I think most people are confused because of CCP’s successful disinformation campaign, and also out of fear of being seen as prejudiced.
The fact is that an epidemic with a corona virus (never before or since seen in the wild) with a peculiarly efficient ability to infect humans started in the _only city in the world with a lab where gain-of-function experiments on corona viruses_ is located.
Just apply occam’s razor, and then you are done.
Every other theory requires involving many more unsupported hypotheses.
This would be obvious to the majority of the HN population in most cases, but the disinformation in this case is apparently quite effective.
It could be that you're confusing cause and effect, though.
How do we know that the virus (or a precursor) wasn't already circulating in China, and was simply detected in Wuhan because of the fact that there are experts in coronaviruses who reside there?
(Also I'm not entirely sure your statement about the gain of function research is correct. A Google search doesn't seem to provide any evidence one way or another.)
There's so many attempts to muddy the waters it would be funny if it wasn't so serious. Even though I'm not sure you attempted to do that here, it certainly reads like it.
So, basically, you're saying that (many, we know how contagious covid 19 is) people got sick and put into hospital/died with a novel respiratory disease in another (or several other) chinese cities first. However, that was covered up or unnoticed _until_ it reached wuhan, and for some reason a researcher who works with coronaviruses at the lab saw a sick patient (at the hospital?), realized "that looks like a novel coronavirus" and decided to raise the alarm? Additionally, after that only Wuhan got shut down, while the other city or cities which should have had a raging epidemic by now still went unnoticed?
That's what I mean, these other theories to explain away what is the most staightforward explanation makes no sense, and invokes too many unlikely scenarios or coincidences.
(Then there are the conflicts of interest of the WHO investigator Peter Daszak, who is very quick to discredit any theory that the virus might have escaped from the lab...)
Again, this is a farce, and it would almost be funny if it weren't for all the dead and the generally shitty situation for most of the world at the moment.
The most straightforward explanation is that factory farming of animals provided natural bioreactors to execute "gain of function experiments" where bats gave the animals viruses which eventually jumped to humans.
What China and the CCP wants though is to have this debate centered around if it was lab produced or not. They can rely on western scientists to debunk the lab created hypothesis. That leaves their own theories about it originated in Italy as the standing theory for their own domestic consumption. And that avoids looking at their animal farming practices and keeps them from having to crack down on that whole economy, which would be highly disruptive.
And this keeps factory farming conveniently entirely off the radar as a cause of this pandemic. The next pandemic could easily be a virus that hops to humans from pigs or chickens in the USA. All the yelling both ways about lab origins is a very effective smokescreen to avoid doing anything to prevent a future pandemic. NOTHING will happen to prevent future pandemics over yelling about lab causes other than making some people in America very, very angry about China. What we should be doing is thinking about factory farming practices and reducing our diet of meat and animal products.
This would mean that we might have to admit that the insufferable vegans were right all along, and then change our own behavior -- so its much easier to just get super angry at China.
The species of bats allegedly involved are not near Wuhan.
Bats — aside from the few blood-drinking bats which aren't implicated, and aren't they New-World species anyway — don't tend to interact much with other mammals or with birds. Without human intervention, there's not much opportunity for them to infect humans or any other animals. Carnivores (raptors, felines, to a lesser extent maybe even canines) do eat bats, but not commonly, and they're unlikely to spread disease further due to their lack of social behavior.
Neither bats nor pangolins are factory farmed (it seems some people have tried with pangolins, given their delicacy status, but they're not easy enough to raise in captivity to make it worthwhile). Bush meat and wet markets create other disease risks, but not the concentrated disease reservoir effect you're pointing out as a problem in factory farming, i.e. typically swine or fowl. There are many reasons to reduce factory farming (meat consumption per capita); disease risk is just one of them. Diseases in factory farms can be monitored, particularly these days with cheap DNA/RNA sequencing. Diseases from wild animals sold in wet markets... no surveillance... greater risk.
