> Pangolins and bats don't usually cohabitate, making this somewhat unlikely in nature.
Horseshoe bats are nocturnal animals that roost in caves during the day but sometimes practice perch feeding at night [1]:
> The other strategy is known as perch feeding: Individuals roost on feeding perches and wait for prey to fly past, then fly out to capture it.
Pangolins [2] and palm civets [3] are nocturnal and arboreal. The bat viral RNA sequences come from anal swabs of netted animals so they are primarily gastrointestinal infections. All of these animals are found in the Lancang/Mekong [4] catch basin. Bat guano seems like a good vector for the virus.
Gain-of-function experiments require two viral isolates that recombine during passage. The lab theory assumes that the RNA sequence of the original viral isolates were never shared. I find this scenario unlikely but I am open to changing my mind based on evidence. SARS-1 is evidence of a very similar zoonotic scenario.
Humans that encounter bat guano in this region also seem like a good host for a recombination event.
As far as I'm aware, there is no "official" Chinese position on where and how the virus originated.
Assuming a zoonotic origin in China, it's much more likely that an infected individual from rural Southern China happened to travel to Wuhan and that the seafood market just happened to be the kind of location where such a virus would spread. There is some evidence that there is a degree of immunity to COVID-19 in areas that had SARS-outbreaks. It would therefore be plausible that an initial COVID-19 outbreak in Southern China, the epicenter of SARS1, could have gone unnoticed.
The actual animals sold at the market would then be irrelevant, but there's a narrative that "animal cruelty and human encroachment are to blame for COVID" that is being pushed here.
Given that the Covid 19 outbreak in Italy (and I think France too but I'm not sure) went unnoticed(1) for well over a month this is quite likely...
(1): I probably should use "unidentified", it was noticed that there was a unusual spike in pneumonia related death. It was just not linked to a "new" virus.
From How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus [1]:
> Shi’s team used the antibody test to narrow down the list of locations and bat species to pursue in the quest for genomic clues. After roaming mountainous terrain in most of China’s dozens of provinces, the researchers turned their attention to one spot: Shitou Cave, on the outskirts of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, where they conducted intense sampling during different seasons over five consecutive years.
Distance from Kumming to Wuhan: 1,566 km [2].
Distance from Kumming to Foshan (SARS-1): 1,315 km [3].
I am saying that horseshoe bats, pangolins, palm civets, and humans overlap in Yunnan province and along the Langcang/Mekong. This is the most likely ground zero for a natural recombination event. When and how the first SARS-CoV-2 virus made its way to Wuhan is a separate question; I'd think a human on a train is the most likely vector.
>"start of this pandemic was in 'Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market' in Wuhan."
To:
> It was produced in a Lab.
Is IMHO a fully unreasonable jump of conclusions. Given that analysis in the recent year showed that the virus spread much earlier and initially undetected to the EU it is quite feasible that the epidemic in China started earlier and potential in different places then Wuhan.
Also one big point ignored is both pangolin and bat are captured (sometimes alive) and kept/transported potentially close together. So even if there is a natural place where they would interact there are "unnatural" places created by the nature of the (not just seafood) marked in Wuhan...
I believe that the preferred theory at the moment is that MERS originated in bats and was transmitted to camels before jumping to humans.
Bats can easily come in close contacts with people and cattle even when they are not actively hunted.
You also make a good point that we're discovering very early cases in the EU and US, which show that this all started earlier than the explosion in Wuhan.
I seem to recall reading articles suggesting that the jump to humans may have occurred more than a year before Wuhan.
Given that apparently the virus was outside China in early December already, is it possible that Wuhan was simply the first fast-spreading location rather than the place where the transmission happened? If the virus was in Milan’s sewers in December, it feels that it might as swell have started spreading there first.
Likewise, Italy contained the virus from May to September, then it exploded again. Nothing particularly happened in September, yet by chance it spiked.
Just speculating though, I’d like to hear others’ opinion on this thought.
There is no direct air flight from Italy to Wuhan without going through Amsterdam Schipol or Beijing. There are no Shipping ports in inland Wuhan.
Do you truly believe it is a realistic scenario that a virus this infectious could traverse from northern Italy to Wuhan, Hubei, without creating multiple infection hotspots along the way?
If I am to put on my tinfoil hat this is exactly the sort of disinformation I would expect from CCP propaganda in order to fight US politician memes of the "China Virus".
Assuming that Wuhan is the Orginal point of infection and there not being any previous infections spreading it to some parts of china including (or mainly) Wuhan is the actual extraordinary claim.
> There is no direct ...
Doesn't matter people travel. My sister had during that time a roommate from China from a large city without any direct flights or port or similar if that would have been Wuhan here bringing the virus to Germany before any travel restrictions started would have been well in the area of possibitly (and no joke as far as I remember it actually was Wuhan but I'm not fully sure about and no Virus was transmitted in this case it's just an example that the argument why virus transmittance is unlikely is IMHO not making much sense)
EDIT:
> without creating multiple infection hotspots along the way?
1. There where other hotspots then Wuhan.
2. Detection and reporting of SARS-Cov-2 was initially not very responsive.
3. Look at how SARS-Cov-1 spread.
4. You just need a exchange student from Wuhan to Italy.
> Do you truly believe it is a realistic scenario that a virus this infectious could traverse from northern Italy to Wuhan, Hubei, without creating multiple infection hotspots along the way?
Sure - I'm not quite sure what the issue is.
A single person X becomes infected mid-week in Europe. Monday they leave for China. The next Thursday, they have a business meeting in China where they are symptomatic but have suppressed obvious symptoms with OTC cold medication - who wouldn't if you flew thousands of miles for a meeting?
A dozen people sit in a room in Wuhan with some infected person for several hours.
An "extraordinary claim" is along the lines of UFOs, ghosts and goblins.
There are hundreds of millions of international passengers a year. That an unknown infectious disease could travel from Europe to Asia undetected is hardly an "extraordinary claim".
Pending any hard evidence at all, it can only be described as a hypothesis.
He's not making an extraordinary claim, just a sensible possible conclusion based on established facts. In fact this is the most likely scenario (Wuhan was the first known outbreak but the virus does not originate from there)
Could we also stop dropping "CCP propaganda" everytime someone writes something others disagree with?
I heard from someone that works in the clothing industry that there are strong links between Italy and China, i.e. there are lots of chinese workers in Italy working in the textile industry. When the talk of the first lockdown was spreading, a lot of people got out and went to Italy. I think this is supported by the fact that the first outbreak in Italy occured in a lot of small towns and away from big cities, typical locations for industrial jobs.
Wuhan was the first recognised outbreak but it's most likely that the virus had been circulating in humans for some time before that. This is neither an extraordinary nor controversial claim.
Now, I believe that the claim about Italy was a bit tongue in cheek but at the same time it is reasonable based on facts and should be thought provoking:
We now know that there were cases of Covid-19 in Italy and France, and perhaps US iirc, at the same time, and perhaps before, the outbreak around that market in Wuhan, as early as November. (So, yes the virus did stealthily traverse continents, by the way)
Now, based on that why would the origin necessarily be Wuhan? Logically, the earlier the cases the closer they are from origin.
The origin of infectious diseases is always tricky to establish. After years we're still not sure about the origin of MERS and possibly SARS. It took decades to pinpoint that HIV appeared in the 1920s, almost 60 years before it can to the world's attention.
While it is still most likely that Covid-19 arose in China we do not know where and when.
> We now know that there were cases of Covid-19 in Italy and France, and perhaps US iirc, at the same time, and perhaps before, the outbreak around that market in Wuhan, as early as November. (So, yes the virus did stealthily traverse continents, by the way)
Can you provide a peer-reviewed source that documents this timeline, you claim "established facts" but to my knowledge there aren't any?
> While it is still most likely that Covid-19 arose in China we do not know where and when.
First positive tests in France are end of December [1] [2](meaning the people caught the virus days or a week before that). Strongly suspected cases based on thoracic scanners are up to mid November [3].
In Italy people were contaminated even earlier than that, apparently [4].
These are not wholly surprising because, again it is likely that the virus had been circulating for some time in humans before it exploded and was detected. It is quite contagious but many people do not experience any symptoms or only mild, common symptoms, which IMO makes it relatively easy to go undetected until it goes out out of hands, as it did in Wuhan first.
It's good to ask for proof but then you should ask for proof of all claims, not only the ones you do not like.
> "I would be very cautious," about these findings, said Dr. George Rutherford, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, who was also not a part of the study. The results "have to be confirmed with different antibody tests," that look for the prevalence of antibodies that target other parts of the coronavirus.
> His previous experience has shown that such antibody tests for the coronavirus' RBD can create a lot of false positives, Rutherford told Live Science. And because this is "such an unexpected finding," it should be confirmed with other antibody tests such as those that look for antibodies against another one of the coronavirus' proteins, an outer coat called a "nucleocapsid," which is also unique to the novel coronavirus, he said.
> Still, "it's not totally outside the realm of possibility," that the virus circulated in Italy earlier than thought. because there is a lot of travel back and forth between China and Italy, especially northern Italy, he said. But considering the earliest COVID-19 case in Wuhan was reported to be in November, "it really gives me pause to say let's really make sure we got this right before we try and explain it," Rutherford said. [0]
> I'm hoping that you are as cautious about pangolin and secret lab stories
Seems like you are trying to ridicule me just because you disagree with me.
'Wuhan Institute of Virology' (China's only BSL4 lab) is less than 14km from 'Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market'.
The 'Wuhan Centre for Disease Prevention & Control' is 1.4 km from the 'Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market'.
Both are public institutions with published research on both virus classification and gain of function experiments.
This is circunstancial evidence. Unlike the previous origin investigation for SARS-Cov1, there has been little transparence or effort to investigate the origin of SARS-Cov2.
Let's agree to disagree. If indeed the origin is a Southern China zoonotic event, which then happened to have a superspreader event in Wuhan, then it is in the interest of the Chinese government to investigate this and disclose this evidence to dissolve international doubts and concerns.
> Could we also stop dropping "CCP propaganda" everytime someone writes something others disagree with?
No, we can't drop "CCP propaganda" fact. Man, they put DOCTORS doing their job to prisons ! Actually we shoud be more concerned about such idiocy ! Where is logic in that ?
Looks more like mentality from few hundreds years ago reborn in autocratic country. Communists usually give orders for achievements :>
But yes, as you pointed, not everything is "CCP propaganda" and such meme is often trown in unresponsible way.
And yes, pointing earlier cases in Europe is good to know too. But in Europe there was cases (x-rays photos, can't find info about dead cases) in September / November but in China there was EPIDEMY in early November. Still, all that is not a proof about origin of patient zero. And Wuhan could be it.
Codogno, the original Italian hotspot, has no airport. How do you explain that? The virus can travel without direct flights and, because you’re not infectious for a few days, you can meet plenty of people in the meanwhile without infecting them.
