[riyadparvez]

> Just that this particular lab is known for being extremely safe, and that it's therefore unlikely it would have had a leak.

This is nothing but disinformation.

> Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...

> Instead, there is Chinese evidence that the lab had safety problems. VOA has located state media reports showing that there were security incidents flagged by national inspections as well as reported accidents that occurred when workers were trying to catch bats for study.

[2] https://www.voanews.com/a/covid-19-pandemic_chinese-lab-chec...

[tripletao]

Beyond that, the original SARS escaped at least once from a BSL-4 lab in Taiwan:

> The scientist had been working on a SARS study in Taiwan's only biosafety level 4 lab since June, the Taiwan statement said. [...] A chest x-ray showed pneumonia in his right lung, and polymerase chain reaction tests of throat and blood samples were positive for the SARS virus.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2003/12/taiwanes...

The idea that "BSL-4" implies "negligible risk of accident" seems to be empirically false. In any case, the WIV was creating chimeras of novel coronaviruses with much looser precautions, at BSL-2:

> The Chinese work was carried out at biosafety level 2 (BSL-2), a much lower tier than Baric’s BSL-3+.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...

[sudosysgen]

> tripletao 2 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | on: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, b...

Beyond that, the original SARS escaped at least once from a BSL-4 lab in Taiwan:

> The scientist had been working on a SARS study in Taiwan's only biosafety level 4 lab since June, the Taiwan statement said. [...] A chest x-ray showed pneumonia in his right lung, and polymerase chain reaction tests of throat and blood samples were positive for the SARS virus.

Many viruses have come to infect people in BSL4 labs, when they happen to be run incompetently.

From the exact same article you cite :

> The AP report quoted Dr. Shigeru Omi, the WHO's Western Pacific regional director, as saying the patient most likely was infected by some spilled liquid he saw on the surface of a test tube. Omi said the man was working without protective gear, such as a gown and gloves, at the time, according to the report.

Which, again, does nothing to oppose the thesis in the original post, which is that these viruses won't escape a BSL4 lab that's actually operating competently at the BSL4 level.

> The idea that "BSL-4" implies "negligible risk of accident" seems to be empirically false. In any case, the WIV was creating chimeras of novel coronaviruses with much looser precautions, at BSL-2:

That was also explicitely addressed. In 2013, the WIV was not a BSL4 lab.

[tripletao]

A BSL-4 lab operated by researchers who never made mistakes would probably be quite safe. Unfortunately, they're instead operated by flawed humans. If you look at the safety culture of nuclear engineering, aviation, or other fundamentally dangerous activities that we nonetheless manage to practice safely, then you'll see practitioners who recognize that. They don't dismiss accidents or near-accidents as human error, even if a human failed to follow a procedure, and instead look for better ways to build systems tolerant of the human errors that inevitably occur. The attitude I've seen from many virologists--or at least, from the virologists with the perhaps-questionable judgment required to become the public face of these arguments--is disturbingly different.

And yeah, the WIV was working with novel bat-origin coronaviruses at BSL-2, not 4. That makes the risk of an accident yet higher, which makes our reddit virologist's argument that "BSL-4 labs like the WIV are really safe" not just bad but also dishonest. So I'm not sure what you think is addressed?

ETA: And I see that the reddit post talks about the WIV doing work at BSL-3 before they opened their BSL-4 lab. This claim is unreferenced, and as far as I can tell it's false; Dr. Shi confirms that they were working at BSL-2:

> In an email, Zhengli Shi said she followed Chinese rules that are similar to those in the US. Safety requirements are based on what virus you are studying. Since bat viruses like WIV1 haven’t been confirmed to cause disease in human beings, her biosafety committee recommended BSL-2 for engineering them and testing them and BSL-3 for any animal experiments.

The reddit post could easily be read to imply that after the BSL-4 lab opened, all work moved to the higher BSL; but it never actually says that, and I'm not aware of any evidence (or even any claim from the WIV) that it did. There's a strong incentive to work at lower BSL even when a higher-level facility is available, since the extra precautions significantly slow work. I therefore believe it's likely that work was continuing at BSL-2 in 2019.

[sudosysgen]

That's interesting, because when you ignore the spin on both texts, you find out there is no contradictory information at all. Yet you could that it's nothing but disinformation. You should also note that the article is in the Opinion section, and doesn't actually publish the cables.

The cables the is factually claiming is that US officials learnt that the research going on at the lab indicated that there is a high risk of a coronavirus causing a pandemic, that there is a risk of zoonosis, and that there are risks associated with this research. There are no specific claims of bad practices or mismanagement, and it is entirely likely that the author is using those words to refer to the decision to do this kind of research as well as GoF research when he talks about unsafe practices and mismanagement, as they are the only material issues with safety and management he mentioned.

Beyond that, I don't see any evidence the lab was operating unsafely. If the virus really was in those populations, you'd need two unlikely things to happen, since we all agree the virus wasn't engineered.

First, the Chinese government needs to have made the conscious decision not to release proof that the virus was natural. Indeed, if it was being studied alive, the WIV would absolutely have identified it and a precursor. They could have offered one or both of these, or returned to where they found it, and pinpoint an origin, absolving themselves of all these arguments.

