I like this presentation of evidence. Rarely do you see such a short acknowledgement that there are multiple contradictory theories, each having some evidence, and making no attempt to pick which theory is correct.
Sometimes its wrong to present "both sides" like that. Like pretending the evidence against the moon landings is equal to the evidence for the moon landings. But if you're going to be wrong, this is probably the best kind of wrong.
You can present evidence for and against moon landing being a hoax and if done properly the delusional theory among them (hoax) should be really clear. Presenting the evidence as plainly as possible should be elucidating not misleading
No one's saying we didn't send artefacts to the moon ...
{Actually, done prior probably say the moon doesn't even exist, but I think this makes the point - there's a plausible reason for a reflector being there that doesn't require a manned moon-landing.
Just saying that for the sake of argument.
Though I did see a program as a teenager that presented some convincing 'evidence' that NASA/USA Government were lying to the public. Then it comes down to whether you trust the USAG who you know have lied access manipulated public perceptions on a grand scale, or trust random program makers who you don't yet know to be liars.}
Surely that can be easily waved away in the minds of an ignorant by saying it's just a shiny rock, crashed satellite, ice patch or some other silly nonsense.
well, often the benefit of listing out as much evidence as possible (basically, look at the facts on hand) is that it can help clarify WHICH theory makes the most sense
I think this is one of those areas where our day-to-day probability heuristics do not align with the actual probabilities. So, as an individual, trying to decide which theory makes the most sense is a Sisyphean task.
For example, I have seen a lot of comments that the closest natural COVID reservoir is 500 miles away, that sounds like a lot! But the average tractor trailer can cover that in a day no problem, so our heuristic needs to include how many trucks are moving between those areas, how many have come in contact with wildlife or are transporting it, etc. Since it only takes one transmission the problem rapidly becomes too complex.
Fortunately the answer has no bearing on decisions being made in the here and now, so we can afford to wait and let experts do their jobs and hope we take the right steps long term if it was something that could have been avoided.
> we can afford to wait and let experts do their jobs
We can emphatically not expect the experts to do their job. Those cited as having the most expertise (virologists who undertake gain-of-function research, symbolically under the auspices of HHS’ toothless P3CO regulation framework) have the most to lose from a finding that the pandemic’s source was a lab leak. They lose all the grants and public financial support, not to mention endure unending public scorn that will haunt the their careers for the duration.
For evidence that the relevant, oft-cited scientists act precisely this way, one need no more than to look at @BlockedVirology’s retweets:
https://twitter.com/blockedvirology
Scientists are human - I would highly recommend disabusing oneself of the notion that they might act contrary to overwhelming human incentives in as weighty a context as investigating the origins of the greatest pandemic in a century.
The only alternative in the face of this embedded conflict of interest in our (society’s) ability to credibly investigate the pandemic’s origins is for technically-minded individuals (who don’t run multimillion dollar virology labs) to avail themselves of the findings gathered to date on the origins (there’s lots! Just need to take a look, the contributors to the above feed are a good place to start), and advocate to their representatives for a credible & even-handed origins investigation.
Failing that, expect no origin beyond all reasonable doubt to be credibly identified in our lifetimes.
Scientists are human, and they will make mistakes, the benefit is that there are many of them with different incentives. The "Blocked Virology" twitter account references a lot of previous lab escapes to say that lab escapes are possible, this is good evidence against your point - how do you think we know about the previous escapes? It wasn't a random group of technically-minded individuals, it was experts that tracked it down.
The level of arrogance necessary to believe that any "technically minded" individual can find where the virus originated is mind blowing to me. Logic isn't the end-all-be-all, for many fields you must also have knowledge. We should not ignore the blindspots that deep knowledge can introduce but to just dismiss it is absurd.
There has never been a lab leak leading to a global pandemic and mass deaths, I don’t think you can compare now to anything other then maybe the Spanish flu
About 700k people died worldwide. That's more than a typical flu season but not grossly so, and it's impossible to say with certainty what kind of flu season would have occurred naturally without the escape.
This is a straw man argument. No one is seriously claiming that this is a "cooked up" (artificially created) virus. It could be a natural virus that escaped the lab.
Also, you can literally look around on this exact post and find people who believe that this virus was cooked up in a lab. There were also a lot of people on my original post who believed that.
