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"But we should keep in mind that the virologists publishing papers downplaying the possibility of a lab leak are not disinterested parties in this. The political context is a debate about regulating virus labs, and it’s hardly shocking that a large segment of the virus lab community doesn’t like that idea."
This, I think, is the crux of our problem. Almost anyone who knows enough about the field to have an informed opinion, is involved enough to have an incentive to convince the world that it was not their profession, that unleashed this. Scientists are human, not demons but also not angels. It would be hard to convince yourself, that your profession was responsible for this. We should listen to what they have to say, but not expect them to be dispassionate and unbiased investigators of the question.
On the TWiV (This Week in Virology) podcast at one point they discussed what would be some of the consequences if the lab leak theory were to be proven.
One aspect mentioned was that all the virology labs doing dangerous research would be moved outside of big cities. Then they concluded that such an act would be a terrible thing to do, since no virologist would want to work and live in the middle of nowhere.
One of the important things to keep in mind is that the standards of evidence for safety policy decisions are not the same as those of civil or criminal convictions.
For civil or criminal convictions, the "innocent unless proven guilty" (for various standards of guilty) applies. For safety regulations making, in general "better safe than sorry" is the standard that needs to apply.
Whenever any group feels threatened with regulations that will cause them inconvenience or cost (eg. In this case Move research centers out of urban areas, stricter interpretation of which BSL standards apply to what research - virologists have said on record they were doing a lot of Coronavirus research in levels 2 or 3), there will be push back and an attempt to conflate the standards of civil/criminal conviction (ie. You can't prove X caused Y) with standards of policy making due to self-interest. You see the same sorts of issues with self regulation in the Finance industry, in the aircraft manufacture industry which predictably also led to crises.
Those have to be over-ridden at a soceital level which happened to various degrees after the 2008 crises in Finance and the 737 Max crises in Boeing/FAA.
In other words, in this particular case, whether we can find out what actually happened (very unlikely given so many intersecting conflicts of interest) really doesn't change the key points of what needs to happen going forward.
I would think, the US or practically any other country would have a huge incentive to be able to blame China for this entire mess. And those incentives would far outweigh having to move a few labs. Plus, "It's China's bad practices that put the world at risk, not the great wonderful lab practices that happen in the US." That would be the line.
There would also be notoriety for the person that would blow the lid off a lab leak. There are plenty of other industries that have eaten there own.
> The political context is a debate about regulating virus labs
This seems... like a naive read of the "political context." It seems like there is far more interest in finding a useful target for blame than any real discussion of how to keep research like that safe, which will likely happen in approximately the same scale whether this WAS a lab leak or not, if only because the specter of it being one has done quite a lot to scare people.
> have an incentive to convince the world that it was not their profession, that unleashed this
I think this badly misses the point. Nobody who uncritically promotes lab leak theories is saying 'scientific hubris must be tempered by civic responsibility!' or the like. They'are using it to argue that China launched a bioweapon upon the world, or unscrupulous deep state bureaucrats/freemasons/illuminati did it to cover up the nefarious goings on of this or that politicians etc. etc.
For those people, it's not a medical/scientific ethics & society debate centered around a spirited but civil disagreement between various nerds about the risk calculus. It's a political football thrown about with the goal of breaking as many windows as possible. To ignore this is to consign oneself to the role of a pawn.
We should also keep in mind the author is not a disinterested party: the author is a blogger. Not a scientist, not a virologist. They profit from clicks, and you don't get clicks for suggesting that the best available evidence is - surprise - the best available evidence, and will probably turn out to be right.
But since the author will never actually be held to account for being wrong, and certainly isn't putting any money where his mouth is, here we are.
The crux of the problem should be the grave injustice IF it was indeed lab generated and leaked. That is why I refer to it as a Lab Genesis, not a leak. The mere downplaying of the possibility is criminally insane.
Totally agree -- a similar situation has occurred where some airplane crashes and the people that know the most about it either work for the industry or consult for the industry and there is essentially nobody else that knows anything useful. So one way that this type of thing can be approached is to have a commission -- the equivalent of an information "firing squad" -- nobody really knows who said what, but it allows information to be presented from experts. But requires a ton of trust among the people in the commission to not out each other for who said what.
