Here's the Cliff Notes version of the argument in this paper:
1. SARS-CoV-2 has a number of unique and unusual genetic features, when compared to close relatives, many of which explain its high virulence and infectivity among humans.
2. A series of research papers published by a group of virologists, dating back a little over a decade, demonstrate (1) a progressively increasing understanding of viral features which make coronaviruses more infectious and virulent in humans, and (2) laboratory capabilities for successfully creating chimeric viruses (e.g. moving one specific protein sequence from a bat SARS-like virus to human SARS virus) to test their hypotheses.
3. Each of the unique and unusual features of SARS-CoV-2 appears somewhere in this line of research.
4. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city where the outbreak began, were intimately involved this line of research.
Taken together, the publicly-available evidence indicates that a select group of virologists had the domain knowledge and laboratory capabilities to create chimeric viruses which possess each of the unusual features of SARS-CoV-2, and that select group of virologists was concentrated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology located at ground zero for the pandemic.
The authors feel that, in light of this preponderance of circumstantial evidence, the hypothesis that the biogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 involved human intervention should be seen as the leading (i.e. most likely) explanation.
They do not make any statement about how the virus first infected a live human and spread into a pandemic, but conditioned on their biogenesis hypothesis being true, one would then assume an accidental lab release from WIV as the most likely explanation.
This isn't entirely true, though. SARS-CoV-2 is much less virulent than SARS or MERS.
For a virus that recently crossed the zoonotic barrier, and even moreso for one crossing from bats, it's virulence is actually astonishingly low.
Therefore, the hypothesis of a two-stage crossing to humans, from bats to a larger land based mammal and then to humans is much much more likely, because this would explain high transmissibility due to the necessity to infect despite small lung volumes, as well as much lower virulence.
Therefore, the pre-existing hypothesis seems to match reality more closely than an accidental release. A virus being engineered to be an order of magnitude less virulent seems unlikely to say the least.
> A virus being engineered to be an order of magnitude less virulent seems unlikely to say the least.
From what I gathered it’s not suggesting specific genetic traits were engineered, but rather that they were experimenting and one of those experiments could have accidentally been released(?).
Yes, but is the theory is that one experiment, in the context of a gain analysis, was made in order to see how the virus might evolve to be much less severe?
Why would a gain analysis try to find ways in which a virus could be made weaker? I don't doubt that an accidental release is feasible, though very very unlikely, but why would an experiment make a less severe virus in the first place?
>Why would a gain analysis try to find ways in which a virus could be made weaker?
To better understand the mechanisms that make it weak or strong?
Plus, why would it have to be "made weaker" as opposed, accidentally made weaker? If they were experimenting they would have all sorts of varieties/results... it's not like every experiment to make it stronger would make it stronger... surely some could fail and make it weaker!
If I were to make a great bio weapon that would do the maximum damage, I will have these attributes:
1. Spread it easily;
2. Don't kill the ones who spread it most easily (the young);
3. Be lethal enough to overwhelm the system.
And so I have the Covid-19.
Of course it is all post-fact analysis. but it also answers your question of why would an experiment make a less sever virus in the first place - to address the biggest problem of an infectious agent as a bioweapon, i.e. a virulent virus ends up killing too many too fast to be highly infective and 'effective'.
And if I were to make a bioweapon, I would think about long-term impact.
(1) Millions disabled is far worse than millions dead.
(2) Attacks can come in multiple pieces. The first virus might do damage to make people especially vulnerable to the second virus. If I can protect my population against the first one /or/ the second, my people are safe.
My opinion is it's just a matter of time before we see bioweapons, and we should be ready. If not before COVID19, then now. Our vulnerability is very obvious.
We should treat this as an emergency prep drill, and make sure businesses can operate remotely, kids can learn remotely, we have PPE, and the infrastructure is in place for essential work. That also wouldn't collapse the economy.
Infectious bioweapons are a horrible idea in a highly connected world for the reason we can all plainly see: they don’t respect national borders.
It is an old-fashioned notion of a weapon that only made sense when there was little exchange between the citizens of states in opposition, like the U.S. and USSR.
China, for whom international trade is a crucial part of their strategy, would not work on an infectious disease weapon unless they simultaneously developed a vaccine to protect their own people. The fact they are not currently vaccinating their population, or even in the lead in developing a vaccine, is extremely strong proof that COVID-19 did not originate as a Chinese bioweapon candidate.
If a lab in China had been working with this virus at all, they would have had at minimum working cultures of it, and potentially multiple strains and experience modifying them. Cultures alone would have put them ahead of western pharma companies in developing a vaccine—even in the case of an unplanned release.
The fact that they’re not ahead is compelling proof that this virus was as new to Chinese medicine as it was to everyone else.
> The fact that they’re not ahead is compelling proof that this virus was as new to Chinese medicine as it was to everyone else.
I appreciate your argument, but are you sure that they are not ahead? I don't have personal knowledge, but (for example) there was a Reuters article last week with a headline that included that claim "China leads COVID-19 vaccine race": https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-.... If somehow it was proved that they are indeed ahead, would you consider this compelling proof in the opposite direction? I think I'd consider both directions to be weak evidence, but neither to be anything near proof.
If there is a country that benefited most from this virus, it's Russia. Crippling economies of China and especially US (with additional misinformation to make people not wear masks).
Why would a country that wanted to deploy a bio weapon started on it's own land? It's not like travel to other countries was restricted.
Also Russia is not a country that would have qualms about affecting own citizens. Putin get to power by coordinating bombings on apartment complexes and blaming Chechens for it.
Well, let's break down this hypothetical a bit more:
(1) "Work on" is different from "release." If I were China, I would not release a bioweapon, but I might work on one. The US and USSR worked on nuclear weapons but did not release them. There are 200 nations. Some of them almost certainly have secret bioweapons programs.
(2) As China showed, they could handle a COVID19-level bioweapon attack while the US can't. US has several times as many /dead/ as China had /infected./ In a war, if I were China, I might release one too if I had one.
(3) If I were planning a sneak attack, as I said, a multipart bioweapon might make sense. If something like COVID19 damages the lungs, and makes people vulnerable to PICORNA21, and only 80,000 of my citizens caught COVID19, while millions of Americans did, it seems pretty safe. Especially if I know I can do another lockdown, and the US can't. Release PICORNA21, lock down, wait for millions of paralyzed Americans, and take my rightful spot back in the world.
(4) China is not the only player. Bioweapons are rapidly moving into the range of clever undergrad students, not to speak of terrorist organizations, rogue nations, etc.
I'm not trying to badmouth China here. I don't even think China is the major threat; just that the US should be ready for something like COVID19 intended as a weapon.
Also, as points of fact: (a) China is vaccinating its military already. (b) China has no reason to vaccinate its population yet; their lockdown has worked. If China did vaccinate their population already, as you point out, that would be clear proof this was engineered by China.
You missed out one critical element of a highly contagious bioweapon: you have to be able to protect your own population. Otherwise it's a self-own.
(This is why nobody has really used bioweapons in warfare to date, with the exception of some questionable reports that the USSR had a really lethal weaponized smallpox strain on some of their ICBM warheads, as a balance-of-terror multiplier.)
While this doesn't prove that COVID19 isn't a bioweapon, it strongly suggests that it got loose long before whoever designed it anticipated. Unless, of course, it was developed by the world-leading Vietnamese biological warfare institute (hey, look at their fatality figures)! (That was sarcasm, by the way.)
>If I were to make a great bio weapon that would do the maximum damage
You must not know much about bioweapons, then. By any measure, SARS-CoV-2 is a very, very poor bioweapon.
Think about it... it infects everyone but for the most part younger people don't die from it or even become incapacitated. It's mostly killing the elderly or people who have pre-existing conditions.
Effectively, SARS-CoV-2 helps the nation that's infected with it prepare for conventional conflict... it leaves younger people able to fight in the military and with some immunity to the weapon, it greatly reduces the need to care for the elderly or those in poor physical condition, freeing up workers for weapons production or logistics.
It's easy to stop this supposed "weapon" from spreading, just social distance and wear a mask... if everyone does it, the attack is ineffective.
Any country that attacked another using SARS-CoV-2 as a weapon would be suiciding. All the virus would accomplish is making the youngest, most able portion of the target population very angry and reducing the number of non combat capable people they have to take care of.
But wait, you say... the US is having a much higher impact from the virus.
That's because our leadership has failed outright and continues to do so at many levels. Calling the virus a hoax, politically motivated re-openings, the support of ignorance instead of science, conspiracy theories... all due to poor leadership.
Which of course is the real reason this tinfoil hat theory that the virus is a weapon hasn't died yet. Convincing a large number of people that it's a weapon would remove responsibility from Trump and the GOP for failing so incredibly badly, or at least make them look better in the run-up to the election.
The truth is that SARS-CoV-2 isn't a weapon, it's a pandemic which the US could have quickly suppressed and defeated, but did not because our corrupt, inept government worships ignorance instead of enlightenment.
Or what if the virus was intentionally released to remove a costly population demographic (old & infirm) that no longer have a cost benefit for the CCP/PRC GDP. Keep in mind that we still don't have valid numbers from China so we don't know how many died though back-channel reports say the reported numbers are much too low. The virus may very well have performed its intended purpose and any damage to enemies of the CCP is just iceing on the cake.
> Why would a gain analysis try to find ways in which a virus could be made weaker?
You're presuming it was for gain analysis. What if the intention was different? What if you were ultimately considering the virus for bio-warfare and wanted to hide that intention?
If we're going to explore theories this fits the evidence, or is at least possible.
I read that viruses, as a whole, are trending to be less severe because highly lethal viruses kill the host faster than it can spread. They could be researching ideas like this.
Accidental releases of viruses from labs have happened quite regularly. It's a serious concern.
The UK was first introduced to the uselessness of Imperial College and their epidemiological modelling by an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001 amongst livestock. It resulted in mass killing (by humans) of animals. Eventually the epidemic disappeared, amongst great acrimony and disaster for farmers.
In 2007 foot and mouth appeared again. This time, the virus was traced to the source of the outbreak. It came from a lab in Pirbright where the virus had been stored for research. Two government orgs were connected by pipes, and the pipes had been allowed to rust due to a budget dispute over which org should pay for repairs:
Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday they have identified 34 incident reports involving bioterror pathogens mishandled at CDC labs that were “inadvertently” not disclosed in 2014 to congressional investigators who had asked for the information
Is this actually the case? This paper [1] seems to indicate that there are multiple types of gain-of-function research, not just an increase in virulence. In fact, the paper specifically discusses “transmissibility”, which would seem to support the argument of the paper under discussion: “In short, SARS-CoV-2 is possessed of dual action capability. In this paper we argue that the likelihood of this being the result of natural processes is very small”
Sure. The issue is that there would have to be gain-of-function research to reduce virulence and (maybe, it's not entirely clear) to increase transmissivity.
There is no evidence for that AFAIK, and I don't understand why a lab would do a gain of function experiment and reduce function instead.
Do you have the study where they would have reduced virulence for these reasons? Because reducing the virulence of a virus to such a level that a large part of the population don't even get any symptoms seems odd to say the least.
Also, it's not even clear that COVID-19 is that much more infectious (or at all) than SARS, it seems to me that its explained well enough by so many people brushing it off or not even realizing they have it because it's so much less severe.
Yes, exactly, which is discussed in the paper. The goal of gain of function research isn’t about “let’s make viruses that do crazy shit,” it’s a method of hypothesis testing. When you can successfully add (or remove) stuff then you can test hypotheses that would otherwise not be testable.
Reduce virulence compared to what? SARS-1? But they are not talking about SARS-1, they actually were talking about some other random bat viruses, which have zero virulence in humans.
>Our key result is that hosts most closely related to humans harbour zoonoses of lower impact in terms of morbidity and mortality, while the most distantly related hosts—in particular, order Chiroptera (bats)—harbour highly virulent zoonoses with a lower capacity for endemic establishment in human hosts.
True, but to be dangerous the have to pass cross species barrier, before that event, virulence is exactly zero. So, random bat viruses have zero virulence in people.
CoV-2 is way more virulent than SARS, as evidenced by the fact it's spread across the entire world. SARS might spread more easily from contact, and it does more damage once it's inside you, but that's only one component of virulence. MERS is also not really comparable - it's very difficult to transmit between humans.
I get what you're saying but practical effects just matter more than isolated metrics. Viruses that transmit asymptomatically are more likely to be virulent, because you can't isolate patients. If you're trying to engineer a virus, you want to make it transmit faster than it kills people and you want to make it hard to quarantine.
You're confusing virulence and infectivity. Virulence is specifically how severe a virus is. For example, one might say that Hepatitis is more virulent than the common cold.
You're right, I am. I should have focussed on the point that asymptomatic transmission and lack of severity may be a feature in an engineered virus, not a bug.
What I know is that a virus like Ebola, which kills almost everybody who is untreated, cannot be that successful as a virus like Covid19 or HIV, because it gets no chance to spread. The corona virus is so successful because it can spread without killing everybody.
1. the severity or harmfulness of a disease or poison.
COVID-19 - has an fatality rate of around 0.5-1%, according to the best methodologies we have, in various environments, with recent papers suggesting that it might be even less lethal in places where medical care is sufficient.
In comparison, the best data for SARS fatality rates is of around 11% (!).
This means that SARS-CoV-2 is around ten times less virulent than SARS. MERS is even worse than SARS.
Now, SARS-CoV-2 is likely even more infectious than SARS, but part of that is because it's less severe, meaning that you can spread it even without being sick.
Should we go by the crude fatality rate since the data around COVID-19 isn't rock solid yet right? Shouldn't we measure COVID-19's virulence by the IFR aka infection fatality rate instead? As of today with 14,194,795 cases and 599,438 deaths, COVID-19's infection fatality rate is 4.23%. By comparison, SARS only had 8,098 cases and only 774 deaths, giving it an IFR of 9.56%.
The issue is the SARS had a lot less cases, and was more virulent. There is no evidence for asymptomatic spread of SARS, and almost every single infection was accounted for using contact tracing.
Therefore, it makes sense to use the best guess at IFR for both. The best guess for IFR for COVID-19 is around 0.3-0.9%, depending on the state of the healthcare system.
SARS however, seems to have a very low rate of asymptomatic carriers : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3371799/ , of around 7%. Of those 7%, it is expected that the vast majority are detected, as there were very few cases of SARS of unknown origin (IE, no contact with an infected person). On the other hand, COVID19 is believed to have asymptomatic infection rates of as high as 50%, and even at the very beginning there were tons of cryptic transmission.
Therefore, it is likely that the CFR of SARS is very close the IFR. Using a high-estimate for the IFR of COVID19 and comparing it to the CFR of SARS should yield a very good comparison for virulence of the two viruses.
Therefore, SARS is indeed in the ballpark of 10x more virulent than COVID19.
We need to be really careful about the claims of asymptomatic infection.
The problem with this concept is it becomes impossible to detect false positives. In fact it makes the test the ground truth rather than actual observable clinical sickness. Any bug in the test thus creates a pseudo-epidemic:
If you look at that paper you can see it admits that other research studies found no asymptomatic infection at all. Others on the other hand said they saw it. So there's no real consensus that this phenomenon actually exists in this case, and the asymptomatic people didn't seem to transmit the virus at all (so why are we all wearing masks now then?).
The numbers involved are tiny. Their conclusions are based on the antibody test returning positive without symptoms for just 6 people. The amount of antibodies found in the asymptomatic cases was significantly lower than for other cases, leading to the question of whether they were picking up noise at the edge of the test's capabilities and whether they truly understand how the test works (given that there weren't many SARS-CoV-1 cases, there'd be limited cases on which to test or calibrate it).
That trade off is made by evolution. I don't see why scientists in a lab would make that trade off in a gain of function analysis - you can just make it more infectious and keep (likely increase) the level of virulence.
Since evolution isn't involved in the proposed mechanism, I see no reason why such a trade-off would occur.
I think you presume a level of mastery over artificially engineered viruses that just doesn't exist. Is it obvious before a modification is made to a virus strand whether it will be more or less virulent? Besides, engineering for virulence can easily get yourself killed. Furthermore it didn't necessarily have to be engineered for nefarious purposes. It could have been an experimental virus that accidentally escaped and that's all.
Perhaps depends on your goals. Virulent enough to cause global panic and show how a totalitarian state can respond better to a pandemic than democratic stated. But not virulent enough to actually kill everyone.
Similarly SARS and MERS were perhaps too virulent and could thus easily be controlled by screening for symptoms, while the new coronavirus can spread without symptoms, which could possibly be attributed to the lower virulence.
Now this sounds exactly like something Donald Trump has been saying all this time, and such conspiracy theories don't contribute much to the discussion.
If thousands of deaths in China, a complete lockdown that hit the economy incredibly hard and perhaps more crucially, the total breakdown and potential reshaping of the global supply chain, which China has been benefitting from massively, is something that the Chinese gov wants to to achieve, then such conspiracy theories might hold water. I think it's plain to see how nonsensical they are.