Straight from the wikipedia entry on the Huanan market:
"In May 2020, George Gao, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said animal samples collected from the seafood market had tested negative for the virus, indicating that the market was the site of an early superspreading event, but it was not the site of the initial outbreak.[43]"
I can't find references now but the idea that the virus started in Wuhan roughly early November and that the Huanan market was just a notable superspreading event which brought attention to the virus is pretty accepted in scientific circles. The virus was too well adpated to humans initially and has not evolved significantly since its first detection then (D614G and the new variants aside).
The animals that carried the virus in the Huanan market were probably just an infected human, and not particularly close to the origin case.
It was just detected there because it was a superspreading event that happened in the backyard of the nearby lab.
The most plausible explanation I've heard as an origin is that it jumped from bat to human in the process of bat guano farming. This would have obviously happened in the rural area outside of Wuhan, but the virus found its way through spreading events into the higher density city, where it was eventually detected. Cryptic spread would have been happening for at least a month or more as it adapted to humans.
The furin cleavage site may also be the result of a recombination event between two coronaviruses (coronaviruses don't just mutation and reassortment like influenza, they also recombine and dual infection with two coronaviruses in an animal or human can shuffle parts of genes):
So if you just assume that trajectory from bat guano farming to city center, along with a missing link to provide the furin cleavage site, then the title articles analysis really falls apart. Not surprising that the bats are far away, the furin cleavage site may be not surprising if we manage to find a similar virus in nature, and mostly what is left is that it wasn't detected until it was right on the doorstep of the virology lab (where the virus found the people who were likely to set off the alarm about it) and the rest some mild cover-your-ass at the lab would be entirely expected.
But that means that there's some bats with answers somewhere outside of Wuhan but China has been stalling efforts to go find them.
SARS-CoV-2 itself is not a recombinant of any sarbecoviruses detected to date, and its receptor-binding motif, important for specificity to human ACE2 receptors, appears to be an ancestral trait shared with bat viruses and not one acquired recently via recombination.
Exactly, "detected to date". The animal surveillance programs were inadequate at the time of the outbreak and have since been defunded and shutdown altogether.
Whenever this topic comes up, the discussion seems to consist largely of _extremely_ strong opinions against the perfectly plausible hypothesis (don't forget, the evidence of zoonotic origin is equally thin on the ground).
My question is, why? What does it matter whether the virus originated from a lab or from a wet market - it isn't any more dangerous if it came from a lab, nor does knowing the origin really help dealing with this crisis at all.
It is certainly interesting to know where it did originate, and that knowledge could inform a debate on the future of (respectively) wet markets and animal husbandry practices, or BSL facilities, but these don't strike me as particularly emotionally charged topics, and in any case the posts I'm referring to don't mention these debates...
Anybody care to explain why you would respond so strongly to claims of lab origin?
In the US, it's because this claim, or rejection of it, is strongly tied to political identity. Because the US is highly polarized right now, once political identity comes into play, you've left the realm of rationality and entered the realm of tribalism.
In China too. With the foreign ministry spokespersons repeatedly making US bioweapon suggestions, believing otherwise is more political than just following the rest of weibo.
The media is more than happy to report on early detections out of China, and let suggestions that the vape lung (now linked to vit. E cutting agent) is COVID run free.
We left the realm of rationality long ago, when the government did a tribalism on behalf of all of us.
(Nationalism is a hell of a drug. The govt still funds crackpots to argue against Chinese people originating in africa, to call greco-roman and egyptian history faked, and don't even get me started on their insistence on 5k years.)
> The govt still funds crackpots to argue against Chinese people originating in africa, to call greco-roman and egyptian history faked, and don't even get me started on their insistence on 5k years
Wait what? The Chinese government does this? Who do they claim faked Greco-Roman and Egyptian history, and to what end? And what is 5k years supposed to be? The age of the earth or something?
Chinese propaganda claims 5000 years of unbroken history. One Han people. One language etc. They conveniently ignore when China was ruled by ethnic Khitan-Jurchen-Manchus. The Chinese literary classic On the Water Margin aka All Men Are Brothers is about local heroes of the Song rising up against a corrupt government which was completely ineffective against the Liao.
This is BS. They perfectly acknowledge that some imperial dynasties were not Han and have no problem with it. These 'foreign' dynasties adopted Han culture. Certainly, Chinese culture did not turn Mongol when the Emperor was an ethnic Mongol.
"'Sinicization' - the thesis that all of the non-Han peoples who have entered the Chinese realm have eventually been assimilated into the Chinese culture--is a twentieth-century Han nationalist interpretation of China's past."
Read up on the now closed Confucian Institutes that were operating in the USA and Europe. [1]
"The online and print cultural materials of the Confucius Institute present a vision of
China with a national history of thousands of years but while these materials note that other
ethnicities might rule China the history presented is undoubtedly Han. This can be seen in the
association of historical figures like the Yellow Emperor and Liu Bang with the Han identity,
while the ethnic identity of non-Han historical figures is presented ambiguously, the ethnic
identity of Han historical figures is always clear. Nearly every single historical figure mentioned
in the cultural materials was Han Chinese and that fact was prominent in the biography. It is
often either included at the beginning of the article next to place of birth, or at the end of the
article under a specific section of nationality" [2]
So it is a racist thing? Otherwise I still don’t get the “advantage” or who gains by this spreading it. The CP as heir to the history? Is it about legitimacy?
The CCP gains an advantage. It is a long complicated political story and it touches upon the sore points that the CCP is extremely sensitive to: Tibet, Taiwan etc. I am not a China hater but I know what it is doing.
In the other link I posted from professor Evelyn Rawski of U of Pittsburg, she explained that the last Chinese dynasty was the Qing who were ethnically Manchu. The Qing saw themselves as ruling five peoples, of which China was the most important. The Qing ruled China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Uighurs, and Tibet. When the Qing collapsed, Chinese nationalists, although they detested the Qing who were foreign conquerors, wanted to lay claim to all the territory the Qing ruled. I would do the same thing. But they used this strange construction of "Han Nationalism" and claimed that all the territory was really Han because the Qing was really Han. This is where the 5000 years of unbroken history propaganda comes from. Professor Rawski explains if you read the official Qing records which is in written in Manchu, the Qing did not "sinicize" or adopt Han culture. The Chinese liked to think they did but that is simply not true.
An interesting side note is that this bizarre cultural legitimacy argument cuts both ways. A few years ago, a Korean professor made the argument if you follow this line of thinking... you can argue that China really belongs to Korea. The founder of the Liao dynasty which once ruled Northern China was ethnically Khitan or "Qi Dan" in mandarin. The Khitan lands bordered Korea. There is some obscure record that conflates or can be construed that Yelu Abaoji is Korean... therefore China is really Korean. Bizarre. I don't remember the Korean professor's name but it caused a ruckus at the time.
Not sure about that one but there's similar stuff in the world of archeology (https://www.nature.com/news/how-china-is-rewriting-the-book-...) , a political motivation to say that humans evolved in China and not Africa. It's a shame when there's so much potential for genuinely exciting finds to come out of the country.
> And what is 5k years supposed to be? The age of the earth or something?
I believe it's the claim that China has 5,000 years of written history. I'm not knowledgeable on this however, so this is a vague memory semi-confirmed by a cursory internet search.
I’ve never heard a credible source state 5000 years of written history, just 5000 years of history, where the inference is that the earlier parts were orally transmitted.
This is on par with election fraud. No matter if there is any, one side will downplay while the other screams it’s the tip of the iceberg. Both sides know presidential elections are a zero-sum game and will do whatever it takes to win.
Again, I don’t think there was that much, let alone enough to swing the election, but we can’t even discuss any of it honestly.
We can't discuss it because they side that claims it exists is solely doing so to overturn the election. Don't try to tiptoe the fact that it's their ulterior motives which is why they are met with a tsunami of eye-rolling.
>The prior probability of voter fraud is so low that it demands really incredible evidence.
The prior probability of voter fraud is the number of elections in which actors have engaged in fraud / the total number of elections that taken place. Consider any of the countless elections that have taken place around the world and throughout history. Do you believe that the number of them in which actors engaged in fraud is so low as to be incredible, when you think about countries and time periods that are not the country and time period you presently live in? Peruvian elections in 1960. Scottish elections in 1990. Zimbabwe in 1994. I'm just naming random countries/times here. What percentage of these do you think involved fraud? That's what the prior probability is.
I don't know what GP is trying to say, but the problem was that they never provided any actual evidence. Everything was presented on social media was made of videos that might have looked suspicious to someone not familiar with the process, but easily were debunked. For similar reason no viable evidence was provided to courts.
Frankly, I would be glad if we would actually ban electronic voting machines, and use paper ballots. There were some fishy things happening in states[1] that didn't get as much attention. It's much harder to commit fraud on larger scale with paper ballots, since everyone knows how they work and it is much harder to hide things.
Because close to nobody is ever charged with voter fraud and multiple investigations after 2016 launched by folks at the federal level looking for it, failed to turn up cases. In the recent election, the Trump team has repeatedly alleged voter fraud but not presented any evidence of such in a courtroom.
It's a geopolitical matter. China doesn't want to be seen as the culprit. It goes against its global ambition.
Internally they are heavily pushing the preposterous claim that the virus is of foreign origin, possibly imported via frozen food.
Objectively lab origin seems likely. The virus started in the city housing the only P4 laboratory in China. This laboratory is known for its lax security (see the 2018 American embassy cables and the declarations of multiple sources in France who participated in its construction) and research on bat coronavirus transmission to humans were conducted there. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder if an accident didn't happen especially considering that we still can't find the missing link which would firmly establish a zoonotic origin.
Of course, as China is extremely uncooperative on this question, we will probably never know.
And there is also a difference between a natural virus brought for analyses into a Lab and an accident happens and a lab created virus and a lab created virus released intentionally.
But without question their internal propaganda is about it is super questionable.
> Why do these distinctions matter? If we find more concrete evidence of a “spill-over” event with SARS-CoV-2 passing directly from bat to human, then efforts to understand and manage the bat–human interface need to be significantly strengthened. But if SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab to cause the pandemic, it will become critical to understand the chain of events and prevent this from happening again.
Does it still matter that much once we have a series of effective vaccines ?
It seems the crux of the argument is to better react in the short term, but it looks to my untrained eyes that we already passed that level of investigation if we have effective means to prevent infection.
I also guess we’d still need to explore all other tracks anyway (we can’t just focus on lab spills for instance, if that was the root cause, and stop to care about the bat/human interface, nor should it be assumed that any other path will be less important in the future)
I would say it matters for future considerations. Gain of function research is happening in many places. Leaks can happen. An unrelated virus could cause another pandemic if there are flaws that go unaddressed. The probability of a pandemic occurring doesn't decrease because this one has occurred, as they are independent events. For all we know, another pandemic could be brewing and we're so occupied with COVID19 that we're not observing it.
Those other viruses could as well come from bats or be leaked. I’m arguing that precise knowledge of what happened a year ago might not be a priority to help us deal with what happens in the real world now.
Basically I see it as preparing to win the last war.
it isn't any more dangerous if it came from a lab, nor does knowing the origin really help dealing with this crisis at all.
Viruses used for gain of function research are selected for high rates of mutation and adaption. If we had known this from day one we would likely have made several changes to how to protect against it in the long term, especially with regards to cross-species transmission.