As is often the case: never underestimate the intellectual overconfidence of people with little knowledge of the subject matter.
To draw a very clear distinction in the sand, I never said we can be 100% certain that this virus didn't originate in a lab. It's just really really unlikely. And there isn't any real evidence to support it. /Maybe/ some circumstantial evidence in the geographic proximity. But even that is probably irrelevant if the current epidemiological evidence is to be believed, which shows that the virus likely jumped into humans outside of Wuhan entirely. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
In order of likelihood, based on all available evidence and expert consensus:
zoonotic release >>> accidental lab release of a wildly collected virus >>>>>>> accidental lab release of a "cooked up" virus > intentional lab release of a "cooked up virus"
I read your post on Reddit back in the day. It was evasive and frankly condescending because you basically argue against something no-one familiar with the science is claiming: that COV is a chimeric virus that is the product of copy-and-paste genetic manipulation rather than directed evolution or gain-of-function research that has resulted in phylogenetic drift against something that was found in the wild -- most likely RaTG13.
And why should anyone take your writing seriously when you don't even talk about "gain of function" research or the various other techniques that have been used in the past decade to aerosolize viruses like H5N1? If you know about them and are deliberately omitting all mention and analysis you are just being dishonest. If you don't then you clearly aren't an expert.
There are also lots of on-topic scientific claims you could address that would let people evaluate your competence and also provide illumination -- what do statistical models say about how long it would take for RaTG13 to evolve into COV19 in the wild? What about in a lab? How likely or unlikely it is to find virii so far away from known ancestors? What are the chances of finding them once we start looking in the wild -- should we have expected to find a closer ancestor by now? And what about the claims made by the State Department about WIV, its closure in September (related: who in the West should be able to confirm/deny if this is the case)? I'd also personally be interested to hear how long it takes to develop research mice with ACE2 receptors since their existence by mid-2020 surely suggests a targeted research agenda that preceded the outbreak? Could scientists in Beijing really have done that in 2 months or whatever?
If you want to be taken seriously, you need to frame the top two or three most credible lab-escape scenarios that work with what is actually public knowledge. Then address the evidence for and against. Setting up strawmen argument, knocking them down and then virtue-signalling on racism isn't useful or on-topic.
I go into detail about petri dish vs lab animals vs accelerated evolution and how implausible it is.
Re: sampling viruses in the wild this isn't necessarily my area of expertise, I'm a lab guy. But I do know a lil bit about it, re: ebola in bats mostly. Only that it actually takes much longer than you think, and it has to do with our sampling methods. RNA is really really really short lived outside the host, and our sampling methods aren't that good at finding it inside animal secretions, they're optimized for humans and humans want to be sampled. you don't need to squeeze a human to get them to pee in a cup, or spit in one, or hold still to swab them like you do bats. So sampling is much more difficult. And since it's out in the field, the RNA decays more quickly too. Some advances have been made in this but it still is quite difficult.
To give you an idea, here is a paper all about the vastly MASSIVE amount of estimated undiscovered viruses out there (figure 3 in particular): https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22975
Re: research mice, the mouse germination time from IVF to F1 (the first useful generation of mice) is about 12-16 weeks. Not that long on the global timescale, but really long in science. You can see a source for this here: http://ko.cwru.edu/info/breeding_strategies_manual.pdf
And that's from Case Western in Ohio, not a Chinese source. It really is that fast.
I'm sorry I'm not framing my arguments in precisely the way you want them, I framed them how I received the arguments out there having discussions in the real world with real skeptics. I then constructed the post to respond to those arguments I had been asked about.
I'm sorry, but that's just the way it is. Take it or leave it.
Everyone knows that mutations that increase transmissability generally hurt morbidity. Is there some reason you think this supports zoonotic hypothesis? It is public knowledge RaTG13 was collected from a mine shaft where a similar virus killed 50% of infected workers and where WIV was doing significant sampling work.
Your comments on mutation rates confirm that RaTG13 is not closely related to COV (we knew that) and imply we should expect to find a closer relative. Yet we haven't. And the paper you share argues (again) against your conclusions by pointing out that neither Yunnan nor Wuhan are expected hotspots for missing zoonoses to emerge. We've also now spent more than a year hunting there and elsewhere in SEAsia and haven't discovered anything remotely related. But China won't let anyone look at or sample Tongguan mineshaft.