Given the bats are the most likely original source, and given that Wuhan lab scientists travelled and collected bat virus samples from where those species of bats actually live, the obvious most likely theory is that there was an accidental leak of a natural or derived virus from the WIV (or at least from WIV scientists on return from one of their trips if you cling to the theory that SARS-CoV-2 is of entirely natural origin).
The closest KNOWN bat sarbecovirus was found in Yunnan, but it was only 96% identical. That doesn't preclude the actual 98-99% identical progenitor virus of SARS-CoV-2 from living in Hubei.
Rhinolophus bats are all over southern China, and neighboring countries with a very wide range, and the all carry SARS-CoV-like viruses.
Also nothing precludes the species jump from bats to farmed animals happening in Yunnan and then infected animals being transported to farms in Hubei.
I also never mentioned pangolins or wet markets because we know at this point that neither of those are related. The animals to focus on would be minks and other mustelids or raccoon dogs or other farmed animals.
And we already know that SARS-CoV-1 likely originated in bats in Yunnan (where the "WIV1" coronavirus was found) while the leap to humans from an intermediate animal is thought to have happened in Guangdong. Again we have here a problem of "how did the virus in Yunnan jump to people 700+ miles away?" but in the SARS-CoV-1 case there's no weapons laboratory distraction. It happened back then with SARS-CoV-1 so therefore any objections you can have about coronavirus jumping species and geography is just falsified. It is unlikely clearly or this would just happen every other year.
For what it's worth, you're disagreeing with Dr. Shi herself here:
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
Anyways, the point isn't that a natural zoonotic jump in Wuhan is perfectly impossible. Even if we assumed (wrongly, at least if you believe Dr. Shi) that natural zoonosis was equally probable in any city in China, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan is still evidence in favor of a lab accident. To a good first approximation, the WIV does 100% of the research on novel SARS-like viruses in China, so an outbreak due to a lab accident would probably emerge there. So whatever your Bayesian prior was for natural vs. lab accident, its emergence in Wuhan should update that by a factor of ~100 (i.e., the population of China divided by the population of Wuhan).
And I'm not sure why you think farmed animals are likely intermediate hosts? China has been sampling extensively, and while it's not necessarily easy to find the intermediate host (e.g., for Ebola), that should be far easier in a factory farm than in the wilderness. So why haven't they found that?
Finally, I don't think anyone brought up weapons here except you? That seems like a deliberate conflation, introducing outlandish theories for which no evidence exists ("SARS-CoV-2 was designed as a bioweapon") to discredit the more likely theory actually being discussed ("SARS-CoV-2 originated from a lab accident during internationally-funded basic research").
Wuhan is the capital of Hubei and is going to attract the surrounding area (if a virus jumped to humans in Sidney, NY it would probably be detected in NYC). Distance from Yunnan will also be a factor and the virus jumping to humans from Yunnan to cities anywhere in the north will be much less likely. A proper model would look the migration of people and animals between different cities and provinces in China.
And again there's the SARS-CoV-1 where bat viruses in Yunnan jumped to people in Guangdong, 700+ miles away. And you'd have to look at the whole population around Wuhan where it is the closest major city (and Wuhan itself is the largest major city in central China, which makes it comparable to massive cities like NYC).
The probability is likely closer to 10%, and SARS-CoV-1 already lost that die roll and wound up in Guangdong. This time you rolled and got a 10% result. That isn't very unsurprising. Your p value is not significant.
And, yeah, I don't think that they've done everything they can to survey broadly. The studies that they've done tend to collect a bunch of bats from a particular cave and sequence the viruses in them and then draw broad conclusions about the whole province. There's only two sarbecoviruses sequences they've found in Hubei. I'd be much more comfortable with statements that SARS-CoV-2-like sarbecoviruses aren't found in Hubei if they'd sequenced 100 of them.
EDIT: Yeah so Wuhan is 6% of the population of all cities in China of roughly its size. But Shanghai is father away so its 24M should be weighted less, so with Tianjin and Nanjing. Beijing is way further away and its weighting should be fairly negligible. Chengdu and Chongqing are slightly closer. Of the top 10 Guangzhou and Shenzhen are both similarly close and in Guangdong where the SARS-CoV-1 spillover happened. My 10% gut estimate still looks pretty good -- "pick a random top 20 city in China somewhat near Yunnan where the bats are" and Wuhan is not that improbable at all.