Because it would make China liable, and for the majority of individuals, their stance on China as a good actor in global matters is now linked to their American political allegiance. It is hard for many folks to reconcile both.
Not really, the Wuhan lab received funding for the studies into gain of function for bat coronaviruses from the NIH (via EcoHealth Alliance). The incentive to bury the origin (if this was the origin) would be high for the US and China both.
...and Ralph Baric (UNC) and Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance) both:
Will we ever learn the truth about China and the pandemic?
Two inquiries are 'cloaked in secrecy'
WHO lets Beijing vet investigators and it
appoints British scientist with links to Wuhan
For what it's worth China is seen as a threat by many people in Western countries irrespective of political allegiance... the nationalist/right wing doesn't like Chinese price dumping and espionage, the left wing is pissed about China's atrocious human rights and environmental track record.
Are you suggesting that people should not be able to hunt for wild foods? Or that they shouldn’t be able to sell what they catch or kill? Or something else?
China has never banned wet markets. A wet market is just a place that sells fresh meat or vegetables. The butcher who supplies your favorite restaurant is a wet market. The fruit & veg stand where you buy organic heirloom tomatoes is a wet market. Every farmer's market is a wet market.
"Wet market" just distinguishes from "dry market" where durable goods like electronics are sold.
China never banned wet markets, which makes about as much sense as saying someone has "banned supermarkets". They banned the sale of certain items at wet markets.
(I live in Asia and shop at a wet market multiple times a week.)
People use wet market synonymously with 'exotic wildlife market' that sell living caged animals in outdoor unsanitary conditions. Often cages stacked on top of each other.
Factory farming of eg, chickens and pigs has previously led to avian and swine flu outbreaks, so there's strict monitoring of viruses around those farm monocultures. But in the wet markets of Asia there's often multiple species together that would rarely encounter each other in the wild.
Traditional Chinese Medicine uses bat feces, pangolin scales and other exotic products, with an emphasis on live animals. Bats and pangolins are a vector for virus and cross-species virus transmission.
Moving wet markets indoors into sanitary conditions, and banning the sale of live produce would go a long way to preventing future outbreaks.
But they should be, because research and reasoning indicate that Chinese wet-markets are uniquely dangerous in their propensity to create, or spread, novel viruses.
See "Infectious diseases emerging from Chinese wet-markets: zoonotic origins of severe respiratory viral infections" [2006]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16940861/
Banned by who? Looking at the relative impact of the virus it seems the US is harder hit. Although the virus appears to be a tragic accident, a weakened US allows other nations to make advances.
That being said, I tend to agree with your assertion.
There are similar markets in the rest of the word so, no.
There is also no need to ban such markets, but to further regulate what and how things can be sold is reasonable.
One problem often ignored is that because of differences in general wealth it's e.g. not always/every where feasible to require selling only pre-processed (cut apart) meat (and other body parts) as the necessary fridge infrastructure doesn't exist and would be to expansive.
I'm also curious about that. HN has very strong opinions about China especially about the Xinjiang re-education camps and/or the organ harvesting in China YET for some reason can't believe that the same country would lab make a virus like this.
Bret Weinstein, who has a Ph.D in biology, claims it's highly likely that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was man-made, rather than naturally occurring. So it's definitely possible it was a test that went wrong (and let's be honest, the Chinese government has a less than stellar safety record).
specifically he is a specialist in bat biology, but perhaps more relevantly he had a very interesting conversation with a russian virologist who also thinks this is the case:
I don’t know if it’s just me, but when I read three or four people on a thread all agreeing with each other, I become suspicious. It doesn’t seem how normal conversations go.
It probably just is my quirk, does anyone else share this gut feeling?
The reason is that if you have a less widely accepted opinion and someone states it and you can add additional info to it which makes it "stronger" you are likely to do so.
Which still doesn't mean I believe it. As far as I know the scientific majority believe is that the virus doesn't show any indication of potential human manipulation and is very unlikely to be human made assuming China isn't years ahead wrt. virus manipulation (which doesn't mean it doesn't escaped from a lab, btw.).
But as I'm not to much involved in this I would need hours to collect sources and trace them back to their original source to provide any useful links. So no credibility to this post.
> evidence of zoonotic origin is equally thin on the ground
What are you talking about? Zoonotic origin is the source of the majority of viruses:
> Approximately 60% of the known infectious diseases and 75% of the new emerging or re-emerging diseases infecting humans came from animals. SARS-CoV-2 is the latest addition to the seven coronaviruses found in humans, and experts said that all of these viruses either came from bats, mice, or domestic animals.
> More so, bats are the source of the Ebola virus, rabies, Nipah ad Hendra virus infections, Marburg virus disease, and influenza A virus.
> An estimated 60% of known infectious diseases and up to 75% of new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic in origin (1,2). Globally, infectious diseases account for 15.8% of all deaths and 43.7% of deaths in low-resource countries (3,4). It is estimated that zoonoses are responsible for 2.5 billion cases of human illness and 2.7 million human deaths worldwide each year (5).
> What are you talking about? Zoonotic origin is the source of the majority of viruses:
This makes the hypothesis very plausible as a starting point, but afaik there is no confirmed reservoir for SARS-CoV-2, the pangolin and bat hypothesis have not been confirmed.
One can conclude you believe it purely coincidental that the Wuhan Institute of Virolgy specialized in research on bat coronaviruses?
A paper in the lancet early in the year reported that the Wuhan Seafood market not only did not sell bats, but that many of the early patients reported never visiting the market.
At this point, it may be too late to ever discover the true origin of the virus.
The Wuhan lab being specialized in bat viruses means very little.
For one thing, this is a classic example of correlation != causation. Let’s say you had a shark attack on some beach and there was a team researching shark attack located right in that area. Would you then conclude that the team engineered the shark attack? The simple reality is that the most likely reason the team studying shark attacks is located in that region is simply because that region either has a history of shark attacks or even if it doesn’t have a history, is likely to have shark attacks. That’s why a team studying shark attacks would decide to locate themselves there.
The same is true here. Wuhan hosts a bat virology research institute because bat viruses are a higher risk here than in most places.
The other factor is that there is probably an infinite number of things that could look suspicious if there is such a disaster. It could be the presence of a bat focused research institute. It could be a conference that was held out there in the past few months. It could be a scientist from that region predicting a bat virus a few weeks before. It could be a district updating its pandemic protection plans in the weeks before. Etc.
The odds of any specific one of them happening are extremely low and would rightly make one suspicious. But the odds of at least one of the infinite suspicious things being true is almost 100%. And that’s probably all there is to it here. The presence of the bat research is just the 1 of many suspicious things that just happens to be true.
That being said, I think the strongest explanation is that Wuhan was considered a likely source of bat virus infections and that’s why the research was focused there.
The same is true here. Wuhan hosts a bat virology research institute because bat viruses are a higher risk here than in most places.
Except the bat in question doesn't originate in Wuhan. I can't remember the cave exactly but the Wuhan researchers documented the capture thousands of miles from the lab, several years ago.
Everything that I've read suggests the bats from which the virus likely originated can only be found hundreds of kilometers away, so it must have been brought into Wuhan somehow. Either for food, or for research, unless you can propose another explanation?
> The bats carrying CoV ZC45 were originally found in Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which were more than 900 kilometers away from the seafood market. Bats were normally found to live in caves and trees. But the seafood market is in a densely-populated district of Wuhan, a metropolitan of ~15 million people. The probability was very low for the bats to fly to the market. According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the market.
Now, I don't suggest that the virus was created in the lab, or deliberately leaked. But it had to be brought into Wuhan somehow. I just don't consider it dismissible, yet, that an inadvertent leak from the lab could have been the cause. I look forward to all new evidence that may emerge.
If the market was indeed the cause, then in the interests of global safety, wild animal markets of this nature should be prohibited.
The first SARS started out with a traveler - what's to rule out that this time it wasn't spreading asymptomatically in other regions and brought into Wuhan by a traveler?
With asymptomatic transmission the virus likely would have spread unnoticed in the town that was encroaching on bats for a while before someone brought it to Wuhan.
The concentration of early cases in Wuhan, hundreds of kilometers of away, would imply that the asymptomatic traveler(s) only traveled to one city, and didn't infect any other people along the way.
It's possible, but you have to consider the probability of all these events, hence the Bayesian analysis performed here.
Highly unlikely given the distances involved. This would be the equivalent of a disease found in bats native to northern Ohio somehow breaking out down the road from the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, with no other cities or towns showing traces of breakouts prior.
This works for sharks because they are a pre-existing condition. However if the bay with a shark bio lab was an origin of shark mutants, I'd assume the lab engineered them.
It isn't coincidental. The reason the institute is there is because of the high prevalence of bats and bat viruses in the region.
If you want to study bat viruses you can't pick many better places. The researchers involved, including connected US researchers, have been warning about this for years.
Ironically one of these researchers, Daszak, was politically targeted for his connections to this Wuhan lab [1], even though he and Wuhan scientists have been trying to get the attention to this problem for some time.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02473-4
What counts as zoonotic? What counts as engineered?
The lab was publishing research for many years. We know they grew bat viruses in HeLa cells that had been modified to have bat features. One would expect, as a simple matter of evolution, that the viruses would adapt to replicate without reliance on the bat features. It's breeding.
Now, is that zoonotic or engineered? Reasonable people could argue either way. Does the term we use matter so much? William Shakespeare wrote that "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
Either way, that is some seriously hazardous research with an obvious potential for permanent worldwide consequences. Somebody needed to say "NO".
I'm going to go ahead and be the "crazy" person in this thread.
In my "bat-shit insane" worldview, wars (including recent ones such as Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) are fought for power and control over resources and global policies. They are not fought for the reasons given such as deposing dictators because they are dictators.
So in this "insane" worldview, the activities of some states take on a less altruistic character and more a brutal practicality. In this worldview, the operating paradigm is not essentially civil. It is "might makes right".
Now if you go further and put the deployment of nuclear weapons into that context, you will have an even more "extreme" worldview.
So in this paradigm, China may, like other countries before it, seek to improve it's access to resources and general power. And like other countries before it, it would be operating in the "brutally practical" paradigm.
So if one was brave and "crazy" then one could speculate that the Covid-19 event may have been the Hiroshima of the bioweapon age. And even if it wasn't intentional, it could be said to serve that purpose.
Even "crazy" people hope that isn't truly part of the paradigm now. But some of the braver "crazies" might still be able to admit some slight possibility.
It is and always has, since the beginning of conflict. That's the only rule that can't be broken.
>Hiroshima of the bioweapon age.
It's not crazy, it's certainly plausible. I've heard theories that China would suffer the outbreak better because they would be better at locking down the population than the West and therefore suffer less economic damage. Such a thing could destroy the Western economy, particularly the US economy (no safety nets) so China could recover more ground or possibly take the economic lead.
It's the, "lets both take poison but I have built up an immunity," strategy as seen on The Princess Bride. Total lockdowns being the immunity.
Having said that, if it did come from a lab, I suspect the lab was designed to counter outbreaks (China has been wearing masks for several years now due to various outbreaks), and an accident happened. Due to the contagiousness during the incubation period and lack of serious symptoms in much of the infected, it had spread and already taken hold of the population before the government could effectively react.
