Yves here. We have been frustrated with the frequency with which readers have taken up speculation supporting what is called the lab leak theory. The strong form version is that an engineered nasty got loose from the Wuhan Institute of Virology; the weak form is that the labs in Wuhan were collecting bat viruses and some got out. I have been frustrated with these discussions because they are entirely speculative, as in they lack a smoking gun, and are essentially based on correlation: “There’s a bat virus lab in Wuhan. Covid-19 started in Wuhan. Ergo, Covid-19 came from the bat virus lab.” That’s admittedly an oversimplification but not by much.
The reason I have been not at all keen about these arguments it that they assume humans have more control over their environment than we do, and/or a need to attribute Bad Stuff to bad or incompetent people. Since Dune is a hot topic, once you get outside the realm of largely human determined activity, like politics and finance, the character Liet-Kynes had it right:
Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.
The narrower reason is that both when HIV was found to be the cause of AIDS, and much later, when SARS was on the loose and looked primed to do considerable harm, a noisy cohort insisted that each had to be the result of human bio-intervention, they were just too nasty to have evolved naturally. In both cases, admittedly after a great deal of forensics (15 years in the case of SARS), the animal origins were found.
This article makes a very tidy and persuasive argument against the stronger forms of the lab leak theory: science isn’t advanced enough to create a human-to-human transmissible virus. And if you want to fall back on the “well a bat virus collected from the lab could have jumped to humans and become transmissible,” that’s a lot of mutating in an awfully short time. And that’s before you get to the fact that the lab collected only a very small subset of the bat coronaviruses that exist in the wild.
A pet theory of Lambert’s is that a Chinese tourist could have brought a bat virus back from, say, Indonesia to Wuhan. Consumption of bats was outlawed in China after SARS but it’s legal in Indonesia (they are even sold in markets, yeech). There are also bat caves that are tourist destinations in Indonesia; I visited one in Bali, for instance. The point is that SARS went from bat to pangolin to humans; there are places in Asia where bats are in closer proximity to other species as well as humans that evolution could have occurred there. Most
experts now believe HIV jumped to humans through bushmeat-eating in Africa, pointing to another issue: where a new pathogen first broke big may not be where it originated.
By Wendy Orent, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology and been writing about biological weapons and the evolution of infectious disease for 25 years. Originally published at Undark
Where die the Covid-19 pandemic come from? Almost since the beginning of the outbreak, a bitter and explosive controversy has raged over the origins of the novel coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2. The rapid shut-down of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan immediately suggested to Western observers that the Chinese government itself thought that the market was the source, especially since 26 out of 47 of the original cases could be linked to it. An article published in Nature in March 2020 seemed to leave no doubt: The virus’s genome showed every evidence of natural origins.
But the story did not stop there. Many writers and researchers suggested that the presence of a high-containment laboratory in Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, could point to a laboratory origin for the pandemic: a bioweapons experiment; or gain-of-function research, in which genetic manipulation adds some new feature to an existing germ; or simply the laboratory escape of a lethal bat virus. Since many lab escapes have happened in the past, some argue, a lab leak is a plausible explanation for this devastating explosion of disease. While a team convened by the World Health Organization declared in March that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely” and suggested wildlife farms that supplied the market could be the culprit, a new group of scientists is now set to revisit the issue.
Still, there remains, as of this writing, no physical evidence linking the pandemic’s origins with a laboratory escape. And furthermore, from a logical and evolutionary viewpoint, there is something fundamentally wrong with all lab-leak arguments. SARS-CoV-2 is a human-adapted virus capable of effective, stealthy transmission from person to person. Lab escape theories cannot clearly account for the adaptation of the virus to its new host, or, in other words, for the evolution of human-to-human transmissibility.
In order for a virus to adapt to a new species, it needs to evolve to a point where it can easily and readily spread within that species. This is not the work of an instant, but rather the end result of a long chain of adaptation and transmission. That’s an evolutionary process. Human-to-human transmissibility has never been produced deliberately in laboratory experiments because no one knows exactly how to make a virus more transmissible among people. It’s not something that can happen accidentally, because the genetics of transmission are so subtle and complex — the result of numerous specific tiny adaptations. And a virus that’s readily transmissible among humans in the way that SARS-CoV-2 is has never been found in the wild, because animal viruses are adapted to their own host species. To make a human-to-human transmissible disease, you need human beings, a lot of human beings, to be exposed to a pathogen. And you need the repeated action of natural selection on the pathogen spreading among those human beings.
Transmission is key to a pathogen’s adaptation. In SARS-CoV-2, transmission is effective, silent, and relentless because the virus replicates at high levels in the upper respiratory tract, making it easy to spread through coughing, sneezing, talking, and breathing. According to coronavirus expert Susan Weiss of the University of Pennsylvania, SARS-CoV-2 replicates better at slightly lower temperatures than some other viruses, allowing it to populate nasal passages and the upper airways, where the temperature is lower than in the lungs. Though it has not been proven, Weiss said it would make logical sense that better replication at lower temperatures could permit the virus to shed early in the infection, before symptoms set in.
In contrast, highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu, for instance, never acquired the ability to transmit from person-to-person at all, despite a fair number of fatal human infections. This is, at least in part, because the virus attaches to receptors deep in the lungs, and not, unlike SARS-CoV-2, in the upper airways.
How would you design a virus to spread stealthily in the ways that SARS-CoV-2 does, either for general research or for nefarious purposes? You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t know how. “There’s a vanishingly low likelihood that you could design a virus so that it spreads asymptomatically,” says Weiss.
Transmission is a subtle thing, involving many genes and many functions. Only natural selection, in the context of repeated spread from host to host within a single species, can guide its evolution. The idea that all of these traits could be accidentally picked up in laboratory experiments and introduced into a bat virus seems no more likely than the idea that they were consciously designed by researchers. Huge mink farms in Denmark and the Netherlands, where, in several instances, infected workers introduced SARS-CoV-2 to the crowded animals, show us how this adaptive evolutionary process works: The human-adapted virus rapidly evolved, several times over, to be a mink-adapted disease which may be better at transmitting among minks than people.
No one really understands the genetics of transmissibility for any virus. The closest scientists have come is in a notorious series of experiments, the results of which were published in 2012. Two laboratories, one in the Netherlands, one in Wisconsin, separately showed that by changing one aspect of transmission, the receptor by which highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu attach to cells in the respiratory tract, they could, by repeatedly passing their altered strain through ferrets, ultimately infect ferrets via the airborne route. Many scientists insisted that this gain-of-function research was inherently dangerous, and the labs agreed to a voluntary year-long moratorium.
But as Columbia University virologist Vincent Racaniello points out, that work actually did not produce a more dangerous virus. By shifting receptors to those high in ferrets’ airways, the virus lost its virulence. None of the ferrets died. Weiss quips that sometimes gain-of-function research actually involves “loss of function.”
The closest anyone has come to creating an entirely novel virus is likely an experiment conducted by Ralph Baric and colleagues at the University of North Carolina, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the WIV, among other institutions, in which the researchers used the spike protein of an existing bat coronavirus and spliced it to the backbone of a mouse coronavirus. Baric, who was not available for comment, showed his chimera could infect and replicate in human airways cells in vitro and the lungs of living mice. Then the scientists tried to develop a full-length virus, but that proved “significantly attenuated” both in human airway cells and mice. It would need, according to the study, “further adaptation” to become an effective pathogen. And there’s no evidence at all that that derived virus could spread.
Even less is known about the genetics of coronavirus transmissibility, which remains a black box, even as variant after variant has emerged and spread. Racaniello describes these new, spreading variants as simply “more fit.” But other virologists, including Stephen Goldstein, a researcher at the University of Utah School of Medicine, think that in this case “fitness” implies more effective transmission. “The take-home is that that these new variants are worse because they spread more quickly and to more people,” he says. “It all adds up to greater transmissibility.” Evolution towards increased transmissibility is, indeed, a likely scenario, as more transmissible strains should outcompete less transmissible ones, and that seems to have happened here.
But we still do not thoroughly understand the genetics of viral transmission for SARS-CoV-2, or, for that matter, for any other pathogen.
Some people propose that an accidental release of a natural virus, probably a bat virus, triggered the pandemic — but that scenario is no more likely. First, no one has found a bat virus close enough genetically to be the culprit. The bat virus until recently believed to be most closely related to SARS-CoV-2, RATG13, is 96 percent similar. That doesn’t mean, according to coronavirus expert Weiss, that “one small stretch (4 percent of the genome) is different” and the rest is identical. It is different in small ways all across the genome.
Results posted on the preprint server Research Square in September, which have not yet been peer reviewed, suggest three new viruses identified in bats in Laos are even more closely related to SARS-CoV-2. But even assuming that scientists in Wuhan cultured such viruses in the lab — which they told investigators early this year was not the case — this doesn’t mean that a bat-adapted virus escaped from the WIV could have seeded the Covid pandemic. “A virus is never going to come out of a bat ready to go,” says Racaniello. “It never has.”
Bat-borne viruses, including Hendra, Nipah, Marburg, and rabies, can kill people, but they don’t easily spread from person to person. While, in theory, a bat virus that has the ability to infect people via the ACE-2 receptor might be able to spread from person to person, there is no known record of any bat virus (or any other wild animal virus) having done so. Six cases of SARS-like illnesses among miners cleaning bat feces from a bat cave in Yunnan province have been reported, but there is no indication that these cases (three of which were fatal) spread to anyone else. There are known instances of a bat-adapted disease transmitting among people, but always, as in the case of Nipah virus, through very close contact or exposure to bodily fluids, not via airborne transmission. Lab releases of a wild bat virus would necessarily mean that lab workers had to be infected — many of them, to allow transmissibility to evolve — but despite speculation, there have been no reported Covid infections among lab researchers at the WIV.
Proponents of the lab-release explanation also point to prior accidental releases as evidence that this could have happened in Wuhan. Proponents cite the six times SARS-CoV, a related virus that infected more than 8,000 people and killed 774 in 2002-2003, escaped from research laboratories by infecting scientists who passed it on. Or they bring up Janet Parker, who died of smallpox in 1978 when a British scientist, experimenting with smallpox virus, apparently allowed the virus to move through the ventilation system and infect Parker, who was working in a room just above the laboratory.
The difference between SARS-CoV-2 and these instances is that none of them involve new pathogens. Citing instances of the release of pathogens that have already established transmissibility among humans doesn’t begin to address the question of Covid’s origins. And that remains the fundamental question.
But the actual key to Covid’s origins has been there all along. According to Weiss, SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 are more closely related to each other than either is to other human coronaviruses. But Weiss says both are also closer to related bat viruses than they are to each other. After more than a decade of research, it’s been established that the SARS-CoV originated in a bat and then moved, in the live-animal market of Guangdong in southern China, into intermediate hosts, civets, and likely raccoon dogs. Infecting other animals seems to disentangle, so to speak, a well-adapted bat virus from its original host, making it, for a time, something of a generalist, able to infect a range of species, including humans.
SARS-CoV-2 probably evolved in similar circumstances. It is likely that, again, civets, raccoon dogs, or other species acquired a bat-borne virus and spread it to other animals — and then to people: keepers, customers, passers-by in the 1,000-stall Huanan market, where wild animals of many different species were caged together in crowded, filthy conditions. These live animal markets are essentially disease factories, effective laboratories for the evolution of deadly pathogens. Huanan was soon shut down. No outsiders were permitted to examine it, or test workers for seroprevalence, which is, according to Goldstein, a critically important step.
According to the Chinese Academy of Engineering, as of 2016, the exotic food trade was a $19 billion industry in China, out of $76 billion for the overall wildlife industry. Countless live wild animals are sold for the luxury market each year. A lot of money is involved, and there’s a lot of incentive to keep quiet. Though the Huanan market remains shuttered and the wildlife trade for food banned, other markets, selling live animals such as chickens, ducks, and pigs, apparently remain open, and in regions far from the main centers trade in wildlife may continue. Live wild animals are also sold in markets throughout Asia.
Obsession with the lab leak hypothesis, combined with the secrecy and lack of cooperation showed by the Chinese government in helping the world understand the origins of the virus, has taken energy and focus away from an important step that can be taken now to prevent future outbreaks of new viruses. We remain at risk for the evolution of new pathogens, of other pandemics, until all wet markets, worldwide, are shuttered for good.
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Good analysis though I might take issue with the last sentence where Orent says ‘We remain at risk for the evolution of new pathogens, of other pandemics, until all wet markets, worldwide, are shuttered for good.’ Yes, that is one easy source to identify but not the one to really look out for. A little over a century ago, the great flu pandemic kicked off in Kansas but as far as I know Kansas was never famous for its wet markets back then.
American towns were chockablock with humans, equines and poultry.
That part of Kansas was rather rural then, so it was probably from close contact between farm workers and livestock. Then it was accelerated by some of these young farm workers shipping off to Army training camps as the U.S. mobilized for World War I (which might explain in part why that form of influenza seemed to impact younger people more).
Am agnostic on weather Covid came from a lab or not, but seems many who (sometimes) gleefully jump on reasons why the origin is lab assume that is the same as proving malicious intent from China. And it’s not the same thing. And if you want to honestly look for maliciousness with lab based weapons it seems USA tops the list but that never comes up.
So what? Flu strains are different from CoVs in the ways they jump host species. 1st they do it mainly from avian sources, not bats and can jump into chicken and swine farms and from there to humans (it is believed swine is the usual suspect for recombination between avian and mammal flu strains. Flu is able to jump between avian and mammal hosts while this is not the case for CoVs that jump within aves or within mammals (all known human CoVs are from bats or rodents) but not between these apparently. (never say something is impossible in science)
By closing wet markets (any commodified industry involving wild animals) you would reduce by much the chances of new batCoVs jumping hosts and ending in humans. Other cautions should be taken regarding farms, which have historically been sources of lots of human pathogens including flu.
Some stupidly believe it is labs what should be closed.
Some highly pathogenic strains of avian influenza are circulating in mammals. See, for example,
Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A(H5N1) Virus in Wild Red Foxes, the Netherlands, 2021
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/11/21-1281_article
and
Encephalitis and Death in Wild Mammals at a Rehabilitation Center after Infection with Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A(H5N8) Virus, United Kingdom
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/11/21-1225_article
Again, so what? What is your point? I didn’t say flu doesn’t infect mammals. Just as has been shown most human infecting NEW flu strains come from swine and crossovers with avian strains in this host.
What is your conclusion, that flu emerged from a lab because there are flu strains infecting foxes? Where is the logic?
There are lots of different virus with different properties and different ways they can jump to humans. flu, CoVs, HIV, Nipah, Ebola… then?
Stick to the natural history of Coronavirus and show some hint of lab origin.
All roads lead to the lab instead of Roma?
My point is that there is variation in the influenza strains. You correctly described the fact that most influenza strains jump from birds and swine into humans. However, if some strains can also infect a range of mammals, there is an increased the opportunity for these strains to jump to humans in ways that may be new. So this is a constantly-changing interface and not static.
As you know, the natural reservoir of influenza is aquatic birds. No one, except you, mentioned influenza coming from a lab, so this is faulty analogy. You brought up influenza, so I was simply pointing out that the interface between human populations and animal reservoirs can shift.
The natural history of coronaviruses is not fully known. Until recent decades, coronaviruses were dismissed for the most part, and thought to just cause illnesses like the common cold. If we had been more perceptive, it might have dawned on us that the coronaviruses responsible for the common cold might be an epidemiological record of previous pandemics. Most “childhood diseases” or longstanding “crowd diseases” were likely far more lethal before the survivors passed on genetic protection to their descendants. This is well-known, for example, in connection with genetic protection against measles in European populations versus populations in the Americas. So what are these “common cold” viruses, exactly? Were they always mild, or are they only mild because the descendants of past pandemics passed on genetic immunity in the population?
If this is indeed what “common cold” viruses are, then this would be evidence in favor for natural zoonotic emergence, as it’s apparently happened several times in prehistory.
On the other hand, it may have escaped from a lab. The evidence for this lies more in the absence of known zoonotic crossover events prior to the pandemic than in the natural history of coronaviruses. Usually, a virus crosses over in zoonoses clumsily before learning to spread efficiently human-to-human.
All roads do not lead to either hypothesis. That’s the point. There’s no clear evidence yet for either conclusion.
Huh? SARS is a coronavirus and it was zoonotic in origin.
The Russian flu pandemic of the late 1800s is now believed to be a coronavirus.
