The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins

1426 983 5 years ago

bartart2• 5 years ago

This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life. I'd ask everyone to please read it because it is incredible.

One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity."

Plus there's all the stuff about the miners shoveling bat poop for weeks and then dying of coronaviruses, and the Wuhan institute collecting and doing gain of function research on these similar-to-SARS samples. And then several of the lab's gain of function researchers became ill in late 2019. And there's the weird renaming of samples to hide the unmatched closeness of the mine samples and covid. This is just the absolute surface of the article. There's too much to list here

Edit: here's another amazement for the list: "Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories." And the article says "BSL-2 [is] roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office."

RachelF• 5 years ago

Take a look here for another shocking article: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

dataflow• 5 years ago

Btw, for anyone who read that, here's a follow-up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27388943

harryf6• 5 years ago

It gets worse - gain of function research was banned under Obama until the ban was lifted in 2017 under Trump - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

I can’t find sources for this right now but apparently Dr Anthony Fauci played a key role in getting the ban lifted. He’s also the head of the NIAID ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci ) which (apparently) is the ultimate source for all funding on gain of function research.

So the lead guy we’ve been listening to (and still are) for scientific advice on this pandemic is entangled in a massive conflict of interest.

Edit: I assume this is getting down-voted either because is sounds like conspiracy theory or just everyone has already heard it and it's not news. Fauci has already admitted having been involved in funding Wuhan - https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/fauci-admits-nih-funding-of-wu... - that on it's own should not have been something he first admitted to in May 2021, while holding such a responsible position. Looking for more sources right now...

Edit 2: In this article from December 2011 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-wor... - you have Fauci making the case for creating viruses in a lab;

"Given these uncertainties, important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory."

It doesn't explicitly mention gain of function but - while raising the concerns, it's arguing for research which would include gain of function. Meanwhile listening to this panel discussion which included Fauci from Nov 2017 - https://www.c-span.org/video/?437187-1/johns-hopkins-forum-e... ... again he's arguing for more aggressive types of research

arrosenberg4• 5 years ago

You are getting downvoted because it's muckraking. There is nothing shady about NIAID giving a (verrrry small for this type of research) grant to a foreign research lab, which is doing research about a topic of interest. That's how you ensure the U.S. government gets a copy of the results.

pfisch• 5 years ago

So it sounds like Fauci is saying they didn't fund gain of function research in the Wuhan lab.

If they did doesn't that really mean Trump is either more responsible for Covid or equally as responsible as China?

Trump allowed the ban to be lifted after the Obama whitehouse explicitly shut down this kind of research. Fauci just worked for Trump. It was ultimately on Trump, not an employee of his.

PaulDavisThe1st27• 5 years ago

So the lead guy we’ve been listening to (and still are) for scientific advice on this pandemic is entangled in a massive conflict of interest.

How does any role he might (or might not have) played in GOF research create a conflict of interest in terms of his advice about the pandemic?

lamontcg8• 5 years ago

They indirectly gave WIV funding to support research into Pig SARS -- Swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus (SADS-CoV).

There is exactly fuckoff zero evidence that funding wound up supporting gain of function research for anything.

And giving China money to study diseases in pigs happening in China that are closely related to a human disease that we were worried about it (or maybe a close relative) spilling over into humans only makes sense.

mkhpalm• 5 years ago

It gets worse - gain of function research was banned under Obama until the ban was lifted in 2017 under Trump...

I'm not sure that claim aligns with historical NIH funding for gain of function research: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9819304

austhrow743• 5 years ago

Article gave me the impression that the Obama ban wasn't real. It included an "unless its important" exception and everyone just kept on doing it anyway.

Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO framework was largely met with shrugs and eye rolls, said a longtime agency official: “If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research anyway.”

tomp• 5 years ago

Fauci in2017:

Fauci said the Trump administration will not only be challenged by ongoing global health threats such as influenza and HIV, but also a surprise disease outbreak.

https://www.healio.com/news/infectious-disease/20170111/fauc...

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/29/fact...

unishark2• 5 years ago

Your May 2021 story includes the following quotes:

But Fauci emphatically denied that the money went toward so-called “gain of function” research, which he described as “taking a virus that could infect humans and making it either more transmissible and/or pathogenic for humans.”
“That categorically was not done,” he insisted.
Earlier in the hearing, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins told Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) that researchers at the Wuhan lab “were not approved by NIH for doing “gain of function research” before adding “we are, of course, not aware of other sources of funds or other activities they might have undertaken outside of what our approved grant allowed.”

Are you saying these are still lies? It doesn't really matter if the NIH funded some other kind of research on coronaviruses if that research was not risky. Presumably the question is whether gain of function research performed there created covid-19. And the grant, which I assume is public record, is claimed not to be for that. Maybe there's more to the story, but seems like guilt-by-association at this point. If Wuhan used the funding for some research it was not supposed to be used for, then it might just as well have been funding for any other disease anyway.

shlant3• 5 years ago

I assume this is getting down-voted either because is sounds like conspiracy theory

I would imagine that is true and it's because how you are presenting it is absolutely conspiratorial. You seem to be very adamant about involving Fauci with weak evidence which is the MO for almost all other biased conspiracy theorists in regards to this topic.

Fauci seems to be a scapegoat for many peoples frustrations with very little rational reasoning - similar to Soros and BLM. Conspiracy theorists rarely talk about the repercussions of their perspectives or tangible calls to action and instead get obsessed with who to blame and nefarious-by-default tangential financial associations.

Maybe if you addressed some of the evidence in the article or even the content of the comment you are replying to then your comment wouldn't be perceived in the same light.

nkrisc• 5 years ago

In retrospect, and knowing what we know now, do you think his advice and direction has been inadequate?

freeflight4• 5 years ago

It gets worse - gain of function research was banned under Obama until the ban was lifted in 2017 under Trump

It was never really "banned", there was a moratorium on such research after a string of safety lapses in US laboratories, moratorium's are always only of a temporary nature [0].

The often mentioned "GoF research" involving bats with US participation and funding, didn't even fall under that moratorium [1].

you have Fauci making the case for creating viruses in a lab

Of course he would make that case, because that's a useful tool to have in research. No offense, but trying to make this out as something so binary and only bad, reminds me a lot about the more radical and clueless takes on GMO that see "All GMO as bad".

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/10/17/3570109...

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787

lettergram• 5 years ago

Supposedly, Fauci only got an approval from a low level Trump administration official.

IMO it’s not clear anyone even approved the research. I wouldn’t be surprised if the NIH just pulled a fast one. There’s also no evidence Fauci never mentioned the research to anyone near the beginning of the pandemic. Several Trump officials came out and said they were never told.

bryanwb4• 5 years ago

Upvoting because you are right. All roads of investigation lead to Fauci. Many seem in denial about this.

bryanwb4• 5 years ago

_IF_ Covid-19 is the result of a lab leak on research that Fauci funded and promoted AND he colluded w/ a group of scientists to hide this fact, it literally is the greatest conspiracy of our generation.

It isn't a big if. The recently released e-mails support this line of reasoning but don't confirm it. To argue the opposite of this, you should have better than ad hominem attacks.

cindarin• 5 years ago

I appreciate that you provided sources and yet the conversation seems to be focused on just your baseless conjecture.

jackfoxy2• 5 years ago

gain of function research was banned under Obama until the ban was lifted in 2017 under Trump

There's no need to politicize the discussion.

1) There's no evidence any recent president or cabinet member had a clue, or if they did have a clue it was off their radar anyway.

2) All this gain of function research was administered either in academic circles or at lower governmental circles where politicians are not involved. See for yourself. Fauci's own email from January 2020 referenced research already published in 2015. (That's during Obama's gain of function research ban, for those of you keeping score at home). Start at 5:00 into the referenced video.

EDIT: The paper was published after the ban was initiated. The research began before the ban, but apparently continued.

The whole video is well worth watching and walks trough Fauci's immediate responses as soon as it became apparent this is the real deal, and still 6 FULL WEEKS before the WHO declared a pandemic. A whole lot of CYA going on here. Fauci knew enough to reference this paper in the wee hours of the morning after a very busy day and before another hectic day he was headed for. Think he was familiar with the topic?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNxoVFZwMYw

epitactic• 5 years ago

It gets worse - gain of function research was banned under Obama until the ban was lifted in 2017 under Trump - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

The ban was actually lifted by the Obama administration, _11 days prior_ to Trump taking office.

Source: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2017/01/09/recomme...

JANUARY 9, 2017 AT 9:06 Recommended Policy Guidance for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight

"Adoption of these recommendations will satisfy the requirements for lifting the current moratorium on certain life sciences research that could enhance a pathogen’s virulence and/or transmissibility to produce a potential pandemic pathogen (an enhanced PPP)."

jMyles• 5 years ago

"Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity."

The interesting part of this - and I'm curious about the personal experience of others here - is that the scientists I know have been the strongest questioners of the wet market theory from the get-go.

I don't think anything resembling scientific unanimity ever emerged, or even appeared to emerge.

Heck, here on HN we've been talking about this consistently at least since the PNAS letter, and probably since the beginning of the pandemic.

jkhdigital7• 5 years ago

And, for this thoughtful observation, you get... DOWNVOTES. These Covid origins comment threads are so brutal!

But yeah, I agree. I’m just a lowly PhD student (an older one, though) but it’s pretty clear from my limited experience that “scientific consensus” is a PR term that bears little relationship to how scientists perform their work and engage with their colleagues.

tacitusarc• 5 years ago

There was an episode of TWIV last year where they mocked anyone taking the lab leak hypothesis seriously

tpfour8• 5 years ago

The calculation is simple and could have been made in early 2020. What's the joint probability of occurrence given everything you know about the origins of SARS-CoV-2?

There is _very_ high probability that this is just a human error.

peter4226• 5 years ago

Was every other emerging virus also created in a lab? SARS? MERS? Influenza? Polio?

The highest probability is this virus originated like every other virus in history.

mhh__• 5 years ago

Yes, but, I've seen people try to do that both on here and on rootcause, and the probabilities are anything but objective. It's just people math-washing what they already thought

JPKab2• 5 years ago

Prepare to have your head explode further.

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...

mc329• 5 years ago

The other astonishing things is the sudden about face by the media. I'm glad they allowed themselves the liberty of looking at alternative origins. But... they were SO adamant and complicit in any discussion about alternative theories being shut down under the guise of conspiracy, Trumpism, anti-China, etc. (These are the same people who have no qualms about attributing anything to Russia even if evidence is thin, so it's clear there is hypocrisy involved).

Edit: It looks like Twitter is suspending the account of the Fauci email leaker(s). So the MoT is still on it.

corpMaverick• 5 years ago

IMHO, we were in the middle of the problem. The important part to was to figure out how to get out of it. The investigation at that point would not be helpful as it may make cooperation more difficult. Even if the result is that is natural origin and it escaped from a Wet Market. It was China's responsibility and the whole world must make sure to force China to ban wet markets. But as I said before, it will come a time for that.

IgorPartola2• 5 years ago

It’s almost as if we learned new information that contradicts old information and the media is doing its job publishing articles about it. How weird.

frickenhamster• 5 years ago

China supported this in a psyop. Remember when they tried repeatedly to push the origin of the virus to Italy? I'm ethnically Chinese, so I'm in contact with a lot of mainlanders. The brainwashing is very effective. Even if most mainlanders know that their state media is bogus, and that Xi is a dictator, they'll take it deeply personally when you say anything that threatens the whole China # 1 narrative. All they had to do was hire a few shitposters, feed a few media narratives and the US fights with itself over stuff like anti-china, racists etc, while the CCP takes over Hong Kong.

ameetgaitonde• 5 years ago

The Fauci emails were published from an FOIA request, not leaked.

tablespoon• 5 years ago

The other astonishing things is the sudden about face by the media. I'm glad they allowed themselves the liberty of looking at alternative origins. But... they were SO adamant and complicit in any discussion about alternative theories being shut down under the guise of conspiracy, Trumpism, anti-China, etc.

I agree. However, I can empathize with the media's position. Their business model has been under intense pressure for decades, so they're far too understaffed to do the kind of job we'd all like them to do; and viral disinformation/misinformation has become far more prevalent and influential in the last several years. Donald Trump also acted as a siren (in the Greek mythology sense) during his presidency to greatly exacerbate both difficulties. It's not surprising that, when they were faced with a crisis where they were arguably on one of the front lines, they were forced to take shortcuts out of expediency that were ultimately mistakes. After all the lab-leak theory is both 1) extremely plausible, 2) conspiracy-theory bait.

Fomite5• 5 years ago

An alternative explanation is that the other COVID-19 narrative - that vaccines work, but those who are hesitant are essentially beyond convincing, and this is going to be both a long and boring years long slog to control globally and longer to find the origin - makes for exceedingly boring news.

On the other hand, talking about "If X is true, then..." and spending the rest of the section talking about the lab leak hypothesis as if it was true" is much more exciting.

Especially given there are now three "lab leak" camps - Bioweapon, GoF Gone Wrong, and Genuine Accidental Release of a Natural Virus all of whom claim they have the smoking gun for three mutually exclusive theories.

pjc50• 5 years ago

This is the Iraq war situation all over again, by which I mean the same people (literally) are pushing the same angle through the same media outlets in the same way.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-w... : Michael R. Gordon, WSJ on the "lab leak"

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-i... : Michael R. Gordon, NYT on "Iraq WMD"

The media are, in these cases, bad, but only because they've not adequately defended against the internal psyop by the US security agencies.

myko3• 5 years ago

Most of the folks I recall from last year shutdown the thought that the virus was bio-engineered, not that I couldn't have come from the lab in Wuhan. Yes, people said there was no evidence of a lab leak (because there isn't) but few people were saying it was impossible.

People are conflating the virus being bio-engineered (pretty sure this did not happen) with it coming from the Wuhan lab (might have happened, need more evidence).

tootie5• 5 years ago

I don't think lab workers getting sick is really a useful data point. People get sick all the time. Could have very easily been seasonal flu or whatever.

It also seems The Lancet letter doesn't actual address the question of lab leak. Only that it wasn't engineered. That was a pretty hot conspiracy theory at the time and one that remains far fetched. They didn't positively say it couldn't be a naturally occurring virus that leaked. I don't know enough to comment on gain of function leaves any hallmarks but I'm guessing it doesn't since it tries to replicate evolution.

lamontcg8• 5 years ago

The lab workers didn't even get sick, it was samples the lab worked on.

calsy4• 5 years ago

It's so far fetched to think a lab with known safety issues could be responsible for leaking a virus. We all know that humans are infallible and never make mistakes and accidents rarely occur in place with poor safety standards. Its just so crazy....

corty2• 5 years ago

Lab workers getting sick should be a starting point to begin analyzing archived blood samples for instance. Also, you don't usually visit a hospital for seasonal flu. And three people from the same lab at the same time suggests a wider outbreak in the lab. Even if it were the seasonal flu, it would have warranted a wider investigation, given what that lab was working on.

systemvoltage4• 5 years ago

3/6 fatality rate of researchers dying should be absolutely chilling evidence of something that’s gone wrong.

newrotik• 5 years ago

How many times you had three of your colleagues sent to the hospital for a flu they caught at the office?

eutropia11• 5 years ago

I quoted this bit in another comment, but Steven Quay (interviewed by the US gov as mentioned in tfa)

The “engineered” comments refer to common amino acid sequences from lab practices, they leave a signature because ordinary biology is more random.

  The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that arerarely used individually and have never been seen together in tandem in any coronaviruses in nature. But these same ‘rare in nature’ codons turn out to be the very ones that are always used by scientists in the laboratory when researchers want to add the amino acid arginine, the ones that are found in the furin site. When scientists add a dimer of arginine codons to a coronavirus, they invariably use the word, CGG-CGG, but coronaviruses in nature rarely (<1%) use this codon pair.  For example, in the 580,000 codons of 58 Sarbecoviruses the only CGG pair is CoV-2; none of the other 57 sarbecoviruses have such a pair.

deeviant3• 5 years ago

If this is the most shocking article you have ever read in your life, I feel you haven't read many articles in your life.

There is absolutely no evidence in it. Just a pile of conjecture. It is absolutely the stuff of conspiracy theories.

The truly shocking thing is that world does not hold China liable for this disaster. It really doesn't matter if it started in a lab or in one of their wet markets; it was incompetence and negligence on China's part in either case. China should pay reparations to the world for turning it off for what looks to be like multiple years, and killing millions of people.

jacquesm• 5 years ago

China could - rightfully - point out that they in fact did get the situation more or less under control and that in spite of being fully aware of the seriousness of the situation the bulk of the governments in the West (those who presumably would be first in line to demand reparation) messed it up all by themselves.

wombatpm• 5 years ago

When China started welding doors on high rises to keep people in, that was the signal to take it seriously-despite what the WHO was saying

WillPostForFood2• 5 years ago

There is absolutely no evidence in it. Just a pile of conjecture

There is much more evidence in the article for a lab leak than there was for the wet market story which was uncritically parroted in the media for over a year.

rvanlaar• 5 years ago

The origin does matter.

If it evolved in a lab, it is highly likely that the virus is better at infecting people in lab conditions, for example that would mean inside.

Which, coincidentally is exactly what we're seeing. People with masks on get infected inside buildings. Outside the risk is much much lower.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 5 years ago

"This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life."

