I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse towards assuming that the lab leak theory must be true. It's not so much the theory itself that's surprising. Lab leak remains plausible but less probable then natural origins.
The sudden shift is just baffling to me though. This huge new furor is due to anonymous CIA sources saying three people got sick? That's extremely tenuous evidence, as you state above.
As far as I can tell, the only biological evidence is the furin cleavage site, which is not uncommon in related viruses. Also, this has been known since the beginning, when the Chinese CDC released the first genome of the virus.
This seems more like people declaring victory because they're finally getting a hint of public support for their suspicions, rather than some truly damning evidence.
Natural origin and lab leak are in no way exclusive. The lab was collecting viruses and creating new ones - either one could have leaked.
I don't have strong views as it's incredibly difficult to prove a negative (that it was not a leak), essentially you would have to identify and prove exactly the actual vector and even then it might be difficult to be conclusive. Lab leak seems however like a very likely scenario and it is crazy how people try to dismiss it without any actual evidence either way - and China's approach to handling the investigation and information flow definitely should cause anyone to be suspicious.
I guess at this stage thr only way we cam find out is if in 10-20 years there's a whistleblower from the lab.
1. The Wuhan institute for virology collected a naturally occurring virus then did gain of function research which subsequently resulted in infected lab workers. There's not a known virus with close enough genome sequence similarity to SARS-Cov19 for this to be plausible. It would be a monumental undertaking to induce >1k mutations in the closest known relative virus. If someone pokes around WIV or a cave in the area and finds a virus with much, much higher but not identical sequence similarity, then that's very strong evidence for gain of function research followed by a leak. In the meantime it seems unlikely that WIV would start doing gain of function research without first publishing about their newly discovered virus.
2. SARS-Cov19 in more or less its current state was naturally occurring in a location that WIV researchers sampled. The virus then escaped while WIV researchers were characterizing it. This requires one to believe that WIV workers, in a biosafety lab, were the first humans to encounter and contract and spread this virus. This is in contrast to the alternate hypothesis that unprotected workers shoveling guano, or maybe a wet market vendor got the virus. I know which possibility I would bet money on.
The point is that we don't have to prove a negative, just weigh the evidence.
Consider the priors. There's one lab of that type doing that kind of work in China. What is the likelihood that an epidemic emerging in China next to that one lab while not being from the lab?
Also lab leaks are a type of industrial accident. Industrial accidents happen even in the places with the most stringent security protocols. Were that lab's protocols the best in the world? Can't say. And those that are best in the world have contingency plans, for when shit hits the fan.
There have been two serious epidemics of coronavirus disease in recent history: SARS and MERS. There is overwhelming evidence that both have a natural origin. Indeed, the fear of further crossover events is precisely why there was a lab studying these viruses in Wuhan.
I'm not saying that this wasn't a lab accident. What I'm saying that is that if you were actually "considering the priors" (in the statistical or strictly literal sense), you'd be concluding the exact opposite of what you're saying in this post.
> There have been two serious epidemics of coronavirus disease in recent history: SARS and MERS. There is overwhelming evidence that both have a natural origin.
This supports the idea that a jump from animals is a possible explanation. It does nothing to indicate that a lab leak is a unlikely explanation (especially with a sample size of two.)
However, the fact that this arose in one of 3 cities on the planet where this research is conducted does provide significant evidence that lab leak is a likely explanation.
Given the lack of evidence, it seems irresponsible to make strong assertions that one theory is more likely than the other.
But SARS has leaked from these labs before. Obviously we already knew about SARS-CoV-1 when it leaked, but this could be one of those situations where the virus leaked from the lab as its first exposure to humans.
You're misreading the context. The furor comes from the fact that the lab leak hypothesis (distinct from the engineered virus hypothesis) was dismissed by fact checkers as a debunked conspiracy theory for a year based on nothing but assurances from the few scientists they interviewed.
The fact checkers were definitely too eager to mark this as debunked, but it still lacks real evidence. No fact checker would mark this theory as true even now.
So let's not make the same mistake by eagerly jumping to conclusions that it was engineered in a lab based on assurances from a different set of scientists.
So are we to believe that, out of 200 million square miles on this planet, this novel bat-related coronavirus just naturally emerged within 8 miles of a facility that specializes in novel bat related coronaviruses?
During a season when bats hibernate to areas thousands of miles away?
If you look at the circumstances behind this pandemic's origins, and do some basic back-of-the-envelope math, the lab-leak hypothesis is close to a certainty.
