the increased acts of violence against southeast Asians in the US and worry that stories like this will make it worse. I'm hoping that the new US government is secretly taking steps to help prevent what may have happened in that lab -- in addition to the large effort needed elsewhere to improve our handling after things had begun to spread.

Anyway, main point is that this was the first time in a long time (ever?) where I really wondered whether, given the circumstances, if it was good to share "the whole truth" (as best we know it) given that we don't know what happened and the potential real-life implications to many people in the US.

foxhop2• 5 years ago

Same happened to me. Now I'm searching for a new tribe of people who think critically.

Gustomaximus• 5 years ago

What bothered me is when a few scientists came out and said the virus showed signs of human manufacturing I posted to a few forums like reddit askscience about how from a science perspective was there any validity or was this unfounded conspiracy and there was no discussion.

Ive no axe to grind politically, simply think its interesting to explore and understand what indicators/benchmarks there would be etc. One of the claimants to human manufactured was a Nobel prize winner, which doesnt mean he is correct but to me seems to add weight to its worth discussing.

I did not see any real 'lets talk about the science' discussion anywhere. And on my post on /r/askscience I could see my post in new list logged in but not when I went in via a new browser... so not sure if a glitch/timing/etc or they have some ninja ban system but it triggered my interest for sure.

While I have no idea what the truth is this kind of thing and not trying to push views down any path, this lack of discussion and that maybe ninja removal really pushes me to more consider something is being actively obscured and therefore why. Ultimately, I suspect we'll never know the truth.

13415• 5 years ago

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.

esja22• 5 years ago

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.

tim33311• 5 years ago

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.

rtkwe• 5 years ago

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.

randomopining3• 5 years ago

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.

phendrenad2• 5 years ago

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.

sunstone• 5 years ago

The thing that really lends credibility to this theory is that nation states have been suspicious of this from the first few months. These are not ding bat facebook groups but countries that have a fair amount at stake by voicing these concerns and yet they still brought it up. I'm 7/10 that the lab leak theory has legs.

hayst4ck4• 5 years ago

https://project-evidence.github.io/

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.

pageandrew6• 5 years ago

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.

koheripbal13• 5 years ago

...and importantly, there was specifically Coronavirus bat research in that specific facility.

hayst4ck4• 5 years ago

I don't find that compelling. Our own US scientists specifically stated they did not see the biological markers of tampering, and I don't see any reason we shouldn't be trusting them. I think there are a lot of people who want to believe China is evil incarnate and things are just as black and white as that. I think that's a mental shortcut with easy emotional payout. I would encourage you to read the link.

Here is a direct link to some gain of function research being done at the lab for anyone interested: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/

Relevant line in abstract:

In this study, we investigated the receptor usage of the SL-CoV S by combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules of human, civet, or horseshoe bat.

matwood• 5 years ago

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.

koheripbal13• 5 years ago

in some circles, lab related equates to malicious bio-weapon

Well that's the problem with reducing every argument to absurd extremes.

It's part of why modern political discourse is fundamentally broken.

We counter discourse out of fear of what the extreme form of that accusation will be - not based on what the argument is actually saying.

8note7• 5 years ago

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.

hayst4ck4• 5 years ago

There is pretty good evidence for that as well. I think section 9 is most relevant.

Huffers22• 5 years ago

If true, I think this would be the first ever case of a novel virus ever being developed in a lab and then accidentally released.

If false, then it's yet another viral mutation / species cross over which have happened all the time throughout history.

When I hear hoofbeats I think "horses" not "zebras"...

wccrawford2• 5 years ago

Why not? There are multiple hurricanes every single year, but I still hear about them. Especially the ones that might affect my area.

But it might be more like: "Yet another hurricane cause by weather." Not really a story, since they all have been. The opposite, though, that'd be a real story: "Hurricane not caused by weather!"

Huffers22• 5 years ago

Sorry, I edited my comment at the same time you posted your comment - leading to yours to not have the proper context.

(For the record I wrote something about things that happen frequently not being news)

georgeglue1• 5 years ago

It's obviously super hazy, but it's worth clarifying that being developed in the lab != originating from the lab.

From what I've heard on Chinese social media, there are a bunch of plausible sounding theories.

For a lot of jobs in China, it's expected that there's moderate incompetence or grift.

For example, say the lab has a bunch of extra animal samples (mice, bats, w/e). Someone in the cleaning staff could make a few extra $ by selling those samples to a wholesaler at the local wetmarket (to be turned into dogfood, etc.); maybe they only meant to sell the clean samples, but got things mixed up.

whiddershins2• 5 years ago

If I’m walking down the street and get surprised with a punch in the face I assume it was intentional, even if there are many scenarios in which it could be accidental.

alacombe2• 5 years ago

Accidental or intentional is irrelevant.

woodruffw2• 5 years ago

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.

medymed• 5 years ago

Other viruses do escape the lab sometimes. The first SARS virus escaped the lab more than once.

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...

Enginerrrd5• 5 years ago

Both in China no less.

woodruffw2• 5 years ago

I'm not claiming that they don't! The article has multiple examples of viruses escaping either individual containment or the lab outright.

What I'm claiming is that the volume of attributed escapes indicates that the average escape has relatively local consequences. In other words: historically, when everything goes wrong, it hasn't resulted in a global pandemic. What, then, made or makes COVID special?

Maybe the answer is raw numbers, and that it was bound to happen eventually. But "one of these incidents was bound to cause a global pandemic" is the exact same reasoning as the (original, still mainstream?) "wet market" theory. What I'd personally like to know is why I should believe one over the other, apart from human propensity to believe conspiratorial claims.

varjag8• 5 years ago

Lab outbreaks with numerous civilian fatalities are not unprecedented:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak

The official cover-up initially was blaming the outbreak on contaminated meat from a wet market.

cowmoo7282• 5 years ago

COVID-19 is one of the few serious diseases that can transmit when the carrier is asymptomatic. That could be a credible reason why a potential lab leak went unnoticed for long enough to begin uncontrolled community spread.

hn_throwaway_994• 5 years ago

COVID-19 is one of the few serious diseases that can transmit when the carrier is asymptomatic.

Is this actually true? It is certainly not true for HIV, and of course is not relevant to diseases like Zika that are transmitted by mosquitos.

Edit: I found the answer to my own question: https://www.kff.org/infographic/ebola-characteristics-and-co... (see second bullet point). Given that this lists Hep C, HIV, Influenza, Malaria, Polio, and Tuberculosis as possible to transmit while asymptomatic, I'd say "COVID-19 is one of the few serious diseases that can transmit when the carrier is asymptomatic." is most definitely false.

mrfusion2• 5 years ago

CNN sold us on asymptomatic spread but it’s actually highly unlikely: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w

renewiltord• 5 years ago

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?

Perhaps it is not special. One might as well ask what was special about a coin that lands heads three times in a row in its first three flips.

lamontcg4• 5 years ago

The biggest difference between all of those and this virus is that those were leaks of already-known viruses. SARS-CoV-2 wasn't known to exist before 2019 and there's no known precursor virus. There's a somewhat closely related virus that infected the miners in Yunnan but it was only 96% similar. There's nothing at all in this article on how SARS-CoV-2 was discovered or created.

The problem I have is that China isn't interested in investigating the start of the pandemic. They've thrown away their wastewater samples, there's some evidence WHO found of SARS-CoV-2 spreading locally prior to December 2019, but no backtesting of any samples. Nobody seems to be looking at the bats in Hubei for sarbecoviruses.

By blocking study of the zoonotic origin of the pandemic, they can use the theory it was imported in food for domestic propaganda. For external propaganda they're happy to have conspiracy theories flying about this lab leak theory creating a "firehose of falsehoods" and distractions. They can rely on American scientists to get engaged with the conspiracy theory and debunk it, wasting their efforts and then they can use that also for domestic propaganda.

Meanwhile nobody gets fucking outraged that China isn't properly investigating the origin of the virus and isn't aggressively looking at the bats in Hubei and any animal farms in the surrounding area. My suspicion is that animal farms (like minks) functioned as a bioreactor that had many opportunities to spillover from bats and then the close contact allowed it to spread well and mutate to optimize it for a more human-like ACE2 receptor, then the mink contact with humans allowed multiple spillover events until it started to spread epidemically in humans.

boomboomsubban7• 5 years ago

The problem I have is that China isn't interested in investigating the start of the pandemic.

Why should they be interested? We know how SARS type viruses can spread to humans, we know what other species are vulnerable, and we know what things make it more or less likely. A new outbreak was not a surprising result. What benefit is there to aggressively investigating the exact transmission method?

If your mink idea was found to be accurate, would you advocate closing mink farms? It being the source this time doesn't make it likely to cause the next transferrable virus.

dillondoyle6• 5 years ago

CCP would also not release serology from blood banks and other blood from before dec which from what I understand would be a gold mine showing earlier spread.

Which wouldn't that be in China's interest?

I don't get why the 'cover up' (maybe i'm too biased with that term, utter lack of cooperation) beyond just the top down controlling nature of the CCP.

Their actions don't lend us any trust so we do have to ask why..

https://www.wsj.com/articles/possible-early-covid-19-cases-i...

orblivion• 5 years ago

The hypothesis is (or maybe this part is established fact?) that this lab was conducting Gain of Function research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gain_of_function_research

It's purposely evolving diseases to spread faster or be more dangerous, for the sake of research. As I understand, it's at least a bit controversial. So maybe there's not as much of it going on as other research? If so, there probably wouldn't be as much opportunity for it to escape. But now that it has (per the hypothesis), it's ready to be very contagious right out of the gate. Thus, pandemic.

2-tpg11• 5 years ago

Established fact. Biowarfare is often coated as "defense": we need to develop vaccines for future viruses or engineered pathogens. The offense is top secret.

SARS-COV are classed Category C pathogen by CDC, in line with Hanta virus. SARS-COV is documented as a viable bioweapon, precisely for the things we have seen in the last year, and studied as such by all capable militaries around the world.

The hypothesis is that this lab (and labs in Iran, China and Iran share biowarfare research) was conducting gene-targeted coronavirus research. Using proxy DNA-testing companies serving Western populace to get their data. A good weaponized coronavirus would have an extremely high R. It would look similar to the flu in the first stages. Then at a later stage (after two weeks) it would deliver a "payload" in the brains of the targeted populace, stopping breathing or causing haemorrhage. The non-targeted races would just have a flu and contribute to the spread. Other engineered viruses focus on plausible deniability, straining the hospitals with patients with vague symptoms, hard enough to visit the hospital and contribute to the strain on public services, soft enough not to actually kill them. It would throw the targeted country into chaos and unprepared for a war.

tgsovlerkhgsel2• 5 years ago

COVID hits the sweet spot of infectiousness, asymptomatic spread, incubation time, and low mortality. I would expect the R of Ebola to be pretty low in developed countries. People wash their hands more often when every place you go to has running water, and if you show Ebola symptoms, you're going to the hospital, and if it's a hospital with a city that has a BSL4 lab, there isn't going to be an outbreak - someone will recognize what it is, and you'll be in an isolation unit in no time and your contacts will be quarantined.

I would expect such a case to make the headlines, but it's quite possible it would be quietly swept under the carpet. How well known was Reston back when it happened? If that didn't make the news, would a lab-originated outbreak?

With COVID, a worker could get infected, hide the exposure out of fear/shame, never show any symptoms... and yet start a pandemic.

With a low-probability high-impact event like a global pandemic, near misses are the only indicator you have until the one time it does go catastrophically wrong.