Your comments on the State Department factsheet don't say anything except express a vague chummy solidarity that would lead a reasonable person to believe that SOMEONE in your group of international scientists should be able to confirm or deny allegations the WIV was in fact shutdown for a week in September. If no-one cannot confirm or deny this direct and very specific allegation how can anyone take seriously your claim that international civilian researchers would have any clue who was doing what kind of research in the facility or with its materials elsewhere? And if your mouse answer is correct surely it should take significantly longer than 4 months to bootstrap a program that can do practical experiments on mice with human ACE2 receptors, if only because IVF is hardly the start of the process.
None of these things support your argument. They just raise further questions that you seem to have zero interest in flagging or asking, despite having a very keen interest in the conclusions that you want people to draw. Science does not work that way.
>Everyone knows that mutations that increase transmissability generally hurt morbidity. Is there some reason you think this supports zoonotic hypothesis? It is public knowledge RaTG13 was collected from a mine shaft where a similar virus killed 50% of infected workers and where WIV was doing significant sampling work.
Why would this support either hypothesis? The cleavage site clearly has nothing to do with RATG-13 and it is probably one of the main drivers of SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis. See here:
So why did you bring it up? The observation doesn't support zoonotic hypothesis at all, although it could support lab leak if we assume GOF was done on a natural or modified virus with a higher IFR rate, such as the ones known to be present in Tongguan where WIV sampled RaTG13.
Similarly -- it isn't clear why you are talking about the cleavage site. You appear to think it argues against some sort of hypothesis. But you haven't stated what you think the most credible lab-leak scenario is and why. It isn't even clear that COV came from RaTG13.
>Your comments on mutation rates confirm that RaTG13 is not closely related to COV (we knew that) and imply we should expect to find a closer relative. Yet we haven't. And the paper you share argues (again) against your conclusions by pointing out that neither Yunnan nor Wuhan are expected hotspots for missing zoonoses to emerge
It's really funny you mention that because when I presented this paper in my departmental journal club, that was the #1 criticism levied. This model over-enriches for South America and under-enriches for East Asia.
Mostly it has to do with (in my opinion) their under-reliance on host-specificity and over-reliance on overall biological diversity. The Pacific Northwest is a hotbed of ecological and biological diversity in rodents among other things, but we haven't had any major outbreaks out of that area yet (knock on wood).
Papers can be wrong or whatever. Or underappreciate things. Lots of other scientists think there's a massive underappreciated reservoir of bat-related viruses in Asia. Peter Daszak is the obvious one, but also Heinz Feldmann, Christian Drosten, Peter Daniels, basically anyone who has ever studied bat viruses or influenza viruses believes there's a lot left undiscovered in Asia. That's also why several of the most recent hemorrhagic fever virus meetings from Keystone was in Hong Kong. SARS-1 is a big memory there, and not a very long ago one.
>SOMEONE in your group of international scientists should be able to confirm or deny allegations the WIV was in fact shutdown for a week in September. If no-one cannot confirm or deny this direct and very specific allegation how can anyone take seriously your claim that international civilian researchers would have any clue who was doing what kind of research in the facility or with its materials elsewhere?
My BSL3/4 was shut down all the time. For maintenance or whatever. They're facilities that go down for maintenance often because of how important it is to make them safe. Anytime an autoclave broke, or a fan broke, you had to take it down because it no longer met the biosafety standards set forth in the protocols.
I personally have no idea if it was shut down for a week in September, that's a very specific thing. Do you know exactly when a company in your line of work started doing work from home? Or when it was shut down for an internet outage? etc. etc. That's a very specific thing.
Sure I could ask around and probably figure that out. But I also don't want to, because I'm not interested in fueling your conspiracy theory when I have no idea what relevance that would have to the likelihood of a lab leak. Given how often these facilities shut down. They do it yearly as a rule, and often 4-5 times per year due to other maintenance reasons. And yes that includes brand new facilities. I cannot tell you how many times people at the BSL4 in Montana here in the US told me about facility shutdowns as reasons they couldn't conduct my experiments! It delayed my PhD a bit!