> So are we to believe that, out of 200 million square miles on this planet, this novel bat-related coronavirus just naturally emerged within 8 miles of a facility that specializes in novel bat related coronaviruses?
No, of course we are not "to believe" that. What we are to do is to consider it is a possibility. Or are we to believe that SARS-CoV-2 could only have emerged as a lab leak? Both the natural and the lab-leak hypotheses are feasible, but treating either of them with near certainty or as impossible is not justifiable with the current evidence.
Imagine an alternate universe where all events played out the same as in our own, with the exception that the Wuhan laboratory's existence was a perfectly kept secret by the PRC. In that case, would the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan lead to the certainty that there must be a secret facility nearby that specializes in novel bat-related coronaviruses?
>Imagine an alternate universe where all events played out the same as in our own, with the exception that the Wuhan laboratory's existence was a perfectly kept secret by the PRC. In that case, would the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan lead to the certainty that there must be a secret facility nearby that specializes in novel bat-related coronaviruses?
The natural emergence of a virus from an animal is much more likely than the existence of a secret, unknown research facility, but much less likely than a lab leak (particularly in the circumstances surrounding COVID19).
All these mistakes in reasoning that I keep seeing in these discussions is making me truly understand the definition of "gaslighting".
Well hey now, I think people are too quick to call gas light these days, such that the term is losing some of its meaning, seriousness, or utility. The people you're talking to (at least in this thread) are stating their own beliefs with their own evidence. No one (that I can see) has directly attacked your self confidence (unless you're extremely sensitive) or attempted to convince you that you're in a different reality to exert control over your personal self expression, esteem, or confidence. Gas lighting implies direct personal attacks and what I see here is thoughtful interesting, but serious debate. I would say that you saying you're being gas lit here is strong indication you truly do not understand what that term is.
We’ve been searching for intermediate animal species for 15 months and none have been found (SARS and MERS were found quickly), SARS-Cov-2 is actually quite bad at infecting bats, and the key thing: arginine-based (i.e DNA amino acid, not RNA) furin cleavage site on the spike protein (widely regarded in the GoF research as a great way to increase human infectivity).
To say nothing of the incredible coincidence of the WIV.
What makes you think it's less probable than natural origins? The wet market has probably been there for 1,000 years and this hasn't happened. Compared to the virus appearing in one of 3 labs in the world that would be studying it.
The Wuhan wet market episode, in retrospect, was almost certainly a superspreading event rather than a patient zero situation. The virus's effects are so variable from person to person (lots of asymptomatic carriers, people who just get a little cold, symptoms undistinguishable from the flu) that it was almost certainly already circulating in Wuhan unnoticed, until it became big enough to be hard not to notice.
Consider for example what happened in the US, in Washington state at the beginning of the pandemic. The first local community transmissions were detected weeks after they had already started happening, even though there was already a relatively high degree of alertness. Without testing, it wouldn't have been detected at all until a similar superspreading event finally took place.
The very fact that miners got sick a few years ago makes it also sound likely, based on Wuhan's history and based on the virus's characteristics, that bat-to-human transmission took place in similar circumstances as the miners' a few weeks or months before the Wuhan wet market event, had some low-key human-to-human transmission simmering in the community which people wrote off as the flu (at worse), until that one superspreading event.
You wouldn't call your local farmers market a 'wet' market because it isn't.
Wet market is the standard English term for a market that sells live animals, typically seafood. They are full of tanks and water filled buckets and polystyrene boxes etc., thus the "wet" adjective. There are 2 less than a mile from my home and I've never heard anyone use a different name for them.
You'll find this term used by the HK (i.e. China) government, so I fail to understand how you came to the conclusion that it's based on racial paranoia:
"As at October 2019, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department ("FEHD") managed a total of 74 public markets, of which 35 were standalone wet markets and 39 contained both a wet market and cooked food centre." [1]
In Cantonese, it's "濕貨街市", which is literally wet goods market/area.
Fair enough. I don't think I made my point exactly how I wanted on second though. Let me clarify.
The term in and of itself is not racist. But the way it was used in American media, and the negative connotations that were fed to us along with it, are very problematic.
The term 'wet market' has never really been used in the American lexicon. The first time the majority of Americans heard it was in regards to the pandemic. And it was instantly being using in a derogatory way. The media and day to day talk was filled with negative and inaccurate depictions of what these places really are.