Pyramus12• 5 years ago

Not disagreeing with your general point that SARS-CoV-2 is an interesting mix of infectiousness and low mortality.

From what I've read Ebola has killed many healthcare professionals because they infected themselves when disposing off PPE. As a result a disproportionally large portion of deaths were healthcare workers.

With COVID, a worker could get infected, hide the exposure out of fear/shame, never show any symptoms... and yet start a pandemic.

In many countries workers are actually incentivised to come to work sick and infect others.

esja22• 5 years ago

In general labs are not both a) bad at safety, and also b) doing gain of function research to make dangerous viruses more infectious to humans. The latter has been banned a few times due to the risk (see below). Both A and B were happening in Wuhan.

"In 2014, after a series of accidents involving mishandled pathogens at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the NIH announced that it would stop funding gain-of-function research into certain viruses — including influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) — that have the potential to unleash a pandemic or epidemic if they escaped from the lab. Some researchers said the broad ban threatened necessary flu-surveillance and vaccine research."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00210-5

p.s. The US NIH did ultimately stop funding that research locally, but continued funding it in Wuhan. Including the exact type of virus we're dealing with now.

samatman• 5 years ago

You don't even have to be bad at safety, just less than completely perfect.

There is also the matter of biosafety levels. Something like smallpox is studied at biosafety level 4, which is very intrusive and difficult. The alleged gain of function research would have been BSL 3 or even 2, meaning a lot fewer precautions are taken, and a leak is correspondingly more likely.

SkyPuncher2• 5 years ago

If this Wuhan lab theory is correct, I think the wet markets play a huge role in the outbreak. They place a huge number of diverse, weakened, living animal in a relatively confined area. This seems to give an ideal breeding ground for a leaked virus - which perhaps can be incubated in a host species found at the wet market. Either the animals are in too poor of condition to notice the infection or they're a natural reservoir - eliciting no symptoms.

My understanding is most other countries don't have wet markets like China does. Even if a virus escapes, it may not have access to the hosts it needs truly become problematic.

Spooky23• 5 years ago

The difference is easy. It’s an aerosol. Known leaks from biological weapons programs are mostly things like anthrax.

That also makes the biological warfare scenario less likely — armies like to control where the bomb goes.

The other factor to discount this conjecture is that if you hear about covid as a biological weapon, it’s less likely to be true as it would potentially expose research in other places. If China is doing this, the US, Russia and others are too.

cnasc• 5 years ago

The armies of statisticians and (human) computers working for the war department found that most munitions fired off don’t hit people. One figure often used is 25,000 bullets per casualty (where casualty does not imply killed). How many disease bullets have been accidentally fired since we’ve had disease study labs?

fendy3002• 5 years ago

Covid is special because it's highly contagious and has delayed symptoms.

However in my opinion, chinese governments (esp. lower levels) like to lower the severity of any issue / risks and they like to repress / solve the issue with local power until it is solved or gets too big. The central gov that like to hide wrongdoings aren't helping either.

In case of covid, they either underrate the severity or tried to suppress the outbreak locally, which they failed and it already spread too wide enough to be contained.

If covid outbreak happened in europe or us, I believe it'll spread almost the same, albeit slower and you'll knew faster since it'll be in news faster.

abacadaba3• 5 years ago

Yup no doubt they fucked up and all the coverup bs cost lives, but there is a 0% chance we would have kept it contained in any major American city.

beowulfey• 5 years ago

Honestly if it was the source, its probably just probability. It is not 100% guaranteed that an outbreak happens from an accident, but there is a chance. And with enough of them happening, eventually one of them will spread.

Fomite7• 5 years ago

There's been a number of very short transmission chains. One of the things that's difficult for infectious diseases is that they have extremely long-tailed distributions. "This has happened before, and it got a couple people sick" is a distinct possibility. It also happens relatively frequently with diseases that have a lower pandemic potential than a coronavirus.

So the answer to "What makes COVID special?" is possibly "We failed our pandemic save."

I did some research during the early stages of the West African Ebola epidemic, when a lot of people were asking why, instead of the usual sporadic, self-limiting outbreaks of the past, we were seeing something larger and different. As it turns out, if you use the parameters people estimated from the older, smaller outbreaks, there's a small but not breathtakingly so probability of a very large epidemic. It's sort of the null hypothesis for pandemics.

newbie2020• 5 years ago

Covid is special because it arrived at just the right time to be politically useful.

tehjoker7• 5 years ago

Pretty incredible how far the US media will go to deflect attention from how bad the US response to the pandemic was to China.

"Let me be clear: Labs in Wuhan might not have played any role in the origin of the pandemic. But a year later, no source has been found, and the world deserves a thorough, unbiased investigation of all plausible theories that is conducted without fear or favor."

Okay. So basically this author has no evidence other than the fact that it's very difficult, maybe impossible to identify the site of first transmission. I don't know what progress would look like, but maybe sampling animals in the wild to find a carrier with a genetic signature that looks like an early version?

This is just speculative nonsense to try to hype the government's pivot to China. That's why its in the opinion section, the worst part of the newspaper.

varjag8• 5 years ago

No, the evidence is there's a relevant viral research lab in the epicentre with known history of safety issues and no animal transmission link have been confirmed.

tehjoker7• 5 years ago

There's evidence that many things are possible. Conspiracies are possible, but they are primarily a diagnosis of exclusion OR if there is specific evidence pointing in that direction.

The US media has made an art out of turning speculation into exciting narratives that large fractions of the population believe that turned out to be completely fabricated but retain adherents for years or generations after.

ninkendo• 5 years ago

Epicenters of a disease like this (respiratory disease with asymptomatic transmission) are likely to be in an urban area, so it's not surprising it's in a large city.

In a typical city the size of Wuhan, what are the odds it has some sort of viral research lab? If this happened in (picking a city at random...) Chicago, you could work backwards, find a viral research lab in say, University of Illinois, and make the same claim. "No link to animal transmission has been found, and the original epicenter was known to have a viral research lab. QED."

VectorLock2• 5 years ago

Its very difficult maybe impossible because China is trying very hard to make it that way.

tehjoker7• 5 years ago

Maybe, but I think it's fairly obvious that this is naturally a hard problem (e.g. having teams of people sample potentially millions of animals in the field) unless you get lucky or catch it in the act.

saas_sam• 5 years ago

Did you know officials sent a warning in 2018 about the Wuhan Institute of Virology warning that their experiments were dangerous and the facility was run poorly, risking a new Sars-like pandemic? https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52318539

Did you know the CCP arrested the first doctor sounding the alarm about COVID? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382

Did you know viruses have escaped from labs before? It is a known risk.

You can say the evidence is not conclusive and you would be right. But it's far from "speculative nonsense."

One wonders if you would be similarly skeptical of claims relating to COVID's cause being something much more speculative and vague... say, global anthropogenic climate change, for example. I'm sure you'd be pumping the brakes just as hard on any speculation to that effect, right? ;-)

tehjoker7• 5 years ago

"The Washington Post newspaper reported information obtained from diplomatic cables on 14 April. They show that, in 2018, US science diplomats were sent on repeated visits to a Chinese research facility.

Officials sent two warnings to Washington about the lab. The column says the officials were worried about safety and management weaknesses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and called for more help." ... "What kinds of security failures were the cables describing?

The short answer is we don't know from the information provided in the Washington Post. But, generally speaking, there are multiple ways that safety measures can be breached at labs dealing with biological agents.

According to Dr Lentzos, these include: "Who has access to the lab, the training and refresher-training of scientists and technicians, procedures for record-keeping, signage, inventory lists of pathogens, accident notification practices, emergency procedures.""

In other words, all the information is non-public and coming from the entirely unreliable US Intelligence services whose job is to lie and make the US government look good. If these reports had been published (meaning in public documents) prior to the pandemic OR there was an admission by the Chinese government, this would be far more credible.

DiogenesKynikos9• 5 years ago

They did not warn that the lab was dangerous or in any way poorly run. That's the spin that Josh Rogin has repeatedly tried to put on the diplomatic cables. The actual cables (written by diplomats, not experts) merely stated that a lab which had not yet opened did not yet have enough trained staff to operate at full capacity. The cables said that in order to ask the US government to continue its training program for staff at the lab. The cables actually complain that the Chinese government's safety regulations are too strict - not allowing the lab to work with Ebola.

bumbada• 5 years ago

People are too naive when they talk about China.

For one people actually believe Chinese's numbers, something no Chinese national will ever do.

China is a totalitarian country, they have the monopoly of the press. That means official numbers are not real numbers because if you go against the official numbers you just dissapear. You can not compare numbers given in a free press country against numbers being given by a totalitarian country.

That happened for decades with Soviet Russia, while Lenin and Stalin made tens of millions of people die of starvation, their official numbers were fantastic. They even exported grain.

There is no evidence because China made impossible for scientists to study the origin of COVID for almost a year. They closed their laboratories and removed all possible evidence with bleach.

8note7• 5 years ago

As a result, I have no reason to believe that Wuhan is actually the first outbreak, making the existence of that lab irrelevant

tehjoker7• 5 years ago

It's amusing that you post this under a US propaganda piece trying to convince people based on zero evidence that China did something bad. The US press is just as propagandistic and vehemently denies it as large sections of the US population lose trust in it (so called "fake-news").

I think you are referring to an event in Ukraine where some of the peasantry burned crops, but some exports were still bound for the cities. In the Irish potato famine, the UK exported food from Ireland even as people starved to death. In the US, farmers burned crops and poured out milk in the great depression as people starved.

Juxtaposed, there is little reason to treat foreign governments as inherently worse than our own and much reason hold them to similar evidentiary standards. My hope is that the standard would be high for both domestic and foreign stories.

trynton• 5 years ago

Without any verifiable evident, it just doesn't make sense. There is a continual exchange of information between Wuhan and other centers of disease control. So it would be very difficult to keep such a secret. Besides, if it was a virus that escaped, then the Chinese would already have the means to create a vaccine and so save the planet. Instead they did nothing and sat on it.

Spooks• 5 years ago

have the means to create a vaccine and so save the planet

is that true though? Aren't a lot of diseases being worked on in labs without the means to cure them yet

whytaka• 5 years ago

Regardless of its origin, what I cannot possibly figure out is why China didn't close its own borders while they were putting travel restrictions within.

JulianRaphael• 5 years ago

Think of it from a perspective of game theory and geopolitics. You have an epidemic raging in your country that has led to lockdowns, casualties and severe economic damage. Now you have two options:

1. Warn the world, lock your borders down, suffer economic damage whilst the rest of the world will prevent your citizens from entering their countries and can prepare for a proper response. Experience a setback on the stage of geopolitics and a loss of soft power.

2. Don't warn the world, suppress free flow of information, impose internal travel bans to stop the virus from spreading within your country, let your citizens carry the virus to the rest of the world, be the party with asymmetrical information advantage, exploit the situation to further strengthen your position on the global chessboard of geopolitics and expand your soft power.

What people in the West tend to forget is that Chinese strategic thinking is older than most Western civilisations. Chinese rulers study Chinese philosophy deeply, whereas Western rulers have little philosophical education. Chinese rulers think fundamentally different from Western rulers and have asymmetrical information advantage in politics as well: hardly anyone in the West really understands Chinese philosophy as it requires you to learn the language to grasp it fully; but it is easy to understand what motivates Western politics.

This situation reminds me of one of the Thirty-Six Stratagems.

