[bradleyjg]

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.

[baryphonic]

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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23038503

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23041871

[hoseja]

Hopefully that person is enjoying their 50 cents.

[WaxProlix]

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?

[rjzzleep]

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.

[kordlessagain]

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.

[tootie]

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.

[Retric]

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.

[tootie]

"There’s evidence that it’s more likely than various other theories,"

None that I've seen.

And the possibility of a future leak is probably unrelated to the possibility of this one having been a leak.

[Retric]

“None that I’ve seen.”

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.

[tootie]

I'm responding to you saying there's evidence. To what were you referring?

[yellowapple]

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?

[pagekicker]

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.

[tootie]

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.

[pagekicker]

As the Post article indicates, DOE has tens of thousands of scientists and has worked on NBC weapons for many decades.

[yellowapple]

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.

[0xBDB]

Because "Department of Energy" is a friendly name for what should really be the Department of Nuclear Weapons, a subsidiary of the Defense Department.

DoE does a lot of civilian stuff now (electrical grid, cybersecurity, etc.) but it's kind of an add-on. The first couple of national labs - places like Los Alamos and Oak Ridge - are historically related to the nuke mission.

[pagekicker]

Read this. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/02/27/...

[yellowapple]

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

- Was being studied in a lab and escaped

- Found its way into a wet market near said lab

[bradleyjg]

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.

[igouy]

> … want to conflate lab leak…

And if a lab worker had become infected while field sampling captive farmed "wild" animals for the lab and brought the infection to Wuhan?

And if a lab worker had become infected while buying captive farmed "wild" animals for the lab and brought the infection to Wuhan?

And if a lab worker had become infected while buying captive farmed "wild" animals for dinner and brought the infection to Wuhan?

[areyousure]

Your example chain of events would be called "lab leak".

[woooooo]

But the lab is completely superfluous to the chain of events. It's jammed in the middle so we can still say "lab leak".

[bradleyjg]

How so?

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.

[woooooo]

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.

[eggy]

I lived in Macau for 6 years, and I went to Wuhan more than a few times. How is "several miles away from the virology lab, and across the river.", a virology lab that specifically studies coronaviruses, be so much more unlikely than a bunch of people traveling from places that don't have bat caves or other zootonic sources be more likely? Also, going to the wet market from work is very common for lunch and to pick up food on the way home. I have been to the wet market in Wuhan.

Second, COVID-19's furin cleavage site is unique from all other coronaviruses and that is what allows it to bind so well in humans. A new preprint (not full reviewed, Oct 2022) is interesting from a genomics perspective on this being a potential bioengineering marker[1].

I think just because Orange man called it out early on, it immediately became a non-starter for most people. A coronavirus lab just mere miles from a wet market where it supposedly bloomed, and contrary to finding other zootonic sources of other viruses relatively soon, none has been found at all in the past two-plus years. The wiping of databases by China; the involvement of US/Europpean/Russian agencies in the Wuhan lab; the whole NIH/Fauci mess with funded research there in gain of function or whatever you want to call it research, and it is unlikely?

Common sense has left the room during the political divisiveness these past years. I do believe over the years more evidence will come out proving a lab leak given the advances in genomics, intentionally slow drip feed of documents, and the sheer number of factors pointing towards this. I do believe it was an accident, and not a bioweapons thing, and originated from the Wuhan lab. Lab leaks are more common than people think, and having worked in China for over 7 years, I can imagine this was not your movie rendition of a BSL-4 lab, but one with a lot of warts. I say this about other countries too. I did some work for an aerospace robotics lab and I was dreaming of the BSL-4 suits and all, and what I found was a normal shop with out of tolerance machinery. This was in the U.S.

[1] https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/preprint-covid-19-shows-f...

[bradleyjg]

You’ve now pivoted from saying that the lab is irrelevant in the lab leak scenario to saying the lab leak scenario is unlikely. Those are two very different statements.

Why the need to throw everything against the wall to see what sticks?

[roelschroeven]

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).

[freejazz]

> Where’s your comment from two years ago belittling the wet market theory as shitty?

Ah, the ol' litigating my personal grievances with society at large, with a particular individual that has nothing to do with it at all...

[hotpotamus]

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?

[bradleyjg]

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.

[hotpotamus]

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.

[bradleyjg]

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.

[LorenPechtel]

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?

[hotpotamus]

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?

[bradleyjg]

I called it semi-coordinated and shading the truth above. I think they privately and in small groups decided to shade the truth or keep silent while their colleagues were doing so. All for “the greater good.”

Specifically, the talking point put out to the media that lab leak is highly unlikely is wrong and was unreasonable based on what they knew at the time.

I think that shading of the truth was arrogant and pernicious.

[giardini]

hotpotamus says >"You may say I'm nutpicking, but I truly have a hard time determining what the lab leak theory is sometimes. "<

Whose nuts are you picking? And, for God's sake, why?!

[coding123]

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?

[jcranmer]

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.

[lovemenot]

HIV has at least one similarly plausible but unprovable origin story - concerning the unintended consequences of polio vaccination in the 1950s.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7935079/

[selimthegrim]

This has been disproven pretty thoroughly IIRC

[paiute]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_polio_vaccine_AIDS_hypo...

[georgeplusplus]

>>> 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

Aint this the dang truth.

[lazyeye]

It's but just one example of the firehose of garbage aimed at us every waking moment.

[coding123]

How big the sway ones political affiliation is drove all of that