For emphasis, I'm not claiming the emergence in Wuhan (or the presence of an FCS, or the higher affinity for human ACE2 than for any other known animal, or the CCP's apparent coverup of something, or any other single factor) is determinative in itself. But there are multiple factors and no clear mechanism for dependence between them. Those should all be considered together, in a Bayesian analysis or whatever other statistical framework you prefer.
As to specific numbers, 10% seems too low to me--Wuhan is 6% of the population of Chinese cities at least as big as Wuhan, disregarding smaller cities entirely, including Foshan where the original SARS emerged, and disregarding Dr. Shi's expectation that origin closer to Yunnan was more likely. But at least we're within an order of magnitude of each other.
Knowing nothing whatsoever except that a pandemic emerged, what's your prior for lab vs. natural origin? It depends how you count, but we've had perhaps a dozen pandemics in the last fifty years, and one (the 1977 flu) was near-certainly lab-origin. So even with extreme optimism as to lab safety improvements, I can't see how you'd estimate less than e.g. 1%. For SARS-CoV-2, you'd perhaps adjust down for the novelty of the pathogen (since most lab work is with known pathogens--though most of the WIV's seems not to have been). It doesn't take that many p = 10% coincidences up to get to even odds or better, though.
Because the problem was not brought to our attention by scientists working in the Wuhan lab, it was brought to our attention by a doctor in a hospital there who noticed the problem. A doctor the CCCP tried to gag and who subsequently died.
So these experts didn't notice/detect a virus right under their noses, or they knew about its existence but could not tell anyone because of fear of the CCCP
>How do we know that the virus [wasn't]...simply detected in Wuhan because of the fact that there are experts in coronaviruses who reside there?
Even if true, that would not explain the elaborate story, regarding the wet market there and species-jumping.
Also, seems unlikely, as there'd have to be reason to suspect a new virus was circulating at scale that required investigation by these scientists, which could have happened anywhere in the country. I mean, it's hard to understand what mechanism you're proposing for scientists residing in the city leading to the discovery of the virus circulating among the population there. It's not like the scientists simply roam the streets with some superhuman ability to detect new viruses in people.
What you misleadingly call an "elaborate story" is exactly the common story of how new disease emerges. It was even in the Sodergbergh movie Contagion from 2011.
If you don't like the word "elaborate" then feel free to choose another word. The point is that it's a detailed story about a specific time and place that they're claiming to be ground zero, and there's no evidence to support it. In fact, they've yet to find the natural reservoir for the virus to be able to definitively claim that it originated in another species, let alone that it did so through a specific species that existed in that specific place, then jumped. So, there's an obvious disconnect in the official story. What would you prefer to call it?
And, that it's a "common story" of how new diseases emerge has exactly zero bearing on whether this specific disease so evolved. You must know that form of argument is just syllogistically unsound.
They’ve tested a lot of banked samples and performed a lot of investigations over the past year, and the first publicly known cases are still in Wuhan.
Covid was discovered in Wuhan by an eye doctor who died. Experts of corona viruses did not "discover" the virus, rather other people in the same vicinity did. The hospitals where regular doctors work discovered it.
The virus was location tracked to the wet market which is Right next to this virology lab.
Now correlation does not equal causation. But correlation and common sense is strong evidence for causation.
Chemo therapy is correlated with cancer deaths. It does not mean chemo causes cancer. The common sense does not match up, but it does for covid and it is highly unwise not to consider this lab as the causative source of the pandemic.
Yes good point . It's widely accepted nowadays that the Spanish Flu did not originate in Spain, yet that was the common belief at the time.
I think it also bears pointing out that, in the US at least, we largely failed to detect that the virus was spreading inside the country for some time - even after knowing said virus existed and with plenty of warning, so you have to wonder in retrospect how effective some of these so-called surveillance systems even are. It's easy to not find anything amiss when you aren't looking.
