[corty]

There may be proof in there that somebody lied about something related to the lab leak. In this case, of course funding is a trail of breadcrumbs, and even if there were no relation, a coverup would be likely. Because it makes the funders look bad at least.

Real proof that COVID-19 originated in one of the Wuhan labs will probably never be found, there was time enough for a coverup of those facts.

But in any case, whether lab leak or not, a few things have become crystal clear imho: Research must really strongly improve its safety around possibly infectious materials. Even researchers working with the stuff consider a lab leak a real possibility. BSL-1 is practically a clean kitchen and BSL-2 is any common hospital before the current Corona measures. Even BSL-3 and -4 facilities are located in habitated urban areas. Researchers freely enter and leave without quarantine, have contact with an unsuspecting population, go to normal hospitals, infect other patients there. Viruses are much much more dangerous than radioactive or chemical materials. A tiny radiation or chemical leak will have tiny consequences. A tiny virus leak can still infect all of humanity.

Also, I'm not qualified enough to comment on whether gain-of-function research is necessary and useful. But I would strongly suggest that given the possible consequences, together with the aforementioned woefully inadequate safety measures, it should be reevaluated. And confined to lonely islands at the end of the world with monthly airdropped supplies, entering or leaving only once a year after destruction of all samples and two months quarantine.

[WastingMyTime89]

> Also, I'm not qualified enough to comment on whether gain-of-function research is necessary and useful. But I would strongly suggest that given the possible consequences, together with the aforementioned woefully inadequate safety measures, it should be reevaluated.

But people have been saying that for at least a decade. There was a moratorium in the USA for a couple of years. The EU produced a lot of guidance. It was viewed as enough and it might have been in a world where international actors are reasonable, transparent and act in good faith. The issue is that COVID have definitely proved that it is not the world we currently live in and some actors are part of the international community in names only.

[corty]

In that case, diplomatic pressure and travel and trade restrictions would be necessary. One would have to treat the whole irresponsible country harboring an unsafe lab just like that unsafe lab.

I think this is also the real problem around Fauci's financing deception: He knowingly financed unsafe research in China, which not just gave them money but also the implicit acknowledgement that they are doing it right.

[throwaway210222]

1. can you define "unsafe lab"?

2. is so, and if such a lab is found in the USA, do you really see a future where Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Mexico, and Brasil stop buying Microsoft products and Apple toys?

Come now, let's be serious.

[corty]

1. An unsafe lab is one, where pathogens can possibly get out with a non-negligible probability. And where those pathogens are infectious and deadly enough to be of concern.

2. Microsoft products don't carry biological viruses, because most of them are software. Microsoft hardware comes out of China I'd guess. Apple also doesn't produce most hardware in the US. Besides, computer hardware can be sterilized. Biological matter, like food and drink are more of a concern. And there is already a lot of regulation around those, e.g. you cannot get imported German sausage or French cheese in the US, and you cannot get US chicken in the EU for those reasons. You also cannot travel anywhere from an Ebola-affected region for example.

I am very serious. But I'm really not sure what you are getting at.

[throwaway210222]

Thanks for answering. Let's address point 1), now that we have a definition:

1. Unsafe labs:

a) Since 1903, the vast majority of known bio-lab incidents have been in the USA and then the next largest group is their western allies;[1] so any solution must address this, no?

b) this 2105 USA Today article describes just 10 recent bio-lab incidents, including this gem:

"In November 2013, a University of Wisconsin researcher in an ABSL-3 punctured skin with a needle loaded with H5N1 avian influenza. The researcher was quarantined for seven days in an empty home."

or this:

"Between April 2013 and September 2014, eight individual mouse escapes were reported at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill."

or this:

"Centers for Disease Control and Prevention inspectors and University of Michigan officials found materials labeled as Brucella, a select agent, outside the BSL-3 containment area in April 2012."

And as a finale [3]:

"Scientists inadvertently switched samples designated for live Ebola virus studies with samples intended for studies with inactivated material. As a result, the samples with viable Ebola virus, instead of the samples with inactivated Ebola virus, were transferred out of a BSL-4 laboratory to a laboratory with a lower safety level for additional analysis."

There are (literally) hundreds more examples.