Dare we inquire how long you have lived. :)

But seriously, I am not sure that the scientific community, nor all national governments, have reached a clear consensus on gain of function research. It is still a developing issue. Welcome to be corrected on that. Such research could potentially help to prevent pandemics as well as accidentally start them. The idea that scientists in the US might have been working with scientists in other countries, including China, on GoF research is not shocking to me. Here is a paper from 2016 on the ethics of GoF research:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4996883/

Perhaps the old saying about mistakingly attributing malice to incompetence applies here.

As for the cover-up, it is difficult to imagine that David Baltimore is wrong. I used a textbook he co-authored when I was in school; he is one of the pioneers of the biotech industry. It seems unlikely this was not created in a lab. Then again, it is probably easier to prove someone in a lab made a mistake than to prove soemthing exists in nature.

AbrahamParangi• 5 years ago

Gain of function research outside of hyper-secure settings is, frankly, idiotic. It’s massively more dangerous than criticality experiments because of the potential for exponential spread.

bitexploder2• 5 years ago

Even if it wasn’t created or modified in a lab, it’s not hard to imagine it was known and known to be dangerous. The conditions described about how these researchers were sifting through bat guano are quite poor to say the least. From the start of the pandemic I sort of shrugged about how it started. I thought denying a lab leak so early on was quite odd, or at least no one should trust that. For simple reasons: governments lie and do dangerous things, harming its citizens and other global citizens in the process. Then they classify it all and lie about it. There are so many examples of this, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. See: Rocky Mountain flats plutonium production, etc.

flatline• 5 years ago

The WaPo article where I first read about the theory said most of this stuff. I didn’t understand then why people were so quick to dismiss it - it is eerily plausible, and we just don’t have much other data to go on. But it’s like having an opinion one way or the other is a political dog whistle that puts you into one of two bins, neither of which I fit into comfortably. This article makes a decent point of that: now that Trump’s racism is out of the way, maybe we can more critically examine the facts. I still think the lab leak theory is less likely than evolution, but it’s at least a bit compelling.

incrudible• 5 years ago

This article makes a decent point of that: now that Trump’s racism is out of the way, maybe we can more critically examine the facts.

I highly doubt it, in most cases "Reductio ad Trumperum" will remain a useful sleight of hand. This is a different matter, being "tough on China" is a bipartisan issue, it's just about showing how the other side was "doing it wrong". For instance, you could say that Trump had "no evidence" supporting his lab leak theory.

rayiner4• 5 years ago

We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. Scientists are human and have human motivations and flaws. They are political, they cover their ass, they suffer from results oriented thinking.

“Science” should be trusted within its domain, but it’s not a replacement for all of the processes western society has developed to address the reality that nobody can be trusted with power. Everyone needs to perform their roles. Reporters still need to be skeptical and question scientists’ motivations and investigate the story. And politicians still need to be in charge of translating scientists’ judgments as to various scenarios and probabilities into the political decisions of figuring out what to do accounting for the entire universe of economic and social considerations that are within their ambit.

rhacker• 5 years ago

I've been hearing more and more that science is moving from the model "theory holds" to a set of arrogant people backing them.

version_five• 5 years ago

To me, the only really horrible thing is the way that anything other than the mainstream version of events was treated. I think there are different plausible theories, and I'm not surprised they have different adherents that are mostly all motivated by something other than a pure quest for the truth. That's life. If this was e.g. a civil or criminal trial, you'd see the same thing.

The only difference is, in a trial, nobody would try and brand the other side as a conspiracy theorist, racist, denier, anti-xer, whatever the most popular inflammatory term is. Nobody would try and block dissent from all mainstream communication forums.

To me, that's the only thing that's new, is the institutional suppression of any suggestions outside of an orthodox version. And it's honestly way scarier than the idea that government labs are doing biological research, or that diseases can jump from animals to people.

rayiner4• 5 years ago

That’s another symptom of the same disease. People have an idea that “trust the experts” can replace all the messy, gross, and often wrong processes we have developed to deal with the fact nobody can be trusted. Trusting scientists involved in gain of function research will neutrally investigate the origins of the pandemic is one manifestation of that conceit. So is trusting fact checkers and review panels to decide what’s “misinformation” and what’s factual.

The marketplace of ideas is better than trusting gatekeepers of knowledge. That’s one of the huge lessons of the enlightenment that we have somehow forgot. We think “it’s different this time.”

grumple• 5 years ago

The problem with this is that the American public discourse is broken.

The Republicans (I can't tapdance around the direct call out with weasel words) and the right-wing media have lost all credibility because they often DO behave as racist, selfish, inconsistent conspiracy theorists. On those rare occasions when they are right or properly play the role of opposition rather than pushing an absurd agenda alongside their media manipulation, their prior behavior causes an automatic immune-like response. You can't trust anything they say or their intentions, and they are experts at the Gish Gallop (constantly coming up with new bs you have to respond to, when response takes far more effort) - why would this particular action be any different? Also, this seems more of a case of "a broken clock is right twice a day" than an indication that the right should be taken seriously as a general rule.

Non-credible actors that are known to be untrustworthy should never be the people who put forth any hypotheses if you want them to be taken seriously. The American far-right politicians/media and 4chan are not credible actors, and any idea associated with them will face an uphill battle.

aahortwwy• 5 years ago

To me, that's the only thing that's new, is the institutional suppression of any suggestions outside of an orthodox version.

This isn't new at all. It's been a staple of many human cultures throughout history, including US culture for much of the 20th century (and, I would say, all of the 21st century). I think what's probably a new experience for most of us is just how all-encompassing the pandemic has been as an issue of discussion.

ramraj075• 5 years ago

This New York mag article [1] published eons ago already made it clear to any sane biologist that all you mentioned are important things to consider. However the issue is sane biologists or scientists in general are actually in extreme short supply, the vast majority are often under the delusion that they “understand the system” better than they actually do. They also are often knowingly and unknowingly more interested in persevering their personal agenda (for eg. Gain of function research in the general sense in this case) than the overall good of humanity or scientific rigor.

Take Fauci for example, is he a good scientist? Yes. But it’s also clear that he too subconsciously has pushed for the method of approaching pandemics that coincidentally he was good at, and now we are left with this mess. I doubt him or anyone in between is going to acknowledge it even if they realize it. I was downvoted here to oblivion for pointing this out weeks back but doesn’t matter. I threw away a decade of my life’s experience because I didn’t believe in this cult of an academic system, downvotes don’t hurt nearly as much.

1. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...

GavinMcG3• 5 years ago

Trump didn't exactly follow Fauci's advice, so it's odd that you'd blame Fauci's "method of approaching pandemics" for "this mess."

Was there some other, better, established method?

matzab• 5 years ago

Honestly, reading comments like these and articles like the OP has convinced me that we, as humans, will not at all be prepared for the next pandemic. And the one after that.

These viruses and their potential recombinations are out there, we don't need some virologist to go out and maybe catch it. People will catch them, we'll just know even less about them when the next pandemic starts.

jb7752• 5 years ago

Also interesting to note that (per the leaked emails) Fauci was in regular correspondence with the guy who thinks everyone should die by age 75 or else they're a waste of space[1]....Discussing strategy on the pandemic that primarily kills people over 75.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/why-i-h...

hahaxdxd123• 5 years ago

The guy has a personal preference for not wanting to live a reduced quality of life, and you're using that to insinuate he wants to genocide old people?

toomanybeersies• 5 years ago

per the leaked emails

They were released under the FOIA, not leaked.

the guy who thinks everyone should die by age 75 or else they're a waste of space

You linked to an article where he expresses the opinion that he personally doesn't want to live past the age of 75. That's a far cry from advocating mass murder of the elderly.

Fauci was in regular correspondence... Discussing strategy on the pandemic

Emanuel is the head of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy. It would be unusual if he wasn't in regular correspondence.

member492• 5 years ago

What is even more shocking is that the mass media and big tech have done everything to keep this covered. Most of the revelations are nothing new if you read alternative news sources where true journalism still exists. Big tech and mass media are now more like China state television, they decide what and how to tell you something based on what they want you to believe.

The greatest threat of our times is not the Corona pandemic or lies about it's origins. It is the loss of true journalism from mass media and free speech on social media. Mass media journalism and big tech are so terribly corrupted that due to that billions of people around the world are being fooled all the time. They are lying to you "for the greater good".

When you start reading alternative news sources you'll find out soon enough something is very wrong. From all over the world renowned scientists, doctors, politicians, lawyers, noble price winners, and many more, are being totally silenced and criminalized. It's truly horrifying.

concordDance4• 5 years ago

The reason that big tech is corrupted is mass media and activists (here I mean anyone who pushes for their company to do good things rather than just neutral thinhs) within the big tech organization.

The (non-rightwing) news orgs had constantly been going on about the evils of Trump and racism and fake news and virus misinformation how very bad it all was, the activists were convinced (because most people don't know how the "news" sausage is made and how it misleads) and pushed to stamp out what they saw as dangerous behaviour. The solution is probably to stop trusting the news media and bring back freedom of communication.

kenjackson• 5 years ago

Isn’t it mass media covering this now? It seems like this is a credit to mass media in that it moves as data moves. I always feel this is a highly underrated attribute in organizations and individuals.

kelp2• 5 years ago

What alternative news sources would you say are more reliable and truthful?

boringg4• 5 years ago

Wow you really went there: Big tech and mass media is the same as China state TV? Do you even know anything about China State TV?

You realize everything you said was anecdotal without any shred of evidence. And infowars and its cohorts don't qualify as evidence.

iab5• 5 years ago

How exactly are alternative news sources more trustworthy than mainstream news sources? Your reasoning is that "mainstream" (I truly hate this moniker) news serves to present biased information, how do alternative non-vetted sources avoid this pitfall?

vladTheInhaler• 5 years ago

From all over the world renowned scientists, doctors, politicians, lawyers, noble price winners, and many more, are being totally silenced and criminalized.

This sentence literally tells me nothing. Which specific people are being "criminalized" and by whom?

jbd0• 5 years ago

Which alternative news sites do you read?

DoreenMichele• 5 years ago

This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life.

From what I gather, Vanity Fair generally seeks to be as shocking as possible. It's part of their marketing strategy.

durovo• 5 years ago

"One obvious demand would have been access to the WIV’s database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, which had been taken offline. At an event convened by a London organization on March 10, Daszak was asked whether the group had made such a request. He said there was no need: Shi Zhengli had stated that the WIV took down the database due to hacking attempts during the pandemic. “Absolutely reasonable,” Daszak said. “And we did not ask to see the data…. As you know, a lot of this work has been conducted with EcoHealth Alliance…. We do basically know what’s in those databases. There is no evidence of viruses closer to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13 in those databases, simple as that.”"

What did she mean when she said that the database is offline? It's not like the data would be gone if the service is not running?

xyzzy123• 5 years ago

According to DRASTIC it's a 61.5 MB mysql database.

Oddly, it went offline 12 September 2019 shortly _before_ the pandemic was announced in December 2019.

Ref: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gilles-Demaneuf/publica...

Not really clear why it hasn't been released, it would be technically trivial and save a lot of speculation.

There is a bit of a pattern of DRASTIC researchers finding interesting tidbits in various science portals, followed by those portals going offline or being restricted.

Fomite5• 5 years ago

Meanwhile, elsewhere, people are arguing that COVID-19 can be studied in BSL-2 facilities: https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/14/allow-bsl-2-labs-handle-...

There's a lot of post-hoc engineering arguing for BSL-4 research into coronavirus when even if the lab leak theory proves true wasn't in evidence at the time.

avereveard2• 5 years ago

good time as any to highlight how "fact checking" suppressed the "lab leak" talk for over a year [1] and how "fact checking" is just groupthink by another name and people promoting "fact checking" driven censorship are the 2020 version of the useful idiots of the olds.

[1] https://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/info-2021/... (point 7)

unionpivo• 5 years ago

Not really sure what is so shocking about it.

This is just about what I would expect from governments to behave (both US and China).

This kind of bullshit where people are more concerned about their departments future funding and prospects, and try to bury "unfortunate" incidents is happening in all the governments(and even inside larger companies) I am familiar with. It's a lot easier to bury if you can prevent investigation, than bury results of such investigation. As shocking as might sound this is pretty much businesses as usual in bureaucracy .

For me that doesn't even comes close to Snowden revelations (even though, again we suspected some of it).

toshk2• 5 years ago

The strong sentiment that it couldn't have come from the lab was suspicious from day one. It was not even allowed to be a consideration.

Also, here on this forum, I was downvoted for saying it shouldn't be ruled out that the lab might be the source.

texasbigdata2• 5 years ago

Maybe this is naive, but what the issue here? These people are alive, the documents exist, the physical locations are accessible. This isn’t archeology.

Couldn’t we ... just... check? Like maybe the UN or the group of 7 or something similar?

You shut down the globe for a year, seems like it’d be worth running down all the Rabit holes.

menomatter• 5 years ago

I think the article mentione one of the reasons:

" When Trump himself floated the lab-leak hypothesis last April, his divisiveness and lack of credibility made things more, not less, challenging for those seeking the truth."

gadders• 5 years ago

What amazes me is the BBC are still going to Daszak as an authority on whether it was a lab leak or not.

mynameishere• 5 years ago

Shocking? This is all very humdrum to anyone who has been paying attention. Maybe you should pay attention.

DebtDeflation2• 5 years ago

"Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories."

This is important for another reason that may not be immediately obvious. The WIV (BSL-4) is ~8 miles from the Wuhan Market. There's a BSL-2 lab (the CCDC) that's literally just a few hundred yards from the market. If the lab leak theory is correct, it may have escaped from the latter rather than the former. Or a visiting worker may have inadvertently transmitted it from the former to the latter before it escaped from the latter.

nraynaud• 5 years ago

do you have a map? I tried to look for things, but it's really hard with the Chinese datum obfuscation.

the best I could do was 3km, but I don't recognize anything from google pictures https://imgur.com/KxOT84W

jonplackett• 5 years ago

I read Biohazard by Ken Alibek years ago and the current situation reminds me of one of the anecdotes in it.

He was a Soviet scientist in charge of creating bio-weapons- the book starts with him planning world war 3.

In one of the anecdotes talks about a lab leak they had, caused by someone not replacing a filter and the the lab accidentally pumping out anthrax all day and killing a lot of people.

The government blamed it on local meat sellers at the market and executed them all. Blaming the local market seems to be part of the bio-weapon-denial playbook.

It's a great (but terrifying) book - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0031RS5DI/ref=dp-kindle-redirec...

tim33312• 5 years ago

There's a bit on the leak in wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak

swiley• 5 years ago

There are a handful of us who are completely unsurprising that both the US and CCP worked hard to cover up certain facts about the virus.

bumbada• 5 years ago

There is a very important thing to mention: Both the US and Europe depended on China's supplies in order to fight the virus in the first place.

Guess what Chinese officials did? They called each individual country prime minister and said: Your news reporters are criticizing China, it seems like you don't want supplies.

So politicians will talk with the boss of the news Media and explain the situation, the journalist will shut up.

This happened in two big European countries I personally know of. I suspect the same happened in the rest.

This is a beautiful reminder that you should never outsource your strategic resources like essential food, energy or medical supplies and if you do, you better don't do that from totalitarian regimes.

rorykoehler7• 5 years ago

The world will reorganise after this for sure.

Tarragon• 5 years ago

The state department memo disclosing the sick researchers story isn't anywhere near as strong as the article implies. It's not US original reporting and there is disagreement about how strong the unnamed sources really are.

I'm also going to attack the sources... This was strongly pushed by the Trump administration which was looking for this result. And originally reported by in the WSJ by Michael R. Gordon who is also one of the original reporters about the Iraq Aluminum tubes/centrifuge story that turned out to be wildly false.

It took about 15 years to trace the origins of SARS [1] to a specific bat cave. We cannot be this confident this early on SARS-CoV-2.

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

_notreallyme_• 5 years ago

After reviewing most of the arguments in favor of a lab leak origin, I eventually concluded that when confronted to their counter arguments, the Occam's razor would be in favor of a natural origin for the sars-cov2.

Indeed, when I heard of the report about WIV workers being sick with covid-like symptom I immediately checked who reported that, and ended up with the same conclusion as you.

While a lab leak origin cannot be entirely dismissed, one should keep in mind that all this fuss is politicaly motivated.

jackfoxy2• 5 years ago

I am not at all shocked. All this was known and reported over a year ago. Social media companies and the MSM actively censored this information then in the name of squashing fake news. It was called conspiracy theory. What is different now? The only new and shocking revelations are the release of Fauci's emails.

gentleman112• 5 years ago

I’m not sure the writing style promotes objectivity. It doesn’t explore certain threads enough to feel like you are reading a trustworthy and complete briefing on the story

fiftyfifty• 5 years ago

I found this News Week article also very interesting and it goes into more detail about the DRASTIC internet group and how they made some of their discoveries: https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-how-amateur-sleuths-broke...

IMO the most upsetting part about this is people like Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak being repeatedly caught in outright lies and coverup behavior. These people seemed to have the best of intentions at some point in their career but they are doing irreparable damage to their field and science in general with the public lies and coverups.

