[stablechaos]

"Zero evidence", huh? The epicenter of Covid-19 was the middle of a major metropolitan city (instead of a rural area near lots of animals), blocks away from a major virology lab which was specifically studying these viruses, collecting hundreds of wild strains from field operations, in research DARPA said before the fact endangers the local community and was banned by NIH, trying to specifically create this virus as closely as possible for the research to be successful...

It's like seeing smoke billowing out of a building and refusing to accept that there's a fire until you see the flames. Very convenient that your standard of evidence surpasses anything we can possibly obtain after the CCP scrubbed everything.

[fsh]

SARS was first discovered in a major city too. This makes a lot of sense. If there is an outbreak in a rural village, the chances of it spreading worldwide are slim. It is quite possible that small outbreaks happen occasionally without anyone noticing. Who is going to test a few villagers that got pneumonia for novel coronaviruses?

I would also argue that in the age of factory farming it is not so clear if more human-animal contact happens in rural areas or in big population centers. SARS was eventually traced back to palm civets which are farmed animals. In this industry wild animals, many of which are susceptible to SARS-like coronaviruses, are being bred in large numbers. To me this sounds like a perfect breeding ground for the viruses as well.

[stablechaos]

It's the totality of the evidence taken together, not a series of things to be considered independently. When a lot of "coincidence" add up, they cease being coincidences. Or, at the very least, if there's no serious investigation by the people in charge of something so significant, an injustice is being done.

Also, factory farming is far safer than all other forms of farming. If the outbreak was unrelated to WIV and centered in Wuhan, wet-markets and exotic animal markets are the likely culprit.

[roenxi]

> When a lot of "coincidence" add up, they cease being coincidences.

The internet doesn't handle subtlety well, so just to spell it out...

If we admit things are coincidences then they can't be added up to get evidence. Lots of coincidences isn't evidence. The point is these things aren't coincidences. If a new coronavirus breaks out next door to a lab studying coronaviruses, then the lab is a possible source of the virus and the proximity is evidence. It is weak evidence and still unlikely, but evidence nonetheless.

However, when the lab is very close and the closest known bat virus (RaTG13) is a very long way away as is the case for SARS-CoV-2 then that is starting to get quite murky as evidence goes. It would be much easier for RaTG13 to travel the rather large distance from its natural location to Wuhan in a freezer/test tube than in a bat.

[stablechaos]

And there are three completely plausible explanations for why Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak's research could have led to the outbreak:

(a) It was successfully created in the lab using gain of function research they were developing

(b) It was accidentally or purposefully cultured naturally from one of the many strains they had collected from the field

(c) A researcher, assistant, or contractor was infected in the field as they were doing field work

Option (c) is particularly compelling because it doesn't require much additional complexity beyond the "official explanation". It still maintains that the origin of Covid-19 was a zoonotic spillover event, but points to the research as the direct cause of that event. And it's not necessarily the case that if the virus was in the bat population already that it necessarily would have spread. Rural populations might become briefly infected with a pandemic-level virus, but the spread is naturally quarantined since they have little contact with major metropolitan areas.

[jml7c5]

"A lot of small things adding up" is also how conspiracy theories are formed and sustained. Be it Qanon, GME, Pizzagate, 9/11-was-an-inside-job, etc. They all rely on small details that are not individually damning, but in aggregate fit a compelling narrative. You have to be extremely wary of this sort of thinking.

I don't think that a lab leak is implausible, but your statement that the small pointers "cease being coincidences" because they fit a narrative imparts far, far too much certainty to the lab leak theory.

[phreeza]

Which other coincidence is there apart from the proximity of the lab to the initial detection site?

[mcherm]

Well, there is the similarity between features of the virus and research being proposed in a grant application written half a world away just a couple of years before the virus spread to humans. That's a coincidence of note.

[phreeza]

Yea agreed this seems like an additional data point, that looks suspicious, but it is very new (at least to me) and I will wait to see what experts make of this.

[krona]

You're correct, however after years of examining blood samples from hospital patients it was possible to trace the phylogeny of SARS to a zoonotic origin. This has not been possible for SARS‑CoV‑2, least of all because the government doesn't want such an investigation to take place. I can't think why.

[aga98mtl]

>SARS was first discovered in a major city too.

How many major cities are there? hundreds. How many with a research center experimenting on coronavirus? (1 china, 2 in the USA) Just in China there are more than 100 cities with 1 millions people. Odds are 99+% that it has something to do with the research center. A very generous take would be that it has 1% chance of being unrelated.

