[tpfour]

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

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

[peter422]

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

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

[yumraj]

Did any of them originate a few miles from a pathogen research lab that handled such pathogen that caused those outbreaks?

[peter422]

I don’t dispute it is one point of suspicion, but Wuhan is also one of the 10 biggest cities in China. It isn’t a surprise the first US outbreak was in the biggest city. The first cases could have been anywhere.

If there were more evidence that it was lab made then the location would be another point, not to me without further evidence it doesn’t mean all that much.

And there have been 2 emerging coronavirus outbreaks in the last 20 years due to natural origin. Why is it so hard to believe there would be another one.

[unishark]

> I don’t dispute it is one point of suspicion, but Wuhan is also one of the 10 biggest cities in China. It isn’t a surprise the first US outbreak was in the biggest city. The first cases could have been anywhere.

Is that really so for animal-borne viruses though? I thought they came from place with lots of animals, hence the focus on the market. If it just showed up on some random high-rise employee downtown that would be hard to believe.

And after it starts, of course a highly-infectious virus shows up at densely populated places quickly. But for the same reason, I would also think it's hard for the first cases to travel to dense areas and spread the disease there without leaving a trail of cases along the trip. Ultimately they should point back to the animals they came from and testing can confirm it. Or at least rule various places out, if the govt was accommodating.

Plus wasn't the first US case somewhere in Washington state.

[peter422]

The first death in the U.S. was only discovered at least a month later, and this is long after we knew about the existence of the virus.

In China before there was a huge outbreak there is absolutely no way you can expect a small number of cases of a virus that nobody knows exists to be picked up. By the time of the big Wuhan outbreak there are already different variations in the virus. It had been in some population for a while before it broke out.

So the first outbreak in NYC is analogous to Wuhan. It could have started in Wuhan or it could have started anywhere else and then Wuhan had the right combination of factors for the outbreak to surge. We don’t know for sure.

[inciampati]

We do know for sure that it started in Wuhan. The viral phylogeny is extremely clear. We have hundreds of thousands of viral sequences that describe a tree that is rooted in Wuhan around October 2019. That's incontrovertible. No evidence has arisen to contradict this despite an extensive search by thousands of scientists.

[ButtSpark69]

This reply only makes sense if covid-19 popped up at a random spot in Wuhan....and not literally right next to their coronavirus research lab.

It's not hard to believe that there could be another spillover event, and I don't have any certainty where covid-19 came from, but you're unfairly downplaying the level of circumferential evidence that does exist. There has been a significant effort against evaluating the lab-leak as a reasonable hypothesis (I say that in the scientific meaning of the word), and that effort has significantly damaged the reputation of scientific institutions around the world, and for good reason.

[jkhdigital]

> If there were more evidence that it was lab made

Have you actually read any of these articles? The location of the lab is like the tip of the iceberg.

[peter422]

Yes I have read more than the articles, which is why I’m correctly saying it was unlikely to come from the lab.

I’m not saying it is impossible, just unlikely. And automatically degrading the opinions of experts who have detailed their arguments because you think they are biased is not proof of anything either.

[IAmGraydon]

The first US outbreak was in Washington state.

[lawnchair_larry]

There are mountains of evidence. Proximity to the lab is barely the tip of the iceberg.

[tootie]

Other pertinent data point, how many epidemics have been positively traced to a lab leak since virology has been widely studied? The Wuhan lab was founded in the 1950s. You can say the likelihood that a virus would one day escape from one of these labs is pretty high. The likelihood that a given virus would be from a lab is very low. All of which brings us back to where we were at the start. It's plausible and possible but not really likely.

[JProthero]

A 2007 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (an important virus affecting cattle) was traced to effluent released from a laboratory in the UK [1].

A small number of SARS infections in 2003-2004 are also believed to have been due to laboratory accidents [2].

This article [3] gives an introduction to the subject from the perspective of a journalist who has reported on laboratory safety in the US.

This article [4] published in Nature in January 2012 by members of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity reviews the risk of a release of an engineered form of H5N1 influenza. It includes some alarming remarks such as:

'We found the potential risk of public harm to be of unusually high magnitude' and;

'A pandemic, or the deliberate release of a transmissible highly pathogenic influenza A/H5N1 virus, would be an unimaginable catastrophe for which the world is currently inadequately prepared'

The authors take the possibility of release of a dangerous pathogen from a laboratory seriously, though the article is prospective rather than retrospective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...