One example is Shi Zhengli publicly stating the the 6 miners that died after shoveling bat guano in a mine in Mojiang died from a fungal infection while the DRASTIC group was able to dig up two papers that specifically stated the miners died from a SARS-like virus. They also dug up evidence that Zhengli's lab visited the mine multiple times since 2012 to take samples after the miners died and retrieved as many as 9 unique Coronaviruses similar to SARS-Cov-2 from the mine.

Throwawayaerlei18• 5 years ago

It's a tremendously good bit of reporting, especially for a generalist outfit like Newsweek. I didn't notice anything wrong in it or the science of the Vanity Fair article this topic is based on, or contradictions between the two articles.

The DRASTIC team's story is an amazing example of "open source intelligence," for that primarily focused on an anonymous Indian who goes by the handle The Seeker who dug up a bunch of papers and theses for the data scientists and others on the team to assemble into a picture that is more and more convincing about the lab leak hypothesis, although having wet lab experience I'm predisposed to suspect this over the zoonotic transfer hypothesis.

But speaking of predispositions, it's exactly the sort of thing the US intelligence community could have done if most of the government and world scientific establishment hadn't already decided on the zoonotic transfer narrative, which is detailed in the Vanity Fair article.

Also an example of how Silicon Valley censorship can backfire, his first posting on this to Reddit got his account permanently banned, which suggested to him he was on to something. On the other hand Twitter didn't have any problems mentioned in either of these articles hosting the discussions of the DRASTIC team.

weaksauce2• 5 years ago

Edit: here's another amazement for the list: "Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories." And the article says "BSL-2 [is] roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office."

"SARS-like" could mean quite a few things and without defining what they mean by that it strikes me as fear baiting or being intentionally misleading to further their thesis.

divbzero• 5 years ago

Potential mistakes across different countries should put to rest the idea that investigating COVID origins is a nationalistic endeavor. The motivation should be as straightforward and objective as investigating airplane crashes.

amatecha• 5 years ago

Check this one out as well, from last month. Excellent post on the subject: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

dazsnow• 5 years ago

Critical China Scholars' statement on the lab leak investigation: https://criticalchinascholars.org/interventions/

mmcgaha• 5 years ago

If anything good can come of this, I hope some of the folks who trusted the science begins to realize that people are behind science and people often act in their own best interest. Not that it will change much but we can at least stop yelling down and shaming skeptics.

seaman1921• 5 years ago

this is terrifying.. who can we even trust then :\

Such exposed dishonesty leads to more and more people completely losing faith in everything that the scientists say and turning into anti-vaccers etc.

clairity• 5 years ago

it's the reality of living in large, complex societies, where our intuitive trust-building relational proclivities get short-circuited by power structures. that doesn't mean we never trust organizations, but trust should be commensurate with our relational distance. that's actually the foundational principle of the federalist separation of powers (in the US).

also, terms like "anti-vaccers" don't help. just stop trying to bucket others as being stupid or outrageous. there are small but real, legitimate risks to every vaccine. that some folks can be overly self-assured and blow out those dangers for their own self-importance has no bearing on that fact. employ your rational brain to keep your emotional brain in check so you can see risks as they are, not as others want to use against you.

elzbardico• 5 years ago

You trust Science, not The Science, not the Scientists. You trust the Scientific Method, and nothing else. It took mankind a lot of centuries to get free from the shackle of the gods, let us not replace the pantheon with our science man.

colechristensen4• 5 years ago

You don't "trust" often or very much. You look for a society where conflicting ideas are encouraged and are based in reason not whacky extremist ideology. You trust good disagreements and debates, you look for argument and parties which try to convince with facts and solid arguments.

We can't just live in a world where my side is right and your side is evil.

The strength of the US system of government and any democracy comes from diversity of thought and opinion which is good enough and respectful enough to actually be interested in arriving at the truth.

Instead we have political process which is somewhere between a reality show, a sporting event, and a religion.

rayiner4• 5 years ago

You can’t trust anybody, not structurally anyway. Western civilization has spent literally hundreds of years developing various ideas, such as free speech and democracy, to deal with that fact of life.

kart23• 5 years ago

Treat Science like a religion, you even used the word faith. It may often be more accurate, but at the end of the day, it's just another way of explaining things.

And if you ever think of science as perfect, just look at the history of science. There was a time where most scientists knew for a 'fact' that certain races were objectively inferior to others. Science is always being refined, new things are being discovered, and the people doing it change. Invariably, there is some scientific knowledge that will be discredited and changed in the future.

ctoth• 5 years ago

Another pretty good article, certainly higher quality than you'd consider given the source[0]. What switch flipped to make all these come out right now?

[0] https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-how-amateur-sleuths-broke...

eyeball• 5 years ago

Who benefits?

disgrunt4• 5 years ago

Big Pharma? Authoritarians? The 0.1%?

All the above.

DenisM• 5 years ago

What switch flipped to make all these come out right now?

Vaccination rates are nearing immunity across the major US population centers. I can imagine "they" wanted to ensure orderly vaccinations and return to the normal economic activity before any possible disruption of the political order.

Far-fetched, I know. But if you had to have a theory, here is one.

nostromo• 5 years ago

The reason it's coming out now is because Trump is gone.

During the election, most of the media decided to ignore anything they were afraid would help Trump or hurt Biden.

Whether an activist media is good or bad is left as an exercise for the reader.

PaulDavisThe1st27• 5 years ago

We have an actively status-quo favoring media, not an activist one. The former president was a pathological liar (thousands of documented clear lies during his office), and there were (and are) extremely good reasons to ignore more or less anything he said.

adrr3• 5 years ago

Trump officials are the ones who said it wasn’t a lab leak from the start. Did you read the article?

tehwebguy2• 5 years ago

Comments like this bring up so many questions in my mind -- do you prefer conservative news media? If so, are you struggling to find news media to consume?

Are you aware of the top cable news network, the newer smaller ones, the media holding companies that dominate local news affiliates and dictate conservative talking points through their hosts, the massively popular hard-right conservative influencers, Facebook, etc?

SkyMarshal• 5 years ago

There’s an alternate interpretation.

It’s not that the media wanted to avoid helping Trump or hurting Biden, even going so far as to withhold reporting the truth of the pandemic’s origin. But rather that the media had a higher threshold of evidence for publishing accusations of malfeasance against another nationstate than Trump did, and hadn’t met that threshold till recently.

Trump was notoriously flippant, with low or no standard for truth, or even merely diplomatic tact. His MO is not truth-finding but rather saying anything distressing to his political adversaries. He is an archetypal Internet troll with the soapbox of the US presidency.

He spent four years doing that, essentially crying wolf over and over. By the time the pandemic hit, the media was universally resistant to serving as a megaphone to amplify his trolling.

Thus they held back on this story until they could piece together and verify enough of it to meet their higher threshold of evidence. That simply took until now to do.

TchoBeer2• 5 years ago

Trump has been gone for half a year.

Izkata5• 5 years ago

There were a bunch of things in the past month or so that flipped the pandemic narratives in general, I'm thinking that made people start to question the rest. Here's some others:

* A Wired article detailed how the whole basis for social distancing and masking was wrong, based on two unrelated facts that got mixed together 60 years ago: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

* Texas and Florida eliminated not just lockdowns but also all mask usage and the predicted spike in cases didn't happen.

* Fauci was caught lying to Congress about funding gain-of-function research.

* And probably the most direct trigger for this topic, Buzzfeed got and released Fauci's emails through a FoIA request just a couple days ago, which among other things revealed that he was warned about it possibly being a lab leak right at the beginning of the pandemic.

clydethefrog• 5 years ago

At the end of April Biden gave a prime-time address to the joint sessions of Congress announcing that the USA is "in competition with China” to “win the 21st century". Critiquing China became allowed and stimulated by that status quo press, instead of a partisan issue promoted by Trump who the media disliked.

m0llusk3• 5 years ago

This is silly. The lab leak hypothesis was never off limits, it was ridiculed because it had little evidence and was based on political things are different this time thinking. Finding viral origins is never a fight, it is hard work requiring detailed research. Both SARS and MERS are good comparisons and took around three years to fully understand.

The lab leak theory is popular because of politics and ignoring the down sides of potential error. The lab leak theory posits that natural disasters such as have happened throughout history no longer happen because all events are shaped by the hands of man. The lab leak theory is based on the idea that establishing guilt brings justice. The lab leak theory is based on a generalized loathing of China. The lab leak theory ignores the history of ongoing transfers of animal viruses to man in favor of the view that it is different this time. Garbage in results in garbage out and the lab leak theory assumes that an incorrect idea will result in correct political action.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy here is that people are appealing to ideas about justice by saying this was a forbidden struggle that is a big fight, yet ignoring the most important realities of justice. If you really want justice then you need a coherent statement of the offense, there should be a fair hearing with representatives of all sides, there should be impartial review whether that be trained judges or a selected jury of peers or whatever else, and so on. We know what justice looks like and any serious introspection will show that this shrill advocacy of the lab leak theory is just more social media garbage like q anon and the rest. If you want justice then you will have to submit to the kind of impartiality that brings justice, but that isn't what we are talking about here.

gjsman-1000• 5 years ago

It was off limits if you dared post it on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or any other "popular" place for public discourse.

m0llusk3• 5 years ago

The dominance of those forums is the problem. Note how many posters on this thread are calling out how "shocking" articles and evidence are? This is how social media works by pushing hot buttons. Actual science is based on evidence and is often an extreme bore. What we are seeing is people getting excited over made up stories while ignoring the real hard work which has time and again pointed to viruses hopping from animals to humans.

henearkr5• 5 years ago

Agree totally.

I'd add that, while China is ready to help and take part in the global fight against the covid, a finger-pointing shaming war against them would probably (as it already did several times) trigger the very Asian reaction of counter-fighting to not lose face, and stopping any constructive cooperation.

JPKab2• 5 years ago

I'm sorry, but you are ignoring the chain of low probability coincidences that were evident from the very beginning. Also, the Lancet letter denouncing the theory, written by scientists who claimed no conflict of interest, falsely.

This is laid out clearly in Wade's article below, and saying it's political is not based on data or science.

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

Note the grant specifying the research here, with the chief author of the Lancet letter as recipient.

https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...

karaterobot• 5 years ago

The lab leak hypothesis was never off limits, it was ridiculed because it had little evidence and was based on political things are different this time thinking.

It was ridiculed because a Republican Senator popularized it, not because of evidence.

The way you know it had nothing to do with the evidence or lack thereof is that people who respond based on evidence don't usually respond with ridicule, and people who respond based on tribal affiliation usually do.

There were definitely some people saying "this is possible, but on balance unlikely given what we know today", but for the most part words like "crackpot" and "incompetent" and even "racist" were used instead. That's not what arguing from a place of facts sounds like.

disgrunt4• 5 years ago

If you really want justice then you need a coherent statement of the offense, there should be a fair hearing with representatives of all sides, there should be impartial review whether that be trained judges or a selected jury of peers or whatever else, and so on.

Cool. Since China is the source of this virus, can they take the lead here? I'll wait.

m0llusk3• 5 years ago

There is no lead. Since America is the prime location for infection and death we should probably try to be serious about the issue instead of getting distracted.

And what exactly is China expected to do in any case? Apologize? Pay in the way fining Germany for WWI led to WWII?

You are full of moral rage, yet still have essentially zero scientific support. Are you sure that is okay?

tim33312• 5 years ago

never off limits, it was ridiculed because it had little evidence and was based on political things

re limits - I got banned from the covid19 reddit for mentioning it and was unable to write about in on Wikipedia, this in Feb 2020, pre Trump

re evidence - there were no bats anywhere near Wuhan and Daszak's gain of function funding and interview were public before the breakout but unmentionable

How is the above that the nearest viruses to the breakout were in a lab politics?

And while people like me being unable to write on Wikipedia etc may seem silly bear in mind 10m people died from this thing and several of those million may not have done if the data was not censored.

inostia• 5 years ago

More recently, Shi and her colleagues at the WIV have performed high-profile experiments that made pathogens more infectious. Such research, known as “gain-of-function,” has generated heated controversy among virologists.

Yeah, I don't see this ending well. A lab leak seems... inevitable, no?

tpfour8• 5 years ago

Anybody who has ever worked in a wet lab, or a lab of any sort, knows that accidents happen. All the time. Things catch fire, things are dropped, labeling issues happen, anything you can think of.

I worked for many years in a lab, the accidental leak hypothesis was and still is what I consider the most probable. Calculate the joint probability of everything we know about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 happening and it should be obvious that the "lab leak" should be _thoroughly_ investigated before dismissing it.

5424584• 5 years ago

What makes lab leak more probable than cross species transfer, something that happens all the time?

bradleyjg2• 5 years ago

As I understand it we haven’t identified a similar enough animal virus to be the source. China has and continues to have every incentive to find it.

tpfour8• 5 years ago

It's the joint probability of everything we know.

p(Epidemic started in Wuhan) * p(origin in market right next to lab) * p(lab is one of 3 in the world to conduct gain-of-function research on conronaviruses) * p(lab scientists were notably sick prior to outbreak) * p(no accident ever happening in a lab) * p(et cetera) = very small number.

That's not evidence per se, but it does show you how probable a human error is.

jeremyjh• 5 years ago

With SARS-Cov1 and MERS they were able to identify the cross-over host and find transitional stages that are somewhat adapted to human hosts but more successful in other host animals. It is not too late to find that of course, but it is becoming conspicuous in its absence. Also, the lab in Wuhan was basically trying to create SARS-Cov-2 and that isn't speculation its what their grant proposal says they were doing.

TechBro8615• 5 years ago

I wonder what other factual reporting might have been suppressed by political orthodoxy dismissing it as a baseless conspiracy theory over the past few years.

rootsudo• 5 years ago

It is, the narrative last year was that if you pointed at Wuhan, or Chinese Lab Leak, you were racist/bigoted.

xwolfi• 5 years ago

Depends how you point. Look I'm French, we built the lab.

In France, all the people involved in the lab construction "quit" any official functions they had before the virus. That's the legend, the doubt is quite strong.

People are just now refusing it could NOT be the lab. And are mounting into conspiracy theory etc just because not everyone rolls over the floor with their conviction.

No: the lab source is likely (suspicious communist behaviour, french handlers all disappeared, geographical proximity, thematical proximity - as in they studied these kind of virii), but not sure yet.

And I'm taking flak in my family for not jumping to the most "obvious" conclusion - probably because they live in France and I live in China hehe. I think the communists are equally able to be stupid enough to refuse any investigation, to have put military command of the lab to actually be ready to study a natural virus under military command, that they were not quite competent enough to raise the virus to that particular gain of function, and that the french handlers left their ministerial position out of precaution.

PaulDavisThe1st27• 5 years ago

That's not how I remember the narrative.

It was split in two.

1. Calling it "the china virus", as the former president was wont to do, was labelled racist/bigoted/nationalistic by those who did not simply agree with anything he said.

2. The claim that it originated in the Wuhan lab was viewed as unlikely, and there was (is) an alternative biological origin story which at the time seemed credible and more likely.

generalizations13• 5 years ago

That's not really how it happened. Remember 'Hug a Chinese person day', over in Italy?

https://in.news.yahoo.com/italy-launched-hug-chinese-campaig...

DudeInBasement3• 5 years ago

Lol. A lab near the wet market, who studies bats and viruses. And people ignore the obvious because orange bad man said it.

lawnchair_larry8• 5 years ago

Except it never seemed more credible. People were assigned their opinion that it was more credible, and accepted it uncritically. It was frankly ridiculous if you had the information about the WIV that was being discussed wherever Peter Daszak wasn’t trying to cover his own ass and ruin others careers.

actuator5• 5 years ago

Calling it "the china virus", as the former president was wont to do, was labelled racist/bigoted/nationalistic

While the racist violence that happened was deplorable, it is entirely amusing to me that we are fine with calling it UK/Brazil/South African/Indian variant but not call it the China virus/flu.

The same publications like Guardian which did not use the term China virus/flu because it was considered racist had no problem in using Brazil/Indian variant as the names of the variant. They are still doing it even after WHO came up with different non country based names for each variants.

The claim that it originated in the Wuhan lab was viewed as unlikely, and there was (is) an alternative biological origin story which at the time seemed credible and more likely

Wuhan lab leak being shot down so easily was the thing I found non convincing and the fact that so many journalists didn't cover it was surprising. While we might be able to ascertain that the virus is natural or man made easily, but a natural virus leaking out would seem high on the probability list to me as there is conveniently a lab at the same place where the outbreak first happened; and it was doing research on the same thing.

swader9996• 5 years ago

It's been practice for centuries to initially name it after where it was first originated. Spanish flu ring a bell? But yeah Trump's racist for saying China flu.

dang5• 5 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27388952.

dang5• 5 years ago

The previous significant threads:

Related threads:

The media's lab leak fiasco - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27307175 - May 2021 (696 comments)

Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before Covid-19 outbreak disclosed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259953 - May 2021 (343 comments)

How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27184998 - May 2021 (235 comments)

More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27160898 - May 2021 (341 comments)

The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 - May 2021 (537 comments)

Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26750452 - April 2021 (618 comments)

Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540458 - March 2021 (985 comments)

The Lab Leak Hypothesis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25640323 - Jan 2021 (229 comments)

Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25585833 - Dec 2020 (351 comments)

Wuhan lab did research on bat viruses, but no evidence of accidental release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23070031 - May 2020 (76 comments)

Experts disagree on whether Covid-19 could have leaked from a research lab - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22695825 - March 2020 (6 comments)

anon325235• 5 years ago

4chan figured this out as early as March 2020: google "site:4plebs.org shi zhengli"

generalizations13• 5 years ago

Nearly made the same comment myself. It feels vindicating to watch all this unfold. How many times now has 4chan been right about the virus, and the media wrong?