[flavius29663]

Was the first SARS discovered in the vecinity of a lab studying SARS?

[gfodor]

The “zero evidence” claim is fun because every day there is a failure to discover an origin species is de facto evidence of a non-zootonic origin, since that evidence is not subject to being hidden and is highly incentivized to find given it would be exculpatory.

[t0rt01se]

The "zero evidence" claim is a blatant attempt to shift the burden of proof. In my opinion the burden of proof remains with those hypothesizing zoonotic origin.

[dash2]

I’d suggest the opposite. [edit: not the opposite, the same!]

If it’s conceivable that gain of function research can release a virus that kills millions, then the burden of proof is with the researchers to prove that they’re safe and this didn’t happen.

[t0rt01se]

Please read my comment again. Perhaps you aren't suggesting the opposite.

[dash2]

Oops! Thanks.

[zhdc1]

> since that evidence is not subject to being hidden and is highly incentivized to find given it would be exculpatory

Why? The wet markets in Wuhan were sterilized and emptied (meaning that the animals inside were removed, killed, and their carcasses disposed of) at the very start of the outbreak - several days before anyone had definitive evidence that SARS-CoV-2 could be transmitted by person to person contact.

I'm sure that the Chinese government would love to have definitive evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is zoonotic, but that evidence likely went up in smoke (January 1st, 2020) weeks before anyone realized that COVID-19 would turn into a legitimate pandemic (January 23rd, 2020).

[cfn]

I can't find the reference right now but the evidence can be gathered from hospital records. There is a progression in cases and some particularities that can be studied to establish the origin of a disease.

[zhdc1]

> I can't find the reference right now but the evidence can be gathered from hospital records.

This is why there has been a lot of attention on certain animals, such as raccoon dogs and minks. It turns out that a lot of the early infections linked to the various Wuhan markets were from shop owners and employees who either sold or were in close contact a small number of animal species. It also turns out that these animals can be infected by SARS-CoV-2. See https://ncrc.jhsph.edu/research/animal-sales-from-wuhan-wet-....

The issue is that (as far as I'm aware) there's no immediate evidence that SARS-CoV-2 jumped to humans from any of these animals, only that there was an (again, as far as I'm aware) unknown intermediary species. However, because the animals at the wet market were disposed of, there's no way to definitively link SARS-CoV-2 to them.

[prox]

Could a recombination be possible? So lab virus meets wild virus in zoonotic environment and sars-cov-2 appears?

[littlestymaar]

For SARS ans MERS the evidence were “we found a variant of the virus before its mutation allowing it to jump to humans in civet/Camel”.

[bawolff]

> It's like seeing smoke billowing out of a building and refusing to accept that there's a fire until you see the flames.

The stuff you cite is circumstantial at best. Yes, given the seriousness of covid i would like someone to investigate it, but i would hardly call it billowing smoke.

> Very convenient that your standard of evidence surpasses anything we can possibly obtain after the CCP scrubbed everything.

Is that really relavent? Say CCP would in theory destroy evidence if such a situation arised. That's not an argument that says it is china's fault, its just an argument that we might not ever know. Its not like the people arguing that it was natural aren't using lack of chinese whistleblower as the evidence for naturalness.

At the very least i'd like evidence that suggests there is a higher probability that it was a chinese experiment than a natural occurance. Occam's razor and all. Arguing that it might be impossible to know what happened, increases uncertainty, but doesn't affect the relative probabilities.

[flavius29663]

Occam's razor works against your argument...given everything we know so far, the simplest explanation is that a chinese lab leaked a virus and it's covering it. There is no jump in logic needed. It's actually easier to explain why the virus was so close to the Wuhan lab.

[bunnie]

Maybe it's the other way around. They put the lab in Wuhan because it's easy to get many samples of the zoonotic viruses of concern due to the presence of many natural reservoirs and wet markets, and you want a lab near the action because you want to be able to study the hot spots.

In other words, your argument is like saying occam's razor concludes that fire extinguishers start fires because they are always found in the vicinity of fires.

Also I think many on this thread greatly underestimate the adaptive and evolutionary capabilities of nature. Having done some wet lab myself, I'm impressed at the ability of nature to do lateral gene transfer, and also it's damn hard to make any experiments work. Plus there are multiple layers of safety and containment around any lab experiment. Movies make engineering look like AI robots in labs and biology experiments that work on the first try, and people who say lab near outbreak must implicate the lab have probably spent more time watching movies about outbreaks than trying to engineer organisms themselves. Having spent a lot of time trying and failing to engineer organisms, occam's razor screams to me that the most likely explanation is natural evolution.

