CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/us/politics/cia-covid-lab-leak.html

by doctaj • 1 year ago

632 740 1 year ago

doctaj• 1 year ago

fgna• 1 year ago

Was thinking this would be due to the inauguration or decree spree, however the analysis was started under the biden administration

mmooss2• 1 year ago

Yes, but we can assume - Trump and his people have openly communicated, planned, and followed through on it - that the actions of executive branch agencies are politicized.

Here we are told that the "C.I.A.’s new director, John Ratcliffe, ... wants the agency to get “off the sidelines” in the debate."; that he's long favored the lab-leak theory (which is a politicized issue); and of all the things a brand new new CIA director must do, we see that this was Ratcliffe's first priority. We know that the CIA did not choose to release the report before the Trump administration.

I think the overwhelming evidence is that it's a politicized action. Would Trump or his team lie or mislead? Of course. We can't give them the benefit of the trust until proven false; they have embraced deceit.

Unfortunately, even though they weren't always credible before, I think that means that these things are now meaningless, other than as clues to Trump's and others' intents: Why prioritize this messaging? Whose idea was it? And always, cui bono - who benefits?

MilnerRoute• 1 year ago

The Times also includes this unusual sentence. "There is no new intelligence behind the agency’s shift, officials said."

And right below the headline on the Wall Street Journal they even stressed that the CIA says it had 'low confidence' in its finding...

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/cia-now-favor...

ironyman• 1 year ago

Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, released the following statement about the CIA’s findings on the origins of the Coronavirus:

“I’ve said from the beginning that Covid likely originated in the Wuhan labs. Communist China covered it up and the liberal media covered for them. I’m pleased the CIA concluded in the final days of the Biden administration that the lab-leak theory is the most plausible explanation of Covid’s origins and I commend Director Ratcliffe for fulfilling his promise to release this conclusion. Now, the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world.”

shadowgovt4• 1 year ago

It was started under Biden, but the decision to publicize it is the new director's decision.

Worth noting is that this is a low-confidence report. I'm not accusing the director of divulging a low-confidence report under the belief that the public will accept it as categorically true because they have no sense of how CIA confidence levels work, but they're willing to believe the director wouldn't publicize it if it wasn't true.

... you should have low confidence in the truth of my last statement.

gtgvdfc10• 1 year ago

Actually under the original Trump administration.

The intel community never dismissed the lab leak theory. The discrediting of it was 100% a psyop

gtgvdfc10• 1 year ago

Specifically, we now have internal emails dating to 2020 from the CDC (NIH? Who remembers, it's been literally two years since this came out) about how it was probably a lab leak and then about the importance to bury the lab leak theory.

ajsnigrutin• 1 year ago

Wasn't this one of those "forbidden" conspiracy theories, censored from most social media, while most people (here too) cheered for "fighting misinformation" with censorship?

suzumer2• 1 year ago

Saying COVID-19 leaked from a lab with zero evidence is different than waiting for evidence and then saying it leaked from a lab.

Throw84949595• 1 year ago

But we can say it leaked from wet market without evidence!

cm2187• 1 year ago

Censoring views that it came from a lab leak with zero evidence isn't any better. In fact I remember being lied to by major news outlets at the time saying that the evidence points to a non lab origin.

lr4444lr• 1 year ago

Yes, but the rush to the wet market theory was no better.

wongarsu2• 1 year ago

There was also no evidence against it. If there is neither solid evidence for nor against something I find it perfectly reasonable to apply the balance of probabilities. At least as long as you qualify your statement with a "probably".

And with the main competing theory (covid spreading from a wet market in a city that contains a biolab) also being consistent with the hypothesis that it was an accidental lab leak, to me the balance of probabilities always seemed to favor the lab leak hypothesis.

Yet saying that Covid probably originated from a lab leak was once branded as dangerous misinformation, with seemingly no evidence to support that claim

themgt• 1 year ago

There were very good arguments that Covid (probably) leaked from a lab as early as April 2020 at the latest (and in January if you were a virologist included in top-level NIAID emails). HN largely went along with the shunning of debate, which helped give everyone the impression there was "zero evidence" of a lab leak compared to solid evidence of zoonotic origin, which was simply never true.

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

wordofx2• 1 year ago

The lab leak theory was started by Chinese netizens. It was mentioned on Chinese media. Hell the name Wu Flu came from Chinese media.

ImHereToVote5• 1 year ago

It was malinformation. Whether it is misinformation or not is irrelevant.

Vecr3• 1 year ago

I'm assuming this is satire?

rUsHeYaFuBu2• 1 year ago

I think the issue falls into the problem of getting reliable information out of China.

Because of a lack of access and free speech it's hard to get verifiable evidence to it's origin being from a lab leak or a market in either direction.

Unfortunately, because of that lack of access mistrust and conspiracy theories spread like wild fires.

It's important with science to understand that there is what happened or what is observed and to separate that away from wishful thinking or feelings.

dekhn• 1 year ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/us/politics/covid-lab-lea... and https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/27/media/covid-19-origins-lab-le...

In short a few prominent people claimed it was racist to suggest that China's research or wet market contributed to the origins of COVID. They were mistaken but with the highly politicized environment, it helped distort opinions at a critical time. The claims of racism have since been demonstrated to be at least partly false (that is, there is a legitimate case to be made that China's researchers or wet market did contribute to the origin of COVID, and that China's leadership hid most of the evidence that would be used to make a case).

_cenw4• 1 year ago

Conflation of very different factors. Animal origin was always going to be the most likely explanation, so wet market tracks. Lab leak after secret gain of function research is much more of a speculatory accusation than the existence of wet markets.

standardUser• 1 year ago

It's not racist to blame China, but it is racist to accuse/harass/disparage Asian people and that was what was happening in America. Pushing back on the lab leak theory was at least in part to stop the dumbest among us from blaming their Asian neighbor. That and the lack of evidence.

chasd00• 1 year ago

while most people (here too) cheered for "fighting misinformation" with censorship?

Exactly right. Remember any comment daring to question the authorities was shouted down to oblivion. Anyone daring to question lockdowns or other draconian measures were met with fire and brimstone. I lost a lot of respect for HN during Covid.

I feel it’s important to not forget the level of adherence to authoritarian rule that infected the population during Covid. Even places like HN were not immune. “Just following orders” was SOP even here.

tensor3• 1 year ago

It wasn't forbidden, it lacked evidence, which it still does, even under this highly biased new administration.

ImHereToVote5• 1 year ago

It was forbidden since users were banned for talking about it. That is what is meant by forbidden. When an authority exercises their power over you to stop you.

mmustapic2• 1 year ago

So there’s a new president and the main intelligence agency changes its position radically in alignment with the new government. Why should we be confident in any other claim they made in the past?

wkat42422• 1 year ago

Yes that's what I thought but it does say it was an analysis project started by Biden. The timing is suspicious, true.

But yeah this topic is extremely politicised (not just by the US mind you, but also by China). So it's hard to say what's the truth. I doubt we'll ever find it.

The lab leak theory does make sense though IMO. I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. But yeah, I take this at face value. And to be honest I'm just really happy that this is all behind us.

layer8• 1 year ago

We shouldn’t be confident in this specific assessment because the agency making it isn’t either:

The agency made its new assessment with “low confidence,” which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete.

hansjorg• 1 year ago

So what you're saying is that we shouldn't put our trust into people who pride themselves on being master manipulators and deceivers?

rightbyte• 1 year ago

The head of a underpants subscription telemarketing firm is probably trusting his underlings more than the head of the CIA.

mhb• 1 year ago

Or, in a parallel universe, there's an old president who preemptively pardoned the person who might have been involved in GOF research leading to a lab leak.

kleton• 1 year ago

It is an interesting angle, because now he could potentially be subpoenaed by Congress or anyone else, and it seems unlikely that he would perjure himself over anything after 2014.

ocschwar5• 1 year ago

That pardon means that person is available for subpoena and cannot decline to answer any question.

morkalork2• 1 year ago

Considering what is known about that agency's activities under Reagan, I think everyone lost confidence about any claims they made before I was even born.

jfengel6• 1 year ago

That's just it. It was a very long time ago. Not many CIA employees are still there.

That's not reason to trust it. But "a bad thing happened in the 80s and that's all I need to know" isn't a compelling argument either.

Hikikomori2• 1 year ago

Essentially goes back to the start, bunch of rich nepo kids playing spy. See Sidney Gottlieb for a fun story.

dandanua• 1 year ago

Even if the lab leak theory is true, why Trump was so confident about it? Does he have sources that CIA does not? I would be so confident in it only in the case if I myself caused that virus leak...

zeagle2• 1 year ago

Well, if there is one thing about Trump that everyone would agree on, it is that he is very self confident in everything he says.

dboreham• 1 year ago

He has the voices in his head.

aga98mtl• 1 year ago

Only one lab in the world doing GoF experiments on this specific furin cleavage site AND a random natural mutation happens within a few KM of this lab on this specific furin cleavage site. What are the odds of this happening? Very close to zero.

ocschwar5• 1 year ago

Trump wasn't confident in the theory. He is not confident in anything. He does not care about the truth or falsity of anything he says. He only cares about it serving his interests.

shadowgovt4• 1 year ago

And, an equally interesting question: why should we be confident in any claim they are making now?

WillyWonkaJr2• 1 year ago

Normally I would disregard their findings. However, the FBI, former head of the CDC, and Congressional panel all came to the same conclusion: Covid was made in a lab.

JumpCrisscross8• 1 year ago

the main intelligence agency changes its position radically

When did the CIA come out against lab leak? Everyone's been spitballing low- and moderate-confidence guesses.

rsanek• 1 year ago

Doesn't feel like a radical change in position to me. They said they weren't sure either way previously. In this statement they're explicitly calling it "low-confidence."

The FBI & Energy Department have both said that they think it's a lab leak.

gtgvdfc10• 1 year ago

In fact the government has been quietly acknowledging that the lab leak has merit for about two years now.

lolinder9• 1 year ago

Changes its position radically? The FBI came out saying it had moderate confidence in the lab leak theory in 2023, right in the middle of the Biden administration [0]. The DOE came out with their own assessment a few days earlier [1]. The CIA's position was hiterto "we're not yet sure", and now it's "we still aren't sure but we're leaning towards lab leak". That's not a radical shift, it's a very slight shift in the direction that other three-letter agencies have been leaning for years.

There were almost certainly some politics involved in the decision to release the report now, but it's not like the CIA were staunch advocates for zoonotic origins up until now, and again: Biden's FBI and DOE were already leaning this way!

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-origi...

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan...

morepedantic24• 1 year ago

I would like to jump on the band wagon and point out that this is an absolutely minuscule shift in position.

mmustapic2• 1 year ago

The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.

From "we don't know if it was a lab leak or spread from the market" to "we think it maybe is". Sure, they started this investigation with Biden, but just released it a couple of days ago AND they have even low confidence on it. So, why release it if the confidence is low? Why now? The answer is: new government, new conclusions.

drewbug017• 1 year ago

The agency made its new assessment with “low confidence,” which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete.

I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain.

---

One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as saying:

“Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Mr. Cotton said.

So... I'm not certain this is a development worth trusting. Maybe it really did originate from a lab! But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.

manbart• 1 year ago

What is clear is that Ratcliff wants the lab leak theory to be true

rayiner20• 1 year ago

That’s certainly motivation for releasing it, but he’s been in office for five days so the analysis being released was done under the prior administration.

rayiner20• 1 year ago

As the article observes, “the new analysis … began under the Biden administration.”

The new administration has been in office a week. There is a political incentive to release it now, but they couldn’t have meaningfully created the analysis for political reasons in five days.

mullingitover• 1 year ago

This assumes operatives haven’t been working on this plan long before the regime took office.

JumpCrisscross8• 1 year ago

they couldn’t have meaningfully created the analysis for political reasons in five days

CIA has been in the hot seat for long enough to be politically sensitive. Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce multiple reports for every conclusion. It's not implausible that this happened here. In any case, we're talking about a partian topic with low- and moderate-confidence reports with a President who has zero chance of holding China accountable on it. Parlour talk.

Hikikomori2• 1 year ago

Sure they could, they seem to be using chatgpt for executive orders so why not this.

ioulaum8• 1 year ago

They say that there is no new data. That they are just altering their choice for what assumption is more likely.

Supposedly because they've had more time to think about the conditions of the lab before Covid was released...

But really, nothing has changed except their biases. Nothing has changed on the solid evidence side.

Separately, if there were actual safety issues and stuff was leaking... Then we're incredibly lucky that it was something as tame as Covid, and not one of the more serious kinds of horrors that gain of function research has successfully produced.

jgalt2122• 1 year ago

I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain.

That's fine. The really problem is all debate on such matters was shut down during pandemic. To the benefit of no one (except for maybe Biden trying to cajole to Chinese into something, or other. Or to protect USG's role in this affair by financing Chinese gain of function research).

eastbound• 1 year ago

The real problem is, trying to cover that, they said masks were useless and other elucubrations for which they didn’t have proof, like “Stay inside”. “But they didn’t know it was false” Well, if so, don’t speak.

pessimizer3• 1 year ago

I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain.

There's never going to be any conclusive evidence of the source of covid, and anyone claiming they have certainty (who wasn't a witness to a lab leak) is simply lying to you. What they're doing is going along with everyone else worth listening to, who find the coincidence that we were funding banned research on coronaviruses in a lab a few feet away from the origin of the outbreak unlikely. They also find tales of non-lab origin both speculative and vague, while stories of lab origin are only speculative.

It's so strange to demand so much more proof of lab origin than one does of non-lab origin. The obvious reasons for that demand are that millions died, and that everybody involved with that lab can easily be named. Also weird that this observation is covid-skeptic coded, when in reality the worse you think covid is, the greater the crime that a lab leak entails.

silverquiet• 1 year ago

I assumed it was a non-lab origin at first because that's how all previous pandemics have started as far as I am aware. A lab origin (and what precisely that means has never been particularly clear to me), but I have to say that I'd say your last observation cuts both ways - if one thinks this is such a great crime, then perhaps one would have encouraged masking, shutdowns/distancing, and vaccines, but those seem anti-correlated. Perhaps we'll do better next time around?

strangecasts6• 1 year ago

It's so strange to demand so much more proof of lab origin than one does of non-lab origin.

It's not, zoonotic transmission has happened many times, lab leak is the extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence

derektank• 1 year ago

Both the FBI and DOE, which have their own foreign intelligence gathering capabilities, had previously assessed that COVID was caused by a lab leak with moderate confidence. So while I agree with you that the truth will likely remain shrouded in some mystery, most of us that believed it originated from zoonosis at first (and I would include myself in that camp) should update our priors both based on the CIA assessment and previous assessments

mulderc• 1 year ago

Are the FBI or DOE assessments public? What I last read in the peer-reviewed public literature seemed to point strongly to animal origin and not from a lab.

spanktheuser• 1 year ago

My priors include none of the agencies having expertise in epidemiology.

yobbo• 1 year ago

Lab leak and zoonotic origin are not mutually exclusive.