I think we can all bet that behind closed doors the people that are involved in this type of research are definitely treating the possibility of a lab-leak as highly probable and are thinking about ways to prevent it in the future since we now know that apparently tons of people would rather get disease X than be told what to do.. so we have a bigger future problem on our hands than we thought if something really nasty escapes..
This seems like bs to me. Imagine the investigators of the space shuttle failure or any aeroplane crash behaving like this. After all it reflects badly on the aeronautical engineering profession!
No, it reflects badly on your profession if you don't do your job properly. And I bet most scientists and virologosts understand this.
Why is this being discussed now? Matt Yglesias has publicly admitted that this piece is flawed. This is critically important context that is being missed by everyone in this discussion:
‘…SIGNIFICANT factual error in my newsletter.’
‘…we knew specifically that RaTG13 samples had been brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and studied there.
That is not the case for this Laos virus.
To me that discovery really does meaningfully detract from the plausibility of the lab leak story and I apologize — I simply missed this when it came out and failed to update my views.‘
https://mobile.twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1499467534202...
I just couldn't take the "research" seriously when I read this:
> They said they found no support for an alternate theory that the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.
No support? Really? Not just "weak" support, but not a single shred of support whatsoever? So it's just a hoax?
There's a long article going into what would be otherwise some very strange and implausible coincidences [1] surrounding the issue for those curious. Surely unbiased research into the topic would deem these to be worthy of at least some cursory mentions (and ideally, some debunking)?
Moreover, this might be an interesting read:
In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet. [...] During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory. [2]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
So something that has entered the discourse of HN [0] is that there is a large PR industry that powers the corporate press. That is where a lot of the money comes from which decides what & how things get covered.
Something I think is plausible is that they've figures out a technique for controlling the narrative in the internet age where they take the range of opinions in a group with positions they don't like, identify a really wild one, debunk it, then tar the whole group with that opinion. I'm not thinking any particular group, although I'm guessing it is deployed against literally all political protests. The technique really needs a well known name.
I doubt that is happening for lab-leak stuff since nobody is making money off it (and if the Chinese government cares they can just restrict access to info). But it is really interesting to note how difficult it was to restart the conversation once the lab leak theory was "debunked", so I'm sure the technical people who want to control the narrative took note. It was a nice clear example of how the dynamics come together.
If anyone wants to go down the "lab leak" rabbit hole, check out Charles Rixey's Substack [1]. He's assembled a massive database of articles and a complete timeline of events [2] that lead to COVID-19 pandemic. He's one of the members of DRASTIC which is a loose group of researchers looking into the "lab leak" hypothesis. [3][4][5]
Even Moderna's CEO Stephane Bancel does not discount it and say's "it's possible" after researchers found a genetic sequence in SARS-CoV-2 virus which was patented by Moderna three years prior to pandemic. [6]
[1] https://prometheusshrugged.substack.com/
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353547700_SARS-CoV-...
[3] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRASTIC
Worth bearing in mind that the author has himself admitted to and apologized for factual errors in his article that could change some of his conclusions.
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1499465032547061767?...
The article (by Matt Yglesias) is more nuanced than the title may suggest. Here’s a quote that gets at the gist of the piece:
“The evidence really does show pretty clearly that there were one or more superspreader events at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. I just don’t think that’s really what the lab leak debate is about; it’s about why there was a superspreader event at the market. Did an infected animal pass it to people there or did a person who got infected at the lab pass it to people there?”
The really depressing part is that the research project in question (where they introduced a furin cleave site into a coronavirus) has been known since early 2020. Newsweek had the link to the research project on the NiH website in March.
And not just are they still stonewalling https://theintercept.com/2022/02/20/nih-coronavirus-research... but the person in charge of the ecohealth alliance project in question is the leading source for any "debunking" of the lab leak hypothesis. Peter Daszak. Who also lead the WHO mission into figuring out the origins in China.
This is a conflict of interests. Something Daszak has experience with, when he didnt disclose his in the first lancet paper painting lab leak as racist conspiracies. A paper he orchestrated and a conflict of interest the Lancet later acknowledged.