- 4chan saw the pandemic coming in January 2020, and predicted it would be big

- 4chan knew it wasn't 'just another flu' in March 2020, when the media was downplaying it

- 4chan figured out the virus is transmitted via areosol, not just particulate

- 4chan worked out that Vitamin D can help (even Fauci admitted he takes it)

- Wuhan Lab hypothesis

That's just off the top of my head. Sure, 4chan got a lot wrong: but better to get all the (possible) facts, and sift through them. That's science. What are you going to do otherwise? Trust Fauci?

PaulDavisThe1st27• 5 years ago

The media showed enormous deference to the Trump administration that insisted it was not going to be big, that is was just another flu, that it wasn't transmitted via aerosol, and that it would be gone soon.

4chan isn't know for enormous deference to anyone, so the fact that "they" (collectivizing 4chan always irriates me, but whatever) got things right given the head-in-sand public attitude (*) of the administration isn't really surprising.

(*) Trump of course privately told Woodward that it was really bad.

jbuhbjlnjbn• 5 years ago

Not to tout my own horn, but it really doesn't take a genius to put two and two together in these instances.

I never read 4chan or many opinions in genral, but I knew all of those points (minus the vitamin D) on my own.

The quote of 'knew a picosecond after he heard' resonated with me, because my intuition - as a laymen - was exactly the same. The moment I heard of the wuhan institute, I basically was pretty sure what had happened. All that followed was disbelief and mild shock about my surroundings not coming to the same conclusions, or lets say suspicions and not hearing the sound of alarm bells.

I lost a lot of faith in the common sense of people through the pandemic.

fullshark2• 5 years ago

Isn't this partially backwards looking at 10000+ shitposts and marveling at the X number that were right?

chasd003• 5 years ago

4chan can be unsettlingly resourceful sometimes. Remember when they identified the location of a terrorist training camp from some photos and quite literally called in an air strike?

vharuck• 5 years ago

4chan flocks to doom and gloom predictions, because that's the most "fun." When they always predict a global disaster, we shouldn't be surprised when they predicted something that actually was a global disaster. Broken clocks are right twice a day.

generalizations13• 5 years ago

More like, '4chan predicted 10 of the last 1 disasters'. Still worth checking in, just in case this is the one that pans out. Definitely better than ridiculing all 10.

DudeInBasement3• 5 years ago

If 4chan is a broken clock, what are your media sources?

fragileone3• 5 years ago

Strange that this article tries to paint anyone right-wing who postulated this theory way before the mainstream finally accepted it as being racist or crazy, as if nobody had talked about this evidence back then. The journal articles published by the lab were public information, as was their prior lab leaks in 2019, poor safety practice anecdotes, etc.

Thousands of social media accounts got banned on all the major platforms during months of suppression all because this theory didn't fit Big Tech's political agenda. Will they get unbanned? Will anyone of them apologise? No, it's business as usual for our corporate overlords. If you're on the wrong side of their agenda then you'll be cancelled even with paper thin reasoning.

jkhdigital7• 5 years ago

Yeah, it’s a good article except for the gratuitous sprinkling of partisan barbs against any and all not-left-of-center political affiliations.

kaesar149• 5 years ago

It’s crazy to me how many people on even this forum, a place purportedly of science, continue to dismiss a lab leak origin out of hand citing it as some sort of crackpot theory. The serious questions raised in this article have been around since last April but it’s only now it’s even allowed to talk about them on digital forums.

Excellent write up by Vanity Fair.

analog312• 5 years ago

Here's what I remember from that time period. My recollection is that the wet market hypothesis fell out of favor rather quickly, but nothing else really emerged in its place. The lab leak theory was circulating, but amongst people such as rank-and-file scientists, the attitude was: We aren't going to get a straight answer about this, but we've got to defeat this virus.

I don't remember dismissing the lab leak theory per se, but rather, taking it in as one of a massive spew of crackpot theories all coming from more or less one source. I'm reminded of the children's story, "The boy who cried wolf."

Looking back in hindsight, I wonder how we could have picked out the lab leak theory as being worthy of consideration, given the context. And whether a more scientifically minded public and government would have faced that dilemma.

kaesar149• 5 years ago

They would’ve had a better chance of being taken seriously if it wasn’t actively a bannable offense to talk about them on major social media websites.

alexkcd• 5 years ago

The article literally cites a statement put out by a respected medical journal on Feb. 29, 2020, and signed by 27 scientists, "roundly rejecting the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism."

Whatever your recollection of "rank-and-file scientists" attitudes is, the narrative on record is to the contrary.

Izkata5• 5 years ago

Looking back in hindsight, I wonder how we could have picked out the lab leak theory as being worthy of consideration, given the context.

There were a lot of threads to pull, and some of us were following it. For example, this video was posted in April 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU

bart_spoon3• 5 years ago

Looking back in hindsight, I wonder how we could have picked out the lab leak theory as being worthy of consideration, given the context. And whether a more scientifically minded public and government would have faced that dilemma.

By actually considering the idea based on the information available, rather than judging solely on the messenger. Things we've known for most of the past year now:

* The wet-market was likely not the origin of the outbreak. Earliest identified positive cases predate the market outbreak and have no connection with it.

* The lab in question was very near to the wet market where the largest outbreak occurred.

* The lab in question specifically researched coronaviruses in bats.

* The closest match to the SARS-COV-2 virus we've found in bats in nature are bats that live over a 1000 kilometers away from Wuhan. However, these bats are among those being researched at the virology lab there.

* The lab in question was the subject of concern among international inspectors years before the outbreak, who stated that they believed the lab didn't meet necessary safety and containment protocols, and didn't have the staff to do so.

* US intelligence agencies have been signalling that the Chinese government has been covering up the origins of the lab.

* The CCP themselves have demonstrated that they are actively working against the discovery of the origins of the disease. Soon after the wet-market outbreak, they closed the wet-market, prevented any international scientists and experts from examining it, and over their objections, purged all animals there and sanitized the entire place, making it impossible to determine what might have led to an outbreak at the market. They also cracked down internally on whistleblowers who said the situation in Wuhan early in the pandemic was much worse than being broadcasted. Finally, they have simultaneously insisted on the natural origin of the virus, while also pushing theories that it originated from non-Chinese sources, such as China, South Asian pangolin black market traders, and the US Army.

* The CCP prevented WHO investigators from actually entering the country to look for origins of the virus for nearly a year, didn't give them full access when they arrived, and the resulting report was declared largely useless by the international community immediately upon its release.

* All people claiming that the lab-leak theory had been "debunked" were actually referring to the theory that it was genetically engineered, which is not the same thing at all.

None of this proves a lab leak, but its strong enough circumstantial evidence that it is at least as plausible as any other origin. Virtually the only new information to have come out is that some of the workers in the lab got sick with Covid-like symptoms in November.

If you swapped China with the US and this lab with the CDC, people would have taken it far more seriously. Imagine a worldwide pandemic started down the street from the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, AND no one could find the origin of the virus but the closest match was in an animal native to Northern Ohio, AND that animal also happened to be at the CDC for studying the type of virus in question, AND whistleblowers had mentioned concerns about procedures there previously, AND the US government did everything in their power to prevent people from investigating. People would have zeroed in on the theory from day 1.

There was always plenty of reason to see it as worthy of consideration, and for those who weren't judging solely based on "Does Trump think this is true or not", they did. The biggest reason it wasn't was solely due to the fact that our media/social media can't function outside the scope of our current political/cultural wars. Information is being judged less and less on its own merits, and more and more on who is providing it.

PaulDavisThe1st27• 5 years ago

Kevin Drum had a good summary of this a couple of weeks ago, much shorter. His take? There's no more evidence for the lab leak theory now than there was a year ago, BUT what has changed is that the cross-over theory implied that we would find certain evidence for the vectors, and that evidence has not shown up. KD's take was that it's not so much that the lab leak theory has become more likely, it's the that biological origin theory has become less likely.

5424584• 5 years ago

We’ve been trying to find the zoonotic origin of Ebola for decades without any success. We don’t have anywhere near a complete catalog of animal diseases, and of those only a fraction have been sequenced.

lawnchair_larry8• 5 years ago

Haha. No. It’s because of politics and TDS. People were taught that this was a Trump theory. That’s all the media needs to say to ensure that nobody will take it seriously and nobody will tolerate anyone else who takes it seriously.

onetimeusename• 5 years ago

I think the release that three scientists fell ill in November 2019, who were working on gain of function research at the Wuhan lab with Covid-like symptoms, may have made the lab leak theory more probable, at least in my opinion, since a year ago. Note that doesn't say they definitely had Covid or that anything conclusive about the theory was settled.

Did Kevin Drum say otherwise?

lifeformed2• 5 years ago

The way I remember it was that people conflated the lab leak theory with it being engineered in a lab. Those are very different things but easy to mix up in a headline.

It being engineered as a bioweapon is in the realm of a crackpot theory, but it being just a poorly contained natural research project was fairly reasonable. Some prominent people mixed the two up on purpose and eventually the whole thing - both ideas - got labeled a crackpot theory by people who just saw some headlines.

Izkata5• 5 years ago

Half true, they did get conflated - but it wasn't just the titles, the articles themselves were using one to debunk the other.

tayo42• 5 years ago

The way I remember it was that people conflated the lab leak theory with it being engineered in a lab. Those are very different things but easy to mix up in a headline.

This is kind of how I remember things too I think, I feel like I'm being gaslit by the internet lately reading how certain some people are.

gimmeThaBeet• 5 years ago

I can definitely say that's what I understood outlets to mean, that it could have come from the lab in both contexts.

I guess I don't quite follow with how people would think that it being a weapon that spread intentionally or unintentionally is the base case.

fireflash38• 5 years ago

I've seen this so many times, yet 9 times out of ten, even in this thread, when people are claiming it originated in a lab, they also include claims that it was created in a lab.

shellfishgene2• 5 years ago

To be fair it does not sound like many people doubt that they were conducting gain of function experiments at the Wuhan lab, which makes it not unlikely that a lab leak as successful as covid was one of those engineered strains. If it was a lab leak at all.

mikem1703• 5 years ago

I too am disappointed at how politicized this is. That includes the Vanity Fair article, which was mostly about press coverage, funding, memos, and circumstantial evidence.

Here's some good science sources:

- Comprehensive reddit post [0] from a virologist (table of contents, also linked as a 34 page pdf), referencing over 150 sources, with several sections going into the details of the genetic evidence, also interesting to read the comments.

- Here's an article [1] talking about different origin theories and the related genetic evidence, having a section I was interested in about the cleavage site and o-linked glycan, something apparently that has to develop in an animal with an immune system (this is something I haven't seen any lab-made proponents speak to yet).

- Lastly, here is an article [2], much more scientific than the Vanify Fair article, in favor of a lab connection (unfortunately, for me, this article doesn't mention the o-linked glycan, nor the genetic evidence that covid-19 may have originated hundreds of miles from Wuhan [3])

That's as far as I've gotten so far following the science. I'm hoping there will be more virologist commentary as more data comes out, perhaps something based on the full WHO report/data that I heard was released last week. I'd like to think that science will give us more definite answers eventually. It could take years.

I'm not so much interested in conjecture from politicians and journalists. I'm really taken back by all the inaccuracies, half-truth's, innuendo, and conspiracy theories floating around. Are we all led so easily by the headlines they feed us?

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...

[1] https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3

[2] https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...

[3] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...

haram_masala2• 5 years ago

Whether or not I agree with everything you wrote and sourced here, let me offer some enthusiastic praise for such a comprehensive and well-informed writeup. We should all aspire to be able to post something as substantive as this.

ramraj075• 5 years ago

I am going through all the documents you referenced but let me tell you about the reason why I believe that you can’t trust the scientists directly involved in the research: the Reddit posting PhD uses this statement to tell why the lab couldn’t have just leaked a sample they collected (so not engineered just being absolutely sloppy):

“The WIV, and Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi’s lab group, are extremely well-respected in the virology community. As well respected as many US scientists.”

In fact this person does jackshit to methodologically prove that this lab was not run sloppily, just throws pedigree and “trust us we know she’s legit” crap. Let me tell you the majority of scientists anywhere should not be trusted in their ability maintain sterile techniques or keeping their lab secure. You can look at the vials that floated out of Galveston utmb in a flood, or the cdc shipping precontaminated Covid test kits because their techs didn’t use filter tips.

This is not just this PhD, it’s basically 97% of all scientists. Any statement that undermines the image that they don’t know what they are doing is taken personally with great prejudice.

The Reddit resource is great to suggest that no one deliberately engineered or even grew this virus. But it does nothing to disprove that they just leaked a sample they excavated in a cave and brought to the lab. And by combining both and collectively arguing against any malice or stupidity from these researchers they are not doing anyone a favor in trusting them. Also a real scientist would never categorically disregard a hypothesis without incontrovertible proof, which this and every other kiss-ass scientist does defending this wuhan cabal.

altcognito3• 5 years ago

That’s because “lab leak” origin isn’t consistently defined. Is it that it was engineered? Was it just being studied? Were the first cases just workers at the lab workers who were doing collections?

I’ve always said, focusing on the origins of “who was responsible” rather than dealing with containment first is counterproductive.

generalizations13• 5 years ago

This is why people say "do your own research". Because trusting some other authority will end badly, just like this.

triceratops8• 5 years ago

"do your own research"

How? I barely have enough time to do my day job. You think I have the time or expertise to research the origins of a virus?

Where does it end? Do I grow my own food? Make my own clothes? Build my own car after mining ore, smelting it and doing a million other things?

generalizations13• 5 years ago

It's a statement of consequences; just "the way the world works."

Trust the experts if you've no time for more, but this is the likely result.

Put time into your own research, and maybe you won't be caught off guard.

reedjosh• 5 years ago

At the very least, ditch ad funded media.

When you're not the product, you'll get more truth.

lmm6• 5 years ago

The more important takeaway is don't shout down those who are skeptical if you haven't actually investigated the authorities' credibility yourself. Get comfortable with not knowing, with being agnostic on a lot of issues, because it's often the only reasonable position.

(The most important takeaway is to ignore Twitter - not "social media", but specifically Twitter).

colechristensen4• 5 years ago

People say "do your own research" but really more than most people are incapable of finding and evaluating information on their own. "Read a bunch of blogs and facebook posts until something fits your pre-judged intuition" doesn't count as research and that is the extent of the abilities of people.

There is something distinctly missing from education even through undergraduate degrees: gathering, evaluating, and criticizing conflicting high quality research.

I took a philosophy class in the spring and one of the most striking things about it wasn't the material but the other students (most of whom a decade or more my junior) reactions to the material. A few of them were openly upset at the disagreement and inconsistency of philosophical opinion on every topic discussed; I didn't really understand it at first but then... What seems to have happened is basically for their entire education up to their senior years in undergrad, these people had only really ever been taught the Truth as though everything presented to them were solid facts and as a corollary, in general things should just be known and true or not.

There is a really big gap there. Sure, there are plenty of things which are quite certain, but people need to be driven to realize the truth doesn't just pop out one day, it is arrived at through a long process of disagreement and development and there are few ideas out there which weren't in their time quite controversial, and there is plenty still which is being presented as True which really has quite a bit of room for doubt.

dang5• 5 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27389001.

PaulDavisThe1st27• 5 years ago

You know the story of the boy who cried wolf?

Trump was the boy.

Everybody knows how that story ended, but as a reminder:

"This tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his flock. When a wolf actually does appear, the villagers do not believe the boy's cries for help, and the flock is destroyed. The moral of the story is that liars will not be rewarded; even if they tell the truth, no one believes them. "

There's a cost to lying. Sometimes it's your own flock. Sometime's its everybody's flock. Maybe Trump was right, maybe he wasn't. The boy was right about the wolf, eventually, too. The moral remains the same.

mc329• 5 years ago

Ok, but somehow he turned journalists' brains into mush such that they could no longer do investigative journalism and moreover turned them into bots which flagged Tweets which questioned the received theory and turned the CDC virologist into a Saint?

PaulDavisThe1st27• 5 years ago

Investigative journalism? Do you know how long it takes to do that sort of thing under normal conditions?

How long was it between the writing of the Pentagon papers and their release? How long did the Catholic sex abuse situation take to be fully reported?

It's been a bit more than a year since the virus turned into a global pandemic. I'm willing to grant journalists a bit more leeway in the timeline for serious investigative journalism, particularly when the central locate is a somewhat secretive Chinese lab in an area that was completely locked down for months as the pandemic started.

lawnchair_larry8• 5 years ago

This is a weak and frankly shameful rationalization. Just take the L. People who dismissed this fucked up. People who were jerks about it fucked up even more. Trump Derangement Syndrome is your fault, not Trumps. None of the people who were looking into this or following it were getting their information from Trump. Most of the detractors just assumed they were.

breakyerself• 5 years ago

I mean the only person in my life expressing an interest in this was my mom and she got it from the radio program coast to coast. Which is almost entirely crackpot conspiracy UFO bullshit. Still. I didn't tell her it couldn't have come from the lab. I said there isn't really enough evidence to conclude that. I think that was the mainstream opinion. Not that it couldn't have come from the lab, but that there wasn't enough evidence to support that conclusion. It's normal that something like this can take years to sort out especially when the authoritarian government controlling the area would prefer not to have that particular conclusion.

briefcomment2• 5 years ago

Craziest excuse I've ever heard: "I couldn't be bothered to act rationally and morally because someone else was being too annoying".