And this paper indicates that if it was a coronavirus (likely) it was of zoonotic origin.
https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1751-7915.13889
> No one, except you, mentioned influenza coming from a lab, so this is faulty analogy.
Nobody, except Semmelweis, mentions antisepsis, “so” this is faulty reasoning.
Dude, come on.
Yes many suspect pigs in Kansas as the origin of the Spanish Flu. Which is why the author’s attack on wet markets. It is vastly more common and thus more likely that the disease came from an industrial animal farm. Many animals are raised in China, and some are sold at these wet markets.
Also the whole wet market discussion seems kind of otherish. Live animal markets are all over the world in rural areas where the capacity to safely store fresh meat isnt there. Here in the US a market selling exotic meats seems more likely in a rich urban or suburban area full of high income people rather than off in the backwoods somewhere, yet the way this Wuhan market is portrayed makes them seem like a bunch of backward hicks who cant get with the times.
Maybe people dont want to get on the wrong side of the meat industry, but it seems like they dont get enough credit for the bad stuff they do in the cause of bacon and steaks.
That is a very fair point and I am guilty of not talking enough about the farms (I have mentioned them but I keep defaulting to “wet market” when the range of animals in the wet market reflects many farms raising or holding exotic animals for sale).
As for Wuhan, its degree of enthusiasm for so many exotic animals is also looked down on in China. A saying goes, “In Wuhan, the only thing with four legs that they don’t eat is a table.”
I’m pre-coffee right now, but I’m not seeing anything more convincing here than was to be found in the stuff Kristian Andersen wrote early on. I don’t want to tar and feather this author with the same brush, Anderson was being mendacious, but I don’t see anything that adds to the power of arguments favoring natural origin, nor, despite the verbage, do I see any new reason to discount the possibility of lab origin.
And the depiction of the emergence of human-to-human transmissibility is, pre-coffee at least, too heavy on romance for my tastes. It’s not well understood – that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be quick and result from very few mutations.
In what sense is evolution a “romance”?
I quit reading at
Plenty of virologists, including Dr. Fauci, have said that the point of “gain of function” research is to modify viruses to make them more easily transmissible to humans and/or more virulent, so they can investigate ways to mitigate its danger. So they think they know how to modify a virus to make it transmissible to/between humans. There are lots of viruses out there that are almost at the point where they can jump from animals to humans.
The thing is, evolution is random. Gregory Bateson explained it nicely in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Evolution is a two step process. It consists of RANDOM changes to the genotype, and a filtering mechanism (ability to produce offspring). The insufferable Richard Dawkins compared it to making random changes to a transistor radio hoping to improve it. Hardly any of the changes will be viable, which is one reason there are so many miscarriages (spontaneous abortions).
Full disclusure: I am not a virologist, nor even a biologist. I am a moderately well informed autodidact. I am open to being corrected, but not to “proof by authority.”
Your statement about gain of function research does not support your conclusion. Obvious logic fail in the four corners of your comment.
Per Fauci per you, it is to increase transmissible from animals to humans OR make an existing human to human transmission more virulent.
What got the US to restrict GoF research was a success reported in a 2012 paper in making a ferret virus more transmissible.
You have yet to provide an example that counter the author’s key point, that no lab has created or modified a virus that was not previously human to human transmissible to be human to human transmissible. This would be a big jump in the state of the art.
It does not set out to create human to human transmission where none existed before. That is a vastly bigger leap.
There is also no concrete evidence that this happened, starting with Covid cases/antibodies among lab staff. All tested negative.
Passage through ferrets was widely used in the past to study zoonotic viruses. Of course, it’s now being re-evaluated.
> You have yet to provide an example that counter the author’s key point, that no lab has created or modified a virus that was not previously human to human transmissible to be human to human transmissible. This would be a big jump in the state of the art.
If any of the lab leak proponents on this thread have met this burden, or even sought to evade it, I haven’t seen it. And such evidence, for a dedicated proponent, shouldn’t be hard to discover and propagate. Since this has not happened, I conclude the evidence does not exist.
My willingness to give credence to lab leak hypothesis supporters now approaches zero, thanks to their collective performance on this thread. So the post had real benefit as a forcing device.
Re: advancing the state of the art: https://twitter.com/r_h_ebright/status/1436149942859415583
It’s summarizes parts of the recent Intercept piece on NIH-funded gain of function(-like) research, including quotes from virologists who, similar to everyone here, are speculating.
Just about everyone outside of the lab is left to speculate on the research done at WIV for the past several years. Unclear to what extent if at all the EcoHealth Alliance had insight into research at the lab beyond the work for which it sought funding. If potentially war-mongering sources are to be believed, then French researchers were kicked out of the lab in 2017 at which time they warned our State Department that a “biological arsenal” may be under development at WIV (see https://www.the-sun.com/news/3376329/france-warned-wuhan-lab-biological-arsenal-chinese-military/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh2Sj_QpZOA, with interviews from our CIA and NSA directors under Trump).
In response to the OP: no mention of the odd furin cleavage site correlation between SARS-CoV-2 and EcoHealth Alliance’s rejected 2018 grant proposal, nor of the China’s disappeared genetic sequencing of (theoretically) potential progenitor viruses. Perhaps the OP preferred a plain language approach, but I would hardly call her presentation “tidy and persuasive” in light of information left unaddressed.
Heeding your concern over irresponsible know-nothings polluting the comments section, I’ll not comment further beyond this final point that a clear definition of “evidence” would aid in discussion: to say that there is no evidence in this case is to say that indicators of intent and ability are no evidence at all.
> I’ll not comment further beyond this final point that a clear definition of “evidence” would aid in discussion: to say that there is no evidence in this case is to say that indicators of intent and ability are no evidence at all.
Thank you. That means I don’t need to repeat myself. As far as ability, you’re just wrong. As far as intent, what exactly is the intent? China and the United States co-operating to build a biowarfare super-weapon? In a civilian lab? (I guess this could fall under the heading of “got lucky,” which seems to be were the lab leak discourse is.)
Only since you asked:
As for intent, there are indicators of benign intent to prevent future pandemics (e.g. Peter Daszak’s talk starting at the 29:45 mark at https://www.c-span.org/video/?404875-1/pandemics describing EHA research / business plans and Chinese research circa 2016) and malicious intent (see State Department release in January 2021 by outbound, possibly bad-faith warmongers: “Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.” https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/index.html).
If there’s no ability then a lab leak is implausible. The authors of this recent Lancet letter say a lab leak theory is plausible and should therefore be explored within the scientific community: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02019-5/fulltext. (See also Peter Daszak speaking in 2017: “coronaviruses are pretty good…you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily…spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus…you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this,” clip at https://twitter.com/HansMahncke/status/1452704951503839236; plus the mere facts that gain-of-function research carry known hard-to-manage risks and that EHA’s 2018 grant proposal was rejected on those grounds.)
This above is not offered as proof but as indicators, or circumstantial evidence even. I don’t disagree with the reduction of it into a “we got lucky” case. What’s interesting to me is that we do, quite often, make our own luck.
“Romance”? Are you serious? This is Goebbels-level turning black into white.
Novels about heroic and anti hero scientists, particularly science gone bad, has been a staple of fiction since at least Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Godzilla. Andromeda Strain. Jurassic Park. V for Vendetta. That’s not even thinking very hard.
Tell me how many best selling books and movies there are about scientists tracking evolution. Aside from biographies and documentaries about Darwin, the list is thin and does not contain any blockbusters. The only one I can think of is a book I read in my childhood about coelacanths. I am high confident its audience was an order of magnitude, maybe even two, less than any of the works I cited above.
Andromeda Strain, book and movie, starts with a premise about bioweapons research gone wrong, but after that is like a love letter to science, and maybe the best Hollywood depiction of biological science until Contagion. The scientists are the heroes. There’s even a woman scientist with 0 romantic interest. She’s just a good scientist.
All the other movies you mentioned and overall point, agreed.
You are misrepresenting my remark. Scientists as heroes also fit. I explicitly said “heroic and anti hero scientists,” or did you read past that?
The point is scientists as powerful protagonists and bioscience driving huge events, as opposed to the less emotionally gripping but vastly more common “Shit happened, we don’t really/yet know why.”
I guess my reply to Lambert earlier went into the ether? Shoot.
By ‘romance’ I meant the depiction of evolution as quasi-mystical, something one can scarcely conceive of human actions replicating or even approximating. I almost called it a failure of the imagination, but I think it’s more a matter of emotional preference, so ‘romance’ seemed about right.
Coronaviruses have a remarkable capacity for rapid adaptive evolution. There seems to have been a widespread failure among virologists and infectious disease specialists to recognize this. It is not at all obvious to me that a bat virus, once equipped with the new spike protein couldn’t handle things on its own from there, and get the job done before being detected. To draw any comfort from someone else’s conclusions in this regard I need a sense that they’re not rehearsing received wisdom of the past, so much of which has been so very very wrong.
I’m struck that you saw fit to invoke Goebbels, since personally one of the things I associate this sort of romanticism with is a certain kind of Waldorf/Biodynamic crypto-rightist thinking, though that wasn’t on my mind this morning.
> By ‘romance’ I meant the depiction of evolution as quasi-mystical, something one can scarcely conceive of human actions replicating or even approximating.
Wowers, what a straw man, good job. Fortunately
> Coronaviruses have a remarkable capacity for rapid adaptive evolution. There seems to have been a widespread failure among virologists and infectious disease specialists to recognize this. It is not at all obvious to me that a bat virus, once equipped with the new spike protein couldn’t handle things on its own from there, and get the job done before being detected.
The question begging here comes with “once equipped.” There’s no precedent for such a capability. There’s no evidence the Wuhan Lab, in particular, could operationalize such a capability, were it to exist. There’s also no evidence of grant money for optimizing human-to-human transmission.
Strawmanning and question-begging aren’t the tactics usually employed by people with a strong case. I suggest you do better.
And I hadn’t even had my coffee yet. But you seem to be laboring under a misapprehension. I wasn’t making a case for lab origins, I was deprecating the case Orent made for natural origins
And as you may have noticed, a number of folks here think it’s Orent who’s engaged in decorous strawmanning. Have you read the stuff Kristian Andersen wrote and which I described as mendacious? Orent has produced a tonier version. I don’t know her intent, but she’s doesn’t offer anything that substantially strengthens the case he made. That was my point, and the fact you don’t like my aesthetic take doesn’t make a strawman of it.
Lack of precedent doesn’t mean ‘implausible’. I mean for crying out loud, that’s what cutting edge research is about. To assert “I don’t believe Covid 19 could have come from a lab.” one must think it utterly implausible that it could have.
As for lack of grant money – Lab rat after lab rat, including my wife, have told me initial research typically precedes application for a grant – something akin to never asking a question you don’t know the answer to. This practice apparently being one of the factors leading to the often rather sketchy and tangled finances of prestige research outfits.
And I reiterate, the lab wouldn’t necessarily have to create a full-blown demon virus, they might have generated a pitiful gimp of a thing, or several, but been so shoddy in their precautions that one or more got to go to school on them.
I suggest you look at the comments by OnceWereVirologist, which he posted in Links:
And also:
He added:
Let me add the key point that everyone chooses to ignore: the Wuhan Institute of Virology tested all of its lab worker for SARS-COV-2. No one had antibodies. So there is counter-evidence to lab leak theory. How could a virus have escaped in sufficient volumes to infect people in the community and NOT lab workers?
The handwaving is entirely on the part of people doing much worse than “assume a can opener” with this type of bioscience. They are casually posting that things happened which are first incredibly daunting and second extremely unlikely (it requires a very long sequence of events all going the right way) even if you assume cutting edge competence.
And that’s before raising a point I neglected. China is far far far far from the frontier of medical science. Medicine is not a highly respected or well paid profession. Mao went after Western medicine during the Cultural Revolution and aggressive supported traditional Chinese medicine. That legacy is still playing out today. The very best medical school in China is #93 in global rankings. Most are below 100. There are no premier research hospitals in China like Sloan Kettering or Mount Sinai. The odds of a development like this happening in Wuhan is even more unlikely given its remoteness from the “better” of the not at all impressive med schools in China. As has been well documented, innovations tend to occur around cluster of institutions, like tech in Silicon Valley and Route 128, or in medicine, around the elite teaching hospitals in Boston and New York and California.
I’m not certain your readers trust the WIV would be honest about results of lab worker antibody tests.
Also those who consider a lab leak possible don’t need to assume an unlikely breakthrough but may also consider the possibility of an accident.
“the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.”
Considerations of Chinese backwardness are not nearly so relevant if this was a U.S. operation, or if they might cut the other way – the Chinese partners being that much more easily bamboozled and that much less aware of risks.
And, saying that a virus which, as GM has pointed out, looks like SARS but with this horrifying spike, so similar to things the researchers were discussing producing, must necessarily be solely the product of natural evolution, because the challenges of making it would be insuperable, that’s handwaving too.
We’re into the skinny end of the thread here, but my stubborness on this point is largely a result of seeing how untterly incompetent so many virologists and epidemiologists were at appreciating SARS-CoV-2’s functioning, and how impoverished their modes of analysis were. If somebody sharp went at analyzing the functioning of these viruses combining in vitro work and animal models with statistical analysis of mutation effects and had lots of manpower and supercomputer time for working out geometric, topological and thermodynamic details, I’m not comfortable they couldn’t do exactly what’s being called too hard to do.
> I’m not comfortable they couldn’t do exactly what’s being called too hard to do.
I’m sorry you’re not comfortable. If you throw all the practitioners in the field that NC has managed to induce to comment into the “untterly incompetent” bucket, then I’m afraid there’s nothing any of us can do to provide you with the relief that you seek.
Devil’s advocate: say we say China engineered a virus. Whatcha gonna do about it? Something akin to all those WTO rules with regard to unfair trade?*
Or maybe get someone akin to Colin Powell to go to the UN and present evidence that China has weapons of mass destruction – WHOOPS – I meant VMD’s, viruses of mass destruction?
*we chose to let China have our manufacturing jobs.
Finding out the origin of the virus stands to be of benefit, however it may have come to be. Also, the issue of what sort of research has been going on, in China and elsewhere, and whether it poses a risk to humanity at large is rather a pressing one.
Finally, all the credible assertions about dangerous research done in China include U.S. involvement in that research. “China dunnit.” is a mischaracterization much used by disingenuous defenders of Fauci et al.
” *we chose to let China have our manufacturing jobs.”
Well, actually, we didn’t. Our ruling class elites chose to let China have our manufacturing jobs over our mere-citizen objections. The UCORG diddit.
( New acronym alert. UCORG . . . Upper Class Occupation Regime Government . . . .if anyone likes it, feel free to use it.)
Thanks for this posting.
I think that there a couple of issues here. First is the resistance, which seems to be widespread in U.S. culture, to accepting the evidence of the theory of evolution. From the article: “Infecting other animals seems to disentangle, so to speak, a well-adapted bat virus from its original host, making it, for a time, something of a generalist, able to infect a range of species, including humans.” In the case of Covid, we are witnessing this evolution in real time.
Many goodthinkers don’t seem to get how relentless evolution is. It’s more convenient to find some knuckledraggers to blame.
Second, the idea that Covid is unusually virulent and mortal just doesn’t fit with history. William McNeill and Hans Zinsser described plagues of various kinds. Zinsser focused on typhus, which is spread particularly by disruptions like war and the flow of refugees (sound familiar?). I learned from McNeill that the Plague of Athens may have been measles. Measles had been floating around China for some time, yet when it turned up in the West, Europeans had no immunity. The death toll was staggering. {Wikipedia, though, says that it is now thought that typhus or typhoid was the culprit–again, war, population movement, malnutrition..)
And:
“Measles is of zoonotic origins, having evolved from rinderpest, which infects cattle.[159] A precursor of the measles began causing infections in humans as early as the 4th century BC[160][161] or as late as after AD 500.[159] The Antonine Plague of AD 165–180 has been speculated to have been measles, but the actual cause of this plague is unknown and smallpox is a more likely cause.[162] The first systematic description of measles, and its distinction from smallpox and chickenpox, is credited to the Persian physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (860–932), who published The Book of Smallpox and Measles.[163] At the time of Razi’s book, it is believed that outbreaks were still limited and that the virus was not fully adapted to humans. Sometime between AD 1100 and 1200, the measles virus fully diverged from rinderpest, becoming a distinct virus that infects humans.[159] This agrees with the observation that measles requires a susceptible population of >500,000 to sustain an epidemic, a situation that occurred in historic times following the growth of medieval European cities.[93]”
Measles, like Covid, is an aerosol. Note the evolutionary aspects here.