There is an unwillingness to have a rational conversation about the likelihood of the furin cleavage site mutation occurring naturally with no trace in nature vs it escaping from a lab where we know such modifications were made to coronaviruses. Simply because Daszak said a lab leak was impossible and Fauci (Whos NiH funded the project) denied that Daszaks work was even gain of function research. And that has been enough for 2 years.
edit: They have had the possibility for two years to actually debunk this by simply releasing what sequence project was working on. Its a publicly funded project btw. They havent and they apparently wont.
As far as I know there is no peer-reviewed research, or research done by virologists or epidemiologists that supports the lab leak theory. It's being pushed on social media by an internet activist group called DRASTIC. They are laying the cloak and dagger act thick, denying that there are good-faith investigations into the theory. Contrary to what they say however most of the world isn't interested in covering up the alleged conspiracy, it's just that the investigations are not at all conclusive. As a data scientist you can nudge things around until you find the pattern you are looking for, but virologists and epidemiologists must take their jobs much more seriously.
Any details on how the researchers completed this detailed stall by stall mapping of the wet market and why it took this many years to be released?
Back in the beginning of the pandemic, no animals at the wet market had tested positive and we were told that it was just in the humans at the market. They were seeing COVID on surfaces at the market at that time, but had opposite conclusions.
> A number of early cases of the outbreak in Wuhan were tied to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. *Later*, researchers took environmental samples that suggested the virus had landed on surfaces in the market. But in the period since, tissue samples from the market's animals have revealed no trace of the virus. For the virus to jump from animals to humans, the animals have to actually be carrying it.
>"None of the animals tested positive. So since January, this has not actually been particularly conclusive. But this has developed into a narrative," he said. Carlson said his colleagues in China have been careful and precise in their work, publishing data according to international regulations that any scientist anywhere in the world can examine, and that strongly supports the conclusion that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market wasn't the source of the virus.
https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-did-not-start-at-wuhan-...
Online "news" has gotten to the same point with me as TV "news": I basically don't believe anything anymore ... it's all just noise. One thing might make more sense to me personally, but if the power-that-be have decided that's not the "right" thing, then I'm labeled a conspiracy theorist.
So I just believe what makes sense to me. I'm probably wrong as often as right, but that would be true if I tried to make sense out of today's news too.
I'm a bit disappointed that people with little connection to Asia are still making a big fuss about wet markets and exotic animals.
In March 2020, it was natural for people to leap to conclusions, because the only thing anyone knew about the coronavirus was that it "came from" a Wuhan market with weird animals.
Weird is socially relative. You eat pigs and pat dogs. Billions of people think that's weird and a bit gross. Fair enough, seeing how many diseases people have caught from them. Animals can carry germs that are dangerous to people. Wash your hands after you touch them.
Objectively, a wet market is just a slaughterhouse. Here's what, in 2022, you should deduce from the fact that the first large coronavirus outbreak occurred in a slaughterhouse: coronavirus outbreaks occur in slaughterhouses. Obviously some animal carried the virus to the Wuhan market. It's very likely that animal was human, because of all the species there, only humans are known to catch the virus. Even if you found an infected pangolin, you'd have to suspect it caught the virus from its handlers.
> The Times made a heat map that ignores the human cases and just plots the stall samples (I’m not totally sure why would you do that?), and then the finger points really squarely at a specific stall that sold live animals.
This would ignore the fact that testers would over-sample points of interest. If you got some positive tests in some location, you concentrate your probing there. You would need to also display the probing density.
Unfortunately I cannot see all of the article, it's not ideal that pay-to-read articles are posted here.
> Over time, three basic issues emerged with this theory. No one has been able to identify:
> A specific infected animal at the South China Seafood Market
Won't ever happen now because they sterilized the market as a containment action almost immediately. With SARS-CoV-1 the virus wasn't as virulent and researchers were able to study it at the market where the pandemic originated. By acting fast to try to contain it, they erased any evidence of it.
> An intermediate reservoir population in Hubei who were infected with a close relative of SARS-CoV-2 (pangolins were initially suspected but never confirmed)
Any animal now observed to have SARS-CoV-2 in mainland China will have a high probability that humans gave the virus to it. That makes it difficult to track down which species was the intermediate animal without a time machine.
> And that is the Covid-19 origin puzzle in a nutshell: how did a bat virus from a cave in Yunnan end up hundreds of miles away in Wuhan?