PaulDavisThe1st27• 5 years ago

What do you think the moral of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is? Is it a lesson for the villagers, or a lesson for a (potential) liar?

remarkEon3• 5 years ago

As has been pointed out, repeatedly, Trump was not the only one pointing out the lab leak hypothesis. "Trump made me not take the lab leak hypothesis seriously" is not the excuse that journalists seem to think it is.

Trump seems to occupy a super position in the brains of media types in this country. He is a idiotic buffoon who no one should take seriously and yet he somehow magically and constantly influences behavior that is directly related to their job.

Leary• 5 years ago

Wall Street Journal's article on US Intelligence having information on the three potential sick WIV researchers was written by a reporter named Michael R. Gordon[1].

[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-w...

This is the same Michael R. Gordon who in 2002 wrote the famous NYTimes article saying US Intelligence had credible information that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (Thousands of aluminium tubes) [2] and led to the Iraq War.

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-i...

CapmCrackaWaka• 5 years ago

To be clear - this guy's article didn't lead to the Iraq war. He was writing about the information that the US intelligence offices were putting out, which at this point we know was dubious. That really has nothing to do with his credibility.

thrdbndndn• 5 years ago

Saying it "has nothing to do with his credibility" sounds extremely naive.

It is totally within possibility that he is "writing about the information that the US intelligence offices were putting out" this time too, to make certain narrative that the US government wants.

_-david-_• 5 years ago

I mean to be fair there were actually WMD in Iraq

https://www.wired.com/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-contin...

sjfidsfkds• 5 years ago

It’s a widely accepted fact that Iraq had a chemical weapons program before the Persian Gulf War. Iraq and the UN cooperated to dismantle that program in the early 90’s. There was disagreement about whether that effort was exhaustive. The Bush administration’s claim to justify invasion was that there was an active ongoing chemical/biological/nuclear weapons program. Some old caches of chemical weapons materials discovered after the invasion doesn’t show that Iraq had an active chemical weapons program circa 2003.

You can read more about how the intelligence community failed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Report_on_Pre-war_Intel...

For example, they thought that Iraq had restarted its nuclear weapons program, and there was nothing like that in the evidence you linked to.

ALittleLight3• 5 years ago

One thing I've noticed a lot in articles like this one is how they kind of "both sides" the issue. This article says "With disreputable wing nuts on one side of them and scornful experts on the other" - to make it seem like both the right wing cranks and the experts were wrong here. Right wing cranks way-overstepped by calling it a "bioweapon" without evidence and experts understepped by assuming it was natural without good evidence.

I looked up the person (Li-Meng Yan)[1], the paper[2], and the Fox News Interview[3] where Tucker Carlson "gleefully flogged" the bioweapon theory that this article references as being part of Steve Bannon's faction of right wing cranks.

In the paper Yan describes "an unrestricted bioweapon" like so -

Although it is not easy for the public to accept SARS-CoV-2 as a bioweapon due to its relatively low lethality, this virus indeed meets the criteria of a bioweapon as described by Dr. Ruifu Yang. Aside from his appointment in the AMMS, Dr. Yang is also a key member of China’s National and Military Bioterrorism Response Consultant Group and had participated in the investigation of the Iraqi bioweapon program as a member of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1998. In 2005, Dr. Yang specified the criteria for a pathogen to qualify as a bioweapon:

1. It is significantly virulent and can cause large scale casualty.

2. It is highly contagious and transmits easily, often through respiratory routesin the form of aerosols. The most dangerous scenario would be that it allows human-to-human transmission.

3. It is relatively resistant to environmental changes, can sustain transportation, and is capable of supporting targeted release.

-------

I don't know that's the exact definition I'd give for "bioweapon" but it seems plausible, from a somewhat authoritative source, and fits covid. In other parts of the paper Yan addresses what she calls the "cover-up" of the lab origins of covid-19 and she points to elements of the cover-up that predate the outbreak and concludes "the unleashing of the virus must be a planned execution rather than accident."

On the Tucker Carlson interview the host listens to Yan's points and invites an expert on. The expert seems to basically ignore Yan's more exotic claims (i.e. that it was an intentional attack) and summarizes the situation at 3:39 as "We don't know" and gives two possible explanations as "Zoonotic transfer" or "Accidental lab release" and leans towards the latter. That seems exactly right to me.

I don't follow the "cover-up" part of Yan's argument (though I will read more about it) so I can't comment on her conclusion that it was an intentional attack. That's certainly not what other people I've read seem to think. The "bioweapon" definition seems a bit like an exaggeration or a technicality, if only because "bioweapon" conjures the idea of much more severe and lethal and viruses.

My point is that the right wing cranks actually come out looking pretty good on this topic - as far as I can tell. They immediately questioned the natural origins and advanced credible arguments for lab leak which are gaining support and evidence. I think it's wrong for this article and others to start out, and dedicate space in the opening of their argument, to try and balance things by saying, essentially, "Yes, maybe the experts were wrong here, but so were the crazy right-wing people." The people who are really and clearly wrong here are the mainstream media outlets who blindly trusted the authorities that told them this couldn't be a lab leak. Tucker Carlson talked to Yan, who may not really be a virus-expert (her degree seems to be in Ophthalmology) and may be over-zealous in her anti-China stance (e.g. concluding it was an intentional attack on what might not be very good evidence) but Tucker Carlson and his show explicitly call out the two main theories as what I believe they still are - i.e. zoonotic transfer and lab leak.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Meng_Yan

2 - https://zenodo.org/record/4073131#.YLl19JqYVhF

3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUbrE1v4kuQ

thatswrong0• 5 years ago

My point is that the right wing cranks actually come out looking pretty good on this topic - as far as I can tell. I think it's wrong for this article and others to start out, and dedicate space in the opening of their argument, to try and balance things by saying, essentially, "Yes, maybe the experts were wrong here, but so were the crazy right-wing people."

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Worse is that said broken clock embraced thoroughly xenophobic language that almost certainly led to a rise in anti-asian violence. It unfortunately made it easier for the public to discount these arguments because it was impossible to tell whether they were being made in good faith, not to mention that these arguments were often made out of a (justified) distrust of the Chinese government rather than an objective understanding of the known facts.

zakkeg• 5 years ago

I assume the author, and others referenced in the article, don't want to admit the other "side" was correct. Nor do they want to admit their "side" was wrong.

Yeah, it is wrong to claim it was certainly a lab leak when there is little evidence. However, it is also wrong to claim it certainly wasn't a leak for that same reason. Let's just hope the truth is found, and we learn from it.

It's hard to do, but simply being able to say "I was wrong" or "I messed up" would make the world a better place. This is actually something I've been working on.

ALittleLight3• 5 years ago

My take is that this is something where most mainstream media outlets need to be saying "We got it wrong." Either they asserted covid was definitely not a lab leak without evidence, or they ignored major media outlets doing that without comment. The problem here is that this article spends a lot of time and text talking about how right wing cranks were kind of responsible and kind of wrong too, when, in this case, the right wing cranks actually seem pretty accurate.

When I'm wrong, I try to have the grace and maturity to say "I got this wrong. I got this wrong for reasons X, Y, and Z. Here is what I can do to prevent or mitigate X, Y, and Z in the future." I think an answer of that form builds credibility. People who see my mea culpa may gain confidence that I've learned my lesson and will do better in the future. If, instead, I were to say "A lot of people got this wrong. These people I hate were wrong too - kind of, I think they were wrong, they are pretty dumb. Anyway - a lot of people were wrong on this..." then that probably wouldn't inspire much confidence that I had learned my lesson. I read this article as more like the latter rather than the former.

Rapzid7• 5 years ago

Vanity Fair.. publishes a ton of articles that pander to various audiences. I'm not sure how else to put it but their stuff pops up all the time on r/politics (somewhere I spend too much time TBH). That community is easily pandered to.. I like to just keep that in mind when reading articles like these from sources like these.

alexanderdmitri• 5 years ago

Assuming a lab leak, but not judging, it's surreal to think what it would be like to be someone involved with the initial handling of Covid-19.

I can't imagine being in those shoes while this unprecedented, global event unfolded with political and economic consequences on such an insane scale ...

Simulacra• 5 years ago

It's refreshing how the news media suddenly notices something everyone has been talking about.

speedgoose2• 5 years ago

This theory has been explained in the French news media for quite some time now.

raphlinus2• 5 years ago

This is a good article. There's been so much junk over the past couple of weeks or so that it's been very frustrating. I've mostly been watching the debate unfold on Twitter, and it's confirmed for me that Twitter is a terrible place for real intellectually-curious discussion (probably social media in general).

I've been wondering certain things, especially why Marc Lipsitch (one of the most consistently trustworthy voices throughout the pandemic) signed that Science letter, knowing that it would add weight to the "it's a lab leak" propaganda, and stood by the assertion that lab leak is plausible[1].

I hope we do get the true answers to these questions, though think it's not especially likely.

I'll say a couple other things. For an audience of honestly intellectually curious people, the Trumpian right-wingers did enormous damage to their theory, even if it was correct, by being racist and scientifically willfully stupid. Similarly, the Chinese authorities, even if they were correct did enormous damage to their theory by being authoritarian and stifling real communication. But it is very easy to see why both sides acted as they did: these mythical honest intellectually curious people are a tiny fraction of the entire audience, and have relatively little power, so they were quite incentivized to act as they did. And, maybe a little too early to say for sure, but it probably worked.

[1] https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1398455815959367683

LudwigNagasena• 5 years ago

For an audience of honestly intellectually curious people, the Trumpian right-wingers did enormous damage to their theory, even if it was correct, by being racist and scientifically willfully stupid. Similarly, the Chinese authorities, even if they were correct did enormous damage to their theory by being authoritarian and stifling real communication.

Eh? And no mention of American urban blue check marks who are being racist, scientifically willfully stupid and who are stifling real communication?

lordloki• 5 years ago

The same media that was reporting on the lab leak being a conspiracy theory were the ones reporting that Trump and Trump supporters sided with the theory due to racism. There was no proof that racism was the reason, only that they referred to Covid19 as China Flu or Wuhan Flu. Both of which represent the origin and not a race.

deugo4• 5 years ago

https://drasticresearch.org/ to see some real hackers at work.

Media, governments, and scientists should take a stronger stand now, or they will not protect amateurs against the full wrath of more unsavory elements of hostile state actors.

knowaveragejoe9• 5 years ago

This site smacks of people starting from a conclusion and working backwards.

deugo4• 5 years ago

Working backwards from February 2020. About 3 weeks after Peter Daszak started his wild PR campaign. Pretty impressive for a group of amateurs to still beat the pros to the finish line. Because here we are. Finally discussing it. This site can be linked, and exposed to ridicule and critique. And it keeps standing (Peter Daszak can not use his Facebook admin powers to block it!). Lovely!

Octoth0rpe• 5 years ago

Several thoughts:

1) If covid _did_ come out of lab - I'm emphatically not saying that I believe that it did - I have pretty high confidence in the ability of the any government to cover it up.

2) There is some class of people who will accept whatever 'evidence' of a lab leak as completely convincing for a variety of reasons (conspiracy minded thinking, anti-chinese sentiments, etc)

3) It seems impossible to strongly prove that the virus emerged naturally (we can't observe the case zero event again), _especially_ to the crowd mentioned in 2).

Given these 3 statements, it's really hard for me to see _any_ value in investigating this any further. It just seems like it'd just feed fuel to group 2), which is not something that I think would be particularly good for anyone in the long run.

rhino369• 5 years ago

Covering up the deaths of 10+ Million people that potentially occurred due to risky research because it might encourage conspiracy theorists and racists?

I’m trying to be civil, but that’s the most conformist thing I’ve ever heard.

haram_masala2• 5 years ago

Not investigating would provide fuel to group 2a, the people who will defend China at any cost and against all evidence, and their Western enablers who engage in performative anti-racism.

tmp404• 5 years ago

While this article is quite illuminating on the political side of the lab leak theory, on the evidence side it's mostly a rehash of some long-standing speculations.

The only recent evidence it contains is the fact that 3 researchers from WIV sought hospital care back in autumn of 2019 with symptoms similar to COVID. However, this piece of evidence is hardly consequential without further details:

- First, most common symptoms of COVID are indistinguishable from common cold. If the researchers were known to have any "signature" symptoms like loss of smell the article would certainly mention it.

- Second and more importantly, China doesn't have a robust GP/family doctor system found in western countries. As a result, many people would go to hospitals directly whenever they're mildly sick.

Taking the evidence as we know it now, the straightforward explanation is that 3 researchers caught cold, got mildly sick, so went to the hospital to get prescriptions or doctor's notes for sick leave (in China it's common for employers to require a doctor's note even for a short sick leave).

That said, I believe the lab leak theory is still plausible, and shouldn't be ruled out unless a clear transmission path from bat to human has been identified (which was done for the 2002 SARS outbreak). But I also think that we may never know. I trust that some theories put forward were in good faith, but so far they are little more than speculations.

graeme2• 5 years ago

Thanks for that context. I had thought the hospital care was more significant as flu hospitalization is rare in working age people.

But medical visits are common so that is quite different.

repiret• 5 years ago

What’s really missing in the analysis is the base rate of WIV workers visiting the hospital with cold symptoms. I’ve heard plausible explanations for why it might be pedestrian or why it might be exceptional, but it’s all meaningless without the base rate.

BrissyCoder• 5 years ago

First, most common symptoms of COVID are indistinguishable from common cold.

I was under the impression that the symptoms were quite different to the common cold and more inline with influenza (fever, dry-cough, aches, no mucus production – symptoms that are rarely caused by the cold).

Jarwain7• 5 years ago

Also, mid winter/flu season

Rapzid7• 5 years ago

I believe you are correct based on my research and having had COVID.

Doesn't take really detract from the points though.

bglazer2• 5 years ago

I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse towards assuming that the lab leak theory must be true. It's not so much the theory itself that's surprising. Lab leak remains plausible but less probable then natural origins.

The sudden shift is just baffling to me though. This huge new furor is due to anonymous CIA sources saying three people got sick? That's extremely tenuous evidence, as you state above.

As far as I can tell, the only biological evidence is the furin cleavage site, which is not uncommon in related viruses. Also, this has been known since the beginning, when the Chinese CDC released the first genome of the virus.

This seems more like people declaring victory because they're finally getting a hint of public support for their suspicions, rather than some truly damning evidence.

ramraj075• 5 years ago

So you’re saying because there’s no new evidence the new furor is not worth it? It was clear for some of us from the beginning that the evidence is damning enough from the beginning.

If you’re going to demand incontrovertible evidence that might never come up. But considering the scenario, viz. a cabal of careless scientists accidentally unleashed a plague that is killing millions , even the slightest hint of a cover up needs to be taken seriously.

Having worked with enough scientists I don’t for a moment doubt this hypothesis either. Ego and arrogance is what drives most of them, they’d rather choose self-perseverance over accidentally killing millions and go home to have lasagna as if it was just another Thursday without a sweat.

TheBigSalad3• 5 years ago

What makes you think it's less probable than natural origins? The wet market has probably been there for 1,000 years and this hasn't happened. Compared to the virus appearing in one of 3 labs in the world that would be studying it.

rebuilder2• 5 years ago

Maybe the Biden administration has concluded that it's possible there may have been a lab leak. It would be damaging to them if they did nothing and ended up unable to conclusively prove there was no lab leak, because Trump has been banging on that drum for a long time now.

So, they don't really have much choice in this. They have to convincingly look like they're pushing to find the truth, or they'd be handing ammunition to the Trumpists.

estaseuropano• 5 years ago

Natural origin and lab leak are in no way exclusive. The lab was collecting viruses and creating new ones - either one could have leaked.

I don't have strong views as it's incredibly difficult to prove a negative (that it was not a leak), essentially you would have to identify and prove exactly the actual vector and even then it might be difficult to be conclusive. Lab leak seems however like a very likely scenario and it is crazy how people try to dismiss it without any actual evidence either way - and China's approach to handling the investigation and information flow definitely should cause anyone to be suspicious.

I guess at this stage thr only way we cam find out is if in 10-20 years there's a whistleblower from the lab.

thebigman433• 5 years ago

This seems more like people declaring victory because they're finally getting a hint of public support for their suspicions, rather than some truly damning evidence.

I think this is the main thing driving these comments. Instead of being totally against the idea, these articles are providing a shred of hope (despite not having any new proof as far as I can tell) for the people who are locked in on the lab leak theory. Definitely people getting overexcited about it and trying to claim they were right the whole time and were being "censored".

txru• 5 years ago

The furor about the lab leak theory isn't solely due to the 3 hospitalized workers, but also due to a well-sourced article [0] written by a editor of the Science section of the New York Times (as well as for Science and Nature), Nicholas Wade. Those two broke on the same day. Papers hadn't been covering the theory in depth since last summer.