Evolution: It’s not for “Don’t Know Much about Biology” anymore.
There’s a lot of hand-waving here. The author begins by insisting that the lab-leak theory can’t be true because there’s no hard evidence, but offers nothing but vague speculation in support of the alternative. And the argument that Covid can’t be (semi)manmade because we don’t know much about how it spreads is a non sequitur. You don’t have to know exactly what you’re doing to tinker around and get “lucky.” The bit about other lab leaks involving natural viruses is a red herring. And as the Rev pointed out, the author’s obsession with wet markets doesn’t pair well with denouncing an “obsession” with the lab-leak theory.
I’m not certain that Covid came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology but it sure does seem like the most likely explanation. Unfortunately, we’ll probably never get a smoking gun either way, and it will just become another faultline in our society.
“Unfortunately, we’ll probably never get a smoking gun either way, and it will just become another faultline in our society.”
Yes. If the COVID-19 virus was actually engineered in a Wuhan lab, the only people positioned to obtain hard evidence on it are Chinese authorities. And if it did come out of the lab, I would expect that they’d never tell us. US authorities (or other interested outside parties) simply aren’t in a position to firmly answer the question for themselves.
I understand people’s desire for a firm answer on “what happened?”, but we’ll probably never know.
Yes, but you can’t “tinker around and get lucky”: without solving the protein-folding problem and a bunch of related problems which are very far from being solved, we cannot figure out what genetic sequence to give viruses to make them more transmissible, *even if we knew exactly what adaptations it would need in advance*, which we don’t. At all. All we know how to do is to exploit natural selection to select the virus for transmissibility in humans — and, er, to do that you pass it through a lot of humans (artificially, since at this stage it won’t spread on its own, as the article notes was done with flu in ferrets). Unless you think the Wuhan lab had a giant dungeon underneath it in which passaging was carried out (and all of whose inmates vanished without a trace right afterwards), there is no population of humans for them to passage through. We know it didn’t happen outside the lab because it would have been bleeding obvious: people swabbing people visibly infected with a pathogen that *did not spread naturally* and then swabbing more people who developed symptoms *right afterwards*, and then swabbing them again to pick up the improved pathogen, and this would have to go on probably for months to years. This did not happen. It would also be crazy because anyone doing *this* is faced with the absolute certainty that the virus will escape into the wild because it’s already there. Not even a Bond villain would be tempted by this.
The hypothesis of a lab leak requires more assumptions than the hypothesis of natural origin, adds nothing in explanatory power, requires extraordinary luck or genius on the part of the researchers *combined* with massive slipshoddiness, *and* gets in the way of actually preventing events we know have happened over and over again throughout recorded history: the emergence and amplification, by replication and natural selection, of new human pathogens from the natural world.
yes, this is the amusing thing to me. The “can’t be a coincidence”-ists seem to have the probabilities ass-backwards: that instead of becoming dangerous to humans through well established, historically repeated and reaaaaasonably well understood natural processes, the virus was actually created as the result of an unprecedented and staggering scientific achievement.
Like, maybe, but something something extraordinary claims something something powerful evidence.
I lot of the author’s statements jarred with me, too.
“Human-to-human transmissibility has never been produced deliberately in laboratory experiments because no one knows exactly how to make a virus more transmissible among people.”
No-one? She can say categorically that some bright spark hasn’t worked it out, or hit on it accidentally, and was quietly working away in the lap on a project to prove it, and make their name and reputation by wowing people like this author with the proof.
“How would you design a virus to spread stealthily in the ways that SARS-CoV-2 does, either for general research or for nefarious purposes? You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t know how.” There’s a lot of money, and reputation, to be gained designing things the experts say can’t be done. The fact you personally don’t know doesn’t mean no-one else will know how, ever.
“But we still do not thoroughly understand the genetics of viral transmission…” We don’t ‘thoroughly understand’ much of what we make use of every day. We need only find out how to make it work. Electricity, anybody?
““A virus is never going to come out of a bat ready to go,” says Racaniello. “It never has.” ” Which means it never will? Especially as, “There are known instances of a bat-adapted disease transmitting among people, but always, as in the case of Nipah virus, through very close contact or exposure to bodily fluids, not via airborne transmission.” OK, So a virus is never going to come out of a bat until it does but always via contact never airborne except that we don’t thoroughly understand the genetics of viral transmission but know it can’t happen.
Sorry but although a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, believing you know more than you do is even more dangerous. This author is impressively credentialed and I wouldn’t argue any facts with her, but much of what she writes sounds awfully like pontificating to me.
> “Human-to-human transmissibility has never been produced deliberately in laboratory experiments because no one knows exactly how to make a virus more transmissible among people.”
It would be very simple for you to refute this claim by producing a counter-example (which would have the additional advantage of not demanding proof of a negative). Since you do not, I conclude no such example exists; I certainly can’t come up with one, and I’ve tried.
As for “sounds like pontificating,” gosh, I’m sorry. Would you like us to rewrite it in an even more approachable style?
Why are we focusing on “deliberate” examples? Isn’t that the loophole Fauci was using in his definition of gain of function? Its only gain of function if you deliberately attempt it, but you can speed up evolution exponentially in the lab and see what happens “naturally”.
Are there also no “non-deliberate” examples out there? If there are this seems like a red-herring to me
With all this speculation that “it is not possible… has only been demonstrated to happen in nature…”your missing the obvious international guidance that says “yes, humans may very well be able to generate a dangerous virus using CRISPR and similar technologies”. That is why such gain of function research targeting humans was much discussed in international forums and banned in many countries starting circa 2010. Speculate as you wish, but examine and address the real evidence which exists from the broad scientific community.
> address the real evidence which exists from the broad scientific community
Please show me the evidence of a lab ever developing human-to-human transmission, accidentally or an purpose.
Let me unpack the consequentialist argument you are making: (1) GoF research is bad, (2) lab leak hypothesis strengthens ending GoF, therefore (3) the lab leak hypothesis must be treated seriously. That may be how things work in the real world — like reporters refusing to report on weak attendance at Clinton campaign rallies because it might hurt Clinton — but fortunately the rot hasn’t spread to the NC comments section. I think.
I’m sure you are familiar with this, but to me it seems directly on point and shows human to human transmissibility. If I’m misreading I would love to understand why.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
I also find this article from the New Yorker far better than the article above. It seems clear that there isn’t evidence in either direction yet, but there are plausible hypotheses for either scenario.
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-mysterious-case-of-the-covid-19-lab-leak-theory
> there isn’t evidence in either direction yet
Did you read the post?
If this claim is wrong, give the counter-example. That should be easy, right?
On the key point for anti-evolutionist lab leakers, there’s no evidence. This entire thread is full of people looking at a scale with a feather on one side and a lead weight on the other, and saying “Well, both sides have some weight….”
To put this another way, I think the readership is more or less in agreement that the mRNA vaccines didn’t live up to their billing, especially since they weren’t sterilizing. So the strong form of the lab leak theory (engineering) must cope with the idea that the biggest and most sophisticated corporate can’t engineer a sterilizing vaccine, and yet somehow a provincial Chinese bat lab is able to engineer a virus for human-to-human transmission, something that’s never been done before, and I would bet is orders of magnitude harder than engineering a vaccine.
The link to the Nature article in my comment above seems to me to be the counter-example you keep asking for.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
“ Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.”
I read this article in mid-2020 (it’s been updated) and find it just as persuasive now as I did then. It includes a link to the full article written by a Norwegian virologist and colleagues.
https://www.minervanett.no/angus-dalgleish-birger-sorensen-coronavirus/the-evidence-which-suggests-that-this-is-no-naturally-evolved-virus/362529
In other words:
1) take a bat coronavirus;
2) combine it with a coronavirus adapted to different mammal (the mouse);
3) the result exhibits characteristics that make it more adaptable to the organisms of human beings.
This corresponds to the way former coronavirus epidemics took place:
a) SARS: bat -> civet -> homo sapiens.
b) MERS: bat -> dromedar -> homo sapiens;
And this also corresponds to the suspected evolutionary path for SARS-2:
c) either bat -> pangolin or raccoon dog -> homo sapiens (wild meat farms);
d) or bat -> mink or raccoon dog -> homo sapiens (fur farms),
additionally keeping in mind that animals such as the raccoon dog and the ferret were highly susceptible to SARS-1.
Hence, the interesting experiment reported in Nature (investigating the SARS-1 coronavirus, and how a specific variant might become highly transmissible to human beings via an intermediate host or via direct infection from bats) provides at least as strong an evidence for the natural emergence of SARS-2 via a path very similar to related coronaviruses as it is for a purposefully or accidentally designed biological entity.
Do you understand that a request for proof of human-to-human transmission isn’t satisfied with an in vitro mouse study? and that we need to demonstrate that the Wuhan lab had to have that capability?
No, I don’t. Please explain why it isn’t sufficient.
Maybe I’m stupid but wouldn’t human to human transmission involve two humans, and not injecting a mouse?
No, since we’re not likely to be given access to that kind of information, we need a preponderance of evidence to make an argument for a lab leak. I don’t understand the hostile response to skeptical readers, especially in the absence of evidence of a zoonotic origin.
Typically when a novel virus emerges, there are crossover events where the virus jumps to individual humans in contact with the zoonotic reservoir. For example, a human handling live poultry might contract an avian strain of influenza, or a human in close contact with camels might contract MERS. Occasionally these pathogens can then be transmitted to close family members, but the virus is unable to easily spread human-to-human.
Each time a novel virus crosses over, there is a chance that the particular event will involve a strain that is more transmissible between humans.
The surveillance of emerging infectious disease often involves attempts to locate an index case or at least early cases. Although it’s not always possible to identify an index case, facility in human-to-human transmission does not emerge ex nihilo in the sense that it is preceded by identifiable early cases of crossover from the animal reservoir. So if SARS-CoV-2 were a natural virus, it ought to be possible to identify some of these early crossover cases. Of course this is complicated with SARS-CoV-2 by the fact that some cases are asymptomatic. But at least some cases of SARS-like illness should have been observed.
To me, what was remarkable about the emergence of this virus was how well adapted it already was to human-to-human spread. I immediately suspected that something was odd. The emergence of this virus did not look like the emergence of any novel virus I was familiar with.
Viruses will frequently surprise us, so the unusual emergence of this virus could mean any number of things. I don’t know whether it emerged in a laboratory or naturally. However, I am very familiar with the history of SARS and MERS. The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 does not seem to fit the same paradigm, even though all are coronaviruses. Maybe this is just due to gaps in our present knowledge.
We’ve watched in real time as more symptomatic and less symptomatic offshoots crop up in real time over the last two years. My working assumption is that regardless of origin, there was a lot more spread of at least one precursor strain that didn’t hit enough health red lines to trigger broad testing that noticed it.
If we got super unlucky and it was circulating developing transmission traits before it started in on the nasty health traits, that could end up looking a bit like our observed case pattern in the early days. This is also how to win at that phone game Plague Inc that became popular again early in the covid outbreak.
Anyway that would explain how we find more oddly early cases in Italy when we start doing historic testing broadly.
> You don’t have to know exactly what you’re doing to tinker around and get “lucky.”
I love that this comment begins by decrying hand-waving. Wowsers.
I guess a Tom Swift-level analysis is necessary when summarizing the anti-evolutionist stance on lab leak theo
rylogy. Thanks for reducing so many comments to their essence.“The narrower reason is that both when HIV was found to be the cause of AIDS…”
Would it be more accurate to say HIV is related to certain kinds of immunodeficiency?
At this point I don’t think it’s appropriate to definitively state one way or another whether the virus is lab leaked or zoonotic. That said I still tend to lean towards the lab leak theory for two primary reasons.
First, the governments of the two wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world have a massive mutual interest in definitively proving that the virus evolved naturally. When it’s definitively proven that a civet or pangolin or macaque or whatever acted as a transmission vector that allowed a bat virus to mutate in such a way that it can then infect humans both countries are “off the hook” so to speak for the work in Wuhan. Nearly two years later the combined resources of both countries have turned up no real candidates for such a transmission vector.
Secondly, Peter Daszak and the Ecohealth Alliance have been less than transparent about the work being done at the Wuhan lab. Some of the most damning documents were only revealed recently, including a leaked proposal to investigate adding human cleavage sites to SARS related coronavirus. That specific proposal was rejected but it’s evidence that Ecohealth and the Wuhan lab were interested in performing gain-of-function research that could well have led to a SARS-COV-2 type virus.
From a pretty decent summary in Vanity Fair(?!)
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-risky-virus-research-in-wuhan
“If I applied for funding to paint Central Park purple and was denied, but then a year later we woke up to find Central Park painted purple, I’d be a prime suspect.”
Sure, but if that was the extent of the evidence you wouldn’t come close to being convicted
Depends on your attorney and how much money you can keep throwing at litigation.
> Peter Daszak and the Ecohealth Alliance
As I wrote in an internal email:
Because a person behaves in a guilty manner does not mean they actually are guilty.
Clearly there was a significant CYA effort at the very least. Maybe Daszak knew they were messing around with stuff that could potentially have led to a leak, or maybe the CYA attempt was just the ingrained instinct of someone who has navigated government-adjacent spaces for his entire career.
> the CYA attempt was just the ingrained instinct of someone who has navigated government-adjacent spaces for his entire career.
Or maybe Daszak foresaw lab leak theory would be used for anti-China warmongering, not hard to believe given the state of US domestic politics and the machinations of the Blob. Perhaps he wished to preserve his lab and Chinese connections, whether for genuine or venial reasons we don’t know.
It is true that if there’s going to be international co-operation on pandemics, there have to be labs where scientists in different countries work together. In a sane world, Wuhan might have been once such place, but here we are. (The Bat Lady is by all accounts a good scientist.)
I’m still split on it being natural vs lab, say 60/40.
What I’m more interested in though is the way the media assured us for over a year that any suggestion that it might have come from a lab was a crazy conspiracy theory, but are now forced to acknowledge that it’s a real possibility.
And of course Fauci keeps getting caught lying.
> I’m still split on it being natural vs lab, say 60/40.
Should be more like 90/10 and that’s being generous:
That’s the extraordinary evidence that the extraordinary claim of the strong form (engineered) lab leak hypothesis would have to produce. Nobody has. Point this out, and all we get is chin-stroking, handwaving, and mush.
> And of course Fauci keeps getting caught lying.
Unfortunately for us all, it’s not possible to reverse engineer the truth from bullshit.
If you’re going to pin it on anyone it should be Ralph Baric and not the Wuhan Institute, https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavirus-triggers-debate-34502.
His research was allowed to continue after the moratorium in 2013, and has long worked with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, which is the US bio-weapons research facility. Safety lapses at this lab were so bad the CDC shut it down in summer 2019. Maybe this is full tin foil hat territory but that is when the mysterious “vaping flu” started to spread. Also in summer 2019 nursing homes in northern Virginia had outbreaks of an unusual respiratory illness that killed dozens of residents.
These aren’t smoking guns I know but as with much of the evil in the world, if it’s human made then we should be looking closer to home for the cause.
Seems to me that all the evidence is not in yet. Much has been shown and proven that SARS as well as other pathogens are natural in origin, but we do not have evidence of when human knowledge of these pathogens first occurred, since most lab work is done privately or in secret, with labs notoriously jealous of closely-held methods and formulas. Since science works best in open air, without national or corporate boundaries, it would seem that science has been hijacked into private space and we are left with…speculation, as you say. Human minds abhor a vacuum, and create that which satisfies curiosity. Until that secrecy and patent-bias is chucked out, people will surmise, and the internet allows wide dispersion of such surmise.
Also, have to agree with Raymind Sim in part – closeness to animal life was probably the cause of many human deaths and illnesses before we started to survey such connections. Disease controls population better than most controls (look at the statistics for war deaths in our Civil War – disease cut as many soldiers down as guns). Would you deny that, if we know that, our fearless leaders do, too, and use such knowledge to their limited and inept ability? The evidence of American investment in the Wuhan lab involved is not evidence of allowed release, but it does raise suspicion, and thus surmise.
A great case for closing down wet markets.
Has it been pinpointed exactly when Covid outbreaks started?
The fact that Tkacik does not have a Pulitzer, or even a Wikipedia entry, is a travesty.
Never mind, wrong thread
Just in case, I disagree!
hahahahahaha!