I don't think it's particularly brave to admit there is a chance this came from a lab. I want to see evidence before I change my prior, and it's a very small chance, but I suspect if people framed it in terms of probabilities, we would find more agreement.
However, labeling the perspectives in heroic terms does a disservice to your ability to more accurately predict the future. Most people with crazy theories end up being crackpots.
I didn't say it was brave or heroic to suggest it came from a lab.
But in many social groups such as HN you do have to be kind of brave to suggest it might have been a bioweapon. People who say things like that are often ostracized in many places online. Or at the very least you get called a crackpot.
I believe it is because a lab origin would mean that we, humans, are not just the subject of the arbitrariness of nature. The virus exemplifies that we do not have control over everything. And that is a truth which is hard to accept.
> ... whether the virus originated from a lab or from a wet market
Maybe this is pedantic, but the introduction to humans could have happened in a wet market whether the virus itself originated in a lab (where bats could have escaped or been smuggled out and sold, etc.) or zoonotically.
Indeed, that is a possibility. It's possible both for the virus to be engineered and spread from the wet-market, and to be zoonotic and spread directly from the lab (where a sample was stored). Perhaps the ambiguity there does contribute to some of the more extreme opinions and discussion.
Right. One scenario could be: escaped from the lab with a technician who visited the wet market on the way home from work, sparking the first identifiable cluster.
Really? I usually see a lot of plain disagreement based on reasonable lines of thinking, but only a very small proportion of "_extremely_ strong" wording. Are you sure you're not just interpreting a multitude of similar opinions as creating a feeling of that opinion being "extremely strong"? Or that you're not just thinking of the cases where people are responding to the overtly political conspiracy hyperbole that sometimes comes as a wrapper around the proposal?
It's of course just more anecdotal evidence, but in my experience if you dare to mention the possibility of the virus being man-made on Reddit, regardless of the nuance and sources you add, you will get torn to shreds.
This is not just me being salty about reactions to my own comments, I've personally never made a comment on the origin of the covid on Reddit, as I don't feel like I have anything of value to add yet. It's just something I've witnessed over and over again.
Like the GP of this thread I've never understood why such a relatively harmless claim would be so contentious. I've always assumed it was something political that as a non-American I simply don't know the context of. It reminds me of the drama around hydroxychloroquine, where mentioning it on Reddit would get you tarred-and-feathered as a loony Trumpist, even though it seemed like a non-issue to me. Obviously HCQ doesn't really work, but believing it does never seemed to deserve such harsh treatment, which I'm again assuming has roots in a political context I don't fully understand.
the political context is that one Trump / far right angle is to play up Chinas fault and use it as a weapon to discount the USs otherwise poor handling of the outbreak. I have several friends and family who think this way, and are nearly offended at the suggestion that eg Trump making fun of Biden wearing a mask is innapropriate. My general view is i am less concerned with the origins and more concerned with our preparedness for the next outbreak. So while i am not one of those down voters you speak of, i do legitimately fear that if it does turn out to be lab made, the far right will win back ground and we won’t see any meaningful progress towards bolstering out defense against the inevitable next outbreak.
But this (escape from a vial in a lab) isn't a strong claim, or at least no stronger than the alternative (the virus escaped from bat in a a wet-market)- why is there no outcry against the wet market hypothesis?
As explained in the linked page under "starting point", the priors for zoonosis are much higher than lab escape. So lab escape actually is a much stronger claim which requires more evidence. The source of the numbers is under the "more >" link.
Zoonosis is basically the null hypothesis, as this is the mechanism for essentially every single other virus. For this virus to be special and have a special and different origin requires evidence.
That’s untrue. Null hypotheses are indeed typically “defaults” - for example, assuming, prior to any evidence, that X has no correlation with Y in the population. If you want to put it in a Bayesian framework, scientists cannot avoid priors any more than anybody else.
If you are trying to do a bayesian analysis, you need a prior probability. That is, what it would be expected to be, without your analysis. This would be zoonosis.
There is never absence of evidence for zoonosis, because by association all other viruses came to be via zoonosis. So, before you do any further investigation, it's the default. And then, when you do, zoonosis is already the null hypothesis as it was the most likely before you being your further investigation.
It would seem if you have a deep understanding and look at the actual structure of COVID-19 - then there are multiple markers that it was manipulated, if you believe Yuri Deigin knows what he's talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug
The liability of China is the main question here.
If it was released from a lab (and I don't think it was), China is liable to this world pandemic which is a huge thing.
You don't need to force China to pay. Typically what is done is that foreign assets are legally seized, for example, Chinese state assets in the West, if China refuses to pay for damages.
Because people want someone to blame, a villian to hold responsible, for whom they can call out for blood. Bats can't be morally culpable; other humans can be.
If it turns out the party to blame is a geopolitical frenemy, all the better for the people who thirst for vengence.
That seems a bit unfair. I lean towards the “random technician was a little careless one day hypothesis.” I’m not looking to blame anybody. S* Happens as they say.
Having the origin be China is bad enough for the CCP but if it’s caused by some kind of accident sloppiness that can somehow be tied to lack of government regulations or something, they’re looking at serious domestic problems. Even if it did happen the CCP would never admit that and will seek to censor any claims to that effect.
That’s why both conspiracy theories about this being a man-made conspiracy of the USA/China stem from the populist camps (ie Trump and Xi).
Its simple. Humans are addicted to blame thinking. People instinctively expect a just world, where bad things are a consequence of some form of sin from bad people and good things are a consequence of some virtue from good people and all problems are some sinners fault. A large fraction of people can't comprehend a world where bad things happen to them and nothing/no one is to blame. In the absence of reason they invent one. My kid got autism? I bet it was the vaccine shots. School shooting? I bet it was those violent video games. Internet connection went down? I bet it was because I just tried to scan a document (yes this is a real example). Any explanation, no matter how spurious, is more palpable to the human mind than "this is random and out of our control".
Throw some confirmation bias on top of it. The easiest group to blame for bad things is the group you already disliked. Traditionally this means foreigners, other races, and heretics. Blaming China both let's people have their imagined just world and vindicates whatever pre-existing hard-line stance they had on China. It's no secret that a lot of people already had a hard-lie stance on China for unrelated reasons (Eg the trade war).
In conclusion the human logical apparatus is bugged, no one is releasing any patches, and the whole issue is emotional because who you blame is tribal signaling dressed up as rational interest.
They covered it up just like the USSR covered up the Chernobyl nuclear accident, so China is at the very least liable for doing that, which led to a delayed response to the outbreak. Responsible parties were doctor Zhang Yongzhen who published the virus sequence, enabling research on vaccines, Li Wenliang and his colleagues who shared the news about the outbreak and were punished for doing so.
There's a world of difference between "China has some liability for delaying the response" and "China intentionally engineered this in a lab". The reasonable argument of the former is drowned out by emotional blame-thinkers who have adapted the latter.
Entertaining the question is dangerous (I don’t believe it, but for the sake of argument)...
My next question would be “why”? What would be the CCP’s motives to study and modify the virus?
Is it to test whether different changes would make the virus more/less communicable?
Is it to prevent another MERS SARS?
Is it to tailor disease for certain ethnicities? CCP doesn’t appear to have qualms about getting rid of troublesome minority populations, as long as they have some amount of deniability to rely on.
Is it to stress test global medical science and institutions?
I’ll keep an open mind in that if (and it’s a large if) there are respected scientists who present evidence of it being a lab modified virus, then the motive must be understood and fast.
Edit: I will say that China isn’t helping its case by impeding research and publishing of any studies simply trying to establish whether COVID even crossed from local (wild) bat populations; and promoting only theories that claim COVID came from elsewhere.
The CCP have done more than that, they’ve actually punished countries that have requested a fair and transparent investigation into the origin. Consider all of the cover up at the start of the pandemic, the data, the doctors, the journalism... and you see their strategy is not a good response at all. Despite their external insistence that it came from elsewhere (which is of course a possibility).
I don’t really get why even entertaining the question is dangerous, and I can imagine some reasonable justifications for why they’d be doing that kind of research (which I believe is called “Gain of Function”). Understanding what mutations could make a virus more communicable is something that I think would benefit everyone. The dangerous questions really do come in at your last hypothetical, which obviously signals extreme nefarious intent and would require extraordinary evidence.
I'm not convinced anyone has good evidence for this particular claim at this time, but labeling it "batshit crazy" is premature. Michael Osterholm, a respected epidemiologist, explains in his book "Deadliest Enemy" his belief ("no doubt in his mind") that the 1977 Russian flu was released from a bioweapons lab. If it happened before there isn't any reason it couldn't happen now.
EDIT: I misspoke slightly by referring to "bioweapons," so I decided to post the full quote here:
> It turned out that the Soviets were conducting vaccine studies using live, attenuated H1N1 influenza viruses in the very area where the new H1N1 was first detected. During our research, we uncovered a letter from the Soviets to the US government requesting that we share with them the 1976 Fort Dix strain of H1N1 for their vaccine studies. I have little doubt that the appearance of the 1977 H1N1 virus and its rapid global transmission in just several months was the result of a release of the virus in the course of the Soviet vaccine studies. We don’t know exactly what they were doing with the virus. What we do know is that it got out, either accidentally or on purpose, causing a local outbreak in lab workers that subsequently spread around the world. Either way, the powerful lesson here is that if an influenza virus accidentally escapes or is intentionally released, expect that it will spread around the world in short order. This is the proverbial single match being able to light a global forest fire. The possibility for a DURC research study using a potentially dangerous influenza virus should scare the hell out of everyone.
You can't stop batshit crazy. There's no vaccine for it. So to go full head in the sand on a topic because of the crazies is detrimental to intelligent debate in general.
> Is it to tailor disease for certain ethnicities?
The problem with this argument is that Covid is not tailored to avoid people of Chinese ethnicity. Indeed, in the UK, they have been especially vulnerable. Asian countries have done better because they have better policies in place.
It would have vast consequences if this came from a lab. It would be the most deadly example of "science gone wrong" ever: 1.8 million deaths, comparable to the Holocaust, from a single disaster in a single lab. We would seriously have to rethink how we did virus biology. And probably there would be repercussions throughout the whole of science. We might e.g. start to worry much more about the risks of many kinds of scientific experimentation.
Yes, even if this was not developed in a lab, every government in the world is now 100% aware of the potential uses for bioweapons. We should discuss how we would deal with and detect attacks like that in the future.
Furthermore, we should talk about ethical disclosure responsibilities that all countries can agree on for outbreaks going forward as well as what will happen if those rules are not followed. For example, countries around the world should agree that if a country experiences a pandemic outbreak and they don't take certain measures to stop an international spread and disclose updates to the world, they will be liable for the extended outbreak. Allowing a virus like this to spread internationally while covering up details where now more than a million people have died is really grounds for war. Even if the virus was not created in a lab or intentional in any way, any limitation on communication and disclosure can have massive impact.
Seems like a great example of why a bioweapon like this is a terrible idea.