To START in Wuhan, the only place doing gain-of function on the closest known virus to SARS2 and to not find a natural source for it given the source was found within months for both SARS1 and MERS.
> Every other theory requires involving many more unsupported hypotheses.
No it doesn't.
All it takes is bats around farmed animals like minks or raccoon dogs.
That sets up a natural "gain of function" experiment with the bats passing viruses off to the farmed animals who pass it sequentially through the entire farm.
The humans who work at those farms then bring in human coronaviruses which could have recombined with the viruses in the farm.
You have large bioreactors doing gain of function experiments all over China right out in plain view, with Charles Darwin overseeing the lab work.
If SARS-CoV-2 evolved on a farm, then shouldn't it be particularly easy to find an intermediate host? No need for wilderness expeditions, just go to the barn and start swabbing. But more than a year later, we're still waiting.
And how does that explain its affinity for human ACE2? At least initially (right after it makes the zoonotic jump), the virus would probably show highest affinity for its animal host, and lower affinity for human ACE2. But SARS-CoV-2 shows highest affinity for human ACE2, and only primates with ACE2 very similar to humans show comparable affinity:
> The very high classification had at least 23/25 ACE2 residues identical to human ACE2 and other constraints at SARS-CoV-2 S-binding hot spots (Materials and Methods). The 18 species predicted as very high were all Old-World primates and great apes with ACE2 proteins identical to human ACE2 across all 25 binding residues.
Yes, the thing I'm most pissed off at China about are the destruction of samples and the lack of investigation towards finding intermediate animals.
And we know that we didn't detect the virus early, it didn't originate in the wet market event. That market event was just big enough right in the middle of Wuhan so it made it unmistakable.
The only way you get that high of an affinity is through serial passage through actual humans, not through the lab.
And this should not be that surprising since we know that it takes several months for the virus to spread before it starts to cause massive numbers of deaths, the IFR is actually low compared to SARS-1 and MERS, and it tends to spread asymptomatically and undetected.
We know pretty much for certain now that it was spreading cyrptically in the area around Wuhan in Nov, and I would bet that the zoonotic jump was Oct or earlier.
And that is also why I suspect an intermediate animal with a more similar ACE2 to humans like minks being involved. So serial passage through one of those animals to get it close, followed by serial passage through humans to refine it.
Surely passage in human cell culture or in mice genetically engineered to express human ACE2 would also create that selection pressure in the lab? If SARS-CoV-2 was manipulated in the lab, that's the usual explanation I've seen given for that affinity.
Mink seem very unlikely to me, since I've seen papers reporting evidence of host adaptation on mink farms:
So if the virus first evolved in mink, it would have to have evolved enough in humans not just to favor human ACE2 but also to lose its affinity for mink (to the point it has to regain it later), all during that couple months of cryptic spread.
And do you really think China is doing a bad job looking for the intermediate host? I don't think that's impossible--for example, the true origin could be some agricultural practice so horrible that they consider the present uncertainty better than disclosing that. Lab origin has become strongly associated with anti-China political sentiment, though. (That seems stupid to me, considering that the USA was funding the WIV; but here we are.) So I'd be surprised that the CCP would pass up a chance to disprove that.
Has China bothered seriously looking for that, or are they happy to distract by pointing the finger at Italy and making the argument over lab escape? I keep reading reports that China conveniently threw away all their wastewater samples and respiratory samples. I don't see much of an effort towards studying their farm animals or tracking down the bat origins.
There just hasn't been that much of an investigation. China seems to have done enough to provide an air of cooperation with WHO, while not producing anything solid.
For their domestic consumption they've also accomplished their propaganda goals. The global scientific community (outside of fringe articles like here) has generally dismissed the idea that it came from a lab, which China can amplify in front of its population. Then they just muddy the waters with the idea that it came in frozen seafood from Italy and they can move on. There's no incentive to investigating the zoonotic orgins.