IVF is actually ALMOST the start of the process since we already had the ACE2 gene sequence. I suppose you would have to clone it and that might take a month. So altogether probably 3-4 months. Especially since it was TOP priority, like drop everything else and do this.
I'll give you an example. In my work, we had to clone Stat1 and Stat2 knockout mice, these are a model for Zika and for testing ebola vaccines and creating anti-Ebola antibodies, I published a paper all about it you can look it up in my gscholar linked elsewhere here.
Anyway, to go from idea to first generation of mouse (I didn't actually do the work, just watched someone else do it this was really early in my PhD)... it took about 6 months. And that's with a zillion other things on our plates. If it was the ONLY thing we were doing? Yeah it probably could have been done in 4 months. Probably 3 if you gave us unlimited funding and perfect facilities.
Science doesn't work the way you want it to work either, btw. It's not about wild hypotheses and conspiracies about people hiding stuff from the public. It's not about supposition and theoretical thought experiments. We rely on concrete data to make very small conclusions based on probability, and then test them.
Unfortunately, this really isn't a testable hypothesis either way. That's why the occam's razor factor matters so much here. It really is a probabilistic argument.
I never said it was impossible that this was a lab leak, only really unlikely.
> I personally have no idea if it was shut down for a week in September, that's a very specific thing. Do you know exactly when a company in your line of work started doing work from home?
I'm quite familiar with my own industry and could easily fact-check claims of this specificity or follow-up with people who would know. If I could not do this, I would not be making appeals to authority in public.
> Sure I could ask around and probably figure that out. But I also don't want to, because I'm not interested in fueling your conspiracy theory when I have no idea what relevance that would have to the likelihood of a lab leak.
Conspiracy theory? This is a claim by the US Government. And you're clearly interested in "debunking" it given the amount you have written on the topic and your holding proactive AMAs. So - yeah - this leaves anyone reading your comments wondering (1) why you are rebutting strawmen arguments, (2) why you don't appear familiar with the facts [i.e. pushed the wet market hypothesis long after we knew it wasn't the origin], and (3) why you still aren't addressing basic, specific and addressable claims from sources with assumed credibility who take a different position.
> Science doesn't work the way you want it to work
The sad thing is that it does. You figure out what the most viable hypotheses are and then evaluate the evidence. Update your priors based on what you find and repeat the process. That's how you end up being able to make statements about Occam's Razor. Quite different from building strawmen, knocking them down and calling anyone who asks questions you a conspiracy theorist.
And you also don't have to take my word for it re: China's problem with zoonotic transmission. Here are scientific review articles that demonstrate that consensus:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16940861/ (this one says wet markets, which probably are an issue, but not as big as initially thought, and probably not the origin of CoV-2)
I don't see the point. We know that zoonotic transmission and natural origin is possible. The question is about how likely it is to be the origin of COV. No-one who has been to Wuhan would expect zoonotic transfer. And certainly not of aersolized bat coronaviruses.
afaict the strongest evidence against lab-origin is the claim that COV was circulating in Italy in early autumn 2019, although I've read lately that the tests claiming this are now apparently suspect. go figure.
The above findings are replicable by any bioinformatician operating on published sources.
This preprint was reviewed by one of the authors of the Human Genome Project’s landmark 2001 paper having served as an HGP sequencing team leader at the Whitehead Institute:
The findings critically undermine Western zoonotic scientists’ (Daszak of the WHO-convened study particularly) claim that they knew what viruses WIV researchers were working on.
> By the way, welcome to HN commments, as I note your account is five hours old.
In this context, that does not read like a genuine welcome but rather as a sinister insinuation. That is seriously against the site guidelines. Please read and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We want HN to be a place that's open to newcomers, not a smug and insular backwater. Internet users (including HN users, unfortunately) are vastly too likely to assume sinister manipulation and bad faith in others.
By leading with a swipe like that, you not only break the site guidelines, you discredit the rest of your own comment. That's a pity. Please stick to substantive points in the future, and follow the rule of assuming good faith even when you feel like the other person isn't necessarily in good faith. The primary reason for the rule is that you (i.e. all of us) owe it to the community, not just to the other person per se.
Thanks, and I upvoted this mod comment. In my defense, I'll voice that the offending line contributes to the conversation, as it asserts the interlocutor has an axe to grind by setting up an account for just this article and commenting extensively on it. Of course however I'm sure many HN users ordinarily and appropriately register on the basis of one such stirring subject or another. Anyway I would edit out the offending line if I had the ability to.