The real lab of concern are the hundreds of millions of people living in close contact with animal reservoirs, performing millions of competitive, uncontrolled evolution experiments daily, with single hosts sometimes simultaneously infected by multiple viruses, thus facilitating lateral gene transfer... and this continues to be the status quo. If you can accept that MERS and SARS CoV-1 are naturally evolved, then occam's razor would indicate that SARS CoV-2 is just one point in a series, and yet another coronavirus outbreak is likely to emerge in the next decade or so, from a dense urban area near animal reservoirs.

Distracting ourselves by fantasizing that only humans could be so devious to create such a virus makes us miss a very important opportunity to try and prevent the next outbreak through careful monitoring and research.

So, if you believe that we should have fire departments and fire extinguishers near ignition sources then, maybe we should have /more/ labs like Wuhan's in high risk areas, not less. And we'd want to encourage more cross border cooperation, not antagonize it, because viruses don't give a damn about your politics.

It's concerning that threads like this, on a forum as ostensibly pro-science as HN, are pushing ourselves further away from science and transparency...

[flavius29663]

> the presence of many natural reservoirs and wet markets, and you want a lab near the action because you want to be able to study the hot spots.

The closest relative to this virus (it's not even that close, just 95% similarity) was found in a bat cave hundreds of miles away. They flew it in Wuhan and made experiments on it (this is all documented, not some crazy theory). Something tells me it's more likely to escape from the lab right there, rather than somehow infect people for hundreds of miles undetected. Your analogy is wrong, the lab is not really a fire extinguisher, because a fire extinguisher cannot cause fires on it's own! Lab leaks happen all the time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

A better analogy is: a nuclear scientist works with heavy metals at a lab (far away from home), suddenly his family gets radiation poisoning. I wonder if it was the scientist that made a mistake, or should we focus all our search for natural radiation sources in the family's house? Sure, it's always a possibility, but what is it more likely? Also, you should at least acknowledge that the person is working with radiation and investigate that possibility thoroughly.

Those lab safety measure were criticized by the US state department https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...

> And we'd want to encourage more cross border cooperation, not antagonize it, because viruses don't give a damn about your politics.

The Chinese took the virus database offline 2 months before the official outbreak...what a coincidence. And what a cooperation effort. Renaming the closest relative virus to hide it's trail. And a lot more.

Yeah, we need more cooperation, and China needs to do it first. They created this mess, the least they can do is cooperate rather than hinder investigations. We need better lab security and better protocols worldwide.

[bawolff]

Occams razor states "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity"

It doesn't seem neccesary for a chinese lab to be involved, and the only evidence so far (afaik) is that it exists and was studying something similar. Meanwhile there exists (albeit definitely not ironclad) evidence that china wasn't involved.

If there is no evidence beyond circumstantial evidence that china had a lab near by, and there is a pretty much equally reasonable explanation that the event happened by chance, than i think occam's razor favours the one with less entities involved.

I'm not saying that china isn't involved. I'm saying that we basically have no idea and the argument that china did it is no more strong than the alternative. On the balance i find the natural explanation more compelling, but ultimately we have no idea. I also think there may be some cognitive biases going on - covid 19 has hurt, and we want scapegoat to blame. If it was natural, than we have only ourselves to blame for being underprepared. If china did it, we convinently have someone to hate.

[flavius29663]

If you take it like that, the it seems like the lab leak theory is even more probable. For the lab leak to work, we have all the entities we need: the bat fever a few years ago, ongoing studies on those coronaviruses, outbreak near the lab, very suspicious lab behavior, Chinese coverup.

If you take the other hypotheses, it goes like this: some bat coronavirus -> jumps to an unnamed animal -> jumps to a human. There is an unknown entity in this equation, which is the third party animal. This is necessary for the theory to work.

If you make me chose between a theory that has all the elements and one that might or might not find a mythical animal in the future...I think Occam's razor favors the one with all known elements. Otherwise, ad-absurdum, you can win any argument stating it's Occam's razor: you just introduce a single magic black box which can substitute any number of entities.

I am not doing this to blame China. I blame China for the opacity of the response, which at times seemed like they didn't care what happens with everyone else. I can blame China regardless of how this virus appeared. I also blame our top scientists, which covered their asses instead of coming out with everything they know and work for the greater good.

What I do want is better bio-labs safety protocols, something that can be monitor by third party inspectors, say from UN, just like we have for nuclear facilities. Lab leaks happen, it's not a Chinese thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...