They were said to be dirty, filthy places, where people are eating bats and all kinds of weird animals. And if only those Chinese people weren't being filthy and eating weird 'dirty' animals in their 'wet' markets, we wouldn't have this pandemic! I can't tell you how many times I heard this lane of thought early on last year.
And how many people still believe this to be the case? Probably a lot. Meanwhile, these places are just normal markets, where many people go to buy fresh meat, seafood & produce. And they spray water on the floors to wash them off (this by the way is my understanding of where the term 'wet' comes from, it doesn't have to be a seafood market).
This was what I was really trying to say, it's not the term 'wet' itself, but the way it was introduced to an audience who was not familiar with he term.
"Farmers' markets may be indoors or outdoors and typically consist of booths, tables or stands where farmers sell their produce, live animals and plants, and sometimes prepared foods and beverages. Farmers' markets exist in many countries worldwide and reflect the local culture and economy. "
"A wet market (also called a public market or a traditional market) is a marketplace selling fresh meat, fish, produce, and other perishable goods as distinguished from "dry markets" that sell durable goods such as fabric and electronics."
Sounds like a farmers market is a kind of wet market.
This is exactly my point. What exactly makes you think this is the case? How do you know there are animals in 'poor health' there?
Maybe the term itself isn't the problem, but the way it was used in American media, especially during the Trump administration. The term, and it's connotations were used in a way to disparage Chinese people. It has been used to suggest the reason we have this pandemic is because these 'inferior' people are eating bats and weird animals in their 'dirty' wet markets.
Your comment confirms that it is a problematic term.
I quote from the Oxford Dictionary:
"wet market n. South-East Asian a market for the sale of fresh meat, fish, and produce."
There is no mention of animals in poor condition and on-the-spot slaughtering. That's your prejeduce.
I don't think I made my point very clear. And don't assume I did no research before you offer nonconstructive insults. Let me clarify.
Sure the term, in and of itself isn't racist. It's the way it was used in our media, and the negative connotations that were implied by it. Especially under the Trump administration.
A good definition: "A wet market is an open marketplace with stalls of vegetables and other food items presented for sale. Many wet markets are found in China and the Philippines. The name is based on the fact that these informal market environments usually have wet floors. Shoppers tolerate sloppy floors and items piled on mats or boards as the foods sold at wet markets are known for their fresh quality and low price. The moisture is created by market workers regularly spraying the produce and floors with water."
Now if that's the way it was presented to us in Western media, there would be no problem. But that's not how it was portrayed. They tried to make it sound like some horrific place. Some god awful disgusting place, where people are eating bats and other weird animals. And it's dirty, really dirty. "If only those dirty Chinese people weren't eating disgusting animals in their 'wet' market, we wouldn't have this pandemic!"
How many times did we hear this repeated by people early on last year? And how many people still believe this depiction of the market? Probably a lot, even in this comment thread it was parroted. Meanwhile in the real world, that market isn't any different than most other markets in another country in the world.
There is no way anybody could have gleaned this explanation from your original post. And yeah, your original post did not indicate any prior research, so don't try to justify yourself ex post facto. The fact that you have to quote wikipedia indicates you've never been to one.
Well, we know for a fact that a >96% similar virus was found to infect the miners naturally in 2006… how hard is it to imagine a few more tweaks since then?
We’ve already had many mutations of COVID occur in the past year. Is it crazy to think virus which infected the miners couldn’t have mutated into what we know as COVID?
No, there is no public evidence that the miners were infected by the virus. The common story is the WIV sent people there to check if it was a virus. From there it diverges to the WIV saying "turns out it was a fungus" and then an obscure masters thesis about the cases that just assumes it was a virus.
> This seems more like people declaring victory because they're finally getting a hint of public support for their suspicions, rather than some truly damning evidence.
I think this is the main thing driving these comments. Instead of being totally against the idea, these articles are providing a shred of hope (despite not having any new proof as far as I can tell) for the people who are locked in on the lab leak theory. Definitely people getting overexcited about it and trying to claim they were right the whole time and were being "censored".
There was censorship in the form of calling the hypothesis of a lab leak (distinct from the hypothesis of an engineered virus) a debunked conspiracy theory. The fact that the theory is considered acceptable again is what people are claiming vindication for, and rightly so.