In my opinion the most damning part of the article is the section about the human-adapted furin cleavage, I recommend reading that part. The working assumption is that we should find people with precursors to covid without that furin cleavage adaptation, and we don't. If China wants to prove it wasn't a lab leak, they'll need to find instances of the virus that predated that adaptation- as was the case with SARS.

[0] https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

isolli3• 5 years ago

You're misreading the context. The furor comes from the fact that the lab leak hypothesis (distinct from the engineered virus hypothesis) was dismissed by fact checkers as a debunked conspiracy theory for a year based on nothing but assurances from the few scientists they interviewed.

This is just one example I could find quickly, but there are many more... https://twitter.com/JoePCunningham/status/139718591836522496...

lucian1900• 5 years ago

It’s how imperialist propaganda works. When material interests shift, suddenly and with one voice all “independent” western media pushes the same unsourced narrative.

If you remember the lead-up to the Iraq was, it was the same surreal experience.

Udik• 5 years ago

I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse

I've witnessed the same exact pattern multiple times in the last few years- often in relation to China. It's as if suddenly everyone not only shifts opinion, but exhibits the same amount of faith in it as if that opinion had been the most accepted for years.

This speaks volumes about 1) the ability of media (and possibly of powerful, interested parties) to sway the public opinion; 2) the easiness with which people align themselves to a (perceived) majority without ever looking back.

In particular, what has happened here is probably that the presence of Trump prevented half of the US from aligning to a narrative that would have been otherwise quite successful, given the political times. Trump gone, that half of the country suddenly was free to align itself with that narrative.

eutropia11• 5 years ago

Which other Coronaviruses have a furin cleavage site using arginine?

Which other coronaviruses even have arginine in their proteome?

Rapzid7• 5 years ago

It's like everyone has forgotten or never even knew the context of the original strong pushback. It wasn't against the possibility of a lab leak, it was against the rhetoric (lies) coming out of our own Whitehouse trying shift blame to China. Lies that were dangerously feeding anti-asian sentiment in the USA.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

Izkata5• 5 years ago

The only recent evidence it contains is the fact that 3 researchers from WIV sought hospital care back in autumn of 2019 with symptoms similar to COVID.

Even that is something people uncovered online and we were talking about a year ago.

Quick edit: Here's a video from April 2020 that touches on this at 6:38 (and a whole lot more otherwise): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU

TheBigSalad3• 5 years ago

It would be interesting to know how many scientists there are and how often they are admitted to the hospital. Then you could say how likely or unlikely the event was. Obviously there would be other factors like season, etc. But maybe this is a big outlier. We can't say without more numbers.

markkanof• 5 years ago

I’ve also been curious what hospital these scientists went to. You would think that they might have some sort of self contained medical unit for when any researchers at these types of facilities get sick. Just to make absolutely sure they aren’t sick with something particularly dangerous that they picked up at work.

op00to4• 5 years ago

I used to work in and around BSL 2 and 3 labs. A leak was highly unlikely. I was way more concerned about catching something where the animals were kept.

nickysielicki• 5 years ago

My recurring shower thought at the moment is that there will eventually be strong evidence of a natural origin and this whole debacle will be rubbed in the faces of people who dared challenge the medical/media industrial complex and its infinite wisdom. Let's be clear: there's no strong evidence either way.

The take away is that it doesn't matter whether it was from a lab or whether it was naturally originating. What matters is that it was (and still is) completely reasonable to question the official narative. The CDC chose to favor the CCP wet market story because they wanted to maintain a positive relationship in order to ensure they got accurate numbers -- they broadly lied to the American public about the certainty of the science in order to achieve political goals. The media, who should have kept the CDC accountable in such a situation, instead could not resist to tell a story about a disagreement between the Trump administration and the CDC/Fauci (both sides did this).

It does not matter where it originated. What matters is the media didn't do their job and the American public was intentionally misinformed by the federal government in a time of crisis, and the people who called out the government and called out the media were ostracized for it. American institutions broadly failed to meet their responsibilities to the public.

SiempreViernes7• 5 years ago

The fact the most ancestral strains of active Covid-19 virus we know of are from outside Guandong, some hundreds of kilometers away from Wuhan, is pretty strong evidence the epidemic didn't originate from the WIV though?

yurlungur• 5 years ago

I think in articles like this there are verifiable claims about facts, and reasonable speculations that have mostly been circling for a while now. These are of course worth considering.

And then there's the completely over the top narrative building based on non-evidence (which also swings wildly based on current trends), legends about mavericks doing secret fact finding missions online etc... stuff that should stay in a bad movie script.

At the end of the day I still think the facts will come up with enough time. If for example the hypothesis is that it's through GoF research, then a group of experts can examine the plausibility and the genomic evidence, try to replicate some of the possible steps etc. Real world research is hard and incremental, it's not done with black magic no one can find out about.

sam3452• 5 years ago

Maybe you didn't read the full article? There's a lot more supportive of the lab leak theory than the three researchers getting sick.

tim33312• 5 years ago

Do you know anyone who's gone to hospital for a common cold? I never have nor can I recall anyone I know or anyone I've heard of. I'll give you that flu is a possibility.

Gatsky• 5 years ago

Assuming the chance of a lab leak is non-zero, it is worth considering how this will ever end.

- If there was any hard evidence actually proving they had SARS-CoV-2 in the lab before the pandemic, it will be long gone. Only an independent full access forensic level investigation would ever find any sign that evidence was destroyed, and that is never going to happen.

- It seems extremely unlikely to me that anyone from within China will A) blow the whistle or B) that we would hear about it.

- If a whistleblower were to escape the country, China would be able to claim they are lying, and it is a plot by the West to oppress the Chinese people etc. The chance that the whistleblower would be carrying irrefutable evidence of a lab leak is again almost zero.

We can keep shaking the tree, but I don't think anything truly satisfying is going to fall out. Consider that even if the USA for example had actual evidence of a lab leak, they would be better off using this as leverage over China secretly than releasing it publicly.

What actually can and should happen, is that some major change comes to virology research to absolutely minimise the chance of another lab origin pandemic. Wherever SARS-CoV-2 came from, we have had lab leaks before and we will have them again, that much is certain.

duxup• 5 years ago

even if the USA for example had actual evidence of a lab leak, they would be better off using this as leverage over China secretly than releasing it publicly.

That seems unlikely to work.

rhodozelia2• 5 years ago

They did have samples of a 98% similar virus collected from the miners working in the bat cave who had died years earlier. The virus had a different name like ratg or something.

krrrh4• 5 years ago

It’s covered in the article and it’s called RaTG13 and no one can get a straight answer on where it was acquired or when. However independent researchers found it is identical to a virus previously known as RaBtCoV/4991 that made several miners ill in 2012.

It’s 96.2% similar not 98%. The issue is that coronaviruses in nature don’t mutate fast enough for that to be the missing link, and they have tested something like 80,000 animals since the outbreak without finding anything closer. One possibility is that the gap was closed through gain-of-function or serial passage research.

jeswin• 5 years ago

Evidence could come from communications. Such a large scale coverup would have required quite a lot of exchanges. Even with China being somewhat opaque and inaccessible to foreign intelligence, there could be digital trails.

dbt00• 5 years ago

You can't assume a coverup proves a crime, though. Is it bad? Yes. Do agents of totalitarian governments cover things up routinely because they assume something bad was done or they don't want to be blamed for it, even if no wrongdoing was behind it? Yes.

(i.e. politically punished by the west for covering up facts is fine but scientifically concluding this proves a leak is not.)

ramraj075• 5 years ago

Holding people from China accountable might be a tree we can’t bark at, but we can sure as hell hold everyone even marginally accountable in the US side if it’s clear they covered up their involvement in the unleashing of this plague.

gary_0• 5 years ago

What actually can and should happen

Not to mention fixing all of the other failures that allowed COVID to kill millions worldwide. Everyone's pointing fingers but hardly anybody's talking about improving epidemiology and public health policy (which the US is long overdue for a reckoning on).

One of those failures, by the way, was the seeming assumption that whatever state a global health emergency started in would act in something resembling good faith. Regardless of how COVID came to be, China wasted precious time deflecting when it should have been diligently helping to sound the alarm and properly investigate.

And how many other countries might have prevaricated in the same fashion, if the pandemic had started within their borders? This is not a failure concerning China specifically. Indeed, there will come a point where blaming China for COVID, however cathartic that might be, will be counterproductive to preventing future catastrophes.

iforgotpassword• 5 years ago

My takeaway was the huge denial most of the rest of the world put itself into.

When it was still only Wuhan, everyone assumed it would go down like sars again, it's just "a Chinese thing" and could never happen in the developed world. We feasted on the images of overcrowded hospitals, people collapsing in waiting rooms, and felt good about or country.

Then when it became clear that China messed up containing the spread and it would not only hit other cities in China but the rest of the world too, we did.... Nothing. Like a toddler we tried solving the problem by ignoring it. Forgotten were the images of chaos and death from Wuhan, politicians would assure us "that it's under control and go away soon". Just how can you suddenly pull such a 180 as soon as it arrives at your country? Then the first cases popped up and "we did contact tracing and stopped the chain". Great, but hoe does it prevent new cases from entering the country?

I came from beijing back to germany on Feb 26, 2020. Getting out of the plane there was... nothing. No temperature checks, no masks, no form to fill in, no "hey please stay at home for two weeks". It went from sitting in a plane for 8 hours with a mask to just randomly boarding a train across germany with nobody giving a shit. It was unreal.

But then, when it eventually got real bad in the West, we pulled yet another 180 and stopped ignoring covid and started going "well China should have prevented it", when we got a head start of about a month where we could perfectly see what this virus does, yet didn't take any measures on our side whatsoever and just let it happen. I know, it's always easier to blame someone else across the planet, but I'm most surprised and disappointed by my own government. I'm wondering how things would have gone if this had originated in Germany.

aww_dang• 5 years ago

- It seems extremely unlikely to me that anyone from within China will A) blow the whistle or B) that we would hear about it.

You might hear about it, depending on where you get your news. You might also hear social media fact checkers dismissing it as conspiracy nuttery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Meng_Yan

https://nypost.com/2020/09/16/twitter-suspends-virologist-wh...

cm21873• 5 years ago

I agree with you. I am not sure what driving around the WHO delegation in wuhan 1 year after the facts was ever going to achieve.

At the end of the day the only people who most likely know whether it was a lab leak or not are the chinese authorities. So we will likely know in 50 or 60 years if those archives are made public (like for the Katyn massacre). The CIA/NSA can possibly get its hand on incriminating communications, but who is going to trust those guys?

Also I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the chinese authorities got all covid lab samples destroyed without being analysed. The best way to not leak that you may be responsible is to ensure no one, even yourself, can ever know whether you were responsible.

lamontcg8• 5 years ago

Wade devoted a full section to the “furin cleavage site,” a distinctive segment of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it to efficiently enter human cells.
Within the scientific community, one thing leapt off the page. Wade quoted one of the world’s most famous microbiologists, Dr. David Baltimore, saying that he believed the furin cleavage site “was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus.” Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate and pioneer in molecular biology, was about as far from Steve Bannon and the conspiracy theorists as it was possible to get. His judgment, that the furin cleavage site raised the prospect of gene manipulation, had to be taken seriously.

Furin cleavage sites have evolved and are present in multiple coronaviruses:

- HCoV-OC43 (infects humans)

- HCoV-HKU1 (infects humans)

- MHV-A59

- ChRCoV-HKU24

- BtCoV-ENT

- BtNeCoV-PML-PHE1

- BtCoV-HKU4

- BtCoV-HKU5

- MERS-CoV

- BtHpCoV-Zhejiang2013

- SARS-CoV-2

Phylogenetic analysis suggests that it has evolved independently at least 6 times that we know of.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...

After that article was published a team in Thailand found furin cleavage sites in sarbecoviruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 called RacCS203 (91.5% similarity to SARS-CoV-2) and RmYN02 (93.3% similarity to SARS-CoV-2)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7873279/

Furin cleavage sites are common, nature understands how to utilize that trick very well, and continuously has re-discovered it.

Throwawayaerlei18• 5 years ago

<s>The</s> A gravamen of the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site claim is that it's not aligned like others in the coronaviruses you cite.

henearkr5• 5 years ago

I'd love more information if you have.

Because per se it does not prove the claim of bioengineering.

Jarwain7• 5 years ago

There are so many "shocking" articles, but here's something I don't get:

The closest genetic match is only 3.8% similar. When it only has 29,903 base pairs, that's 1,136 mutations. I'm no bioscientist but my friends who are tell me that's a lot of changes, and that experiments might change a few base pairs or proteins at a time. A lab leak theory doesn't explain how gain of function study resulted in so many mutations, unless they were blasting these viruses with radiation, and what would be the point of that? Radiation mutations would cause too many changes to do useful science.

Everyone keeps looking at bats but the closest bat coronavorus is 20 years of evolution away. SARS and MERS came from palm covets and dromedary camels respectively, so what's the deal?

Every time I read about this I keep thinking "huh that's sketchy but circumstantial" and I've yet to find an answer to how the lab would've gotten to this point, undiscovered, with no published papers or research or notes or preprints anywhere

Throwawayaerlei18• 5 years ago

but my friends who are tell me that's a lot of changes, and that experiments might change a few base pairs or proteins at a time. A lab leak theory doesn't explain how gain of function study resulted in so many mutations, unless they were blasting these viruses with radiation

Or explicitly creating chimeric coronaviruses, which has been the state of the are for some time. Here's https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26552008/ one of the sources of smoke on this, a 2015 paper co-authored by the Bat Woman (2nd to last author), the key sentence from the abstract:

Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.

Have you read the fine article? It cites more than a few papers.

cma2• 5 years ago

There's around one mutation each time it transmits between hosts (for flu it is one each time it goes cell to cell). 1,136 doesn't seem that high, say it hops 100 bats a year, that's just a divergence of 11 years of bat hopping (the more mutations that add up maybe the rate doesn't hold due to conserved regions though?). 5X less hops a year, 55 years: still a blink.

puzzlingcaptcha• 5 years ago

The closest genetic match is only 3.8% similar.

Keep in mind there is an estimated 1.5 million viruses that have not been identified yet. There might very well be a virus in nature which is the 'missing link'.

bartimus• 5 years ago

The closest genetic match is only 3.8% similar.

How did you come by 3.8%?

bena2• 5 years ago

Humans are 98.8% similar to chimpanzees genetically. That 1.2% is critical. Now viruses have shorter lifecycles, blah blah blah, but 3.8% is a huge gap to overcome.

Also, "circumstantial" doesn't mean weak. It means "pertaining to circumstance". For example, the fact that the virus's origins are in the same area as the lab would be circumstantial evidence that it was created in that lab.

Many circumstances can point to a conclusion. Even the phrase "the smoking gun" which has been bandied about in the discussion of this article, is an example of circumstantial evidence. Circumstantial evidence is opposed by direct evidence, which would be eyewitnesses, video/photos of the thing taking place, etc. And eyewitness is actually one of the weakest forms of evidence because memory is faulty. So circumstantial evidence is usually the evidence that convicts a criminal.

To illustrate that, I like to point to my two favorite circumstantial convictions, Hans Reiser and Scott Peterson.

They convicted Scott Peterson based on buying porn, a dye job, and selling cars.

The convicted Hans Reiser of first degree murder of his wife, Nina, despite not even having any direct evidence that she was in fact dead. They only found the body after Reiser himself led them to Nina's body in exchange for pleading guilty to second-degree murder.

A cleaned car, a missing seat, and some books on murder investigations were the evidence they used. Entirely circumstantial. And they deduced that Nina was murdered from those same circumstances.

teorema3• 5 years ago

In one of these recent articles (the Wade piece?) they explain it's not the presence of a furin cleavage site, it's this particular furin cleavage site pattern including its flanking regions. There's discussion about the existence of furin cleavage sites in other coronaviruses, but also explanation for why it's unusual in SARS-CoV-2.

eutropia11• 5 years ago

The “smoking gun” was the “human” (arginine as CGG) way the AA seq was coded for at the furin cleavage site: Only 5 percent of SARS2’s arginine codons are CGG, and the double codon CGG-CGG has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus.

lamontcg8• 5 years ago

has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus.

That does not mean it doesn't exist, just that we haven't found it.

We didn't know of any other sarbecoviruses that had furin cleavage sites, then we found them in bats in Thailand, then the goalposts moved to how this paricular furin cleavage site is weird.

Once a decade passes and we find animals with beta-coronviruses which have the same kinds of furin cleavage sites, I'm sure the goalposts will move again.

tim33312• 5 years ago

Wade's section is about:

There are several curious features about this insert but the oddest is that of the two side-by-side CGG codons. Only 5 percent of SARS2’s arginine codons are CGG, and the double codon CGG-CGG has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus. https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

wuwuno• 5 years ago

In early December of 2019 with absolutely no indication that a new virus was being spread, the Chinese figured out that they had a) a new virus and b) they were able to identify the virus.

In this case the Chinese knew, in early December, they had a problem when they only had a handful of cases. HOW????

COVID presents like the flu, so there isn't a novel symptom to help them identify that something new is in play.

There wasn't a significant rise in cases or deaths. There couldn't be a significant rise in deaths because there weren't that many cases. A small cluster of flu cases escalating into pneumonia, and then death won't raise a red flag because it happens all the time. I've had multiple Chief Medial Officers tell me this.