I don't think more disclosures would have helped a lot of the countries. China locked what 10M people in January and lots of the world essentially went "huh". There were reports of welding people into their homes when UK rates were in double digits. We seem to have done little with the already very public information so what would have happened with more?
A bioweapon like coronavirus is a terrible idea in ordinary war, but a massive asset in a last-effort or scorched-earth scenario. I would not be surprised if despite all bans any nuclear (super)power does not have at least three different agents under development.
The origin of the virus is worth knowing. I think the far-right in the US are trying to use "covid was made in a Chinese lab" as a way to build anti-China sentiment and also to dismiss the virus' impact in a way. Their power comes from garnering votes from people who are swayed by boogie men. Keep in mind, the US ruling class is trying to start a new Cold War with China.
Someone mentioned in another comment that some on the left were tying criticism of China with racism, and I'd like to point out that those identity politics only benefit the right. I think this link is mostly coming from some of the US liberal class (financially well off, lives aren't directly affected by election outcomes, centrists, etc.) and not from The Left (socialists, left of Bernie types).
Blame a government, not its people. There is plenty of criticism to throw at China without being racist. But if anyone is claiming that blaming China is racist then they are just as misdirected as the people that use criticism of a county to be racist against its people.
This is the virus that has probably received the most attention by the largest number of global experts in history, or close to.
If there was anything that showed it was in any way artificial it would have been detected by all mainstream experts by now and that information would have been publicised one way or another. Yet these claims and 'evidence' are only reported as coming from fringe people if not likely paid 'agents' (I'm thinking about that HK 'scientist' girl that fled and is in the US now, doing the rounds of all tabloids on the planet).
On the other hand, there are known virii extremely similar to it in the mild (90-95% similar and related).
I don't know if the hypothesis that it may be artificial is plausible to start with, but the facts seem to weigh heavily against it while the interests of some to create this "conspiracy theory" is pretty obvious as are the interests of some to expose China if they had actual evidence.
Wild conjectures with no shred of evidence is not 'discussing'... It has no place in a scientific journal and is pub talk at best or, worse, FUD.
It is perfectly possible and sensible to state that finding the origin of this virus is important, like it is important for all new viral diseases, without engaging in conjectures, especially wild ones.
Judging by the comments on HN many people (even more educated than average) are not able the see through this, are not able to distinguish facts from fiction and baseless conjectures. FUD works and is dangerous.
Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance researching the origins of pandemics, pointed out in April that nearly 3% of the population in China's rural farming regions near wild animals already had antibodies to coronaviruses similar to SARS. "We're finding 1 to 7 million people exposed to these viruses every year in Southeast Asia; that's the pathway. It's just so obvious to all of us working in the field..."
Yeah, I initially thought having a big bio lab in the city where the pandemic started, in a country with a history of managing security in their bio labs poorly, in a lab known for studying sars like coronaviruses, including gain of function research to better bind to human ace2 receptors was just too many coincidences. You have to admit it's believable. But then when you realize how many people in rural China have been infected with sars like viruses, you start to understand that the whole country is like the ideal breeding ground for a bat virus to adapt to spreading in humans.
The whole lab thing is people getting cause and effect mixed up, the lab is there because novel coronaviruses keep happening in that region, but because all people know is that COVID-19 is new (and none of the history) they immediately jump to that the lab specializing in this type of disease at the epicenter is too big of a coincidence to ignore (rather than it being there exactly because it is a common epicenter).
It is like putting an earthquake lab in the middle of a seismically active area, then blaming the lab when an earthquake occurs.
> It is like putting an earthquake lab in the middle of a seismically active area, then blaming the lab when an earthquake occurs.
This is a really bad analogy, though.
Seismic lab doesn't contain self propagating "seismic seed" that has the danger of being let loose and spread across the world, whilst virology lab _regularly_ handle dangerous pathogen.
The major reason people suspecting lab origin is not simply due to the existence of WIV next door. It is due to how the ccp purge information on WIV[1], have the lab taken over by the military[2], and the sentencing/disappearance of numerous civil journalists (陈秋实 Chen Qiushi, 李泽华 Li Zehua, 张展 Zhang Zhan are the ones that come to mind).
In the article there isn't any discussion of cause and effect, it is a probabilistic model. Eg. being near a virus lab makes it more likely it's a lab escape, being 1000km away from the main zoonotic reservoirs (bat populations) in China make it less likely it's of zoonotic origin. This is not to say it's impossible as researchers do travel 1000km from Wuhan to get samples from bats. I'll not comment on the probabilities they assigned to each hypothesis (they may very well be discounting the likelihood of zoonotic origins too heavily) but that is the approach they took.
The point is, the probabilistic model treats it as “very surprising” that the virus originated in a city where there is a virus lab. But that becomes less surprising if you consider that virus labs will often be located in cities at high risk from zoonotic outbreaks.
> The whole lab thing is people getting cause and effect mixed up, the lab is there because novel coronaviruses keep happening in that region...
That is not the case, the outbreak in Wuhan came as a surprise even to the virologists there.
The region where you would expect this to happen is Southern China, where there's bats living close to humans, not Wuhan, where there aren't any bats at all.
The virologists in Wuhan had to travel hundreds of miles to Southern China to collect samples from bats.
The chief virologist heading bat research at the lab also was very surprised and gave an interview describing her efforts to see if it came from her own lab, being the only known store of bat viruses in Wuhan. Thankfully the genomic sequences were too far apart to make a direct jump credible so at the very least there must have been one intermediary carrier regardless. How the intermediary carrier, i.e. the pangolins, got it, either at bat caves in southern china or otherwise is the part still being explored. This may be the sort of thing where 100% proof is impossible, and a probabilistic answer is the best we will ever achieve.
The lab theory is better suited for a movie, as no hard evidence has been presented.
Oddly enough, it seems the virus will end up transmitting the Chinese control over its people to several western countries.
At least where I live a quite scary addendum to the current epidemic law has been presented. If passed, it will grant the possibility to test people at an event and fine those that won't comply.
This is addressed in the article, although I don't see sources, so who knows how accurate it is.
>The most similar coronavirus is found among bats that don’t live nearby, and scientists have not been able to pinpoint the exact point where SARS-CoV-2 transferred to humans
SARS was a thing in China, so that's not surprising. The discussion is about SARS-CoV2. Now they are a few small mutations away that would be significant.
It would make a lot of sense that SARS-COV2 was spreading in Southern China for a while, but going unnoticed, due to immunity. Then, as soon as one of those rural workers visits another major city further up north, it gets a chance to spread in a more susceptible population.
I dont find that very plausible. There aren't really any places on earth with that many people AND that isolated from the rest of us. For it to be common among them for a long time without escape? I'm not buying it, at least at this level of discussion.
Also there is quite a lot of domestic travel within China, and it’s not that hard to connect via 1-2 people to a major Chinese city with international flights.
With how contagious we know COVID-19 to be, there is no way it started in Southern China and then infected a significant amount in Wuhan and only Wuhan first, of all places.
We don't actually know that it was "only Wuhan first". SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have spread worldwide as early as November.
Wuhan is the 9th largest city in China and also more "blue collar" than cities like Beijing or Shanghai, so the odds that the most visible outbreak of all would occur in Wuhan by chance alone aren't as low as you think.
I'm not saying it could have spread "for a long time", I'm saying it spread undetected "for a while" in a region where significant immunity exists, thus causing no significant amounts of suspicious illness.
That is, the actual ground zero of the outbreak would be Southern China, where you would expect an outbreak of a novel coronavirus to occur, not Wuhan.
Unfortunately, I do not have the chops to debate against this, but the political ramifications would be immense. The bet (https://www.rootclaim.com/rootclaim_challenge) requires that (a) you have $100k (b) are able to successfully debate it.
I won't put $100k against this, but I'll put $10k against it, because "the truth" is worth it. I'll pool $10k into a $100k stake behind a debate team that can debate this (and validate that this is actually refutable). This is valid until 2021-03-01.
If someone organizes something credible I'd also be in for 10k.
However, I suspect root claim wouldn't go through with it but would just update their model to incorporate more information. They hint at that possibility on their site.
It’s to avoid wasting time, to create a sense of urgency, and to avoid putting myself in an awkward situation where I have to say no due to changed circumstances.
Please clarify your date format. Is that 1st of March or the day before 4th of January? According to my European sentiment it's the 3rd of January, is that correct?
There are many ambiguous date formats, but this is not one of them. Four digits, delimiter, two digits, delimiter, two digits always means year, month, day, no matter where you are in the world[0]. Well, except in Kazakhstan, but only when writing in the Khazakh language.
That's true, but it takes more than one example of confusion to justify the label "ambiguous." Otherwise the label would have no meaning; it could be applied to anything that had ever caused anybody confusion, which is everything.
For example, the meaning of the word "ambiguous" is not ambiguous. If somebody were to ask what the word meant because they did not know the definition, it wouldn't make the word's meaning ambiguous. It would make that person uninformed.
Yep. Although I don’t use ISO8601 for time stamps when communicating online (for 2021-03-01T00:00Z is more confusing to me than 2021-03-01 16:00 PST8PDT), it’s easier to use for dates when discussing in an online forum where people may be from outside of the US.
For what it is worth, they say there is an 81% probability, based on their analysis, that it was a lab leak. That is not the same thing as "claims COVID-19 originated in a lab" - so I think the title is a little misleading - which is probably why the title actually seems to be "What is the source of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2)?"
Looking at the report, most of the likelihood is from a single "prior".
The whole likelihood basically hinges on the fact that the outbreak occurred in Wuhan and that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been working for decades on enhancing coronavirus strains. That's quite strongly circumstantial but it's not evidence. Possible chimerization and furin-cleavage insertion seem a lot more interesting imo but are weighted much lower.
Based on their report [1], most of the likelihood of lab-escape (almost 50x weight) just stems from the fact that the outbreak is in Wuhan. They state that it's because of the proximity to Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the lab's gain-of-function research - only one of 5 locations world-wide.
That single "bullet-point" re-weights zoonotic origin from 97% to 56% and lab-escape from 1.4% to 42%. Otherwise their final likelihoods would be: "zoonotic" 85.5%, "lab-escape" 8.5%, "bioweapon" 6%.
In addition to that, one of their other priors supporting lab escape appears to be plainly wrong:
>Furin cleavage sites are not common in other related coronaviruses.
However, this claim appears to have been investigated and debunked [1]
>Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2.
And that is very solid bayesian logic. Wuhan has the only BSL-4 lab in China, and was specifically working on gain-of-function research on coronaviruses.
The initial prior of zoonotic origin simply because that was usually the case in the past is just as circumstantial, but also just as solid in bayesian terms.
Belief in the posterior update is still completely circumstantial. It's not direct evidence, nor an explained cause other than proximity. I'd argue they miscalcualted the probability change with respect to this piece of information.
From their Twitter account:
"Probably our most surprising finding to date: COVID-19 has likely originated in a lab.
A probabilistic analysis shows the proximity to a major coronavirus lab and anomalies in the genetic code are too unlikely for SARS-CoV-2 to have developed naturally.