So having established that unsafe labs abound in the USA (per your definition), let's move to point 2 in your suggestion: "diplomatic pressure and travel and trade restrictions "

What possible restrictions of any kind do you possibly see any ally of the USA enforcing in any future "world-wide, no-execptions-to-the-rule agreement" scenario, given that they already tolerate all this incompetence?

And that's just the Western allies. Do you see any third-world, dollar-dependent, tourist economy placing any restrictions on American tourists because a rate escaped from a lab?

So, for the sake of brevity, did you really mean: "the USA and its allies must put diplomatic, travel, and trade restrictions on China?"

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

[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/05/29/some-recent-u...

[3] [https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/human-error-in-high-bioconta...

[corty]

Well, obviously China is suspected of having let Covid-19 escape, so of course this is first and foremost about restrictions that affect China..

What are you getting at?

Also, of course there are accidents in any lab, most of them just reportable incidents. Why are there almost no reportable incidents from Chinese labs? Usually because either they are not using those labs (unlikely) or because they don't do incident analysis and reporting. That the list contains almost no incidents from China means quite the opposite of what you are suggesting: It means that China regularly covers up even very small mishaps such as a mislabeled sample of something relatively harmless. Just stuff that cannot be covered up will be reported (such as the few thousand people infected with Brucella somewhere...)

Does that mean that all other labs are safe? Certainly not, and I'd suggest you read my other comments about improving safety. But quarantining a researcher after a needle puncture is the right thing to do. Recognizing and reporting the escape of lab animals is a sign of there being at least some amount of oversight. China quite obviously doesn't have that, because noone in their right mind will believe that a lab never has a reportable incident.

So yes, I'd suggest starting at the most unsafe labs, where quite probably Covid-19 originated, and improving those, e.g. by closing them. And rebuilding them somewhere safer, to a far higher standard. Same for the rest of the world's labs, of course, but priority is on those having started global pandemics in the past...

[salawat]

>So having established that unsafe labs abound in the USA (per your definition), let's move to point 2 in your suggestion: "diplomatic pressure and travel and trade restrictions "

There's a key difference going on there, and you're sort of making the poster's point. The United States is genuinely transparent about as evidenced by your ability to actually find write-ups, and that processes are sufficiently audited to improve on process with. China hasn't done that and has actively stonewalled international cooperation by destroying or otherwise covering up any information vital to characterizing the nature of the early days of the pandemic.

So you're creating a false dilemma. Yes. Unsafe labs happen. How seriously is the issue taken, and with what level of transparency and scrutiny and preventive due diligence are these inherently unsafe ventures undertaken with?

That's more what I think the poster is getting at. Not a simple binary yes/no unsafe labs, but track record of safely and transparently handling lab escapes.

[lamontcg]

We know it wasn't engineered and wasn't due to gain of function. SARS-CoV-2, RatG13 and RmYN02 evolved from a common ancestor decades ago:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33500788/

If SARS-CoV-2 was a spike spliced onto a backbone it wouldn't look like they evolved from each other (similar to a photoshopped picture with different shadows and noise).

It also didn't arise from serial passage since the distance is large enough that the 1,000 base pair difference would take passage through many, many millions of animals, not something that could be accomplished in a lab. 30-50 years of evolution is an awful lot of serial passage, and only nature can accomplish that large of a serial passage experiment.

It is also very unlikely that the lab found SARS-CoV-2 or the immediate ancestor and cultured the live virus without publishing the sequence. They did culture WIV-1 and used the WIV-1 backbone, but they also published the sequence years before they did that and did it all in the open. That's the reason why people know about that. Before the pandemic there would be no reason to keep a SARS-CoV-2 sequence secret, and they earned their living by sequencing sarbecoviruses and publishing them. And still its unclear how a lab leak would happen with this virus, since you need to both culture the live virus and somehow aerosolize it and snort it in -- as we've learned it doesn't transmit by surfaces and restaurants doing deep cleaning after COVID issues are just engaging in sanitation theater.

The actual bioreactors where it formed are all sitting right out in the open. All the bat caves across China, all the factory farms which have tightly packed intermediate animal hosts. All the humans interacting with those animals through factory farming or collecting bat guano for fertilizer. All the mixing that occurs by those animals being transported across china. There's a million times more serial passage and animal-animal or animal-human contact happening right out in the open.