The lab leak hypothesis means "accelerated evolution" through either caged animals or "in vitro cells" infecting the lab personnel. Gene splicing and such are not necessary to make the argument.

The observed fact pointing to this is the number of generations required to produce the divergence between the first SCoV2 variant and the closest wild ancestor. It corresponds to something like 20 years (?) of evolution.

giantg22• 1 year ago

I have family that have worked on developing NBC equipment for the military. The first thing they said when covid was spreading was that it was most likely from a lab. That was before anyone in the news was saying that. So an independent first-look assessment by someone with experience, followed by later finding out that there was in fact a lab there, has me heavily leaning towards it being true. But it doesn't really change anything unless there's hard proof. Even with hard proof, do you think China would pay for anything? I don't think so.

therealpygon• 1 year ago

You should realize experience in a tangentially related field and there being a lab somewhere in the area is not the same as insight and evidence. That’s like saying that if a new flu came out of Atlanta, the fact the CDC is there proves it came from a lab, and must be true because someone’s janitor cousin who worked there one summer said it was true.

“Low confidence” means that there is a lack of evidence and the statement is ambiguous; that it could be completely true, or completely false. The only lower confidence would be direct evidence that it is outright false. Given, as you said, how nearly impossible it would be to prove true, wouldn’t you think it equally nearly impossible to prove false?

Believe what you want, but even the CIA doesn’t lean on the side of you being right.

throwawaymaths8• 1 year ago

there's a 19 bp sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade). now an exact match of that length isn't impossible, but which is more likely? that this managed to be exactly correct on accident? or some grad student was told to just copypasta every furin cleavage site in the database into a GOF library and surprise surprise the most virulent form that became a pandemic came from the sequence that is engineered to be efficient.

any scientist that has any molecular biology wet experience will tell you this is exactly what they would have done (though us researchers would probably not have pulled from the patented BLAST sequences, since that selector is turned off by default by the NCBI)

myvoiceismypass2• 1 year ago

If I said I had cousins that were bankers, I am not sure that it would make me more credible to talk about finance. I mean - to the people who care about expertise.

ioulaum8• 1 year ago

If SARS-Cov-2 was from a lab, what about the original SARS?

Generally though, China is somewhat better suited to producing pandemics, because they have a larger and more dense population within which a disease can spread.

gtgvdfc10• 1 year ago

I had a Chinese colleague in January of '20 saying it was obviously a leak. I hadn't even heard of Wuhan before, and he told me there is a bio lab there.

ksec• 1 year ago

That was before anyone in the news was saying that.

May be in the west? It was certainly well publicised in other regions.

secondcoming• 1 year ago

This is an event that saw a lot of the world effectively under house arrest for two years. I think that trying to finding out the underlying reason behind that is a reasonable goal.

Looking for reparations is secondary to that, but maybe not entirely unreasonable either; not that it'll ever happen.

scarface_742• 1 year ago

Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world

Does COVID being a “plague” jibe with the talking point that COVID is “no worse than a cold”

Eextra953• 1 year ago

Placing rhetoric in context like you did has a way of cutting through the bs and really getting to the core of what current politicians want covid to be. A minor cold when it was running rampant, and now suddenly a plague. Why could that be? Could it be because during the pandemic it was in their best interest to downplay it while hundreds of thousands died, and now that we've passed it and the USA is facing the rise of a successful nation with a different political system, we need to paint them as the enemy? For what it's worth, the current administration is showing signs of cozying up to nations with weak or non-existent democracies. Just look at the proposed tariffs - they are NOT targeting China but rather Mexico and Canada. Why could that be?

Ultimately the question should be, how can we improve our systems to better respond to future pandemics. Does it matter if it was a lab leak? What will that do for those who died? Will revenge prevent a future pandemic from happening? Viruses and bacteria do not care about their nation of origin, once its out its out.

Analemma_• 1 year ago

But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.

Yes, the annoying thing is that "the truth about covid" literally only matters to culture war grievances, it has no relevance whatsoever to the actual world. If it was a lab leak, then China needs to improve their BSL-4 safety... but they need to do that anyway[0]. If it was zoonotic, then they need to clean up the wet markets... but they need to do that anyway. The true origin of covid makes no difference at all, and I wish these people would just come out and admit this is all domestic political peacocking.

[0]: and so does everyone else, for that matter. The US has also had several close calls with BSL-4 leaks; if covid did originate from a lab leak, the fact that it wasn't from an American lab is just sheer dumb luck.

wahern2• 1 year ago

If it were a lab leak then the people especially fearful and distrustful of gain of function research would feel vindicated and try to use that to shut down existing research programs. I don't think that group of people is meaningfully divided along partisan lines, and outside the professional class probably includes everybody.

Conversely, if it were a natural outbreak then that bolsters the case for continuing gain of function research as before. Such research is precisely why we were able to identify the threat and within weeks assemble a vaccine, at least on paper. (Granted, the arc began long before 2019 with a through-line of research going back to the 2002 SARS outbreak.) And it's why we've many other advancements. Creation of CRISPR and related technology emerged in part out of gain of function research with viruses. Gain of function is a critical tool in testing hypotheses about how foundational molecular machinery works, and viruses are a convenient research model for exploring and testing ideas in that space.

But I'm not sure the origin should matter to that debate. And I'm even more sure it probably won't matter, even if we agreed on a definitive answer.

rayiner20• 1 year ago

Whenever you have an institutional failure, you need to do a root cause analysis to fix the problem. That includes Chinese labs. That also includes health organizations who may have put aside their objectivity and tried to discredit a theory merely because they disagreed with the politics of those supporting it.

disambiguation4• 1 year ago

Wow do we live in the same "actual world?" If we knew for certain that covid began in the Wuhan lab, it would be World War 3.

I get your perspective: an outbreak is an unfortunate byproduct of the risks necessary for scientific progress. No one couldve known how bad it would be. The damage is done, learn from your mistakes and move on. Very enlightened.

In the real world, people will lose their absolute shit. There would be near global demand for sanctions and reparations, and there's enough anti china sentiment that its a real possibility.

Backed into a corner, the world against them, they would have no other choice. It would be a matter of survival.

ioulaum8• 1 year ago

The wet markets were a super spreader event... Doesn't really tell you much about where it started (even if it has animal origin).

People just assumed that the wet markets were the cause of the problem, because they found them digusting (and wanted an excuse to blame it on the Chinese being evil).

In a less dense population, without many people going to the same hospital... You would just not have noticed Covid much.

tzs• 1 year ago

> One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as saying:
“Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Mr. Cotton said.

That could backfire in a couple ways.

1. China could say that they'll consider paying for COVID escaping their borders if the US pays for the damage the things that have escaped its borders have caused, such as greenhouse gases.

Yes, I know that China currently is emitting more greenhouse gases than the US, but since CO2 emissions stay in the atmosphere for several hundred or even thousands of years the US is responsible for more of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere than China is.

It's 26% US, 16% China, 7% Russia, 6% Germany, 5% UK, 4% Japan, 4% India, 2% France, 2% Canada, 2% Ukraine, 2% Poland, rounded to the nearest 1%. All the rest of the countries round to 1% or 0%.

That's a can of worms I don't think the US wants to open.

2. China could say they they'll consider paying, but only up to the amount of damages that would have been reasonably incurred if the US had handled COVID competently.

There were several distinct patterns in COVID deaths in the US. First, there were states like Washington that had a fairly linear growth in the cumulative number of deaths per capita from the start through April 2022, and then after that continued with a linear growth but not as steep.

Then there were states like New York, which got hit very hard in the first two months, because of a combination of nobody really knowing yet how to treat it and dense populations of especially vulnerable people. New York reached in two months a deaths per capita number that Washington took 22 months to reach.

But after those first two months, New York's deaths grew at about the same rate as Washington's, except during the Delta surge and to a lesser extent the Omicron surge. Washington's rate picked up during those surges, but not very much.

There were states like Florida. Its curve was like Washington's first 3 months, the switched to growing about twice as fast. By the end of 2021 it had almost caught up to New York. From then it and New York both continued at about the same rate was Washington, with Florida slightly higher so it passed New York in August 2022.

Other states tended to be a mix of those three patterns. California was close to Washington up until Delta, which brought it to near Florida, but then after Delta was was similar to Washington. A little better actually. Right after Delta it had about 70 more deaths per 100k than Washington, but by March 2023 was down to 56 more deaths per 100k.

Texas was like Florida until Omicron, which it handled better, and after that it was similar to Washington, or even a little better. It had 140 more deaths per 100k than Washington right after Omicron, but only 115 more by March 2023.

By March 2023, which is when the data I'm using ends, Washington stood at 206 deaths per 100k population, California at 256, Texas at 322, New York at 396, and Florida at 404.

Tom Cotton's state, Arkansas, was basically the same pattern as Florida, except with a higher rate. It ended up at 431 deaths per 100k by March 2023.

A good case can probably be made that somewhere from 25% to 50% of the Florida deaths were due to Florida's lax handling of the pandemic.

That too is probably a can of worms many politicians would not want to open, especially if their state is one of the ones that China would be arguing should get greatly reduced damages.

maxglute9• 1 year ago

if the US pays for the damage the things that have escaped its borders have caused,

Or just covid. I remember after PRC lockdown when regional countries were publishing their inbound repatriation flight test data and basically they only got very low digit covid positives, i.e. it was epidemiologically containable. At same time you have all the news of western travellers spreading covid to different countrries because they kept borders open.

westcort2• 1 year ago

I have previously shared this little known, but factual, event on Hacker News. It is simply a Wikipedia article--the 1977 Russian Flu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu). This is not my statement, note this well dang, and read or argue with the editors of Wikipedia if you want (not me), but the following statement stands firm:

"Genetic analysis and several unusual characteristics of the 1977 Russian flu have prompted many researchers to say that the virus was released to the public through a laboratory accident, or resulted from a live-vaccine trial escape"

Terr_• 1 year ago

Tangentially, risks like that are why I'm really frustrated-with/exasperated-by certain mRNA-vaccine scaremongers: Ones who act as if older techniques were already fine and sufficient.

Ex: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/vaccine-derived-p...

braiamp• 1 year ago

Reanalysis of the H1N1 sequences excluding isolates with unrealistic sampling dates indicates that the 1977 re-emergent lineage was circulating for approximately one year before detection, making it difficult to determine the geographic source of reintroduction. We suggest that a new method is needed to account for viral isolates with unrealistic sampling dates.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2887442/

I will have to have a discussion with the editors of that page.

tootie• 1 year ago

It's also pretty clear in the article that the newly appointed head of the CIA is very politically motivated to endorse this conclusion.

ridkjdr• 1 year ago

This is a strange take to me. Of course the search for truth is to some degree a search for accountability. It's not a gotcha to say "They just want to hold China accountable". Of course they do if it seems likely it came from poor procedure, it makes it their responsibility.

drewbug017• 1 year ago

It's not a gotcha to say "They just want to hold China accountable".

Sure, it’s not a gotcha if we divorce such a statement from all of its surrounding context.

But context in communication is incredibly important, and it’s unwise to analyze these kinds of statements in a context-free manner. I find it occurs on this site fairly often; it seems endemic to engineers. I try hard to avoid it myself, but frequently fail.

The relevant context here, of course, is the rabid anti-China sentiment expressed by folks like Sen. Cotton for years, dating back to well before the COVID pandemic. I take no position on whether or not his views are accurate or fair - but a context-informed analysis of the situation suggests that Sen. Cotton (and others) are not simply seeking truth and accountability: rather, they seek pretext to justify their views.

duxup• 1 year ago

I remember watching the movie War Games (1983 film) and even as a kid when they announced nuclear missiles had been launched and "confidence is high" I thought "That's a really good way to indicate that there are indications that something might be happening, AND indicate how much you believe it when you talk about things that you can't confirm."

hedora• 1 year ago

Two things to note:

1) Multiple departments of the executive branch were saying this under Biden too.

2) The US gov’t funded the biological weapons research lab at Wuhan. Mr Cotton has been a senator for 10 years, and therefore was around when the funding was approved. So if he wants to find someone to punish, maybe he should look in a mirror.

dinoqqq• 1 year ago

Sources?

miguelazo3• 1 year ago

What’s most disturbing and highly irresponsible about comments like that and all of the reporting on this development is that there’s almost zero acknowledgement that the lab in question was being funded by the US government and much of the Gain of Function research was being directed by a US nonprofit with ties to the US government.

oneshtein6• 1 year ago

There is nothing wrong with that. You should worry about those, who do such experiments secretly. (Russians)

macns• 1 year ago

Sources for this? Deserves it's own post if data are there to back it up

greasegum• 1 year ago

I think people are missing one very sympathizable effect of this joint research, that it prevents either country from gaining an offensive edge from dual-use research that could be used for bio-weapons. You could argue that this has the benefit of preventing a bio-weapons arms race.

Vertiginous to think about the layers of unknowns.

Animats• 1 year ago

Right. "Low confidence". Read [1] People who deal with intel data need to work with possibly wrong info. Most spy novels don't get this. Real military planning works more like: "Intel says the enemy is at A or B, most likely at A. How much resources should we devote to A vs B, or hold in reserve until we find out by encountering the enemy? What's our plan if we guess wrong?" Planning has to assume that intel might be wrong.

Go watch "A Bridge Too Far" (WWII). Read the story of the Son Tay raid (Vietnam). The many overestimates of Soviet capability during the Cold War. The underestimates of North Korean missile capability. Sometimes uncertain intel really works, as with the attack on the bin Laden compound in Pakistan.

Retrospective intel questions may never be answered. It's known that the US atomic bomb program had another Russian spy who is mentioned by code name in VENONA transcripts, but that spy was never identified. There are still arguments over whether the explosion of the Maine in Havana harbor in 1889 was an accident or a hostile act. It's still not clear why Turret 2 of the USS Iowa blew up in 1989. Huge amounts of effort were expended on all three of those questions, all of which were important at the time, and yet they remain unsettled.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Article-Principles-...

choppaface• 1 year ago

It’s also important to weight dramatic changes in the White House this week, too, right? There’s the intel itself, but then there’s also the guy trying to control the news cycle.

oooyay• 1 year ago

Real military planning works more like: "Intel says the enemy is at A or B, most likely at A. How much resources should we devote to A vs B, or hold in reserve until we find out by encountering the enemy? What's our plan if we guess wrong?"