Also, nobody made the US look bad but themselves. This is obvious if you compare COVID responses in countries like Germany with those in the US.
Then it was truly unavoidable for the us to keep getting worse and worse, for some reason more in states full of people who think masks are mind control (a total mystery that we will never understand), while other countries are seeing things get better.
It's not that mysterious how tribalism, fear, and the discomfort of admitting being wrong, just to name a few contributing factors, can result in people holding irrational beliefs.
They're not a different species, they're people. If you give into the urge to treat them as "other", as inferior, or as a different "tribe" to be defeated you're not as different from them with their ridiculous beliefs as you might like to think.
That's not completely true. Some of those pressures still apply to artificial viruses once they're released. Highly dangerous viruses get quarantined, and viruses that produce symptoms quickly (and don't transmit asymptomatically, or have a shorter window) are more obvious. Both of those properties reduce real-world transmissability, which is all that actually matters.
I'd argue that SARS-CoV-2 is very far from the Pareto optimal trade-off in infectivity and virulence. There are viruses that are both more virulent and more infectious.
Related to the origin hypotheses, the hypothesis of zoonotic outbreak from a wet market in mid-Dec no longer seems as relevant. It was first laid out in a widely disseminated paper in The Lancet [1, see Figure 1B], but since then retrospective wastewater analyses from Italy[2], Spain[3], Brazil and others[4] have found it was circulating much earlier.
"The Italian National Institute of Health looked at 40 sewage samples collected from wastewater treatment plants in northern Italy between October 2019 and February 2020. An analysis released on Thursday said samples taken in Milan and Turin on Dec. 18 showed the presence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus." [2]
and
"Most COVID-19 cases show mild influenza-like symptoms (14) and it has been suggested that some uncharacterized influenza cases may have masked COVID-19 cases in the 2019-2020 season (11). This possibility prompted us to analyze some archival WWTP samples from January 2018 to December 2019 (Figure 2). All samples came out to be negative for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 genomes with the exception of March 12, 2019, in which both IP2 and IP4 target assays were positive. This striking finding indicates circulation of the virus in Barcelona long before the report of any COVID-19 case worldwide." [3]
I think the “hypothesis of zoonotic outbreak from a wet market in mid-Dec” is still very relevant, and the few papers claiming to have evidence of SARS-CoV-2 prior to Dec 2019 outside China are still very questionable. It’s not like they tested old samples in a few places and the virus promptly showed up. Rather, lots of old samples were tested all over the place, and the virus almost never showed up, except in a very few instances that night more parsimoniously be explained with false positives.
It isn’t relevant, and hasn’t been since almost the beginning of the pandemic. We’ve known since March that the earliest retroactively identified case of the disease in China was from October and had no connection with the Wuhan wet market. The wet market may be the the earliest identified widespread outbreak, but it is clear that the crossover event happened earlier and the virus had been circulating at low levels prior to that.
> but it is clear that the crossover event happened earlier and the virus had been circulating at low levels prior to that.
Source? Definitely some experts think it is not impossible that it was brought to the wet market very early in the outbreak, that's not implausible at all. But the idea that it was circulating globally or widely at all before that is not backed by the evidence.
There are some Brazilian researchers in the process of mapping the whole genome of some samples collected and frozen back in November 2019 that they believe to be SARS-CoV-2.
It will be interesting to see how that compares to a Wuhan sample and see if it had most of the novel features of COVID-19, but is maybe missing one thing like how it binds to ACE2 which is probably implicated in all the cardiovascular issues it causes.
There could have been a baseline level of the virus or a close brother of it in circulation early in 2019, but the conditions of the wet market ecosystem in late 2019 let it suddenly spiral out of control, or make a final evolution to its current high-transmissiveness form.
Sort of like how we can find, retrospectively, intermittent cases of HIV back to the early part of the 20th century, but it suddenly exploded in the 1980s.
It's actually been hypothesised from the beginning that ancestors of Covid-19 passed back and forth between humans and animals several times before taking its current form. The idea being that an ancestor of the virus was first transferred to humans where it 'learned' how to adapt to the human body before transmitting back to an animal host and mutated to become more deadly to humans and then transferred back to humans. This is partly based on the idea that a successful virus wouldn't adapt to be more lethal to its host and that close cousins of Covid-19 have been found in several species of bats and other animals.
This actually makes China a much better candidate than Europe for the place where the most important step in its evolution occurred. China has much more vibrant trade in wild animals for clothing, consumption, and traditional medicine. China also happens to be the place where the first reports of widespread hospitalisations occurred.
I don't think it's possible that Covid-19 in its current form could have floated around with its current high level of transmissivity or even the lower level of transmissibility of the Chinese strain without being detected for more than a month.
As we've seen from America's second wave (bumpy first wave?) the virus replicates exponentially (even with some social distancing), so tens of thousands of people can be infected within two weeks. So we ought to see pretty strong signal in ICU admissions within about 5 weeks of an outbreak (allowing ramp up time, incubation period, and time for symptoms to progress). We'd also expect to see all-cause mortality rates of people over 65 to increase significantly within about 7 to 8 weeks of the outbreak occurring as the average time to mortality is about 18 days.
I fail to see how it'd be possible for the health system of any developed nation to miss all that, but a developing country that has a culture of secrecy and suppressing information from both its own people and central authorities? Yeah I could believe that.
> Sort of like how we can find, retrospectively, intermittent cases of HIV back to the early part of the 20th century, but it suddenly exploded in the 1980s.
That's in large part because HIV collided with African urbanisation, significant international air travel deflation, an explosion of homosexual activity (unprotected sex), an industrialised blood transfer system, and a drug epidemic with administration using shared syringes. I can't think of a similar set of factors changing in our current society that could have allowed for the explosion of a coronavirus.
I would consider the final evolutionary jump to not have been at the wet market, but the virology lab where someone who works with the bat virus caught the one in circulation worldwide - this more deadly virus broke out in Wuhan because that was where the last jump occurred.
Some viruses lie dormant in our bodies for years, was someone at the lab infected with a bat SARs virus at some point, and all it needed was this other virus to come along for it to share some of its virulence?
> Related to the origin hypotheses, the hypothesis of zoonotic outbreak from a wet market in mid-Dec no longer seems as relevant
Perhaps in your mind, but this is not at all a fair representation of the general scientific consensus - most still hold the weight of the evidence leans towards a November '19 origin in Wuhan
I think you were partly right on this, so wanted to update you in case you're interested. Science has a new interview with Zhi Zhengli who also no longer supports the idea that it was probably from the market:
"However, two papers published in late January revealed that up to 45% of the first confirmed patients—including four of the five earliest cases—did not have any ties to the market, casting doubt on the theory that it was the origin. Shi agrees: “The Huanan seafood market may just be a crowded location where a cluster of early novel coronavirus patients were found.”
Please don't spew falsehoods and add 'general concesus' to it.
There are reports that the French team that traveled in
October in Wuhan for mil. sports games, got infected by it. So, that it was at circulating in Wuhan at least since October, even most probably: early september.
Whether that's likely or not can be estimated by extrapolating case numbers from January back in time into 2019 and using a reasonable estimate for the R0 value without any measures against the spreading of the disease. Even if you don't trust the Chinese numbers, the estimate should be roughly in the right ballpark, since we certainly didn't have millions of deaths in Wuhan in January. The initial exponential growth phase is similar in all regions with comparable population density.
I haven't crunched these numbers, but a start in early September seems unlikely to me - call it a hunch, based on looking at the initial growth curves.
He cited two scientific papers, one which is peer-reviewed and indicates that the virus originated in Wuhan and one which is an un-peer reviewed pre-print on medRxiv, funded by a private company with interest in promoting the efficacy of wastewater monitoring, that Covid was present in wastewater. It's worth looking in to, but hardly discredits the widely-accepted Wuhan origin yet.
In your poorly fit analogy, the scientific consensus would be the gun to the single, unreviewed paper's knife.
I read the spain paper. They don’t report the false positive rate of the test they used, but if it was one that was commonly available, that paper’s P-value is something like 0.5. They don’t compute a P value.
Until the others make it through peer review, I wouldn’t read anything into their results.
As noted downthread, these points don't particularly point to it being engineered (point 1 applies in spades to SARS and MERS, for example). Most scientists believe the evidence [0] indicates it's of natural origin.
> SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins were so effective at binding to human cells, they had to be caused by natural selection.
Read the article you are citing. There is convincing evidence that the virus developed via evolutionary mechanisms. That in no way refutes lab-origin and is entirely consistent with how most labs promote infectiousness (particularly airborn infectiousness) through gain-of-function research.
Very unlikely to be the case here though, in particular because the same receptor domain is found in the wild (e.g. pangolins).
Yes, quite a lot of media have become politicised (the reason for which being quite well understood). None the less, the science is what it is - provisional. It is not surprising that commercial entities take particular positions to benefit from said politicisation.
In most countries at least, the science will ultimately give us the answer.
Thanks for the summary. It feels a bit like the intelligent design argument for God. It has these features, we can’t imagine them randomly coming together, so it must have been designed. Add that humans really want to ascribe motive and reason to events, when sometimes it really is jus chance.
You’re missing step 2: a group of virologists published research showing (indirectly, over time) exactly how one might create a chimeric virus with the characteristics of SARS-CoV-2. The argument is not “we can’t imagine them randomly coming together”, the argument is “these virologists had the experience and knowledge to put them together, and have been doing so for years in their experiments”
No, but other similar viruses have already risen out the same general conditions in China before. The evidence to say that this one is different is going to need to be very compelling. Circumstances are not enough.
I feel step 4. is just a more specific detail of step 2, and the critical tricky piece of their argument is step 3 because that's the step that synthesizes steps 1 and 2. I imagine that the rebuttals would try to show that step 1 or 3 do not hold.
Right, in the conclusion they refer to "means, timing, agent and place" which seems to frame this like one would prosecute a criminal trial in the absence of "smoking gun" physical evidence. If the researchers at the heart of all this were located far from the epicenter of the outbreak, then you'd need to find a good explanation for why it started where it did, which is why I think it should be mentioned as a distinct point of evidence.
No, that’s a misleading comparison. There is no such thing as a “scientific argument” about matters of historical record, because you cannot conduct science on history. Forensics is all there is. It’s just that there is no piece of evidence that incontrovertibly ties the virus to the lab prior to the outbreak, e.g. a leaked research document dated prior to the outbreak showing knowledge of the virus or something.
I think it's more people taking what a court calls 'evidence' and declaring it 'scientific evidence' - sure they both use that same word 'evidence' but they are quite different things and shouldn't be mixed
The summary is very much faithful, unfortunately followed by comments from commenters who obviously did not read the paper. I would just add this item, paraphrasing the paper:
In 2015 the Wuhan team of virologists working with researchers from Chapel Hill, NC obtained a chimeric virus able to infect the human respiratory tract, while unexpectedly featuring an increased pathogenesis in the mouse. The dangerous outcome was briefly discussed in the original paper, and further experiments seemed to have been carried out only at the Wuhan lab, possibly because of a US gov ban on such experiments that existed at that time.
A slightly tangential question I'd love to get more perspective on is the impact of the virus being "man made" on our current predicament. Even assuming that the virus was not naturally evolved, and its characteristics are partly caused due to human interventions we're still stuck finding a vaccine, medication and ways of reducing transmission.
Is there still a thread here that this virus is evidence that humans can possibly create chimeric viruses? In my limited understanding, using protein sequences to modify viruses is generally believed to be possible.
In the article, the authors say that, in 2015, US researchers created a chimeric virus from a bat coronavirus to infect mice lung cells. They tested the virus on human lung cells and predicted that it would be very dangerous to humans. They stopped doing research on it because it would break the US rules against making human viruses more powerful. They were working with virus researchers from Wuhan. The authors conjecture that the Wuhan researchers used the same techniques and made Sars-cov-2 and it accidentally got out.
What do you mean by this? I heard that it has incredible affinity to ACE receptors, which is why it sprrads so quickly (combined with asymptomatic infection)
Yes, it binds to ACE2 receptors more strongly, but once you're infected it's about one order of magnitude less severe.
To note, receptor affinity is not the only mechanism by which infectivity is modulated. You would already expect that a virus that is ten times less severe would spread more easily, and SARS was already able to spread efficiently through air at great distances, so it seems likely that me that receptor affinity is stronger but that other mechanism are weaker. This would explain the fact that it is less severe and not much more infectious.
Modifying a sample genome is easy. It has been done routinely in industry and academia for decades.
Alternatively, they can inexpensively “print” entire virus genomes from scratch from a digital copy, but the “printer” is pricey.
(I’m being intentionally vague here, and skipped a few steps. I accidentally wrote a tutorial for starting your own biological weapons lab, then edited it down.)
>the impact of the virus being "man made" on our current predicament
One good aspect could be the lack of an animal reservoir would make it less likely to come back. So far minks seem to be the only animals to catch it in a major way.
Or, and this is a really crazy theory, they were studying it in China because it was a local virus that they were worried might one day infect humans. Maybe they were studying which changes would make it most dangerous because they wanted to be ready if those changes happened naturally. Honest hard work can sometimes look like evil plans, and not every coincidence is the result of conspiracy.
I actually believe this to be the case. From what I have read researchers often do something called gain of function research. In this research they add genetic features to viruses that could make it more infective. This is done, at least in part, to help learn how to protect society from such a virus if it were to evolve naturally. I thought I heard somewhere that one of the functions coronavirus has that its closest known relatives do not have just happens to be something that virologists frequently add.
All this leads me to believe it was created in a lab. Likely for altruistic purposes but still. When this escaped whoever knew that it was from a lab should have disclosed it ASAP to help the world prepare.
I have no experience in virology so don't trust me.
The thing I just don't understand is why gain research would take the effort of making the virus much less deadly. This virus is around ten times less deadly that SARS, wouldn't gain research at least maintain virulence?
You switch from death rate or R0, so it's not clear which variable you are referring to. COVID-19 may be less deadly, but it has killed more people than SARS. So it does appear to be a 'better' virus.
One way of discovering what increases property X is testing that some change decreases property X.
Another way of discovering what increases property X is testing that some change indeed increases property X, while also discovering it decreases property Y.
While attempting to increase both X and Y, they made an intermediate with increased X and decreased Y. Perhaps it seemed a promising starting point to also increase Y.
I don't get the surprise. This is all par for the course in research.
I do not have experience in virology either but what you heard is correct. Researchers do work on creating new strains of viruses, with the goal being development of vaccines before epidemics start.
> they were studying it in China because it was a local virus that they were worried might one day infect humans. Maybe they were studying which changes would make it most dangerous because they wanted to be ready if those changes happened naturally.
The person you're responding to didn't say anything different to what you've said.
> Honest hard work can sometimes look like evil plans, and not every coincidence is the result of conspiracy.
Why did you say that? It certainly isn't stated or even implied by the person you're replying to.
The person he/she/they is responding to may not have originated the thought, but the quote this poster is responding to is very clear from context. It reads as follows:
“The authors feel that, in light of this preponderance of circumstantial evidence, the hypothesis that the biogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 involved human intervention should be seen as the leading (i.e. most likely) explanation.”
Which is not an accusation of research done in bad faith. The linked paper referenced 4 others as evidence. It doesn't say that those 4 were somehow done for evil - just that they were done.
Even taking the worst possible view of the Chinese government, they have strong economic reasons to have been preparing for a new SARS type epidemic over the past twenty years. They don't need the benefit of the doubt.
One could also easily argue that the CCP has very little to gain from ruining almost all of their customers financially.
So far, it also looks like mainland China was hit hard, while Taiwan got off easy. The CCP would most likely not strengthen a territory that they hope to eventually absorb.
And lastly, I would assume that with Trump, the CCP could just bribe their way into Washington.
So I see very little for them to be gained from starting this. And you yourself also conclude that India is benefiting more than China.
Why give a government with modern day concentration camps, an avoidable epidemic of prisoners with COVID-19, and military occupation of free countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or more historically in Iraq (again), Somalia, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Cuba, I feel like I’m just naming random countries at this point...the benefit of the doubt about anything?
C'mon Hong Kong belongs to China and always was. It was just leased to UK and this lease had ended in last century. China just wanted to reap benefits of Being Kong economy this is why they given them such a huge autonomy . They can change it anytime as this is their property. If someone would follow your logic Hawai is also US occupied country ...
So I'm not going to get into an argument, just make three basic points to reply here:
Hong Kong did not always belong to China, and was not leased to the UK - part of Hong Kong's area (the New Territories) was leased, but Kowloon and Hong Kong island were ceded in perpetuity.
China signed an international treaty with the UK regarding the handover of Hong Kong, a treaty which comes with certain rights and responsibilities. Sure, there's no real way to actually enforce such a treaty, but you can't really complain if other countries react to the breaking of a treaty with punitive measures, and don't trust the treaty-breaker not to break other treaties in future.
How about asking the people of Hong Kong what they want? There's about 7.5 million of us here, with a fairly unique history and culture, so maybe just being subsumed into another country wouldn't be the choice of the population?