Per Lambert’s pet theory. I have been to Indonesia a couple of times, and I have Indonesian friends. I think it’s fair to say that Indonesia is not the most hygienic country, so given how frequently bats are consumed in certain regions in the country, it should be seeing a more frequent epidemic within its borders, and yet it hasn’t. Also bats are often sold for consumption in places like North Sulawesi (see linked article), but North Sulawesi is not exactly a tourist magnet. I have also been to many wet markets in Jakarta (capital of Indonesia), and Bandung (the capital of West Java) and never once have I seen a stall selling bat meat.
> Per Lambert’s pet theory
It was over a year ago, and I can’t find the thread, but to the best of my recollection this is the theory, for which I cannot take credit.
There was a spate of videos, I believe in Chinese media, showing Chinese people eating bat soup. An ingenious commenter — take a bow, whoever you are — tracked down the origins of the videos, and discovered that they all came from a tourist island, I think in Indonesia, possibly Bali. The Chinese tourists were eating bat soup “for the ‘Gram,” as influencers say, and then put the videos up for clicks. Note that not only were the Chinese tourists eating the bats, but the cooks were cooking them, the prep workers were prepping them, they were bought and sold in the markets, and of course captured in the wild. So all the elements that make the Wuhan Market an ideal cesspit for developing transmission existed in this context, with the added video evidence of people actually in close contact with the bats, evidence that to my recollection we do not have elsewhere. Could be Index Case Zero! (IIRC, the bats were whole. That was the charm of the dish.)
This theory also appeals to me because I have priors on air travel, and priors on tourists.
That said, I don’t pet this pet theory a whole lot any more. Evolution is the obvious answer, as it has been in the past (see the post). The Wuhan Lab Leak Theory (strong form) is a case of “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence,” of which there is none. The Wuhan Lab Leak Theory (weak form) cannot, as the post points out, give an account of the development of transmissibility.
Evolution is the obvious answer Lambert
Labs use evolution too, usually to attenuate a human virus, by infecting animals with that virus and allowing time for the virus to evolve to fit the animal and in the process becoming less fit to infect humans.
I don’t see why the reverse process could not be done with mice engineered to be similar to humans to evolve an animal virus to be MORE fit to infect humans.
So no great skill would be required to evolve a deadly human virus, just persistence and commonly available resources such as those mice?
Btw, the process I described above is called “serial passage” and has been around for a long time.
Excerpt from link:
When developing vaccines for viruses, the emphasis is on attenuating the virus, or decreasing its virulence, in a given host. Sometimes it is useful to employ serial passage to increase the virulence of a virus. Usually, when serial passage is performed in a species, the result is a virus that is more virulent to that species.[4]
> I don’t see why the reverse process could not be done with mice engineered to be similar to humans to evolve an animal virus to be MORE fit to infect humans.
Then you should read the comments from people in the field who do that work. Then you will see.
Thanks. If the Coronavirus had truly come from bats or other wild animals in Indonesia, then the country would constantly be a hotspot for coronavirus outbreaks, but that’s just not true.
Dried bat droppings are sometimes applied to the eye in Chinese medicine. Ye Ming Sha is used to treat human patients with night blindness.
When it comes to the role of bats, it’s also interesting to consider a potential role of Chinese medicine.
I don’t have time to outline the arguments in more detail, but I find this article very unconvincing – it is little more than a series of motte and bailey assertions, along with straw manning of the more detailed arguments put forward by people like Alina Chan. That said, Chan is about to publish a book co-written with Matt Ridley, who is certainly an expert on man made disasters, having been responsible for Northern Rock, not to mention a number of other Tory screw-ups, so I’m not entirely sure about her bona fides. As so often with Covid, its incredibly hard to find experts/investigators who don’t have hidden biases or motives. Chan seemed convincing to me until I found out about her Ridley connection.
I am largely agnostic about the question, not least because most of the science is well out of my pay grade, but my personal sense is that when a disease breaks out quite literally down the road from a major biological laboratory, hundreds of miles from the natural habitat of the host species, the balance of evidence should be on those arguing that it arrived via a wet market, not on those who argued that it arose in, or was released via, the laboratory. It has to be emphasised that the markets in Wuhan are not the filthy places we see in photographs from small towns in western China. Its a big modern city, and while the markets in those cities can be a little gross compared to a western supermarket, they are generally reasonably clean and well regulated. I think that if the virus originated naturally it is very unlikely that its first appearance would be somewhere like Wuhan, rather than a small village or town in Yunnan or Guangxi or northern Vietnam. It really doesn’t make a lot of sense to assume this is the default theory.
The are numerous questions arising around activities in and around the lab, and the highly suspicious speed with which a number of virologists attempted to stamp out any talk of the lab as a source made me, for one, highly suspicious. But all this is purely circumstantial. However, what is undeniable is that there has been a very systematic attempt by both US authorities and the Wuhan authorities to cover up what was really going on in that laboratory. If they were really so sure it didn’t come from there, there would be no need whatever for all of this. This reality alone, is for me enough reason for suspicion. I simply don’t buy the assertion implicit in this article that its up to lab origin theorists to ‘prove’ their case, while the ‘natural origin’ is the default assumption. In my opinion, its a very open question.
I’m disappointed in your response and that of other readers.
First, as I pointed out, HIV became a major disease very far away from the African bush, where the bushmeat practices led it to jump to humans. So there’s no reason to think geographic proximity is dispositive. Animal studies warned in 2016 warned that the COV family that caused SARS had a reservoir in bats and that the mutation of the spike protein could lead to transmission to humans.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298330455_SARS-like_WIV1-CoV_poised_for_human_emergence/link/58719f7a08ae8fce491f0562/download
Second, there are documented early cases in Italy, so the index case may not even have been in China.
Third, the fact that no human to human transmittable virus has even been created/engineered by humans considerably raises the evidentiary bar for the lab leak theory proponents.
Yves
I think the commentariat make very good points. The article is largely assertions.
You may agree with the assertions, but that doesn’t devalue the responses of Knifecatcher, PK and others. Regarding your third point, “the fact that no human to human transmittable virus has even been created/engineered by humans” don’t the gains of function of Anthrax and Dengue suggest otherwise?
Looks like there’s plenty of links to me. If you want to move up from mere handwaving, it would behoove you to point to particular “assertions” that you feel lack sufficient evidence.
Lambert, has Orent addressed cell cultures as a potential path for evolution in her other writings? Kaina raised the possibility back in May: https://doi.org/10.21873/invivo.12384
The argument made is that enhanced transmissibility need not be intentionally done by using a designer genome. Instead, you let the virus continually infect human cell lines cultured in a nutrient bath. The virus adapts to the new cells over years. You just take samples from old cultures and introduce them to fresh cultures, sort of like a sourdough starter.
The virus gets the time it needs to naturally adapt to human cells, and this enhanced transmissibility can be the accidental byproduct of a lab protocol. Someone might have wanted to keep freshly cultured virus available for research at all times. Then you either have an accidental infection of a worker or an improper disposal, and your virus is out in the wild.
Maybe the lesson here is to not, by implication, allow prior better cases for natural origin of the virus to become tied in with a weak exposition of the natural origin theory.
In line with what others say above, if you want to slosh things around a bit further, the last time we went through a bioweapons scare was in the runup to the invasion of Iraq. Not sure how central that was to the WMD lie package, but it helped. Entertaining what seems to be “judicious” doubt regarding the natural origins theory is not risk-free.
My 2 cent observation suggests that, it is undeniable that there is a great deal of smoke and that it is self evident that the potential risks (as presentiment?) were well known in advance . One obvious conclusion is that the publically available probative facts suggest further detailed, transparent inquiry.
Published: 12 November 2015
“Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research”
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787
“But other virologists question whether the information gleaned from the experiment justifies the potential risk. Although the extent of any risk is difficult to assess, Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, points out that the researchers have created a novel virus that “grows remarkably well” in human cells. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” he says.”
“The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” agrees Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Both Ebright and Wain-Hobson are long-standing critics of gain-of-function research.”
Sorry Yves but my own contribution above backs PlutoniumKun and others who were unimpressed by this piece. As to the source of the virus I have no opinion as I know nothing reliably, but it was quite legitimately argued for many years that Darwin’s theory of evolution, while intellectually attractive, couldn’t happen for real because there was no way the earth could be the necessary millions of years old enough. The nuclear fusion explanation of the sun which allowed for the time span Darwinism needed came later.
Never say never, and there was a lot of that in the article.
> Third, the fact that no human to human transmittable virus has even been created/engineered by humans considerably raises the evidentiary bar for the lab leak theory proponents.
I would like the anti-evolution commenters on this thread to state clearly whether they agree or disagree with this statement.
I’ll toss down the gauntlet and go first:
[x] agree
[ ] disagree
Let’s avoid all the handwaving and start out with the checkboxes, mkay?
[x] agree
However it’s also an accomplishment that one might be inclined to conceal had one been so incautious to have acheived it – would the experiments necessary for proof even be legal?
Additionally a couple of the proposals submitted by Daszak etc to DARPA might break very new ground. They proposed creating an ‘averaged’ virus and (apparently mass) inoculation of bats with vectored ‘human capable’ spike protein. Had anybody ever done these things before?
Actually, I hope noone’s ever done these things. but you know what I mean.
> Let me add the key point that everyone chooses to ignore: the Wuhan Institute of Virology tested all of its lab workers for SARS-COV-2. No one had antibodies. So there is counter-evidence to lab leak theory. How could a virus have escaped in sufficient volumes to infect people in the community and NOT lab workers?
On the key point of failure to address lack of precedent for lab development of human-to-human transmission, I wrote:
Based on the collective failure to address this second key point, my needle has swung from zero to negative.
“Let me add the key point that everyone chooses to ignore: the Wuhan Institute of Virology tested all of its lab workers for SARS-COV-2. No one had antibodies.”
Without data from China there is no way to know how early the virus could have been spreading. There was a much higher than reported level of antibodies in Wuhan in early days of the pandemic, which would indicate a large understatement of reported cases. There is some evidence that it could have been spreading through asymptomatic transmission earlier than China became aware of it. Also, some lab workers were hospitalized in November of 2019, though lack of data means there is no way to confirm whether they might have been infected with SARS-COV-2.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intelligence-covid-origins/2021/10/29/4aa23632-38de-11ec-91dc-551d44733e2d_story.html
They would have had Covid antibodies if they had been infected earlier. So the earlier hospitalization is off point.
I have no idea what you are talking about with higher antibodies. Crowded conditions will also produce more intense exposure. That’s why for instance there were so many infections in Souther California. Some immigrants were living in overcrowded housing.
The earlier hospitalizations info counters the claim that nobody from the lab was infected. Due to problems with data from China, there is no way to know.
Also, there is no way to know how how long people were carrying antibodies after being infected before China started testing for them.
Passing virus through humanized animal models and selecting for increased binding to human proteins and/or increased infectivity in the humanized animal models takes advantage of evolution to circumvent human’s limited ability to design and manufacture human-infectious virus.
I favor the lab leak although as usaul I could be wrong.
Handwaving.
don’t throw up a pro or anti evolution strawman, it is not constructive.
a dog is a wolf that has evolved in a direction selected by man. totally compatible with evolution and natural selection
man can select for features that natural evolution wouldn’t, including adaptions to new hosts, this includes passaging viruses through humanised animals or through human cell lines or direct deletion and insertions of genetic sequences.
the author Wendy Orent here is blowing smoke, she, along with her friend the bioweaponeer Domaradskij with whom Orent wrote a book, would know that this kind of thing would be done in secret, it would never be published as it is prohibited (BTWC) weapons research. Marburg U, one of Biopreparats inadvertent creations would likely be very much human human transmissible as it was passaged through a human. That is Soviet Biotech from 30 years ago, now the tools are more powerful and used even more unwisely today.
I think it likely the creation of novel human infecting viruses has been done multiple times in biological warfare labs in the West and elsewhere. These labs pretend to be defensive as plausible cover. they are not going to reveal offensive weapons research has occurred and is still occurring by publishing the experimental details.
Whether the Wuhan lab was involved with SARs-2 is forever going to be an unknown but the work that the NIH funded through Ecohealth was highly questionable and very stupid and they and Fauci should be rightly damned for what they were involved with.
These people should not be allowed to play with their dangerous toys in the shadows without having to account for the complete lack of morality and ethics in what they do.
We hear, in various guises, the idea that “something so complicated could only have happened as a result of design.” In fact, as the post points out, we generally hear this with zoonotic diseases. This is, in fact, the Watchmaker Analogy, explicitly developed against evolution (and ubiquitous in school board fights and lawsuits against teaching evolution in schools”).
If lab leak people use the Watchmaker Analogy, they should indeed be called out as anti-evolution, since (a) the logic is anti-evolution, and (b) so are its historical antecdents. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.
I can’t recall a time when smearing people with whom you disagree gets them to become more open to your argument.
Anti-evolution accusations isn’t serving your goal here.
I refuse to answer on the grounds it might incriminate me.
Or, rather, I know nothing about creating/engineering human to human transmittable viruses and can have no way of forming a valid opinion as to how likely/possible it is.
ALL that I, a layman, can do is assess the amount of credence I can give those who do claim to know about these things.
You state as a fact, “no human to human transmittable virus has even been created/engineered by humans.” Do you KNOW this or is it just what you believe? Has it in fact been done in secret, for military purposes perhaps? Or has someone done it but decided not to publish the fact for fear of the ramifications or dangers? Could it in fact probably be done but because of the obvious dangers the ‘scientific community’ has decided not to attempt it? Are you, personally, sure of that which you claim.
And this evidentiary bar is raised or lowered in comparison with what? The ‘natural’ jump of this virus from animal to human, another animal? The author of the article makes the point herself that, “In order for a virus to adapt to a new species, it needs to evolve to a point where it can easily and readily spread within that species. This is not the work of an instant, but rather the end result of a long chain of adaptation and transmission. That’s an evolutionary process.” So how high do we set the bar for that? I have absolutely no idea. So your question, as far as I am concerned is unanswerable.
In the absence of a consensus among those who have both the necessary expertise and access to the relevant fact I have no way of KNOWING if this is a lab leak or not, or even how likely either is. All I can do is form a provisional opinion based on the credence I extend to those who do claim to know. And I tend to be a little wary of those who make bold claims that ‘x’ is impossible or ‘y’ has never happened. As history amply demonstrates eggs and faces have a habit of interacting.
> Or, rather, I know nothing about creating/engineering human to human transmittable viruses and can have no way of forming a valid opinion as to how likely/possible it is.
Then why are you commenting at such length?
Yves, would you be so kind as to clarify what you mean by “created/engineered”? Because it is well known that the 1918 h1n1 “Spanish” flu virus was recreated in the early 2000s from recovered genetic fragments – Wikipedia:
And the 1977 “resurrection” of another h1n1 flu strain is now widely believed to be the result of a lab leak:
Lastly, does anyone reading this disagree with the final bit of Yuri Deigin’s long Medium technical analysis “Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research | by Yuri Deigin | Medium” from early last year?
Because it seems to me that a lot of the “could not have escaped from a lab” noising by the GOF advocates and researchers has been in an effort to quash the much-needed debate on whether the current lax oversight of such research needs to be overhauled.
> Because it seems to me that a lot of the “could not have escaped from a lab” noising by the GOF advocates and researchers has been in an effort to quash the much-needed debate on whether the current lax oversight of such research needs to be overhauled.
Yves has real work to do, so I’ll respond.
I love articles with sentences like “The speculation… is supported by the observation…,” especially when they’re about some other virus. Of course, depending on the speculation, any evidence whatever can be adduced to support it.
My views on lab-leak theory are not consequentialist. However, what you have done is give a motive to Daszak and EcoHealth generally to run exactly the kind of operation they ran to avoid having their lab shut down, whether they are guilty or not.
“Second, there are documented early cases in Italy, so the index case may not even have been in China”
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/coronavirus-italy-covid-19-pandemic-europe-date-antibodies-study/
Multiple cases means Italy’s index case was likely much earlier than September 2019
Amplification usually does occur in a more urban setting than the original crossover events of the novel pathogen. Often it occurs in a hospital or an urban setting.
There is a large Chinese population in Lombardy, so presumably residents were traveling between the two countries and picked up the virus. What the early seroprevalence in Italy may be telling us is that SARS-CoV-2 must have emerged much earlier than China admits.
> There is a large Chinese population in Lombardy, so presumably residents were traveling between the two countries and picked up the virus.
Lombardy does fabric design, China does the manufacturing. So there is a lot of air travel between the two.
Thank you. PlutoniumKun.. I enjoy reading your views, your unique cultural insight. You expressed my “agnostic” view on the origins theories much better than I could. I agree, it remains an open question.