Not quite, and you can't possibly capture all of that paper in that sentiment. For instance, there's this excerpt:

People’s judgments and willingness to accept analytic findings are framed by multiple factors, including backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs. Every decisionmaker has cognitive biases, including theories that guide them (e.g., the liberal international order), beliefs about how the world works (e.g., the arc of history bends in a particular direction), or sacred beliefs (e.g., all things happen for a reason). Thus it is essential for the analyst to understand as much as possible about the decisionmakers and the environment in which they operate.

Military intelligence will happily give you high confidence leads that are entirely wrong because, by all appearances, the information came from a source in the right place with the seemingly right motivations when in reality they can be playing 4D chess better than the analyst.

The confidence level can only be expressed in finite ways but it can be analyzed in almost infinite, one of them being that the information needed to develop "high confidence" has disappeared and the window of opportunity to gain insight has long passed. Personally speaking, I do not think we will ever find out the origins because a whole gaggle of people with various interests had a vested interest in a particular answer at the time. This is the byproduct of a democracy and bureaucratic system which has not been functioning nominally for quite some time - doubly so now.

I would go so far as to describe the events at the time as parallel construction.

rolandog• 1 year ago

Any new theory needs to match evidence for SARS-COV-2 being present in European wastewater during December 2019 [0] [1].

Maybe it leaked from the lab; maybe it was released? As far as I understand (but tbh, I have not kept up as much with immunology news) the alternative theory of the virus hopping from another species hadn't been confirmed, as no reservoir had been found. Does anyone know if that had been the case?

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53106444

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7428442/

rob_c7• 1 year ago

Sigh again this is where we were ending up.

So... I'm not certain this is a development worth trusting. Maybe it really did originate from a lab! But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me.

0. COVID-19 was mostly harmless. Even more so than Douglas Adam's books. 1. China reacted asif they'd accidentally released a bioweapon. 2. China did what it does best, shut the F up on the world stage. 3. Everyone saw China's reaction because this isn't the 1950s and the internet exists. 4. The developed nations freaked out until there was data, hence the first set of lockdowns in Europe very quickly. 5. 2-3 years later after media pantomime, sectarian politics, holier than though preaching from everyone, the WHO declared the "emergency" over.

Some countries achieved 80%+ vaccination rates, didn't see 20% die. Some only achieved 50% and didn't see 50% death rates.

We now have a serious economic tab to be paid because of the BS pushed by developed countries in a panic that might have been less dramatic had there been information available from day 1.

China _has_ hidden and or destroyed a lot of "evidence" making certain discussions mute. (Again they are good at this let's not pretend otherwise).

Western countries, who, _like china_, jumped on a "who can punch themselves hardest with policy?" approach to this unknown now want someone else to blame.

Aka because we can pin a small significance and serious fault on China being a bad neighbour. (Snooze to the sensible this isn't news, china is very private about internal policy and now even more so) We are choosing to blame them for everything to get motivation up to get them to pay the bill...

This unfortunately was clear winter of 2020 and is clear now, it's just taken 4-5yr for politics to go through it's "he said she said" cycle. And I'm not referring to the US or UK political cycles this is the slow bi-partizan we all need someone to blame rather than be introspective and realise __"We should have handled this better"__.

drewbug017• 1 year ago

You have some interesting thoughts. But:

0. COVID-19 was mostly harmless. Even more so than Douglas Adam's books.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I found out that my father and his partner had COVID. He lived, at the time, about 12 hours drive from me. Where he lived, his support network was thin (to say the least) - the little family he had nearby needed to keep away because they were responsible for caring for my cousin with a severely weakened immune system. His friends, sadly, also contracted COVID around the same time.

I called him twice a day, and each call he was worse than the last. I decided to rent an AirBnB nearby. My partner and I packed up the dog and everything we needed and drove overnight to get there.

We masked up, and got supplies at Walmart. We brought them to my Dad’s house and left them on the patio - retreated a safe distance - and my Dad came to retrieve them. He was in an awful condition, and his partner was worse.

For the next week I came to their porch every few hours, and called my dad, and we spoke with what little breath he had. He dictated his last will and testament to me. I delivered pedialyte, meal replacement shakes, pulse oximeters, anything to help them make it through. I forced them to get up and move around a little from time to time, and took notes on their condition. They wouldn’t let me in the house.

One day, before I arrived with supplies, my Dad told me they had called an ambulance for his partner. They took his partner to the local hospital… and the hospital turned him away because they had no beds. They essentially sent my Dad’s partner home to die.

By some miraculous turn of events, they survived. They have issues walking and breathing to this day, but they survived.

It’s one of the more agonizing, awful things I’ve ever had to watch. COVID-19 wasn’t harmless; it killed millions. I saw it up close. Especially early on, it was virulent and deadly, and very nearly took my parents from me. It did end up taking a lot of people in my extended social network. They died agonizing deaths.

How dare you paint it as “mostly harmless.”

hoppp• 1 year ago

Just more reasons for a trade war that is not good for anyone

ban-evader• 1 year ago

Getting to the truth is a valid motivator for a bit over half of the country.

eightysixfour7• 1 year ago

I had a pretty long post about this here before, due to the politicization of the issue it is highly unlikely any of us will ever know “the truth” without a surprise smoking gun. There are good reasons to believe the natural or the lab leak hypotheses.

I think you have to accept it is now unlikely we normies will ever know the truth.

The post, and its comments, are worth reading still IMO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26750452#26751943

pinkmuffinere2• 1 year ago

I feel this is a great summary, and really calls out the issues that we are certain of — namely the politicization and the resulting uncertainty. IMO, everything else is difficult to know with high confidence, because of those two issues.

bhickey2• 1 year ago

unlikely we normies will ever know the truth

Thanks for the dose of epistemic humility. I'm willing to go one step further: It's plausible that no one knows the truth. Keeping secrets is hard. If someone knew they might've died in the early stages of the outbreak.

eightysixfour7• 1 year ago

There’s an asymmetry of potential evidence for each of the theories as well.

• If it was a lab leak, then even if the people responsible are dead, there was likely data that could trace it back. It is unlikely that data still exists or is findable, for obvious reasons.

• If it was not a lab leak, it may be impossible to find evidence to prove that is the case.

cypress662• 1 year ago

It would be trivial for the Chinese to determine if covid 19 matches with what they were investigating in the lab, and if the people in the lab were among the first infected.

florbo3• 1 year ago

There are good reasons to believe the natural or the lab leak hypotheses.

Given the ridiculous response from everyone involved, I'm just going to assume it was an accidental biosecurity breach of a natural specimen. It happens frequently enough and enough puzzle pieces seem to fit. Not that I care or think anything should come of it, other than hopefully learning better biosecurity procedures.

eightysixfour7• 1 year ago

I'm just going to assume it was an accidental biosecurity breach of a natural specimen.

Why bother assuming? Why isn’t “I don’t know” good enough?

morepedantic24• 1 year ago

The lab leak is more likely than zoonosis. Uncertainty still dominates.

The take away is not that we'll never know. The take away is that governments conspired to obscure the truth, control public opinion, and censor dissent.

chimprich2• 1 year ago

The CIA is not a neutral party in this. Discrediting China may well be their goal here.

A lab leak is not impossible, but there are good reasons to suspect a natural spillover event. There have been a number of studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests that the Wuhan wet market was the origin.

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2

tcdent• 1 year ago

overlaying an additional conspiracy theory in skepticism of the current conspiracy theory

wkat42422• 1 year ago

There have been a number of studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests the Wuhan wet market was the origin.

Those are not mutually exclusive theories.

It could have been a lab leak that was then superspread by the visit of an affected lab worker (or someone they came into contact with) at the wet market.

chimprich2• 1 year ago

That is possible, but the evidence doesn't suggest that. E.g. if I am reading the paper correctly, they say that there is evidence of two distinct spillover lineages, which wouldn't be consistent with a simple visit from a lab worker.

DiogenesKynikos19• 1 year ago

They really are mutually exclusive theories.

The current evidence points to at least two different spillover events (of slightly different variants) at the market, followed by spread of the virus in the communities surrounding the market, eventually radiating out to the rest of Wuhan. There is solid evidence now for each of those statements.

If you try to reconcile that with the lab leak theory, you end up with an ever more implausible theory: two different scientists got infected in the lab with different variants (of a virus we have good evidence never existed at the lab in the first place), then both of them went to the market (where the same types of wild animals that caused the original SARS outbreak in 2002 just happened to be sold) and infected people, but somehow they didn't infect anyone else at the lab. It's just one implausibility stacked on top of the next, all with the goal of avoiding what the data is obviously saying: the outbreak began at the market.

Aloisius2• 1 year ago

A hypothetical lab worker which only spread it to the market and nowhere else seems implausible.

I suppose that could happen if what they were carrying wasn't capable of human transmission yet, but was capable of infecting some species of the live animals at the market, but that's a big if.

There's till the problem of the second lineage which would indicate multiple zoonotic crossover events.

indoordin0saur6• 1 year ago

Or the selling of "used" animals by some irresponsible night-shift employee at the lab in charge of said animals.

mrkramer• 1 year ago

US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no conclusive evidence of what exactly happened. The burden of proof is on China. But let's be honest if it was a lab leak of this scale and consequences in US, US wouldn't admit it as would probably no country.

jgalt2122• 1 year ago

US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no conclusive evidence of what exactly happened.

Right, but in 2020 and 2021, the US was doing everything it could to discredit those who were trying to possibly discredit China. And the WHO was doing whatever China wanted. No scrutiny was to be tolerated. That in and of itself is very fishy.

pessimizer3• 1 year ago

US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no conclusive evidence of what exactly happened.

The US funded the lab and the specific fields of research. I have no idea how people can still be banging on about lab-leak origin being a racist plot against the Chinese. Covid probably leaked from US lab experiments in China. The rest of the world should be raging against the US and China both.

lenkite2• 1 year ago

There will be no major discrediting of China since the bat coronavirus research at Wuhan labs was funded by the National Institute of Health. This was firmly and unequivocally established by the hearing held by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Refer to “Overseeing the Overseers: A Hearing with NIH Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak”.

Dr. Tabak testified in this hearing that the NIH was funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China through a grant to EcoHealth.

Of-course this was in "direct contradiction" of the earlier testimony given by Dr Fauci under sworn oath. But hey - he has already been pardoned for it.

The only thing that can be laid at China's feet is ignorance of what was going on in their labs and the useless attempt at media suppression once the virus got out. However, anyone who has studied the facts in detail would easily form the judgement that a subsection of the U.S. government had the majority share of culpability.

scarface_742• 1 year ago

Just like the “Spanish Flu” didn’t originate in Spain. And information about it was suppressed in the US.

pessimizer3• 1 year ago

The US funded the Wuhan lab through the EcoHealth Alliance, which was used as a vehicle to steer US government funding into areas of research that Obama had banned the US government from funding.

The idea that this assessment needs a goal is strange, because it is the most reasonable assessment, but the idea that it discredits China more than it discredits the US is bizarre. Maybe it does for the Chinese people, who can see that their government is willing to put Chinese people in danger in partnership with a US that was nominally refusing to put American people in danger. Turns out viruses don't need visas so it didn't matter, but maybe it's the thought that counts.

jandrewrogers3• 1 year ago

US intelligence likely has more evidence than they will publicly discuss. It is a matter of public record that parts of US intelligence (not CIA) had been tracking COVID in China since at least November of 2019. That they coincidentally happened to be johnny-on-the-spot when the initial infection(s) happened, long before anyone was paying attention or trying to create a narrative, suggests that they probably have more context around the conditions of the initial infections than they will ever disclose. How they managed to be "right place, right time" to observe the initial stages raises all kinds of interesting questions that aren't going to be answered.

However, what the (classified) evidence indicates is somewhat separate from whatever public posture the CIA finds useful to take.

wahern2• 1 year ago

It is a matter of public record that parts of US intelligence (not CIA) had been tracking COVID in China since at least November of 2019.

What's public record is that ABC News reported[1] that two anonymous officials claimed there was an internal intelligence report in late November discussing an outbreak in China, and that it was briefed up the chain. All other news outlets then picked it up, with attribution (ABC News says someone else says...) buried deep in the text per usual. The report was immediately denied publicly by various officials and in over 4 years has never been corroborated, not even with other anonymous sources.

Plus, even if it were true, what's the relevance? It originally made headlines because it implied the Trump administration was slow to react; in particular, that they possibly had as many as 4 additional weeks in which to begin preparations. But it doesn't speak to origin. Most advocates for both the natural and lab-leak arguments all agree that the COVID-19 outbreak began sometime in Fall 2019. It's not a point of contention except possibly when comparing one overspecified theory against another overspecified, straw man theory. There are so many degrees of freedom to either theory (or rather, group of theories) that an early or late start doesn't significantly weigh in favor of one or the other.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-c...

ioulaum8• 1 year ago

They could as well say "We aren't sharing our real sources, but we have high confidence."

But they are saying that they have low confidence, and that there is no new evidence that changes anything.

They're just changing the way they're biased, because they think that the lab's conditions weren't particularly safe.

But then, we might as well expect that dozens of dangerous viruses should've gotten out.

willmadden3• 1 year ago

What are you talking about? The NIH funded the research through Ecohealth alliance. It was funded from the US and created in the Wuhan lab. We've known the virus was created in a lab and not natural since early 2020.

https://peakprosperity.com/more-evidence-covid-19-may-not-be...

etc-hosts2• 1 year ago

you're really going to make us watch a 45 minute youtube video?

csomar• 1 year ago

If only there was an inter-national body that everyone contributes to and that does these things /s. Both parties here are at blame: China didn't fully cooperate with the WHO and the US recently kicked it out.

morepedantic24• 1 year ago

It's not obvious that international bodies are the answer. Health agencies the world over lied through their teeth to manipulate the public to take specific actions.

So if you believe that your lauded international bodies are immune to politics and the abuse of authority, then maybe it will work. The rest of us prefer international bodies to be forums and coordination points for the real authorities.

blcknight• 1 year ago

Eh, sure, the CIA isn't behind honest. China isn't being honest. There's too many parties with ulterior motives to trust anything being said. China has done a great job of looking like they're covering something up.

I read "Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley" and it convinced me the lab leak theory was at least fairly likely. The proximity of the outbreak to WIV -- which was doing gain-of-function research of bat coronaviruses -- is convincing. Occam's razor and all.

aithrowawaycomm• 1 year ago

Pretty safe to say this is a politicized nothingburger:

  The announcement of the shift came shortly after Mr. Ratcliffe told Breitbart News he no longer wanted the agency “on the sidelines” of the debate over the origins of the Covid pandemic. Mr. Ratcliffe has long said he believes that the virus most likely emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology....