[tim333]

Not true. We know it didn't come from any viruses that have been published but the Chinese have been pretty diligent at taking down databases and hiding information and there are almost certainly many viruses they have that we don't have the details of that they could have used.

I have to say the data hiding is pretty suspicious. If it was a natural virus it would be useful to have a look at WIVs extensive research on bat coronaviruses and have a look at the other nine they took from the Mojang mine along with RaTg13. If they have nothing to hide why hide that stuff as soon as we have a pandemic that it would be relevant for?

[lamontcg]

Well lets be clear then that there is zero published evidence and all that remains is a perfectly executed cover up (which is both unprovable and unfalsifiable).

[tim333]

I'd say a fairly shoddy cover up. These things are not unknowable - someone could leak the database. Someone could find the natural source if it came from nature and so on.

While they have taken down the WIV database there is quite a lot of information in other papers and PhD thesis that came out before the outbreak and so were not censored. For example this stuff https://mobile.twitter.com/ydeigin/status/142816212306298881...

[lamontcg]

That's a preprint by two "independent researchers" that they apparently had to submit to the physics arxiv because medrxiv wouldn't take it, which is discussing pangolin sequences done by a lab in Guangdong. I don't know why you think that has any relevance to the WIV database.

And until someone actually leaks some information, you still have zero information. You believe on faith that it must exist. There's no point in arguing with you about it. At least its obvious now that the lab leak hypothesis is starting to resemble a religious belief.

[NGRhodes]

> Researchers freely enter and leave without quarantine, have contact with an unsuspecting population, go to normal hospitals, infect other patients there.

Just to be clear, which/what labs are you referring to here ?

[corty]

All of them. Even a BSL-4 lab is just a day job. In the evening, you get out of the lab area through the airlock, take off the suit, shower and go home to your family. After shopping and a quick beer of course. Followed by going to the movies.

[michaelmrose]

We probably couldn't realistically conduct research under conditions where you had to live in confinement for the duration of research with weeks long cooling off periods between visits to the real world. You simply wouldn't be able to find personnel to sweep the floors let alone bright motivated researchers.

[corty]

There is a long waiting list for research at the south pole. Also, if that research is important enough, it can be sufficiently high-paid, so that people willing to do it can be found. If there isn't enough money for that, that research is obviously not important enough. If it isn't important enough to spend that money on, it also isn't important enough to justify the risk to society.

[native_samples]

Interestingly enough, some decades ago there was an outbreak of common cold virus at a British Antarctic research base. The catch: at the time of the outbreak the researchers had been isolated there for months, with no contact with the outside world. It was investigated and no origin for the infection could be found. No new supply crates had been opened, for example.

Quite what this implies for COVID is unclear, because the field of epidemiology seems to have forgotten about this incident and never investigated deeply. It's worth noting though that there have been repeated cases of outbreaks in New Zealand that couldn't be traced back to any contact with anyone who had crossed the border. Personally I suspect that SARS-CoV-2 can be carried by the wind and maybe in the upper atmosphere - that has certainly been asserted for different viruses in the past - but that's heresy at the moment because it would provide a theoretical reason why lockdowns and mask mandates don't seem to have any effect.

Anyway, not really directly related to your point, but the mention of isolated research bases reminded me of it.

[michaelmrose]

It seems vastly more likely that the virus lied dormant upon supplies that were kept cold and was by happenstance later carried back into the warm than to imagine it carried across thousands of miles in the upper atmosphere.

Even if it were possible for someone to infect you from thousands of miles away with no intermediary save the wind it wouldn't be likely nor would it change the average dynamic where masks and lockdowns decrease spread in far more normal scenarios.

A lot of arguments against public health measures seem to bear a strong resemblance to yours. It is formulated like bullet proof vests don't stop hellfire missiles ergo we should stop wasting our time and money making swat team members deal with the sweat and discomfort of wearing vests!

It's only tolerable as an argument between people who have already decided that such protective measures are bad. Had the same sort of argument been made on a topic which they found controversial their reason should immediately have suggested 7 different counter arguments.

It seems like dubious reasoning to imagine that individuals spending 90% of their time in their homes and going out to the grocery store once a week wearing masks or not at all with curbside should spread disease just as much as when people mix normally.