And its the same thing here in reverse. Politically we just get articles like this to get people very made at China over the lab release hypothesis, which deflects from our own pandemic response.
Politically there seems to be very little will on the planet towards finding a zoonotic source.
> The fact is that an epidemic with a corona virus (never before or since seen in the wild) with a peculiarly efficient ability to infect humans started in the _only city in the world with a lab where gain-of-function experiments on corona viruses_ is located. Just apply occam’s razor, and then you are done.
What's the reason the lab is located in that city? Is there an underlying causal connection?
For example, is Wuhan prone to novel coronoviruses because of the local bat population, and so that was the logical place to site a coronavirus research lab?
If so, Occam's Razor would suggest that common connection as the more simple explanation.
The idea that the bat population is local to Wuhan is a misconception. The bats from which the gain of function research studies are being done were collected from Yunnan province 800 miles away, not locally in Wuhan. They still have not been able to identity any animals in the market, bats or civets, that would explain the natural spillover hypothesis.
Fair enough. I was mostly trying to point out there is no ‘local’ bat population tied to coronavirus. I appreciate you’re trying to look at it with critical thinking though.
I don’t know the reason that lab is located in Wuhan specifically. But if you want to find the answer, I think you have to look into who funded the research.
It's not. The officially suspect bat population was some 800km away from Wuhan.
Similarly, Sverdlovsk lab (the ground zero of 1979 anthrax outbreak) wasn't located there because Sverdlovsk specifically suspect to anthrax. An interesting tidbit, the party blamed the local farmer (wet) market for the outbreak there.
> What's the reason the lab is located in that city? Is there an underlying causal connection?
I thought so initially, but then:
1. look at the size of China; even assuming bats are found only in half of it, and maybe that Wuhan has more bats than other cities, that's still pretty fucking unlucky.
2. the bats in question are not from the same province anyway
I would like to add another factor in your favor for this hypothesis. Naturally occurring viruses/bacteria tend to evolve to spread most effectively in conditions similar to how animals live: outside. COVID-19, conversely, seems to fair poorly outside and spreads most rapidly in indoor conditions not unlike one would expect in a human run laboratory environment.
There's a lot of bats, caves, and viruses. Virologists find new viruses all the time, why would you expect that they have surveyed enough that the fact that they haven't found a particular one is evidence it's not present?
A virus with a novel mutation favoring humans would be successful infecting humans, period. I can't imagine any respiratory virus that wouldn't spread more effectively indoors. This "factor" is not particularly compelling (to me).
The Chinese state is by no means the only body pushing politicized information regarding covid origins
It doesn't make much sense to single it out here, the most plausible version of the lab leak hypothesis is that covid is the result of cooperative research undertaken by American and Chinese scientists and funded by both governments
Edit: I'd love to receive a substantive counterargument from the downvoters
I think you underestimate the carelessness of humans and their ability to understand risk. Years ago I saw a graduate student break important lab rules and bring home a genetically modified plant to show some friends and I how cool it was. Had that plant somehow cross pollinated with its wild cousins, who knows what kind of damage it could have done. The genie may never have ever gotten back in the bottle, kinda like SARS-CoV-2.
I think you're misunderstanding me. I totally agree- humans are frequently careless and wont to ignore risks which don't slap us in the face
I'm saying there's a paper trail establishing joint American-Chinese gain of function research taking place in Wuhan, and if we're going to judge the lab leak hypothesis plausible, I see no good reason not to ascribe similar motivations to cover it up to the US government as well as to the Chinese
Because the origins are in China, and the lab breakout would be squarely blamed on China, the incentive for them to lie is basically existential. Since the CPP manipulates all data for their gain, it's very well within their objectives and capabilities to make up whatever story they think will work. Literally the future of their Empire is at stake.
As for the Americans, their culpability in helping make the lab I think would be seen as a small thing.
Paradoxically, it may be in everyone's interest for the plebes to never find out the truth. If there was magically some 'hard evidence' to appear, right now, that made China culpable ... we would be heading into another, massive recession. There would be riots around the world, Asians in every continent would face threats of violence and attacks for a decade. Forget America where those things are talked about ... you can forget being Chinese in Poland, it would be painful.