  Another senior U.S. official said it was Mr. Ratcliffe’s decision to declassify and release the new analysis. There is no new intelligence behind the agency’s shift. Rather it is based on the same evidence it has been chewing over for months.....

  To boost the natural origins theory, intelligence officers would like to find the animal that passed it to a human or find a bat carrying what was the likely ancestor of the coronavirus that causes Covid.

  Similarly, to seal the lab leak, the intelligence community would like to find evidence that one of the labs in Wuhan was working on a progenitor virus that directly led to the epidemic.

  Neither piece of evidence has been found.

kryogen1c• 1 year ago

It's wild to me that everyone is calling lab leak a politicized theory.

I suppose flat earthers make heliocentrism and the laws of physics politicized theories too, then.

m0llusk• 1 year ago

The thing is that unlike political science, virology is an actual science. Scientists have found little evidence of coronavirus at the labs and there is record of them failing even to culture the virus which would be required for any research including gain of function research. In dramatic contrast samples from the wet market were easily cultured into multiple related strains which strongly points to the wet market as the source.

int_19h• 1 year ago

All theories regarding COVID-19 origin are politicized simply because the question itself became a prominent political matter.

pinkmuffinere2• 1 year ago

+1, the question of origin in general is politicized. I don’t think individual theories are taboo, it’s just very difficult to truly evaluate the evidence at this point, unless perhaps you are an expert and can do all the fact checking yourself.

jfengel6• 1 year ago

Heliocentrism was politicized. The Galileo affair had a lot more to do with Church authority during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation than about cosmology. Galileo went out of his way to antagonize certain key players, and his punishment was primarily a political matter, not a scientific or even theological one.

andy_ppp2• 1 year ago

We can conclude nothing, except that humans do stupid stuff and usually conspiracy theories are incorrect. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Do we actually know if NIH was doing gain of function research (on Corona viruses) in the Wuhan lab? It sounds like another right wing conspiracy theory but if people have high quality sources for this being true I’ll happily change my mind.

frankharv2• 1 year ago

They subbed it out to these guys because it was illegal to do Gain of Function research:

https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/2024/06/ecohealth-alliance...

DiogenesKynikos19• 1 year ago

The demonization of the Ecohealth Alliance is one of the more depressing aspects of the response to the pandemic.

EHA has been warning for decades that a coronavirus pandemic is likely, and that governments should be taking steps to prepare for it and to make it less likely. Then, they're proved right, but instead of society thanking them, they're subject to a politically motivated witch hunt, with the aim of distracting from the US government's disastrous pandemic response.

andy_ppp2• 1 year ago

I can’t believe how much people want to find a reason for this with great certainty. It’s impossible to prove either way…

steveBK1232• 1 year ago

It was never an implausible theory so the censorship over it was foolish.

Of course the immediate jump to conclusion in the first few months by some who found it politically expedient was no better either.

People need to be more comfortable saying I don’t know but we are looking into it.

nxm2• 1 year ago

Back then anyone who suggested the lab leak theory was immediately labeled a conspiracy theorist by main stream media.

steveBK1232• 1 year ago

Yes and I’m saying that was bad.

gigatree2• 1 year ago

Hopefully this helps people realize how meaningless it is to be labeled a conspiracy theorist.

Johanx64• 1 year ago

[flagged]

philjohn2• 1 year ago

Were they? Or were those who claimed it was the only possible answer, without the evidence to back that up?

arp242• 1 year ago

The major reason for that is that many were doing this in language that was generally considered racist and/or mixed in some other weird stuff like how COVID lockdowns were like the Jewish persecution, rants about masking, or that type of stuff. I'm not saying everyone did that, but there was a huge overlap.

bufferoverflow• 1 year ago

It was never implausible, it has always been the most likely the most straightforward theory. A lab that worked on gain of function of coronaviruses.

All other theories sound as made up bs.

Glyptodon4• 1 year ago

It only went the way it did because people were making "lab leak" synonymous with "genetically engineered."

morepedantic24• 1 year ago

I think you're confusing genetic engineering with the bioweapons research. The WIV did collect natural coronaviruses and genetically engineer them.

calibas• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EcoHealth_Alliance#Project_DEF...

frankharv2• 1 year ago

https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/11014...

shadowgovt4• 1 year ago

I simply cannot use this as signal to update my priors on the theory given how politically charged this issue is and the new administration.

We cannot ignore the timing or the fact that the release appears to be the direct consequence of the previous director not believing the information he had passed the evidential bar and the new directory believing it does.

It's new signal on the question, which is always nice-to-have, but I'll be digesting it with a huge grain of salt given its pedigree.

jfengel6• 1 year ago

I don't think anyone is updating their priors. It's just a loud restatement of existing priors.

ricksunny2• 1 year ago

Society is like a meta-brain. One neuron may believe something to a different degree than the others - i.e. different priora. Highly-reported channels like this are the society brain updating its priors at large.

rhansgrt• 1 year ago

Fauci has been preemptively pardoned for gain of function research (lying or funding), so the bureaucrats can now pander to Trump. Anyway, we have always been at war with Oceania and China is now our enemy! Next week the NYT will use the term "Wuhan Virus".

This is the first US presidential change of power I'm following consciously. Have there always been such abrupt 180° turns and pledges of loyalty as now? I feel like I'm watching The Godfather.

shadowgovt4• 1 year ago

FWIW, the pardon doesn't mention gain of function research. (https://www.justice.gov/pardon/media/1385746/dl). This pardon applies every bit as much to him parallel parking while attending a Chief Medical Advisor meeting as it does to gain of function research.

This is the first US presidential change of power I'm following consciously. Have there always been such abrupt 180° turns and pledges of loyalty as now?

No; this is 100% new. This is in no way a normal Presidential transition of power.

SV_BubbleTime6• 1 year ago

Fauci’s pardon curiously goes back to 2014. What do you suppose he needed cover for that long before Covid?

ndr422• 1 year ago

I found this recent interview with Christian Drosten [1] very interesting, he explains very good scientifically why it is much more probable that the origin is not from a laboratory.

A quick summary of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av2Hax3Bg1U

(1) The area where the Nyctereutes spec. (german: Marderhund, I have no idea how it is called in english) where kept, there where a lot of DNA of Nyctereutes and a lot of nucleinacid of SARS II.

(2) From the beginning there a two lines of the corona viruses laboratory-confirmed. From the evolutionary speed of virus mutation it is nearly certain that the separation had to be taken place months before. About 8 times a corona-variation had been aquired by man. From this infection chains 2 virus-types had survived to be confirmed in Wuhan. A person who works in the laboratory would have been working with a clonal virus that is not mutated in that way.

(3) The market is the center of all infections even if you take out everybody that is known to be at the market, not the laboratory.

(4) For the animals at the market a analysis showed that they had been ill/infected (not specifically corona)

These are all separate published aspects that points to the same thing.

The part starts at 2 hours 23 minutes 30 seconds - you have to use auto-translated subtitles which are unfortunately not very good (german language)

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

edit: grammar

throwawaymaths8• 1 year ago

there's a 23? bp sequence that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade).

now an exact match of that length isn't impossible, but which is more likely? that this managed to be exactly correct on accident? or some grad student was told to just copypasta every furin cleavage site in the database into a GOF library and surprise surprise the most virulent form that became a pandemic came from the sequence that is engineered to be efficient.

cakealert• 1 year ago

Can you estimate the entropy of the sequence? Maybe by walking to it from other known sequences?

nickburns6• 1 year ago

there's a 23? bp sequence that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade).

could you cite this? not because i'm questioning the statement's credibility, but because i'm curious (and you could save me a lot of time from even knowing where to begin to look for credible information for myself—full disclosure, lol).

110bpm• 1 year ago

I wanted to learn more about where this claim comes from and found this article [0].

The linked commentary [1] raises several interesting points.

"Unfortunately, the authors did not provide details of their BLAST research. The patent database that they used contained 24,712 sequences. Yet, by querying BLAST, we obtained a database of 46,121,617 patent sequences with an average length of 560 nucleotides. The authors should give more details and justification for their query, especially if they queried the full database but a posteriori restricted their computation. Of note, with such a large database, and despite the fact that the average sequence length decreased, the probability of finding at least one sequence containing one of the 16 patterns previously mentioned may rise to 68% under assumption 2."

0: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.33...

1: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.33...

dist-epoch• 1 year ago

The virology research in Wuhan was done with US money and US experties (Ralph Baric, ...).

The US has absolutely no interest in prooving that the virus leaked from there.

jfengel6• 1 year ago

It very much does. China is a political opponent, and casting blame on China allows the US more freedom to act against them.

American involvement is barely an inconvenience. For those most eager to blame it on China, it was the fault of one American. They would like to punish him, too, but he has received a preemptive pardon. (Either to avoid political persecution of an innocent man, or to cover up the dastardly deeds of their domestic political opponents; take your pick.)

sumek83• 1 year ago

and the people that believe it tend to be also very happy to be exposed to biological weapons running wild

nxm2• 1 year ago

But the fact checkers back in 2021 labeled the lab leak theory as false/misinformation. Meanwhile anyone who suggested it was labeled a conspiracy theory by the main stream media.

philjohn2• 1 year ago

That's absolutely false. If people claimed that it was definitively lab leak in origin, it was (correctly) labelled as false. Can you cite me examples, with wording, of people positing it, but not claiming it outright, who were censored?

stvswn2• 1 year ago

It's pretty wild to me that a good portion of commenters here seem to think that only one side can politicize Covid's origins when the cited article itself says that the conclusion predates the new administration.

The natural origin bitter-clingers are still citing papers that claim to lean towards natural origin with the thinnest possible evidence. I admit I'm not a virologist, but I am a bit skeptical that this community would be completely forthright with us.

I can't shake the feeling like there might be fire where there's smoke: the Chinese government has not provided access to the WIV's data, for instance. The Chinese government deleted the virus's genome sequence from GenBank before later releasing it publicly. The closest relative to Covid-19 in known databases is RatG13, a virus from bats that was discovered in caves thousands of miles away, a complex that the researchers at WIV had used to collect samples. Peter Dasnak of EcoHealth alliance had previously submitted a plan to the DoD to introduce furin cleavage sites to existing coronaviruses to do gain-of-function research (or some euphemism for GOF to evade restrictions), a proposal that was declined, but within which there are still comments extant where they discuss outsourcing the riskiest research to China. Peter Dasnak led the delegation from WHO to China but never publicly disclosed that he had, only several years earlier, been interested in research that would have produced a virus that very specifically resembled Covid. A small group of influential scientists and bureaucrats were discussing via email that it certainly appeared to be a lab leak to them until they met in person to speak with Dr. Fauci in February 2020, after which they abruptly stopped discussing the possibility of lab-leak and worked to submit the Proximal Origin letter to Nature that claimed a consensus among scientists that it must be natural origin -- based on the airtight logic that if a lab wanted to make a coronavirus it probably would have done it differently. Those authors did not disclose the influence of Peter Dasnak and Dr Fauci in drafting the letter. Subsequently, the US government used the existence of the letter as authoritative evidence of a natural origin in order to lean on social media companies to censor speech about the potential of a lab leak. Meanwhile, the fact remains that in order for Covid to have made a jump from an animal species, it would have to be extant in the population of an animal species -- or a variant clearly one mutation away would need to be. It's been 5 years and we haven't found an animal with Covid.

Of course we'll never get the smoking gun because the data you'd need -- the experimental data from WIV -- is likely gone forever. Why would that be? Why wouldn't a leading research center on coronavirus virology -- perhaps the foremost in the world -- hide its records when the big event that represents its entire reason for existence -- a coronovirus pandemic -- has shown up in the world, conveniently on its doorstep? Shouldn't that be their time to shine? Are you going to blame that on Trump's rhetoric? Why hasn't all of Baric's data from UNC been released to the public yet, then?

It is really pretty amazing to me that many people will likely go to their grave thinking "oh, no, no scientists released a paper that says the natural origin is still a live theory, I don't have to listen to any of this conspiracy nonsense" simply because they can't live in a world where Trump was right.

mandmandam2• 1 year ago

oh, no, no scientists released a paper that says the natural origin is still a live theory

Not to mention that the main paper cited for this was written by ... Daszak, yet again. And it was endorsed by 26 other people who all had conflicts of interest, under a Lancet editor who since admitted that he knew Daszak had a massive conflict of interest, which wasn't admitted publicly for a year.

Ain't it odd that media never really ran with that story? That neither Dems or Republicans had much to say about Daszak? It didn't too viral on social media, there were never any TV interviews where they showed people reacting to being told that, no documentaries about the flaws of the Lancet paper and how it was pushed; it was never part of any drive to change policies, etc. Seemed odd to me anyway.

tveita• 1 year ago

Out of curiosity, have you seen the debate between Peter Miller and Saar Wilf, summarized in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r...?

defrost3• 1 year ago

That was a serious debate with considerable time, effort, and independant third party scrutiny.

Another good overview is at:

https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses...

  The 18-hour video debate

  The Rootclaim debate was structured over 3 days with 3 thematic blocks;

  * the first block was about the geographic location and the evidence for the Huanan market versus the Wuhan Institute of virology being where the virus came from

  * the second block was about the SARS-CoV-2 genome and whether its genetic features more likely arose in nature versus gain-of-function research

  * the third block was about probability; how can the evidence be grouped and what probabilistic assumptions should be taken to accurate reflect odds of the evidence occurring

  Each side first got 90 minutes to lay out their cases, then another 90 minutes together to respond to questions. 

  No matter how you slice it, this is a serious effort and time investment, as the preparation alone of materials and research into it probably consumed hundreds of hours from speakers and judges alike.

p0w3n3d• 1 year ago

I have some opinion on this: despite whatever was the source, the reaction that was made by countries (i.e. complete global lockdown of population) means that they were scared as hell. And I haven't seen any govt scared so much on any flu that came out in my life, however some of them were baddest in my life (not mathematically speaking, I know that every set has a supreme element, what I mean that flu can be dangerous to people incl me, with asthma)

Based on their reaction we may know that they either knew something very bad (i.e. failed experiment) or were suspecting something so bad that could, at least in their theory, kill the population or massively decrease it.

In other words something was fishy and they overreacted.

notRobot• 1 year ago

were suspecting something so bad that could, at least in their theory, kill the population or massively decrease it.

Yeah, a really bad virus.

jmyeet• 1 year ago

It's crazy for a Trump loyalist to complain about "politicization" of this process when declassifying and releasing a report with no hard or new evidence is quite clearly a political decision.