Yeah sure the racist hypothesis of Chinese people eating bats is far more likely than a virus escape from a Wuhan lab with known protocol defects that worked on coronaviruses. /s
Bats are not really eaten as food in China. Maybe eaten as part of traditional medicines or rarely in specific rural areas but that's about it.
The videos of people eating bats that surfaced following the beginning of Covid-19 were from Indonesia.
The way this misinformation has spread is indeed based on racism (Chinese are 'barbarians' who have 'barbarian' eating habits and they should change them and eat like 'normal' people).
Now, (fruit) bats eaten as food in West Africa is a major vector of the spread of Ebola.
> Now, (fruit) bats eaten as food in West Africa is a major vector of the spread of Ebola.
And maybe one day we can conclusively say bats play no roles whatsoever in the spread of Covid-19, like we are able to say confidently about bats and Ebola. We aren't at that point yet, dismissing bats as a factor is a disservice to science.
Discussing whether bats play a role as vector or reservoir of the virus is not the same as making thinly-veiled racist comments on a culture or as spreading misinformation on a culture.
Would you rather that we don't discuss bats in this specific thread? Because all that mentioned so far is that bats are(were) sold at Wuhan market as food, and that they may have a role in spreading the virus. Both of that is true. Nothing that implies Chinese people are "barbarians" or they should eat like "normal people".
Bringing racism up where it doesn't exist discourages, or at worst suppresses, a healthy discussion.
A healthy discussion starts by acknowledging bias, racism, and misinformation. All of which have been widespread on this issue (Covid-19).
Now, this thread goes further by continuing to relay the conspiracy theory that the virus is man-made, not least when the paper concludes by claiming that the burden of proof is reversed and that it is the natural origin of the virus that must be proven.
All the things that the article posits have been looked into and the conclusion from most of the scientific community is that it is extraordinarily unlikely that this came from a lab in Wuhan.
> the conclusion from most of the scientific community
Who is this "scientific community" that you speak of, anyway? Modern science is conducted through published research papers. I read papers and decide for myself which arguments to believe. Do I understand everything? No, of course not, but I learn a helluva lot more than if I trust what a secondary source tells me about scientific research and leave it at that. You only have to read a few papers to realize that what is reported in the media is often radically different than what the authors actually claim in a paper.
But really, this is tackled head-on in the paper itself. There is basically one peer-reviewed paper that argues against the man-made theory, and the authors point out flaws in that paper. I also read it an did not come away thinking that they had made a particularly convincing argument. I encourage you to do the same; it's a very approachable paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095063/
They even state that "More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another." In other words, the jury is out, and the prosecution has brought more evidence. Time to reevaluate.
It is a false claim that the Covid-19 outbreak started from Wuhan. Scientists from Spain, Italy and Brazil have independently reported the detection of the coronavirus in their city waste water samples dating back to early 2019.
China was the first country to detect the existence of the coronavirus, but it does not mean the virus started in China. If a country announces the finding of a new virus, it makes that country a whistle-blower for the mankind, not the scapegoat.
The fact that the virus was detected in wastewater samples in Italy earlier doesn't by itself rule out an origin from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or from China.
Epidemiologist Ellie Murray said it better than I could, so I’ll just quote her: “Yes, the chance of a virus like SARS-CoV-2 suddenly arising is fairly low. That’s why we have so few pandemics!!
But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!!
There’s no conspiracy, just statistics”[0]
That said, the fact that the outbreak started so close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology is certainly suggestive that it escaped from the lab, though that doesn’t mean it was necessarily “man made.”
> the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high
This statement obscures and oversimplifies, which is unfortunately what scientists sometimes do when speaking to the public because they assume people won't understand otherwise.
When she says "like SARS-CoV-2" she is not speaking about the physical structure of the virus, she is really just referring to general qualities that a virus would need to display in order to reach pandemic level: high infectivity, unusual disease progression for which proper treatment is poorly understood, frequent and unpredictable mutation, etc.
What the researchers in this paper have done is identify the unusual components of SARS-CoV-2, i.e. the proteins and their physical structure, which give it this pandemic potential. And then they describe a sequence of research papers, published by virologists from the WIV, which demonstrate awareness of the characteristics of these exact features as well as a laboratory capability to produce chimeric viruses with these exact features. And the epicenter of the pandemic is a stone's throw away from the laboratory where those virologists work.
If you're going to make a hand-wavy argument about real-world events using Bayesian inference, you need to be prepared to explain why certain evidence is independent of your prior. Or drop the argument.
It is worth clarifying that she was not responding to this paper specifically, just to general arguments of the type “this must be man made because it has so many features that make it well-suited to spread in humans.”
The fact that researchers in Wuhan were studying (some of?) these features is stronger evidence when combined with the location. However, it also seems reasonable that features of viruses researchers study because of their likelihood to increase human transmission would show up in a naturally occurring virus with a lot of human transmission.
> However, it also seems reasonable that features of viruses researchers study because of their likelihood to increase human transmission would show up in a naturally occurring virus with a lot of human transmission.
You are letting language get in the way here. Researchers at Wuhan weren't studying "features" of viruses, they were studying what happens exactly when you insert X amino acid at Y location and how that can affect the structure of Z protein. And that exact, one in a billion, never before seen mutation happens to occur randomly right next door to them?
The line of thinking is seductive, believe me, but that's the thing about circumstantial evidence - it is very likely that there is a coronavirus infectivity research station next to a massive source of bat coronaviruses, that was in fact why the lab was there!
But do you see the qualitative difference between "pandemic virus appears in general region where these kinds of viruses are common" and "pandemic virus appears down the street from a viral research lab"?
You're also just making a straight up false claim anyway, since most of the virus samples discussed in their research come from distant regions (500+ miles away).
Instead of "pandemic virus appears down the street from a viral research lab", it might be more accurate to say "pandemic virus has first documented human outbreak in a province whose capital city is a metropolitan area of over 19 million people and also has a viral research lab." Wuhan is bigger than two New York Cities put together -- and it's not at all impossible that the earliest cases actually came from outside the city but were treated in Wuhan. (A report from the South China Morning Post in March, based on unpublished government data, was that "a 55-year-old from Hubei province could have been the first person to contract Covid-19," and the description of him as "from Hubei province" rather than "from Wuhan" is at least suggestive.)
If China's BSL-4 virus laboratory was set off in the countryside in a "little" town of 50,000 and the outbreak started there, the paper's argument would be way more compelling. If we could even reliably trace a "patient zero" to a neighborhood near the WIV, then, again, maybe. But we can't. All we can say for sure is that a dangerous global pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus started in a huge metro area (or its surrounding province) that's also the site of a BSL-4 lab specifically set up to study dangerous global pandemics caused by novel coronaviruses. The paper's conclusion is, well, pretty much the paper equivalent of archly intoning "that would sure be a weird, ironic coincidence" and staring meaningfully into the camera. I mean, yes, it would be, but that's a little short of a slam dunk.
"These meet the criteria of means, timing, agent and place in this reconstructed historical aetiology to produce sufficient confidence in the account to reverse the burden of proof. Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from zoonotic transfer need to explain precisely why this more parsimonious account is wrong before asserting that their evidence is persuasive"
ie. Basically, there are enough red-flags here that the burden-of-proof is to show that it isn't artificial rather than that it is.
...and you could hear that argument.
On the other hand, it's not really rigorous.
You can't go and say, hey, look, I invented an EM drive; rather than proving that it generates thrust without any emissions by isolating it and measuring it, the burden of proof is on everyone else to "prove why this more parsimonious account is wrong before asserting that their evidence is persuasive".
Ie. Before you go and measure anything, first you have to come tell us why we're wrong.
Now, rather than putting the EM drive in an isolated box and measuring the thrust it produces, you have 50 different people who have to go out and prove that EM drives are impossible before anyone actually goes and measures anything.
See any problems here?
I mean, you could argue it either way, but it doesn't convince me.
While I agree that the paper lays out some interesting points, they're wide open to attack on the conclusion they draw from them.
This, in particular:
"We refute pre-emptively objection that this methodology does not result in absolute proof by observing that to make such a statement is to misunderstand scientific logic. The
longer the chain of causation of individual findings that is shown, especially converging from different disciplines, the greater the confidence in the whole."
Sure.
"We posit that the evidence below attains a high level of confidence."
Yup, that's what they've done here. They posit which means, in this case, arbitrarily assert without proof that it is the case that there is a high level of confidence here.
They just haven't shown that in a compelling way imo.
How you interpret their data is up to you (e.g. whether it gives you a high level of confidence). But they’ve clearly given you proof that the virus is artificial.
Personally I think the circumstantial evidence in this case is fairly strong. But I’m hardly impartial.
> they’ve clearly given you proof that the virus is artificial
No, they haven't.
The evidence is circumstantial.
You can choose to believe what you want to believe; but the fact is that they have not proved anything.
That's the problem with the paper. Actually read the darn thing.
I'm 100% sympathetic to what they're saying here and I do hear their arguments, but this paper doesn't prove it.
> Personally I think...
You know the quote. "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."
If it comes down to "well, I think that's high confidence" and someone else is just like "well i don't" as a personal opinion ("...But I’m hardly impartial..."), then, don't you think, maybe they haven't really done a great job here?
> You know the quote. "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."
The things written down in this paper are true whether or not you agree that they lead to the conclusion that the virus was engineered (obviously, exclude their conclusions).
This isn't actually one of the qualities of SARS-CoV-2. Like other coronaviruses, it possesses a proofreading mechanism for its RNA code which drastically lowers its mutation rate compared to something like influenza.
> the chance of a virus like SARS-CoV-2 suddenly arising is fairly low
I don't know if misleading is the right word, but this isn't the whole story and could in fact mislead people. What we should be taking from this breakout is that although potentially not that likely, they are becoming more and more likely. What's bothering me is all this focus on the wrong things. We need to already be preparing for the next spillover event for the next virus, but that isn't even close to being on the table, much less discussed or even mentioned. We shouldn't and can't be treating this as a singular event, but many are.
>> Are spillover events more common now than 50 years ago?
> Yes. EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO, and others, looked at all reported outbreaks since 1940. They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production.
> But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!!
This statement is a distraction from the main question. The question is: conditional on being in a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, what is the probability that the virus arose through purely natural processes, vs. the probability that it escaped from a lab.
I am not equipped to assess the biological evidence, but I do know this: The virus came out of Wuhan, the location of a top safety level (BSL-4) lab that experiments on coronaviruses. It is China's first BSL-4 lab, and one of a small group of such labs worldwide. This alone suggests that the probability of a lab escape is not negligible and should be taken seriously. In fact, without considering additional evidence I would argue this puts the probability of a lab escape above 50%. But again, I am not familiar with nor am I equipped to assess the biological evidence.
In addition, if the virus did escape from a lab, both the Chinese government and the bio scientific community are clearly and highly incentivized to keep this fact a secret. Therefore, when a member of one of these groups argues that this is not a lab escape, this serves as very weak evidence in favor of natural evolution. The incentive to keep such an outcome a secret is so strong, that I would argue we should discount such statements altogether and focus on the actual evidence.
There is something about this way of reasoning that seems faulty to me.The reason the Wuhan laboratory was studying coronaviruses in the first place is that there is a large reservoir of the virus in the area. In other terms: diamonds are hard to find, but where you find diamond mines you also find diamonds, ergo: diamond mines must create diamonds.
Diamonds coming out of a mine is of course no surprise. But let’s look closer at these “diamonds”.
It’s said that diamonds are like snowflakes as each one’s minute imperfections make it absolutely unique.
So in this case we have a diamond mine pumping out “natural” diamonds but turns out they all have a very specific structure which exactly matches a manual published a few years earlier on making lab created diamonds which are almost indistinguishable from natural ones.
It might lead you to suspect that the diamond mine in fact provides the perfect cover story to ship as many lab-made diamonds as you want and sell them with the natural diamond markup.
I have no way to gauge for myself how definitive these genetic abnormalities are, but if they’ve found published research painting a trail directly toward these specific unique and highly unusual sequences which are also specifically responsible for the extremely contagious nature of SARS-CoV-2, then I think at least we are beyond the simple fallacy of believing “mines make diamonds”.
This is why I prefer thinking about the goal of this discussion as estimating probabilities, rather than as coming up with a logical argument that has a definite conclusion. I agree that the presence of a large virus reservoir in the area shifts the probability in favor of a natural process. I don't think it is enough to make the probability of a lab escape negligible.
As a followup, I would ask: How many such reservoirs are there, how close are they to human population etc., and therefore what is the probability that the virus came out of this particular one? How many of these BSL-4 labs are located next to such reservoirs? etc. All with the goal of estimating how likely a lab escape was.
I would like to emphasize that (1) it is important that we know the truth, because it will inform our preparation for future pandemics, and (2) there is sufficient evidence that warrants a serious look at the possibility of a lab escape. Instead of dismissing it as a "conspiracy theory", or leaving it all to the biologists, I suggest taking considering all the evidence and trying to estimate these probabilities.
It's not faulty reasoning, it's how probabilities work. I am estimating the probability of a lab escape given the above information, and without evaluating the biological evidence. It's a prior. By evaluating the biological evidence we can update this probability, but I didn't do that. I'm saying that because the prior is high, it is worth to go ahead and evaluate all the evidence. And I know that when experts who I respect looked at the biological evidence, they came to the same conclusion, namely that a lab escape is likely.
To quote Feynman: "I just saw a car with the license plate <some random string with no meanimng>. The probability of that happening is far lower than being hit by lightning!
As to the laboratory being close: it wasn't accidentally located in Wuhan. The city is the regional centre for a region that only recently expanded into somewhat pristine nature. With ongoing and constant encroachment of natural habitats, there is far more contact between wild species and humans than there is in Europe/North America, or even other Chinese regions.
Feynman is making a joke which people who understand priors would get, but you’re using the punchline as if it means something.
If Feynman had guessed the plate number before seeing it (say, written a research paper identify the exact number ahead of time) then something miraculous indeed just occurred.
Well, sadly, the damage is done. And it has certainly exposed our unpreparedness, broken/outdated protocols among agencies and exposed deep divisions in these United States. Just imagine if this is a test case, we’ve really exposed ourselves. I am quite certain our adversaries are watching and learning.
If this was a dress rehearsal for a WW2 repeat it certainly doesn't look good. In 1941 the US had enough societal fabric to conscript every fighting age man and send everyone else to the factories to make munitions for 4 years. Today, the US can't even get people to agree on using face masks and staying 6 ft away from each other for a few months.
As a percentage of the population more Americans have died from covid than the Vietnam war. The wartime comparison is apt.
No, sorry. The US was prepared, we just have an administration that failed us and an entire political party that cares more about short-term politics than protecting its citizens. We have to reform our system because it should not be possible that someone like Trump is head of the executive or Mitch McConnell is head of the Senate. Arguing counter factuals is hard, but I entirely believe we could have whipped this thing had we competent, good faith governance.
Yeah we've been tracking it and preparing for it since 1918. There's a whole industry built up over the years around preparing for this, but it still requires leadership involvement to put it into action. The leadership we have now believes in ideologies, conspiracy theories and blame. All they had to do was stand on the shoulders of science and let it work, as many previous administrations have done to prevent pandemics from becoming catastrophes.
USA and UK both reportedly took actions to stop funding pandemic response infrastructure, removing stockpiles and failing to fix known failures.
The chances of both countries doing this just before a global pandemic seem similar to the chances that there's a virus lab in a Chinese mega-city that saw some of the first cases.
So, it's proven Trump and Johnson are secretly Chinese operatives working as part of a covert group hellbent on destroying Capitalism with engineered viruses!!1one /s
This is the same stuff that causes conspiracy theories around airplane crashes.
The conspiracists go
“It must be a conspiracy because there are like these 6 redundant safety mechanisms and the odds of them all failing at the same time are extremely low”.
But the answer is obvious. If the 6 redundant mechanisms hadn’t failed, the plane wouldn’t crash.
So as long as the odds of failure of each redundant system is not 0%, every plane crash that ever happens will look the same, with multiple redundant items with extremely low likelihood’s of failing, failing together.
Imagine Russia announced last week they had a airplane hacking tool that could crash any 747 by using sonic waves to rattle some bolts loose making the wings fall off the plane.
If tomorrow, 3 different 747s crash all because their wings fell off, would that be suspicious?
You could say "well it was a plane crash, something had to go wrong". But things went wrong in a very specific and unique way that is directly linked to another nation.
It's the same here. The researchers are showing incredibly specific modifications to protein structure and DNA. It's not just "oh wow, this virus is very virulent". It's "oh wow, this virus has a handful of never before seen mutations, all of which were being studied in Wuhan, where the virus began".
The odds of having a particular order in a deck of cards is very low, but the cards have one of them anyway. I think you are looking at the odds from the wrong place.
Could have been a pandemic with a simpler virus, too.
Depends on how you define pandemic. Just in my lifetime I've seen the rise of HIV, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, H1N1, SARS-CoV-2, and perhaps others that I've forgotten, that meet the dictionary definition of pandemic. That is more than one pandemic per decade, on average, which seems like a lot.