With COVID presenting like the flu, and with so few cases the ONLY way they could know that a new virus was spreading was if they had prior knowledge. The only way they could get prior knowledge was because someone working at the lab got sick, and then people they came in contact with got sick.

If this really happened organically then it should have been spreading pretty damn fast, and because it presents like the flu it wouldn't have raised any eyebrows until either the case rates spiked or the death rates spiked. In the U.S. flu cases per year range from a low of 9.3M to a high of 45M and deaths of 12,000 up to 61,000.

I suspect that China sees the same fluctuations in yearly flu cases so localized spikes wouldn't have raised any eyebrows it wouldn't have gotten anyone's attention until hospitals started to get overwhelmed. But in early December they didn't have that many cases.

So how did they know?

saalweachter• 5 years ago

Ground glass lung X-rays?

gkfasdfasdf• 5 years ago

Does anybody know if the current lab leak theories say if it was a natural virus that was released by accident, or was it something engineered in the course of research that was released by accident?

dariusj18• 5 years ago

It's not that productive to say, but this thread's comments are mostly trash, if you read this comment first, just turn around.

S_A_P2• 5 years ago

Why is the lab leak theory so taboo? I dont understand why this would want to be glossed over? If a mistake was made why are we not learning from it? Why would China care? its not like anything would change if they admitted a mea culpa here. I just feel like so many factors point to this not being a 'wild' virus it just didnt make sense to not investigate if this was a lab leak. Lets learn here and do better.

S_A_P2• 5 years ago

really not getting it here- even if my home country had a lab leak I would be interested in learning from a mistake.

psychlops• 5 years ago

This article is painfully political. The author takes far too much time demonizing Trump and anointing Biden to keep me interested in learning what she has to say.

badmadrad3• 5 years ago

Now that media has to tell the truth they have to get the negative Trump spin in to justify the vitriol of the last 5 years otherwise the narrative wouldn't make sense.

MilnerRoute• 5 years ago

I'd like to point out that the lab-leak theory is still being dismissed by portions of the mainstream media. (I'm not taking a side here -- just pointing out that this hasn't been settled yet.)

Today the Los Angeles Times published an article headlined "The lab-leak origin claim for COVID-19 is in the news, but it's still fact-free."

What's missing from all this reexamination and soul-searching is a fundamental fact: There is no evidence — not a smidgen — for the claim that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory in China or anywhere else, or that the China lab ever had the virus in its inventory... No one disputes that a lab leak is possible. Viruses have escaped from laboratories in the past, on occasion leading to human infection. But "zoonotic" transfers — that is, from animals to humans — are a much more common and well-documented pathway. That's why the virological community believes that it's vastly more likely that COVID-19 spilled over from an animal host to humans...

"We cannot prove that SARS-CoV-2 [the COVID-19 virus] has a natural origin and we cannot prove that its emergence was not the result of a lab leak," the lead author of the Nature paper, Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, told me by email. "However, while both scenarios are possible, they are not equally likely," Andersen said. "Precedence, data, and other evidence strongly favor natural emergence as a highly likely scientific theory for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, while the lab leak remains a speculative incomplete hypothesis with no credible evidence." Co-author Robert F. Garry of Tulane Medical School told several colleagues during a recent webcast: "Our conclusion that it didn't leak from the lab is even stronger today than it was when we wrote the paper." As the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski sums up the contest between the lab-leak and zoonotic theories, "the likelihood of the two hypotheses is nowhere near close to equal."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/column-the-lab-lea...

And Wired also ran a piece last week with a similar skeptical headline. "The Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory Is a Tale of Weaponized Uncertainty." Its subheading? "Scientists almost never say they’re sure, and it could take years to pin down the pandemic's origins. Until then: People are trying to scare you."

https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-lab-leak-theory-weaponi...

knowaveragejoe9• 5 years ago

What if that's because there's less to the theory than you think? Your own quotations, not to mention other comments in this very thread, show that there is still a non-trivial amount of doubt on this one. I seriously think a lot of people leaving comments along these lines WANT this hypothesis to be true because they think it proves they were "always right".

timelincoln5• 5 years ago

I think the real point that no public figure is willing to say, is that if this virus did leak out of a CCP lab after being modified the entire world will to some degree or another demand consequences for the CCP.

While doubtful the consequences would lead to nuclear war that’s not outside the scope of possible outcomes. What’s more likely is the vast consumer public rejecting the relationship with the CCP, leading to a quicker downward spiral of relations leading to risky military situations and a lot of rich people with a stake in China trade becoming slightly less rich.

chasd003• 5 years ago

I think many people who make important decisions related to things that explode would rather just not know.

“To the heart and mind, ignorance is kind

There’s no comfort in the truth, pain is all you’ll find”

- careless whispers

timelincoln5• 5 years ago

Go ahead and Vote me down , it’s still true https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/lab-leak-china-intern...

dukeofdoom• 5 years ago

Account of the Informed Consent Action Network @ICANdecide reportedly locked out by Twitter after they announced to publish more emails from Dr. Fauci obtained via FOIA request, citing #COVID19 misinformation policy.

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1400571828230369282

qrybam• 5 years ago

For anyone who’s listened to Bret Weinstein’s podcast from early on in the pandemic, “gain of function research” will be a familiar term. Great to see this hypothesis getting traction in mainstream media. What’s still crazy to me is how quickly things were explained away and how strongly the directly related scientific community said the hypothesis was “fringe”.

Here’s an episode of Bret’s podcast from June 2020 covering this in depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug

Edit: a word

noetic_techy• 5 years ago

Came here to see if anyone mention the fact that Bret had ALREADY identified this exact scenario on his podcast months ago! He even pointed out the Drazak conflict of interest.

But no one listened.

Its bewildering how blind people can be. I hope they start paying attentions and giving him credit because he is saying things today that no one in the mainstream is paying attention to... but I feel will have the exact same gravity of scandal later on.

systemvoltage4• 5 years ago

Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the CDC, said he received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN he thought the virus likely escaped from a lab. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science,” he said.

Holyshit. We have created an atmosphere of censorship and suppression to the point where noble, well meaning people have been turned into monsters.

Aachen2• 5 years ago

Turns out one human isn't necessarily better than another? This emphasis on that scientists are evil in this thread astounds me.

systemvoltage4• 5 years ago

The emphasis is that reasonable, educated and rational, self-introspective and self-critical people like Scientists can issue death threats from their wokeness just shows how bad politics have gotten on both sides.

djkivi• 5 years ago

What a difference a year makes?

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/why-scientists-belie...

badmadrad3• 5 years ago

This is an example of "anything Trump says I must believe the opposite" logic that has plagued our country for the last 5 years.

capableweb• 5 years ago

Your comment makes it seem like they somehow shifted their opinion from one side to the other. That's not what either articles are about.

The one you link is about "Wuhan-Lab Coronavirus Origin Theory Is Highly Unlikely", that the science is "dubious" but doesn't seem to make any strong claims either way (but I only skimmed the article).

The one in the submission is about how conversations and debates about the "Wuhan-Lab Coronavirus Origin Theory" was silenced because many thought it was so obvious.

While the articles are about the same subject, they touch on the subject in two very different ways and are in no way contradictory.

What you are doing here is trying to add more gasoline on some fire, but that's not super helpful.

ralph84• 5 years ago

We can only hope that someday the "I fucking love science" crowd will realize science is no less political than any other human endeavor.

Aachen2• 5 years ago

More like they weren't actually doing science, not that science was wrong or turns out to be a bad concept. I should most sincerely hope that the love of proper science will not be reduced due to articles and comments like these. What kind of dark ages would that land us in if the general public started doubting that if you do an experiment that shows X, and you can repeat that and it still shows X, that X is likely true?

ngc2482• 5 years ago

This goes a bit more into detail -

https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...

throwaway210222• 5 years ago

The American government might much more cooperation in their lab-link investigation if they can guarantee the Chinese that there will be ZERO consequences (financial, legal, oversight, etc.) for them if its found to be true.

If its just about getting to The Truth.

But its not.

speedgoose2• 5 years ago

USA's medias are a bit late to discuss this theory seriously. I know that they usually don't read newspapers that are not written in English, but they perhaps should do because it's not the first time they arrive months later. For example the theory was discussed a lot in major French medias months ago after the CNRS, a major research institute, published about it : https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/articles/la-question-de-lorigine-d...

Since very recently you also have a letter in the Science journal written in English, so it may help USA medias to consider the theory: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1

Anyway, better late than never and this is a good story from vanity fair.

yarcob• 5 years ago

One thing that's baffling to me is that I've not seen any discussion from scientists who actually know what they are talking about. All we get are articles who talk about the political side, and try to prove things by how certain actors behaved.

Most of the actual science that all the articles cite are pop-sci simplifications at best. People talk about how parts from multiple viruses would be joined together etc, how base pairs are 97% identical, etc. These are all very high level summaries that don't really allow for detailed conclusions.

Now I'm not a subject matter expert myself, but from what I've learned about evolutionary genetics is that some scenarios would be pretty obvious when looking at the genome. For example, you could look at where in the genome the mutations occur.

I'd love to read an article that goes in depth on the actual scientific arguments, rather than just rehashes of rehashes like this.

dalbasal2• 5 years ago

I agree. It's a structural weakness.

Human stories about conflicts of interest, ideological takes focused on confluency with grander theories, politically factionalization and such make the better story. Hard positions make better stories than skeptical ambiguity.

That can't be helped. Most people are going to read the compelling story, so that will be what major publications print. We do need some sort of journalism that doesn't do this. Someone needs to research and investigate this without populist considerations playing a role. Not instead of what we have, in addition to.

mcintyre1994• 5 years ago

Obviously this article isn’t making a comprehensive argument for gain-of-function research, but it’s interesting how the arguments made in favour of it seem to have been demonstrated so poorly during this pandemic.

The argument that it’d help detect risk doesn’t seem very good, we know these researchers published work on similar viruses and it doesn’t seem to have caused anything to change and increase safety.

The argument that it could contribute to vaccine research doesn’t seem to have held up either, AFAIK there’s no link between such research and the Covid-19 vaccines we now have.

I’m sure there are other arguments for the research, and I’m sure it won’t stop regardless of what people want given how the article says Obama’s moratorium was treated and the obvious military applications. But it seems that the experience of Covid-19 does drastically alter the risk/benefit calculation of that research given it seems to have had no benefit in practice.

Teracotage• 5 years ago

G Greenwald has an interesting take on it https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-fbis-strange-anthrax-in...

mountainboy• 5 years ago

People have been discussing a possible lab leak for well over a year. For the most part commenters here on hackernews have been close-minded, arrogant, dismissive and probably wrong. disgusting.

I don't actually care much about the lab leak hypothesis. So I don't have a dog in that particular fight. I think contagion itself is a myth. See the work of Dr. Tom Cowan if you are interested. I just don't like the arrogant attitude I see on display here all the time, on so many topics. People wielding beliefs, opinions, and "scientific consensus" as if they were facts, and there is nothing left to discover about biology or wider sciences.

Guess what people, human understanding of the natural world is moved forward by those who DO NOT AGREE with scientific consensus of the day. The heretics are the interesting ones to follow, not the rest of you lot.

I'm quite frankly glad to see a bunch of you eating crow right now. You should.

Good day

rogers18445• 5 years ago

What's interesting is that the way the Chinese govt responded and is responding is consistent with the fact that they believe it escaped one of their labs.

There is much to be said in not cooperating in an investigation against yourself, but active measures to prevent the investigation is a step further.

Ultimately the problem will be cracked, artificial selection and natural selection can be discerned given enough time and effort.

DevKoala• 5 years ago

> When Trump himself floated the lab-leak hypothesis last April, his divisiveness and lack of credibility made things more, not less, challenging for those seeking the truth.

Bullshit. It was the media which rejected this theory. How is this also Trump's fault for suggesting it? Are they also going to rewrite this part of the record?

abbassi2• 5 years ago

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

abbassi2• 5 years ago

The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2

To the Editor — Since the first reports of novel pneumonia (COVID-19) in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, there has been considerable discussion on the origin of the causative virus, SARS-CoV-2 (also referred to as HCoV-19). Infections with SARS-CoV-2 are now widespread, and as of 11 March 2020, 121,564 cases have been confirmed in more than 110 countries, with 4,373 deaths.

SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans; SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 can cause severe disease, whereas HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E are associated with mild symptoms. Here we review what can be deduced about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 from comparative analysis of genomic data. We offer a perspective on the notable features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which they could have arisen. Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.

sbagel3• 5 years ago

The amount of wildly delusional oppression complex in this thread is staggering, HN has really gone downhill.

On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence.

There were tons of articles and threads on it everywhere including HN, no one was being silenced, give me a break. The oppression complex is really out of control, as if people were being visited by the secret police and forced to immediately cease all discussion about the lab leak theory. It just had no credibility due to lack of evidence. As more info comes to light it's being given more credence, simple as that.

Really seems many want to feel like they've been oppressed and silenced when that couldn't be further from reality, reaching absurd levels of delusion here.

DiogenesKynikos3• 5 years ago

As more info comes to light it's being given more credence, simple as that.

The thing is, no new info supporting the lab-leak theory has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been. All the evidence still points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology not having had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic, and all the new evidence is consistent with the default prior - that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals, just like every other novel virus in history.

ravel-bar-foo4• 5 years ago

No new evidence for natural origin has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been, and you are making an isolated demand for rigor.

If you read the Nicholas Wade article, the PLOS blog, or even this article, you will know the evidence is not pointing in any one direction at the moment, but there is solid evidence of a cover-up and blame shifting by the Chinese government and the virology / national defense establishment.

krona• 5 years ago

Oppression complex? How about orthodox privilege?

dalbasal2• 5 years ago

Regardless of which hypothesis turns out to be true, there are fouls in either direction. Certainly overblown claims of both silencing and misinformation peddling.

The "human story," conflicts of interests and such, gets most of the attention... unfortunately. Some of those interests were/are personal. The most onerous interests seem to be narrative. One narrative or the other suits a grander political narrative, for a variety of reasons. That kind of stuff sucks us in, unfortunately.

There can be a fine line between skepticism and orthodoxy though. Skepticism defaults to ambiguity. I'm sure that ambiguity is the majority position, but "I don't know" isn't a position that gets much journalistic and political attention.

Media, both new and traditional, gravitates towards hard positions... poop slinging and human conflict stories.

whiddershins• 5 years ago

The rational thing was to agree the lab leak was a perfectly decent theory from the beginning.

Saying you have ‘no evidence’ of something is not a reason to discard a hypothesis. On the contrary, it is a reason to figure out how to get more data, a reason to figure out how to falsify the hypothesis.

It’s a common logical fallacy to conflate absence of evidence with evidence of absence.

sega_sai• 5 years ago

When there is no evidence, the discussion is purely in the sphere of priors. And that doesn't make it very fruitful to discuss, as different people will likely have different priors. I think I agree that the likelihood of lab-leak was downweighted previously probably too strongly, but in the same time, I still don't see too much evidence in favor of it now.

concordDance4• 5 years ago

There were tons of articles and threads on it everywhere including HN, no one was being silenced, give me a break

On hackernews the most you would get is downvotes. On Facebook or youtube? Things were deleted and banned.

skylabmelody2• 5 years ago

You don't get to rewrite history after the facts and invent another smearing label to wave off the reality.

Social medias implemented CCP-style censorship on their platform on anything related to the lab leak theory for more than a year.

Posts and comments were systematically deleted, users accounts were suspended.

At some point you couldn't even share a link in a private message as it was blocked.

You are the one reaching absurd levels of delusion here.

sbagel3• 5 years ago

Citation needed. Please direct me to any user or accounts banned or suspended for discussing the lab leak theory. You're the one rewriting history here.

calpaterson• 5 years ago

There were tons of articles and threads on [the lab leak theory] everywhere including HN

Until relatively recently lab leak discussion was censored from Twitter and Facebook. I didn't see much of it in the period Feb 2020 - May 2021.

On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture

There was no brilliant evidence for any source of the coronavirus. Regardless of that, the idea of a lab leak was quickly ruled out and that was unjustified.

I think the problem for the media was that a controversial American president publicly endorsed the lab leak theory, as it supported his broader agenda, and that made people in the media prefer to disbelieve it, even to wrongly suggest that it was not credible. In short: bias.

frakkingcylons• 5 years ago

I came across this article on Twitter about the lab leak hypothesis back in September 2020. The scientist in the article also was actively tweeting about the theory, she was definitely not being censored.

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-br...

whitepaint6• 5 years ago

What was the evidence that it occurred naturally?

stevenhuang• 5 years ago

You must not have been paying attention.

Here's one case of someone stating the true goals of those who promote the lab leak hypothesis is to promote anti Asian sentiments...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26547263

It's hard to believe how one can reach such a daft conclusion.

There are many others.

flavius296633• 5 years ago

anti Asian sentiments

I think an unintentional lab leak is going to create less issues for Asians than the other theory of "dirty" Asians eating bats, don't you think?

shkkmo5• 5 years ago

That is not what that comment is saying. It discusses effects, it does not ascribe motivation.

christophilus• 5 years ago

It’s not surprising. The lab leak hypothesis was one of several obvious and logical hypotheses, but it’s the only one that we were consistently told was Dangerous and Disallowed Thought.