No, you are not agnostic PK on this question. And nobody is asking the right questions here and just sticking as you did to the ‘there is a lab around it might come from the lab’. So, you are assigning probabilities but at the same time ignoring all about virus evolutions and zoonotic diseases that Orent tried to explain in simple words avoiding entry into the messy details of virus evolution and transmission.
This thing about ‘probabilities’ has been repeated many times in the ‘intelligence reports’ cited by someone cited in the media as if someone could assign probabilities to a lab for an event like this.
Several experts have explained how unlikely is that this beast originated in a lab either by lab assay (even repeated assay) or by genetic manipulation. Conditions in a lab are very unsuitable for the kind of evolutionary events required to the surge of a totally new human infecting virus transmitting with the ease SARS CoV 2 does. Furthermore whatever we learn about it, for instance it has some known ‘motifs’ in the Spike prot is treated as proof or print of manipulation. As Orent explains leaks occur, but these always involve a virus that was known before to infect humans. No new virus ever jumped from a lab.
Everything is seen ‘suspicious’ around the lab and this is not agnostic, this is our desire to believe it must be from lab origin no matter how unlikely it is. It is not suspicious, on the contrary because from the very very beginning scientists knew that the lab would be blamed so they tried to explain that it was pointless.
The likelihood of something like this hapenning –knowing what is known about the virus and its closest relatives– is so low that there is not way you can explain how it could occur in a lab. Not by intended genetic manipulation, not by in lab evolution. This means that in order to give a smidgen of validity to the lab leak theory you need to present proofs and its absence means that we can readily rule out the possibility on the basis of nearly 0 likelihood.
I don’t see why anything that can happen in nature can’t happen in a lab. And if the lab is specifically trying to do those things, using human/mouse hybrids and splicing furin cleave sites in coronavirus, it seems like the odds would go WAY up. Granted no one has ever to my knowledge created and released a novel human virus, but no one had ever made a smartphone a few years ago, and creating novel human infecting virus is reckless and crazy enough that I am shocked that they were trying to do it at all. And not on an island lab but in a city?
What exactly is the impossible part of a lab origin? And what are the odds that a naturally occurring novel coronavirus would appear on the doorstep of the WIV by coincidence?
‘I don’t see why anything that can happen in nature can’t happen in a lab‘
Exactly this is your problem. An idea that is idiotic to the extreme. Think twice. Of course you can’t.
I mean, OK, fine. It would be hard to get a supernova in a lab. I don’t see why any genetic mutation of a coronavirus that can occur in nature can’t occur in a lab. Especially a lab studying just those types of mutations. Obviously nature is bigger and labs have more intentionality, but most of nature isn’t on the relevant labs doorstep, either.
Think about this. SARS CoV 2 has so far infected about 250.000.000 people according to records in nearly two years (my guess is there have been lots of missed infections) and we have obtained ‘variants’. Some of them accumulate up to 50 mutations and these are not scattered randomly in the genome. Many tend to concentrate in the Spike protein (immunologically driven drift).
Could you please explain me in simple words how is it that in the Wuhan lab RaTG13 could have so pointedly accumulated about 400 mutations all around its genome leading to SARS CoV 2? Is the Wuhan lab a supernova-like hot mutational spot?
Are there lab techniques for enhancing mutation rates in viruses?
I don’t know, I only work with plants. In plants we have lots of ways to hike the rate of evolution up to a pace that humans are more comfortable working with, since we’ve been doing it in labs for ~100 years on top of >15k years in the field.
I have no idea if a lab originated this virus or not, and honestly don’t care at this point because it has no relevance to treatment of symptoms or suppression of spread.
Some observations about this thread though, which seems to be a lot more uncomfortable than the usual NC fare.
– I find it weird that in this thread the “humans might be able to black box development of this” is being classed as “anti-evolution”, given the suggested approach (very similar to neural networks at a gross scale) leverages evolution explicitly. I’m assuming this is because in the USA there is still an active “argument” about evolution, but it’s strange from here.
– I also have seen no reason not to assume that weapons research continues to be a low-ethics high-risk environment, as it always has been.
– The nature of miltech research makes it a perfect setting for both conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies, because we will likely never know what they are actually doing.
– The Dune quote supports a lab playing with fire screwup just as much as it does human/other animal systems screwups.
– This hasn’t happened before therefore it can’t have happened is not a great basis for an argument, and would be shredded in an economic context on this site.
– The strongest argument in the original post appears to be Occam’s; it would be hard to do this on purpose so doing it by accident is simpler. That doesn’t seem (to me) to prove anything about where the accident happened.
– We should totally be more on top of zoonotic disease control than we are, including in wet markets and in other settings that don’t trigger western sensibilities in the same way. The focus exclusively on wet markets when industrialised ag does things just as silly (the mink farms in Scandinavia) is a bit xenophobic.
You might be able to generate some variability though not to the extent you might find after infecting 250 million people. Second and even bigger problem is to apply in the lab the selection forces to obtain the desired capabilities, such as airborne transmission. No way infecting VERO cells or a few lab kept mice. Your assay conditions cannot by any measure resemble what happens in mother nature. Replicating the tough conditions of the wilderness is something that you cannot dream in a lab.
The same with plant virus. You can easily go and infect in a greenhouse some thousand of lab grown plants that tend to be tender and easy. Try to do the same in the field. Not that easy.
So roughly, you can easily cause a lot of mutations in random directions in viruses, but you can’t apply the selection pressure to get them narrowed down to only the mutations that will help with transmission in human hosts (without using humans in large numbers, or a close enough analogue species). Is that about it?
You can mutate a bunch of plants in a field pretty easily, but plants are a heck of a lot easier to work with because of totipotency and asexual reproduction. Getting down to the mutants that do what you want is usually a case of exposing them all to whatever it is you want them to resist or thrive on (and killing the rest in the process). Harder to do that with people, ethically. Or indeed with viruses affecting plants, as you say. Could probably design an experiment to detect high-transmissability variants of a virus in a field of plants, given access to a big enough field and no care for the risk (military research for example).
why would there be no care for risk in a military research context? The researchers – presumably unscrupulous and selfish enough to be doing ethically questionable work and therefore probably holding themselves and their lives in fairly high regard – would themseves be at risk, as would the population where the lab is sited. And WIV plainly isn’t a clandestine military skunkworks.
The problem when trying to accelerate mutation rates compared with thee natural error rates of RNA virus, which are already high is that you probably wouldn’t obtain anything that is infectious as you are introducing too many mutations most of them will be deletereous to firal functions.
In fact, because those high error rates of viral RNA replicases, viral RNA genomes cannot be as large as viral DNA genomes and harbour the minimal number of genes required to keep their functions. At those error rates of 1 per 1000-10000 copied nucleotides in a single replication round RNA genomes that are larger than those of CoVs would accumulate too many mistakes to be viable. So if the error rate or RNA polymerases is high and exploited to its limits I don’t see any point about trying to increase it artificially.
setting aside that economics and natural history/science are rather different beasts – that’s not the line. The line is that if you’re going to argue that something unprecedented and apparently extremely difficult to do has taken place, then the point is not that it can’t have happened; the point is that you need exceptionally strong evidence to prove that it has. Instead we get circumstantiation and watchmaker arguments, and “check out Dr Reginald Mendacious PhD MBBA MD MSc LL.B’s YouTube video from May 17, 2020. Very interesting I’m sure you’ll agree.”
Just one thing I’d quickly add:
I’m not sure you’ve read it right (but maybe I haven’t). “Earth is so exquisitely balanced and sophisticated that it must have been created by someone” – this is the spurious creationist/anti-evolution argument, or the “watchmaker” argument, as Lambert puts it. Popularly, it’s been used as a rationalisation; the bailey position of creationists that they retreated to after it was shown that, yes, life is in fact older than ~6000 years (thank u science!!)
It is not the content of the argument, but the form that is being repeated in this debate: “SARSV2 is so effective at infecting humans (and it happened down the road from the virus factory – that’s one of the corcumstantial bits) that it must have been created by humans, and unleashed by same (either by design or accident)”.
As an argument, it’s not actually about evolution per se. It’s more about creation/origination/causation. But the form of the argument (to people who care about such things) is not especially persuasive in and of itself. This, it seems to me, is why – without wishing to speak for him – Lambert seems so surprised at how many here have been taken in by the argument.
Clearly I’m missing a lot of context about this debate that isn’t present in this thread or post.
What I’m seeing in this thread is a lot of people saying “Based on what we’re scientifically capable of right now, it could be from a lab, or from ‘natural’ sources, but we don’t know enough to say” who are then getting attacked for the idea that humans might be capable of making something like covid.
I have seen plenty of evidence that accidentally making a virus zoonotic and terrible is within the scope of modern techniques, but also lots of evidence we probably couldn’t do it on purpose (within a reasonable timeframe).
And I have seen no good evidence for wtf covid came from, just lots of confused scientists saying “the way we worked out origins for previous viruses isn’t working this time”. Which isn’t evidence for anything except tough breaks in sciencetown.
Maybe all the people making the weak “it must be designed” argument without evidence are elsewhere and I missed it? I don’t consume a lot of media so it’s entirely possible.
Seriously? No good evidence, or no evidence that you’re inclined to believe, because reasons?
Even if you think that the zoonotic origin argument is just as circumstantial as the lab-leak argument, the fact remains that zoonotic emergence of human infective viruses is a scientifically observed and fairly well understood recurring tendency; it is not an extraordinary claim in the manner that a lab leak is. So why one would discount the former in favour of the latter – I just don’t really get it.
Looks like there’s a nest limit on comment replies. So I can’t reply directly to either Basil or Ignacio in the right places.
Basil – I haven’t seen strong evidence for a zoonotic origin for covid19 from any source. That doesn’t mean I don’t think a zoonotic origin is less likely, so don’t paint me with your lab leak conspiracy brush please.
On the balance, it seems more likely that human error in managing ag or food prep generated the opportunity for this viral lineage to crop up than human error in a lab. Without any other data, the sheer quantity difference in ag/food vs lab work with animals would make it a more likely source.
And thankyou Ignacio for answering my questions re: viral mutagenesis, that does sound like it would not be a productive approach to take, whether intentionally or by accident.
> ‘I don’t see why anything that can happen in nature can’t happen in a lab‘
Like consciousness, gravity, fusion…. Oh, wait….
I suspect some experts are considering the possibility that their research could be shut down.
What do you think would happen if you serially passed a bat virus with poor affinity for human ACE2 through a humanized mouse expressing human ACE2? Especially if you had been engineering the spike protein as this news item claims?
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4099020
This is a trivially easy way to expand the host range of a coronavirus and would quite likely work without even doing any genetic manipulation.
Furthermore, a letter from the NIH was recently released stating that Ecohealth Alliance was doing exactly that experiment, using a different coronavirus, and created a virus with enhanced virulence to mice as a result.
https://republicans-energycommerce.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/NIH-Document-Production-Cover-Letter-2021.10.20_McMorris-Rodgers.pdf
> created a virus with enhanced virulence to mice as a result.
Monkeys exaggerate. Mice lie. I mean, a mouse study? Really?
Seems like a straw man since the lab was using *humanized* mice.
https://www.genetargeting.com/transgenic/transgenic-mice/
Lambert is correct. By happenstance, epidemiloigist Ignacio addressed this very point in 10/30 Links (emphasis mine):
Still, there remains, as of this writing, no physical evidence linking the pandemic’s origins with a laboratory escape.
I’d put more faith in this statement if the Chinese weren’t stonewalling the WHO investigations into the origin of this virus, and if the WHO team itself weren’t compromised by conflicts of interest. And given the NIH/NIAID were funding Wuhan GOF research (despite Fauci’s denials), they seem also to have a motive in participating in a cover-up.
The US would never let the WHO conduct a similar investigation here if the shoe were on the other foot.
This is exactly true.
Our behavior in this regard is so dumb. I can already see the next swine flu epidemic that China has to deal with being labeled “Carolina Crud” because we put it out there that countries should be held accountable for this. And I can’t wait until chronic wasting disease makes the jump from deer to humans because we’re farming those for meat now. When that gets going it will legitimately be our fault.
Mass Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease? Oh, that would be so fun. It would make the emotional mess over Covid look just absolutely mild.
Are we sure this is true? If the US felt there was a good chance it was leaked from a lab–I’m sure you are correct, but if the US was pretty positive it was natural and that they would be vindicated by allowing a similar investigation I’m not so sure. Maybe I’m just naïve though?
Actually, if it were the same panel, I bet we would.
Exactly the same way we put ourselves under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Oh, wait…
With Daszak at the head of the panel you had the equivalent of an International Criminal Court headed by Henry Kissinger, staffed by his chosen men, and convened to try only the case of the U.S. aerial bombardment of North Vietnam.
And this is on point why?
Because all the disconcerting revelations have come via the U.S. paper trail. I don’t think the Chinese government was likely to face great difficulties maintaining control of the narrative. It was the people on the U.S. side who needed some cover. I don’t think the shocking lack of propriety in the makeup of the investigative team was born of the need to protect China.
I doubt very much that the US would submit to the International Criminal Court even if they could rig the tribunal. The risk to sovereignty is too great. Perhaps the next case would be rigged by another party. Best avoid it.
Eschew a quick fix because some day we might not be the strong ones? What are we, weenies?
You under-rate yourself. A weenie isn’t able to move goalposts at supersonic speed.
Vincent Racaniello had several members of the original WHO team on an episode of This Week in Virology earlier this year and it was an interesting discussion.
Does nobody believe in links anymore?
China stonewalls pretty much everything. The government there isn’t exactly the most transparent in the best of times.
There are so many problems with the lab leak hypothesis and it’s a frustrating conversation to have with anyone in good faith. I wish we could move to dealing with the consequences of the pandemic we’re still experiencing rather than try to figure out who’s to blame for the creation of the pathogen we so expertly allowed to flourish in our society.
I’m optimistic that the recent revelation of the beagel torture experiments with sand flies might get people thinking about what we are doing in other countries. There will be a SARS-COV-3. What I’d like to make sure of is that we citizens had no part in funding anything that brought it about or made it worse.
according to MMT you don’t fund the government. it funds itself and the rest of us.
so “taxpayers” didn’t fund it. but our government funded and allowed it, even in a backhanded way and also at the same time officially disallowing it. it seems, maybe, for now.
The lab leak theory reminds me in some ways of the Russiagate hoax, which relied on huge unjustified jumps in reasoning.
Trump hired a Russian (Konstantin Kilimnik) and said nice things about Putin. Therefore he must be colluding with Russia. The virus appeared in the same city as WIV, therefore it was created in the lab.
Also, both Trump and Fauci are revolting loud mouthed scum and proven liars. Therefore … a bunch of conclusions that just don’t follow.
Why does everyone feel the need to have an opinion? Why not wait for the facts to be made clear?
the people with something to lose who were scared that they could be implicated, rightfully or not, in anything have played keep-away with the “facts”, thus creating at least half of the suspicion that they are indeed guilty. and possibly permanently barring us from knowing what those facts are.
quite a conundrum.
This is what I was thinking. People who say it came from a lab are really also saying that all the virology experts are dishonest liars who have conspired to keep the truth from the public. (Personally, I think this is rather unlikely).
As I understood it, in February and March 2020 the scientists were saying that through very precise genetic sequencing they had determined that the virus was wild in origin, and my understanding is that they still have found no reason to change their minds, despite all the speculation.
Of course, science deals in probabilities not certainties, so there is always a possibility that they are wrong. But there really doesn’t seem to be any clear evidence for all this speculation.
The geneticists I’ve talked to about it have been pretty clear that they would never publish an opinion either way – it’s far too hot a socio-political environment and only the egotists are jumping in there.
Note: this doesn’t indicate anything about whether human-assisted or hands-free evolution is the ultimate source, just that the literature on origin is going to be scarce and biased towards big statements and low evidence.
Whether or not the virus came from the Lab isnt all that important right now. The relevent questions are:
1) Is it possible future viruses may come from a lab
2) What can we learn about the current Covid-19 to help us more effectively combat it
You can debate whether the Wuhan Institute of Virology removal of public databases in September 2019 that contained Covid virus samples is a smoking gun or not. But that along with China’s general lack of transparency with the rest of the world on all Covid-19 fronts makes it harder to answer and assess the 2 questions above.