But you can also avoid calling them pandemics. HIV, for example, is officially a "worldwide epidemic". As per the dictionary definition of pandemic, I cannot find any difference between pandemic and worldwide epidemic, but I suppose to an epidemiologist there is a difference.
There used to be a difference in the WHO definitions but they changed the definition of pandemic at the time of swine flu, the new definition didn't require the virus to be deadly anymore.
There are virus labs all over the place so this could be a birthday paradox. There's one here in rural Montana (the data we quote often about sars-cov-2 survival times on surfaces was generated there).
I've had some trouble understanding this claim though. From my understanding the bats that the virus most likely came from are thousands of miles away from Wuhan. This also is the area that the Wuhan researches went every year to collect samples.
My understanding of Chinese geography is a bit weak - but it is a bit like if a cow disease broke out in Boston near a BS4 lab. There are certainly some cows in Boston a few blocks from the BS4 lab there. Sure - there are cows in Massachusetts - but statistically it would be a bit surprising that a disease in cows would first show up there.
Yes, the institute of Virology in Wuhan did research on bats up to thousands of kilometers away. There are, after all, only two BSL-4 labs.
However, there is a large population of bats right outside Wuhan, and you can find research by the WIV cataloguing different viruses found in the same province. For example : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31009304/
The key here is that the bats the virus (likely) came from are not actually thousands of miles from Wuhan, but only a few dozen. It's just that since the WIV is a huge institute they sometimes also do research in bats in other regions too, because they don't have such facilities.
I'm a bit confused. That article doesn't mention viruses at all in its abstract, only bacterial studies.
My understanding is that the virus came from horseshoe bats. These largely live in Southern China. Wuhan is not Southern China. All studies of Corona viruses I can find deal with going to southern China (because that's where horseshoe bats live) to collect samples from horsehoe bats: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6563315/
Do you have a non-paywalled version to the link you provided? It says they looked at bacteria in bats in the abstract but didn't mention anything about which species of bats.
> But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!!
This will be misinterpreted by everyone who doesn't understand the Bayes rule (which is 99.999% of the population). What she's saying is just a fancy version of "this is the kind of a virus that would likely cause a pandemic", nothing more.
Might find more if you search for Birger Sørensen. He is kind of legit from previous work however he is viewed as a fringe character in Norway with this, and "no-one" supports this.
>“The authors feel that, in light of this preponderance of circumstantial evidence, the hypothesis that the biogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 involved human intervention should be seen as the leading (i.e. most likely) explanation.”
I think they are just two different papers. The linked paper has the following quote:
>We have just (2nd June 2020) published Biovacc-19 in QRB-Discovery: a candidate vaccine for this daunting task (Sørensen et al., 2020).
Can't speak for the OP, but for myself: I am not qualified to evaluate the evidence in this case; I just don't have the biology background. But sometimes when you get some out-there questionable sounding stuff research, and you spend a minute googling, you quickly find out that the journal the thing is published in is chaired by the author and itself has no credibility, the author is selling some form of snake oil directly supported by the dubious claims, and similar. Sure technically their argument ought to stand on it's own anyway, but there are so many quacks out there and so little time. It's a useful optimization.
> I am not qualified to evaluate the evidence in this case; I just don't have the biology background.
A "background check" does not change this fact, nor does your point actually negate the comment you are responding too. No one here is arguing that you must listen and believe everything that someone has written in a paper, but things must be proven and disproven.
"Background checking" in any form is not science. It might help you make a decision. But that does not make the decision a scientific one even if you consider it "an informed" decision.
To be completely honest, it has become silly that things like this need to be said and reirerated so often on HN.
Most things that climate change deniers post are factually accurate. If you would target the basis of their claim with the data they provide, you will always lose. Being a climate change denier when you only have access to facts that don't support climate change is only logical.
To disprove them requires you to have even greater subject matter knowledge than they do, which is unfeasible for most normal people. Even at a top university you would need several years to become a subject matter expert. Clearly not a feasible strategy for every commenter on HN.
So what can we do? Most "Climate Skeptics Science", while not being factually disproven, can lose a great amount of credibility by background checking things like authors, what scientific conferences or journal a paper has been submitted to, if it is peer reviewed, etc. In fact, with enough loss of credibility it becomes the burden of the author to prove that they/their paper is credible (see what I did there?).
If there was a clear bias in the authors' background, this would call into question the credibility of the paper. Humans are well-equipped to understand bias without a university degree, less so with bioengineering.
To summarize: HN commenters are generally ill-equipped to prove/disprove arguments in a scientific paper. Like in most sciences this isn't always necessary since you can put the credibility of the authors up for test. If they fail that test, they must prove their credibility before their scientific argument carries any weight. Most HN-commenters are adept at judging other peoples biases.
The problem is that this... methodology... works for both true & false claims. Pure credentialism held up Lysenkoism, among other things, for quite some time, after all. I mean, I read this:0
> If there was a clear bias in the authors' background, this would call into question the credibility of the paper.
And I can't help thinking how there would always be a "clear bias" of people who weren't strongly in support of the Party against Lysenkoism, so it just puts people into a stronger bubble, it doesn't defend any truth.
I think that those not capable of defending a position scientifically shouldn't attempt to do so and should leave it to those who can. I think this because I see these failed attempts as a way of weakening the point they're attempting to support.
> To summarize: HN commenters are generally ill-equipped to prove/disprove arguments in a scientific paper.
I disagree strongly with this, we have a lot of good scientists here who are better equipped than the vast majority of sites. Maybe not everything can be written into a single post, sure, but most of the people here have blogs or what have you and it's not uncommon to see someone post a rebuttal on their blog and for that to make the front page of HN.
I think I understand your argument, but I think you misunderstood me. I agree that just looking at credentials isn't the way to go. It does create these echo chambers where only those wearing "my colors" can be correct (when perhaps people need to see and hear those without "their colors"). But my argument was never to resort to pure credentialism. Looking at someones background is an important tool in our toolbox for finding the truth. My argument wasn't that a background check should replace scientific debate.
> I think that those not capable of defending a position scientifically shouldn't attempt to do so and should leave it to those who can.
Exactly! And to the 95+% of people who commented or clicked the opening link who do not have a background in bioengineering, how could they take a critical and informed stance to what the paper claims? The claim of the pandemic being man-made affects them, wheter they can fully understand the scientific discussion or not! I never meant to say that there is no-one on HN that cannot have the scientific discussion. I meant to say that most people simply have other skills than bioengineering in their toolbox, but they do have the ability to judge someones character if they find background information about them.
Maybe I should have put more emphasis on "generally" when I wrote it, but I hope I have clarified my point here and that you see it is very much in line with your thinking.
That's better, I just find that when things get political, it's best to focus on facts. People can have completely opposite views about a particular party's credentials. Here, for example, someone might reject authors that are Chinese because "of course" they'd defend the CCP vs. other people who think just the opposite.
I feel that pure facts helps take away the "heat" of an argument. Things that shouldn't be even remotely political--like wearing masks--have turned into political footballs and adding more "heat" to the issue only hardens people to bad positions that hurt everyone.
As a non-expert, if someone says something unusual that would require expertise in the field to say with credibility, I have every right to verify their expertise. Or to at least verify whether or not they have a history of things like “being convicted of fraud” or “being barred from practicing medicine due to publishing fraudulent papers in the Lancet”.
The reliability of those who write papers is fairly important. How do I know that data hasn’t been falsified? How do I know what is correct?
There are reasons why some publications are treated more seriously than others. Reputation is very helpful for the layman. The very fact that most scientists have said they feel it was a natural outbreak speaks volumes to me. This paper is just a vast chain of speculation, and I think it needs to be treated with a great deal of caution.
A background check does help though. If a paper written by or on an anti-vaxx site for example, I have some idea what I’m dealing with right away. It makes me less likely to be charitable on any questionable claims.
Also, swamping people with already settled arguments that they have to continue to prove or disprove is a disinformation tactic. A background check helps avoid giving those situations any air.
I disagree. Or rather, I don't think this is about doing science.
In many aspects of our lives we rely on the advice of experts. Personally, as I am not a trained biologist, I am unable to reliably decide if the arguments here are right or wrong. I also believe the vast majoriy of people are in a similar position.
As a result, the only options are to look at:
1. The scientific consensus.
2. The legitimacy of the people making the claims.
In many aspects we rely on multiple and competing opinions from various experts. It's not unheard of to go see half a dozen or more experts for treatment recommendations from various experts on a disease. Covid is a novel virus, so nobody has any more than 6 months or so of experience with this particular virus. So first of all, the rush to consensus is a mistake for a novel virus. Secondly, ascertaining the origin of a virus is not something that you garner from consensus. It takes serious investigative work that may take years.
So, again, consensus is just a way to cast complex, nuanced topics as flat, solved for things. That's not the case in most scientific subjects.
#2 is not what remains. You can engage with the arguments and the logic. Even as a layperson.
It is very easy to find out whether someone is an expert, as long as you really want to and don't just fool around. For example, an expert on viral diseases will have a long track record of publications in highly acclaimed journals for the past 30 years or longer.
For the purpose of validation or expert testimony, there is no need to consider everyone who has a PhD and got tenure an expert. It is reasonable to set the bar very high.
The expert on catholicism example is a needless distraction. Of course, there are such experts on catholicism, and they can tell you best what catholic doctrine says. Their opinions about virology are obviously irrelevant, though.
By your measure, Professor Ferguson at ICL is an expert in predicting diseases. He's got a big team and has been doing it for more than 20 years. Many published papers. Invited repeatedly to advise world government's due to his expert status. Widely asserted to be the best in his field.
Guess what - it appears every prediction he ever made was wildly wrong. His predictions for COVID were also wildly wrong. His code was released and it was full of severe bugs. He told the world millions would die of COVID and then when they didn't, claimed his expert recommendations had saved them, all in a fraudulent paper that assumed as a prior that the virus in Sweden mysteriously behaved totally differently to everywhere else and that only lockdowns can possibly affect the course of an epidemic (despite knowing that it isn't true).
This guy has been a failure and fraud his entire life. So has his entire field. It's not just him. All the expert epidemiologists produced models that failed to track reality in any way at all.
Yet, he's an expert by any proxy metric you care to pick. His colleagues rally around, his university protects him, Nature magazine published apologetics for him. He's an expert, unless you pick the only test that matters - are his papers correct?
I know it's scary. But decades, perhaps centuries of near sheep-like behaviour towards science and academics has led to their institutions being saturated with incompetence and fraud. They have no working institutional mechanisms to detect or clear it out. That's why so many fields have "skeptic" movements that "deny" the science. Usually they aren't actually science-deniers as painted, they're people who expected the so-called science to actually care about the scientific method and do their sums right. When they discover that it isn't happening they blog about the errors they found, and the next thing they know, they're being demonised by the press and the very self-same scientists they're criticising. Not because they are wrong, but because they are dangerously right.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Doubly so when there is motivated reasoning behind the argument.
If a pharma company came out with a paper saying “we’re almost done developing a cure for cancer!”, people would be rightly skeptical. Lethal manmade viruses are less ridiculous than that, but I’d still classify them as very surprising. Motivated reasoning for those with political ends should be unsurprising when it comes to discussing whether covid is manmade.
Checking background/credentials is due diligence to ensure you aren’t being duped. I wish the world exclusive operated on good faith argumentation. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.
I think it's valid in a politically charged scenario such as this one to take into account the motivation behind the research as well as the research itself. At least in a forum like this one, as opposed to similar research papers. And I think the GP did it in an even handed way.
In science (as in politics) it is important to understand the reputations of the people who have produced research. Andrew Wakefield being a terrific example.
It's also important to point out that this is pretty much an opinion piece.
Actually it makes sense to background check from an ethical point of view. There's a reason you are supposed to disclose your affiliation, source of funding, conflict of interest, human subject consent statements etc when publishing any bio paper.
It's not of course, it's chaff from the sort of leftists who don't believe anyone who believes in local government should be allowed to have any influence.
This is a politically charged topic so any strong political affilications are notable. I would've also mentioned it if he had run for lib-dems or green or any other party.
The idea this is relevant to the argument relies on a hugely convoluted and entirely unarticulated conspiracy theory of the form ... "the paper is a clever obfuscation that's not really about the stated topic but rather designed to push the political goals of ukip" but there's no plausible way that's true. It's about as relevant as saying the guy is a dog owner.
Of the five salient points they make here, I would argue that they are a lot less strong than the authors believe them to be.
Point 1 can also likely be made for the original Sars-CoV, and probably is irrelevant. If they show CoV-2 is more human like than the earlier, then they can begin to make the point.
Point 2 is a gigantic leap of faith - I don’t understand how they connect amino acid inserts into the sequence to gain of function experiments. It makes no sense!
Points 3 & 4 are related: The extra charge on the RBD. If you look at the previous virus, it has a much smaller positively charged patch, and this expands in CoV-2, which makes an evolutionary drift in this direction entirely reasonable. It’s not a wholesale integration of a brand new feature. This charged patch is actually important for binding to heparan sulfate, which gets involved with a bunch of viral entry events (eg AAV, Chinkunguya virus, some other coronaviruses I think). There’s a few recent preprints that discuss the HS relationship with Cov-2, and can go a long way to explain the tropism of the virus. The HS can overcome lower expression of ACE2, by possibly supporting the attachment.
Finally, point 5 is where they throw out DC-SIGN as a receptor. While there are high mannose glycans on the virus particle, I don’t know of anyone proposing this as a receptor for the virus. There is no biochemical/experimental evidence that they show to support this idea.
I will add a few points which I read on a github page and I am unable to verify, so I would be keen to have others review and sanity check:
1) The likely genetic source of SARS cov1 and cov2 is a species of bat in Yunnan province, thousands of miles away, two provinces away from Hubei (Wuhan).
2) The outbreak allegedly started in December in Hubei province when the local bat population (which does not carry this SARS virus?) would be hibernating (?)
3) Only 66% of the initial 41 COVID patients had exposure to Huanan _seafood_ market.
4) A seafood market where you would have to have non-hibernating bats from Yunnan thousands of miles away from Wuhan(?)
5) The seafood market is 13Km away from Wuhan Institute of Virology where Yunnan bats were studied. And 1.4km away from Wuhan's Centre for Disease Prevention & Control (?)
Are these points real or misinformation? If real, why is there no pressure for an independent investigation?
5) We're talking about a dense urban area ~ 1580 km^2. A _lot_ of businesses and institutions are within 13 km radius from each other. And there are 19 million people in this metro area. So a lot of things should e hapenning in the same city and only few km away, but most of them are not related to each other.
1, 2, 4) are probably irrelevant, because the researchers mostly agree that there was an intermediate host (which one remains to be determined, might be pangolin). So it doesn't matter if the bats were far away or hibernating. Consider also that people often travel, and trade is not limited to one town.
3) It only confirms that we still don't know who was patient zero, and when and where he or she was infected.
I suppose my issue here is that, all the point I mentioned appear to be inconsistencies with the current official statements and all the counter arguments deconstructed them are probability based and arguably as speculative as the authors claims on biogenisis.
> A Norwegian virologist has made claims about the non-natural origins of the new coronavirus. These claims were, reportedly, in an earlier draft of the paper, and Dr Sørensen has since repeated them to Norwegian press.
> The final version of the research paper, which has undergone peer review and been accepted for publication in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, doesn’t actually make any claims about whether the virus was natural or man-made in its current form.
> The scientific community widely agrees that the virus was not artificially engineered.
One has to wonder how a "Fact Check" site can make an assertion like this without any provided list of references. What exactly does "widely agree" even mean? Was there some sort of statistical polling they did to establish that? Exactly what percentage of the scientific community constitutes "widely" anyways?
In fact, this website appears to enjoy using the word "widely" within articles to make all sorts of broadly generic assertions without any numerical/statistical basis.
Obviously this has nothing to do with conclusion of the paper, but this "many scientists agree" lingo that shows up in various places (Wiki articles, fact-check sites, news, etc) can really be used to push a narrative without any sort of rigor. Personally I look forward to the day where I get to meet the "they" in "you know, they say..."
> The scientific community widely agrees that the virus was not artificially engineered.
Artificially engineered isn't really the question; the questions are 'is this a lab escape?' and 'if this is a lab escape, did the virus work so well on mammals pre-experiment?'.
The scientists have a massive incentive not to believe that the virus is a lab escape until the evidence is overwhelming. This is a global disaster, if it was a lab escape there will be dire consequences for the funding and regulation of level 4 biosecurity centres and potentially global trade & travel for countries that have them.
Everyone has a massive incentive to look for actual, concrete evidence for a lab escape before they draw any such conclusions. Leaving aside the uncomfortable geopolitical angle (US policy is to respond to deliberate biowarfare with nuclear weaponry), extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
1) This clearly wasn't biowarfare. The coronavirus is so useless when viewed as a bioweapon that there is no way it is even vaguely possible that it was developed as one. The idea is laughable.