Same problem with SARS-CoV-1 where the closest related bat virus is WIV1 which was isolated in 2013 (ten years after that outbreak) from bats in Hubei but which wound up causing an outbreak in wet markets about 700 miles away in Guangdong.
RaTG13 is also separated by several decades of evolution from SARS-Cov-2, you can't close that gap with any experiment in a lab without a massive serial passage experiment through many millions of animals.
And the really problematic issue for the lab leak theory is that it looks like Lineage A and B were separate spillover events of different variants.
Is that the complete article? Or does it continue (for subscribers) after this paragraph?
> But you could also draw a map focused on the human cases that would have shown a cluster in the other corner. And certainly the evidence is all consistent with the theory that a human got the virus at the lab, brought it to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and triggered a super-spreading event at the market (potentially infecting raccoon dogs along with humans).
There will likely never be a smoking gun. But provocative reasons for globally felt tragedies are always fodder for conspiracy theories. Have fun!
The important part:
> ...the boring truth is that we don’t know where Covid-19 came from, we probably aren’t going to find out, and very little of consequence actually hinges on the answer. [emphasis mine]
> Of course, politically it’s a big deal. The case for stricter supervision of virus-related lab ...
Pandemics caused by new infectious diseases were a ~regular thing long before humans had labs studying viruses. Experts familiar with coronaviruses had been sounding alarm bells since the SARS outbreak of 2002-2003. It's d*mn obvious that local government officials in China completely botched the initial response, then a huge number of other government officials botched their own responses, all over the world.
The endless arguments about "who's at fault" for COVID-19...my biggest take-away from them is that the world is really disfunctional, and there's minimal interest in making the future any better.
Happily for me, I'm rather old, and probably won't be around for most of really bad years that the average HN'er will have to live through.
" it would be an odd coincidence for a lab-leaked virus to have its first big super-spreading event at a live animal market,"
A good explanation for this that "used" (and thus infected) lab animals were sold at the market. Anyone who has ever been to China would not be surprised by this happening.
> it would be an odd coincidence for a lab-leaked virus to have its first big super-spreading event at a live animal market,
Not really if the market is literally next door. The infected lab worker goes over to do their after work shopping for a few days in a row and you've got your outbreak.
I'm pretty sure if there were a bunch of dead bats/mice/monkeys coming out of the lab it wouldn't be unexpected for some to turn up in the local market.
Its worth reading about the Smallpox outbreak in the UK, where it was being studied in a university building with poor security. These things aren't secure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbreak_in_the_...
As the person who originally posted this to HN, after reading some of the refutations of Matt Y’s piece (the OP), I’ve come to believe the evidence for zoonotic origin is stronger than Matt Y gives credit for.
One short rebuttal I found particularly understandable to a layperson comes from a prominent economist (not a virologist), pointing out a few considerations that Matt’s piece appears to give insufficient credence to:
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/case-closed-2/
There’s also the twitter thread by one of the original research article coauthors, but I actually found that harder to evaluate as a layperson.
In particular: 1. Matts piece may overweight how much of a coincidence the virus emerging in Wuhan was if it were zoonotic 2. Matt’s piece may underweight the coincidence of emerging at a live animal market if it were a lab leak 3. Matt’s piece underweights the finding that the market hosted both the original A and B variants
This is like the Kennedy assassination. there is the official narrative, and at the same time other alternative narratives that the govt. will never entertain but are still also possible. You're never going to see a NYTs or WSJ headlines that says "lab leak confirmed by Whitehouse". It will always be something in the air.
How does this not mention project defuse, the NIAID funded EcoHealth Alliance research program taking place in wuhan which sought to:
1. Study immune boosting drugs in bats.
2. Take bat corona virus and 'predict' how it can become infectious to humans by incubating it in humanized tissues until it thrives in them, and if that is insufficient directly modifying it to insert a human-specific furin cleavage into the viruses genetic code for the spike protein (as this is an already known barrier to human infectiousness).
3. Inoculate wild bats against human infectious corona viruses by administering drugs to boost their immune system and exposing them to the viruses developed in the prior phase.
Sars-cov-2's primary functional difference from its nearest known wild ancestor is exactly the cleavage proposed in defuse. However, defuse proposed studying a different wild virus than the ancestor of sars-cov-2. The nearest known wild ancestor of sars-cov-2 is the virus the same researchers were working with immediately before the project proposal for defuse.