The populism would be intense and ferocious, but not only that, regular institutions, businesses, CEOs etc would also be upset for very good reason. I can see China facing lawsuits for literally Trillions of dollars.
It could feasibly lead to a chain of events sparking a war.
This is completely conspiratorial, but I honestly wonder if the West actively doesn't want to push for the truth because it would do more damage than good. If China knows 'they did it' they're probably going to make the changes necessary so it doesn't happen again, for their own benefit, and it's unlikely they need international pressure or the threat of litigation to improve those pressures. But that's just a fantastical idea.
Basically 'The Truth' is a different thing than 'The Impact of Public Information' and both of those things matter. It's a scary thought but it's the Realpolitik of information.
There is a paper trail establishing joint American-Chinese gain of function research taking place in Wuhan, and if we're going to judge the lab leak hypothesis plausible, I see no good reason not to ascribe similar motivations to cover it up to the US government as well as to the Chinese
> It could feasibly lead to a chain of events sparking a war.
The American stance as it stands could very well lead to war, with or without covid as an aggravating factor
Exclusive attention to questions of Chinese culpability without turning a critical eye to the United States, as in the comment I responded to, feeds directly into the sort of tensions you claim to want to avoid
The sort of "realpolitik of information" you describe may be necessary for the maintenance of political order precisely insofar as its subjects believe themselves to participate freely and voluntarily
Because Americans were helping to finance something, does not make them directly culpable.
More importantly this is raw populism, not details.
If there were conclusive evidence that mapped COVID to the lab ... I think literally Chinese people would be murdered the same day in violent outbreaks in Philippines, Malaysia and India for example. There would be anti-Chinese riots literally the world over, every Chinese business would be wary of having it's windows smashed in, politicians would have to balance tamping down the violence with doing politically populist acts of retaliation etc..
It would be really ugly. I can see people on CNN begging to stop the violence.
That America sponsored some of the specific research I don't think would much factor in either in the US or anywhere else.
Business between China and the rest of the world would have to transform quite dramatically.
All actual facts aside, that would be my big worry.
> Because Americans were helping to finance something, does not make them directly culpable.
Yes, and the same can surely be said of Chinese- we must consider whether to allow this kind of research in the future however
A conclusive "reveal" is unlikely given the variety and saturation of information channels- and with respect although your description of the risks is overstated imo the level of detail you go into makes your comment read uncomfortably like a threat
I think the global distribution of opinion regarding the U.S. and China portends a very different reaction to a hypothetical reveal than the one you describe
Let's strive neither to put actual facts aside nor to grasp for certainty where little exists
No - if a Chinese lab/company let the virus out, it's not really comparable to America's involvement. It would be 'mostly that agency's fault', objectively speaking.
Internationally, people would see it as 'China' not the specific agency.
If we did in fact find that this is a 'Wuhan Lab' issue - it would be a seminal geopolitical event - on par with the dropping of Nuclear Weapons.
It would be a major global realignment in so many areas, even without the populism.
The issues around populism are not a 'threat' it's a 'concern'.
3 Million people have died from this, there are grieving families all around the world - there are 100's of millions unemployed - and they will be told 'It's China's fault' - what do you think is going to happen? Since we're already seeing light anti Asian sentiment around the world, what will happen when we are told that 'China' is culpable?
On the day after 9/11 the only flights out of the US allowed were those back to Saudi Arabia. G. Bush basically told the Saudi Embassy and many student nationals etc. to 'get everyone out in 24 hours' for fear of populist reprisals.
BLM protests broke out, billions in damage and several dead over a police shooting ... and that's in the US.
So I don't think it's that much of a stretch to say it would be dangerous to be Chinese in many places in the world. It's certainly not a threat, it's the reality of the world we live in. There are ethnic riots all over the world, all the time.
Every other theory requires involving many more unsupported hypotheses.
This would be obvious to the majority of the HN population in most cases, but the disinformation in this case is apparently quite effective.