Disturb the water and catch a fish (渾水摸魚／混水摸魚)

Create confusion and exploit it to further one's own goals.

koheripbal13• 5 years ago

Because that would have impacted trade and commerce.

alacombe2• 5 years ago

Because China first reflex is to deny anything is happening. By the time shit hit the fan, it's too late to do anything.

DiogenesKynikos9• 5 years ago

First of all, China shut down all travel - both domestic and international - from Hubei province. For people outside of Hubei province, the government made international travel more difficult.

Second of all, what country has ever prevented its own citizens from leaving the country because of an outbreak? The Hubei lockdown was already the most dramatic response by a government in modern history to an outbreak. A province with 60 million people was put strict lockdown. Almost nobody was let out of the province, and people were told to stay in their homes.

lordgrenville• 5 years ago

That's what the people at Rootclaim concluded as well https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/what-is-the-source-of-cov...

Giorgi• 5 years ago

Looks like breach theory is finally reaching mainstream. Good to know wokies protecting "poor China" will finally GTFO.

dang13• 5 years ago

Please do not use HN for nationalistic or ideological flamewar. We ban such accounts regardless of which country or ideology they are for or against.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

stunt• 5 years ago

Virus coming from a lab is just an effort to not invest against the next pandemic. This wasn't the first pandemic, and it isn't going to be the last one.

jsnk• 5 years ago

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.

- 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...

Invictus02• 5 years ago

A friend with access to Merrill Lynch Research told me in August that there was strong consensus around the WIV lab theory. If there's one reliable source of truth in the world, it's the information that banks are betting billions on.

dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp• 5 years ago

So much opinionated certainty.

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.

sweis• 5 years ago

"WHO Points To Wildlife Farms In Southern China As Likely Source Of Pandemic" https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/03/15/9775278...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/health/WHO-covid-daszak-c...

Historically, SARS-CoV-1 is suspected of being transmitted from bats to civets: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291347/

In Feb 2020, China shut down its wildlife farming industry and sent out directions on how to kill and dispose of the animals: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00677-0

http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/c30834/202002/c56b129850aa42acb584...

https://multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/news/china/article/...

Wildlife farming was a $70B industry that employed around 2% of China's workforce. There was a short-lived ban in 2003 in response to SARS-CoV-1, which was later rescinded.

hospadar• 5 years ago

Like, so what?

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).

hsitz2• 5 years ago

Yes, exactly. I would add, though, that the "Wuhan lab leak theory", in many people's minds, seems to be combined with a suspected intentional act by the Chinese government, to unleash a dangerous virus on the rest of the world. I think we should dismiss that part of the theory (it's of course not impossible, just not likely, mostly fun fodder for conspiracy nuts). But as far as infectious disease labs all across the world being dangerous places that need strict safety and security measures, duh, yes.

danudey2• 5 years ago

Let's also add in that the "Wuhan lab leak theory", combined with the "China virus" nomenclature, has resulted in huge increases in racist and white supremacist violence against people of Asian descent.

3327• 5 years ago

Maybe if it wasn’t CONCEALED by the government in the country of origin, our lives would be different now.

Talk about that will you?

vkou2• 5 years ago

We had 1.5 months [1][2][3] of clear warning that this is a serious epidemic.

When China locks 35 million people in their homes, and this makes the New York Times, and we don't do anything to respond for another month, and we don't do anything meaningful for a month and half... What we have is a domestic, not a foreign problem.

These articles made the news on January 8th, January 23rd, and February 7th. The first travel ban, that only covered China was on... January 30th. The first travel ban on Europe was on March 11th (At this point, Europe had ten times the active COVID cases that China did at the end of January. Why did we wait so long to stop travel from it?)

The first state lockdown was in New York State, on March 22nd.

Exactly how much advance warning did we need to deal with this pandemic? Three months? Three years? Do you think that a president who would constantly deny reality, to the point of claiming that there would be zero cases in the US by April would have handled this crisis any better, regardless of how much lead time he was given?

I'll also eat my shoe if the CIA and/or the NSA weren't at least as aware as the NYT of the seriousness of the situation in China (It can't be hard, my co-workers with relatives in China were all aware of it from, you know, talking to folks back phone. On the phone.) And if they weren't - why on Earth are we wasting billions of dollars on their cloak-and-dagger budgets, when I can get a better take on current events by having lunch with my team?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-pneumonia-ou...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/world/asia/china-coronavi...

[3] https://time.com/5779678/li-wenliang-coronavirus-china-docto....

Pyramus12• 5 years ago

our lives would be different now.

How? Following your line of reasoning, it makes the US response look even worse. No enemy of the US would have imagined that US citizens will turn wearing a mask into a political statement. Before the pandemic, the US was rated #1 in epidemic preparedness. No one had imagined that it will become societal consensus to sacrifice 500k American lives.

read_if_gay_• 5 years ago

We should get better at responding fast and saving lives

If the whole pandemic could’ve been avoided, that’s part of getting better at this.

dvt3• 5 years ago

We should get better at responding fast and saving lives (my opinion).

I think you're wrestling with a strawman here, no one's arguing the inverse. But in any investigation (arson, murder, etc.) the details do matter -- where, how, what weapon, when, and so on.

michaelbuckbee• 5 years ago

Respectfully, there is still a sizeable contingent of the US population that thinks that the pandemic is "no worse than the annual flu" and that efforts to combat the pandemic are at best a wild over-reaction and at worst some kind of sinister plot by the government.

akira2501• 5 years ago

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).

Then we shouldn't be doing _gain of function_ research on the types of viruses that can cause these outbreaks.

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.

What's the cost-benefit analysis for running the lab in the first place? Was any of it's research used in producing the vaccine? If it's all about saving lives, can't we be mad at both the lacking response and the laboratory at the same time?

I don't care where it came from [...] We should get better at responding fast and saving lives (my opinion).

Those two goals seem in conflict with each other. Good offense is something we should aspire too.. but that doesn't mean we should entirely ignore defense as well.

WrtCdEvrydy• 5 years ago

we shouldn't be doing _gain of function_ research on the types of viruses that can cause these outbreaks.

Why not? Seriously, this is the "let's just stop developing nukes" argument... someone will and whether we're prepared or not is on us.

Pyramus12• 5 years ago

I agree with parent's point to focus on defence, because a) defence is where the US leadership, but arguably also large parts of society, horribly failed and b) defence lies within your locus of control.

Before the pandemic, the US was actually rated #1 for endemic preparedness. No one had imagined that wearing a piece of cloth to protect others would become a political statement. No one was dreaming of the loss of half a million (!) American lives being remotely acceptable.

I would even go so far as to argue that from a psychological perspective the situation is similar to losing a war. US society will have to come to terms with what happened and how to prevent it in the future, and that's at the heart of parent's post.

vkou2• 5 years ago

Yes, but getting better at dealing with infectious diseases that we had ~1.5 months of advance warning for doesn't score political points among the base. The base does not like most of the machinery that is required to 'get better' at epidemic control.

If your goal is not good governance, but getting re-elected by your base, that is not something you need to optimize for.

zozin• 5 years ago

Maybe, just maybe you can care about two things at the same time? Maybe, just maybe, a Wuhan lab leak was concealed by the Chinese gov't to save face, thus shrinking the amount of time we had to respond fast in order to save lives?

danudey2• 5 years ago

Western nations had plenty of time to react, relatively speaking. The US was hit especially hard, though, by policies which dismantled the government's ability to handle this sort of event, the discarding of a practiced playbook for responding to this sort of event, and government and right-wing lies and conspiracy theories.

Given that the US government's response was basically to do nothing until it was too late, and then to do nothing except hinder the states' abilities to respond, it's hard to imagine that an extra six months' time would have made any difference, other than giving them six more months to downplay and dismiss the problem.

So yeah, we can care about whether the Chinese government was trying to save face, but in the end does it matter whether that's the case or not? The only thing we can change is our own countries' responses to pandemics like this.

ryandrake• 5 years ago

Worrying about where it came from is misdirection to distract us from the real issue that you pointed out: That nearly all countries totally failed to effectively deal with it and contain the spread, resulting in a body count that should be totally unacceptable. We got extraordinarily lucky that it wasn't super deadly. Imagine if the next COVID is 20X deadlier and hits uniformly across age ranges. We're doomed if we take the approach we took this time around.

nexus2045• 5 years ago

Especially considering Contagion was filmed close to 10 years ago...

mc32• 5 years ago

And maybe people should not have dismissed it as a crockpot idea that should be dismissed out or hand and had Twitter suspensions over mentioning it.

And maybe if it was a leak and the world had been warned of the dangers then they would have locked down movement to and from the origin before it began to spread internationally.

enchiridion4• 5 years ago

Yes and no. The response would have been far greater if the virus was more deadly. This virus was not that deadly (relatively), so ended up getting half measures.

tryonenow4• 5 years ago

I imagine if it were deadlier, people would have been more incentivised to deal with it. Bodies piling up on the streets is a much better motivator for staying inside and socially distancing than news reports of regional hospitals being gradually overwhelmed by a predominantly mild or asymptomatic virus.

The fact is that even ignoring government response, all of our medical institutions seemed to presume that this was yet another [avian, swine, bird, ...] flu outbreak and it would be about as minimally impactful for the west as the rest have been. Which indicates that doctors and hospital administration were either not reading the literature coming out of China as early as last january 2020, or they simply disregarded it as sensationalist and/or sloppy. And, to be fair, given the state of crisis that our research institutions are in globally, I can't entirely blame them, though I still think it was irresponsible that no one seemed to make any preparations for months after the outbreak was apparent. It's as if everyone sat on their hands waiting for the government to tell them it was serious.

dfee• 5 years ago

This reads like “we shouldn’t worry about the cause, only the effect”. As in, I’m unable to see another interpretation of your remark.

No! We should worry about the cause and also concern ourselves with managing the effect.

If we can prevent this, we should try. And, if our (American) politicians can be held to account for mishandling the situation, the WHO and China should be scrutinized on the international stage.

tkinom2• 5 years ago

If it is indeed "sloppy lab" leak the virus and we don't care, it will happen again.

onethought• 5 years ago

As has been pointed out, it will happen again no matter what. The vectors of deadly disease occurring are huge. The response is the piece we can properly control.

pasquinelli• 5 years ago

cool. i agree, we need to git gud at public health. that notwithstanding, we should also know if this virus was made or not, if we can know, because if it was, that needs to be addressed from a public health policy perspective. imho, natch.

burntoutfire• 5 years ago

Like, so what?

Compensation for damage inflicted, for one thing? If a country is inept at handling deadly viruses, tries to handle them anyway and in result causes millions of deaths and trillions of dollars worth of financial loss, they should be liable for the damage they've done?

r00fus2• 5 years ago

This ^^^ so very much. Think of it like infosec angle: Yes, it's interesting to identify and neutralize hostile actors, but the 100% more effective solution is to have defense-in-depth and system resilience in place - because you control that, but you can't control the external actors unless you have a god-complex.

esja22• 5 years ago

What sort of defence in depth can work against a virus that's been engineered to infect humans very easily, and which can only be stopped by shutting down the world economy and waiting months or years for vaccination? I think the last year has proven comprehensively that we simply cannot implement any sort of defence in depth and need to try very hard to eliminate these problems at source. Just like we do with chemical and nuclear weapons. We don't wait to clean up the damage afterward, because the damage is so horrendous.

esja22• 5 years ago

Would you write the same response about chemical or nuclear weapons research? I hope not.