Even if it turns out to be a false hypothesis, it’s outrageous that it was treated the way it was for so long, with such vitriol, and with such unanimity before any real investigation had been done.

I’ve got no dog in this fight, but the way this hypothesis was treated gets my libertarian hackles up.

op00to4• 5 years ago

You can’t rail against the government due to your own oppression if you’re making $350k+options without some serious mental gymnastics.

istjohn• 5 years ago

The media also insisted masks were useless for the general public. The media demonstrated a real inability to critically evaluate the statements authority figures feed to them over the past year.

flavius296633• 5 years ago

You can attribute that to being unprofessional. Which is not great, but not terrible.

What is absolutely terrible is for the media and big tech to ACT like they are the absolute authority in any field they have interest in. We're heading towards "ministry of truth" levels of censorship.

bart_spoon3• 5 years ago

On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants.

Virtually none of the evidence being discussed here, aside from 3 workers at the lab getting sick in November, is new. Its all the same info that has been available for well over a year. And much of it not coming from "misinfo merchants".

Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence.

This cuts both ways. There have been many who haven't been saying that the lab-leak is definitively the source of the virus, but simply saying that its a credible possibility with at least as much evidence as any other theory, and should therefore be investigated. Throughout the last year, it was pretty consistently called a conspiracy theory or "debunked", when clearly it was neither. Declaring something to be misinformation when it is not, isn't any more skeptical that declaring something to be the truth with no evidence.

You can try and poo-poo all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the mainstream narrative, both on social media and in the mainstream media, has been wildly off about this for over a year, and virtually nothing has changed from an evidence perspective to warrant their about face. The general narrative was simply wrong, due to a combination of hubris, partisanship, and lack of skepticism.

bena2• 5 years ago

Not to mention, the "origin of COVID" fails my test of relevance.

If it came from a lab, does anything change? No, not really. It's still a virus that we need to protect against.

The only thing that would change any sort of response is if COVID was deliberately released. And that doesn't even change the medical side of the response, just the political side.

HN has really gone downhill.

Yes, it has, but mentioning the reason for that will bring the brigade of the very same element that has made it go downhill.

qez• 5 years ago

I was a bit shocked by this sentence

On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants.

As far as I can tell, it makes two logical errors, 1) that absence of evidence is reason to not take an idea seriously, in a space of known unknowns, & 2) that a possibility can be discredited because dishonest people are pushing it.

On the former point: "evidence = likely" does not necessarily imply "no evidence = unlikely" as you seem to believe (if by evidence you mean like courtroom evidence; we use probabilistic reasoning in the absence of such "evidence" for any one explanation.) we have gathered 0 evidence for many (probably most) true things.

Finally, there's a lack of understanding of how power works in the US. If you could get censored for saying something that the US government knew for months, then yes, you were being silenced, the absence of literal NKVD notwithstanding.

orolle• 5 years ago

This is nothing new. The independent media wrote about this a year ago and mainstream media organized an anti-fake news campaign against it. Now the mainstream presents itself as the saint - BS! 1 year ago mainstream did not check the facts or at least compare natural versus lab origin. No - they steam rolled independent media for publishing "fake" news, got them kicked off of social media and destroyed their income stream. Now it's factual news and they present themselves as saints, without apologizing for their wrong doing. I do not trust these mainstream media outlets anymore. I spend my money on independent news.

intricatedetail2• 5 years ago

I don't trust "prestigious" science magazines, since they publish substandard research on cannabis for political purpose. I am an expert in that topic. If they do this with cannabis, what else they publish with an agenda?

zalo• 5 years ago

Can’t we tell whether the 4% difference between SARS-Cov2 and RaTG13 is responsible for the Furin Cleavage site?

If so, that would be a huge connection suggesting GoF and the template coronavirus SARS-Cov2 was based on

Grustaf• 5 years ago

Surely you mean "The lab-leak CONSPIRACY theory"?

NoblePublius2• 5 years ago

Ok so…China infected the President of the United States with a bio weapon? And we are going to do what about it?

eutropia11• 5 years ago

TFA doesn’t call Sars-Cov-2 a bioweapon. Sloppy lab practices on virus research is all it takes to have a lab leak.

NoblePublius2• 5 years ago

to suggest that gain of function research is not in service to bio weapon development is tantamount to suggesting the United States went to the moon purely for scientific purposes

izhak• 5 years ago

The very first paragraph starting with a hackneyed image of an "Asperger’s Syndrome" scientist who is good in "finding patterns" is quite a serious signal of bullshit. Let's read further...

sam3452• 5 years ago

Dislike of the messenger and conflicts of interest clouded and intimidated the search for truth. We need an objective press and a de-politicized science free, or fully disclosed of, conflicts of interest. Intimidation by the political wind of the day has substantial consequences.

myfavoritedog12• 5 years ago

I know that most people won't; but if this article is some kind of major a revelation to you, I hope that you take some time to re-evaluate your information sources. You really should think more carefully about how you detect bullshit.

There were those who were sounding the alarm about this lab leak hypothesis well over a year ago. The overwhelming media narrative to look away from that hypothesis and smear those who talked about it was always artificially manufactured in a way that should have been obvious to most people.

But this kind of misinformation is really par for the course with the mainstream media. If you're only paying attention to ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, NYT, WaPo, etc. (and downstream from those sources) for your day-to-day news - you're in the worst manufactured media bubble in existence. Those big media companies are a locus of power that is manipulated to an incredible degree.

I'm not telling you to drink the koolaid and only watch Fox News while reading Breitbart. I'm definitely not telling you to waste your time on Alex Jones or someone like that. I'm saying to balance what you look at with other information sources with a variety of political slants. This WIV narrative is just one of many that the MSM has been pushing over the last few years. It scares me how gullible people have been on so many topics.

infamouscow• 5 years ago

I'm not sure why you are being downvoted for suggesting people should form their own conclusions rather than blindly following team red or blue.

myfavoritedog12• 5 years ago

Yeah, that feeling of belonging to a team is all that matters to a lot of people.

I know several people whose happiness is based upon whether or not the Atlanta Falcons or Braves are having a good season. It's bizarre to me, but there it is.

altcognito3• 5 years ago

Im still curious what you think this article really reveals. It makes a lot of unsupported claims. Fox News Is mainstream news. It literally is the most watched network, well beyond all those you listed as being “mainstream news”. Yet they serve the same biased, lack of balanced coverage as the sites you listed. In fact, the article even points out how White House advisors (on Fox, OAN) put out the WIV origin story over and over again using bad research and sources.

And again, I still don’t even know why this is more important than the task of dealing with the pandemic first. Pointing fingers directly led to a simpleton policy of blocking flights from China, which was the extent of public health measures for weeks. Cases were pouring in from italy without anyone doing quarantine follow up or contact tracing. It took months to get PPE and adequate testing in place.

Even today, as variants occur (hey, but nobody seems to care that those have origins too right?), there are literally Republicans fighting measures against public safety and calling into question the efficacy of vaccination.

myfavoritedog12• 5 years ago

Fox News Is mainstream news. It literally is the most watched network

If you view Fox News as one of many competing news outlets, sure, it's got a big voice. But I'd urge you to view it in terms of collective narrative. The left-leaning narrative bubble is far larger than Fox News by more than an order of magnitude. When CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, the AP, NYT, WaPo, ESPN, late-night comedy hosts, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are all driving the same narrative that it's conspiracy theory to consider the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a possible source of COVID... Fox News' mild protestations to the contrary are insignificant in terms of bandwidth into the American psyche.

dogman144• 5 years ago

I'll push back here... if you actually want the data on this, it's not a clean MSM<>Fox and co split, via "analyzing over fifty-five thousand online media stories, five million tweets, and seventy-five thousand posts on public Facebook pages garnering millions of engagements."

There's this general situation where yes, there is that ecosystem 1 and downstream sources OP mentioned, and there is the ecosystem 2 (Fox and downstream sources).

However, former POTUS and ecosystem 1 cycled between themselves a fair bit, ecosystem 2 and former POTUS cycle, so by proxy eco1 and eco2 are cross-linking to each other in a sense, and so on.

I'm not telling you that there is no good way to parse info sources out there, but I am telling you the "MSM vs. other" delineation that OP is calling for awareness of doesn't really exist if you study the actual information flow... which this team did.

If you want my advice, read primary sources on events that matter to you. Studies, court documents, and so on. It's what that whole confusing ecosystem uses as well, and you can get the raw data without the analysis.

- the study: https://cyber.harvard.edu/publication/2020/Mail-in-Voter-Fra...

- discussion on the study: https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-yochai-benkler-m...

myfavoritedog12• 5 years ago

When Trump himself floated the lab-leak hypothesis last April, his divisiveness and lack of credibility made things more, not less, challenging for those seeking the truth.

Right, it's Trump's fault that the media and political opposition acted like children in opposing every word that came out of his mouth.

Apply that logic to your favorite left-leaning politician:

"The fact that Obama was always a natural born citizen would have been accepted by some Conservatives who thought he was born in Kenya, but the fact that Obama denied the claims that he was foreign-born made things worse."

When you're wrong, you're wrong. Try to own up to it without blaming the people who were actually right.

daughart• 5 years ago

And the villagers were the ones to blame in "the boy who cried wolf".

myfavoritedog12• 5 years ago

There was a need to rely on the boy who cried wolf at first, since he was the only one out in the fields.

There was never a need to rely on Trump. This was a pandemic. Basic journalistic curiosity and integrity should have meant that our "free" press should have been all over figuring out how COVID-19 came to be. Instead, they played politics with information that they could have easily looked into.

CRConrad• 5 years ago

Right, it's Trump's fault that the media and political opposition acted like children in opposing every word that came out of his mouth.

In 2020?!? By then, "acting like children" would have been not to doubt every single word from Über-liar Trump.

freeflight4• 5 years ago

The article claims "the Lancet statement rejected the lab-leak hypothesis", which is a bit misleading considering what the Lancet statement actually did was reject a human origin of the virus, based on genome sampling and other evidence.

The two are not equal, the virus could be of natural origin but leaked from a lab, that scenario is still very much possible even in the context of the Lancet statement.

Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist, then is cited as saying there is no evidence in the statement, when actually there are around 12 relevant citations in there. I guess a dozen is just not enough data for a data scientist?

The actual context of that statement also gets quite a bit embezzled with an off-hand remark about "xenophobia and climate denialism": Since the first case in the US, there had been a concentrated and very nasty effort to politicize the virus.

It was US senators and US new pundits who at first floated the claim of it being a bio weapon [0], that's what triggered said Lancet statement in the very first place. It didn't just come out of nowhere for no reason, as some people like to claim, to imply the statement itself is already evidence for a cover-up.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation#Wuhan_...

meowface3• 5 years ago

the virus could be of natural origin but leaked from a lab, that scenario is still very much possible even in the context of the Lancet statement.

That's absolutely true, but one of the main corollary claims is also that SARS-CoV-2 may have resulted in part from gain of function research. People making that claim have said that the virus seems to be particularly effective against humans despite no intermediate forms discovered yet and that a natural virus leaking from a lab would be less likely to spread so widely. They've also cited the fact that the lab does do gain of function research on coronaviruses.

If it were true, that definitely wouldn't imply it's a bio-weapon (such research happens everywhere all the time, etc.), but it would be important to know.

freeflight4• 5 years ago

People making that claim have said that the virus seems to be particularly effective against humans despite no intermediate forms discovered yet

But such forms were already discovered back in 2015 as a result of the research that's now labeled as "GoF research", even tho it didn't actually fall under the GoF moratorium back then [0].

Imho the whole thing has a very "shooting the messenger" vibe to it; The evidence we had for this being a very real possibility of happening is now turned into the alleged cause of it actually happening.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787

SavantIdiot• 5 years ago

We weren't talking about gain functions 1.5 years ago. That term has just recently appeared in the media. And now that phrase is the new "scape-phrase".

"Gain function" now means there's now a great way to confuse man-made and natural. I find it both a more concise scientific term, but anathema to politics.

betteryet• 5 years ago

Katherine Eban is exactly the right person to be reporting on this. Her work on fraud in the generic drug industry has been eye-opening.

donewithcoding• 5 years ago

I knew something was off from the very beginning once big tech started banning scientists with dissenting voices. The fact that Fauci and Zuckerberg were literally conspiring to induce greater panic in the masses is icing on the cake. Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying's DarkHorse podcast have been very critical of Fauci's involvement but they would have been banned just 6 months ago.

caseysoftware• 5 years ago

FTA:

"In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it."

In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (or "Who will guard the guards?")

wycy• 5 years ago

I'm normally one to be quick to criticize the media for its many faults, but in this case I blame the scientists--namely those at the Lancet--more than the media. Journalists aren't virologists or biologists, and I have a hard time blaming them for taking the statements of scientists at the most respected medical journal at face value.

This is massively discrediting to the Lancet. Similar to the review of Linux patches from U of Minnesota, it would be prudent to review past publications by the scientists who published the Lancet statement.

FridayoLeary2• 5 years ago

What i feel is that as much as science has distinguished itself over the pandemic e.g. identifying the virus developing a vaccine etc, it has disgraced itself. First of the criminal and disgraceful actions of the WHO helping China cover up the virus in the initial stages. Then afterwards, despite obviously and understandably being totally ignorant of almost all basic data on how the virus spreads, works etc. (data that the Chinese withheld) they felt confident enough to offer clear guidelines. So much so, that when Trump closed the US to China, he was slammed as xenophobic. The scientific community have a lot to explain, but shockingly they don't seem to be hanging their heads in shame. Rather they are soldiering apparently oblivious to that fact.

macspoofing8• 5 years ago

We'll see if this lab-leak theory stands the test of time - but if it does, this is another Chernobyl-moment for communist regimes.

samuelizdat• 5 years ago

You guys really think people would do that? Lie about a crisis to consolidate power? Those WMDs were real, they HAVE to be! People with power over me wouldn't lie because that's wrong!

kodah• 5 years ago

Did the zoonotic origin story have a favored political party in the US? Who even introduced it?

I wish Trump had never commented on this stuff at all. I feel like what that did is take advantage of people's rage over Trump to sell them facts that they would have never otherwise bought.

Not everything is political, contrary to that foolish saying. I think politics ruins everything it touches, like Midas, except it turns everything to trash.

boringg4• 5 years ago

The most shocking thing about this is actually the comment thread on Hackernews and the level of conspiracy that exists here under guise of uncovering facts.

I've read lots of comments on how major media organizations are hiding information or not covering stories to push a narrative. That the US media landscape is like China State TV. That Fauci must have been involved at a conspiratorial level. It's legit bananas and deeply concerning.

I always assume HN commentters broadly havev a scientific mindset (anything is possible - though many are unlikely, fact based, empirical evidence, probabilities) as I equated programming/computer engineering similar to scientific thinking.

However I realize through experience that many people here like to think they have a scientific thought process and in fact don't and truly harbor intense conspiracies.

There is a chance that the commenters are actually not that representative of the broader population and this story brings out the biases of people who have a conspiratorial Fauci angle.

jb1991• 5 years ago

the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs

What in the world does that mean?!

inancgumus• 5 years ago

TLDR: Demaneuf soon discovered that there had been four incidents of SARS-related lab breaches since 2004, two occuring at a top laboratory in Beijing. Due to overcrowding there, a live SARS virus that had been improperly deactivated, had been moved to a refrigerator in a corridor. A graduate student then examined it in the electron microscope room and sparked an outbreak.

Overdr0ne• 5 years ago

Independent of whether the virus was lab-leaked or natural in origin, the conduct of Peter Daszac was completely inappropriate, and he should face consequences.

Spearheading and cosigning the statement: "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.", when you have specific career and financial interest in that statement being true, is a conflict of interest, is not scientific, and should be addressed publicly. But then privately saying “you, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.” Daszak added, “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.” displays clear intent to manipulate public opinion. Unbelievable.

lazyeye• 5 years ago

A good article although it spends too much time blaming Trump for other peoples failures. How hilarious will it be if Trump was more accurate on this issue than Fauci?

throwaway67435• 5 years ago

A sideshow is what’s happening on Wikipedia. There’s a cabal of editors that shut off any mention of a lab leak, using mis-applied content guidelines designed to protect against quack medical advice. Talk pages are constantly purged, which is a sign that someone desperately doesn’t want a consensus to form. Anti-pile-on policies are used as a way to ignore criticism.

Are these Chinese government agents? Overzealous students studying in North America? Gain-of-function grad students protecting their turf?

There were a smaller number of suspicious accounts that overzealously pushed the lab leak, possibly agents of Taiwan, but these were banned swiftly.

With the anti leak thought-policing editors, normal editors are intimidated into silence. Despite all the talk of dealing with organized manipulation around the 2020 election, the foundation hasn’t bothered intervening. Normal amateur editors don’t have the resources to push back against zealous state-actors.

This issue could pose a devastating blow to Wikipedia.

kangaroozach3• 5 years ago

Lableaktheory.com has aggregated links to various primary and secondary sources on the topic.

rvba• 5 years ago

I posted this article some time ago:

https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/origins-of-covid-19-...

But it was flagged nearly immeditally. I wonder why and by whom. Do moderators here check for state sponsored bots that try to hide such stuff?

The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

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