"
The problem here is that "anomalies in the genetic code" is, I believe, their claim, not fact, but presented as a fact along with established facts, which may be interpreted as a deliberate attempt to spread essentially 'fake news'.
I disagree, I don't think it's presented as a fact. They have a detailed analysis on the page. Click the "More" links under the "Chimera" and "Furin cleavage" topics.
No idea how credible that analysis is, but it seems to me like it's done in good faith.
>Probably our most surprising finding to date: COVID-19 has likely originated in a lab. A probabilistic analysis shows the proximity to a major coronavirus lab and anomalies in the genetic code are too unlikely for SARS-CoV-2 to have developed naturally.
They're stating the facts of the results of the probabilistic analysis, not the facts of the actual situation. Their only comment about the actual situation is that it's "likely".
I can see how it could be interpreted in the way you suggest, but if you read it from the perspective of discussing the probabilistic analysis, I don't think they're intending to mislead. But, again, I also don't know how strong the analysis is. It could be that the analysis is weak, in which case I still wouldn't think the tweet is likely deliberately misleading, but simply wrong.
> 11 November 2020 Editor's Note: Readers are alerted that concerns have been raised about the identity of the pangolin samples reported in this paper and their relationship to previously published pangolin samples. Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved.
I am commenting on their statement about "anomalies in the genetic code", which, as presented, is not a result of their probalistic analysis, but a premise.
Is it a fact that this virus has "anomalies" in its DNA?
If the answer is 'no' then there is no point discussing their 'analysis' further.
1. This isn't the product of researchers. It's the product of an algorithm that also happens to be a product that is being advertised.
From the "About Rootclaim" page:
"Proven probabilistic inference models – The model breaks down highly complex issues into small questions that are each answerable by humans, and then uses these answers to reach mathematically indisputable conclusions.
Openly crowdsourced evidence and claims – Anyone can impact an analysis by contributing evidence, rational explanations, past examples and statistics. Unlike polling or voting, a strong claim by one person can beat many widely supported weaker claims."
2. Reputable researchers publish before going to the media. Would this analysis pass peer review?
3. The company is a startup, and is looking for press.
4. Like many conspiracy theories, this claim is not easily falsifiable. No matter how transparent the Wuhan Institute of Virology tries to be, as an institution associated with the Chinese government, accusations of a coverup will be nearly impossible to conclusively refute. International trust in anything related to the Chinese government is currently very low.
No one can be trusted 100%. That's the whole point of the linked analysis. You assign certain probability ranges (based on facts, past track record, research results, etc.) to various events and then mathematically infer the probability of event in question.
This technique looks reminiscent of "superforecasting".
Caveat that their conclusion hinges on their assumptions, and we would expect that about 2/10 of their 80% predictions would actually be false if we could score them all.
For those interested, the specific breakdown is on this page [1].
I don’t know what good will come of this discussion, unless all countries are willing to discontinue gain-of-function research if this claim is found to be true. However that’s a lot of “ifs” and there is too much opportunity to simply place blame, which won’t help anyone.
One of the strongest indicators is China's fierce opposition to an independent investigation in to the origins of the virus. Why wouldn't they want that?
I'm inclined to agree with you based on my political views, but in this case.... Chinese were pretty reserved about outsiders meddling in their internal affairs already before Covid, so this isn't necessarily indicative.
I don't think that's a strong indicator. Why would you want an investigation that likely requires you to grant foreign investigators access to your bioweapon labs and their records?
That's slightly different depending on the country i.e. we have Trump on record confessing about doing both to woodward over the phone but it's not like it came from a US lab.
The whole world said it was nothing until February or so, when Italy had its first casualties. The reason for this was the WHO's downplaying of the virus.
The US response was shit but A) we have a timeline of events so we know it came from China B) the US didn’t cover things up, rather some politicians (trump for one) massively downplayed the virus.
To be clear I’m just playing devils advocate, but how can we be certain the virus originated in Wuhan? There's quite possibly information I'm not aware of that refutes this, but isn’t it equally likely that it was first discovered there and it originated somewhere else given the number of asymptomatic cases?
I find it difficult to understand how anyone is going to take action when the media trumpets that COVID isn't an issue much of January and February of this year. [1][2][3]
It wasn't just Trump downplaying. I have emails from my employer about it from early February saying that "common influenza" still represented a greater risk. This was based on CDC/medical expert advise, no doubt.
This is nothing more than cheap (effective!) content marketing for the prediction platform (rootclaim) that it is on.
I ran a large forecasting research project for 4 years so know this field quite well.
The "willing to bet" thing seems nonsense - there are no bet resolution criteria stated anywhere I can see.
They seem to be using a "Superforecaster"-like method of breaking down a prediction into smaller parts, and trying to work out the liklihood of each.
But their approach for doing it is crazy. The "escaped from lab" odds increase the most because they guess (and it is a guess) that the Wuhan lab does "20% of the gain-of-function research in the world"
That only makes anything resembling sense if they can establish that C19 is caused by gain-of-function research - but they haven't done that.
The whole hypothesis chain is full of this weak reasoning. For example the "lab dissociated itself from bat research" claim uses an unreferenced article by Miranda Devine in the NYPost as a source. Devine is an Australian columnist who left Australia after being forced to apologise for making up a story that a 9yo boy with dwafism was running a scam[1]. If this site was being honest in their approach they'd include that as evidence her claims on this story might be made up too.
Edit: and in (sarcasm) astonishing news, they also think the Syrian chemical attacks weren't carried out by the Syrian regime[2].
It's remarkable how little discussion there is about where SARS-CoV-2 actually came from. Yes, there is some. But it's a tiny fraction of the overall amount of digital ink that has been spilled over this during the past year.
The potential cost of a new virus is so enormous that measures reducing the probability of its occurrence, even marginally, are ridiculously cheap bargains even if they're expensive in absolute terms. But we need to know what really happened in order to take the right measures.
I admit that I do find the lab-escape hypothesis plausible. I'm not certain of it, but there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that points in that direction. Perhaps one reason this hypothesis hasn't been publicized more is that those most qualified to assess it aren't eager to learn that some of the research they do is insanely dangerous, and that members of their profession may have committed a screwup of world-historical proportions.
I've only read this [1] before, and its not a bad story, but I wonder how sure you can be without knowing every corona virus strain in the region, it can still be from a strain we haven't sequenced.
Also, it is more likely a something like this gets discovered in a major city vs some rural backwater, because they have more educated doctors there and more patience to detect a pattern.
Agreed; even outside of the COVID-19 topic, I'm a big fan of this style of clear Bayesian arguing and think a lot of HN users would be interested in it. I have no idea how strong the actual analysis is, here, but the format is refreshing.
I wish all arguments about everything ever had a page like this; ideally with Wiki-style features like forks and suggested edits or something like that. At the moment I think they just rely on comments rather than something like a Wiki, but the overall model seems really appealing.
And, also, with respect to the COVID-19 topic, here people can actually argue about explicit and delineated claims rather than jumping into politics, which I think is way more interesting and productive. If I were dang (and I know I'm very much not) I'd keep the thread open but enforce a strict rule that all comments should be directly related to this page and not derail into the usual heat and noise.
I really like the way they lay out the probability factors that contributed to their conclusions - it's easy to follow, at least.
I'm glad they put money behind it, but dislike that they're expecting $10,000-$100,000 in risk from submissions. They hyped up the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, but - as far as I can tell - that challenge didn't require the applicants to take on such risk.
I get that they want to stem the tide of low-quality submissions, but doing it this way really takes the wind out of their James Randi spiel.
With the paranormal challenge, you could say "the lack of applicants indicates they know the claim is false." With this, the lack of applicants could just as easily indicate a lack of funds/risk tolerance.
Not a biologist. But this interesting article [1] in Science Magazine, describes a possible route how SARS-CoV-2 may acquire multiple new mutations: Immunocompromised patients with long running infections.
Two cases have been independently reported in the UK and US. The patients have been infected for a duration of 101 and 154 days respectively. In both patients the virus acquired multiple new mutations, both were eventually treated with antibodies, but have still died in the end.
It looks like a weak immune response which is not sufficient to clear the virus, may help the virus by giving it the time needed to further adapt to it's human host.
I'm not a biologist either, but I've been told recently by someone who's likely to know what he's talking about (albeit also likely to be a bit "rah-rah Britain") that the UK is doing far more genetic sequencing of the virus than the rest of the world, which would explain why it gets noticed more in the UK.
Not a biologist, this is not a biological question per se - all viruses and bacteria mutate over time during replication. It's a question of statistics rather... When you have 100 infected individuals and a virus that mutates in 1% of infected people (note: this is a random number, no idea what the actual mutation rate of coronavirus is), you'll end up with one mutated version. When you have 100k of infected people, you'll end up with 1k mutations that are spreading out and (essentially) self-selecting. And when you hit 1M of infected people... it's 100k mutations.
That is why it would have been important to keep infection rates down until there's a vaccine - because it is more than likely now that there's a strain of coronavirus somewhere that has a different spike protein and so is not caught by the existing vaccines.
Not an expert here, but there probably are many other strains out there with fewer mutations (and some with more). Most of them residual because they don't provide a clear advantage. The reason we know about this 17-mutation one is that this specific one turned out to have such an advantageous infectivity that it's displacing all other strains and becoming the dominant one.
The problem is most countries don't sample - they put people through a PCR test and then send them off their way. The UK also does somewhat-regular genetic sequencing of positive tests, precisely to spot new mutations.
Where do they offer $100K to anyone who debunks their hypothesis?
How can someone "prove" it is Zoonotic in origin, to "win" the bet?
Is this a false challenge; Someone may be able to prove that this started in a lab, but no one can prove the opposite. Free publicity.
As an aside, it looks like they list "No whistleblowers" and "No reported infections at WIV" as increasing the odds it is not Zoonotic, which makes no sense.
I guess the only way to really prove it is to find covid-19 in an animal and then expose it to the human with the antibodies to it and measure the response?
You are right. The way they structure their challenges is different. Basically it's a debate between the two parties and judges with the relevant domain-knowledge will decide who is right.
I think this is the most unscientific way to judge a claim, but I think that it's possible that the a group of people with enough knowledge in epidemiology and biology will be able to win this competition.
Please don't take this as science. This is a marketing gag.
I am not a virologist but not far away from it. It is well possible that the virus escaped from a lab. But never claim maliciousness for something that can be easily explained by stupidity. When working with Chinese in the lab I experienced them as never working very clean (e.g. with radioactive stuff).
This alone shows the guys don't know what they are talking about.
There is no evidence that the virus was artificially altered (But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).
This being said, it seems to me that Corona COULD be used as a weapon. China is coping much better then the EU or the US with the virus. We know this now. How about 3 more viruses in the next three years? Will the west survive this? While I STRONGLY believe that China is not really to blame for the outbreak, I am sure the development has raised eyebrows in China.
Oh 2020. It's a crazy thing to say out loud (or even to type), but there is substantial doubt about the origin story of this virus in mainstream scientific circles.
The National Academy of Sciences published an opinion piece from a reputable scientist containing fairly strongly worded (for PNAS, anyway) conjecture regarding a possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. [0]
(you might recognize Relman's name from his work on identifying the human gut microbiome.)
