Where’s your comment from two years ago belittling the wet market theory as shitty?
This whole saga is a damning indictment of: science journalism, government agencies’ public engagement, scientists’ public engagement, and the critical reasoning skills of middlebrow audiences.
I know you're making a rhetorical point, but I found a thread I remembered from May 2020 where I both said that the wet market theory was shit[1] and that the Wuhan Institute of Virology/Wuhan CDC needed to be investigated without widespread censorship.[0] At the time, it was not exactly well-received. Someone accused me of throwing out so many lies that reasonable people couldn't even rebut it.
I saw a lot of folks saying that the theories all kinda stank at the time, and to wait and see. Interestingly, a lot of folks also kept quiet and didn't champion any theories. Maybe I can link you to a lack of comment two years ago to back up my bona fides?
Normally when you try to solve a serious problem in a small company you might want to know who caused the problem, but most of the times you just need to know it wasn't intentional and you focus on addressing the outcome and making sure it never happens again.
In big enterprises usually solving the problem is secondary to finding who the culprit is so that all future problems can be blamed on that department.
China and the US are both like big enterprises. None of them is actually focused on making sure all the problems that happened will not happen again. People are just focused on blaming their domestic shit on the other.
China releases a strategy paper on US hegemony, US brings the lab leak theory back into the spotlight. It doesn't really matter if there was valid research on that theory. The fact that the major newspapers come out with it 1 day after China releases their stuff, shows you it's political.
It may be right, it may be wrong, an unintended leak has always been a very likely on the list for me. It's not like lack of security in labs hasn't been an issue in the US, in China and in a bunch of labs in Europe for that matter. Probably other countries are way worse.
The point isn't whether it's right or wrong, the point is that the goal isn't to solve the problem, but exclusively to assert blame.
When it hit, I took the first Wuhan sequence and ran it through some Python and pulled out string repeats in nucleotides. I then searched for those repeated sequences in Google and found the NIH lab in Maryland was doing research on how to better infect mice or rats with a substitution technique for twiddling into a cell's ports. So, it's entirely plausible, but without proof it isn't scientific.
It seems that lo these many years later all the theories are still full of holes. Lab leak is plausible but there's no public evidence to back it. Somehow the DOE thinks they have something but we haven't seen it. Just based on history, zoonotic remains most likely but no host has been found.
There’s evidence that it’s more likely than various other theories, but there isn’t a smoking gun. That’s the kind of nuance that’s easy to ignore in favor of your preconceived notions because weak evidence is rarely worth changing your mind over.
At a practical level I don’t think there’s much difference between the lab link being a 7% chance vs a 70% chance. What’s more concerning is the potential of future leaks and what responses they might result in. The possibility that local officials get in CYA mode over a possible lab leak of a more dangerous virus is seriously concerning.
Which has little to do with the existence of said evidence. I’ve never seen direct evidence for the year Columbus sailed.
Anyway, many things that would make future leaks less likely also make past leaks less likely. The types of experiments being conducted and the types of labs those experiments are conducted in. Oversight, funding, and systems for reporting safety issues etc etc.
It's also weird to me that the Department of Energy (and not, say, the CDC/DHHS or USAMRIID or what have you) is advancing such hypotheses in the first place. What does the origin of SARS-CoV-2 have to do with American energy policy?
DOE supervises the national labs, which have 1) bio experience 2) high classification 3) supercomputers 4) lots more scientists than CIA or God help us FBI. DOE has organic science resources. The other agencies tend to rely on academic consultants, who are compromised because no one wants to bring virology labs under intense and blaming scrutiny.
That would also imply they were specifically looking at lab protocols to determine if there was a possibility of leak and perhaps not fully evaluating the likelihood of other origins which would be outside their expertise. The CDC/NIH/WHO operate loads more labs and also employ loads of epidemiologists.
Right, but that still doesn't answer why the DoE is supervising the national labs or otherwise has any significant degree of bio experience in the first place.
Were any of these "theories" (they're hypotheses, at best) ever mutually exclusive? It seems entirely possible - and maybe even probable - that SARS-CoV-2:
- Originally evolved in the wild to at least some extent
Originally evolved in the wild to at least some extent
Almost everyone thinks this is true. Even the most fringy people don’t seem to be claiming that a virus was synthesized from scratch.
Found its way into a wet market near said lab
Ditto for this one. It’s pretty clear that there was a cluster of people early on that were infected in or near the market.
—-
The distinction between the lab leak and non-lab leak theory is whether the lab had anything at all to do with the chain of transmission.
If patient zero caught the virus in the lab or from a vector that was once in the lab, that’s lab leak. It’s apologists for the lab that want to conflate lab leak and bioweapon in order to dismiss the former as a nutty conspiracy theory.