Yet we've just spent the last year proving that biological warfare will be potentially more deadly than chemical or even nuclear warfare.

Decades ago we banned research into those other weapons and implemented international treaties and inspection regimes.

Even the possibility that this could have been a lab leak should scare the whole world and motivate a massive reform of these labs and the experiments people are conducting.

I hope the people in power don't share your complacency.

jariel2• 5 years ago

Both things matter a lot.

In particular, if true that it 'leaked' ... it's not like other nations are leaking pathogens which kill millions and cause 5 Trillion in destruction. It would literally change the geostrategic equation overnight and be seminal, defining world event certainly bigger than 9/11. On the scale of a WW.

If it was quasi-intentional (this is definitely not true, but since you speculated...) then it would be an act of war and the most damaging attack on the US (and other nations) ever. The US and the world would have to go to war with China over this. (Again this surely is not the case).

All while the US/EU/Rest of Word 'get better' at the above.

throwawaysea7• 5 years ago

We should care about it because it will help prevent the next outbreak. Not only that, we should hold the CCP accountable on suppressing reports of COVID-19 early on, which delayed the world's understanding/preparation/response. Furthermore, China should have shut down all their ports much earlier. Take a look at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how..., an article titled "How China locked down internally for COVID-19, but pushed foreign travel"

CoryAlexMartin• 5 years ago

Knowing the environment in which the virus developed can help us better understand it, which will strengthen our ability to appropriately respond to it, now and in the future.

You should care about knowing where it came from if you want to save lives.

tim33311• 5 years ago

Like, so what?

Like so let's try to stop it happening again.

alephr2• 5 years ago

A lot of the discussion I see on this hinges on possibility and not strongly believing the claim is false. Sure, this theory is "possible" in some sense but I rarely see anyone presenting concrete evidence for it and I don't think I've seen anyone who supports it suggest a piece of evidence that would change their mind on it.

If most of the discussion on an idea is about how people dismiss it or how any evidence is being covered up the idea might not be that strong.

tripletao15• 5 years ago

I believe it's quite possible (p ~ 0.5) that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic originated from a lab accident. If the proximal animal host were identified--as it was for both MERS and the original SARS within about a year--then I'd drop that probability by at least a factor of ten. For references see

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127197

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26129052

alephr2• 5 years ago

well that's a start, kudos for the probability and evidence that would shift it.

Like most people I haven't looked into any of this much before the last year so I'm far from knowledgeable here but:

.5 is a surprising number without any additional explanation because it suggests you think this is about as likely as a zoonotic origin (or at least not specifically the result of an accident). Does that probably extend to other viral outbreaks or is it specific to something? My baseline probability would be significantly lower (although non zero because I'm not denying the possibility; the article makes the case that lab safety is a concern worldwide) based on my, admittedly limited, understanding of past outbreaks. Is it the case that you think about as many viral outbreaks were due to lab accidents as not? or maybe this is more specific to coronaviruses or this specific virus? I'm curious how you'd model this, even if informal.

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

It will be interesting if the cause of the pandemic can be pinned down to specific time, place and person

6_3_1• 5 years ago

the elephant in the room that became too controversial to question. Solid post

the_jeremy• 5 years ago

As a layperson whose activism only amounts to charitable donations, yard signs, and voting, why should I care whether this virus was a lab escapee or naturally spread?

This is an earnest question, not a blind "I don't care". I think this is interesting, and I can see some amount of merit in these claims, but at the end of the day it doesn't feel like it matters to me which one it was. It seems like the only change would be "China gets more bad PR" and maybe American racists use this as an excuse to be more racist.

8note7• 5 years ago

What does this actually change? If China did indeed release the virus, does that mean I should not take a vaccine? That I should stop wearing a mask?

If China knows and is hiding it, I'm still not clear what that changes. They'll still know to improve their safety practices

stevenhuang2• 5 years ago

It means culpability. A better understanding of the dangers of experimenting with deadly viruses.

All of this contributes to the history and scientific corpus of what not to do, and lessons to learn from in the future that we can point to as what can happen in lab leak scenarios.

It's hard to accept in good faith the proposition that not knowing the truth of what happened is preferable to knowing the truth.

stevenhuang2• 5 years ago

History exists for a reason. It's there to learn from.

If we can establish that a lab leak lead to a worldwide pandemic, we'd place much more importance on lab security and better handling procedures.

If it was naturally spread then we'd look at the feasibility of reducing the chances of this happening again, like improving sanitation of wet markets, implementing regulations, or even banning them entirely.

Frankly the notion of it not mattering to someone how covid came to be is absurd.

If you don't want something to happen again, you first need to understand the circumstances that lead to it.

MisterBastahrd• 5 years ago

Here's why I dismiss it anyway:

Regardless of what happened inside a lab, or how it got out, it's how we responded to it that ultimately matters. What did we learn from it? How are we prepared to deal with another outbreak in the future? ARE we prepared to deal with another outbreak in the future? If so, how long are we prepared to do so before we let our guards down?

The people who are most interested in where it came from instead of how we handled it are those who are politically motivated to disregard safety in general. They need a boogeyman to deflect blame onto for their ridiculous dereliction of duty.

I refuse to allow them to do so.

nathias• 5 years ago

maybe we should regulate gain-of-function research not tourism?

midrus• 5 years ago

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.

robin212• 5 years ago

The only war with China is a trade war and that is only fought by convincing the public to endure the pain. I think everyone would welcome the ability to cut China out of the global supply chain if they could, it’s just about getting the people to go along with it.

brippalcharrid2• 5 years ago

Over the last year there seemed to have been such an outright refusal on the part of relevant sections of the scientific community to countenance the possibility that this virus had leaked from a lab which had been conducting Gain of Function research into bat coronaviruses that I got the impression this must have been motivated by fear that it could lead to political strife, including war, or that it might result in sweeping new restrictions and funding cuts to particular types of research.

I think that people can easily develop a misplaced sense of humanitarian responsibility where they are under the impression that they are called to serve a higher purpose and that they feel as though they are beholden to use their power and influence to prioritise (for instance) pacifism and internationalism above the public search for knowledge, where these have the potential to conflict. There can also be a sense in which the scientific establishment pursues its own independent, technocratic public policy. We have seen the huge amount of political power and influence wielded by high-ranking members of the scientific establishment, and no doubt the stakes were raised for this by the fact that it was an election year.

gregwebs3• 5 years ago

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.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.resea...

trhway• 5 years ago

a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world.

not that outbreak. US stopped doing that GoF research and funded it in those Wuhan labs instead - basically like any other outsourcing of environmentally dangerous manufacturing/etc. to China. My pet conspiracy theory is that as part of that GoF the virus was tested on humans there - say some prisoners happily volunteering for a couple weeks break from hard labor to spend it in a nice hospital with a "flu".

And if the virus had totally natural - accidental freak of Nature - origin, why would you give 4 year prison to a journalist who was covering the beginning of the pandemic in Wuhan?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/12/28/china-h...

The suppression of any information is totally in-line with some deep f&ck-up and/or government potentially looking very bad if real picture sees the light of day. Even Chernobyl wasn't suppressed to that degree.

gmanley• 5 years ago

And if the virus had totally natural - accidental freak of Nature - origin, why would you give 4 year prison to a journalist who was covering the beginning of the pandemic in Wuhan?

I really wouldn't attach that much meaning to the prison sentence handed out. It is entirely in line with the CCP's behavior in the past. They strongly repress any information or people they perceive as causing them to lose face or look bad.

bloaf• 5 years ago

US lab shut down temporarily due to inadequate waste sterilization. They were infecting monkeys with ebola? https://wjla.com/news/local/cdc-shut-down-army-germ-lab-heal...

jounker2• 5 years ago

It’s quite possible that it’s a pangolin virus. Guess what trafficked in Chinese wet markets?

eloff• 5 years ago

The earliest cases has no known link to the wet market. That's an old hypothesis.

wilg• 5 years ago

Apparently the Pangolin thing is looking less likely: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4

tripletao15• 5 years ago

Pangolins were an early suspect, but Alina Chan discovered that the multiple pangolin papers were all from the same batch of smuggled pangolins. This makes it much more likely that the pangolins were infected by something else, in the same way that housecats get infected by their human owners.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v1....

Because of this, Nature has placed an editor's note on their pangolin paper:

11 November 2020 Editor's Note: Readers are alerted that concerns have been raised about the identity of the pangolin samples reported in this paper and their relationship to previously published pangolin samples. Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x

No one is seriously proposing pangolins anymore, not even Daszak and the Chinese. The proximal host for MERS (camels) was identified in a little over a year, and for the original SARS (palm civets) in a little less. For SARS-CoV-2, despite the much greater effort, we're still waiting.

strogonoff3• 5 years ago

An eerily prescient quote from a paper[0] published in 2015, two of the authors of which are with Wuhan Institute of Virology:

Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future.

China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I think it’s silly to presume CCP engineered a virus as part of some warfare strategy, or even to vilify/sanction them for a lab leak if it indeed was the cause (mistakes happen). However, CCP’s resistance to a proper thorough study of the origins of COVID is IMO not exactly appropriate.

Active research was taking place in the vicinity of suspected ground zero. Lab escapes happen—there are well-documented cases of the original SARS virus leaking from a lab in Beijing in 2004 (killing at least one person). Why was this time such a scenario discarded as so ridiculously impossible at first, and is still considered “extremely unlikely”? Is it politics?

[0] https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-...

IgorPartola3• 5 years ago

My naive reasoning on why China didn’t create COVID-19 with the intention of using it is that I suspect (unburdened by education or the thought process) that engineering a virus is as difficult as coming up with a vaccine or treatment. If you are developing some kind of super virus to shut down the world economy and then immunize your own people to take advantage of the situation, wouldn’t you have the cure ready to go?

Now, an unintentional leak would be theoretically possible with these initial intentions but then wouldn’t China still have a leg up on developing treatments? If so, wouldn’t we have seen that in their vaccine development?

Of course you this is all uneducated speculation. Quite possible that engineering a deadly and very infectious virus is easier than creating a cure or a vaccine by orders of magnitude.

Aeolun3• 5 years ago

However, CCP’s resistance to a proper thorough study of the origins of COVID is IMO not exactly appropriate.

It is, in fact, highly suspect. I’m not at all positive that it indeed leaked from a lab in Wuhan, but the fact they won’t let an independent investigation anywhere near it makes me lean more strongly towards that as a possibility.

The description of the last investigation into the origins of the virus felt more like a ‘guided tour’.

neolog• 5 years ago

Don't sanction for the mistake, sanction for the nontransparency.

andrewflnr2• 5 years ago

My impression was that "lab escape" was conflated with "deliberate release" by conspiracy types early on, and once that took hold it became impossible to talk rationally about the accidental escape hypothesis.

op03• 5 years ago

Its not inappropriate. They know they are dealing with characters in the US govt who have a track record of cooking up stories about Aluminium tubes and WMDs to push the herd in whatever direction they want.

chrisandchris• 5 years ago

[...] China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I think it’s silly to presume CCP engineered a virus as part of some warfare strategy, or even to vilify/sanction them for a lab leak if it indeed was the cause (mistakes happen). [...]