The Chinese military would have to be beyond stupid to go into a bioweapons program and develop a virus that mainly only targets old people, usually doesn't cause symptoms, spreads like wildfire and is therefore a huge risk to countries with large, densely packed populations. If it was a lab escape it would probably have been just part of studying SARS-like viruses for public health reasons.
2) And there is nothing extraordinary about claiming "Standards in practice were lower than the standards on paper". That is a pretty mild claim. Lab escapes of viruses are a thing.
> The coronavirus is so useless when viewed as a bioweapon
Considering the how it's playing out in the US, it looks like a great bioweapon for an civilian attack. A big chunk of the population is old enough to be at risk of death. Another non-negligable portion of young people develops long-term disabilities (which is even more crippling to the economy than short-term deaths). And as a nice side-effect of how bad job security is, millions are now unemployed.
If you were to construct a civilian bioweapon you want to target against the US, it almost looks like you would have new playbook now. I very much agree though, that it's extremely unlikely that it was developed and planned in that way.
The variety of weird symptoms ("covid toes" and loss of sense of smell, for example) also adds a lot of uncertainty and distrust on top of the actual problems the virus causes.
Thank you. Finally someone else has realized that the scientific community may, in fact, be composed of human beings, an animal that comes baked in with an aversion to making their own life more difficult or jeopardizing the attitude of those around them to their work!
You can't look at the set of circumstances that lead up to this, factor in that a lab escape is likely, and make an honest attempt at projecting what additional controls may be rolled out on the field of virological research, and come away from that blind to the fundamental conflict of interest this may generate in people in the field.
Hell, I know researchers who can't even imagine why anyone would do the kind of work described in these documents in the first place, yet nevertheless we have the papers to show they did. We know the equipment and techniques to do the deed exist. That they were all in the same geographical and temporal location. If you don't suspect spooky action at a distance, or endorse magical thinking, you have to come to 2 very uncomfortable conclusions.
The first: technical know-how, tools, and people to wield them existed within the same space, at the same time. The outbreak started in close proximity to this potential causal nexus. This was paired with seemingly anomalous behavior in the initial response to said outbreak, and. It is politically intractable to get a good first person inspection of what was going on at the early stages of the pandemic response due to official acts of censure and destruction of evidence.
The second: Everyone who you'd defer to decide whether or not it's reasonable is also liable to place a variety of unpleasantly enhanced controls on their field as a consequence of giving an affirmative answer.
It'd be like asking the fox whether the lack of security measures on the coop may have had something to with the sudden sharp decline in the population of living chickens. We already know what that answer will look like.
We all look at each other and assume the best of intentions, but even history tells us the best of intentions have a way of finding their ways to very unpleasant outcomes in the presence of enough cogs without the full picture of what is going on, and those with enough of a picture to know what is going on are infrequently in that position due to a willingness to cut their own throats by admitting why they are really doing what they are. That's just the Machiavellian or politically inclined ones.
You've got Oppenheimer's and Teller's who did research just for the fundamental beauty they saw in the math, and understanding, and power conferred by the knowledge gained from their work.
I can't be so crazy as to be the only one to see the ridiculousness in taking the very people with the most lose as being perfectly impartial. I can't be the only candid or meta-cognitive enough to realize that at some level there needs to be a degree of salt taken to any assertion that a lab couldn't have been involved and we should all just stop even considering it.
This point - that the field of virology will be seriously damaged if a lab leak is believed, is one that Bret Weinstein, a serious biologist, has been advocating.
It explains the difference in opinion of virologists and the well informed independent investigators.
“ doesn’t actually make any claims about whether the virus was natural or man-made in its current form.”
Huh? The paper claims that the preponderance of evidence supports a theory that the virus is the product of a sequence of laboratory manipulations. I suppose this could hinge upon one’s definition of “man-made” but creating a chimera is man-made in my opinion.
> In this paper we argue that the likelihood of this being the result of natural processes is very small.
> We have deduced the internal logic of published research which resulted in the exact functionalities of SARS-CoV-2, including the convergence of agreement from difference classes of source, the timings of the stages of the research and the development of documented capabilities by named institutions and individuals
It’s the latest revision from July 1, by now the text is probably trying to be as “gentle” as possible.
This is the immunology equivalent of "jet fuel can't melt steel beams". It's embarrassing to see it here, especially in a community with pretensions of bringing "disruption" to biotech. It would take a long time to catalog all the nonsense here but I'll just say that short subsequence (6aa) BLAST is meaningless and this subsequent claim is just word salad: "Such high human similarity also implies a high risk for the development of severe adverse events/toxicity and even Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE)"
(there's no relationship between the capacity for ADE and self-similarity of amino acid content)
I didn't watch more than a few minutes, too much real research going on to keep up with the more fringe stuff.
But tl;dr it could be a lab escape but most virologists think it's more likely to be spontaneous zoonosis. In either case, the evidence for genetic modification or "serial passage" is very weak and the virus's distinguishing traits all fit in well with the background distribution of coronaviruses we know about. So the fixation on lab escape seems like a distraction.
Regarding your fuel comment, that is what NIST found. They confirmed in their report that indeed, it cant and didnt. They rely on a weakening... where the fire was, which is a few floors of the top of the 2 buildings. The 3rd building is a different eh... reason.
I’m not sure why you’re downvoted, I thought it’s widely known by now that there were helpers on the ground for 911. Building 7 being the easiest one to draw conclusions from.
This paper is not evidence, it is speculation based on an inability to see a path other than gain-of-function lab work. These coronaviruses are slow to evolve due to their proofreading capabilities but they recombine readily. The natural path, therefore, is a wild animal (likely pangolin, civet, raccoon dog, or even human) that is simultaneously co-infected by two viruses that recombine.
The problem with genome data centric analysis is that no distinction is made between RNA samples and virus isolates. Key evidence for the gain-of-function hypothesis, is one or more lab isolates that match long segments of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, including non-coding segments.
When Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier suggested that COVID-19 could be man-made, I started taking this view more seriously. Now seeing additional papers coming out supporting this, the case is getting stronger.
I'm not a biologist but I do find it strange that COVID-19 is so infectious in humans. How can a virus which supposedly 'naturally evolved' in a totally unrelated animal species (bats) be so well adapted to spreading between humans? Intuitively, that doesn't make sense.
Also the fact that the WHO has kept changing its story about this virus from the beginning is not reassuring at all. At this stage, as crazy as it is, I'm inclined to believe the conspiracy theorists because the official version comes across as even crazier.
By the same logic, was the H1N1 spanish flu designed to perfectly flourish and kill possibly 10% of hosts?
You say it in your second paragraph. You're no biologist. But you find it strange. Very few biologists find it strange. They have in fact been warning of a ticking time bomb [0 for brevity, 1 for article].
May I respectfully suggest that you stick to your lane regarding the science? WHO ups and downs and political bickering to one side, science is a messy process of honing in on the right answer and lay-people have a hard time wrapping their heads around that when other answers fitting in more closely with their world view abound. It would be nice if scientists could come out on day 1 and tell everyone exactly what to expect but that isn't how science works.
I understand your impetus to tell others to 'stick to your lane' but I respectfully disagree and cite their post and your response as why. OP had what you deem a misapprehension and they deem a valid point. By voicing their point as they believes it, you were able to retort with evidence you feel should convincingly disprove it. To me, this is reasoned, diverse discourse correcting for unintuitive misapprehensions, at the very least. Is this not a medium like HackerNews is for?
HN has always felt like a good/safe place (to me) to talk about interesting things with a mix of experts and lay people.
When it gets down to science though, agree or disagree need to be left to the experts. I can’t be the expert/final arbiter because my knowledge isn’t good enough (although I have some capacity), and so I am encouraging OP to go with the experts on this one.
It’s too complex a field for people to have their own opinions based on hearsays - science should not be politics and we’re seeing that in the world now. It doesn’t matter what you believe coming in with science, you have to be guided by (a best approximation of the evolving) facts.
I’m not totally sure what you disagree on, is it the rudeness of ‘stay in your lane’ or my argument?
Ben Franklin once said that the best argument against democracy was a discussion with the average voter. But I think there is an equal risk there of members of a society being unwilling to read what experts put out, and evaluate it themselves as well. Once people start saying I don't know anything about this and I can't make any determinations, democracy starts to make a lot less sense. At the end of the day science is basically critical reasoning backed by fact collection. If you can go read up on the facts, you can reason based on them. If someone can explain to you why you are wrong that may be one thing, but simply assuming you can never reason anything out is very dangerous.
I won't comment on the rest of your post, but I'd like to point out that there's no evidence Ben Franklin said that. That quote is commonly misattributed to Churchill, but that seems to also be a misattribution [1].
Okay, sorry, threshold triggered. I've called this attitude and tendency toward academic elitism out before, and I'll do it again.
We don't rely on experts to tell us what we know or have the capacity of knowing. The hard to access ideas have already been articulated and written down in this case. OP is absolutely right to be misapprehensive in light of these studies and the perception of "it doesn't compute". By virtue of surviving to human adulthood, and to even be here admitting there may be the makings of ignorance in themselves, they've already proven they have a higher than average meta-awareness of their own capabilities, which means they have a similar basis from which to evaluate other people's action.
What they've seen from the experts in the field is a growing rift, and far from a universal consensus. They've seen an abnormally ineffectual and particularly inexplicable reaction from official sources. As a non-expert, if they weren't consumed with misapprehension, they'd be a fool.
All "official" means of rebuttal to disprove lab origin are stymied by refusal to submit to inspection by the rest of the world by the origin nation in question, and we have evidence of official orders to obfuscate any evidence trail that may have existed in the early stages of the pandemic.
You can dismiss the motivation for why (saving face/survival), but no reasonable non-expert with even a passing interest and the capability or inclination to follow the threads laid bare in those papers should shy away from trying to reason from it. The hard part that requires an expert is done. The paper is written. The known has been hewn from the unknown. The question people should be cogitating on is as follows:
"Given what I know my species is capable of, and the circumstantial proximity of all the physically mandated ingredients for this to even be a possibility, is it unreasonable that this crisis could have an origin from the one place on earth staffed, equipped, educated, and mandated by it's reason for existence to engage in the academic pursuit of the processes that could lead to a virus such as this?"
You do not need to be an expert to consume or evaluate the output of experts. We rely on experts to handle that which no human has handled before, or to quickly handle that which few have handled before, and we are not willing to walk the path to know. This is not that. Further, if everyone left it to the experts, there would be no experts. "Stay in your lane" has no business being aired in any context in which one or the other is in the process of endeavoring to further their own understanding. If a human being has done it, a human being can do it, and not one person on Earth has the standing to tell another not to reason to the best of their ability, or through communication with peers seek to surpass their previous limitations in that department. Science has not, and never should be, only the Ph.D holders need apply. Especially when the questions being asked are far away from technical minutiae, and closer to "Given everything that would be needed to make it happen was there, should we consider lab origin as worthy of delving into?"
Given material I covered earlier in the thread (on the ill-advised endeavor of blindly deferring to the fox on matters relating to the security of the hen house), the answer should strike expert and non-expert alike as worth looking into. The expert can be forgiven for not deeming it worth it, at least, as they have much more pressing issues to attend to in trying to stop/prevent the next thing. The non-expert on the other hand should be seriously weighing how much we trust our neighbors when they say "Nope. Nothing to see here. Why are you looking anyway? How dare you! Questioning our handling of internal matters!"
Tell someone they're wrong when they have facts wrong, or don't have all of them, guiding them in the right direction, but don't dare tell a person to cease in their attempts to enlighten themselves and reason from what is in front of them. Especially on a forum where the entire point is to share knowledge with the very experts who should putatively be being deferred to.
Stay in your lane. The nerve. The unabashed gall. Here, of all places.
As I understand it, the general rule of nature is that biological specimens don't thrive as well in environments that they are not evolutionary adapted to. This is why humans can't swim very fast and fish can't walk on land.
The fact is that COVID-19 made its first jump to humans (new environment) only a few months ago and yet it spreads better than most pre-existing known coronaviruses that have been affecting humans for centuries before that seems odd.
So when scientific papers match my layman intuition (though I do know something about evolution in general, just not microbiology) and I also see the so-called 'real experts' lying about the facts, and some other experts are writing papers which seem to confirm with my intuition, then my intuition has a lot more weight.
The H1N1 flu spread during the first world war that humanity has ever had. It came in waves and each wave was evolved. Talk about extremely unique circumstances to brew the perfect storm.
When COVID-19 spread, there was literally nothing different occuring at the time that could have provoked any evolutionary changes in any virus to be more evolved in infecting humans outside of normal human density levels.
Flu viruses have been evolving in humans for millenia. This has not.
> there was literally nothing different occuring at the time that could have provoked any evolutionary changes in any virus to be more evolved in infecting humans outside of normal human density levels.
There is now, though. We're selecting strains that aren't as concerned with masks and social distancing. Back in March, I remember reading some anecdotal accounts of cities' responses to H1N1, but it wasn't widespread. We've never actually stopped somethings this widespread, so it's not clear how these measures play out long-term.
To expand on your first point, the circumstances of World War 1 led to carriers of the asymptomatic strains of H1N1 staying in place, in trenches, where the strains extinguished themselves for lack of hosts to spread to.
Carriers of the more symptomatic strains were transported to military hospitals which acted as conduits of transmission.
The result was the virus progressively evolving to become more deadly.
The first wave of the Spanish flu had a fatality rate that is typical of the flu, with deaths preponderantly amongst the elderly, which again is typical.
The second wave was massively more deadly, and killed the young in large numbers.
Is Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier not science worthy enough to give credit or what is your point? Or is science a democratic forum where the most votes win and not facts? If it's not facts but guesstimates then everybody has equal input into that, some intuitively more so.
You're probably not french nor in a quack-watch group (anti-guru groups essentially).
Luc montagnier made a lot of money writing about how homeopathy works thanks to water memory, i'd say i would disqualify every work he's done since then if it is not peer-reviewd.
But in a way this further proves my point. How can one be expected to "stick to one's lane" when you have to check on each and every "expert" out there. It is quite valid to think by oneself!
It's surprising to me the GP looked at what a Nobel laureate said with trust and was still told to "stick to one's lane".
And if science facts need to be "voted on" by a majority of scientists then it stops being a fact and more like an informed guess. But that doesn't necessarily mean a layman could not reach the same or a better conclusion.
When things are so clearly bullshit then the point of being 'open minded' about things that are done and dusted only serves to confuse and obfuscate. Take the US at the moment. A contry ripped apart by anti-scientific thinking.
To be more specific, the origins of SARS-CoV-2 are still potentially unknown but if the overwhelming scientific consensus is that it has natural origin. So what does the purpose of dissenting voices, and the average joe seizing on one of these because 'it feels right'? It's the same problem that has lead to anti-vaccers - the unneecessary sewing of doubt where it is not their place to doubt.
Stay open minded, ask important questions, but for gods sake, if you are not a scientist, recognise that those that are trained people who are doing much of the hard work for you. And scientific concensus is not going to be overturned by someone listening to the president on fox news or one outlier quack peddler
> I'm not a biologist but I do find it strange that COVID-19 is so infectious in humans. How can a virus which supposedly 'naturally evolved' in a totally unrelated animal species (bats)
Bats are mammals, and so far from “totally unrelated” to humans, but...
> be so well adapted to spreading between humans?
So, Spanish flu wasn't of avian (far less related to humans than bats) origin but was also a man-made bioweapon?
Biology, and the universe in general, aren't always intuitive.
I'm also completely flabbergasted that you take 1 person's opinion, despite it being the opposite of the opinions of a general educated scientific community, and you take that one person's opinion more seriously.
And apparently you are not a historian, either, because we've had viruses spread in humans in the past. I don't see how this being a naturally-made virus is crazier than it being man-made. In fact, it's crazy if it is man-made.
Every single pandemic in history was naturally occurring, so I think it makes sense for our priors to be weighted towards COVID-19 being a natural occurrence like all others.
Substantial evidence and compelling arguments can overcome these priors. But it’s a big claim with huge implications so I think caution is warranted.
> Every single pandemic in history was naturally occurring
Add also that the scientists have been warning for decades that another SARS-alike was almost inevitable, cf.
> The now-prophetic words could be found at the end of a research paper published in the journal Clinical Microbiology Reviews in October of 2007: “The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb.”
Would you also like me to prove to you that <insert diety here> didn’t make the human eye?
Nature in general creates amazing things on its own. Viruses are constantly mutating in animals, people are closer to these animals, and travel is ubiquitous. There’s a reason that many smart people have been warning and preparing for this to happen. No matter how unlikely, lotteries are won.
It has happened before multiple times, so clearly it can happen.
This feels like confusing weather and climate, and working backwards from a conclusion.
The evolutionary chance to make a single virus so well suited to human hosts is probably very small. If you take a single event and work backwards it seems very unlikely.
But in aggregate over time, it'll happen fairly regularly, hence the warnings.
> How can a virus which supposedly 'naturally evolved' in a totally unrelated animal species (bats) be so well adapted to spreading between humans? Intuitively, that doesn't make sense.