Suppose a lab worker went to a cave hundreds of miles away and collected a bunch of bats. Those bats were returned to the lab. At some point a different lab worker exposed himself to one of the bat carcasses and caught proto-Covid-19. Three days later he stopped at the wet market on the way home from work to pick up dinner and infected patients 1-5.
In what way is the lab in this scenario superfluous? If it had better and enforced protocols for handling potentially infected specimens there would have been no pandemic.
Because there's no reason it has to be a lab worker involved.
The ground zero wet market in Wuhan is several miles away from the virology lab, and across the river.
The simplest explanation is that one of the 11 million Wuhan residents who do not work at that particular lab brought it to the wet market. It was right before spring festival, lots of people traveling.
Inserting "possible" events that loop in the virology lab while all of the initial infections were nowhere close to it, with no evidence, is just trying to keep "lab leak" alive. Sure, it's possible! We could assume it was lab workers somewhere in the chain, or assume the CIA, we can assume whatever we want.
They were not really mutually exclusive, but were often portrayed as such. The lab leak theory got confused with the intentionally fabricated theory, probably as a strawman argument to discredit the lab leak theory.
For what it's worth, your scenario seems to me the most probably by far. I don't think we'll ever know for sure, since China has done it's best to destroy all evidence (we should be careful not to take that fact as evidence for one theory or another though).
What was the origin of Bubonic Plague, of AIDS, of Polio? Do we know in sufficient detail? I remember many saying that the exact origin of SARS-CoV-2 may never be known. Say it did escape from a Chinese lab - is that all you need to know? Or would you want to know how it came to be in the lab in the first place?
I remember articles and quotes firmly rejecting the lab leak hypothesis and darkly implying that those championing the theory had a hidden agenda.
The considerations were:
— there were random attacks on Asians
- public health officials and scientists were worried about an anti science backlash
- virologists were really worried about a backlash against virology
— relations with China had not yet deteriorated to their current levels and government leaders didn’t want to antagonize them
So there was a semi-coordinated effort by government officials and the scientific establishment to put the lab leak theory beyond the pale. The middlebrow media either wittingly or unwittingly went along for the ride. Their readership ate it up.
There were and are problematic elements of the lab leak people as well - I still see people (on this site) who claim that some or all aspects of the virus were synthetically created at the behest of Anthony Fauci. You may say I'm nutpicking, but I truly have a hard time determining what the lab leak theory is sometimes.
But my sense was that the agenda behind the lab leak family of theories was to lay blame at some human or humans for the events of the pandemic, which to me seems like a fairly futile endeavor. One of my questions for these people has always been this: say their darkest theories are correct; what am I supposed to do about that? It seems that the best course of action was to wear masks, socially isolate as much as possible, and get vaccinated and keep getting vaccinations as new strains appear.
It’s one thing for nutjobs to push a bad theory for some whacky reason and another thing entirely for establishment figures to shade the truth in order to push a (positive!) agenda. We have so many nutjobs, in part, because of generations of establishment figures being dishonest for the greater good.
Lab leak was always a better theory. There were what hundreds? thousands? of wet markets across China and two bsl-4 labs. Given that the virus arose in a city with a wet market and a bsl-4 lab, the prior should be that it had to do with the lab and not the wet market. That could be overcome with evidence, of course, but it is not some out there idea.
What are you supposed to do about it? Maybe nothing. But if you are an establishment figure, certainly don’t lie about it and further destroy our society’s trust in experts.
Except for the little detail that this virus has been observed to make natural zoonotic jumps at least twice--and has infected other humans (probably *many* other humans) without appreciable onward transmission. It's an entirely reasonable thing for it to have happened once again. We simply don't need to involve the lab, so why blame it other than to bash China?
Do you think all these establishment figures all had perfect knowledge of the origin of this novel virus and all chose a coordinated lie, or does it seem possible that this was all the process (which I'll note is ongoing and may never be complete) of figuring it out, which is indeed messy and happens over time and in public?
You know how you're driving and a person behind you gets in a turning lane but then continues to go straight anyway and then honks at YOU for getting in their way. And because you are the nice guy but knows they fucked up you don't raise a stink and honk back but you're still fucking mad as hell?
AIDS is caused by HIV, which is believed to have evolved from a virus infecting primates in Africa (probably more specific details than that exist, but I don't know them offhand).
Bubonic plague and polio both predate the existence of writing, and may well predate even agriculture.
>>> This whole saga is a damning indictment of: science journalism, government agencies’ public engagement, scientists’ public engagement, and the critical reasoning skills of middlebrow audiences
How many people in this world just put their blinders on and distort new information to fit their preconceptions and biases? What do you think "low confidence" means in the context of an intelligence report? I tried finding out myself, and I mostly just found people like yourself pretending it means whatever they want it to.