Maybe it‘s just me, but I do not have enough trust in humans that they will say „hey shit happens, do just better next time“. I mean, we are pretty good today in blaming others just so someone gets blamed.

batpangolin• 5 years ago

It's not eerily prescient at all. It has been known a long time and the subject of much research that viruses jumping from bats to humans is one of the most likely, and most dangerous sources of new infectious diseases in humans.

anthony_romeo2• 5 years ago

I agree. Personally I’ve not dismissed this possibility at all. But as it stands, it’s just a hypothesis with suggestive information, but nothing concrete. There are verified wrongs to criticize them for right now, and can be a starting point for remediation, rather than drum up hate and criticism of mere hypothetical wrongs. (And of course, one such example of a verifiable wrong could be proof of Chinese institutions destroying evidence of the disease’s origin...)

JPKab2• 5 years ago

The lack of concrete evidence wasn't an accident. The CCP deliberately prevented it's collection.

bitreality3• 5 years ago

The problem is that discussing this hypothesis in any form is often labeled as "offensive" and "racist". The generally accepted theory even in the West is the lab leak was somehow disproved. It's always baffled me, because the only way you could really disprove the lab leak theory would be by finding the original source of the virus.

Instead, the media often attempts to disprove the lab leak by pointing out that COVID-19 differs from the viruses that were being worked on in the Wuhan Lab. But that in itself implies that China is being transparent. To the contrary, we know that China would take every measure to obfuscate the lab leak if they believed it was the origin of the virus.

908B64B197• 5 years ago

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.

Then why hide information and prevent world-wide collaboration then?

emkoemko2• 5 years ago

imagine if this happened in the USA and they prevented any international investigations or collaboration... and instead just started to blame other countries. Then a long time later allow people in who they choose and basically tell them what happened and call that a investigation.

jokoon• 5 years ago

Because there is no culture of transparency in China.

nickt• 5 years ago

It’s probably important to point out that a “lab leak” is a result of human-clumsiness or similar, and not the sci-fi movie bad guys engineering a virus. A lot of the non-HN crowd don’t get the difference.

dillondoyle6• 5 years ago

I get what you're saying, but it seems slightly more nuanced. From my understanding WIV did do gain of function research. e.g. purposefully make virus' more deadly or infectious to study them.

Definitely not a super villain at least I hope/highly doubt the intention was a weapon (you could surely create a better weapon?).

I'm not judging the value of that research, it does sound valuable but maybe not more so than the (small?) risk of an accident.

There is also reporting WIV was doing top secret research for CCP military.

So bad guys depends on your worldview.

https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-experiments...

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...

jtdev4• 5 years ago

Yeah, but the effect of this “human-clumsiness” is millions dead... it’s not a simple matter to excuse such clumsiness if this is in fact a lab leak.

unishark2• 5 years ago

That would certainly be the most likely kind of lab-based hypothesis. Especially considering the overt flouting of rules people engage in for other kinds of animal research, in the rush to compete for results and publications.

But it would still result in heads rolling and a constant stream of embarrassing revelations. Consider the Fukushima investigation. Every revelation of bad process and ignored warnings is another news cycle with everyone outraged at them. "Bad luck" is something you are not forgiven for if there's any negligence to point at.

nradov• 5 years ago

An alternative hypothesis is that a human was infected near the bat caves, then traveled to Wuhan and spread it to other humans and animals at the seafood market. There's no specific evidence for that, but we can't rule it out either.

gscott• 5 years ago

The seafood markets sell bats and other wild animals as well. When they butcher the bats, dogs eat the leftovers then someone else eats the dog. Plenty of ways for the virus to mutate.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8163761/Chinese-mar...

mensetmanusman3• 5 years ago

Roll a dice representing all the locations of possible human bat interactions. How many of those land next to research labs that study this.

mensetmanusman3• 5 years ago

We will never know the truth to the extent that China would admit this.

It’s obvious in hindsight that what you say is likely true, but there is no feasible political route for the CCP to take blame, as their lives would be at stake due to unrest.

tkinom2• 5 years ago

WHO should sequence all the Virus DNAs from that lab in 2015-2019 compare that with all the Covid sequences.

ajross3• 5 years ago

There is no requirement that bats be transported to Wuhan. It's close to a known bat virus, and that's all we know. There are local bats in Wuhan, needless to say. Other species can easily be involved. The truth is that there is nothing particularly surprising about the way this virus evolved. Fundamentally this is a pandemic like any other. They happen in some species or another every year.

And that, more than anything else, is why we should be suspicious of "exotic" theories like human intervention. It's an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary proof. You seem to be arguing the opposite, when Occam is clear that we should be betting on natural evolution.

bgandrew5• 5 years ago

The fact that they didn't find an intermediate host after more than a year of search should tell you something.

gregwebs3• 5 years ago

It is exotic to claim that the virus was engineered by humans, but that is not what this article (or myself) are claiming. Just that there is a lab outbreak.

Researchers have gone to a particular region of China and otherwise gone to great effort to find these particular bat viruses. I agree it is possible that they could be ignorant of the fact that the virus is in their own backyard. But it must a lower probability event that people got infected by such city bats given that we already know for certain the labs were transporting the bat viruses directly. Additionally, I would be surprised if they have not been testing nearby bats for such viruses since the outbreak happened. If they got a match it would be highly publicized.

andai• 5 years ago

In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute [Wuhan Institute of Virology] published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[11][12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#Co...

handmodel• 5 years ago

Is it Occam's razor?

The Bayesian probability suggests the odds that it would evolve by chance AND first become an issue right next to one of the top three bat virus research centers in the world are pretty slim.

It would be like a new mosquito disease first being an issue in human population next the CDC headquarters in Atlanta instead of somewhere in Africa of South America. Sure - there are mosquitos everywhere - but the chance that a new disease would start in Atlanta are very slim.

salawat• 5 years ago

The truth is that there is nothing particularly surprising about the way this virus evolved.

I beg to differ. How many pandemic causing viruses have their ground zero right outside an instition that for the last decade has been cranking out study after study derived from GoF research? A place that also was receiving information from American university researchers on how to develop chimeric mutations? Which just happened to share genetic material with strains known to have been researched for bioweapon applications? All at the same time as an uptick in censorship of academic papers.

There's coincidence, and then there's coincidence. I don't think anyone was out to make the darn thing, or intentionally release it. When I see a bunch of virology going on, and a pandemic starts up next door, I'm not looking 1000 miles away for the source.

cameldrv4• 5 years ago

It's not just that the closest known virus is a bat virus. The closest known virus, RaTG13 was discovered in a cave in Yunnan, and brought to Wuhan by WIV researchers where it was sequenced, and probably other experiments done on it. WIV has also changed its story twice about the history of RaTG13, first, the date of first sequencing (They initially claimed 2020, and then changed their story to 2018), and second, they did not disclose for months that it was in fact the same virus as BtCoV/4991, which they had previously published a partial sequence of.

Transportation by lab personnel is the only way that RaTG13 is known to have come to Wuhan. Any animal transport is possible but only speculative. This entirely flips what should be the assumed scenario vis a vis Occam's razor.

tim33311• 5 years ago

Occam might say there's a bat coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, now where's the nearest source of bat coronaviruses?

I'm not sure that's terribly extraordinary and exotic.

btilly3• 5 years ago

This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world.

In general, yes. In this case, no so much.

The feart that it could happen here is why the USA restricted gain of function research in 2014. And only reopened it in 2017 with stricter safety controls.

If China had made the same policy decisions, would COVID-19 have become much less likely? That's an important question to answer. Whether or not it DID happen that way, as a planet we need a more consistent way to evaluate such risks.

kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj2• 5 years ago

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.

But China knew about the virus in 2019 and kept it quiet. They silenced scientists. China is complicit in this pandemic and should pay reparations.

plibither8• 5 years ago

Exactly. Frankly, I'm tired of this tip-toed attitude - there hasn't been any sort of consequences suffered or imposed on the Chinese government for how they surreptitiously dealt with the virus, initially.

I'm not condoning or advocating conspiracy theories, but where they are wrong, they should be penalised.

Consultant324523• 5 years ago

I feel like only one thing matters. If regular people find out that gain of function research (or something similar) resulted in a lab leak that killed millions of people, then regular people will demand this kind of research stop.

None of the people most qualified to speak on this issue want their funding cut or the research to stop.

ipiz06182• 5 years ago

This is the truth. We don't have evidence that the virus came from a lab (how could we when China refused investigation?), but we have evidence that the whistleblowers were arrested. Some are dead and some aren't seen again. Are we not supposed to blame this regime?

sampo• 5 years ago

But China knew about the virus in 2019 and kept it quiet.

I don't think it would have mattered. We had documentaries such as The Lockdown [1] in the end of February 2020, yet still most Western countries spent much of March 2020 still debating whether they should react somehow or not.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU9FVqwO4TM

kodah• 5 years ago

It's really ludicrous that anyone gets conspiratorial about the CCP spreading a bioweapon that originates in their own country. They snuck military scientists into the US to tap into coronavirus research. The most simple litmus test I can think of is if China led the race for a vaccine, but they didn't.

People really need to stop and think, because next time that lab could be in your country. With icebergs and permafrost melting, you can bet there's going to be more pandemics in the pipeline. This really isn't a time for people's crass and nihilistic takes on foreign governments, science, or even your own government. When you leave room for people and systems to screw up, then things get better; if you're hypercritical then all you incentivise is the burying of evidence and lies.

JPKab2• 5 years ago

Bioweapon is not the same as an accidental lab leak of a virus altered to accelerate research.

The latter is highly likely, the former is ludicrous.

Regardless, the CCP were clearly hiding something.

emkoemko2• 5 years ago

we had a issues with the CCP few years back, they shipped deadly viruses out to the Wuhan lab.

"We have a researcher who was removed by the RCMP from the highest security laboratory that Canada has for reasons that government is unwilling to disclose. The intelligence remains secret. But what we know is that before she was removed, she sent one of the deadliest viruses on Earth, and multiple varieties of it to maximize the genetic diversity and maximize what experimenters in China could do with it, to a laboratory in China that does dangerous gain of function experiments. And that has links to the Chinese military."

i doubt their narrative because they where not transparent and kept making up conspiracy theories that it came from the US, then it was Italy, frozen fish etc etc all the while preventing any international investigations.. We also know labs do leak and even China had many leaks in the past including SARS and other viruses so its not unbelievable to think it was just a accident and if they where doing gain of function we need to know and we need to figure out a plan and have better systems in place to prevent leaks.

sumedh• 5 years ago

We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth

Or China can start to be more honest if it does not want to be demonized.

thewileyone• 5 years ago

July 2019 - USAMRIID Fort Detrick shuts down due to a virus leak.

August 2019 - "Vape flu" appears in the US.

October 2019 - World Military Games in Wuhan, 300 US military men and women attend.

November 2019 - SAR-COV2 appears in Wuhan.

Let's not discount this sequence of events as well.

Izkata4• 5 years ago

August 2019 - "Vape flu" appears in the US.

Wasn't this discovered to be due to contaminated vape fluid, not anything contagious?

ceilingcorner• 5 years ago

People are demonizing the CCP because they refuse to allow a thorough investigation.

Mat3425• 5 years ago

Also they lied Wuhan virus won't be on scale of Sars, says Chinese top expert Zhong Nanshan https://archive.is/O5PhV#selection-895.0-924.7

manojlds• 5 years ago

We need to demonize China for all the things they have done to keep it secret in the early days and even upto now, not that the original leak did happen if at all we ever find out about it.

ipiz06182• 5 years ago

China is demonized not because of an accident (if it was one). Even if it's confirmed that a lab accident was the cause, China holds the blame for hiding the truth, telling the world it's all okay, and arresting people that dared to speak out (even causing their deaths). No matter what was the origin, China is responsible for the outbreak.