This is particularly strongly worded for this publication:
"""
Some have argued that a deliberate engineering scenario is unlikely because one would not have had the insight a priori to design the current pandemic virus (3). This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory. Alternatively, the complete SARS-CoV-2 sequence could have been recovered from a bat sample and viable virus resurrected from a synthetic genome to study it, before that virus accidentally escaped from the laboratory.
"""
These sorts of conjectures of what might be possible are exactly on the same level as me writing that it is possible that the virus could have been developed in an American lab and planted in Wuhan as part of a CIA plot.
The realm of what is 'possible' is extremely large. This is exactly a reason why serious people without an agenda tend not to play this conjecture game and stick to evidence-based facts.
Are you seriously suggesting that Dave Relman (and the National Academy of Sciences) has an agenda here beyond scientific curiosity and a desire to find the truth?
What has he to prove and to whom?
I'm as distrusting of establishment forces as anyone (and heck, maybe that's part of what predisposes me to take this more seriously), but everything about this seems genuine to me. And while I don't think he's entirely above reproach, I think he's a really good guy and someone who is unlikely to mislead or engage in the kind of undue speculation you're talking about.
Yeah, the problem with this startup is that the high-minded Bayesianism of their model is going to run up against the crass incentive to make exciting, media-friendly claims. Their track record doesn't seem that rigorous either, they just list a few (like 5) cases where evidence has later supported them: https://www.rootclaim.com/rootclaim_track_record
Their track record seems neither compelling nor skepticism-worthy, I think, often because a lot of their conclusions lined up with already widely accepted hypotheses (e.g. that MMR vaccines don't cause autism and that MH17 was shot down by DNR), and a lot of the controversial things naturally remain unknown.
The most interesting - where public opinion was against and Rootclaim was for, and it was later shown Rootclaim was far more likely to be right - seem to be the deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman [0] and that MH370 vanished due to pilot suicide [1].
I think where the rubber would meet the road is if they're ever shown to be correct about the Syrian chemical attacks [2], where they draw the opposite conclusion Bellingcat did, and of course about the COVID-19 origin.
If they do turn out to be right about those, that would grant them major credibility points, I think; though the conclusions there may never be known one way or another. If they are right about COVID-19, it would also make me view Bret Weinstein with a lot more credibility, since he's been advocating the likelihood of the lab leak hypothesis for a while.
The reason I posted it here is because I think they don't get enough attention from people from the industry who understand biology, statistics and reasoning.
They are using the fact that no one challenges them as an evidence that their claims are true.
Or just the ability for others too wager against them based on their conclusion. If they think they have a 99% chance of being correct, then let people put 1,000 up against their 100,000.
It would be very interesting to do this same study earlier than December 2019, since quite a lot of bood from donors in that month tested positive already
Serologic testing of U.S. blood donations to identify SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies: December 2019-January 2020
Even if covid came out of a wild animal market the simple fact that "gain of function" research on coronaviruses was getting funded in the first place should be be cause for concern.
Many people are asking for the truth to come out, for China to be cooperative on investigations, etc. I would say "be careful what you wish for".
Imagine it did come out that it was an accidental lab-leak. Public opinion around the world would be super critical of China. The US would have to step in, demand certain investigations and lab inspections from China, who would of course disagree. This could very well be World War 3 brewing. Sometimes it's better for these things to stay silent.
China has had lab leaks from viral research labs before a few times. However these were all for existing viruses (Sars, bird flu), and it didn't spark much controversy. Mostly because the external impacts were low. The impacts were low because they were identified in the community and isolated etc in time. I doubt it was an accidental leak but if it was then it doesn't follow how how labs have dealt with leaks before.
Leaks have happened in other countries too but I don't the consequences.
I've been saying it was an accidental release since mid December of last year.
Everyone is focused on the genetics of the virus, but honestly that doesn't really tell us anything about how it was introduced into the human population. Frankly someone could have been legitimately studying the virus which was was circulating naturally in the bat community, with zero intention of trying to weaponize the virus, but anyone with access could have easily stolen some of the virus and deliberately infected themselves or someone else.
I read an article on December 13 or 14 of 2019 about a 20 cases of a "strange new flu" circulating in Wuhan. When the Chinese publicly admitted they had a problem at the end of December, they said they only had a handful of cases.
Finding 20 cases of a 'new flu' that has the same symptoms as the regular flu is impossible, there wasn't a test available for months, so the Chinese would have had no way to identify a 'new flu' at the time of infection.
There is only 3 ways for the health officials to know they have a 'new flu' circulating based on cases:
1) There are significantly more cases of the flu circulating than during a peak year.
2) There are significantly more flu deaths relative to the number of patients.
3) The cases have significantly different symptoms than the regular flu.
None of these situation was present for Wuhan during the early days of the virus. So that means the Chinese needed some other way to identify that they had a new flu circulating, and identify it with so few cases. Even when the COVID19 was peaking in China they still didn't have enough cases that would be significantly higher than the number of flu cases they would have during the same period.
A deliberate release or an accidental lab release is the only real way to know that a 'new flu' is circulating, when there are so few cases, and symptoms that are identical to the flu.
I believe the Chinese were studying the virus, and then due to an accident, or just sloppy lab work, even in China the lab techs are overworked and underpaid, someone got infected. Knowing human nature, the person who had the accident or was sloppy tried to cover up what happened, because they didn't want to lose their job. Unfortunately the person was infected, and maybe became ill, they also spread the infection into the community. At some point the person who originally got infected was forced to admit their mistake, either because they were sick, or because people they knew were getting sick, and trying to cover what happened became impossible.
Once the Chinese government learned of the accident/sloppy lab work it would be really easy to do contact tracing and identify a handful of cases, it would also be really easy to tell the world that that virus started in the wet market, because those markets have already been idenified as a potential risk for a pandemic level virus.
If you disagree with my opinion, that's fine but please explain how the Chinese could possibly know they had a new virus/flu circulating, with almost no data, cases, deaths, or novel symptoms. They knew because it was a accidental lab release, that's how they knew.
They could know because of a difference in symptomatic presentation combined with exclusionary testing.
There's very few diseases with a similar presentation to COVID-19 that we don't already have tests for.
This is how new illnesses are almost _always_ detected: patient has illness with specific symptoms, test for illnesses correlated to those symptoms, if those tests (and follow ups) come back negative then you might have something.
When your patients start dying faster than you'd normal expect that's a great indicator too, which happened(s)
interesting and compelling analysis. Their response was also swift. The complete isolation of Wuhan so early also makes me think they knew it was an accidental release.
To me, the most likely explanation is that one or more researchers became ill or died and WIV triggered the release protocol. This isn't the fault of PRC but this plus the treatment of Uigher, illegal fishing, IP theft etc. Can we just say F China as this point and bring our manufacturing back to the US and its allies? China has good people but their government shouldnt be allowed superpower status given their transgressions.
It seems reasonable to me to believe you have a “new flu” based solely on hospitals seeing increased pneumonia counts without identifying any of the usual causes - bacterial or influenza
What if it turns out to be like the Spanish Flu where we got the origin wrong and most of this conjecture is meaningless because the premise is faulty?
A more statistically rigorous assessment of the odds of a lab based origin places the likelihood at 6%-55% [1]. However it understandably does not account for circumstantially suspicious behavior from China, which I would argue provides a significant signal.
One of the main claims that the Chinese turncoat is making is that the bat virus which is used as a reference and hypothetical source for where Covid-19 evolved from (RaTG13) is _also synthetic_.
I haven't seen any media try to verify or disprove this claim. Does anybody know any more about this?
Likelihood of covid originating from lab has always been 50-50, due to the fact that China has not allowed any impartial outside investigation on this. They even imposed trade restrictions on countries like Australia that demanded. What's sad is we may never know.
Doesn’t the cumulative error from all of these adjustments just mean garbage comes out the other end? This whole thing seems more like clickbait to give the company publicity.
For approximations based on multiplying numerical estimates, the overall standard deviation (or error) of the final result is proportional to the square root of the number of estimates. So yes more adjustments will increase the error, but probably not as badly as one might think.
As an aside: I particularly enjoyed the film Outbreak (Kevin spacey notwithstanding), it's a not totally unrelated plot to the linked theory. It's on Netflix!
"Based on the underlying genetic structure, we have already established that, if COVID-19 was the result of a lab escape, it was from gain-of-function research. "
This claim is illogical and does not stand. For example, a lab could have stored naturally occurring viruses that were then later leaked.
If the article is asserting that the virus could only have resulted from gain-of-function research, then why bother assigning a probability to it being naturally occurring.
I have not read or analyzed this startup's claims, and don't know if they're substantial or worthwhile. However, I'm glad to see that this possibility is being given some attention. Such possibilities should be seriously considered because a lot of truths first begin as exploratory speculation. To attack someone for speculating is to disagree with truth seeking. There are numerous other past incidents where governments and corporations covered up past accidents and atrocities and only admitted the truth when it was undeniable. For example Union Carbide initially denied there was a huge gas leak that ultimately became the Bhopal disaster. The USSR denied there was a serious nuclear accident at Chernobyl until brave voices within their country spoke up. The US has numerous questionable practices revealed by Wikileaks or Snowden. All of these and other incidents were initially trivialized and dismissed by naysayers who were anti-truth or on the side of the perpetrators. Those seeking the truth were written off as crazy conspiracy theorists. We shouldn't let that happen in 2020.
With that in mind, I am surprised that no one in this conversation has mentioned Zero Hedge yet. Earlier in the year, Zero Hedge wrote about the possibility that the virus may have originated in a particular Wuhan lab (which was close to wet markets, and advertised research involving bats and coronaviruses). Zero Hedge received a lot of criticism from those who politicized this topic or were anti-Zero Hedge for other reasons. Just like with those other disasters I named above, the critics insisted that there is absolutely no possible way this virus originated from a lab. The same critique then extended to Trump and became further politicized when he correctly suggested halting inbound flights from China as a precaution. The focus on Trump poisoned civil discourse around the coronavirus. In the middle of all this chaos, Zero Hedge was banned from Twitter for "doxxing" researchers at the Wuhan lab (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/01/twitter...) although if you look at the actual Zero Hedge article in question, the researcher they named listed his contact information publicly, as he's the public face of the lab (so there's no doxxing). Zero Hedge later wrote an article covering the extremely biased attacks they were subject to from news media outlets (https://www.zerohedge.com/political/zerohedge-suspended-twit...), which is worth reading if you're into truth seeking. Embarrassingly, Twitter ultimately reversed their "permanent ban" of Zero Hedge (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-zerohedge/twitter...) but the damage was done.
Remember, we have no reason to believe the Chinese government's claims about the virus. They sought to oppress initial reports of the coronavirus, which delayed the world from knowing about it and being able to take the necessary actions (banning travel from China to their countries). The WHO was complicit in this by blindly relaying the CCP's claim that SARS-nCoV-2 does not transmit between humans (https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152), and in refusing to investigate the Wuhan lab themselves (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-world-health-...). And it is remarkable that after all these months of secrecy and denial, the scientists at this lab are only NOW (in December 2020) saying they are open to a visit and probe into the lab - after any evidence would be scrubbed (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55364445). This is obviously an underhanded offer given that the Chinese government just recently sentenced the Chinese journalist who challenged the government's early coronavirus narrative to 4 years in prison (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/world/asia/china-Zhang-Zh...).