"A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion."
Yikes, what's your definition for "shitty theory" then? Something that's "not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion" sounds pretty shitty to me. Literal shit lets you draw more conclusions about the defecator than that!
What do you think a theory is? A theory is by definition unproven. With enough evidence, it becomes proven and therefore no longer a theory. Then there's the grey area in between, where a theory seems plausible but there's not enough evidence to be conclusive about it.
A "shitty" theory is one which completely lacks evidence supporting it and/or has far more evidence that contradicts it. The covid lab leak theory is not "shitty" by either metric.
Yes it's a completely ridiculous theory that the biolab that works on bat borne coronaviruses might have had something to do with the bad borne coronavirus that sprang up a mile away.
It's just a theory. Totally crackpot.
I mean come on they totally found the animal that came from to support the zoonotic origin theory.
Oh wait, they have yet to identify a spillover animal.
Anyone with common sense notice the lab leak is the most likely scenario here. But sure go ahead and continue to defend the honor of the CCP, an organization that is shortly going to be sending lethal weaponry including suicide drones to Vladimir Putin so he can murder Ukrainian civilians with impunity.
The spillover animals (aka intermediate hosts) for SARS-1 were rapidly identified as civets in a wet market, in less than a year. The animal reservoir that infected the civets were the horseshoe bats, and yes, that took a few years to confirm.
No intermediate host was ever identified as the source of infection in Wuhan. The article you posted regarding minks has absolutely nothing to do with an original source of spillover. It's simply documenting the common pandemic phenomenon of humans infecting mammals with covid, and, wow, the minks infecting humans with the same virus that is already evolved to infect human ACE2 receptors.
You started with an absurd, inverse hypothesis.
The lab that studies bat-borne coronaviruses had absolutely nothing to do with the bat-borne coronavirus that broke out a kilometer away, despite:
Location is 1000km away from the known horseshoe bat populations in Yunnan that are SARS reservoirs.
Emergence was during late autumn/early winter when local bats are already hibernating.
Emergence was in the middle of a cosmopolitan metropolis where the locals don't eat bats.
Chinese Communist Party immediately blocked any investigations and never even pretended to want to restore records that were deleted, despite the prospect of being vindicated by a zoonotic origin being found.
CCP currently, rather than attempt to continue to claim a non-existent zoonotic origin, has now claimed a US-based lab leak is at fault.
Multiple NIH grants specifically mention humanized mouse models with human ACE2 receptors lining air passages, and conducting serial passage of wild-type bat-borne SARS in research being conducted by grant recipient in Wuhan lab. (There was an intermediate host, it was a genetically modified mouse model, and long since disposed of.)
> The spillover animals (aka intermediate hosts) for SARS-1 were rapidly identified as civets in a wet market…
I'll take your word for it. (A long "few years" — "The virus originally came from horseshoe bats, though that wasn’t conclusively determined until 2017".)
"No intermediate host was ever identified as the source of infection in Wuhan" likely because —
"Unlike with SARS, however, there were no opportunities to sample the markets to look for animals infected with SARS-CoV-2. Chinese authorities closed and cleared out the markets soon after the epidemic started, citing public-health concerns, and banned all wildlife trade on 26 January 2020. Eating and trading wild animals were permanently banned in February 2020. Samples at the market to test for SARS-CoV-2 were not taken until months later. The virus was found in the drains of the market, but there were no live animals to test."
"The tick study that documented the sale of illegal animals in the Huanan market observed, however, that the sellers were not too concerned about law enforcement, and that plainly illegal animals were openly sold. It is unclear whether any of the animal traders engaged in illegal wildlife commerce have been since found, fined or punished. The swift clear-out of the market may have been intended to protect them as well as the law-enforcement officers and local politicians who had looked the other way."
> You started with an absurd, inverse hypothesis. The lab that studies bat-borne coronaviruses had absolutely nothing to do with the bat-borne coronavirus that broke out a kilometer away…
People want a blunt weapon to promote their politics with.
All of the theories had the properties of being convenient darlings of some pre-existing political faction.
The most responsible thing is to claim ignorance on the origin story unless you have genuine, credentialed, expertise and analytical training for it and even then, those people choose their audiences and presentation carefully because of the unintended consequences.
Those who refuse to fuel speculation on topics they are unqualified to comment on is by definition, absent and invisible.
It's also a distraction. The real problem is the chain of decisions and coordinating made by hundreds of groups around the planet between say November and April that catalyzed this from a problem to a global catastrophe. That's really the focus here because an H5N1 mutation is potentially around the corner and that could be much much worse.
It's dramatically affected egg supplies as you've probably seen at your local supermarket. A human uncontrolled outbreak would be a disaster. It's far more dangerous than covid.