> That's why when consensus exists about something, you should respect it. There is quite a large consensus about this one.
Respecting a consensus is reasonable. That having been said, I would be interested to hear what the virologists to whom you refer think about Ralph Baric's work. Ralph Baric is a very well-known virologist specializing in corona virology. His group synthesized quite a few SARS-CoV variants, a number of years before SARS-CoV-2 made its appearance. While there's no proof that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab, there are quite a few studies describing the synthesis of different SARS-CoV variants, some quite dangerous.
"Using the SARS-CoV infectious clone as a template (7), we designed and synthesized a full-length infectious clone of WIV1-CoV consisting of six plasmids that could be enzymatically cut, ligated together, and electroporated into cells to rescue replication competent progeny virions (Fig. S1A). In addition to the full-length clone, we also produced WIV1-CoV chimeric virus that replaced the SARS spike with the WIV1 spike within the mouse-adapted backbone (WIV1-MA15, Fig. S1B)"
EDIT: jeduehr, given your background in virology, I would be interested in any technical critique you may have regarding the Yuri Deigin article referenced in my post below.
It's important to understand the distinction between chimeric and mosaic viruses.
Baric makes Chimeras. CoV-2 in comparison to the other closely related viruses in nature, is a mosaic. Lots of little changes all over the genome, not big copy and pastes.
Hi, I made a response to the Deigin medium post in your original context. Sorry I don't have time to go more in depth, that thing is a beast. But he makes a few fundamental mistakes that tear at his core argument that I think are sufficient to show he doesn't really know what he's talking about in this arena.
Wow I also describe elsewhere how his understanding of the CGGCGG codon usage is truly flawed. It looks like these codons weren't actually there in the earliest sequences of the pandemic, but evolved over time as the virus adapted to us as a host. Really not the smoking gun he thinks it is. If you wanna see what I mean, just search this page for "CGGCGG"
@jeduehr No one established there was a consensus, nor should a consensus necessarily be respected out of hand even if there was one. (Recall that it was not long ago that there was ‘consensus’ that sc2 couldn’t pass human-to-human, or that non-healthcare workers shouldn’t wear masks to name a few examples). A lot of lab leak researchers _are_ scientists (microbiologists, genomics researchers & bioinformaticians). The profile you describe of an anti-GOF scientist is met by Marc Lipsitch of The Cambridge Working Group, and he is far from taking any position that states a wholly zoonotic origin for sc2:
There was never a consensus that SARS-2 couldn't pass human-to-human. Just because WHO said it doesn't mean there was a consensus.
There was also never a consensus about masks, the US government and a few US virologists just felt that way. Asia and a lot of Europe definitely did not feel that way. I would urge you to be as non-America-centric as possible because the consensus that the virus is very likely not a lab leak is also global in character.
I actually know Dr. Lipsitch and have met him at a conference or two before, and he's not wrong in a lot of ways, it should be investigated to the fullest extent possible, I would absolutely agree with that and have never disagreed on that. China should allow in international investigators from unbiased third-party institutions with expertise in the relevant areas.
The problem, of course, is that it will likely be impossible to prove it either way. The closest we could get is identifying an extremely close relative of SARS-2 in nature, in bats or w/e, in an area where we also find Human seropositivity (antibodies in the blood).
On the other side, we could find a sample of SARS-2 frozen and old in a chinese lab that shows they had it before the outbreak.
Presumably finding unbiased people is impossible. Trump latched on to calling it the "China virus" because he knew it would feed into nationalism/separatism and harm Chinese imports. All countries are involved in global trade; at this level of importance most people could be influenced.
As far as finding frozen samples, you'd also need verifiable documentation, presumably, otherwise we wouldn't know if it were a zoonotic sample ... so we wouldn't know if it were a wild origin, or a lab-captured origin?
If it were a lab-release, was it accidental or the actions of some other nation wanting to harm China.
It seems to me that conclusion people want is quite possibly not out there.
Sometimes its wrong to present "both sides" like that. Like pretending the evidence against the moon landings is equal to the evidence for the moon landings. But if you're going to be wrong, this is probably the best kind of wrong.