People can be censored but wrong, however, that doesn't mean the censorship policy was good. Censorship distorts your information market and makes getting to the truth harder. Sure, only the general public might be being censored but that makes said public (and the news media) associate taking the censored hypothesis seriously with craziness and evil. Which makes it substantially harder for university scientists (and to an extent, government ones) to research (this can take the form of cancellations, like Steve Hsu, lack of funding or just reputational damage)
It's like everyone has forgotten or never even knew the context of the original strong pushback. It wasn't against the possibility of a lab leak, it was against the rhetoric (lies) coming out of our own Whitehouse trying shift blame to China. Lies that were dangerously feeding anti-asian sentiment in the USA.
I can't believe you're putting me in a position to have to even slightly defend Trump. You are giving Trump supporting whack jobs credibility when you give deference to this sort of revisionism.
The news articles that require the most analysis are the ones of which we are least critical (i.e. those which are prima facie the most factual), yet here you are with a lazy article about Rush Limbaugh. I mean come on, we know he was there to spread propaganda.
Now here's a CNN article, posted May 1, 2020. Let's lightly analyze it:
My favorite part about this article is that, coming back to it today it's so easy to plausibly deny the associations they were making, but in the context of the time the conclusion from the article is that the lab leak theory is a conspiracy that the intelligence community is pushing back against.
>President Donald Trump contradicted a rare on-the-record statement from his own intelligence community by claiming Thursday that he has seen evidence that gives him a "high degree of confidence"
POP QUIZ!
1. Did Trump say he had a high degree of confidence that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the lab?
2. Why would CNN need to misrepresent something Trump said when he says enough BS the way it is?
Answer key: (1) No, watch the video (it was the interviewer who projected that statement onto Trump). (2) I don't know, but it doesn't seem like they have any good reason to do so.
The reporter drives the sentiment. The reporter is who the viewership listen to on how to feel about a particular statement. And what has the reporter done in this article? They have first suggested that Trump claims to have strong evidence the virus was leaked from the lab. Then they move on to suggest the intelligence community disagrees with this claim:
>In acknowledgment of that effort, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued an unprecedented public statement Thursday prior to Trump's comments making clear the intelligence community is currently exploring two possibilities but cannot yet assess if the outbreak "was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan" or began "through contact with infected animals."
Then they create an association with conspiracy theories:
>While the statement suggests the intelligence community has not yet developed a clear assessment as to how the outbreak started, it does say that officials have ruled out the possibility that the virus was "man-made or genetically modified," agreeing with a near consensus among scientists and refuting conspiracy theories.
The article says both theories are plausible! you might think, but the reporting brings us back to this central claim:
>But the lack of evidence to back up claims that the outbreak began in a Chinese lab has not stopped top administration officials, including Pompeo, and some Republican allies of the President from raising the possibility in public comments.
(emphasis on possibility is mine)
So when you say
>It wasn't against the possibility of a lab leak
I have to disagree. The mass media artfully manufactured the consensus that the possibility of the lab leak theory was unfounded. They did so while producing factual information that suggested we didn't have much evidence backing either theory, but used skillful narration to direct all attention to denying the possibility of the lab leak.
Fuller video of what lead of to those questions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3BRQ7scbqc . Trump was already starting to spread the FUD about the virus situation being China's "fault" and strongly insinuating it was somehow malicious.
Also, in that CNN article video he is asked a question not asked in the above video. A very direct question and NOT leading:
> What gives you I high degree of confidence that this originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
> I can't tell you that. I'm not allowed to tell you that.
Seriously though, I was alive and not under a rock in 2020. I was paying attention to all of this while it was happening.
Great, I don't have to do any Trump apologetics now. But while you were busy adjudicating what Trump did or didn't say, you forgot about what CNN was doing in its article - the most important part (and CNN isn't the only one who did this). They created an association of the WIV lab leak theory with Trump, suggested he was in disagreement with the intelligence community, and wrapped that up with denials of the lab leak theory.
Let's not go into semantics and technicalities here - journalists know how to write and they know how to clarify. They had ample opportunity on air and in writing to say something to the effect of "while Trump is a fucking idiot and mischaracterizes the lab leak theory, we can not rule it out". Instead they manufactured an association and a denial instead of separating the valid parts of the theory away from what Trump claimed.
Well look, I didn't bring up Trump. I just said the WH because there were a lot of people within the admin and in their circles who were trying to offer up China as the "enemy" in the COVID situation with a bunch of BS supposedly backed by secret evidence that has yet to be seen in order to deflect blame for the situation in the USA away from.. Areas they didn't want the blame to fall. Probably related to the 2020 run-up.