I’m fine sticking with the facts, but regardless of where Covid came from, we should learn from China’s behavior that they cannot be relied on. We absoutely should not be funding research in China as the NIAID currently does and which Fauci is still saying we should expand
I think you are on the money here. This is another avenue that even if Covid did not come from a lab, the technology to engineer viruses easily and quickly is fast approaching. Sam Harris has a good podcast called “Engineering the Apocalypse.” He does an excellent job staying out of the covid lab leak argument while still presenting the history of lab leaks elsewhere and covers the current state of technology used to print gene sequences-they are not far off from being able to do viruses. Add that to the list of things where to the unassuming scientist might be a break through, but also another way for us to kill ourselves off as a species. While the MSM has pushed hard over the last year and half to herald scientists as new god like figures who should not be questioned as to their intent. We all know the story though, great breakthroughs can have consequences. We have to ask ourselves, if this could come from a lab, are we prepared for something worse? Covid is pretty benign compared to previous pandemics. Humans have been exposed to zoonotic transmission since the beginning of time, but our advances in genetics are novel and to me seem up there with Nuclear proliferation as a means to get us to our final curtain call.
Absolutely agreed that we should be learning from both possible origins and mitigating both. This is just sensible risk management.
I’d say addressing funding of science is probably important. At the moment the funding is highly financialised, like everything else, which is going to have the same effect it does in other markets – reduce controls and chase big wins regardless of the possible downsides.
The other thing is, it’s such an historically predictable development. I’m reading ‘The Pandemic Century’ by Mark Honigsbaum (as recommended by IM Doc) and while I’ve not yet finished it, it’s a recurring theme, if not the central thesis of the book: the careless encroachment of human populations on wildlife and habitat – ecological disturbance – tends to drive pandemics (it was written pre-Covid but I’m reading a 2nd edition with a Covid chapter).
That doesn’t definitively answer the question re: C19 origin one way or the other , but it’s not really clear to me on the existing evidence why the lab leak theory should be so persuasive. It just seems rather circumstantial.
The final point I’d make, though, is that while it’s important to try to find out the virus’ origin for the sake of knowing and not making the same mistakes again (granted, a very optimistic assumption but hopefully you take my point), as far as blame goes it’s largely irrelevant. There’s plenty of blame to go around and whether it came from the lab or the wet market, C19 simply never had to reach the scale of shit-show that it’s become – that may well be on all of us, to some extent. I deeply hope that Covid historiography never loses sight of that fact.
This is interesting. I don’t think this analysis actually excludes viruses leaking from the WIV but it makes a case for how difficult it would be to prove it. We know CoV2 was in Italy in early 2019 – so if it did leak it did so much earlier than claimed. It’s almost ironic that the WIV was studying gain of function, slowly and meticulously, and then along came a virus pandemic that blew it all out of the water. Mission accomplished. But not as useful as they had hoped. It’s probably more difficult to pick up those research threads now. Having to isolate all over again to achieve some specific gain of function that strategically transmits certain RNA into human cells which can cure some disease, etc. About the question, Where did CoV2 originate?, the original mutation of the bat virus which then went on to achieve human transmission and mutate around the world – Edward Steele, an Australian geneticist, speculates that viruses are hitchhikers on cosmic particles (panspermia) and that ancient Chinese records frequently correlate pandemic outbreaks with meteors and comets. It sounds a little too mysterious until you consider that viruses do indeed shower the planet everyday and that some of them might interact with our native viruses, sharing snippets of dna, etc. Basically the origin of any virus is almost impossible to establish for that reason and for the fact that they mutate so aggressively, sharing and borrowing as they go. The normal course for virus mutation is to exponentiate themselves off to a less virulent form. We’ll see what comes after Delta.
So one more thought: maybe when the pandemic subsides we will be left with a less virulent form of CoV2, one which can be used to transmit certain snippets of RNA into human cells to propagate and cure various illnesses.
> Basically the origin of any virus is almost impossible to establish for that reason
Viruses fall into a few major clades, all of which are clearly related to each other; many of the key genes shared by most members of these clades have homologues in non-viral organisms.
Viruses are not hitch-hikers from space. Or at least none has never been found that isn’t obviously related to the rest of life on Earth. (When you think about it, no hitch-hiker from space could possibly work like a virus: they are more intimately connected to the operation of other organisms than anything else. They *have* to be related to them, or at the very least have coevolved with them. They can’t just drop it on us from above, unrelated, and work. Bacteria could, in theory. Viruses? Not a chance.)
thanks. very interesting.
I think fungi are currently the most likely space invaders – and they eat everyone, eventually. Alien origin just changes the genre of the horror :)
This is an important discussion. I am mostly agnostic but leaning toward the lab leak theory of origin. The two people I have talked to who are pretty convinced it is a lab leak are both practicing scientists in the biological sciences.
“How would you design a virus to spread stealthily in the ways that SARS-CoV-2 does, either for general research or for nefarious purposes? You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t know how. “There’s a vanishingly low likelihood that you could design a virus so that it spreads asymptomatically,” says Weiss.”
This kind of argument is definitely not helpful. It is a strawman. Of course you do not design in the consequences of your accident. Unknown consequences are one of the reasons that there was heated discussion about GoF research in 2013-2014.
Here are some issues I would like explicitly addressed for talking to these people. The author rightly emphasizes the evolutionary struggle necessary to achieve human-to-human transmission. Covid does not spread well among bats so a direct transmission between bats to humans is very unlikely. So there would need to be that evolutionary struggle in an intermediate animal where viruses can mix yes? I am told this leaves a trail, a trail of the evolutionary struggle. Yet, there is not a hint of this struggle. It is a completely cold trail. This and the lack of genetic diversity of the early cases bothers them (I do not understand this argument as well, I admit). When I point out at the difficulty in tracing past viruses they point out that this is a much colder trail than those past efforts. We are getting nowhere in a much more intense environment of scrutiny. Finding other similar viruses but without the furin cleavage site is unconvincing.
I would also like an elaboration on the argument that it would be very hard to engineer a virus that jumps from human to human. The grant applications we have seen certainly don’t imply that. The spike protein was known to be crucial in species targeting. All we hear about when talking about how problematic Covid is comes down to discussions of the spike targeting ACE-2 and the furin cleavage site taking advantage of a human enzyme. That is what I have seen anyway. If there are other things, I would like to know for these discussions (arguments?) Changing two genes is technically not a Herculean task. The lack of similarity of the rest of the ‘backbone’ to anything else published is a big hole for the lab leak theory. But, the hiding and lying about the research is not comforting regarding this. Actually this is why I am leaning lab leak. There is certainly a coverup of something. And the recently leaked grant that proposes to do the very thing that is the crucial mystery, the origin of the furin cleavage site. Now, I would be inclined to hide that too, if I was unlucky enough to have a proposal of mine coincidentally be precisely relevant for an explosive controversy such as this. A controversy which I also happen to be a central figure in. But, wow! What extraordinarily bad luck!
“Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.”
I like this quote too. And it certainly applies to the consequences of our technologies. We are, after all, part of the universe.
Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.”
Hanlon’s Razor
I like this quote too. And it certainly applies to the consequences of our technologies. We are, after all, part of the universe.
Epicurus. Lucretius. Bruno, Galileo, Spinoza. Tommy Jefferson. Albert Einstein. Ghost in the Machine
Being a jealous man by nature I wish Yves would stop mentioning her vacations (most recently Maine and Bali)
I am very sorry! I went to Bali in the early 1990s, when I was much more flush than now. I didn’t mean to make it sound recent.
Maine is the only vacation I get and it’s only a bit more than a week once a year.
First concerning the assertion that the SARS-COV2 came from nature explanation. There are at least two significant distinct mutations in SARS-COV2. First in the spike protein allowing entry into the human cell and second the furin cleavage mutation which opens the site for entry by the spike protein. From what I understand it is very unlikely, bordering on impossible, that both these mutations occurred simultaneously hence the belief an intermediate animal must be involved. To date, there have been no animals, wild or domestic, showing either of these mutations although biologists are searching diligently. When an intermediate host is discovered, sort of a missing link, I will acknowledge SARS-COV2 evolved in nature.
Second concerning the Wuhan lab, and the possibility of a lab created SARS-COV2, I quote from a recent Atlantic article “The latest piece of evidence came out this week in the form of a set of murkily sourced PDFs, with their images a bit askew. The main one purports to be an unfunded research grant proposal from Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a global nonprofit focused on emerging infectious diseases, that was allegedly submitted to DARPA in early 2018 (and subsequently rejected), for a $14.2 million project aimed at “defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses.” Released earlier this week by a group of guerrilla lab-leak snoops called DRASTIC, the proposal includes a plan to study potentially dangerous pathogens by generating full-length, infectious bat coronaviruses in a lab and inserting genetic features that could make coronaviruses better able to infect human cells. (Daszak and EcoHealth did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)” “There is good reason to believe the document is genuine. The Atlantic has confirmed that a grant proposal with the same identifying number and co-investigators was submitted to DARPA in 2018.”
See link
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/lab-leak-pandemic-origins-even-messier/620209/
> When an intermediate host is discovered, sort of a missing link, I will acknowledge SARS-COV2 evolved in nature
You realise this is most unlikely to happen, right? And not because it didn’t evolve, but because this was probably an unlucky single organism or small population: the virus was not too well-adapted to replicate in that, either: at best it will have later been completely supplanted by a more recent strain of SARS-CoV-2, which is quite happy to replicate in all sorts of mammals, leaving no trace. (Many earlier-dominant strains of SARS-CoV-2 are extinct already. Strains go extinct very easily, and this one, with a tiny population size to start with, would have gone without anyone ever noticing.)
The microbiological world doesn’t have logs. Things can and do happen that leave no traces at all.
So a tiny population of some kind of animal with say a few hundred species somehow had the numbers of virus in its population to generate a significant mutation, and then promptly went extinct without a trace. A bit of a stretch it seems to me.
Its also suspicious that, as I understand the facts, all the animals in the Wuhan lab and the Wet Market have been completely destroyed, and evidence of the DNA and RNAdata of Wuhan lab animals was not shared with investigators.
To me the case is still open as to whether the SARS-COV2 virus is natural or man made.
No, a tiny population of a few hundred *individuals* had enough to generate a significant mutation — probably through coinfection with another virus — and then later on it is quite likely that SARS-CoV-2 would have swept back through it — or, y’know, we just never found that population. It might be a subpopulation of bats in a cave with a population of millions. Would we find the subpopulation? Hell no. It’s hard to even go in there for more than a few minutes: the air is toxic from all the bat shit.
It is utterly routine for coinfection of one cell with multiple viruses, often quite distantly related ones, to cause major mutations due to both viral genomes getting shuffled together. SARS-CoV-2 particles don’t have specialized machinery to assemble them, after all, they self-assemble. There is literally no machinery *there* to spot the fact that one bit of RNA from one virus and another from a completely different virus have glommed onto each other and made a freak combination. Nearly all of these don’t work and die, of course, but it only takes one lucky one from one lucky cell… and a single infected individual produces trillions of viral particles. It has a *lot* of chances to recombine successfully.
I don’t see why anyone would consider it suspicious that in the middle of a pandemic biosafety procedures in viral research labs get increased and a bunch of animals get killed as a result. This is perfectly normal human nature: you see the consequences of a major viral pandemic and you think OH SHIT this probably didn’t escape from here but what if the next one did? Let’s crack down! Actually you’d probably be even more likely to do this if it didn’t come from you than if it did. (The US has also increased biosafety at its labs recently. Maybe it’s a US-originated virus!!! No.)
First of all, I have to go with Jon Stewart here. If there is an outbreak of chocolatey goodness in Hershey, PA, “it’s the fucking chocolate factory!”
Another tell-tale sign is that the Chinese government has just been going ape-shit on Australia for the mere suggestion that there be an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19. Why the strong reaction?
The latest letter released by the NIH to Congress shows that the NIH encouraged the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to do gain-of-function research, gave them funding to do it. and that the scientists had no qualms about doing gain-of-function research, and that they did in fact do gain-of-function research.
There was also a documentary that ran on Chinese television before the pandemic, showing off the lab in Wuhan. One of those typical Chinese things, “See, we are just as good as Western countries!”. The documentary interviewed scientists who were complaining about being bitten by bats through their protective gloves.
> First of all, I have to go with Jon Stewart here. If there is an outbreak of chocolatey goodness in Hershey, PA, “it’s the fucking chocolate factory!”
That argument has exactly the depth that I would expect from Jon Stewart. “I went to the Grand Canyon, and holy moly, it must have come from the Stone Factory!” ” I went to Seaworld, and those beautiful fish must have come from the Fish Factory!”
This amazingly stupid yet virulent argument is the Watchmaker Analogy: A design must have a designer. The argument was developed and propagated by Christianist opponents of evolution, so I’m a little surprised to see several people in the commentariat falling for it.
“like brings like” is an ages old human reasoning thing. i read about it in the Golden Bough and it seems to go back to the origins of humanity (maybe beyond–who knows how crows reason?).
no need for any specific “invention” date, party, motivation.
A novel coronavirus apparently originating in bats was first detected in the city home to the institute housing the largest collection of bat coronaviruses outside of the very distant bat caves themselves. Research on the viruses at that institute having been carried out under BSL2 controls. That’s a ‘2’ not a ‘3’. One needn’t hypothesize a creator to regard the institute as the most plausible source of the pathogen.
Please don’t threadjack. Your comment has nothing to do with the original comment or my response to it.
But since we’re on the lab, please show that the Wuhan Lab had the operational capability to produce or evolve human-to-human transmission for the virus. Or is the coincidence of name, location, and a Tom Swiftian “They got lucky!” theory enough for you?
In business and politics, the sequence for getting Big Things Done, which looks an awful lot like what is proposed for the Wuhan scientists, once you strip out artful but not always on point uses of terminology, is:
And horrific damage to innocent parties can be a feature of the part where they pretend to do the magic. Lac Megantic comes to mind.
The fact that one needn’t believe in intelligent design to regard the WIV as the most plausible first stop for the virus in Wuhan is most certainly relevant to the argument you’re making here.
Is your argument that because the direct bioengineering of such a pathogen is highly unlikely, the research program at WIV is in the clear? The most obviously risky aspect of the whole business was the project to collect all those potentially dangerous viruses, and that would seem to be an indispensible first step.
This is straw manning and you know it.
> The most obviously risky aspect of the whole business was the project to collect all those potentially dangerous viruses, and that would seem to be an indispensible first step.
And the indispensable last step would be to create and test human-to-human transmission (not shown) using the operational capabilities of the civilian Wuhan Lab (not shown).
I suppose if I still a child of twelve, I would find these Tom Swift-like excursions exciting. “Why, even I can build a rocket in my garage!” And yet so many continue to find “comfort” in juvenile narratives…. .
That was the weakest point. You addressed that one, but ignored the others.
Well, when you encounter something that dumb, it’s a poor investment of my time to go on. And don’t assign tasks.
This article has a bunch of very interesting viral genomics information in 20-odd paragraphs in the middle under points 3 and 4.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/
Thanks for this link. It is meaty indeed and from a highly respected source.
Yes, thanks. This is very interesting, though apparently Wade’s perspective has been critiqued by some serious contributors to the debate.
Oh, please. Not Nicholas Wade again. Yves writes:
Reader AP pointed out by e-mail that journalist Nicholas Wade abjectly misrepresented the article that he asserted supported the “OMG furin cleavage” claim:
Crap disintegrates and feeds the soil. Bullshit, like plastic, feeds nothing and is immortal.
“Italy has a documented case of Covid as of October, which blows up the Wuhan timeline.”
Best not to be so quick to accept “evidence” that is less than robust:
Yves states that, “…admittedly after a great deal of forensics (15 years in the case of SARS), the animal origins were found.” In the absence of Occam’s Razor, this is the course of inquiry that I am interested in. It seems to me that trodding this 15 year animal origin path has been made easier by our recently successful SARS forensic scientists. So, it shouldn’t take until 2034 to find the offending intermediary critters. If it takes until 2034, I’ll be in hell. But I’ll still be checking NC on a daily basis.
I don’t find much of an argument against the theory that the virus was brought to Wuhan for study, and ‘leaked’ by spreading to humans in the lab studying a new, highly infectious virus with a propensity for asymptomatic infection. I suppose you could claim that it is more likely that travelers from Huanan, where we stipulate the virus jumped to humans, brought it to Wuhan. And it could, of course, be both. It seems impossible to determine, and mostly irrelevant, since the point of the “Lab Leak” story is to pin Covid on some enemy, and an accident studying an already extant virus is not nearly as useful, especially as ‘leak’ is intended to misimply lab creation.
> I don’t find much of an argument
Consider reading the post?