Btw, I don't think we can ever find out the truth. It's been over a year, and China has all the time to clean up and conceal every piece of evidence. The WHO scientific team's visit to Wuhan is no difference to investigating a murder scene a year after the event, with the murderer living in it all that time. Nothing but a joke.

bitcharmer• 5 years ago

I couldn't agree more. There is so much evidence of China suppressing information I don't understand how so many people dismiss their role in spreading the virus beyond their borders.

They had a choice to make: country-wide lockdown and travel ban or lie about it and make it spread worldwide. The former would leave their economy in a disadvantaged state while the latter would level the playing field for the rest of the world and give China opportunity to even earn some dough in the process (PTE sales). Now, this may be a cynical view but so are China's leaders. If you're someone who strongly believes this scenario could not have transpired, you're just naive.

aww_dang2• 5 years ago

Minor nitpick, but it would be more accurate to use CCP in place of China in this comment.

herbst5• 5 years ago

No matter what was the origin, China is responsible for the outbreak.

Even if thats the case its still the shitty response in the west, ignoring any chinese advice, that made this a global thing.

Jan4542• 5 years ago

Seems the same behaviour with any other country. Can you name just one that would behave different? So this is no accusation but just business as usual.

Besides, why at all trying to blame anyone on this? It's a natural disaster that could happen to anyone anywhere. The real culprit is, that as long as the wealthy don't try to vaccinate everyone in this world as quickly as possible, the virus still has potential to mutate to sth. where current vaccines don't protect against ..

anigbrowl• 5 years ago

Indeed. All sorts of accidents happen at biological labs. https://globalbiodefense.com/2019/09/21/explosion-confirmed-...

29athrowaway• 5 years ago

No need to demonize China, or better said, the Chinese Communist Party. They already behave in ways that are the envy of actual mythological demons.

Social scoring, mass surveillance, the Great Firewall, forced labor, harvesting organs from healthy people, Uyghur genocide, Falun gong murders, Tiananmen square massacre...

And actively trying to cover up every crisis, torturing and murdering anyone who speaks up. From environmental disasters to COVID-19 to party corruption.

nednar• 5 years ago

The alternative theory is [...]

So there are only two alternatives, and we just need to compare which sounds more likely? Or could it be that you exclude about a million other alternatives here, while also ignoring that just a little bit more information about context often makes unlikely scenarios more likely and vice versa?

Not arguing any of the theories here, just looking at the approach. The first task might not be to make assumptions, but to understand the situation better.

CorrectHorseBat• 5 years ago

SARS was also first discovered ~1000 km from those caves, so it's not that far fetched. That said the proximity of the lab is very suspicious.

I'm afraid we'll never know the truth though, China would never admit it was a lab leak.

cheph• 5 years ago

avoid demonizing China

China is actively engaging in genocide and nobody wants to even speak up about it because "cultural differences". I think we should much rather be scared of running even more cover for them, than less cover for them. They already have enough people white knighting for them.

Western companies are demonizing the west for profit, and running cover for china for profit, just another example of how capitalism always wins.

All of this is sickening and it needs to stop now.

h3cate• 5 years ago

Moral of the story: governments around the world need to stop fucking around with potentially deadly viruses

dominotw2• 5 years ago

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.

I think it was western scientists like Peter Daszak who suppressed lab leak theory in fear that their research will be demonized forever.

It wasn't CCP who called everyone consipiracy theorists it was Peter Daszak and co [1]. I don't understand how he can be the WHO investigator of his own lab [2].

1. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/947620

2. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4119101

justpassing9• 5 years ago

Yes, let’s agree not to demonize the country committing genocide against uighurs or they might throw us in camps next.

Uninen• 5 years ago

There's a recent episode of Joe Rogan podcast (#1616) with Jamie Metzl that goes quite deep in this very topic: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7aitKgecZ0fPKjT15no5jU?si=h...

He's also published a blog post titled "Origins of SARS-CoV-2" on his Web site: https://jamiemetzl.com/origins-of-sars-cov-2/

hootbootscoot2• 5 years ago

Hypothesis. Theories have evidence. This hypothesis has circumstantial evidence that a basic study in RNA molecules, virii, hydrolysis, mutation, protein-mimicry, "trying all keys of a combination lock, getting the right one gives you a direct ticket to an animal cell taking you into it's DNA replication process"

The so-called "Spanish Flu" of 1918 had origins in a migratory bird route over large tracts of pig stockyards, and the workers and nearby army base residents were subsequently infected and subsequently brought it over to Europe at the end of WW1.

Given both points above, shame on USATODAY for giving the time of day to such dangerous speculation while much of the planet chafes under lockdown and is irritable and hating on China anyway... shameful demagoguery. Dismissed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_hydrolysis

StringyBob• 5 years ago

The Times newspaper (UK) has also some pretty good investigative coverage with a well-produced podcast episode covering Covid origins - https://play.acast.com/s/storiesofourtimes/failuresofstate-t...

EMM_3862• 5 years ago

Recently from MIT Technology Review ... worth a read:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/18/1021030/coronavi...

BoorishBears2• 5 years ago

I think the theory should be dismissed because it's not falseable.

Right now, there is no question that say, the US military has samples of Coronavirus. Not for nefarious reasons mind you, but of course it's of military importance to study a global virus if only to work on vaccines and such.

Even if Coronavirus originated in nature, going forward if there is ever a new outbreak, you technically can't prove it wasn't the US military accidentally messing up can you?

You don't know the characteristics of the strain they're holding, and if it originated in nature then any study of it will show it came from nature.

Likewise you can't prove it wasn't the lab. They could have had samples of it from before, how can you prove the negative of that? It's hard to prove you didn't have access to a given thing.

BoorishBears2• 5 years ago

It's weird that this is such an unpopular concept to some people

If a child insists you have cooties (the fictitious ones, not lice) do you fight them to the bitter end?

You can never prove definitively that you don't since, of course they're not real, and the child gets to define the criteria for having them "oh you can't see cooties with a microscope, only I can!"

It's not about implying the Wuhan lab did release the vaccine, but it's about realizing chasing a conclusion that is not falsible is never going to give you a scientific conclusion.

Most of the current lab leak theories revolve around:

But it’s also possible that SARS-CoV-2 evolved naturally in the wild before it was brought into a lab to be studied, only to subsequently escape.

At the end of the day you're saying the one thing you can freely observe indicates it was not man-made, but due to factors you can never observe (with an extremely closed country with a government structure that strongly discourages a mistake like this ever being properly attributed even if there wasn't immense pressure to not have this come out as the case)

Well when it comes to pinning blame on a country for releasing a virus that leads to a pandemic, "if it quacks like a duck" doesn't pass does it?

Why not spend energy looking at how we went from a virus shutting down a city in mainland China to 500k deaths in the US and all the mistakes made along the way there rather than chasing the equivalent of saying another kid gave us cooties on purpose...

musicale4• 5 years ago

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"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...

esja22• 5 years ago

The mainstream press were all conflating accidental leaks with bioweapons engineering. It went on for months.

f430• 5 years ago

I recall many people calling the Wuhan lab leak theory as conspiracy on HN. They were adamant that it came from bats. Interestingly enough, those accounts were all brand new accounts and some haven't been active on HN for several months all of sudden started coming out of the wood works.

La1n• 5 years ago

If you want to call people shills, at least gives some evidence.

musicale4• 5 years ago

Most of the media coverage and consensus, from the Washington Post to Nature, seems to be that:

- the lab escape theory has been thoroughly debunked by science

- the WHO investigation put the final nails in the coffin of this theory

- therefore, lab escape continues to be a fringe conspiracy theory at best

- coverage of the lab escape theory is politically motivated rather than scientifically motivated

- continued coverage is largely a combination of irresponsible journalism, disinformation and anti-China political propaganda

Does the USA Today article indicate a shift in this perspective, or is it just an outlier? Has something changed, for example new information coming to light?

geoduck144• 5 years ago

The WHO investigation DID NOT eliminate this theory. From what I remember, while the WHO was investigating, one member said "it didn't come from a lab". Then when everyone returned to their home country, some members suggested that it was possible - and I don't think their official report opined on it coming from a lab.

DiogenesKynikos9• 5 years ago

The official report isn't complete yet, but at the press conference, it was clearly stated that the team as a whole viewed a lab leak as extremely unlikely. More recent statements from team members have elaborated that that was a unanimous judgment of the scientists on the team.

Klinky• 5 years ago

No, nothing has really changed. It's an opinion article that's basically saying since lab accidents happened elsewhere, a lab accident could have happened in Wuhan. No smoking gun here.

hayst4ck4• 5 years ago

The lab escape theory has been thoroughly debunked by science

This is absolutely not true. Lab invented was debunked, lab escaped was not.

Have a read: https://project-evidence.github.io/

tripletao15• 5 years ago

The Washington Post has already shifted:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-...

It's less what new information has come to light, and more what hasn't. For MERS and for the original SARS, the proximal animal hosts were identified within about a year. For SARS-CoV-2, we haven't found that yet. (See my comment history if you're thinking pangolins; they're pretty much abandoned.)

So a year later, despite the considerable effort spent looking for evidence of natural zoonotic origin, we still have nothing. We also have no evidence of lab origin, but that investigation has been thoroughly obstructed--for example, the WIV's private database of viruses went offline in September 2019, and any reporter who approaches the mine where SARS-CoV-2's nearest known relative (RaTG13) was discovered gets turned away by Chinese police.

ricksunny4• 5 years ago

Not sure which WaPo articles you're reading - -

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/05/coronavir...

I'll give you that Nature is steadfastly on the zoonotic side of things. But even Nature News journo has retweeted the USAtoday article:

https://twitter.com/NidhiSubs/status/1374002441780391940?s=2...

ricksunny4• 5 years ago

There's an extensive list of lab-considering origin articles as curated at US Right to Know (recommend starting under Most Recent Articles):

https://usrtk.org/biohazards/origins-of-sars-cov-2-risks-of-...

As you can see, besides WaPo, WSJ editorials & op-eds also figure prominently among those calling for investigation inclusive of lab-associated pathways. New York Magazine, Politico.

Then you can see Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists right in there.

Even an nytimes piece that didn't make that list: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/health/covid-virus-origin...

musicale4• 5 years ago

My point was not about what is true (which we really don't seem to know) but rather about what I've observed in the reporting on the subject, and wondering whether there is a shift going on in said reporting.

Someone did note a shift in WP's coverage, which is interesting to me.

watertom• 5 years ago

A lot of smart people in this forum.

Someone please explain to me how the Chinese were able to identify that that had a new virus.

I’ve done pandemic drills with homeland security. They said they way you know you’ve got a new virus floating around is either new symptoms; significantly more “flu like” cases; significantly more cases escalating to pneumonia; increased deaths.

Covid presents like the flu, so much so you need a test, but early on a test was not available. So the symptoms are not unique.

Early on there was not a spike in cases, so that would not have sparked an interest.

Early on there was not a significant uptick in flu cases turning to to pneumonia, so that would not have sparked interest.

Early on there was not a spike in deaths, so that would not have e sparked an interest.

In fact when the Chinese discovered covid, there was absolutely no evidence that anything out of the ordinary was taking place.

But somehow the Chinese knew that they had a very contagious, bat based virus circulating, based on no information.

Everyone is focused on the wrong thing, I want to know how they discovered it with no information?