Then, the virus, which would belogically present in bat populations in those populated areas, would have had to escape a BSL4 lab, but not have escaped into society beforethen? What's the likelihood that it could have, while weakly infectious and poorly adapted to humans, managed to go through the protections of a BSL4 lab, but not managed to make it out of those animals?

[riyadparvez]

I don't have the time to go through lawyer-speak arguments. The cables from officials regarding WIV safety have been verified. Just because it's on the opinion page doesn't mean it's false. It has way more credibility than some random virologist's claim about WIV safety on Reddit. Period.

Just few points:

* There's no agreement that this virus hasn't been engineered. Ralph Baric has said that just looking at the DNA it's not possible to distinguish whether a virus has been engineered or not. Alina Chan had raised this point and Vox has even made a correction on their article [1]:

> A previous version of this story stated that SARS-CoV-2 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies … assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty. (h/t to Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for her critique and input)

Please don't spread misinformation.

* A bio safety expert has weighed in and also expressed his concern about possible lab leak of SARS-CoV-2 [2].

* Viruses escape labs on regular basis [3]. Someone else on this thread also posted a link of a recent virus escape from a Taiwan lab.

* This is not the first time a lab leak happened and virologists tried to cover up. It happened during Soviet era in the 70s [4]. The truth came out after the fall of Soviet Union.

[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22734496/genetic-engineer...

[2] https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1479170984343064579

[3] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/20/18260669/deadly...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/20/world/europe/coronavirus-...

[awb]

> Just because it's on the opinion page doesn't mean it's false.

No, but if it’s a red flag that the author has an agenda, or wants to jump to a conclusion without gathering enough evidence required for the news section.

> It has way more credibility than some random virologist's claim about WIV safety on Reddit. Period.

Reddit is the medium of distribution, as it was intended as kind of a springboard to an AMA. Could have been posted on Medium, Substack, etc. For what it’s worth, he is a published virologist: https://scholar.google.com.co/citations?user=8wCwbNUAAAAJ&hl...

I’m not saying he has the right take (I don’t know enough about virology to evaluate his content), just that it was a widely circulated, comprehensive and researched piece of content about the lab leak theory, as were the other two articles.

In a sea of half-thought out opinions and conspiracy theories these 3 articles actually spent incredible amounts of time and published evidence (on both sides of the theory) that can be analyzed and debated in depth.

[sudosysgen]

> The cables from officials regarding WIV safety have been verified. Just because it's on the opinion page doesn't mean it's false. It has way more credibility than some random virologist's claim about WIV safety on Reddit. Period.

The cables were written by an entrepreneur and a manager, and the opinion section isn't willing to publish them. That's not lawyer speak, that's the lengths you have to go to in order to interpret a shady opinion piece that goes to lengths not to provide the actually interesting information.

> There's no agreement that this virus hasn't been engineered. Ralph Baric has said that just looking at the DNA it's not possible to distinguish whether a virus has been engineered or not. Alina Chan had raised this point and Vox has even made a correction on their article [1]:

> A previous version of this story stated that SARS-CoV-2 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies … assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty. (h/t to Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for her critique and input)

You can't prove a negative. That's all the substance in what I've quoted.

> Please don't spread misinformation.

Where have a I tried to prove a negative?

> Viruses escape labs on regular basis [3]. Someone else on this thread also posted a link of a recent virus escape from a Taiwan lab.

You should read my reply - from that article, the infected scientist was at the time not wearing his PPE. The infection was due to his incompetence, and wouldn't have happened if he was actually following BSL4 regulations. It seems his colleagues saw this and thought it was fine.

> This is not the first time a lab leak happened and virologists tried to cover up. It happened during Soviet era in the 70s [4]. The truth came out after the fall of Soviet Union.

Don't try to beg the question, please.

> A bio safety expert has weighed in and also expressed his concern about possible lab leak of SARS-CoV-2 [2].

Now we're finally getting somewhere. I assume who you're referring to as a biosafety expert is James W. LeDuc. All he's saying is that it's a possibility and that it needs to be investigated - so I don't see the disagreement. This was in April 2020, before a lot of the evidence we are relying on came out. Beyond this, his interlocutors points seem not be factually accurate, or at leasy hasty conclusions that later did didn't bear out.

[sterlind]

> You should read my reply - from that article, the infected scientist was at the time not wearing his PPE. The infection was due to his incompetence, and wouldn't have happened if he was actually following BSL4 regulations. It seems his colleagues saw this and thought it was fine.

that's.. worse though, right? that's an incident in a BSL-4 where an incautious scientist disregarded regulations, without his colleagues calling him on it, and leading to the release of SARS. that's the reality - regulations are always broken, colleagues are always complacent. why would WIV or any other BSL-4 be any better?

[awb]

> why would WIV or any other BSL-4 be any better?

Why would they be just as bad?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7088173/

> In this study, an international survey based on volunteering was conducted in biosafety level 3 and 4 laboratories to determine the number of laboratory-acquired infections and the possible underlying causes of these contaminations.

> The analysis of the survey reveals that laboratory-acquired infections have been infrequent and even rare in recent years, and human errors represent a very high percentage of the cases.

> Today, most risks from biological hazards can be reduced through the use of appropriate procedures and techniques, containment devices and facilities, and the training of personnel.