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

[3] https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2021/03/22/why-covi...

[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/482153a

[jk7tarYZAQNpTQa]

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

[Throwawayaerlei]

There's no other credible explanation for the return of influenza H1N1 in 1976-7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu

For an epidemic to occur, you need not just a lab leak, but a population sufficiently naive to the pathogen. H1N1 was displaced by H2N2 in the late 1950's pandemic, which in turn was displaced by H3N2 in the late 1960s pandemic. Thus it hit the cohort of people aged 25-6 or less who'd never been exposed to H1N1.

[tootie]

That article doesn't support your argument. It just says it was suspected.

I found an NIH article that says the likelier origin is that the 1950 virus was used to produce a weakened live virus vaccine candidate that lead to the reemergence and not an accidental leak. It also concludes by saying there has never been a likely lab leak epidemic ever observed.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/

[tripletao]

That article's definition of "lab accident" seems narrow and legalistic to me. In either case, the virus spent 1950-1977 in a lab freezer. It ended up in the wild, with ~700k people dead. The only question is whether it escaped in an infected researcher (or in infectious lab waste, or in whatever else you'd consider a proper lab accident) vs. in that failed vaccine candidate.

Those details do inform some details of the correct policy response. For example, they determine the relative importance of better PPE at the bench vs. better QA before allowing the vaccine to leave the lab. They don't change the overall question of whether scientific research has ever caused a pandemic, though. That causality is what matters, not whether the sign on the door said "lab" vs. "experimental vaccine nurse".

For example, if the pandemic originated from a WIV researcher who became infected in the field (during their many expeditions to remote bat caves that no other humans would routinely enter), was that a "lab leak"? Literally no, since they weren't in the lab. The causality would still be the same, though--if not for that scientific research, that virus would likely have never left the cave.

To avoid such confusion, it's probably better to say something like "unnatural origin", or "origin arising from scientific research". A much bigger mouthful than "lab leak", though.

[flukus]

These labs are in major cities. Epidemics are likely to be detected in Major cities. The chance of an outbreak being near a research lab aren't as long as you seem to think.

If an outbreak were to happen in the United states just about everywhere would be near a CDC location: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&tbs=lf:1,lf...]

[kaesar14]

As pointed out in the article, there were exactly 3 cities in the world working on gain-of-function research related to bat-originated coronaviruses. Galveston, Texas, Chapel Hill N.C, and Wuhan. It’s way more narrow than just being near a biological laboratory.

[flukus]

At that point you've subtly moved from lab leak theory to engineered virus theory which is much higher up the conspiracy theory chain.

[tannhauser23]

That's not what the person you are responding to said at all. Please stop dishonestly conflating the two theories. You can believe that a coronavirus accidentally leaked from a lab that was studying coronaviruses without believing that it was intentional, or that the disease was a bioweapon.

Honestly, this is not a difficult distinction to understand. You have to wonder why people are so eager to conflate the two.

[kaesar14]

Why? Im not passing judgement on whether it was engineered as a bioweapon. But there was a lab that was actively engaged in research of viruses that are exactly what COVID is. They were conducting research on making said viruses more infectious. I’m not sure why the more likely thing is that it was just a virus sitting in a lab that spilled out, as opposed to a virus that was actively being worked on using the techniques the lab was known to be studying.

[stef25]

Labs may be built in areas relevant to their research.

[tripletao]

They may be, but the WIV wasn't. In the words of Dr. Shi herself:

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

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

The closest animal virus to SARS-CoV-2 was found in nature about 900 miles from Wuhan (RaTG13, in Mojiang), closer to Chongqing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, or HK.

[Throwawayaerlei]

According to Wikipedia the lab had been established many decades ago, "The WIV was founded in 1956 as the Wuhan Microbiology Laboratory" and got its current name in 1978. For better or worse, open, public labs tend to be set up in urban areas, see the insane move of the work done at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center to college town Manhattan, Kansas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan,_Kansas in the heartland of American agriculture.

[Fomite]

Ebola Reston did.