Rather than simply berate as sibling comments have done, I'm going to try and explain it as I understand it (also as a layperson).
Basically, you have the compatibility at the wrong level, and the effect backwards.
Bats and humans are very different from each other when taken as a whole, but if you dive into the smaller structures, they're much more similar. Lungs, heart, blood, etc, and well as deeper to cells. Viruses adapt at those levels, able to attack cells with specific structures, so when they jump species those similar structures are what get attacked. This is why it appears well-adapted to humans, because it is well-adapted to similar cell structures shared between animals.
As for the effect: The viruses in total exist at that same level, and our bodies haven't adapted to them, so we have no strong defense* in the form of antibodies. On top of that, it's a respiratory virus, where simple breathing can spread it rather than requiring some sort of physical contact. Those two reasons combined are why it spreads so fast.
* Not exactly true, I'm simplifying. We do have defenses, they just don't seem to be as effective against this virus. See "innate immune system" for un-targeted defenses that work on a variety of invaders, and "adaptive immune system" for the one that creates antibodies.
Luc Montagnier is the guy who claimed to invent a way to teleport DNA using electrical signals. His paper was so bad, so stupid and and ignorant, I initially took it for satire. It might be the worst research paper I've ever read, and it was universally mocked by everyone except supporters of homeopathy.
Speaking of which, he also buys into the homeopathy thing. Yes, he did important work on HIV, but given his overall track record, his support of COVID conspiracies should make you less credulous, not more.
Do we actually know this virus evolved in bats? To my knowledge, bats are simply a carrier, and the viruses they carry don't necessarily evolve in bats themselves (this should be checked). It seems possible the virus came from somewhere else. Bats are definitely not the only carrier of viruses, so it's dangerous to think they're the only animals to worry about. There are millions of viruses out there carried by all sorts of animals.
why should viral "behavior" be "intuitive" in any sense at all? (unless of course youre a bioligist of the requisite experience). here is one idea that might reframe your intuitons: viruses are so small there are billions of them on you right now. intuitions about the behavior of such tiny things, even outside your body, are tough. does a piece of paper block them or are they small enough to pass through the pores of the paper? any idea? and what happens to them inside your body? your intuition ought to break down by now unless you have good mental models of the biological process.
Nobel laureate James Watson insists black people are genetically stupider than white people and Watson made arguably the most significant scientific discovery of the 20th century along with Crick.
Even Nobel laureates are humans prone to mistakes.
What if he is correct? Or what if it would be exactly the other way around? We simply don't know because no one is "allowed" to do that kind of research. We found genetic reasons why some type of cancer are more common in some people. We see all kind of other differences that are genetically. Form hairs on the head to the foot shape and toes. Differences between people are obvious. So how likely is it actually that the brain is the same for all? It's only racist if you think people should be treated differently or have different rights. Its not racist if you find differences just like it isn't sexist if you find difference between man and woman.
There's no accepted definition of intelligence so how could he be correct [0]? He's using a culturally defined comparison which unsurprisingly places him on the winning side.
If you make comparisons on the basis of race (which is a social construct[1]) where the result demonstrates "racial superiority" then it is racist.
It's social and cultural influences all the way down.
He made the statements with the word "intelligence" but obviously meant IQ points as it is still the only way to measure something close to what we experience as intelligence. Away its not relevant I didn't talk about intelligence I specifically said "differences" because it removes the implicit rating. It should be up to everyone to decide whether it is good or bad or rather irrelevant or whats most likely, it has its pros and cons like almost all other known genetic differences.
The whole "winning side" and "racial superiority" etc. is made up. He obvious could not choose his own race and even put "his own race" in the middle according to his definitions of intelligence. The "winning side" would have been some Asians and he is clearly is not Asian.
He also never proclaimed any kind of race superiority. Pointing out a conclusion of his research can not be racists even if the facts turn out to be wrong because of an error. Or maybe the facts stay correct in case of the IQ differences but other research suggests that IQ points are horribly to measure intelligence. Either way you would need to find prejudice, discrimination or basis IN HIS RESEARCH not in his concussion to convict him of actually being racist.
Errors or definition changes simply should lead to a new concision that would be that there is still a measurable difference in brains but it doesn't directly correlate to intelligence.
In every other similar situation this would be common sense. For example people with Trisomy 21 have statistically significant lower IQs. Its just a fact. No one comes around and screams racism if you state that fact. Also no one who states that fact wants to express their superiority over these people. In fact people who research all this are on the front line to support these people because knowing the differences is what allows coexisting with maximal individual freedom. Denying differences does not help anyone.
>It's social and cultural influences all the way down.
Plenty of research suggests otherwise.
Like I said in my previous post "how likely is it actually that the brain is the same for all?" While all the rest of the human body has differences.
Its actually very very unlikely and reality is almost certainly a mix between social and cultural influences and genetic differences in the brain but also in the rest of the body that affects the brain in millions of different ways.
I said "allowed" for a reason. You can of course research whatever but if you publish something either none cares because you are a nobody or you get canceled if it doesn't support the "current truth". People have better things to do than destroying their reputation for zero reward.
The rest is just a lie. There are plenty known significant differences especially difference in risk for diseases that are linked to genetic differences. And that's about the only place where research is done today because if you literally are the person who tries to cure cancer you are apparently whitelisted ehm... I mean allowlisted from seeing genetic differences.
Luc Montagnier's theory is inconvenient in two ways: 1. it suggests that academic research concerning viruses is potentially catastrophically hazardous and 2. he predicted that the pandemic will dissapate all on its own because the manipulated aspects of the virus will not survive long.[1]
These are truly fascinating claims, especially the second, which despite the credibility and stature of the source, have been targeted rather than reported by traditional media outlets in the U.S.
Hmmm. Looked into it some more. Unfortunate that. I'll give his stuff a read to be sure it says what everyone else seems to say it does, but I can see your Point if other people's assessments I've read are accurate.
Has this paper either been peer-reviewed or submitted for peer-review as a preprint?
I have a PhD in chemistry and I certainly don’t feel like I’m qualified to judge the quality of the work or the track record of the authors, scientifically.
I think this paper’s deserves a thorough airing and evaluation, but I don’t think Hacker news is a forum well equipped to produce a high signal to noise evaluation on such a highly charged claim, to say the least.
Most of HN is not qualified either to judge the quality of AI, ML, opsec, renewables or any of a whole host of topics that are actually deeply complex.
But that does not mean it does not classify as potentially substantial news, that at least should be visible.
Nobody is arguing that it shouldn’t be more properly vetted when published via normal scientific channels, as these things usually are.
I’m not saying anyone’s arguing that. But I’m just trying to establish if it is being properly vetted anywhere. If so, it would be nice to amplify the vetting as much as the claim itself, given its seriousness.
So what would evidence, rather than speculation, look like in this case? A SARS-CoV 2 genome sequence dated before December 2019? Somehow identifying patient zero and corresponding records of their exposure at the lab? I’m skeptical that any hard evidence will be found. It seems to me the origin is likely to remain speculative indefinitely.
If it was the lab someone involved in the research may talk. If it's natural we may find the animal source. The Chinese have not been terribly cooperative with investigating things though so it may remain speculative.
NSA/CIA intelligence catching them red handed discussing how it happened. Of course, with the Iraq fiasco still in our collective memory, who knows if the public would believe it.
For example, in their point 1 they feel that since an aspect of the virus is well-adapted for humans it was not the result of evolution. However, viruses jumping between species happens naturally... because an aspect of the virus happens to be well-adapted for the new host species.
In fact, in this argument they seem to misunderstand the fundamental mechanism of evolution: a random aspect of a replicating organism provides an advantage in an environment, allowing the organism to thrive. For any random aspect that provides an advantage there might be thousands, millions, or more that do not. The existence of a particular unlikely successful aspect is not an argument against natural evolution. We expect many successful aspects to be highly unlikely.
Another example is in the conclusion:
> Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from zoonotic transfer need to explain precisely why this more parsimonious account is wrong
I think they rather significantly overstate how “parsimonious” their explanation is, but setting that aside, they scarcely address the alternative. In this article they address ways in which the virus might have been created by scientists, but do not address the ways in which the virus could have evolved naturally. You can’t conclude X is more likely than Y if you only consider the likelihood of X but not Y. So, e.g., they would need to survey the science around how viruses evolve and jump species naturally and show how it does not explain this virus.
There are plenty of more flaws in this article. But I’ll stop here. It’s probably pointless to argue with reason anyway, since the people putting forward this kind of nonsense already don’t care about reason.
Anyway, if this is the best case that the virus was artificially created, we can probably all rest assured it was not.
When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week unveiled a report documenting multiple safety breaches at its labs, its director for the first time suggested the country turn back the rapid-fire proliferation of such research units, which have tripled in little more than a decade to at least 1,500.
“One of the things that we want to do is reduce the number of laboratories that work with dangerous agents to the absolute minimum necessary,” said CDC Director Dr Thomas Frieden. “Reduce the number of people who have access to those laboratories to the absolute minimum necessary. Reduce the number of dangerous pathogens we work with.”
Or we could go further and impose a complete moratorium on gain of function research until such time as better technological and operational advances can be made to prevent potential leaks. These pathogens could be viewed with as much risk as nuclear proliferation is. But they are not.
We may or may not be seeing consequences today, I am not here to speculate.
What we know is that there were ongoing gain of function experiments with bat coronaviruses in Wuhan and elsewhere. What we also know is that there were leaks of SARS-1 from research labs in Beijing studying it. What we do not know is if Covid-19 was leaked from a lab.
When we convict someone of a crime we use innocent until proven guilty to make our decision. Absent evidence we therefore presume humans to be innocent of creating this virus. But that does not mean we shouldn't act under the presumption that this virus could possibly have been or future viruses may be leaked and rethink our positions on research safety.
You can more correctly assess the credibility of counterclaims, and evaluate how they are motivated to disinform about vitally important issues. Similarly, if they are wrong, you can evaluate how their motivations caused them to mislead about such an issue. Knowing the truth is almost always useful. Some people even define truth in terms of the usefulness of a given belief.
Also, if they are right, you can press to find out whether the originator of the pathogen simultaneously developed antigens for their internal use, or for later sale, and can better make the case for regulatory regimes which are better equipped to prevent such events. If it was developed by a state actor, peers can exert pressure and international law to circumscribe the potential for future harms, and the political processes internal to the state will become empowered to make internal changes to prevent harms to the people and the state such as result. It is much more difficult to disempower a successful deceiver than an unsuccessful one.
Unfortunately, the labs reside in China. Even if we had hard scientific proof (and consensus, despite many in the scientific community deriving funding from CCP backed sources), it wouldn’t be enough.
China would either:
1. Refuse outright and militarily prevent anyone seizing the land
2. As a UN Security Council and WHO member, promise to conduct their own investigations with some oversight from the WHO - and subsequently release the wonderful findings freeing CCP from accusations and claims.
$20-$30 trillion in damages for 2020-2022 is a reasonable estimate (taking into account hits to economic output, budgets, stock markets, some reasonable number for lives lost & human suffering). China could come up with $2-$3 trillion as reparations. $30t is likely a bit high (and $10t would be too low).
The global economy is unlikely to shrink more than 5-7% this year (call it a $4 to $6 trillion contraction). I believe the IMF and Worldbank are both around 5% contraction as their guesses. It will likely resume growth in 2021. Most of the major stock markets are being propped up and haven't suffered horribly. The big damage has been in lives lost, suffering caused (in numerous ways), and the social financial cost in budgets (blown out budgets, debt, unemployment, etc.). There will be ongoing unemployment costs for years post vaccine, which I've assumed in the $20-$30 trillion figure.
That 1/10th figure is not the problem. China could come up with $300b per year over ten years. The problem is they'll pay those reparations over their dead body, so to speak.
Just look at the prior chinese coronavirus-related studies, they did antibody tests in villages near bat caves for SARS-like coronaviruses, some of villagers had antibodies in 2015 despite no reported SARS infections ever near the area.
Simplest conclusion:
Zoonotic diseases sometimes jump from bats to humans in Chinese rural areas. The case clusters stay inside the isolated communities and stop naturally due to low population and lack of super-spreader events that can kickstart an epidemic.
In 2019 it happened again, but this time a villager who was infected visited Wuhan => pandemic
It is interesting to think about the origins of Covid-19 with Bayesian statistics in mind. We believe that the virus originated in Wuhan, and the two competing "mainstream" theories are whether the virus came from a wet market or a bio lab.
I don't know exactly how many wet markets exist in China, but I would guess that there are thousands spread across China. A wet market is simply a place where fresh produce/meat is sold (think farmer's market). "In Hong Kong, for example, there is a widespread network of wet markets where thousands of locals shop everyday for their meat and vegetables. There is one in almost every district and none of them trade in exotic or wild animals." [1] Of these $\Theta(1000)$ wet markets, probably a few are located in Wuhan.
Notably, there is only one level 4 bio lab in China, and it happens to be located in Wuhan. [2]
You can't conclude anything with absolute certainty doing this kind of probabilistic analysis, but this line of argument swayed me to seriously consider the possibility that the virus originated in the lab.
And, of course, note that we do not have to assume any malicious intentions. It's easy to imagine a virus accidentally escaping the lab, regardless of whether it evolved naturally or with some human intervention to facilitate research. A State Department cable from 2018 wrote that the lab "has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.” [3]
Footnote: Yes, I know that $\Theta(1000)$ just means "some constant" from a mathematical perspective. But I think the idea is clear, even if the mathematical statement taken at face value conveys no information.
That's an interesting argument. I guess one critical piece of data would be - is the probability of Covid-19 originating from wet markets the same across all of China?
If every wet market had the same probability, then yeah, it's odd that the alleged wet market is one of thousands, but just happened to be next to the bio lab in Wuhan.
But if the probability was unevenly distributed and such a virus originating was highly likely in only a few dozen wet markets, Wuhan included, then the probability of it being a coincidence is much higher.
"Right next to" being 14 km away, on the other side of a major metropolis.
Nobody knows where the outbreak actually began, though. Wuhan was just the first place it was detected. It could easily have begun somewhere in the countryside, only taking off when an infected person went to a major city. Just look how long it circulated undetected in the US - for more than a month - before anyone noticed.
The wet market and lab are not the only two options. The millions of people who come into contact with animals infected by novel coronaviruses on farms or in nature every year are, by far, the most likely origin of the outbreak.
One the one hand, you have a handful of highly trained technicians basically wearing spacesuits, and undergoing strict decontamination procedures.
On the other hand, you have millions of people in the countryside who live around bats (a few percent of which are infected with SARS-like coronaviruses at any given time), or who live around livestock that are potentially exposed to bats. You have people who go into bat caves specifically to collect guano (i.e., bat poop). And there's evidence that a few percent of people in villages near these bat populations have actually been infected with novel bat coronaviruses (based on serology).
While you worry about a few people in the lab, there are millions of people in far more risky everyday situations you're ignoring.
The issue is that the lab was placed in Wuhan to begin with because it was likely a coronavirus could spillover. That throws a wrench into that kind of analysis.
Comparing wet market vs. lab escape based on numbers of each isn't that useful to analyze.
For one thing, those are far from the only places the virus could have jumped to humans. (In fact, investigations of early cases in Wuhan show that while the market appears to be the site of a super spreader event, it wasn't the origin of the spread of the virus in humans.)
Also, by comparing counts of wet markets and bio labs, you ignore that the likelihood of spread from each are not comparable -- they'd have to have something like the same order of magnitude of likelihood for your analysis to have meaning. Obviously, that's rather unlikely to be true.
> You can't conclude anything with absolute certainty doing this kind of probabilistic analysis
I don't think you can conclude anything from your analysis considering all the holes in it.
Additional data point: Of the earliest identified cases, less than half had any connection to the wet market.
Also there's one misconception here:
> A wet market is simply a place where fresh produce/meat is sold (think farmer's market).
Farmer's markets, if they even have live animals, are kept distanced from food being sold. Wet markets, live animals are often being sold for food and/or butchered in front of you upon sale.
> "none of them [wet markets] trade in exotic or wild animals"
That's not what we've been hearing at all. Did the Huanan Seafood Market have live wild animals or not? If not, why does your quote contradict literally everything I've ever read about this market?
Has it been peer reviewed? Otherwise not being an epidemiologist it is hard for me to judge weather the scientific argument presented by this paper is sound.
Unfortunately, peer review is roughly as good as a die roll these days. I've submitted many scientific publications. I think only one was seriously read by reviewers. Others -- both accepted and rejected -- had comments which demonstrated the reviewers hadn't read it. One paper -- accepted -- it was clear reviewers didn't even give a cursory skim (ACM venue too).
NIPS found peer review to be no better than chance, and my experience is the same.
Impossible for non experts to interpret, but deserving of an equally careful and thorough response in any rebuttal claims.
> Conclusion
> We have deduced the internal logic of published research which resulted in the exact functionalities of SARS-CoV-2,
> including the convergence of agreement from difference classes of source,
> the timings of the stages of the research,
> and
the development of documented capabilities by named institutions and individuals.