The US is clearly setting up China to be the next Big Enemy, the USSR 2.0. The US establishment expects--and arguably is fomenting--economic and possibly eventual military conflict with China. The "lab leak" declassification neatly fits into that narrative.

We may never know the truth or it may take decades to find out.

There's really only two likely theories here: zoonotic origin and lab leak. There are many variants of "lab leak" but the most likely is that it was accidental. It's more fringe to claim it was intentional. This sort of thing has happened before [1].

There is circumstancial data for this like China not cooperating with a WHO investigation back in 2020 and 2021 and a Wuhan Institute of Virology virus database in SEptember 2019. To my knowledge, that has never been recovered or examinted by external parties. My theory is, like every government (including the US), China doesn't want to know the answer to this question. There's literally no upside. Would you want to be the official who oversaw a leak like this? Would you want to be in charge of the government at that time? Nobody wants that. Governments love ignorance.

The zoonotic origin is still more likely but it has the obvious problem that we haven't (yet) identified the host animal. Also, Wuhan is quite far from the bats that might be the likely source.

It might be a complicated origin, such as a person or animal being infected with multiple strains and a replication error creating the virus from multiple sources.

But the main point here is we're going to see a lot of anti-China sentiment being drummed up by the US in coming years. This is bipartisan too.

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

CMay2• 1 year ago

Things that are true:

"Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time."

The Department of Energy concluded with low confidence that it was a lab leak.

The FBI concluded with moderate confidence that it was a lab leak.

The CIA's new report also concludes that they have low confidence that it was a lab leak.

It's important to note that low confidence is a positive number, not a negative number.

The wet market theory loses some credibility given some data points, but the lab leak theory remains plausible.

China has had lab leak origins in the past, so this would not have been unprecedented.

China obstructed and delayed the investigation.

Whether it leaked from a lab or not, China covered it up. China covering it up is not necessarily evidence that it was a lab leak. If there was any truth to it (which they may not even know), they probably wouldn't want it reflecting poorly on the state. China is big on "social harmony", so you don't have the right to know.

Whatever happened wasn't necessarily intentional. China made some deeply embarrassing and shameful decisions around this time and they won't want to promote them, but they were also not alone in making mistakes.

If China concluded it was a lab leak internally and shared that, there wouldn't have been as much need for the world to speculate, analyze and investigate so much which only hurt China's reputation more.

Coincidences occur, serendipity occurs. Most people have experienced one. As a result, proximity to the lab is not solid proof, but it is not the only datapoint either.

If China was more transparent and cooperative, there could have been more information to make higher confidence conclusions with.

RajT882• 1 year ago

"Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time."

Officials are saying that, true.

I have "low confidence" it actually is true. Everyone since the election has been scrambling to kowtow to the new boss to avoid his wrath.

mrandish2• 1 year ago

Officials are saying that, true.

I have no idea if the report's conclusions are correct, but I doubt a report like that was created in three or four days. Tasking expert analysts, reassigning the manpower necessary and going through legal and secrecy review in 96 hours would be extraordinary for a large bureaucratic agency. Sure, it could happen but that kind of all-hands, crisis urgency is hard to keep quiet. It's something we'd hear about from insider leaks.

I think it's more plausible that the report existed (because we know the CIA did look into it multiple times already) and the previous director had decided not to release it. And now the new director decided differently. Both of those decisions (not release vs release) were probably politically motivated to some extent but we don't have to jump to assuming an entire new report was fabricated with different conclusions practically overnight. After all, most government agencies that looked into it already concluded with low or medium confidence that it was a lab leak. It's not like the CIA report conclusion is an outlier here.

JumpCrisscross8• 1 year ago

the agency was not bending its views to a new boss

Trump has thrown the China hawks under the bus. To the extent anyone is winning accolades by pushing this hypothesis, it's in giving Trump leverage in a trade negotiation. That's too marginal to motivate an adverse conclusion at the CIA.

(Counterfactual: Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce reports for every possible conclusion, and then pick the one that would please the boss.)

twh123751• 1 year ago

... giving Trump leverage in a trade negotiation.

That is a perfectly valid hypothesis. In the EU there are also doubts as to what Trump's actual goals are. People are preparing for the scenario that first Biden and now Trump are driving a wedge between the EU and China, whereupon Trump will suddenly change course and be China's best friend. (The unspoken second thesis is that the same scheme applies to Russia):

https://www.politico.eu/article/fear-and-loathing-in-davos-e...

"There’s another scenario that has the Europeans worried: After getting a reluctant EU onside with his anti-Beijing agenda, the famously fickle Trump could U-turn and end up ganging up on the bloc with his “very, very good friend” Xi Jinping, China’s president."

"There’s precedent for that: In 2020, after years of escalating hostility during Trump’s first term in office, Washington and Beijing struck a mini trade deal aiming to increase U.S. exports to China and to ease their trade war."

"Now, Trump has billionaire China dove Elon Musk in his ear — and he needs Washington to retain good ties with Beijing to keep his electric vehicle company Tesla afloat."

mrandish2• 1 year ago

That's too marginal to motivate an adverse conclusion at the CIA.

The decision to not release by the previous director and the decision to release by the new director probably were political to some extent. But I agree with you that the report's impact is too marginal to assume its creation or conclusion was politically motivated. But I think that for a different reason: I doubt adding yet another "low confidence" agency report onto the pile of existing ones changes much - either in geo-political super power negotiations or in the mind of the American public.

The issue has been played out and it's not top of mind or relevant anymore. The majority of people have already made up their minds one way or the other - or decided it doesn't matter anymore and they don't care. Pretty much everyone already acknowledges we'll never know for sure.

blackeyeblitzar2• 1 year ago

There are a few things to consider that I’ll add, which further bolster the idea that China has systematically covered up up a lab leak that caused the COVID-19 pandemic:

1. Coronaviruses are hard to contain, even if you have good practices. For example, the earlier SARS outbreak (from the early 2000s) had several documented lab leaks, including multiple within China (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/).

2. The US state department was aware that China was conducting dangerous research on coronaviruses on poorly managed labs a few years before the COVID-19 pandemic (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...).

3. The WHO got completely manipulated by China, either willingly or just due to their incompetence. For example, it is well documented now that the WHO publicly praised the Chinese government but privately was concerned and frustrated by the lack of transparency and sharing of vital information, including blocking visits to Wuhan (https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-china-blocked...).

4. The NIAID (Fauci’s agency, under NIH) conducted gain of function research through a third party, EcoHealth Alliance. The grants are all public and document gain of function research, which was illegal since President Obama had banned it through an executive order. There was evidence that the NIH helped EcoHealth craft their grant language in a way to avoid oversight processes that would have blocked the grant (https://theintercept.com/2021/11/03/coronavirus-research-eco...). Note that the president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, is a listed author on gain of function publications from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. After years of trying to bury this, the Biden administration finally blocked funding to EcoHealth in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/health/us-government-suspends...).

5. China only allowed a WHO visit over a year after they knew of the COVID-19 outbreak, in early 2021. They only allowed specific people to participate in the investigation, and the only person allowed from the US, was the same Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance who participated in the research at Wuhan Institute of Virology (https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/03/asia/wuhan-coronavirus-who-ba...).

cyberax4• 1 year ago

President Obama had banned it through an executive order.

Can you provide a link to the executive order? It sounds seriously strange.

aussieguy1234• 1 year ago

China obstructed and delayed the investigation.

You can only assume from this that whatever was going to be found would have been unfavorable to them. Although that would be the case with both the market theory and the lab leak theory.

PoignardAzur2• 1 year ago

You can, in fact, imagine other things.

For example, maybe the people shutting down the investigation had no idea what it would find and just didn't want to take the chance.

newsclues• 1 year ago

Or you understand that there is going to be a viral outbreak and you can choose: save the rest of the world from the pandemic or limit information and allow people to spread the virus globally to ensure that your nation doesn’t suffer disproportionately.

Leary• 1 year ago

Things that are true:

The first large cluster of infections was associated with the Huanan Seafood Market, and retrospective analyses of influenza-like-illness patients and blood donations in Wuhan found no evidence of earlier circulation.

Sampling of many individuals prior to December 2019 showed no positives for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, suggesting that the virus did not spread widely before the market outbreak.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not known to have possessed a sufficiently close backbone strain to engineer SARS-CoV-2, and there is no public data indicating they had undisclosed viruses that match it.

Specific genomic features, like the furin cleavage site, appear suboptimal for an engineered virus (e.g. the PRRAR sequence and an out-of-frame insertion), which fits with a virus evolving naturally rather than through targeted gain-of-function work.

Several closely related bat coronaviruses have partial insertions near the S1/S2 region, suggesting that such changes can occur naturally over time and need not be artificially inserted.

A negative binomial pattern of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, with many zero-spreader events and a small number of superspreader events, is consistent with a spillover followed by rapid amplification in a crowded market setting.

Evidence of multiple potential intermediate animal hosts (e.g. wildlife farmed animals) further increases the probability that a bat coronavirus evolved into SARS-CoV-2 through natural spillover events rather than intentional engineering.

Early cases identified at the market and lack of widespread pre-epidemic infection clusters elsewhere in Wuhan align with the idea of a swift zoonotic jump to humans in late 2019.

scarab92• 1 year ago

Forgive the silly question, but does the lab leak theory entail the virus being engineered in the lab, or simply sampled from nature by researchers then not adequately contained?

I’m not clear on what exactly is being alleged by these agencies?

CMay2• 1 year ago

The closest natural relative origin of SARS-CoV-2 was in Yunnan ~700 miles away from the market.

The Wuhan lab collected samples from that area and the lab is only ~10 miles away from the market.

Those wet markets are huge vectors for a viral spread, so a virus being spread there doesn't necessarily mean it started there.

Why that market in Hubei and not first at a market closer to Yunnan? It might be more profitable to transport and sell them there, but it's still a long way to travel and avoid spreading during that time just to end up at a market so close to that lab.

A lot of reasoning around whether a lab leak is more likely doesn't require it to be engineered or modified in any way.

stared• 1 year ago

You are conflating two things - a lab leak and a virus being engineered. These are two separate things.

Likely, the virus was not engineered but was stored in the laboratory.

nialv73• 1 year ago

Very good summary, but the problem is, like most things, it is impossible to 100% rule out the lab theory. It is always possible to look at one of these evidences and say "yeah, but ...". And given how politicized this question is, people are just going to believe what they want to believe. I am quite pessimistic about this, that people will remain rational.

maeil5• 1 year ago

How many times do we need to repeat "lab leak != intentionally lab engineered"? Your most relevant parts are all about the latter. You know this, yet muddy the waters.

indoordin0saur6• 1 year ago

There have been cases of irresponsible employees of other labs in China making a quick buck by selling "used" lab animals to wet markets.

hnbad• 1 year ago

I'm not sure what the Department of Energy's qualifications are (I know they're in charges of nukes so maybe also bioweapons?) but I don't see what relevance the FBI's opinion has.

casefields• 1 year ago

DOE has its own massive farm of experts: https://www.energy.gov/intelligence/office-intelligence-and-...

There’s 17 intelligence agencies that all staff knowledgeable experts on all sorts of topics. Our government is Leviathan.

Fomite16• 1 year ago

The National Labs, where a tremendous amount of infectious disease work is done for national-scale questions. I've worked with them in the past, and considered taking a job with them - of the various agencies, they're the ones who have weighed in with probably the most expertise.

morepedantic24• 1 year ago

China covering it up is not necessarily evidence that it was a lab leak.

Yes it is, but the evidence is non-specific. China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis. The cover up is consistent with either theory, but it is the only reaction consistent with a lab leak.

raziel2p• 1 year ago

"China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis."

this is a blind assumption. they may just be covering up 100% of all things, especially when the international community (i.e. Trump) is trying to push/blame them.

petre4• 1 year ago

Cover-ups are a cultural thing in East Asia because reputation is paramount. They'll attempt to cover up anything that makes them look bad as means to protect their reputation. So the second part of your statement is not necessarily true.

maxglute9• 1 year ago

If China concluded it was a lab leak internally and shared that,

This insinuates the only reasonable conclusion is PRC lab leak. The only fact is we don't know where covid originated, only PRC was the first to detect and acknowledge it, and for doing so, US under PRC hawk admin tried to weaponize for propaganda war. PRC can still say covid come out of Fort Detrick, and until US opens up soveriegn US soil to WHO investigation (good luck now), then this is all a US coverup and it would be perfecty cromulant position and as "true" as anything CIA claims.

If China was more transparent and cooperative

If US under Trump and Pompeo wasn't utterly antagonistic to PRC during time frame, there might have been more cooperation. This new CIA spin is continuation of the same geopolitical games.

juliushuijnk3• 1 year ago

Apart from directing anger for political reasons, I don't see the big importance.

It's like wondering why a single building caught fire, when the shocking thing was that the whole world caught fire. Surely the lessons to learn are with 'how to deal with a spreading fire', and not with 'how to prevent a fire'.

tensor3• 1 year ago

The biggest irony in this is that apparently the lesson the current US government learned was "let's cancel all the fire stations and fire all the fire fighters!"

Khaine3• 1 year ago

The NIH under Fauci may have been funding gain of function research in China in violation of an Executive Order (EO), and this research may have caused the pandemic.

If so, I think it's pretty important to investigate, how the NIH could violate the EO without appropriate oversight, and to hold those who made those decisions to account.

From: https://unherd.com/2025/01/the-criminal-pardoning-of-anthony...

"Fauci claims — in a curious echo of Trump — that he is the victim of partisan threats of investigation and prosecution. “Let me be perfectly clear: I have committed no crime and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me,” he said in response to Monday’s news. Yet it was noticeable that the pardon is backdated to 2014. This is, coincidentally, the same year that the US three-year ban on gain-of-function research took effect and also the start date for an NIH grant to Wuhan that biosafety experts such as Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, believe is linked to the “reckless” research that sparked global pandemic. “The pardon is a travesty,” he told me.

The evidence has shown clear efforts to avoid such scrutiny. One memo disclosed that “Tony” had told David Morens, a senior adviser to Fauci, how to avoid requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), suggesting that he stop using government-issued phones for his gmail accounts. A leaked email indicated that Morens was coached on evasion of FOIs by Margaret Moore, Fauci’s long-serving assistant — who pleaded the fifth when asked to testify. “I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” he wrote. Another senior aide to Fauci misspelled key conspirators, presumably to avoid searches intended to fulfil FOIA requests."

juliushuijnk3• 1 year ago

Sorry, I don't care about Fauci. From my perspective he stood up agaist trump, the all sorts of attacks appeared. They're always contradictive. He and his people don't care about consistency, because his followers only focus on what resonates with their fears and anger. They'll take that storyline and will find things to make that story work. For example on Biden in Gaza, he was both too pro Israel, and too pro Muslim, depending on the audience.