I’ve always believed this was an lab accident by a technician that needed their job so they covered it up until they and too many family members got sick and it was obvious something was wrong.

They knew about the virus because it was being studied, and that’s the only answer that makes any sense.

miemo23• 5 years ago

but there was a spike in pneumonia related cases... didn't a doctor sound the alarm on this (and was reprimanded for it)

esja22• 5 years ago

Several doctors were discussing it in a WeChat group in December 2019 and were basically arrested and forced to apologise for spreading “misinformation”. The main person who became famous for sounding the alarm (Li Wenjiang, an ophthalmologist) later died of the disease.

hfjfktkrkf3• 5 years ago

From what I've read when you have pneumonia you receive antibiotics. If that doesn't work, they test a lung wash sample against the usual bacterias/viruses. If that doesn't match anything, it's called unexplained pneumonia, and that gets escalated and the sample is sent to top labs for sequencing. When they did this, they got a 90% match to SARS and raised the alarm.

m0llusk• 5 years ago

You should look up some of the leaked videos on the Internet. There was in fact a huge spike in cases early on and people were dropping dead in the street. That was the freak out that led to the Communist Party not being able to keep a lid on the whole mess. It wasn't just sick people showing up in hospitals in huge numbers, it was dead bodies lying in the streets.

The thing is that whether this came from a lab or not is of limited relevance. Viruses have been hopping from animal hosts from humans for a while and if anything this one was late and long expected. Either way the kind of preparations we need to make for future events are the same.

ryanSrich• 5 years ago

There was in fact a huge spike in cases early on and people were dropping dead in the street

Wasn't this happening well after they knew the virus existed? From my understanding, they knew the virus existed very early on. Much early than when people were dropping dead in the streets or getting dragged out of their apartments.

IAmGraydon2• 5 years ago

You should look up some of the leaked videos on the Internet. There was in fact a huge spike in cases early on and people were dropping dead in the street.

Which is also weird because we all know Covid doesn't make people suddenly drop dead in the street.

refenestrator7• 5 years ago

People anthropomorphize the CCP far too much. It's 100 million people.

What happened politically should be straightforward to anyone who's worked in a corporation: Wuhan mayor and Hubei governor tried to keep a lid on it, counterproductively, so their reports upstairs wouldn't look bad. They couldn't, higher authorities noticed, blew up the visibility on it, instituted nationwide programs to counter it, and fired the afore-mentioned mayor and governor.

foxhop2• 5 years ago

It matters a real lot if it came from a lab.

themacguffinman• 5 years ago

The thing is that whether this came from a lab or not is of limited relevance.

It has plenty of relevance. If lab leaks are the source of the virus, any serious solution will need to include improvements to lab containment and practices. Knowing what happened in a hypothetical lab leak could also help identify the original animal to study. Understanding how viruses hop & adapt from animal hosts to humans begins by studying specific cases of it.

For example, past US lab virus leaks including SARS have led the Obama administration to temporarily suspend and investigate the risks of Gain of Function research in 2014. At least one of the Wuhan labs were conducting Gain of Function research at the time of the outbreak.

aluminussoma• 5 years ago

it was dead bodies lying in the streets

I remember seeing these videos in January 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. Young, healthy-looking people, too. I'm very surprised that there were not similar instances outside of China.

VivaCascadia• 5 years ago

This episode of Frontline does a really good job of walking through the timeline of what was discovered and when, and how long they sat on that information before taking action.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets...

xienze• 5 years ago

I’ve always believed this was an lab accident by a technician that needed their job so they covered it up until they and too many family members got sick and it was obvious something was wrong.

Really drove me nuts how early on everyone, everyone was working overtime to try and dismiss the possibility that this was some sort of lab leak. I’m sorry but the way China went absolutely DEFCON 1 (welding people into their apartments, blocking the roads out of town, nightly fumigations of public spaces) within a short period of time strongly suggests that they had a “oh crap, _that thing we were working on got out_” moment. Never understood why people were so eager to dismiss this possibility.

BeyondLimits99• 5 years ago

Absolutely.

You don't just lock up a city full of 11 million people because they have the sniffles.

The western world really dropped the ball with this one.

sjg007• 5 years ago

They knew about the virus because it was being studied, and that’s the only answer that makes any sense.

This is because you don't know how pathology works and what technologies (specifically sequencing) are available to identify pathogens of unknown origin.

agumonkey3• 5 years ago

I'm just a dude, but early videos showed people collapsing on the streets. If you have a few people like that in one area you start to think it's more than a flu I guess.

krallja• 5 years ago

Please read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang

oliv__• 5 years ago

Oh gee, what a shame that he died of Covid, at the young age of 33. A tragic coincidence

aeturnum• 5 years ago

Early on there was not a spike in cases, so that would not have sparked an interest.

My understanding on this was that doctors local to Wuhan noticed a surprising and sudden uptick in pneumonia that did not respond to antibiotics. The Chinese government managed this badly[1]. Your timeline doesn't reflect how things happened at the time - there was a "slowly" (over two months?) growing problem in Wuhan that locals noticed and authorities suppressed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_2019%E2%80...

ping_pong3• 5 years ago

Pneumonia is both bacterial and viral. It wouldn't be surprising if it didn't respond to antibiotics. It was the CT scans of the lungs that showed glassy nodules that was the new symptoms.

wuwuno2• 5 years ago

Not in November when the Chinese first discovered the virus.

ping_pong3• 5 years ago

This isn't correct. It wasn't just looked upon like the flu.

In December there were reports of an uptick of people dying of pneumonia. When they did CT scans, they saw that their lungs had glassy nodules which was not normal. This was the way that they identified something new was spreading.

dillondoyle6• 5 years ago

So many great replies answer/correct some of these assumptions.

Want to add that I highly recommend the frontline doc it has so much great reporting that gives the background needed here.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets...

sparrc• 5 years ago

Flagged for misinformation. There definitely was an uptick in deaths and pneumonia. Scans of patient's lungs showed new symptoms not normally associated with pneumonia. This happened over the course of a few months and is what tipped off doctors in Wuhan that there was something new spreading.

jackweirdy• 5 years ago

And another point that cements this was the Reddit “china_flu” subreddit’s creation in December 2019, when word was spreading outside China that _something_ was spreading, probably flu, and nobody knew what

wuwuno2• 5 years ago

Not enough, and not in November when the Chinese first discovered the cases.

flu cases year to year have a very wide variety. In the U.S. the low number of cases one year was 16M two years later it was 68 Million cases.

rfoo• 5 years ago

I want to know how they discovered it with no information?

tl;dr: mNGS [1]

Longer answer as I think you may need to be mansplained because you wrote a long post which could be answered by a simple Google search and Wikipedia article:

Step 1: Doctor wonder why their patients were so sick, looks like infection but no pathogens identified, this is actually not that rare as there are many obscure pathogens even for experienced doctors.

Step 2: Patients agrees to pay for mNGS. Nurse draw their blood, send to lab.

Step 3: mNGS matches every DNA "pieces" from the patients' blood against a database. One of those pieces matched the original SARS with about 90% similarity.

Step 4: Chaos in the lab, the hospital and the government.

Step 5: "We've detected a new virus"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_metagenomic_sequencin...

Graffur3• 5 years ago

Science, like journalism, is supposed to be about facts and about getting to the truth.

No source of covid-19 has been found.

Similar lab leaks happen frequently.

BUT.. you're not allowed to discuss it with the undertones that you're a bad person. If you say china virus you could be accused of being a racist. But if you say South African or British variant it's okay. The mental acrobats are insane. If you suggest people aren't thinking critically about it you will be accused of flamebaiting or trolling. If you call out people who are trying to silence your comments you'll be accused of "making boring reading".

I think it should be discussed, debated and seriously considered. There is a suggestion in here to assume both the animal farm and the lab were the cause and to respond appropriately. With lack of further evidence I think this is the best idea.

albatruss• 5 years ago

There is no blame or antagonism towards British or South Africans implied by the use of those terms. No British or South African communities have seen a rise in violence against them in the last year.

It's not mental acrobatics. It's pragmatism and empathy.

shard972• 5 years ago

https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2021-01-19-don...

ckardat123• 5 years ago

I would think that the reason that people calling COVID the "China virus" are accused of racism is that there is really no reason to use that term for the virus outside of trying to offend others.

snicksnak• 5 years ago

Can we call it the chinese variant then? Because we do that with the new mutations: the brazilian variant, british variant, south african variant

docmars5• 5 years ago

I think that's a pretty loose assumption that _all people_ are using it with ill intent.

Anything can be said or used with ill intent, because intent matters and is separate from actual language. That's why we have tone in speaking and writing to help distinguish this. Our nonverbal cues say a lot more than the words themselves.

A rise in violence against Spaniards cannot sloppily be attributed to the use of "Spanish Flu" to describe a virus that some believed to either come from Spain, or affected Spain the worst.

It's morbidly irresponsible to assume negative intent when people are trying to name and classify a virus based on its best known origins, and attribute "racism" towards a people group of that same origin as being caused by the naming of a virus.

This is a fine example of: correlation does not imply causation.

A person who cannot separate the two concepts cleanly is the person who needs deep understanding for why they are wrong, especially when there is no credible data to support that assumption.

The media outlets reporting hate crimes caused by the naming of a virus are, in effect, assuming that all or most Americans are too stupid to act reasonably and understand these two very different concepts, so they declare the correlation however they see fit and expect their viewers to latch on and make the same poor and irresponsible assumptions blindly.

We are so much smarter than this. Pay close attention to the way journalists mold and shape the narrative based on assumptions and opinions to get you to believe their take. Also pay attention to the fact that CNN and others called this virus "the Chinese virus" well before our 45th President used the phrasing.

How does a media outlet get to blame behavior they created without first examining themselves?

standardUser2• 5 years ago

There were several terms that came into common use very quickly and none of them included the word "China". When a president with a history of racist statements started using it constantly, and Asian Americans started to get harassed and attacked at an increased rate, it became obviously unethical (to most people) to try and replace the existing, widely used terms with one that has a racial and national component.

No acrobatics necessary.

tim33311• 5 years ago

I've only heard "China virus" being used with xenophobic intent. Back in January 2020 before it has an official name it was referred to as the Wuhan virus.

nemothekid2• 5 years ago

I’m baffled at what branch of science involves being able to call it the “China virus” rather than COVID.

When was Science about prescribing blame?

TheKarateKid2• 5 years ago

Gee I don't know.. maybe going 100 years back with the Spanish Flu? West Nile virus, Zika virus, Ebola.. all those are okay but saying Wuhan virus is considered racist.

Izkata4• 5 years ago

Well, to be a bit pedantic those aren't the same thing. "China virus", or an alternative that used to be more common, "Wuhan virus", refer to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 - a disease that not everyone who is infected with the virus gets.

xrd• 5 years ago

If there are "so many dangerous terrorists" worthy of trillions of dollars of military spending to protect me (I'm in the US, but all governments invoke terrorism as justification), why aren't those terrorists utilizing viral weapons like this person describes? Is there something that could stop this kind of threat, if it is as real as described?

cdolan• 5 years ago

Playing devils advocate here but… people are so scared of everyone we literally do not go outside anymore. Is that not successful terrorism?

fredgrott• 5 years ago

People are injecting politics into this instead of medical science and science of human behavior.

China got caught with their pants down on pandemic prevention given their past research into bat virus and their own initial warning in 20127. That does not mean that combine that with politics about the CCP to jump to a lab accident conclusion.