> These meet the criteria of means,
timing, agent and place in this reconstructed historical aetiology to produce sufficient confidence in the account to reverse
the burden of proof.
> Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from zoonotic transfer need
to explain precisely why this more parsimonious account is wrong before asserting that their evidence is persuasive, most
especially when, as we have indicated, we note puzzling errors in their use of evidence.
> In our companion article, in a
similar forensic manner we will explore the primary evidence used to sustain the hypothesis of zoonotic transfer.
> In neither
this article nor the next do we speculate about motive.
Not sure he has any options there. The normal approach would need to be overwhelming to be taken seriously without the protection of some political language. You’ll need to defend your reasoning just for people to hear you out once there are political implications. And that’s on top of the normal work. I can’t interpret this though so I cannot say myself.
I’m a layman, but the paper reads more like a series of assertions. Maybe those assertions are self evident for an expert in the field (Id love if someone could reply with follow up information if that’s the case), but it just doesn’t seem to present actual evidence to back up the claims.
I don’t agree. Political, overconfident language is not scientifically appropriate, especially for a paper purporting to overturn the scientific consensus.
Sounds like this is language that was in there before peer review but that was removed before publication. Makes sense that part didn’t pass peer review as it’s improper to make such overconfident conclusions and claims in a scientific paper.
That evidence looks weak IMO, but it's frustrating that the current culture in science isn't "present the best argument for your position no matter how crazy it is" but rather "your arguments better agree with the established consensus unless you have overwhelming evidence that you are right."
It's because normal people are not equipped to deal with the cherrypicking and manipulative narrative that these kinds of "evidence" papers show. Take the 5G conspiracy for example, 100+ cell phone towers attacked, and workers setting up attacked as well. Lots of testable assertions made, none backed up with any kind of evidence.
I remember when I saw a headline that said gene researchers say there is no way the virus was made in a lab.
I'm like oh this should be interesting, they must have done some sort of dating on the mutations. maybe there are markings biologists can look at that are telling signs of natural vs man-made. or compared genomes to ... And there 100% undeniable argument: the virus effects bats and people researching bio weapons would -only- look at virus that effects humans.
I'm like really? are you really that narrow minded and completely devoid of imagination? you think labs are only for making bio-weapons? you think someone making a bio-weapon would limit themselves to just virus that effects humans? that's your full proof thinking?
>you really that narrow minded and completely devoid of imagination? you think labs are only for making bio-weapons?
It wouldn't even have to be bio-weapon related. It could just be a genetically altered virus (routine in gain of function research) that escaped a lab due to an accident or carelessness, and was later covered up with the whole wet market story. People who disdain the idea that the virus could be man made are almost always attacking the hypothesis of a deliberate bio-weapon release, which is such a straw man.
But this could very well be a result of priming people for a consensus (or its opposition) I’m too young to judge but it wasn’t always like this or was it?
depends on what you mean by always, but looking back at how this was handled re: tobacco, leaded gasoline, and climate change (pre 2000) should give you some idea.
As far as I personally can see, it's been like this for a large portion of the 1900s at least.
Yes, things have always been this way and if you really want to see just how long, look at speeches and other “news” from Ancient Greece.
The significant difference today is how quickly and widely falsehoods can be distributed and redistributed, and how many different sources this can happen to. Pre Internet, if I started telling my friends about this thing called QAnon, how far and how quickly could it really spread? Not far and not quickly. Today however it can spread across the world in a day and be picked up by every major news outlet. It’s disturbing, and we should all be very concerned.
>It's because normal people are not equipped to deal with the cherrypicking and manipulative narrative that these kinds of "evidence" papers show
I'm pretty sure this is the exact attitude that the poster was describing. You're just blanket dismissing out of mainstream science with accusations of bad faith.
That's because it's exhausting to debunk idiots & those operating in bad faith (often both); it takes several orders of magnitude more work to respond and debunk that unicorns don't exist than it does to post that they do.
This isn't just about science. Conspiracy theorists and unethical people with agendas use documents like this to support their beliefs, and it becomes impossible to refute them. In the age of social media, misinformation and conspiracy theories can cause real damage.
As a recent and somewhat topical example of this, there is an article circling around the internet right now that cites about a dozen studies proving that "masks don't work". If you actually read through the quoted studies you quickly realize that they don't actually support the author's conclusion at all.
But that didn't stop the author from taking a bunch of out of context quotes to make an argument that sounded vaguely scientific - scientific enough for people with a particular agenda to parade it around as if the science was on their side.
I started writing a rebuttal to this article, but as I was carefully reading through the details of the nth study to see if it actually matched what the author claimed, I realized I was just massively wasting my own time. The people spreading the article around don't actually care, they never read those studies and they never will. They just wanted something scientific-looking to cite that backs up their pre-existing opinions.
> Conspiracy theorists and unethical people with agendas use documents like this to support their beliefs, and it becomes impossible to refute them
This should give you a very hard pause and rethink. If it becomes impossible to refute unethical people because they have sources to back them up how do you know that anyone who has ever used scientific evidence in any shape or form was doing it ethically? Maybe they were just very good at citing sources?
Secondly, most ethics (except perhaps honesty) is fundamentally consensus driven. Science is supposed to be orthogonal to consensus. Thus, if one wants to be an honest scientist, one must accept possibility that one's work might be used for unethical ends. And honesty, to remind you, is an ethical position.
> it's frustrating that the current culture in science isn't "present the best argument for your position no matter how crazy it is" but rather "your arguments better agree with the established consensus unless you have overwhelming evidence that you are right."
That current culture of science has gradually driven me toward skepticism. Unless I see converging evidence from various independent sources, a claim is just a big "maybe". How many of the claims have been peer reviewed, or replicated (when everyone is busy publishing their own papers, or competing to make the news, or signing book deals)? How much of what is repeated by those with a platform just a gambit, riding on the reputation of those claiming it first? How much is just unchecked assumptions (e.g. that others will have certainly verified the claims)? As you start looking closer, the level of imposture and bullshit is just too high. Scientists are as human as anyone, with everything it implies.
See especially from Marcia Angell:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-co...
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."
And, from the 1990s, from David Goodstein, who was Vice Provost of Caltech then, here is part of why thing have gotten that way:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face."
"You better agree with consensus" has always been the current culture in science. It's nothing to do with science itself -- just human emotionality. We don't change unless we have to, unless there's overwhelming evidence that we need to.
That is antithetical to the principles of science, but it depends on what area of science you operate in.
To take the spectrum of shades of grey:
- white would be math
- first hint of grey with physics
- greyer all they way down to biology where every different field has their own bar graphs
You're a lunatic if you say 2+2=5, to return to the cases in point, it's been done, it's been dusted (mostly), and there's going to be a lot more work to do in the future to clear it up but people will always want to see the 'missing link' or proof that there was no leakage (deliberate or otherwise) from the lab.
If you make a claim that's wildly diverging from established consensus, yes, you're required to bring overwhelming evidence. Because the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the claim being wrong.
There's no point in relitigating everything from first principles unless you can make it extremely clear it's worth the effort.
I would go a step further: The odds of any claim being wrong are overwhelming, regardless of whether it is endorsed by the consensus or not, whether it is ordinary or extraordinary. Brains are not truth-making machines.
Anyhow, I'm not sure what is extraordinary about biowarfare labs making biowarfare agents. It's actually quite ordinary.
Yeah but maybe the fact that science and politics and media have become so interwoven and in some cases march to the same drum, it does feel like something is quantitatively different about science in 2020.
Agree both that 2020 is completely effed and that important issues from political perspective right now are unusually science driven.
Having to go through the process Kuhn describes but where both the brains involved in paradigm transition are not trained in evidence, and, the accumulating evidence is...people dying from COVID...is just so grim.
> "your arguments better agree with the established consensus unless you have overwhelming evidence that you are right."
Isn't that the whole point of science? Big claims require big proof. What standard are you proposing be used instead?
Or are you leaning on the "better" in that sentence in the sense of coercion? As in, you're saying that arguments without overwhelming evidence that contradict established consensus are being suppressed?
If so, how? This garbage is being circulated endlessly. There's not a virologist in the world who isn't aware of it. It's not suppressed. It's just wrong.
For the sake of argument, something like Einstein's special relativity had little to no evidence backing it up, but was still accepted simply because it provided a more elegant explanation of several concepts. Of course it also had a few weird, testable, consequences that where later confirmed experimentally.
All this is just to illustrate that it's not always easy to prove something right away with large amounts of experimental evidence. However if we consider the 'elegance' of a theory proof then we've abandoned subjectivity. It is a bit of a limitation of experimental science that it cannot determine the prior probability, which therefore must be assessed by evaluating the theory itself, which can only be done by experts, who are fallible.
When little to no experts seem to accept a theory then it's usually a bad sign though.
Einstein's special relativity had lots of evidence backing it up in that existing (Galilean) relativity was completely at odds with electromagnetism. The speed of light is constant, Newton was wrong.
In this situation there is no smoking gun to prove it was made in a lab.
I don't disagree but as this article shows you can probably find a few smoking guns if you look hard enough. However this would be evidence to support a theory that on the face of it doesn't seem to be give that good an explanation. Certainly not as good as the natural outbreak of a coronavirus pandemic, which was considered likely enough to fund the lab involved with the supposed creation of the virus. Asking for more smoking guns is not really all that helpful, in my opinion, when the theory itself is still rather shaky.
I guess this still boils down to 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence', but interpreted differently from the way the comment I replied to was using it (which implied that it meant you'd need more proof if you went against the current consensus).
> Einstein's special relativity had lots of evidence backing it up
Yes, it immediately solved several outstanding anomalies. GP should have brought up Einstein’s general relativity as something that had little evidence to back it up initially.
If you’re an expert in this field and can elaborate, I would love to read more. I’ve read the paper, but as a layman it’s difficult to discern why something is a “smoking gun” vs nature at work.
I’m not an expert. The entire content of the paper is the exposition of a series of four published studies, with Wuhan researchers involved, that took a coronavirus and enhanced its ability to infect the human respiratory system, through the mechanisms we are seeing in action now. They argue that these characteristics are known to be originated in the lab, from these previous papers.
No, Carl Sagan's famous "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is certainly not the whole point of science. At best it's merely a useful heuristic for judging how much effort to put into researching a particular claim.
Trying to use that argument as the basis for science is highly problematic because how do you know what constitutes an "extraordinary claim" ? Claims can only be evaluated against the current state of scientific knowledge, which is itself in a state of constant evolution and which has also undergone and will continue to undergo many revolutions.
The core of science is the use of repeatable methods which can be verified by anyone (so very similar in spirit to open source software). The gold standards for such methods are random controlled experiments and rigorous mathematical proofs. However in many fields these methods aren't available and weaker ones must be used. Then you can certainly get into much discussion on the strength of the methods used as well as the interpretations of the results.
the papers make a lot of specific arguments. if you have evidence against those arguments, you can say this point is wrong, here is the evidence against it, therefore that claim is likely wrong. Thats science.
Your method comes off as: thats not the consensus, thus you are wrong.
You're missing the point of "consensus". The value of having a scientific consensus of trusted sources is precisely that we don't have to all individually read random conspiracy nonsense and come up with counterarguments on our own. We can trust the experts.
So if you come by with a theory that isn't supported by those experts, the burden is on YOU to convince people, not me.
Now I know you're going to come right back and tell me why, this time, after the last thousand tries, the consensus really is wrong and the conspiracy nuts are actually believing in a REAL conspiracy this time. And again I'll rely on my general sense of statistics to tell me who to trust.
> The value of having a scientific consensus of trusted sources is precisely that we don't have to all individually read random conspiracy nonsense and come up with counterarguments on our own. We can trust the experts.
This sounds like a priesthood. Don’t consider evidence from rando papers. Instead, simply trust the consensus view of these certain, special people who have been blessed as truth-knowers and wear the right robes and hats.
And this sounds like a description you read in a comic book somewhere.
You missed some elements: that "priesthood" isn't a unified block, it's a gaggle of independent thinkers (some of them my friends and family) with a thousand year history of argumentation, refutation, and adjustment of theory. The "priesthood" gets it right, eventually, every time. Yeah, I'll trust that "priesthood".
Unreviewed papers pushed by conspiracy nuts on the internet, on the other hand, don't exactly have that record to back them. They demand that non-experts "read it for themselves" precisely because they can't convince anyone who matters.
I think there's a two way problem. The current state of public discourse on science in the U.S. is very skewed from scientific consensus. For example a YouGov poll found that 49% of Americans think that the virus originated in a Wuhan lab.
This kind of skew between public perception and scientific consensus can create a siege mentality, because it's easy to find someone who has been convinced by some media subculture that something is self-evidently true in spite of reams of evidence to the contrary. As in the vaccination-autism connection situation, all it can take is one scientific study, subsequently debunked, to give an entire movement the validation they need to completely ignore an enormous consensus with plenty of data to back it up.
BTW (need to add this disclaimer on the internets, I often forget) I'm not disagreeing with you, just riffing off your comment with some more thoughts.
Anti-vaxxers is a pretty small movement according to polls, compared to the attention they've been getting (ten percentish). And it's certainly not just a US thing. More people probably believe in astrology.
I'm not a virologist (nor a conspiracy theorist, by the way), but every time I read articles about the origin of covid being settled, I feel like the writer is trying to push an agenda. Yes they give perfectly sound logical reasoning, sure, but that's all it is. The counter view obviously will continue to be driven by the location of the origin.
Edit: and by the way, the autism-caused-by-vaccines theory is not solely the result of a bad study getting too much attention. It is similarly the result of people making conclusions from big coincidences. In this case the onset of autism (at least the age when symptoms get bad) is commonly around the same age that children get vaccinated. The study didn't just make that idea up, they were trying to validate a belief that was already held relatively widely.
It's not just weak, it's incoherent and seemingly written by someone who misunderstood some wikipedia articles on virology.
There's a difference between someone trying to seriously assess the possibility of lab origins for SARS-CoV-2 and whatever GPT-3 generated nonsense this post is.
How many times has a single scientist been chastised by the broader scientific community at first and then their original idea finally accepted as the truth?
Sometimes ideas initially can seem crazy because they're unfamiliar I guess.
I suppose in this case, I oppose this idea because it sounds kind of scary.
How many times has a single scientist been chastised by the broader scientific community at first and then their original idea finally rejected as false?
Almost always. Have you met reviewer number 2? I suppose he's right most of the time, and feels vindicated as a result. I'm just troubled by the the modulus, the work of merit, rare and precious as it is, that suffers from the statistically justified bias for false negatives.
I can certainly understand opposing an idea for diverse reasons, valid or invalid, but I can't understand how it is that some people seem to feel that opposing ideas on the basis of the balance of their features, rather than digging into the conditional structure and examining their merits and demerits, is something to be proud of, rather than ashamed. I consider that many of that group may have been anti-maskers as well, and that eventually evolution will take care of it, but I probably won't see the benefit of that.
You're free to present crazy-sounding arguments in day-to-day conversation, but a journal isn't the place to present crazy arguments. Journals are where you present overwhelming evidence or replicate/falsify existing results.
Journals are where scientists present any sort of evidence that is backed by sound reasoning, meta-studies are where overwhelming evidence tends to be presented.
If it were any other way, then where would scientists publish underwhelming evidence that is crucial for accumulation in order for overwhelming evidence to appear?
This seems to me to be a dangerous paper. It's effectively an opinion piece, pre-published, requiring a high degree of domain expertise to even read, with a clear conclusion in the title that you can see being used to deflect attention from the massive job the world has at hand (not that we shouldn't ask hard questions)
Why am I qualified to comment? Well, I’m a medical doctor (which frankly means jack shit for the ability to parse this paper) but got there through a major in biochemistry and molecular biology (which is a partial toolkit).
Unlike their paper on Biovacc-19 (0) it has not been accepted or submitted for publication yet (not enough to rule it out immediately because there is an increasing trend to pre-publication with the rate of research publications in this space as well as problems with traditional publication methodologies)
Without going too far the dissection, I would just point out that the overwhelming scientific consensus is that SARS-CoV-2 is natural in origin, this nature article describes this well (1).
Worth specifically responding to is their claim that
The co-receptor dependent phagocytic general method of action for infectivity and pathogenicity of SARS-CoV-2 appears to be specifically related to cumulative charge resulting from inserts placed on the surface of the Spike receptor binding domain, right next to the receptor binding motif.
Inserts placed is a poor choice of descriptor in my opinion. The Fox Newsification of research findings. Well, you can see the 4 additional amino acids that give rise to the change in isoelectric point in the spike protein in the nature article, and much greater minds than mine have dissected this genetically and decided that such a mutation is possible through evolutionary methods alone.
They specifically say they disagree with the findings of the nature paper so to go on any longer risks drawing my bow in this area further than I am comfortable, but I would sum it up by saying that in science it is always good to have dissenting voices (such as with climate science for all the good that that does), but with just how fraught the world stage is at the moment I don't believe this dissenting voice deserves much attenion
I'd say that the "Proximal Origins" paper makes a very weak case especially given what we now know. The essential argument is that it's more likely that the RBD came from a lineage that includes the Pangolin-CoV than that it was designed by a human. That does seem reasonable. They suggest that the virus was the result of a recombination event. However, that recombination could have occurred artificially at the WIV. The WIV and Shi Zhengli specifically have recently published papers about performing precisely this type of work on SARS like coronaviruses.