"People want a blunt weapon to promote their politics with."
You are right and thats the most fascinating / absurd part of this whole thing. Somehow wet market vs lab leak has political sides and people are emotionally invested in one over the other. Its crazy, lets just have the truth and move on, either way it came out of China and savaged the world. People don't want the lab leak theory to be true for the sole reason that Trump said it and they believe Trump is the devil. I am very much not a fan of Trump and saw his actions leading up to the election as a clear and present danger to our democracy but still have no emotional investment in one theory over another. I just want the truth. This is an example of how insane American politics have gotten over the last 8? years
Do you need the truth though? In some ways the mere question on the origin of the virus is a political one. No one in the public has ever cared to have definitive proof where any virus came from before. The ability to point to a specific time and place is probably outside of our ability. A lab had it on Nov 1st, 2021. A lab worker brought it home, is that 100% proof that was the first infection? Or did the lab get it from a place where it was already infecting people?
Finally, what do we do with the info? Is it just a, 'oh well, that's interesting'?
I don't think it is just 'evil' China here. I think this is the US, China, and other world researchers who with NIMBY were doing research on coronaviruses and modifying them. Let's not use racism to mask the military-industrial-government complex as the true culprit. I do believe though that an accidental, not bioweapons release, of the virus occurred because people make mistakes. The coverup is why I think this needs to be vetted. It needs to be prevented, and not satisfy some stupid political ideologues. I commented elsewhere in this thread, but I lived in China over 7 years. I have been to Wuhan and the wet market there, and I have been disappointed at seeing tech sites in the US and China that don't live up to what people think when they hear a BSL-4 lab designation. Fauci and crew admit to doing experiments at the WIV, but argue the semantics "gain-of-function". The firin cleavage site on COVID-19 is very unique compared to other Corona viruses. It seems very plausible a lab leak spread to the wet market. We need to audit and call for more transparency so this never happens again, or it is minimized and can be attacked promptly and not when it's too late next time.
Moreover, disease stories has a very long history of being used to justify racism and genocide.
There's a specific American racist connection with blaming Chinese immigrants for disease that goes back to the era of the Chinese exclusion act of the 1880s. There were riots attacking chinatowns and doing ethnic cleansing with lynchings and mass destruction in Denver, Tacoma, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Eureka, Seattle and others throughout the 1880s.
Eugenicist texts of the early 1900s claimed Asians were disease carriers as well.
The general public's relationship with this stuff has only really been ugly and I can't stand here in 2023 pontificating absolute free speech and pretend like these types of narratives won't become tools of violence and racism in the hands of scammers and hatemongers.
So are you advocating for the government lying to the American people over where it came from because the truth might seem to be racist? Really? You would rather the government conceal information about a virus that killed millions of people because it might make some people upset with Asians? What else would you like the government to lie about? Murder rates? Crime Rates? The color of a man they are looking for accused of sexual assault?
Additionally it seems like you are advocating removing free speech? Friend you are sitting here actively campaigning for a 1984 style society. Not sure I have ever seen this one before; well done.
I don't need it, not much in life anyone really needs besides food, air and shelter. This applies to the majority of information on earth. Doesn't stop me wanting to learn about things. Not much I would do with it either, it would just let me know what happened and what caused my kids to spend a year plus in isolation. I'm just a single guy, consequences are a little above my paygrade. Do we need to cause of the Ohio train crash? 9/11?
But while this helps the CCP party save face, it doesn't help to move on with the investigation. It's not even about the blame. We investigate air crashes in such detail so we can prevent them from happening again. Of course with an even bigger event like this we should do the same.
The pandemic has happened and no kind of blame or money can revert it. But we can try to learn everything about it that we can to stop the next one. I'm sure it was an accident but we need to know what happened.
For this reason I really think China should cooperate with the investigators.
You're missing the point. The main purpose of airplane crash investigations is to find the cause and fix it so it doesn't happen again in the future. This is done mostly without placing blame on anyone, precisely because that leads to finding a scapegoat instead of finding and fixing a problem.
Finding and fixing a problem is exactly what needs to happen here too.
You aren't going to get any confirmation or material evidence until the chinese government allows it to happen, and with their initial reaction to the situation before the rest of the world kenw what was happening and their reaction to the WHO inquiries, odds are we'll never get anything aside from "low confidence".
Science isn't a magic wand, its a process, and honestly assuming we do get access an investigation like this most likely wouldn't even involve the scientific method at all. If science was enough to determine the origin given current available knowledge it probably would've been solved already.
This whole saga is a damning indictment of: science journalism, government agencies’ public engagement, scientists’ public engagement, and the critical reasoning skills of middlebrow audiences.