So, I guess I’m trying to figure out, assuming the premises of the article are true (and I think, for the most part, they are true), what the scenario is that fits the known data of the “natural” (i.e., non-lab leak) hypothesis.
This study out of UCSD (a “retrospective molecular clock analysis”) says the median number of individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan was less than one until 4 November, four on 17 November and reached nine on 1 December. Is nine “a lot of human beings to be exposed to a pathogen” such that SARS-CoV-2 becomes “human-to-human transmissible”? When and under what circumstances did human-to-human transmissibility occur? Obviously, it did occur but when was that and how?
If SARS-CoV-2 was “circulating” in Italy as early as September, 2019, were those cases human-to-human transmission?
Presumably, “a lot of human beings” would mean a lot of cases of unexplained “pneumonia” and “flu” but, if you need a “a lot of human beings”in the first place to get to the point where they can transmit to each other, where and when are those cases supposed to have occurred? In early December, 2019, in Wuhan?
I’m not asking these questions to raise doubts about the author’s view of the “lab leak” theory. (I’ve never been convinced by that.) I’m trying to understand how the available data fits with the transmissibility piece, if, as Columbia University virologist Vincent Racaniello says, “A virus is never going to come out of a bat ready to go.”
> what the scenario is that fits the known data of the “natural” (i.e., non-lab leak) hypothesis.
I think once idea is to look at Kent, where Alpha evolved. The whole article is worth a read, but a key passage:
Kent, as we might expect, also high rates of drug use and prostitution, and plenty of damaged immune systems for Alpha to evolve in.
It’s hard for me to imagine that there are not places with conditions like Kent even in modern China, especially in rural or provincial areas (Wuhan being a provincial capital).
Hi, Orent. You have nicely tried to explain why you don’t believe SARS CoV 2 is a creature originated in a lab -or originated elsewhere but out-bursting from the lab– I would add and you did it in simple words avoiding the bio-technical wording and concepts that would be necessary to know.
Particularly nice the bit where you explain how a human-to-human airborne transmissible virus is not a creature that arises easily and requires, intense, prolonged and varied contact with the sources and we, clever humans, are still unable to grasp how is it that viruses can ‘gain this function’ using the crypto-scientific language that has become so popular. — My theory is that they gained the function precisely because the reservoir animals are kept in cages and transmission to humans required airborne capabilities..
Yet this haven’t found an audience ready to assimilate it. All of them people with excellent reasoning skills, clever, and for which I have a lot of respect, but in this issue… nothing can be done I regret to say.
> nothing can be done I regret to say.
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” Hebrews 11:1
I don’t understand why this is considered a strong argument. You don’t have to engineer all the aspects of the virus. The theoretical virus that was manipulated could’ve been already airborne and all that was changed were the parts that targeted a certain species like the spike protein. The arguments that occurred in the 2013 and 2014 era about gain of function were about unanticipated consequences as well. Of course, we can’t predict the consequences of interventions into complex systems. The argument that we would have to design in advance all the consequences of COVID-19, like Asymptomatic transmission, airborne transmission, etc. is not a good argument. Viruses are complex with emergent properties and the spike protein and furin site could be interacting with other proteins and affect airborne transmission. But, you could muck around with these two sites (as explicitly discussed in grants) and unintentionally affect airborn transmission. Or start with an airborne virus.
Again this:
“How would you design a virus to spread stealthily in the ways that SARS-CoV-2 does, either for general research or for nefarious purposes? You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t know how. “There’s a vanishingly low likelihood that you could design a virus so that it spreads asymptomatically,” says Weiss.”
Is not a good argument. Noone here is claiming all these consequences were intentionally engineered. Our ignorance about these things is precisely why these experiments are especially dangerous. The arguments about the rest of the virus, the ‘backbone’ (the disimilarities with published viruses) that would have to derive from the ‘source’ virus seem stronger, but no one points to technical papers on this aspect. Why?
Back in 2013-2014 very eminent scientists were on both sides of the gof debate. They certainly thought we were capable of doing this kind of thing.
I do have a bias which I will state. Back in 2013-14 when I discussed this with colleagues I was against gof experiments and I am now. Even the ‘best and brightest’ of us are too ignorant and accident prone (that is, human) to conduct these types of experiments. They should not be done. Whatever the source of this epidemic, if it shuts down gof research that will be good for humanity. It is clear that the virologists who conduct this research are aware of this opinion.
> They should not be done. Whatever the source of this epidemic, if it shuts down gof research that will be good for humanity. It is clear that the virologists who conduct this research are aware of this opinion.
In other words, you have just proved that Draszak et al. have a very strong motive for acting as they did. Even if they were innocent, their lab would have been shut down regardless. That knocks the props out from the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” crowd, good job.
Well, people people making those assumptions certainly do get amplified a great deal more, and the desperate need for bad guys to blame has been at “We didn’t lose in ‘Nam.” levels, but my impression is that the work at WIV amounted to the beginnings of a small industry, extracting potential human pathogens as a resource, and researching possible methods for refining them into useful products.
A very novel activity it seems to me, and one where it’s not so much the things they have control over, as the things they can’t control, don’t care to be bothered controlling, or simply aren’t aware of that are most concerning.
The question of how long SARS-CoV-2 or possible predecessors may have been circulating in humans and/or associated species seems severely neglected. The possibility that SARS-CoV-2 originated in someplace like Chapel Hill, but was only first detected in China, having been brought there by some hapless researcher after catching it at a virology conference is never brought up at all.
Those bats in that Indonesian market look like fruit bats. Which are the biggest heaviest bats by far. I can’t imagine the little insectivore bats even being worth the trouble to eat.
So maybe those Indonesian fruit bats should be surveyed for their coronaviruses in particular, to see if the fruit bats in particular harbor any covid-similar coronaviruses.
See, I’ve mentioned this above. Some Indonesians have been living with and eating this creature for a LONG time, and yet the last time Indonesia had a pandemic this serious was probably sometime back in the 1920s?
https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/shaps-research/2020/12/15/1918-spanish-flu-colonial-indonesia/. Actually considering the number of fatalities, the Spanish Flu was way worse. H1N1 in 2009 affected around 50 thousand Indonesians, so Covid 19 is way more serious.
If these bats somehow were responsible for the coronavirus, then we should have been seeing a lot more coronavirus outbreaks in Indonesia starting from years ago. But nada. Also Bali is a MAJOR international destination, and yet the first serious outbreak clearly happened in Wuhan. By the way I am not saying that this virus was engineered or developed in a lab or what have you, because I just don’t know enough about the science. Just merely pointing out my observation.
I did not see live markets in Bali. They are very common in China, the preferred way of eating meat. Slaughtered right in front of you, plus lots of exotic species together at the market AND at small farms before brought to market.
The rest of Indonesia still has some, even post the furor about the Wuhan live market:
https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/southeast-asia/covid-indonesia-wet-markets-bats-dogs-b1880750.html
On Laos, could only find this video on a quick pass. From 2021. Market with uncovered prepared food and bakery also has live frogs. Not sure what else:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K26cWEc9CYQ
SARS happened 20 years ago and it took 15 years to track it through an intermediary species. It was not bat>human but bat>pangolin>human
Live markets are common in Indonesia too. Visited a couple of times, in fact did a road trip of the entire island of Java.
This is it. The problem is not eating bats.
1) Bats are well known reservoir of Coronavirus (and others), but there is not proof of a direct transfer of a bat virus to become a human infecting and transmitting strain. There have been isolated episodes in which, by intense exposure, one person could be directly infected by bat Coronavirus but this did not result in human to human spread.
2) Most human infecting CoVs are from bat or rodent origin but in most cases at least an intermediate host has been identified. Some of then were farm animals and in other cases were wild animals like in the case of SARS CoV 1. This is a fact that lab leak theory proponents ignore once and again.
3) The problem, as shown by the appereance of both SARS CoV 1 and SARS CoV 2 associated in all cases to wet markets is the trafficking of wild animals including species that are known to be intermediate species such as civets or racoon dogs. The commodification of wild meat results in rising probabilities of transfer to human in all the process. Capturing, caging, keeping, transporting and finally preparing the animals in the wet markets by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, by the hundred of thousands. The risk resides there not in someone that goes to the wild with his sons and captures a bat to eat instantly.
4) In the case of SARS CoV 2 as chinese authorities ordered the sacrifice of all wild animals kept and the closure of wild animal farms it is now impossible to trace the most proximal origin of SARS CoV 2 though I believe that intense sampling in the proper sites and animals might show that SARS CoV 2-like virus occur somewhere in Southeast Asia in the regions where Rhinolophus bats live (some not far away from Wuhan in the very same province). Chinese authorities stubbornly refused to let researchers do this job.
Same stubbornness applies to those that give equal probabilities to a lab origin ignoring all what is known about CoVs.
Let us also consider the risk of going to bat caves where humans were known to have contracted respiratory diseases in an attempt to acquire a comprehensive catalog of potential human pathogens, then conveying the samples to an urban area and researching the finds under BSL2 precautions.
Is Wuhan the only place in China with wet markets? How common have zoonotic outbreaks of bat coronaviruses been in China?
You ignore the threshold question: how bad would a coronavirus infection have to get for anyone to consider that it wasn’t just a bad flu? As I pointed out elsewhere on this thread, AIDS was tracked 50 to 70 years in Africa, where it circulated unrecognized in 1959-60, and the prevalence then suggests it was out and about even earlier. It also apparently went back from simians to humans multiple times.
There is a possible case of a small of miners getting what looked like a very bad coronavirus infection, bad enough to land them in the hospital with pneumonia. But this was documented only in a PhD thesis. Miners and others who spend too much time with bats can get other respiratory infections from fungus.
On, and aside from loss of taste, the symptoms of histoplasmosis look a lot like Covid:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/histoplasmosis/symptoms-causes/syc-20373495
Yves, I promise you, the threshhold question has been on my mind damn near every day since the first case of community transmission in the U.S. was identified, in the county next to ours.
But it cuts both ways – if the virus was circulating in various places, what are the odds Wuhan would be the first city where the damage was too great to be ignored? And what are the odds that the containment of the outbreak in China could have been accomplished via the methods that were employed, regionally focused as they were?
Personally I’m inclined towards the notion that the ancestors of SARS-CoV-2 were with us for quite a while, a view I came to just a little while after that first community transmission I mentioned led me to realize how little disease surveillance there was, as compared with what I would have imagined. But I don’t see that the possible ridiculousness of what Eco Health said they wanted to do makes the coincidence of the pandemic’s first great outbreak occuring in the hometown of WIV something that can, or should be dismissed.
The second part you’ve got the wrong assumption.
China and all the countries that had SARS wheeled into rapid containment mode. Recall the SARS index case was in Hong Kong and rapidly infected ~100 others due to poor procedures in the hospital.
Remember also that the mortality rate for SARS was 10%. That focuses the mind. I think it was at least a month in before China had a handle on the CFR (that it was a lot lower).
So I’m not at all surprised at the response.
> If these bats somehow were responsible for the coronavirus, then we should have been seeing a lot more coronavirus outbreaks in Indonesia starting from years ago.
Or human-to-human transmission is extremely difficult, and doesn’t happen often, even in nature.
(Also, Indonesia is an archipelago. My recollection was that the bat-soup incident took place on a “tourist island,” so not necessarily Bali, although Bali is an island. However, this means that transmission island-to-island would be more difficult than on mainland China because ocean transport is a bottleneck.)
Listen to Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologists who knows a lot about bats and viruses. The Wuhan Lab was doing “gain-of-function” research – despite denials and against US prohibitions. That is, they were intentionally trying to create a deadly virus, not to spread it, but to learn how such viruses could evolve or be created – to be better prepared to stop future pandemics. But such labs have a long history of lab leaks, which was the reason for the prohibition.
Meanwhile, he says that it is extremely unlikely that the COVID-19 virus suddenly jumped from bats from to humans – that it would need an intermediate host and a long period of successive mutations. Evidence for this was soon found for the pervious viruses of this type but non so far for COVID-19, despite intensive research. This is why WHO eventually backed off on its claim.
As of now, there is not conclusive evidence either way, but the circumstantial evidence is strong for the lab leak hypothesis.
> not conclusive evidence either way
Again, “not conclusive evidence either way” is the anti-evolutionist’s “teach the controversy,” reformulated for this new context.
If Sars-CoV-2 has evolved from bat populations in the wild (I am carefully not saying naturally, the processes are the same whether the hand of man is involved or not), we would expect to be able to discover five things, according to this article:
– a region with bat populations with endemic Sars2 progenitor virus
– a record of endemic disease of a variant of the above progenitor in at least one non-bat, non-human population, as bat viral zoonoses appear to require an intermediate host (pangolins, civets etc for Sars1)
– a record of endemic disease without human to human transmission in local human populations exposed to these bats and intermediate hosts (hunters, workers with animals, transport workers, retail workers if the animal is consumed in some way rather than say a rodent pest, workers in mines/forests etc).
– a record of sporadic human to human transmission. Given low introduction rates from the intermediate zoonotic reservoir, this would take a long time potentially to enable enough passage cycles to give the virus time to mutate in the direction of human to human transmissibility (for example, its tropism moving from deep lung tissue like MERS to upper respiratory tract infection)
– a record of sustained human to human transmission and, after a while, an epidemic
The problem is, we seem to lack evidence of steps two to four in the wild. We just have various bat viruses, which we are told present no real epidemic danger without a lot of evolution, and a highly competent human-infecting virus.
The plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis rest on the fact that step 2 is what a virology lab’s animal house exists for. If you believe Orent, experimental serial passage in an intermediate animal will select for transmissibility in that animal (not humans) and attentuate pathogenicity. Step 3 is then just a lab accident away. Step 4 is just a natural experiment: if you are unlucky, your lab release of a poorly human adapted virus, capable of human to human transmission only by direct infection (kissing, medical procedures, puncture wound) manages to sustain transmission and gradually evolves into a virus capable of aerosol transmission.
The point us that one can believe a lab accident was involved without having to believe that a lab was running deliberate experiments (in cultures, animals or humans) to optimise human transmission, let alone the ridiculous strawman that the lab was artificially building a human transmissible virus.
This is before you consider the unusual genetics, of the presence of the furin cleavage site and the human-preferred codons in it. These are not features of disclosed coronaviruses and these were research proposals by Daszak et al.
For me, lab collection, assisted evolution and accidental release, without any intention of creating airborne transmissibility, seem perfectly plausible to explain how the virus suddenly appears in Wuhan, thousands of miles from known bat CoV progenitor sites. Just as plausible as trapper collection and accidental serial passage in wet markets rather than animal houses. Either way, chance then did the rest in a dense big city….
Given that nature does not keep records and the Chinese will not allow wild sampling or independent investigation, we will never know, unless China’s internal investigations come to light.
I well understand the desire for a “human” origin of SARS-CoV-2, and the disarray and dissembling of the scientific powers that be has only heightened our anguish. These PTB include the usual suspects in DC/Bethesda/Atlanta and Wuhan.
But despite a fairly large and strident literature on the “lab leak,” the evidence is not there. Yet. Granted, different virus, different disease, but regarding the “how” we should remember that HIV-positive samples have been reliably identified from a European merchant sailor who died in the late-1950s (IIRC) of what was remembered by his physician as very much like AIDS. This appeared in Science, I think, and a current colleague who tested these and other archived samples while working in Big Pharma at the time has confirmed this after I gave a talk about the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the US.
Since then, it has become clear that HIV-AIDS was a thing long before the early-1980s. The evolution of HIV from SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) and the jump from chimpanzees (bushmeat) to humans is well accepted, now. Only a few cranks ignore this. And the evolutionary history of HIV-AIDS shows that for a long time there was unrecognized chimp-human transmission that became human-human transmission. The behavioral and social differences that made the trajectories of the AIDS epidemic so different in the Global North and the Global South are irrelevant.
What seems to be most salient about COVID-19 is that it is a reminder that disease comes when humans go places they should not while treating the world as their property. Dominion-imperial, religious, whatever-is a curious concept but its attendant ecological disruption and devastation looses pandemic on the world. This is an old but true story with a substantial supporting literature.
As for the lab leak being an accident, I also understand the surface plausibility and even attractiveness of this assertion. I have worked in similar laboratories, including those working on human pathogens. for more than 40 years. Stuff happens.
But for now, the lab leak theory is little more than a cry that “we, as sentient and intentional human beings, cannot be responsible for something this awful; unless, of course, there were foul motives afoot.” The correlative political considerations of this case need not be mentioned.