If you have lots of data, you can find all sorts of patterns. Now your looking at misspellings and inferring things from it..

More importantly, I don't care about 'getting justice' on an indvidual. I want lessons learned on how to deal with a new pandamic.

cal85• 1 year ago

Both, come on

juliushuijnk3• 1 year ago

No. It doesn't matter, because just like with fire, with new virusses it is well known that these will happen regardless of people having bad intent.

You can't prevent someone with mental problems setting a tree on fire to smoke out the deamons in their head. It's a huge distraction and waste of energy that could be spent on the things I wrote about earlier.

Workaccount23• 1 year ago

We will probably never know what happened unless the CCP collapses and all the documents leak out.

China had a bit of a freak out when the pandemic first started and pretty much silenced everyone close to the lab and kept everyone else out. It was until months/years later that China started allowing chosen data out, and who knows the truthfulness of it.

Authoritarian regimes, especially China, are the furthest thing from transparent.

snowwrestler• 1 year ago

I think it’s important to note that there are really two “lab leak” theories:

One in which the virus developed naturally, was collected in a remote location, and was being studied in a lab when it leaked from the lab into nearby human society.

One in which it was not a dangerous virus originally, and it became dangerous in the lab through human agency, either maliciously (e.g. bioweapons research) or accidentally (e.g. gain-of-function research).

Note that in the first theory, the virus has a natural origin, but the pandemic originates in the lab leak.

These two theories get mixed up constantly, either by accident or on purpose, who knows. For example look at this CNN story:

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/01/25/politics/covid-19-lab-lea...

First paragraph: “The CIA now assesses the virus that causes Covid-19 more likely originated from an accidental lab leak in China, rather than occurring naturally”

Deeper in the story: “Every US intelligence agency still unanimously maintains that Covid-19 was not developed as a biological weapon” and “almost all American intelligence agencies also assess that the virus itself was not genetically engineered.”

So it didn’t occur “naturally” but also wasn’t developed or engineered. Makes no sense.

JumpCrisscross8• 1 year ago

These two theories get mixed up constantly, either by accident or on purpose, who knows

I'm struggling to see the practical difference. Ebola naturally evolved. I'm not sure I'm be more incensed if an American lab released natural versus artifical Ebola into the population.

nickburns6• 1 year ago

the "practical difference" is that zoonotic spillover and lab leak may not be mutually exclusive theories.

crazygringo• 1 year ago

One way to look at the difference is that a "natural Ebola" almost certainly would have spread at some point anyways, and so it wouldn't affect the total number of world deaths in the end, just make them happen some number of years sooner.

Whereas an "artificial Ebola" would never have existed without it being intentionally created, so all the deaths aren't just time-shifted, they wouldn't have happened otherwise. They're new.

lolinder9• 1 year ago

The practical difference is that many of the arguments against lab-leak theories in general are actually arguments against the gain-of-function theory in particular. Things like lack of markers that would indicate engineering, or the presence of markers that would indicate animal origins. So distinguishing the two candidate theories becomes important for discerning whether the evidence is for or against a lab leak: you can't use animal-origins evidence as evidence against a lab leak, only evidence against an engineered virus.

dehrmann3• 1 year ago

It guides policy. If it was engineered, it means this is research we really shouldn't be doing. If it was a wild virus being researched, it means we need to take the threat of spillover more seriously.

nialv73• 1 year ago

I think the natural-virus-leaked-by-lab theory hinges on the argument that, (assuming it was true, then) had the lab leak not have happened, SARS-CoV-2 wouldn't have made to jump to human by itself. And this is where the Ebola analogy breaks down. Because SARS-CoV-2 has a higher basic reproduction number than Ebola, meaning it's more transmissible. And it's also much less deadly than Ebola, meaning it has much more opportunities to spread.

Remember, it is a virus that caused a global pandemic, despite all the efforts made to stop it. Based on that, I think it is highly likely that whether the lab leaked it or not, it would have made its way to humans by itself. In other words, there would effectively be no way to tell one scenario from the other.

morepedantic24• 1 year ago

These two theories get mixed up constantly, either by accident or on purpose, who knows.

You literally just reduced 3 theories to 2: lab leak natural virus, lab leak medical GoF, and lab leak bioweapon. These theories get collapsed because there's no practical way to distinguish between them. A 4th theory, intentional release, is often used as a weakman for all lab leak theories, but isn't actually a leak at all.

So it didn’t occur “naturally” but also wasn’t developed or engineered. Makes no sense.

Yeah, someone wants to split hairs, but it's impossible without knowing the specific definitions they want.

nickburns6• 1 year ago

You've made great points throughout this entire post. This is yet another that I've just upvoted (from having been downvoted). But in each you've been needlessly aggressive and hostile. Everyone here knows how frustrating COVID-19 can be to discuss—as is the case with most topics worth discussing. But it's less frustrating when we all implicitly agree to stick to our thoughtful great points.

ashoeafoot• 1 year ago

Lets play cluedo. How about a cremation janitor without any formal education trying to sell exotic meat as a side hustle ?

tgv• 1 year ago

You may distinguish a 100 different lab leak theories, but they do have one thing in common: the virus came from the Wuhan lab. And it's not as if people are going to shrug and say: well, it only costs 100 of thousands or even millions of lives, and still cripples a great many, but forgive and forget.

audunw• 1 year ago

The best theory I’ve ever read, wrote about miners working in caves with bat who came down with serious pneumonia, or something like that, in the area that the lab sampled viruses from.

The viruses could evolve quite a lot in an immunocompromised individual.

The virus was then probably leaked as part of the work to sequence its genome. So they wouldn’t have published anything on it yet.

I don’t think they did any GoF research or engineered the virus in any way.

I’m fairly certain China knows a lot more about what actually happened though.

WillyWonkaJr2• 1 year ago

I suspect that most people are so against the lab manufactured hypothesis because they've been infected by Covid, probably multiple times, and have decided to stop taking precautions. To accept that you've been infected with a bioweapon is a pretty upsetting prospect.

mandmandam2• 1 year ago

I suspect that most people are so against the lab manufactured hypothesis because they've been infected by Covid

Sorry, but that borders on historic revisionism. People are so against the lab manufactured hypothesis because millions of posts regarding it on social media were suppressed and blocked across Facebook, Twitter, and others; and because high-level US officials pressured scientists to claim that it was more likely natural origin than a lab leak despite their actual beliefs; and because a vast section of media and academia blithely swallowed and pushed Daszak's paper in The Lancet despite obvious flaws and massive conflicts of interest. Dissenting views and evidence were heavily suppressed, no matter how convincing or reputable.

The narrative was so forcefully shifted that any discussion of a lab leak was often met with hatred.

And all that was well before most people were infected multiple times.

maeil5• 1 year ago

Your memory is accurate. Yet elsewhere we have an infectious disease researcher claiming

At the same time, I've come to distrust many of the voices who push the lab leak hypothesis, either because they're obviously doing so for geopolitical reasons, or because they've become addicted to being "the lone voice in the wilderness", despite it not being a risky position to take.

It's an incredible phenomenon, the collective memory blackout that seems to have taken place regarding the vibe in 2020-2021. Never before, or even after (so far), have we seen a more strictly coordinated ban on discussion of a specific topic across all major US social networks. It even reached as far as Wikipedia.

Here's what Yishan Wong (ex-Reddit) has said about it

Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic because the "debate" included ...massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting, and abuse that spilled over into the real world - e.g. harrassment of public officials and doctors, racially-motivated crimes, etc.

There are many problems with this reasoning, but the biggest one is that if true, it should have rightfully caused mob behaviour.

Gaza War (2023-present): <100k deaths Ukraine War: <1 million deaths Korean War: 2-3 million deaths Vietnam: 1.3-3.4 million deaths Covid: 6+ million deaths

ocschwar5• 1 year ago

It's not like we will ever have a chance to do a useful reassessment of what happened in Wuhan when everyone involved is scared of being designated the scapegoat and executed. And I do mean executed. If the CCP feels that it's useful for the state to find someone there and give them a lethal injection, they'll do it. So it's ridiculous to expect any cooperation from anyone there.

And ultimately it doesn't matter. If a contagious virus is coming to your country, your best response is independent of its origins. And if your response was a complete shitshow, finding a scapegoat in Wuhan won't make your response any less of a shitshow.

The US's response to covid under Trump was a ridiculous shitshow. Nothing more to it.

jmull• 1 year ago

Does this matter?

This is the CIA, which will make any kind of claim, true or false, if it suits their aims.

Well, it does signal their aims.

ychan268• 1 year ago

I mean which country benefited from COVID? China controlled the virus first then lost a lot from strict lockdown, western had many death cases not to mention developing countries. If some Bie Inc made COVID, I don't think they have the courage to piss all governments.

ImHereToVote5• 1 year ago

The country with the population that has the most incompatible ACE2 receptors benefitted the most.

foobarbecue• 1 year ago

One thing I've always wondered is: how many labs are there in the world doing gain-of-function research on coronavirus, as the Wuhan Instutute of Virology was?

Intuitively, it seems to me like there aren't that many, so it's a pretty interesting coincidence that the virus started right next to such a lab.

However, if coronavirus labs are common, then it's not an coincidence. Can anyone point to research that answers this question?

From a political and public safety standpoint, I think the US government and WHO probably felt they had a moral obligation not to point the finger at China during the height of the pandemic. And now we have the opposite -- a cult of hate has taken over the US government, and they have much to gain by preaching hate against China (Trump was in power in 2019, but he only had presidential powers. Now he has absolute power.). So, in either case, it's quite hard to get undistorted information.

chadcmulligan• 1 year ago

When you say it that way it was an incredible coincidence

tripletao20• 1 year ago

I'm not aware of teams other than Dr. Baric's at UNC and Dr. Shi's at the WIV proposing to enhance sarbecoviruses by genetic engineering. If anyone knows of more, then I'd appreciate a link.

SARS-CoV-2 might also be a naturally-evolved virus collected and accidentally released by researchers. The field for that is a little wider. I believe the WIV had the world's biggest collection, and the closest relative published before the beginning of the pandemic; but the BANAL viruses collected by the Institut Pasteur du Laos are now closer. I think there's a few more teams, though with smaller volumes of work.

Naively, I'd think "an American-funded lab in China with American collaborators had an accident" blames China less than "Chinese wildlife traffickers supplying Chinese tastes for exotic wildlife had an accident". The political perception is generally not too tethered to reality, though.

breadwinner2• 1 year ago

Americans had a role to play here as well:

In 2014, Obama administration halted the so called "gain of function" research because of laboratory accidents.

In 2017, Trump administration restarted the research. See links below.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/white-house-to-cut-fun...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih...

The U.S. government, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provided funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an American non-profit organization focused on studying emerging diseases. The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses.

paul_h2• 1 year ago

This was published 17 Jan 2017 - https://www.science.org/content/article/after-criticism-fede... - before Trump's inauguration. The process to reconsider the ban started under Obama.

breadwinner2• 1 year ago

Date on the article you linked is 24 Jan 2020.

arghandugh2• 1 year ago

There is no evidence or plausible scenario to support this, but it’s an incredibly useful story for the incoming regime to promote for the purposes of hampering consensus reality.

It also gives conspiracy theorists and low-trust communities a bone to chew on, since UFO hysterias are proving to have an increasingly short shelf life.

Vecr3• 1 year ago

What do you mean by "no evidence"?

arghandugh2• 1 year ago

There is no evidence. Period. Just a dozen contrived situations that “might have been” being aligned for political ends.

Meanwhile in reality they’ve all but named the goddamn specific animal that brought it from the zoonotic pool and introduced it to mankind.

Handwringing about the existence of a somehow malign bio lab in a city LARGER THAN NEW YORK that has DOZENS is preposterous. There’s no evidence, no scenario, no whistleblower, no documentation, nothing. It’s a chew toy for low-information busybodies who need this to be an evil foreign plot.

And it’s boring and sad, particularly when America’s first dictator is installing a profoundly corrupt lunatic who is here to overturn germ theory.

Have some dignity.

m348e912• 1 year ago

Curious if this lends credibility to the Indian research that was dismissed early 2020. The paper claimed the covid19 virus was man-made.

https://sundayguardianlive.com/news/fauci-described-indian-r...

"...Indian researchers wrote that the composition of the 'inserts' in the Covid virus was similar to one found in HIV-1."

ak2172• 1 year ago

No. The paper by Pradhan et al. was withdrawn and its methodology refuted in https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jproteome.0c00129. Spike protein sequences in SARS-CoV-2 don't have any unique similarities to HIV-1.

Putting these together, we believe that there is a close evolutionary relation between 2019-nCoV and bat coronavirus RaTG13. The four insertions highlighted by Pradhan et al. in the spike protein are not unique to 2019-nCoV and HIV-1. In fact, the similarities in the sequence-based alignments built on these very short fragments are statistically insignificant, as assessed by the BLAST E values, and such similarities are shared in many other viruses, including the bat coronavirus. Structurally, these “insertions” are far away from the binding interface of the spike protein with the ACE2 receptor, as shown in Figure 2, which is also contradictory to the conclusion made by Pradhan et al.

seaourfreed• 1 year ago

From xAI: Gina Haspel (Director of the CIA) who was the, allegedly authorized bonuses for six CIA officers to change their assessment from a lab leak to a non-lab source for the origin of COVID-19.

Sources documenting this: National Review, New York Post & Daily Express US.

US government lies, and then calls "misinformation" on people who call out the truth. Now they are being held accountable to go back to the truth. Which is why the CIA is now switching 180-degrees from a Lie to the truth (non-Lab to Lab).

cyanydeez• 1 year ago

Does thw presodent get classifief EOs caise, thays thos

whoitwas2• 1 year ago

Hasn't this always been the most likely cause? I thought practically all evidence pointed to that. I haven't even heard a competing theory.

lolinder9• 1 year ago

The competing theory is that it was transmitted from living animals sold at a wet market in Wuhan.

Either story isn't a great look for the CCP: either they failed to maintain sufficient health protocols to keep diseases from spreading in wet markets, or they let a dangerous virus leak from a lab. There's no theory for its origins that have the CCP looking competent, so I'm not sure why it's such a politicized topic.

wordofx2• 1 year ago

A lab leaking wouldn’t do any harm to the CCP. The harm they caused themselves was a mixture of lying and trying to cover up the whole thing. Downplaying it. Etc. The WHO says any unknown phenomena must be treated as airborn until proven otherwise. But they followed the CCP in telling us it was fine, it wasn’t transmissible.

whoitwas2• 1 year ago

I thought that was baseless speculation and the lab leak more likely explained it because it was in close proximity to the market.

maeil5• 1 year ago

It has, since day one. The fact that the WIH was one of only 6 institutions in the world that had been conducting GoF research on bat-related pathogens before the pandemic gives such strong statistical evidence towards it that any theory holding the WIH is unrelated, would require very strong evidence. At no point has there been such strong evidence.

lolinder9• 1 year ago

Can someone help me understand why a lab leak looks worse for China than zoonotic spillover? Why would Senator Cotton need it to be a lab leak to give him more leverage?