I wasn't posting that article as the word of god. It contains information about conspiracies and BS that was being spread around at the time. To add context to what was being pushed back against at the time. Interviewers will also setup questions like this:
> Last night so-and-so indicated he has seen evidence that China is responsible for the coronavirus outbreak and may have manufactured it in a lab and released it on purpose. Let me ask you this: What do you think of the lab leak theory?
> Sigh Let me be clear, there is NO EVIDENCE THAT THIS yada yada yada.
So now a year later, with all the context apparently down the memory hole, this is being shortened to:
> Let me ask you this: What do you think of the lab leak theory?
> Sigh Let me be clear, there is NO EVIDENCE THAT THIS yada yada yada.
"OMG, this was so-and-so then and look at him now:"
> I have never ruled out the possibility of a lab leak. I just thought then and now that the highest likelihood is a jump between species.
Oh please. Your one article doesn't change the fact that even mentioning the lab leak theory got you labeled a right-wing conspiracy nut and in some cases banned from social media.
The furor about the lab leak theory isn't solely due to the 3 hospitalized workers, but also due to a well-sourced article [0] written by a editor of the Science section of the New York Times (as well as for Science and Nature), Nicholas Wade. Those two broke on the same day. Papers hadn't been covering the theory in depth since last summer.
In my opinion the most damning part of the article is the section about the human-adapted furin cleavage, I recommend reading that part. The working assumption is that we should find people with precursors to covid without that furin cleavage adaptation, and we don't. If China wants to prove it wasn't a lab leak, they'll need to find instances of the virus that predated that adaptation- as was the case with SARS.
> I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse
I've witnessed the same exact pattern multiple times in the last few years- often in relation to China. It's as if suddenly everyone not only shifts opinion, but exhibits the same amount of faith in it as if that opinion had been the most accepted for years.
This speaks volumes about 1) the ability of media (and possibly of powerful, interested parties) to sway the public opinion; 2) the easiness with which people align themselves to a (perceived) majority without ever looking back.
In particular, what has happened here is probably that the presence of Trump prevented half of the US from aligning to a narrative that would have been otherwise quite successful, given the political times. Trump gone, that half of the country suddenly was free to align itself with that narrative.
It’s how imperialist propaganda works. When material interests shift, suddenly and with one voice all “independent” western media pushes the same unsourced narrative.
If you remember the lead-up to the Iraq was, it was the same surreal experience.
Sorry, I was being hasty (replying in too many locations to produce a good and thoughtful response -- instead I produced a factually incorrect one)
Damns my credibility a bit, doesn't it? Well, I should have more accurately mentioned that the FCS insertion (CT CCT CGG CGG G (PRRA)) Is rather unusual by betacoronavirus standards in that arginine is not typically coded as CGG (~5% of the time), and that RR coded for as CGG-CGG has not been seen in any betacoronavirus to date.
But my quality quotient on this thread has been all over the place. Probably too invested in getting people to consider the possibility of the lab leak as most probable until we see an animal population to prove the natural hypothesis.
Maybe the Biden administration has concluded that it's possible there may have been a lab leak. It would be damaging to them if they did nothing and ended up unable to conclusively prove there was no lab leak, because Trump has been banging on that drum for a long time now.
So, they don't really have much choice in this. They have to convincingly look like they're pushing to find the truth, or they'd be handing ammunition to the Trumpists.
And when I say "find the truth", I'm not taking a stance on what that is. I personally don't rate the lab leak theory very highly, but then I don't know enough to say one way or the other.
So you’re saying because there’s no new evidence the new furor is not worth it? It was clear for some of us from the beginning that the evidence is damning enough from the beginning.
If you’re going to demand incontrovertible evidence that might never come up. But considering the scenario, viz. a cabal of careless scientists accidentally unleashed a plague that is killing millions , even the slightest hint of a cover up needs to be taken seriously.
Having worked with enough scientists I don’t for a moment doubt this hypothesis either. Ego and arrogance is what drives most of them, they’d rather choose self-perseverance over accidentally killing millions and go home to have lasagna as if it was just another Thursday without a sweat.
The sudden shift is just baffling to me though. This huge new furor is due to anonymous CIA sources saying three people got sick? That's extremely tenuous evidence, as you state above.
As far as I can tell, the only biological evidence is the furin cleavage site, which is not uncommon in related viruses. Also, this has been known since the beginning, when the Chinese CDC released the first genome of the virus.
This seems more like people declaring victory because they're finally getting a hint of public support for their suspicions, rather than some truly damning evidence.