Even the US Defense Intelligence structure has jumped to such a conclusion.

docmars5• 5 years ago

Huh, I remember a certain "conspiracy group" that was demonized and declared a terrorist organization trying to think more deeply about a theory like this. Now a mainstream media outlet publishes this and nobody bats an eye. Pun intended. ;)

The hypocrisy is strong with this one, Luke.

cletus• 5 years ago

I see three broad dimensions to any lab origin theory:

1. It was human made or found. Human made is common QAnon fodder. I don't believe anyone serious finds that idea credible. Nature is probably far better at concocting new viruses than humans are. And if it was found, where did it come from? I'm honestly surprised DNA sequencing hasn't been more effective in answering this question thus far;

2. Whether it was deliberately released or accidentally leaked. Note that a deliberate release doesn't have to be state-sponsored. It could be a rogue employee like the Anthrax letters from ~20 years ago; and

3. Whether the lab knew what they had or they didn't. Coronaviruses are studied by Chinese labs. They could have hundreds of samples without realizing that one in particular can infect humans and be transmissible effectively and asymptomatically. I suspect that in any version of the lab origin theory that it's more likely they didn't know what they had. That would take human testing.

What does seem clear is that the CCP isn't particularly interested in getting to the bottom of this. I wouldn't take that as evidence of them having more knowledge of this than we do. I suspect they simply don't want to know. More to the point, I think the CCP sees efforts to find out as a direct attack on China.

masswerk• 5 years ago

Shouldn't we see rather distinct spread patterns for the two scenarios (a lab accident and contaminated frozen food at the market)? I guess, the patterns, social contacts, habits and locations of a typical lab worker or scientist is quite distinct from those of a typical person working at the market, even in the CPR.

(In the first case, the market may be expected to be just another case in a wider spread pattern with a gravitational center involving typical contacts and residential areas of lab workers, in the second one, we may expect to observe an initial spread around the market and the living quarters of those, who work there.)

Even without a patient zero, there should be some indications regarding clusters in early observations.

fireeyed• 5 years ago

Didn’t YouTube and Twitter start banning people for evening broaching this topic.

jfoster• 5 years ago

1. Start with the 3 earliest known cases.

2. Review CCTV of their movements for the 14 days prior.

3. Find the commonality.

If there's genuine interest in where it came from, I think the answer is certainly findable.

endisneigh• 5 years ago

Assuming it was leaked and China didn’t disclose it - so what? Is the idea to blame China for everything? What’s the play?

I honestly don’t see what difference it makes from it coming from a lab in China vs someone eating something they weren’t supposed to be vs a bat, etc.

I’m honestly curious to why it matters - not to say that we shouldn’t pursue the truth but it seems like it doesn’t matter.

These theories without conclusive evidence seems to just blame China - which unfortunately drive anti Sino sentiment.

disgruntled101• 5 years ago

It seems that the common trend of explaining why China covered up the information and didn't let external third parties investigate is due to possible backlash. My simple question is, why fear backlash if it wasn't a leak either due to incompetence and malice? If bats from outside the lab truly started it, why not let observers see this? Why hide it?

rossdavidh• 5 years ago

It is not impossible that the authorities in China don't actually know what happened, but are afraid that it could have been a lab accident. Thus, they cover up from observers just in case, even though it might not actually have been the source. But, I share your concern.

smohare• 5 years ago

In this thrwad

tedk-42• 5 years ago

All these speculation pieces and theories without any proof at all.

My issue with the theory is it lights a fuel under people for more racism against asians in general. Until there's solid evidence, everyone should dismiss it as just that - a theory.

moosey• 5 years ago

Right. If everyone wants a scapegoat there is a real one that we can all focus on: meat consumption. 1918 flu pandemic probably started on a pig farm. This one at a wet market. We encroach on nature to make more corn and soy for meat, the outcome will be more diseases and death, and that doesn't even include the health issues and dangerous conditions required for cheap meat.

This isn't a theory, unfortunately, but since it requires self reflection it will never be a popular story in the US media. I admit I have seen it discussed in print several times.

marshmallow_12• 5 years ago

WARNING: shameless conspiracy theory ahead:

Let me explain that i'm not trying to push any agenda, or that i ever normally believe such things but i think this event hasn't had enough coverage https://thebulletin.org/2019/11/what-happened-after-an-explo...

Conclude what you will. I personally don't know enough so i'm not sure whether a link can be drawn, yet the timing is curious.

FuckButtons• 5 years ago

Utter bollocks. The most galling thing about this is that the more conspiracy theories get spun out the less people are going to hold the global developing world agricultural sector to account and the more likely this is to happen again.

EGreg• 5 years ago

Isn't there a site where you can bet and win if you can show the opposite, that it's originated outside the lab? What is the name...

ngloom• 5 years ago

Then why the USAMRIID lab leak theory should be dismissed ?

dionian• 5 years ago

China is pushing real hard to discount it and try to hype up zoonotic transmission. That should tell you something.

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

China is pushing real hard to discount it and try to hype up zoonotic transmission. That should tell you something.

That's what China would be expected to do:

(1) if it knew the Wuhan lab leak theory was correct,

(2) if it knew zoonotic transmission was correct.

(3) if it had no idea what was going on.

(4) if it wasn't a lab leak but a deliberate biological weapons test that went wrong, and they has engineered both their overt argument and the lab leaks story as layers of cover.

So, no, their behavior here tells us nothing.

godmode20193• 5 years ago

The cause of this virus while concerning. Is nothing to the hysteria created from this virus, remember how this virus was branded at the start. Basically brave yourself for death, a interesting study is to look at news articles over time.

Its an example of bait and switch. This virus is not something that should have gained this much attention.

A bayesian inference shows that death when looking at a age stratification chart, who died compared with how many were expected to die in this cohort vs how many where expected to die were it a average flu outbreak in that same population.

I was building a model for local hospitals, with information back in march 2020. I grew disheartened when I realised that this killer virus was hardly more deadly than a bad flu year.

That brings up the excess deaths, why is it so high? Its hard to find good numbers in this, especially when you apply related increase in violent crime in 2020. Murders increases by 40% in NYC for example. More needs to be done to look into these numbers.

The death rate in all countries is died with, nor from. For example the UK lists all deaths who died within 30 days if a positive reading as a covid death. So to get the true numbers you need to apply a bayes model to see what we should have seen in a normal year.

A person over 70 has a 10% change if dying each year.

So if a virus that had no affect but turned your hair green killed 10% of people in an aged care home this would be branded as a deadly virus. Because of collerlation.

Now this virus kills much more than 10%, flu outbreaks have been reported to kill 12-16% of people in aged care homes. Covid is still more however.

I am now rambling, I have not squared the circle just yet. I still don't understand the hysteria, but it reminds me of post 9/11. Where people were acting crazy and full of anger.

I don't know what comes next, but I can tell you it won't be logical.

jmspring• 5 years ago

Did your modeling take into account impacts on life due to lingering health issues for those that became seriously ill but did not die?

godmode20193• 5 years ago

This was not known in march 2020, so no.

How can one even quantity that information?

andagainagain• 5 years ago

Step 1 - provide evidence.

kiawe_fire• 5 years ago

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".

DoctorNick2• 5 years ago

I look forward to a bunch of HN posters uncritically swallowing State department propaganda.

DoctorNick2• 5 years ago

I have to wonder if the upvoters realize I'm talking about the US State department...

kgeist• 5 years ago

I am disappointed there are no Russian hackers in this conspiracy

christmm• 5 years ago

I thought Wuhan lab was calculated to be most likely source by scientists.

ngcc_hk2• 5 years ago

I think accident happened. And it is fierce competition among scientists to get the SAR virus under control. Like things to remember recent case of a doctor bought some cell from mainland to hk for cosmetic operation, it just happened and if unchecked will happen again.

Whether it is deliberated it is harder. But if it is an accident.

And let Wu Han people to fly away to the world ...

ngcc_hk2• 5 years ago

You can say German x Spanish flu Uk variant ... you can talk about USA cdc lab issue ... but all is fine with China lab. Who is in charge who is right ...

say_it_as_it_is• 5 years ago

Brett Weinstein spoke about this theory several times in the last year. You can hear him discuss it on his Dark Horse podcast relatively often. Here is one episode dedicated to it entirely: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bret-weinstein-and-yur...

mikhailfranco3• 5 years ago

Almost certainly an accidental lab release.

Probably from known civilian gain-of-function research.

Probably not from a classified military biowarfare program.

known• 5 years ago

Can we seek compensation from China?

arisAlexis• 5 years ago

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.

choeger• 5 years ago

I mean, seriously. How many such labs, specialized in research of Coronavirii, are there in China? It certainly looks like a weird coincidence that the first know hotspot is actually close to such a lab.

But of course there are many reports about the virus circulating long before the Wuhan cluster was exposed. Maybe the lab was responsible for that cluster but not the actual first outbreak?

ourcat• 5 years ago

I find it odd that there's no mention at all of the University of North Carolina in any of these articles and threads concerning the handling of deadly pathogens.

Before the BLS4 facility in Wuhan was established in 2017, there was a lot of SARS / Coronavirus research going on at UNC (alongside people from Wuhan's Institute of Virology).

This included 'gain of function' research which attempts to create the means to 'deliver' pathogens via aerosol.

I'm not saying UNC had anything to do with Wuhan itself, but I do notice many articles avoid mentioning that very similar work goes on in other parts of the World.

(I was also amazed that the distance from the Wuhan lab to the fish market is startlingly close).

tim33311• 5 years ago

Can't cover everything in one article I guess.

ggm• 5 years ago

Why is nobody discussing confirmation bias? Repetitions of "I knew I was right" are really unhelpful.

The fundamentals remain unchanged from when the WHO did their work, nothing said here is adding new evidence, its just the volume of agreement making people feel sure.

lanevorockz• 5 years ago

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?

cryptica• 5 years ago

If globalization and wealth concentration/inequality continues, workers will become more malicious and we're going to be seeing more leaks and unexpected threats coming from all sorts of places and industries. Humanity will destroy itself. It's vital that we decentralize capital and bring back fairness to the global economy.

scotty79• 5 years ago

What evidencewould be sufficuent to disprove this theory?

And if no evidence is good enough is it really a theory?

How does it fit the detection of the virus in the material collected months before officual discovery in places far away from the place of official discovery?

mrkramer• 5 years ago

I believe US intelligence already knows this was lab leak because one of the Biden's intel guys said it was probably "gain of function" research that led to leak. But I think it was accidental not on purpose because the US would retaliate as fiercely as it was retaliation to Japan for Pearl Harbor.

Not the first not the last pandemic that originated in China: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/140123-...

Some time ago I shared here on HN a US research on "The debate on potential pandemic pathogen creation" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OaTwPAQ3v0

Interesting research on bio weaponry.

randomopining3• 5 years ago

If China didn't have any covering up beyond low/middle-level CCP members that wanted to save face... they would be heavily incentivized to allow a thorough investigation. This would let them save face across the world: "Thorough WHO/UN Investigation Shows China Largely Followed Proper Pandemic Procedures"

Of course, they don't allow a thorough investigation and thus are trying to hide something.

g42gregory• 5 years ago

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.

fukmbas• 5 years ago

Sooooo many cult45 on HN. Sad

mikhailfranco3• 5 years ago

'A lab leak isn't 100% certain but it seems to be the only logical source of Covid': Washington expert who led inquiry into the cause of the virus reveals three Wuhan lab scientists fell ill in November 2019

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9410163/US-State-De...

Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

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