Now the closest known viruses to SARS-CoV-2 are RaTG13 and Pangolin-CoV. Pangolin-CoV is a very close match in the spike protein, and RaTG13 is a very close match on the rest of the virus. RaTG13 and Pangolin-CoV were both discovered by WIV but their sequences sat unpublished until after the pandemic started. The grafting of the spike protein onto a "backbone" of another SARS like coronavirus is specifically something Shi Zhengli has been involved with and published with Ralph Baric in 2015.
Furthermore, the spike of SARS-CoV-2 is better adapted to humans than to any other species, and it's better adapted to humans than any other published coronavirus. This doesn't make sense unless the virus spent some time evolving in humans or in human cells. Interestingly, passaging SARS like coronaviruses in human airway cell cultures is also something that has been done in recent years. Ralph Baric's lab specifically has published work on this. The only real other possibility is that SARS-CoV-2 somehow spent many months circulating in human populations undetected while it adapted to human ACE2. There has been no evidence published that this occurred.
Finally, it is quite a coincidence that the lab where both Pangolin-CoV and RaTG13 were discovered is in the same city as where the outbreak started. Yes, both of those viruses were discovered in China, but Pangolin-CoV was discovered about 1000km from Wuhan, and RaTG13 was discovered about 1500km from Wuhan.
So you've got a situation where the natural reservoir of the viruses is geographically proximal to a lab that was set up to specifically study these diseases. It's a conspiracy theorist's wet dream
The bats that carried RaTG13 are 1000 miles away from Wuhan. It's unclear how it would have migrated to Wuhan given that horseshoe bats do not live near Wuhan.
On the other hand, the one thing we know for certain is that RaTG13 was present in Wuhan and was brought there by researchers at the WIV.
I'm curious as to why this was downvoted so much. This chap seems legit (I checked), so he's not one of these "instant Internet experts." He's probably not in line for a Nobel in medicine, anytime soon, but he does seem to fit his description.
I don't see much in his breakdown that is inflammatory.
I am not qualified to judge it on its merits, though, so maybe he puts forth some kind of bad science.
Thank-you for your reply, tbh I couldn't understand it either and it was quite savage initially, particularly given the effort I went into to walk a straight line (and yes, certainly not going to be heading to Sweden anytime).
Perhaps the highly political nature of the subject matter? Maybe I shouldn't have used the word dangerous
I am just astounded that anyone is taking this seriously. Epidemiologists have been warning us for decades about the increased likelihood of infectious diseases jumping from animals to humans with the exponential growth of the population and therefore, industrial-scale farming of animal. The intense proximity of animals and humans in these circumstances combined with the shortened lifespans of the animals involved means a virus that both spreads quickly and infects humans would thrive in such a situation.
This speculation is as irresponsible as it is baseless. You know as well as I do it would mean World War III.
Between this and the active surpression of research on the topic in China through intimidation and the ongoing denial and destruction of evidence, I see no reason why we ought to give China the benefit of the doubt.
Its likely that Viruses like COVID-19 have come and gone over time, and been completely unnoticed.
The difference being now that we have much older and elderly populations, often with chronic health conditions and deficiencies, kept alive 'artificially' by modern healthcare.
For example, approximately 50% of COVID deaths are to people in nursing homes. Without this population, the virus would be put down as regular influenza/pneumonia, albeit an unusually virulent strain.
That same modern healthcare is making the covid death rate much lower than it would be otherwise.
We've had plenty of people hospitalized who were not so sick and elderly that they depended on modern medicine to stay alive. Without modern hospital care, more of them would die.
I wonder if this is a good point to be made against the paper's claims, given that viruses like MERS-CoV are not exactly proven to be natural in origin and even about HIV a lot of similar claims have been made over the years:
Gunnveig Grødeland, vaccine researcher at the University of Oslo, is one of the scientists voicing their disagreement with Sørensen. She explains that what Sørensen referred to as "inserted sequences" can enable the development of a more serious disease, but this is not unusual in nature: "Examples can be found in other viruses including subtypes of influenza (including "bird flu"), HIV, and several human coronaviruses (MERS, OC43, HKU1)."
What is important is that this needs to be investigated and the world needs to take measures to protect us from total future annihilation in a similar situation
A while ago (18 June) former biology professor Bret Weinstein said the same in a Joe Rogan podcast [0], that there are several indications that seem to point out the virus is engineered.
One of the most interesting point he brings up, at least from my perspective, was the following:
- Bats are outdoor animals
- As such a corona virus that mainly targets bats should have little trouble spreading outside
- However if a virus has been studied in a lab, so perhaps the virus has mutated to spread more easily indoors and "forgot" how to spread outdoors
- Hence this could be the reason why at the moment this corona virus seems to have trouble spreading outside
- The virus originated very closely to a lab that is known to study virusus
But Bret also brings up other points.
Also, what I found very interesting about this podcast and related to the development of vaccines, is his statement on lab mice and the possibility that laboratoria currently use mice that might have been (perhaps unknowingly) conditioned to produce desirable results in tests [1].
The "spreading indoors" argument that Bret Weinstein made was mind-numbingly stupid. I know he has a degree in biology, but this is just embarrassing.
He's making an argument that this virus has been selected in a lab for a specific transmission mechanism. That means that the virus would have to have undergone many generations of animal-to-animal transmission in a lab. There's no reason why a virus would adapt to transmit well if it were being studied in cell culture - because there's no transmission involved.
So Weinstein's theory requires a large-scale operation in which scientists keep large numbers of animals in the lab, and allow them to periodically come into contact in order to possibly infect one another. This has to go on for many generations, with the researchers constantly bringing in new animals to be exposed, until the virus "forgets" how to transmit outdoors. Where does Weinstein suppose this massive research operation occurred? The people he's alleging did this research are well known (and highly respected) scientists who publish their research in top international journals like Nature. Why did they keep silent about this massive research program, and how is it that none of their international colleagues had any idea about it?
Meanwhile, there's an obvious reason why the virus might transmit better indoors than outdoors: many respiratory viruses do. That's one of the explanations for the existence of "flu season" - people spend more time indoors during the winter. Indoors, people are closer to one another and there isn't as much air circulation.
You don't have to invent completely unsupported theories about scientists carrying out large-scale, secret animal infection experiments in order to explain why a respiratory virus might transmit better indoors than outdoors. But Bret Weinstein is doing that, because he likes attention. I was on his side in the whole Evergreen saga, but now that he's become a celebrity, it's gotten to his head and he's saying stupid things to get attention.
Do viruses closely related to SARS-Cov-2 do all the "unusual" things it does? Do they cause brain damage, reproductive damage, anosmia without congestion, strokes, and unusual clotting activity? If not, I would be reassured by someone explaining to me how a natural pathogen could pick up all these features at the same time.
Precisely this. I can't understand how so many people are so dumb that they can't add one plus one and understand that all the scare stories they hear is just normal consequences of a single issue. It's like saying that people who have a salmonella infection also have other issues likes diarrhoea, dehydration, headache, dizziness, tiredness, etc.
Well of course, if you have a stomach bug which gives you diarrhoea then you shit water and you get dehydrated. When you dehydrate then you get headaches, can feel dizzy and your energy levels drop and you feel tired.
Even the title seems intentionally written in a misleading way...the OP correctly kept the original title but it is by design misleading with that use of which
"Gain of function" is regularly done to make various viruses "better" so as to study then how to defend against that potential mutation happening naturally.
See the big scandal from some years ago when the H5N1 virus was modified in a lab to be airborne, and the accusations that such research on such a dangerous virus is just reckless.
That’s interesting but I still don’t understand the motivation. There are plenty of currently successful viruses for research that making one airborne seems like it should be taboo. But again I’m not part of that community so maybe it’s just natural for virologists you want to play with viruses.
The argument is identical to arguments supporting intelligent design, that because it evolved in an unlikely or complex way, it must have been intentionally created.
There's a reason we haven't seen a virus like this in a century - because it's so unlikely that a new virus will appear in any given year with both a high rate of transmission and a high fatality rate.
This is bad logic. Suppose some state sponsored lab actually did create a hybrid virus (not terribly hard, as demonstrated by the controversial ccr5-binder/flu fusion which was generated in Australia iirc) what would be the evidentiary standard you would use to judge that this 1) could be or 2) was the case, of course, assuming you could not have access to the state's lab logs?
Or would you throw up your hands and say "it's unprovable"?
>The argument is identical to arguments supporting intelligent design, that because it evolved in an unlikely or complex way, it must have been intentionally created.
I think intelligent design would be a pretty plausible explanation for humanity, if we already knew there was a god.
Intelligent design is kind of stupid because life is clearly not designed very intelligently.
The "evidence" that sars-cov-2 is designed with a guided purpose is kind of there in the paper, though. And that we as a species (and the bois in WIV) clearly had the capacity to do so.
Interestingly, the often repeated "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" comment is also a relative likelihood argument "like those supporting intelligent design". I'm pretty sure the proportion of people making such arguments who grasp both ergodicity and measure theory is small, since experts on those subjects are typically much more cautious about wielding such brushes. See: I just made a relative likelihood argument. May I have a Dunning-Krugerrand?
Look, when most virologists/epidemiogists look at this "evidence" and consider it too flimsy and flawed, then I wonder why people here are so eager to jump on it as "I'm not a biologist, covid19 is so unusual, it's obviously man-made". HN is embarrassing right now.
The same happened with HIV, these kind of conspiracy theories are inevitable. People always want to blame someone, even when there is overwhelming evidence that a natural catastrophe occurred. Remember the Italian seismologists who got sued because they didn't predict an earthquake?
Fact is that if the virus escaped a lab, the incident could have occurred in any other lab, too. It likely evolved naturally, though, and another fact is that it could have occurred naturally in many places in the world - e.g. in the Middle East or in Africa -, and a more dangerous virus could evolve in many regions of the world at any time.
Many people just don't want to accept this, especially those who reacted in the wrong way to the pandemic initially. It's always easier to blame someone else.
Luc Montagnier has gone completely nuts long ago. He's on several occassions proclaimed that DNA can teleport, that autism isn't real or caused by vaccines and joined anti-vaxxing movements and supported homeopathy, and the idea that water has memory, among other things.
I ran a blast query against the cov2 glycoprotein that binds to human ACE2, and it just pops out of nowhere in 2020. There is a difference of like 30 amino acids from anything that came before, which is much too great to be explained by the coronavirus wild mutation rate of 1 nucleotide every thousand years. So, possibilities are it is a strain that has evaded researchers till now, some natural phenomenon vastly accelerated its mutation towards infecting humans, or it is genetically engineered.
> some natural phenomenon vastly accelerated its mutation
Natural recombination [1] vs gain-of-function lab work. Some of the lab work leverages natural recombination by artificially co-infecting lab animals with multiple viruses and studying the resulting chimeras.
Wait, didn't Chinese authorities said when this all started that there was a minor outbreak in the BSL4 lab, but it's under control? It's just when the "under control" didn't work, they started to cover things up.
Also weird is Fauci both promoted this sort of research and oversaw the funding line that went to the Wuhan lab that funded a very similar research in 2019. My theory is this is an accidental lab outbreak, and Fauci is advising because he knows the cause and is trying to undo his mistake.
Can we stop with these posts where we dig through someone's post history and accuse them of shilling/being paid trolls if they hold a constant view that differs from our own? If you disagree with something you can debate it without having to resort to such nasty, underhanded tactics.
If that constant view only ever promotes a single narrative and doesn't engage at all in HN comment streams about typical HN topics elsewhere - no, I don't think we should.
Also, I think it's unhelpful to pretend that propaganda isn't a thing, or that HN isn't monitored by any number of state and corporate actors with a narrative to sell.
The HN guidelines specifically forbid these kinds of comments and explain the correct course of action if such conduct is suspected:
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
I really hope anyone with a genetics background, or the desire to go really in depth about what makes a virus 'Lab-made', read through the above posted first article.
It takes a long time but explains why the source is not very likely to be an evolved combined bat x pangolin virus, and has curious markers similarly used in other gain-of-function research, even similar techniques as used in past research by Dr. Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Natural origin not ruled out as being impossible, but not likely.
Combining it with this possible explanation looking at the possibility of RaTG13 being entirely fabricated altogether by Dr. Shi in January 2020, and you can at least definitely see where the conspiracy arguments come from, and why the CCP has an overwhelming need to create and play up a 'natural origin' argument, along with passing on mountains of misinformation.
This seemed mostly fluff and argument from authority to me, with the main substantial counterpoint this:
> Gunnveig Grødeland, vaccine researcher at the University of Oslo, is one of the scientists voicing their disagreement with Sørensen. She explains that what Sørensen referred to as "inserted sequences" can enable the development of a more serious disease, but this is not unusual in nature: "Examples can be found in other viruses including subtypes of influenza (including "bird flu"), HIV, and several human coronaviruses (MERS, OC43, HKU1)." Grødeland also says that Sørensen's paper offered no biological confirmation on the relevance of positively charged patches.
To be fair, this claim (the main paper) is released for a month. I even remember encountered a HN submission for it. However, the claim doesn't really attract much attention. A few UK media mention it, but focus mainly on the MI6 chief. Googling the researcher names also found mostly Norwegian sites.
Since the traction of this claim is quite low, then not much further discussion by other scientists as well.
Regardless of the source of this one, it is only getting _easier_ to engineer these extraordinarily valuable weapons. The 24x7 induced fear response is the real threat, not the virus.
This is very unlikely. The technology to design a virus reliably just isn't there.
What is much more likely is that a lab was studying coronavirus isolates from animals, and had a failure of containment. This has happened multiple times before (eg. with small pox).
But even then it is a moot point, because there is no way China, or any country for that matter, would admit they unleashed a global pandemic. Can you imagine the fall out?
The paper literally walks you through the sequence of published research which demonstrates that scientists have successfully performed chimeric virus manipulation that could explain the observed genetic components present in SARS-CoV-2. The technology is hiding in plain sight.
They didn’t “build” new proteins, they swapped them between viruses. And their published research doesn’t imply that these things could be done, it is transparent evidence that they did it already.
The technology to design a virus has been around for a decade. You need a computer, a biology degree and 8 dollars. 8 dollars is the cost for a lab to synthesize your virus and put in a container (you may also have to pay postage). It's really really cheap.
You are confusing ‘making’ a virus with designing one with particular virulence and transmission characteristics. The latter is what I am talking about.
By the way, if you try making bioweapons this way, there are automated systems that will identify it and send the black helicopters instead of your package.
The evidence is pretty compelling and I’ve suspected something was up the whole time in fact I began social distancing November of last year after hearing reports of a mystery virus. At some point in my life I met a mechanical engineer while helping out a friend who lost his job. This guy happened to be his neighbor and was the only one who was willing to run an electrical cable to my friend’s unit for a small sum since his electric got cut off. This guy explains he was working in a lab that did continuous culture experiments and explained how it worked. He had the blueprints in his unit so I had no reason to doubt him and paperwork from the lab. Long story short he quit due to military influence on the project and was pushed out over his concerns which were ethical in nature. He opened my eyes to the fact a virus can be evolved rapidly and made extremely resistant without specific genetic modification. A little bit of googling and I could see the same company was involved in research going on in that Wuhan lab. The point here is how do we define “modified” as it is certainly possible through rapid continuous cultures and selective survival of strains any virus can be modified. This happened in the early aughts and so it’s been nearly two decades this research technique has been in play. If it wasn’t for that chance encounter I’d naturally be more skeptical about possible modifications of the virus but just so happens that I’m not as a result.
1. SARS-CoV-2 has a number of unique and unusual genetic features, when compared to close relatives, many of which explain its high virulence and infectivity among humans.
2. A series of research papers published by a group of virologists, dating back a little over a decade, demonstrate (1) a progressively increasing understanding of viral features which make coronaviruses more infectious and virulent in humans, and (2) laboratory capabilities for successfully creating chimeric viruses (e.g. moving one specific protein sequence from a bat SARS-like virus to human SARS virus) to test their hypotheses.
3. Each of the unique and unusual features of SARS-CoV-2 appears somewhere in this line of research.
4. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city where the outbreak began, were intimately involved this line of research.
Taken together, the publicly-available evidence indicates that a select group of virologists had the domain knowledge and laboratory capabilities to create chimeric viruses which possess each of the unusual features of SARS-CoV-2, and that select group of virologists was concentrated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology located at ground zero for the pandemic.
The authors feel that, in light of this preponderance of circumstantial evidence, the hypothesis that the biogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 involved human intervention should be seen as the leading (i.e. most likely) explanation.
They do not make any statement about how the virus first infected a live human and spread into a pandemic, but conditioned on their biogenesis hypothesis being true, one would then assume an accidental lab release from WIV as the most likely explanation.