The questions before us now should be “What are we going to do and how are we going to prevent this from happening again?” So far, our answer has been little more than “Isn’t Biotech Great!” My worry is that our response may be as ultimately effective as our (non-)responses to anthropogenic climate change, which was suggested by Charles Babbage, who invented the programmable computer in the mid-19th century (see Fossil Capital by Andreas Malm) and the mechanism confirmed by Svante Arrhenius, founder of physical chemistry as a discipline and Nobelist in Chemistry. In 1896.
reading thru a lot of the comments, there seems to be a strong interest in supporting one side of this argument by the powers that be (of this site). i am not convinced the evidence shows that. the behavior of the chinese government itself indicates they know something they don’t want disclosed. the state of biotech during the aids academic, ‘human manufactured viruses’ was a stretch – it is not so 40 years later.
not sure why a site that in general is very un-biased on topics and keeps discussions open is leaning so heavily to one side here, but a little disappointed here.
The reason we are behaving this was is we are employing our usual standards of requiring evidence and logic. The case for the lab leak on the other side, despite their shiny veneer, are extremely weak. TSee the comment by OnceAViriologist on what is actually involved, versus what the hand-waivers have been saying. Having created SARS-COV-2 would be an extraordinary achievement technically. This falls in the category of “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” and the proponents don’t have it.
The proponents do not have anything approaching actual evidence or even good theories. And the fact that the lab immediately tested all its employees and none had Covid antibodies is one piece of concrete evidence pointing the other way.
As for China’s behavior, the US would never allow China or the WHO in if the shoe were on the other foot. China also has a bad habit of getting screechy when its sovereignity is challenged.
It is true that the Chinese government is extremely uncomfortable about the impact of the virus originating at home on its credibility, but China has absolutely awful sanitary and animal husbandry practices. Wuhan is worse than the rest of the country. When my parents went there, they said it was the filthiest place they had ever been, and they spent 3 weeks in China, mainly the boonies. And they have other health problems, like the level of pollution. I won’t eat tilapia because 70% comes from China
> The reason we are behaving this wa[y] is we are employing our usual standards of requiring evidence and logic.
C’mon Yves, don’t be such a hard-ass. “Teach the controversy.”
How do you get shiny veneer from “no conclusive evidence”?
Apparently this site is not against stealth deleting their own comments when called out for making s**t up. I’m 100% sure that a comment Yves posted that was completely inaccurate about what virology experts said about the likelihood of a lab leak in this Intercept article has magically disappeared.
Talk about disappointing.
Concerns me as well. Came back here just to see if Yves would correct/retract it only to find your comment. Disappointing
Just to clarify, given the quality of work NC does, I don’t agree that Yves would make something up but more likely just made a mistake, happens to us all.
Unfortunately, given the ferociousness of responses to genuine differing opinions from readers in this thread, deleting the misleading comment used to rebuff those opinions, rather than correcting it, is unfortunate.
Also disappointed with Yves and Lambert here, repeating Ignacio’s opinions hardly makes for good argument.
Respectfully, it looks like Ignacio’s specialty is plant biotechnology, unless there is another Ignacio Moreno Echanove that is an epidemiologist.
https://es.linkedin.com/in/ignacio-moreno-echanove
Not sure what to make of this, just makes being a curator of truth more challenging. The spurious attacks are especially hard to understand.
I heard another researcher suggest that SARS-CoV-2 could have made the jump from bats to pangolins to humans years ago if not decades ago. The virus could have been circulating in humans under the radar screen in remote parts of Asia.
There are things we know, things we believe and that which we understand. At this moment we know very little about the origin of COVID19. We have substantial evidence that gain of function research MAY BE a factor in the development of the virus and the resulting pandemic. What I find disturbing is what the approach of the medical community has been, especially the actions of the CDC and the NIH. From a medical point of view it seems to me that the first objective of the medical community would be to develop medicines and regimes for the treatment of the infection. What has occured has been the vilification of several treatment regimes and a warp-speed development of vaccines. Concurrently , data and science are ignored and political control mandates are being followed. It is my belief that COVID is a pathogen that has been genetically modified over the course of gain of function research. I also believe that 20 or 30 years from now it will be recorded that the lockdowns, mask mandates and especially the mandating of vaccinations, even when natural immunity is present will have been a colossal economic and medical blunder.
> We have substantial evidence that gain of function research MAY BE a factor in the development of the virus and the resulting pandemic.
We have substantial evidence that droplet transmission MAY be true.* Don’t you see how “MAY” cancels out “substantial”?
NOTE * No, we don’t.
It is so easy to nitpick others who attempt to find the right words or phrases in communicating complicated and sometimes contradictory understandings.
Take a gander at this, published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that may budge your 90/10 belief a wee bit.
Pick on somebody (author) your own size.
Lambert took apart that article, by Wade, earlier in the thread.
In February 2020 Dr. Francis Boyle gave an interview in which he stated the covid virus was a bioweapon made in the Wuhan lab. He also claimed that the WHO was fully aware of this. He stated there were some 800 people doing gain of function research and they should all be “sent
to the Hague.”
The video was removed, but there are later ones on u-tube. Dr. Boyle is a Professor at University
of Illinois School of Law. He wrote the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 which our
Congress passed unanimously to enable the U.S. to implement the Biological Weapons Convention.
He cited biological anomalies that revealed the human tampering with the covid virus. He said that he was blackballed by US press after he revealed the anthrax used to terrorize Congress post 9-11
was the Ames strain from Ft. Dettrick Maryland. That has been accepted as fact.
For more information on his extremely humane and distinguished career https://law.illinois.edu/faculty-research/faculty-profiles/francis-boyle/.
> He cited biological anomalies that revealed the human tampering with the covid virus.
I don’t see how it would be possible to make such an authoritative claim in February 2020. If the sort of genetic analysis that Georgi et al. do revealed this — and the genome is freely available, thanks to a heroic Chinese scientist — I assume we could have heard more about it. So it sounds like a damp squib, to me. One among many.
I’m glad Boyle is a humane person, but I hardly see how a Februaryt 2020 YouTube is a net value-add to the discussion.
Why do we care? Why do we keep arguing about this?
Is there a chance in hell that we will ever really learn the truth? Suppose somebody actually comes up with an answer that is demonstrably correct. So what?
Will we change any behaviours as a result? Will we do something different now or in the future?
This thread is already so long that I am sure my comment is a repeat, so I apologize for increasing its length.
Activities at research labs will be subject to greater scrutiny, regardless. However, if the origins of Covid-19 or other human diseases can be traced to research lab activities, societies will place much stronger restrictions and oversight on future human pathogen research. To enjoy continuing public support and trust, there needs to be enough transparency and auditing to easily trace whether or not lab escapes are responsible for disease outbreaks.
The burden of proof to exonerate (or implicate) research labs when disease outbreaks occur should be on the global oversight systems. While it’s difficult to say exactly how well these oversight systems have worked in the past, several outbreaks have been traced to research on pathogens in labs and others have been traced definitively to natural origins. Early successes in tracing SARS and MERS beta coronaviruses to natural origins created high expectations for finding similar origins for SARS-CoV-2.
The failure of the Wuhan Institute of Virology oversight systems to either exonerate or implicate lab activities in the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is eroding trust in such systems around the world. If a disease outbreak occurs in Chapel Hill, will existing regulatory mechanisms be able to exonerate or implicate Baric’s lab? More importantly, are precautions sufficient to prevent lab escapes in the first place?
Finding independent knowledgeable people to design and implement adequate research lab oversight systems must be challenging. Conflicts of interest seem inherent in way this research is funded, intellectual property is granted, and researchers are educated. Perhaps it’s time to overhaul the entire system.
It would certainly be nice if there were a system for learning from pandemic outbreaks that works as well as the FAA does for aircraft crashes. (FAA was pretty captured at Boeing, as the MCAS disaster showed, but IMNSHO redeemed itself subsequently.)
We are pretty far from that. Since one obvious motivation for blaming China is warmongering, one would expect the CCP to have national security considerations of their own. (One reason, if one is looking for reasons, to lower the temperature on the issue, but as we see in these threads, the damage is done.)
I recall Johnathan Messiano-Crookston pointing out in a tweet that gain of function research on influenza viruses, discussed in a paper he was citing, appeared to have been conducted without aerosol precautions. If nothing else the safety of these healthcare workers, as of others, needs much more protection.
Doesn’t anybody believe in links any more?
An element that seems to be missing from this discussion is Recombination. This can occur when a cell is infected simultaneously with two strains of a virus. It will a rare event, but when it occurs a far greater step change in the properties of the virus will be possible.
I don’t know whether or not SARS-COV2 originally arose by recombination, but I am fearful that it may be a route by which new more dangerous variants will be arising.
If two different strains of a virus are twice as prevalent, novel mutants will be twice as frequent, but recombination will occur four times more often. So that allowing high levels of virus to circulate is not a good idea.
I am agnostic on the origin of the virus. One point, you would not expect any different story from official Chinese sources, but if it was a lab accident, you might expect to see unannounced changes on the ground.
More handwaving.
There is no “smoking gun” but Australian scientists at Flinders University became suspicious when they first looked at the virus last year. Since then they’ve published a scientific paper in collaboration with other Australian and UK scientists.. Instead of me telling you all about it, read this article. Note there’s a link in it to the scientific paper:
https://news.flinders.edu.au/blog/2021/07/04/covid-19-origins-still-a-mystery/
(By the way, the Flinders University Professor Petrovsky who is quoted in this article has developed a vaccine for the virus but is getting virtually no support to carry on with its testing)
> Instead of me telling you all about it, read this article
Please don’t assign tasks. Also, “If only you read (or listen) to this over here you’ll believe me!” is a classic tactic of misdirection, well known from other episodes of CT virulence.
Finally, your link is broken. If you had given the title, the authors, or a summary I might have been able to find it, but oh well.
In silico comparison of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein-ACE2 binding affinities across species and implications for virus origin
Scientific Reports volume 11, Article number: 13063 (2021)
Found via following the links, which work for me. Nevertheless, I find the failure to cite the relevant findings quite annoying. From a quick scan, it appears that the spike protein binds much more strongly in humans than in any other animal tested. That was deemed surprising.
From the Flinders University link:
https://news.flinders.edu.au/blog/2021/07/04/covid-19-origins-still-a-mystery/
This expert uses the exact reasoning that some have used to say this strain of the virus could not have evolved so quickly in nature as a way to explain how it could not have happened in a lab. Given these two uses of the argument, are we to conclude that it could not have happened in nature and it could not have happened in the lab. Does that mean that what we can plainly see happened did not happen at all?
When Dr. Fauci first started to justify funding of the Wuhan lab, he claimed that the lab needed our expertise to do the work. Since I knew that the head of the lab had gotten a significant amount of her training by working in the USA with leading USA experts, I knew this justification was phony. I could not understand why Fauci would use such a phony argument as an excuse, but I let it go as just a requirement of politics. I have since seen Fauci lie in public so many times, that he has lost all credibility with me. I don’t know why Congress and the media can’t find an expert who still has some credibility. The more they use Fauci, the more skepticism it engenders. If Naked Capitalism is going to rely on the same set of liars, Naked Capitalism is destroying its credibility, too
You are assuming facts not in evidence, as in “evolved so quickly.” SARS came out of nowhere in 2002. There was huge debate then as to its origins, with a noisy cohort claiming, as happened with HIV, that it could not be natural in origin basically because so nasty. It took 15 years to establish that it was indeed zoonotic, although there are still debates over the finer points of evolution and transmission.
And for HIV, I suggest you read this paper on HIV. There are two main strains, HIV-1 and HIV-2. On HIV-1:
It also discusses how the disease passed from simians to humans MANY MANY MANY times.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3234451/
I find Brett Weinsteins argument convincing leaning towards lab leak
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/04/04/dr_bret_weinstein_evidence_for_and_against_lab_leak_hypothesis.html#!#
A video? From April? Really? Here’s the squib, I would assume the best Weinstein can do:
Needless to say, that’s no proof at all. “They’re all liars!” is not positive proof for your preferred claim, whatever it may be. For example, I try hard never to run stories from the Post, etc., that are sourced from anonymous members of the intelligence community, because, well, they’re all liars. This is not positive proof for any theory I might have about the intelligence community.
“No clear evidence either way” is the anti-evolutionist’s “teach the controversy” recast for this new context, good job.
I think the state of the pro-lab leak case has been summed by beautifully by two concise comments:
A) You don’t have to know exactly what you’re doing to tinker around and get “lucky.”
B) I don’t see why anything that can happen in nature can’t happen in a lab
A very large proportion of the pro-lab leak/anti-evolution commentary on this thread can be reduced to either of these two simple propositions.
With these lines of reasoning a popular jury wouldn’t need proofs to declare guilt on lab managers.
Indeed.
Seems to me that the pro-lab leak theory and the natural origin theory are not mutually exclusive. Isn’t a new, naturally occurring virus exactly the kind of thing the WIV crowd was looking for and bringing back to the lab for further study?
but then how can one assert that the lab is the source of the outbreak, especially if none of the WIV staff had the relevant antibodies?
The most hilarious and disturbing thing about any “lab leak” belief is that given the largely pathetic performance by the west in containing the virus – as in, abandoning the #ZeroCovid approach, and focusing on “re-openings” (and but, but muh freedoms) – it stands to reason that any ostensibly megalomaniacal entity (China!!!! /sarc) has already “won”. To quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Conan” on what is “best in life”: “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.”
I don’t know how “lab leakers” sleep knowing that our plutocrat masters in the west care less about the labs and more about sending the proles out to work after getting billions from western governments in bailouts/aid. Meanwhile, bought-and-paid-for kleptocrats will gladly choke the working poor by providing insufficient economic relief and using legislation to enforce “back to work” policies.
A useless blame game to be sure, with not much logic to support. As always, cui bono?
Look, I think that its not possible to support the lab leak theory without rejecting the weak form as outlined in the introduction. The weak form allows a certain amount of weasle like behaviour. An individual gets to say “oh I’m not suggesting anything deliberate or evil intention”. But in fact this is precisely the implication.
It is clearly stated that there are no known or documented examples of manufacturing a new human to human infectious virus. It is beyond the bounds of the current state of knowledge. I havent seen anything in the comments thats argues against this.
The only credible explanation then is that these methods have been discovered by the Wuhan lab or the techniques passed to workers at the Wuhan lab by the funders of the research. Keeping such extraordinary knowledge secret can only imply malicious intent. A conspiracy to infect humanity with the opportunity to make some money with a vaccine.
I see no difference between the “innocent” lab leak theory and the wildest conspiracy theories. The analogy to the teleologic arguments in support of god are most apt. Lab leak supporters are looking at a natural phenomenon, that is easily explained by evolution and the current pressures on our eco systems, and seeing design.
And those who only have the courage to support the weak version nevertheless must read design into their narrow focus on the proximity of a conveniently Chinese lab and its association with some bumbling idiots who were put in charge of the US covd response. Never mind the intricacy and natural adaptive flexibility that we see in all life every time we open our eyes and which has always been driven by evolution.
I regard Daszak et al as almost certainly being of evil intent. I regard it as quite plausible that their idiotic project of bat virus collection led to the introduction into the human population of a virus which, whatever it may have been at that time, eventually evolved into SARS-CoV-2.
The only ‘design’ I read into the presence of WIV at Wuhan is that samples of virus and bats were brought there – by design.
Broken record is a site policy violation.
Well there you go. At least you acknowledge the requirement of evil intent. From there, much as with discussions on the existence of god, it is difficult for either side to provide a knockout blow. It took Dostoevsky to shatter teleology into irrelevance and maybe we will just have to wait the required few years of dedicated research to do the same for the Wuhan lab theory that has been done to all previous pandemics
> I see no difference between the “innocent” lab leak theory and the wildest conspiracy theories. The analogy to the teleologic arguments in support of god are most apt. Lab leak supporters are looking at a natural phenomenon, that is easily explained by evolution and the current pressures on our eco systems, and seeing design.
Thank you. I feel about teleology now about the same way I feel about NGOs: Euthanize it.
It could be argued that this is exactly what Dostoevsky did in The Brothers Karamazov. He demonstrated that an all powerful omnipotent god that refuses to intervene in the face of the screams of one single small child being tortured then raped and left to die in a ditch is itself a manifestation of evil intent and that given this unavoidable conclusion, the only thing to do is to utterly reject any offers of a heaven created by a monster. Evolution is part of this rejection and is recognised by the purveyors of the doctrine of the all powerful god as such even if only at a sub conscious level