[tripletao]

Ebola Reston evolved naturally, and emerged in humans due to an infected lab monkey imported from the Philippines to a contract research organization in Reston. Anyone who guessed that it came from Fort Detrick would have been wrong about which lab it came from, but right that it came from a lab.

Put differently, if scientists there hadn't been experimenting with monkeys, Ebola Reston wouldn't have entered humans there. We don't absolve exotic wildlife traffickers or farmers of the consequences of their actions in releasing novel, naturally-evolved viruses; so I'm not sure why we'd absolve scientific researchers.

[rhodozelia]

The lab leak theory doesn’t imply that the virus was created, or gain of functioned, in the lab, merely that it was studied there and escaped. The lab leak theory doesn’t imply unnatural origins.

[corty]

An example of this would be the Marburg virus (unrelated to CoVs): leaked from a lab, but of natural origin, through an infected lab animal caught in the wild

[swader999]

When bats weren't even being sold in that market? When the nearest ones were hundreds of kilometers away and in hibernation? No it was just easier to call a guy racist and bury your head in the sand.

[mc32]

So when we find Anthrax outside its normal "range" but close to a lab we can just say, yeah, no, while it's not endemic to this location it is 1000 miles away, so nothing to worry about? Oh, and never mind the lab.

[dboreham]

We found Novichok very close to Porton Down. However it actually came from Russia.

[mc32]

This is not remotely comparable. Russia uses Novichok as a signature "we did it, don't F around".

This one was, yeah, this is a virology institute, we study corona viruses, we were hiring for corona virus experts, we do GoF work, but trust us, just because it first appeared blocks from our facility, it did not come from us. Also, don't believe our former virologists who skipped town.

[XorNot]

Or you know, 2 days drive depending on road conditions and trucking shipment along the route to a major metropolis.

This is an argument from incredulity.

[krrrh]

Doesn’t it seem likelier that zoonotic transmission from an animal in Yunnan would infect a local and result in an initial local outbreak, which we have no evidence of? What do you think the ratio of locals in Yunnan are to visitors from Wuhan or potential visitors to Wuhan are at any given time? 100 to 1, 1000 to 1? I have no idea, but excuse the incredulity. It’s less likely that a virus from Yunnan would break out somewhere other than Yunnan, perhaps by a couple of orders of magnitude or more.

I mean sure, anything’s possible, but we have only circumstantial evidence right now and this observation isn’t a smoking gun, but it ain’t worth nothing.

[XorNot]

This presumes COVID-19 had to evolve in the place people are looking for possible coronaviruses and had to jump directly from bats to people, and not in surrounding or isolated areas where the bats might roam. Or that their wasn't - as is suspected now - one or several interim species.

SARS after all was found in civets, and then later several other species as well despite originating in bats.

[krrrh]

It doesn’t presume that it had to, it just conjectures that it is either more likely or not significantly less likely than the scenarios you listed.

We can’t rule it out, ie. we only have evidence right now to try to make a determination based on the preponderance of evidence, not beyond a reasonable doubt. The story that is emerging is that we may never be able to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt because the debate was quashed for a year by political concerns, institutional biases, and motivated reasoning.

[tpfour]

You're taking this the wrong way. You have to update your priors and calculate a joint probability knowing everything we know about the origins of this particular virus.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Except that we still don't actually know very much about the origins of this virus.

[tpfour]

We know enough to calculate a joint probability. Just update your estimate with new information. This should be pretty non-controversial. Everybody does this every day especially in the face of uncertainty.

[tremon]

Perhaps you should do the work yourself, rather than requiring others to do it for you?

[tpfour]

Are you expecting a number? The joint probability of low-probability events is itself very low.

I'm not saying you should calculate it like P(10 000 tails coin flip) * P(1 000 000 tails coin flip). That can be done numerically. I'm saying that based on everything I've read, the highest probability hypothesis according to my own evaluation is the unintentional lab leak. To me, that's as uncontroversial as it gets. Human error happens _all the time_. Arguing against the lab leak, knowing what we know about China's refusal to allow an actual thorough scientific investigation into it, seems quite a bit more controversial to me.

Labs burn down, medical errors happen, bridges collapse, whatever. That's just reality.

[mhh__]

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