From what I understand, one theory is that China has for decades tolerated unsanitary wet markets that allowed dangerous diseases to evolve, get stronger, and eventually transmit to human hosts. They'd been warned about this over and over again and had failed to implement the required policies, leading to a preventable pandemic.

The alternative theory has China accidentally letting a disease leak from a lab.

From my perspective, if anything the lab leak theory is the one that makes China look better: at least it emphasizes that it resulted from China's scientific pursuits and not their lack of health codes!

Why would the China hawks need a lab leak in order to China hawk?

davesque• 1 year ago

That's one way to look at it. Another is that a lab leak makes the government seem much more culpable, since they would presumably have more direct control over the activities of government funded scientists. In any case, I think world governments have been reluctant to endorse theories that place more blame on the Chinese government for fear of forcing them into a defensive posture and risking a larger confrontation. But there are also those who desire such a confrontation. That makes it hard to trust the motives that any given party might have for promoting one theory or another.

At the end of the day, all that any sane person should care about is preventing another similar pandemic.

lolinder9• 1 year ago

It may be true that other states don't want to antagonize them, and that may also be why we don't see enough emphasis placed on how absurd it is that China has allowed these wet markets to exist so long. Imposing a basic set of health codes is a very fundamental task of any government, and their inability or unwillingness to do so does not reflect well on them.

If anything, one reason why the China hawks may prefer the lab leak theory is because it makes China look more threatening than the alternative: the we-couldn't-enforce-basic-health-codes version of the story doesn't mesh well with the image we have in the West of the CCP as an all-powerful Big Brother that has complete control over every aspect of their citizens' lives. It instead projects a CCP that can barely perform the minimum functions of a state, which is harder to be afraid of.

downrightmike• 1 year ago

Same reason Senators claimed American blood was spilled on American soil in ~1835 in the Mexican state of Tejas, which we now call Texas. Notably, Abraham Lincoln demanded proof, but the senate was too happy to see manifest destiny come about even on lies. Fast forward ~200 years and you're starting to hear the same things.

fragmede• 1 year ago

Lax health codes mean the virus came about through sheer (bad) luck, by a bunch of "dumb hicks". The US doesn't have to do anything to compete with a bunch of yokels with bad hygiene. We have those in the US too. But if it came from a lab, using advanced technology that the west doesn't have, China goes from being more than where shitty knockoffs come from, to a much scarier boogieman that requires us to give more money to the military-industrial complex.

lolinder9• 1 year ago

Yeah, I think this hits closer to home: the zoonotic origins story makes the Chinese government look incompetent. They actually are much less competent than Western popular culture likes to paint them, but emphasizing that doesn't provide a very effective external threat to rally the masses against.

A lab leak plays into the stereotypical German or Russian mad scientist trope of the 20th century: the incredibly powerful supervillain who in their hubris (nearly) destroys the world.

FeteCommuniste• 1 year ago

Because a lab leak could imply that China had a direct, active role in cultivating or engineering the virus, as opposed to the “mere” disastrous negligence entailed by the wet market theory.

Fomite16• 1 year ago

That this is someone's fault and they can be punished is, I think, the reason people want it to be true. Rather than the world is a terrifying place that sometimes kills millions.

persedes• 1 year ago

Or less nefarious: that they mishandled an extracted virus /someone got bitten by a bat in the lab and was allowed to leave without quarantine.

ioulaum8• 1 year ago

If it could be blamed on "China", it could as well be blamed on "the US" for having also funded that lab, and likely having been responsible for what security measures it would have.

And more realistically, if it was a lab leak, it was likely some lab technician being careless, or some thing breaking and whoever was responsible, not fixing it quickly enough.

Sporktacular• 1 year ago

No it wouldn't imply that at all. The same animals ending up in wet markets could have ended up in labs. Nothing to imply it was engineered, which is a whole other level of culpability. Sucks that so many people are itching to make this leap.

Digory2• 1 year ago

Right. It fits well with the Anglosphere’s concept of compensible negligence.

China had a duty to run the lab safely, it breached that duty, and so China is responsible for the harms and losses caused by its negligence.

Missouri actually filed suit against China, and it is set to go to trial next week. It will be interesting to watch. If Missouri were to get a judgement for all the costs created by the virus, it could theoretically collect Chinese-owned assets in the US.

And, the news has been full of stories about one particular Chinese asset the US would like to have held in the US: TikTok.

miguelazo3• 1 year ago

Except for the part they left out which is that the lab was being funded by the US government and its GoF research directed by a US nonprofit entity with strong ties to the NIH.

throwaway2905• 1 year ago

lab leak could imply that China had a direct, active role in cultivating or engineering the virus, as opposed to the “mere” disastrous negligence entailed by the wet market theory

This was literally outsourced US DoD research...

Fomite16• 1 year ago

I wrote this awhile ago on a previous thread about this:

To my mind, there are a few reasons why people are so fixated on the lab leak thing

1) It makes the pandemic deterministic (bad lab security means an outbreak) instead of stochastic (wildlife spillover). That is, to be frank, even as an epidemiologist who is very skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis, a comforting thought.

2) It's a popular topic in the Substack/Medium set, because it moves the pandemic back into their wheelhouse of expertise, international relations, policy, etc. It becomes a human problem with human solutions.

3) It appeals to the contrarian mindset.

4) All of the lab leak papers at least attempt to show definitive proof. In contrast, actually finding the source of spillover events is the work of decades (and isn't always or even often successful). "Science is slow and uncertain" is a less compelling narrative.

dehrmann3• 1 year ago

There's a greater burden of proof for spillover when there just happens to be a lab doing virus research near the epicenter of the outbreak.

Glyptodon4• 1 year ago

Even in the wildlife spillover case don't you still blame it on people doing business with bat carcasses or was there some kind of obviously fine as an animal product intermediary between the bats and the people?

morepedantic24• 1 year ago

Edit: name checks out.

It makes the pandemic deterministic

I don't understand why determinism comforts you, but you do you. Unfortunately, a lab leak is totally stochastic, and I hope this revelation doesn't keep you up at night.

It's a popular topic ... because it moves the pandemic back into ... policy, etc. It becomes a human problem with human solutions.

Zoonosis is a wet market hypothesis, not a random encounter. China failed, and continues to fail, to ban or regulate the wet markets to solve the problem. Zoonosis is clearly policy and human problem.

It appeals to the contrarian mindset.

The lab leak appeals to anyone who groks statistics. Wet market zoonosis could happen at any one of 40,000 Chinese wet markets. But a lab leak could only happen at one of ~2 Chinese laboratories. Zoonosis happens more overall, but lab leaks are more probable in the direct vicinity of the lab specializing in collecting and studying samples of this exact family of viruses.

finding the source of spillover events is the work of decades

The reservoirs for both SARS and MERS were found quickly with much less interest. The probability of the lab leak increases every day that we don't the reservoir. Worse, at this point even finding a reservoir isn't definitive, because we would need to establish that the reservoir predates the pandemic, and that it didn't spillover into the animal population from humans.

Given all publicly available information, the lab leak is far more likely. The uncertainty is very high, because China destroyed or concealed the data. Unless someone's memoirs leak it in 50 years, it's unlikely that we'll ever know.

KPGv2• 1 year ago

I don't think it's an attack on China. It's a political attack on Fauci, who became public enemy #1 for conservatives early in the pandemic. They've been looking for reasons to blame him (oh, who just incidentally helped protect those dirty gay people during the AIDS crisis), and now our President has stripped him of security detail and announced he wouldn't feel responsible if something bad happened to him.

Izkata3• 1 year ago

The lab in question is BSL-2* while viruses like this are supposed to be researched in BSL-3*. If it was a lab leak, they were using insufficient safety protocols to keep the virus contained. It also implies they're probably still doing the same for much worse viruses.

*I think these were the levels, I'm going from memory.

AlotOfReading• 1 year ago

There are two campuses in Wuhan. One has BSL-3 facilities, the other BSL-4. Not all work is done at the highest BSL available for cost and practicality reasons though. American rules were that research on agents in the same classification as COVID is BSL-3, but routine diagnostic work is only BSL-2. Chinese researchers classified both at BSL-2.

renewiltord• 1 year ago

Lab leaks admit the possibility that China was developing a bioweapon. If you're a Chinahawk, this is something you'd be concerned about.

indoordin0saur6• 1 year ago

It's the difference between burning down the house because you were playing with fire indoors vs burning down the house because some cheaply bought electric appliance malfunctioned.

vcdimension3• 1 year ago

rootclaim gave the lab leak theory an 87% probability using Bayesian analysis back in 2020: https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV...

defrost3• 1 year ago

Which means what?

"Rootclaim" then bet $100,000 on being able to back that claim in a independant structured 18 hour long debate of their own devising .. and lost the $100,000.

The Rootclaim assessment was worthless.

See: https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses...

Or watch the entire 18 hour debate in which that claim was shredded.

Given your user profile about: it's easy to see why you might give weight to Saar Wilf's Rootclaim project .. championing this particular result while ignoring its full history seems professionally questionable.

vcdimension3• 1 year ago

Which means this; it gives further weight to the lab leak theory, and shows the reasoning behind it.

I don't have time to watch the 3hr debate or read all of that article (which makes some misrepresentative statements, and like your response, is rather venomous in tone), but here is the response from rootclaim about the debate outcome: https://blog.rootclaim.com/covid-origins-debate-response-to-...

I also know from experience that scientists, and people in general, are often not well trained in the kind of probabilistic reasoning that is required for combining and weighing up multiple sources of evidence.

jdietrich2• 1 year ago

If we actually care about public health, we should act as if both the lab leak and zoonosis theories are correct. We should take laboratory biosecurity, wet markets, the bush meat trade and intensive livestock management equally seriously as threats. We should do this because we have no idea where the next pandemic - and there will be a next pandemic - will come from.

It seems fairly clear to me that a lot of people are much more concerned about finding someone to blame for the last pandemic than about preparing for or preventing the next pandemic.

npunt• 1 year ago

Agree, that's the only sane way to approach things. I worry that it's already relatively rare for people to realize that problems in general can be multi-causal, let alone that we can approach problems as probabilistically multi-causal. Placing blame, on the other hand, is something everyone understands.

amarant• 1 year ago

The blame game is kind of like a variation of a bikeshed discussion, except it might lead to war.

War happens to be my least favourite colour for a bikeshed...

jtc331• 1 year ago

The problem is that the two theories can have competing indications as to how to prepare. Specifically: should we do gain of function research, or is that foolish — depends on how you read what happened in 2020.

Retric7• 1 year ago

The actual future risks don’t change based on which specific origin happened.

The correct response is likely to spend significantly more on doing actual research and a great deal on making sure everyone is well contained. It’s likely a good idea to locate such labs outside of highly populated areas as part of a defense in depth strategy.

zmgsabst3• 1 year ago

I’ve seen no compelling evidence gain of function has benefited us in any pandemic — or even a theoretical justification.

How, precisely, do you believe that gain of function will benefit us the next pandemic?

Edit:

Swap “aid” to “benefit us” for hopefully better clarity.

jdietrich2• 1 year ago

The question of whether we should do gain-of-function research is a fairly complex cost/benefit analysis. The precise cause of the 2019 pandemic is only a very minor variable in that analysis, because that specific outcome doesn't change the underlying probability of a lab leak. More to the point, do we realistically believe that everyone will stop doing it, even if there's a credible international moratorium? If not, then we need to plan accordingly.

theptip2• 1 year ago

I think the parent is arguing that lab leak is plausible, even if it wasn’t certainly the cause. GoF is foolish if you think the lab leak was remotely plausible.

Most folks had no idea about the sort of GoF being done, and the attitude of many researchers (highly dismissive of risks) should worry us a lot.

We should also be more worried about zoonotic transmission too, and press harder to ban wet markets.

I don't think these conclusions compete, that’s the point; the actual fact of the matter regarding origins doesn’t much affect the weight of the damning evidence.

DiogenesKynikos19• 1 year ago

Nobody in this thread seems to know what gain of function means. It's a very broad term covering a large percentage of all virology research. If you ban it, you might as well say that we don't want to do any research into understanding viruses from now on.

When you compare the massive risks of spillover from animal populations, which have millions of interactions with humans every minute of every day, with the risks from a small number of highly contained biology labs, the ratio between the two risks is so enormous that this entire discussion is absurd.

drak0n1c• 1 year ago

At the very least, we hopefully learned not to subsidize and encourage gain of function research at labs that were already known pre-Covid to have poor hygiene and containment practices.

jjk166• 1 year ago

Gain of function research in a lab you can't (and more damningly won't) prove had adequate precautions is bad regardless of the source of Covid or the utility of the research. We should be taking it as a wake up call to make sure standards are appropriate and the institutions to make sure those standards are met are strong.

hibikir• 1 year ago

If this wasn't a political problem, but me and my teammates dealing with the aftermath of an incident that cost the company serious money, that's how we'd approach it. But we are technicians trying to prevent a problem, with incentives very well aligned with the company.

Government committees just don't have anywhere near this level of goal alignment, and it's not as if there is a lot of media whose best interests aligns with prevention either. You aren't getting a lot of information in the future out of a group of people you badmouthed a year ago.

tw04• 1 year ago

Well, assuming you’re part of the “we” that resides in the US, I think we’ve made it pretty clear we’re aren’t taking any of it seriously. Pulling out of the WHO is akin to burying our heads in the sand.

Sure, technically it “isn’t our problem” when some new disease breaks out in another country. But when (not if) it is eventually our problem, it’ll be a very big problem.

petre4• 1 year ago

It seems fairly clear to me that a lot of people are much more concerned about finding someone to blame for the last pandemic than about preparing for or preventing the next pandemic.

That's why avian flu was allowed ro spread to cows in 16 states.

Fomite16• 1 year ago

My present take: As an infectious disease epidemiologist whose expertise lies in the dynamics of infections a week or so after an initial spillover event, I am much more cautious with my opinions on the lab leak hypothesis than a lot of people who took a single biology class as a distribution requirement in undergrad.

morepedantic24• 1 year ago

Are you equally cautious with your opinions on zoonosis?

The problem is that huge swathes of the medical community politicized the pandemic for a specific political purpose, especially in the USA. For example, the Moderna vaccine trials were delayed 2 weeks to change the protocol to appease a political activist in the medical community accusing Trump of trying to ram an unsafe vaccine through. Naturally the trial results were available immediately after the election.