DARPA had declined to fund the project, with the view that it violated the US government moratorium on funding gain-of-function research ( https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/301... ). NIH has taken the view that this project was not gain-of-function research because the particular virus they were experimenting on could already infect humans (just not particularly well) and because they were directed to pause research and report if they found a ten fold increase in infectivity (the researchers seemingly failed to do so, but did eventually report when they hit a 10,000 fold increase in apparent viral load).
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop...
My simple question would be, if it was really a lab leak, wouldn't you expect the people working in lab to be infected first? Or is this assumption flawed? If so why?
The two new preprint papers (“The Huanan market was the epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 emergence” and “SARS-CoV-2 emergence very likely resulted from at least two zoonotic events”), only trace back to December 2019. Why no go back further? Considering the "unknown" virus stated even in November and possibly October.
One recent find that makes me doubt the debunking:
>doctors in Wuhan said that unless pneumonia cases were linked to the Huanan market, they did not meet Wuhan Municipal Health Commission standards and were often not reported or counted.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/149956665134336000...
In January 2020 there was discussion on Chinese Social Media about lab conditions at the plant, and that it came from there. There were multiple quality sources about it. There ended up being a crackdown on discussion about this from China with several people being taken away.
I've always considered that a reasonable and boring explanation for the source, and I've seen no reason to update that point of view.
The number of early cases connected to the market could be partly confirmation bias -- you detect an early case at the market, and then start to investigate everyone connected to the market, and surprise! almost all of the cases you find are connected to the market.
The lab is only 27 km from the wet market along two main arteries. How about the idea a compromised lab worker went to the wet market on the way home, or for a prepared lunch and it spread to the general population that way?
I’m not convinced by the bioweapon debunking either for that matter.
But I can see how legitimate research can be made to look like weapons research and vice versa, so I have no idea how one would go about with either proving or disproving it.
"it would also be an odd coincidence for a devastating zoonotic coronavirus plague to occur in a city that happened to host a lab doing research on coronaviruses"
Uh, no it's not a coincidence at all. It was doing coronavirus research because SARS-1 was known to have jumped from bats to humans in China and Wuhan had a lot of bats near human population. China (and everybody else) had spent decades on high alert for another bat-born coronavirus variant and it was considered a very likely source of the next pandemic. So, they dedicated a ton of resources to studying exactly that. It would be like expressing shock at the coincidence of war breaking out in the exact spot where two opposing armies have been pointing guns at each other for 20 years.
I still don't understand:
1. How you would prove this? 2. That it matters until you can prove it happened
Lab safety does matter though.
Signed -> Me a lab scientist.
This is a great example of what would be obvious to a 10 year old (natural virus leaking from a lab) yet we've seen endless lies and distortions from the media and intelligentsia trying to obsfucate the idea.
I dont understand how anyone can have anything other than utter contempt for the media and associated "experts".
On this issue I suggest figuring it out for yourself. Look into the technology a bit and decide.
This issue illustrates that public pronouncements and published material can be misinformation and opposite to the obvious truth. Great ways to identify liars for yourself.
People are living in a fairy tale. Whether intentional or accidental lab leak, or accidental market incident, the effect has been the same.
Covid-19 will be viewed historically as the Hiroshima of biowarfare. And actually biowarfare will be viewed in the future as a slightly less uncivilized alternative to nuclear warfare. Although they will be both be in the same category of horrible weapons to be avoided in general, nuclear will be seen as somewhat less evolved and more horrific.
Especially, it is likely that Chinese will view biowarfare as a regrettable but necessary tactic, and again less destructive than nuclear warfare.
The efficient production and distribution of vaccines or treatment is now a national security issue. The extreme political polarization is also now a security issue because it is blocking the efficient distribution of vaccines.
For the American-led western coalition to maintain its dominance, there is an urgent need to either completely change the paradigm from one where overt force is generally accepted, or develop new effective weapons, such as space-based. Biowarfare is pretty much a non-starter for the west.
What I keep hoping, probably quite unrealistically, is that we will have a new international citizen-led paradigm that supercedes nation-states and their brutal strategic operations.
In my mind, global security boils down to merging the different information streams that various political factions tend to push to one extreme or another and even deliberately disconnect from each other.