All that is a long way of saying: please don't politicize this topic. Let's allow the open discussion, investigation, and research into the possibility that this virus originated from a lab or any other source.
> When you see a reliable public betting challenge with real stakes, you can be very confident the claim is true at a probability that is significantly above 50% (assuming 1:1 odds are being offered).
This makes the assumption that the overall stakes are even. What if Alex Jones puts up 100K that boiled frog eyes cure COVID? He could be absurdly wrong, but the additional credibility offered by this may let him sell a million dollars more of boiled frog eyes.
The problem is, there is going to be virtually no research on whether boiled frog eyes are a cure for covid, so it is next to impossible to challenge the claim and made all the more difficult by the potential for human error and the risk involved noted in the challenge.
Is this a joke on his 'I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin' frogs gay!' famous sentence? Because it's true: https://www.pnas.org/content/107/10/4612
Atrazine causing feminization in frogs is an undisputed fact, but the statement as given ("they put chemicals in the water TO turn frogs gay") is absolutely not. Atrazine is used because it's a cheap and effective herbicide, frog feminization is a side effect which doesn't factor into decisions about its use.
Yes sorry, I typed it out from memory. I didn't think the exact wording would be relevant, when that was not the point I was trying to make. I have corrected it to the actual quote.
Ah yes, technically the chemicals are being put in the water and are turning the frogs gay but you see, they only intended to put the chemicals in the water and didn't specifically intend to turn the frogs gay.
Atrazine isn't intentionally put into water, it ending up in water reservoirs is a second order effect of its primary use as an herbicide. Its subsequent tertiary effects on the ecosystem are far removed from the people who applied it, who were just looking for an easy way to kill weeds.
The chemicals are not being intentionally put in the water at all. They are sprayed onto plants and then run off into the water. Atrazine is a herbicide.
The assumption the writer makes about correlation of odds and probability is nonsensical - betting houses change the odds regularly so they make money based on essentially random bettors current intuition.
Exactly, like under the 'WIV lab procedures' section it states:
Probabilistic Estimates:
Labs with lax security and procedures are conservatively estimated as 2x more likely to produce a lab escape.
However, since the reports are not very reliable, this is reduced to 1.5x.
There's no explanation or methodology presented as to how they derive these probabilities based on articles they found in the news and most of their assertions rely on this inexplicable methodology. Another example of just how nonsensical their conclusions are, under the sections 'WIV disassociation' and 'Chinese response' they again rely on news articles to conclude China's response merits suspicion and therefor must be covering up the source of COVID. This assertion is just illogical and fatally flawed. While China may have motivation to cover it up if that were the case, scientists in other countries who have obviously spent a great deal of time examining COVID and concluded it's zoonotic wouldn't have motivation to cover it up. Yet this obvious logical deduction is not factored into their conclusions or even merits a mention.
The nice thing about Bayesian analysis is that you have to make your priors explicit. That’s what this is, a prior. It doesn’t have to have a derivation; it can just be a guess. The important thing is that you’re writing your guess down so everyone can see it.
You can then also do a sensitivity analysis to figure out how much your conclusions change if you modify your priors. So if you, the reader, think the priors are wrong, then you can change them and re-do the analysis.
I think the most interesting thing about this analysis is exactly that: we can look at the priors and come up with a principled conclusion. We can then argue about whether the priors are right.
The major issue here is that the sensitization of priors can be a marketing ploy.
It's very easy to "make guesses" that present your conclusion, throw in a paltry amount of money, then make bank off the publicity.
This possibility poisons the well for the entire process. If they can make money off this even if they are completely off-base, then it's not rational to build up the trust necessary in their process to engage with their model.
This is a company that is selling a product, and they're receiving a GREAT deal of publicity about their utilization of a methodology core to their offerings.
There are many people that are convinced this is the case, however, most scientists with the relevant domain knowledge claim that the virus was naturally mutated.
They update their likelihood of lab origin from 1.4% to 42% solely based on the virus originating in Wuhan. They use fancy words like "evidence" but I don't even see a clear reference to Bayes.
I don't see any _new information_ here, it's all stuff we've known for months. To me, this is just a conspiracy theory wrapped up with 'probability charts'.
Unless I'm missing something, is there any non-circumstantial evidence that this is true? All I've seen for the past year(!) is "it's not a coincidence that these two things happened in the same place" - which isn't science.
I disagree that "it's not a coincidence that these two things happened in the same place" isn't science. It's a valid argument. In fact it's not unlike a p value. The null hypothesis is "covid came from animals". Under the null, the probability of getting this lab is very low - since there are many large cities in Asia. (The article has more details about e.g. the distance of Wuhan from wild bat populations.)
I don't say that the argument is enough to be persuasive on its own.
Its pretty irritating to me that any theory of conspiracy must outright be rejected in the english language because "Conspiracy Theory" has somehow come to mean undoubtedly wrong. And the same thing with "Circumstantial Evidence", somehow in common english language has come to mean not very good evidence. Guess what, eye witness accounts of the accused murderer at the scene is circumstantial evidence, but damn if its not pretty devastating evidence coupled with the bloody clothes!
Circumstantial evidence is a part of some scientific analysis, especially as it edges up against forensic science.
It is part of divining what type of experiment or investigation is indicated to unearth direct evidence.
From the opinion piece in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences I linked elsewhere in this thread:
"""
An investigative process should be transparent, collaborative, international, and, to the extent possible, devoid of political interest. Recent, productive scientific collaborations between the United States and China, for example, provide hope that such a process can be achieved. But the kind of effort required will need to expand far beyond what’s taken place so far, and nations other than the United States and China will need to be involved. Conflicts of interest by researchers, administrators, and policymakers on all sides must be revealed and addressed, and all relevant global constituencies must be included.
"""
I wish more people would watch this [0], might not be true but damn does it seem convincing. Seems pretty obvious that it was lab originated, even if it isn't manufactured.
Rootclaim, an Israeli startup, claims Covid-19 SARS-CoV-2 was developed in a Chinese lab and was released was released by accident.
They are offering to bet $100,000 on the accuracy of our analysis.
Here you can find information about the challenge: https://www.rootclaim.com/rootclaim_challenge
Personally, I think their logic is doesn't work and I would like to see someone credible challenges them.
It could be a direct application of Cunningham's law: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
In other words, a curiosity that begs to be proven wrong. We have a saying over here.. "A fool throws a pebble in a pond, and ten wise men can't recover it".
Yes, it's a common approach to trick people into believing things:
1. Open a public "bet" or similar
2. Make it so that you can always wiggle yourself out of the bet (on nitpicking and legalese)
3. If someone challenges you wiggle yourself out hope that person sues you and then use nitpicking and legalese to win the court case about that proof of you being wrong not being applicable for the bet
4. Then claim that the court agreed with you that you have right with your bet (which isn't what the court case was about but people don't know and sometime don't (want to) understand).
There had been some case of this pattern in Germany wrt. to (I think) vaccines and autism. If I remember correctly (I might not) their trick was to require a single scientific paper formulated in a way so that if you paper has other papers it refers to it's no longer eligible for that bet and in turn to win the bet you would have to do multiple large case studies from scratch in cram them into one massive paper covering multiple topics and the joint conclusion. I.e. it's not very feasible.
Good lord is this startup trying to draw attention to themselves with this analysis by spinning up bogus stories?
Just look at this:
However, Wuhan stands out for housing the Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of only a few labs engaged in gain-of-function research.
How does this imply causality? Why do they not consider the simple alternative, that a location that specialises in gain-of-function research of coronaviruses has the highest concentration of people who are able to DETECT novel coronaviruses with a much higher likelihood? If the virus originated in a city that has no lab specializing in these viruses, how would they ever have distinguished it from pneumonia?
The coexistence of the lab and the outbreak of the disease leads them to raise their estimate from 1.4% to 42%(!) lab made chance although it does not establish cause at all and does not even consider this inherent bias in sensitivity to detection.
> Why do they not consider the simple alternative, that a location that specialises in gain-of-function research of coronaviruses has the highest concentration of people who are able to DETECT novel coronaviruses with a much higher likelihood? If the virus originated in a city that has no lab specializing in these viruses, how would they ever have distinguished it from pneumonia?
SARS has a distinct clinical pathology different form ordinary pneumonia. Physician Ai Fen was the first to identify pneumonia cases in Wuhan as SARS, based on her clinical experience. This was then publicized by colleague Li Wenliang. Only later was the virus identified as distinct from previous SARS viruses by virologists.
Okay, but the exact same logic applies? Doctors who are experts in disease detection likely reside close to clusters that study said diseases and have high populations and access to modern technology.
Put it very concretely, say patient 0 was infected in a village a hundred miles away, is asymptomatic like most patients, travels to Wuhan, infects someone, that person is the officially first detected case.
If you're generalizing it like that, your argument becomes weak. There's no connection with these physicians and the virologists required in order to detect a SARS outbreak, and (to my knowledge) no such connection existed.
Remember, you're using this argument to dismiss the fact that the outbreak happened in the one city where the world's top virologists on the topic of bat coronaviruses were performing gain-of-function experiments. The virus samples were obtained hundreds of miles away in Southern China, where these bats actually live and where the SARS1 outbreak originated. There are no bats in Wuhan, no bats were found in the food markets and no other intermediate host has been identified.
That's a lot of circumstance that isn't dismissed quite as easily.
I still think is a bioweapon. Is not deadly enouth to kill an entire population, but enouth to cause panic.
The time that the virus stays incubated, already transmiting, but with not sympthons, is like is was designed to break quarentine protocols.
That sayed, if it is a bio weapon, I also think it got out by accident. The lab that in Wuhan alread have problems with employes selling animals that should be euthanized.
So I think is something like Chernobyl. Someone made a stupid mistake, but fear of repercutions, delay action that could avoid the spread of the virus.
> Pangolins and bats don't usually cohabitate, making this somewhat unlikely in nature.
Horseshoe bats are nocturnal animals that roost in caves during the day but sometimes practice perch feeding at night [1]:
> The other strategy is known as perch feeding: Individuals roost on feeding perches and wait for prey to fly past, then fly out to capture it.
Pangolins [2] and palm civets [3] are nocturnal and arboreal. The bat viral RNA sequences come from anal swabs of netted animals so they are primarily gastrointestinal infections. All of these animals are found in the Lancang/Mekong [4] catch basin. Bat guano seems like a good vector for the virus.
Gain-of-function experiments require two viral isolates that recombine during passage. The lab theory assumes that the RNA sequence of the original viral isolates were never shared. I find this scenario unlikely but I am open to changing my mind based on evidence. SARS-1 is evidence of a very similar zoonotic scenario.
Humans that encounter bat guano in this region also seem like a good host for a recombination event.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_bat#Diet_and_foragin...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangolin#Behavior
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_palm_civet#Feeding_and_d...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mekong