I have a question for you: do you trust the provenance, integrity, and completeness of data from the earlier stages of the outbreak in Wuhan?

Fomite16• 1 year ago

"I have a question for you: do you trust the provenance, integrity, and completeness of data from the earlier stages of the outbreak in Wuhan?"

Nope.

And yes, I am equally cautious with my opinions about it being a zoonotic spillover event. I consider it the more likely of the two explanations, but far from definitive.

mike_hearn6• 1 year ago

Given that epidemiology features no biology whatsoever, being these days purely a matter of playing with statistics, why would you feel qualified to discuss anything related to labs, leaks, or GoF research?

Fomite16• 1 year ago

Both because I hold a microbiology degree as well, and also because that's not actually how epidemiology works either.

Fomite16• 1 year ago

Side note: The CIA can publish this, but the CDC can't put out the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Because that's where we are.

macinjosh3• 1 year ago

I don’t know why it isn’t obvious to everyone how this happened. The lab leak theory is true the outbreak started in force in the market where lab employees sold animals used for testing. They probably didn’t know the animals were infected. Earliest cases were among lab employees. Likely the ones who handled and sold these animals.

djkivi• 1 year ago

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)

- https://naacp.org/articles/spread-disinformation-and-how-we-...

pharos92• 1 year ago

Is it realistic to expect that the people who have surveillance across the whole planet don't know the origins?

willmadden3• 1 year ago

The furin cleavage site in the virus was synthetic. The peak prosperity guy blew the lid off of this in early 2020. I guess that was a "conspiracy theory" though?

https://peakprosperity.com/more-evidence-covid-19-may-not-be...

SV_BubbleTime6• 1 year ago

Find me a conspiracy theory that was found to be true AND was pushed by the left. I haven’t seen one yet.

steele• 1 year ago

Anything to deflect incompetent leadership, I guess

etc-hosts2• 1 year ago

not this again

Beijinger• 1 year ago

It is close to my degree, and it was always the most likely explanation. I am not saying there was purpose, I am not saying there was gain of function, but the connection to the Wuhan lab was obvious.

Don't suspect maliciousness if something can be explained by stupidity!

This was a likely source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8490156/

There was a Chinese master thesis found on the web about this incident that was translated. I can't find any sources now anymore. Maybe it was this one: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/a-chinese-phd-...

Nope. This one: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/masters-thesis-analysis...

There is even a girl that worked in the Wuhan lab and has likely died from this Virus. https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-mail-on-sunday/20210117/2...

gtgvdfc10• 1 year ago

What I never understood about the politicization of the lab leak theory is this:

How is it more racist and Sinophobic to support the lab leak theory vs the wet market one?

The lab leak theory has single individuals messing up.

The wet market theory judges an entire nation's culinary habits.

Of course racism has nothing to do with the Truth of COVID's origins. Im was just always perplexed how the lab leak ended up spun as more "racist" than the wet lab one.

tim3333• 1 year ago

I have puzzled about that too. One issue with it being a lab leak is the Chinese very clearly said it's not a lab leak and tried to cover up, hiding databases, banning access to the lab or the area etc, so they would have been shown to be lying and covering up. Also about half the work at the WIV is military stuff and you're not really supposed to be doing military virus research these days.

gtgvdfc10• 1 year ago

I understand why China would spin it.

I understand why the NIH (who appears to have funded this) would want to spin this.

What was in it for CNN and MSNBC to spin this as racist when, IMHO, blaming COVID19 on culinary habits is far more racist? What was in it for Rachel Maddow to lecture America about the lab leak when she could have more effectively lectured us about financing the whole thing?

lordloki• 1 year ago

Accusations of racism were always a lie used simply to silence those who said it was a lab leak. Our governments failed us, lied to us, censured us, and demonized those who didn't bend the knee.

WarOnPrivacy• 1 year ago

Perhaps reparations by China could be modeled after the reparations by the US, for the devastating 1918 Kansas/USA flu.

Noting that the above statement honors the notion that flu ought to be named after the country of origin.

JohnnyLarue• 1 year ago

And there's absolutely no geopolitical reason for the unassailably truthful three-letter terrorist organization to announce this whatsoever.

Glyptodon4• 1 year ago

That said, "lab leak" still doesn't mean "virus built or engineered by humans for nefarious reasons."

I think the conversation about this has been repeatedly horrendous because it seems like people don't really understand that there are lots of degrees between "virus in research lab" and "genetically engineered bio-weapon." Though obviously there's more embarrassment and culpability on China's side (by most standards) with a poorly controlled lab situation than some rando, basically serf by implication, selling bush meat at a bazaar.

kats• 1 year ago

Can't trust a word out of the New York Times.

mannyv• 1 year ago

No natural reservoir of covid has been found. Ergo it's not natural.

peeters• 1 year ago

I've never seen a polar bear. Ergo they don't exist.

morepedantic24• 1 year ago

Doubt. You appear to be Canadian, and their major zoos all have polar bears. Plus you live in Canada, where polar bears run amok. How do I know you're not looking at a polar bear right now, with their iconic black fur?

jeffreyq2• 1 year ago

Has anybody listened to this podcast episode? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d-eqdRSx7Y&t=1s

Curious to have a discussion on this with anybody knowledgeable on the topic.

knorker• 1 year ago

Obviously I don't know either way. But remember when saying "lab leak" god you banned from social media?

I don't think anybody ever explained why exactly it was "racist" to think that labs can leak in China just like has happened many times all around the world, but wet market theory and the dangers of the Chinese food customs is "not racist".

Does anybody know? There were many people online who more than went along with this. Why was it not the other way around?

Organisations I understand, they have whatever hidden motives. But normal people in the "lab leak theory is racist" mob, they never explained why it wasn't "wet market theory is racist" instead.

gizajob• 1 year ago

ITT: CCP shills.

rdm_blackhole• 1 year ago

I think this is unfortunately a vindication for the conspiracy theorists and a massive failure for all the journalists/TV show hosts of the mainstream media who openly mocked/refused to investigate this possibility back 2020.

The trust in the media was already low before this and I can't imagine that this news will make things better.

ribcage• 1 year ago

Mankind for some reason is blind. Doing CTRL F for the magic word in this Hacker News thread yields no results. There was a political conflict amongst Chinese people which had it's peak at the moment the virus appeared. If not for the virus, that conflict would have ruined China's image for decades and centuries to come.

mordae• 1 year ago

That's just too risky. There is likely still internal opposition to Xi and if true, this would allow for his deposition.

haunter• 1 year ago

There was a political conflict amongst Chinese people which had it's peak at the moment the virus appeared.

Hong Kong protests?

thrwyeyeacc• 1 year ago

https://the-eye.eu/public/Random/wuhan%20coronavirus/

Just for the people who have forgotten what actually happened.

The Wuhan incident was very well documented, it's just that nobody besides the eye kept a record of it and blindly trusted someone else to do it.

Take a look at the reports for yourself, don't trust political bias.

ehehe• 1 year ago

Congratulations US, you speedran all the way to Russia in 5 days.

squarefoot• 1 year ago

The new CIA director speaking about this sensitive subject with no less than Breitbart explains everything.

aucisson_masque2• 1 year ago

If the cia wants to prove something, they do. See the Saddam Hussein weapon of mass destruction that never actually existed.

The fact they can't prove it and have low confidence on this theory means it has absolutely zero credibility.

I see a pattern in the news these last month of warmongering, from the US to China. Maybe I'm wrong but history has shown that with the us, everytime they want to make a war they first got to brainwash their population into that for a few years and then they find any convoluted reason to get in while pretending they're merely defending them or others.

MagicMoonlight• 1 year ago

China wouldn’t have acted the way they did if it was a surprise to them. They were burning bodies and interning people like it was an escaped bioweapon.

sumedh7• 1 year ago

China did not allow any outsiders to check the lab which means they knew it was a lab leak. China has no credibility here.

maxglute9• 1 year ago

US did not allow any outsiders to check out Fort Detrick which means they knew it was a US engineered bioweapon. US has no credibility here.

PRC maintains covid came from outside of PRC, they have no reason to let their labs be scrutinized by outside actors just because Mike Pompeo / CIA made up antiPRC propaganda. That's want weak idiots do. Reality is PRC already waste effort entertaining WHO, until US reciprocates by openning up US biolabs for international access to entertain PRC propaganda, they nor their narrative or people that endorse them have credibility either.

badgersnake• 1 year ago

Because Trump told them to.

tim3333• 1 year ago

It's funny how everyone's opinions have changed now Trump is in power. It just shows how much of what people say is to advance their own interests rather than to say the truth.

Personally I'd guess it was almost certainly a lab leak doing research similar proposed by Ralph Baric (the world's leading researcher on this stuff) as described in his testimony to a congressional committee. His work was proposed for US funding and didn't get it but probably the Chinese conducted much the same research themselves and the research pretty much is to make covid for research purposes. One of the viruses he mentions interest in has an insert amino acid identical to covid.

Re. what the sensible authorities at the time have to say I give you the head of the CDC at the time and the chair of the Lancet covid enquiry:

CDC Redfield: "[The US] contributed to the research that led to it and that's to say is that the US government was very involved in funding the Chinese lab that did this research..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMlhvnMpRU0&t=119s

Lancet, Sachs: "Where do you think Covid came from".. "Covid um the question is which lab and in which way. It almost surely did not come out of nature uh it almost surely came out of uh a deliberate research project ..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS-3QssVPeg&t=6493s

Also amusingly on of the scientists most active in implying anyone suggesting a lab leak was a crank or conspiracy theorist at the time of the outbreak was Kristin Anderson. Later his slack chats were subpoenaed and he was saying in them “The main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” He then got a $7m grant from Fauci totally unrelated to saying the research Fauci funded couldn't have been the problem.

ic_fly2• 1 year ago

CIA favours lab leak theory after a new head is picked. A person that has always been a vocal supporter of the lab leak theory.

No facts changed, just a Trump appointee starting work.

andyjohnson0• 1 year ago

I understand that this is based on an evaluation that started when Biden was president. But, given the timing and the weak confidence level, what's the likelihood that this being made public is just the CIA signalling their alignment with the Trump administration?

Havoc• 1 year ago

Announced days after new administration...what a coincidence!

Dig1t• 1 year ago

It’s not just the CIA

https://oversight.house.gov/release/final-report-covid-selec...

The house oversight committee investigated for 2 years and came to this conclusion. The CIA is falling in line with the rest of the government.

The single most thorough review of the pandemic conducted to date
The FIVE strongest arguments in favor of the “lab leak” theory include:
The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events.
Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels.
Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.
By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced.

randm_sequence• 1 year ago

For anyone who believes that the pandemic was a "natural zoonotic spillover," please read the following sections of the DEFUSE proposal, highlight copied below:

"Synthesis of Chimeric NovelSARS-CoVQS: We will commercially synthesize SARSr- Cov glycoprotein genes, designed for insertion into SHCO14 or WIV16 molecular clone backbones (88% and 97% S-protein identity to epidemic SARS-Urbani. These are BSL-3, not select agents or subject to P3CO (they use bat SARS-CoV backbones which are exempt) and are pathogenic to hACE2 transgenic mice. Different backbone strains increase recovery of viable:viruses identification of barriers for RNA recombination-mediated gene transfer between strains™. Recombinant viruses will be recovered in Vero cels, or in mouse cells over-expressing human, bat or civet ACE2 receptors to support cultivation ofviruses with a weaker RBD-human ACE2 interface. "

In vitro testing of chimeric viruses: All chimeric viruses will be sequence verified and evaluated for. i) ACE2 receptor usage across species in vitro, ii) growth in primary HAE, iii) sensitivity to broadly cross neutralizing human monoclonal antibodies that recognize unique epitopes in the RBD. Should some isolates prove highly resistant to our mAB panel we will evaluate cross neutalzation against a cited number of human SARS-CoV serum samples from the Toronto outbreak. Chimeric viruses that encode novel genes with slower potential will be used to identify SARSr-CoV strains for recovery as full genome length viable viruses.

In vivo pathogenesis: Groups of 10 animals will be infected intranasally with 1.0 x 106 PFU of each vSARSr-CoV, clinical signs (weight loss, respiratory function, mortality, et) followed for 6 days..."

S2 Proteolytic Cleavage and Glycosylation Sites: ... We will analyze all SARS-CoV S gene sequences for appropriately conserved proteolytic cleavage sites in S2 and for the presence of potential furin cleavage sites".... Where clear mismatches occur, WE WILL INTRODUCE APPROPRIATE HUMAN SPECIF CLEAVAGE SITES AND EVALUATE GROWTH POTENTIAL IN VERO CELL AND HAE CULTURES."

I apologize as the copy and paste from a PDF is not ideal. If anyone ever wanted a smoking gun, this is it. The WIV proposed to build SARS-COV2 in 2018/2019. The key point is that when someone proposes this type of research, they often have already done the work and the funding will be used to generate the next result needed for future funding.

Also, one item that the world conveniently forgot was that half of the specialists in this field believed passionately that the only way to prevent the next Pandemic was to create super viruses in the lab (this is in the public record). Given the extensive history of lab leaks and suspected lab leaks, this path is absolute and complete hubris and folly. The same folks who were pushing this agenda (and the DEFUSE proposal is filled with little notes as to how certain rules could be skirted) were the folks who immediately claimed that it was absolutely impossible for this to be a lab leak.

This proposal was shopped to a number of different US agencies in 2019. This means that there were likely dozens of individuals in multiple agencies who reviewed this proposal and said absolutely nothing when the pandemic broke.

th3o6a1d• 1 year ago

There are animal markets all over China. This isn’t just any market. It’s a market that happens to be near a virology lab that studies bat coronaviruses, which had been investigated for questionable safety practices by u.s. inspectors.

ikrenji• 1 year ago

pro lab leak: 1, WIV being 10 miles from the outbreak area 2, WIV housing dozens if not hundreds of strains of coronaviruses 3, poor bio security / laboratory technique amongst WIV staff 4, previous incidents of accidental leaks in Chinese labs

does it conclusively establish that the virus leaked from WIV? no. but i’d say it at least moderately probable…

pathikrit• 1 year ago

My favorite conspiracy theory:

After Tiananmen, the CCP planned many contingents next time something similar happened.

Cue, the [2019 Hong Kong Democracy Protests][1]. The MSS releases Covid19 at the peak of the protests (actually they do pick Wuhan so they can use lab leak as a plausibility if needed) in Sep 2019 and later they use the lockdown laws to completely clamp down the protests.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_Hong_Kong_pr...

CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

Related Stories