The theory seems plausible to me. There’s not enough evidence available to say either way, but the fact that the city where it was first identified contains a lab where they research coronaviruses in bats is some powerful circumstantial evidence. Heck of a coincidence.
If you think it had nothing to do with the lab, imagine for a moment a parallel world in which it did. What would be different in that world that we could use as a test to differentiate them?
Would there be genetic markers to see? No, because the lab theory is that it was a naturally occurring coronavirus that was being studied in the lab.
Would the Chinese government tell the world that some flaw in their biocontainment led to a pandemic? I’m going to go with “no” on this one too. The Chinese government was lying about what they knew about the disease from the very beginning until it was impossible to ignore.
Diseases get transmitted from wet markets to people all the time, so that’s also a plausible source, but there are a lot of wet markets in the world, and not a lot of labs that study coronaviruses. Could be a coincidence.
Well, if it got loose from a lab, we should probably figure out how, and how to stop that sort of thing from happening again. It’s important to study diseases, and also important to not let them out. And if it did come in from a wet market, then we should probably figure out how to reduce disease transmission from wet markets.
The actual source of this disease should inform us about how the world works and what steps to take to prevent future pandemics. The wrong source may lead to us focus on the wrong thing.
Diseases have escaped from labs before, and usually it’s due to normal human error or badly designed systems. Acknowledging that fact isn’t racist.
This isn’t “Oh, you know those Chinese, always eating infected bats”, it’s “Oh, you know those viral biocontainment protocols, extremely difficult to get perfect”.
I think that’s true, but also I think it doesn’t really do anything to dispel the “escaped from a lab” hypothesis. The vast majority of biolabs that study diseases aren’t genetically manipulating them, they’re studying them in their natural form. And sometimes they get out.
I agree, as I’ve already said above at post #8. I was responding to somebody specifically disputing the question of whether it was genetically engineered.
But if it escaped from the lab, the idea that somebody was selling infected animals for consumption seems pretty far fetched. Surely the obvious scenario would be that somebody in the lab made a mistake and got infected. Given how often it is asymptomatic, they might not have known at the time. But if this happened, there was surely a cover up, since they would have figured out it was one they had in the lab when they sequenced it.
The paper argues that the most likely origin for the novel virus’ is natural selection. This argument is fine and is the most likely origin, but it is not definitive. We should not frame it as if it is. We don’t have a patient zero and we don’t have any examples of this virus existing in nature, which are both huge holes in proving this theory. Also it has not been proven that the suspect pangolins ever passed through the wet market where the species jump is believed to have occurred. No bats at the wet market ever tested positive for the ancestral virus either. The wet market theory is speculative at best. This doesn’t make it false, but it’s very much an open question.
More importantly the “escaped a lab” theory does not require you to believe that the virus was engineered. The lab may have collected samples of both the bat virus and the pangolin virus that have been identified and the recombination could have occurred there. It could have infected someone who spread it at home. This is not a completely far fetched idea and the evidence offered doesn’t refute it.
There is a motive for the scientific community to downplay this risk and that motive shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand either.
Just because racists and assholes have circulated idiotic and politically motivated conspiracy theories is not a reason to stop asking questions here, but that’s what the overwhelming message is right now.
I thought of this thread while reading the one about serving meat with the head attached, and why anyone would do that. It also reminded me of the podcast I saw with one of the American Ebola survivors, and in the Q&A, a woman asked him if it was really true that people in Africa eat bats, rats, and monkeys.
I think it’s definitive that it was not deliberately engineered. The novel RBD contains a set of mutations that, out of billions of possible sets of mutations, turn out to increase affinity for human ACE2 in a novel manner that current technology could not have predicted would work.
I’m not sure what “huge holes” you are seeing here. We have the pangolin RBD, we have the bat. We may never be able to prove exactly where and when the recombination and/or natural selection occurred. But surely you’re not suggesting that we need to know that in order to accept that the origin is natural selection rather than genetic engineering? We don’t know exactly where and when humans diverged from chimps, but we know they did.
Now this is plausible, and maybe this is what you’re getting at, rather than genetic engineering? We can exclude deliberate engineering, but we cannot easily exclude mutation/recombination and selection events that might have occurred in a lab environment in a manner that’s indistinguishable from what might have occurred in nature. This point is addressed in the paper, and here I agree that their dismissal of this possibility is not conclusive. It rests on:
(i) No published work describing progenitor viruses that might therefore have been kept there. I think we can dismiss this as worthless.
(ii) A requirement for natural selection in cells with ACE2 receptors and in the presence of selective pressure from an immune system - i.e. not in cell culture. But I don’t see how they can exclude some initial recombination that could have occurred in cell culture passage in the lab, then infected a lab worker, then been subject to natural selection in human hosts.
Yes, all of this I’ve said myself earler in the thread.
If it wasn’t engineered deliberately then necessarily that means it came about through natural selection. And if it came about through natural selection then there’s no particular reason to assume it came about through natural selection in a lab.
It sounds to me like someone really wants to blame the virus on a deliberate act by a Chinese lab but now that it turns out the virus almost certainly didn’t come from a deliberate act by a Chinese lab they are looking for some way to involve the Chinese lab in some way anyway.
Labs in the Sahara don’t study South American wet tropical rainforest frogs. This isn’t a coincidence.
But I don’t think the Wuhan lab is located there because of close proximity to natural habitats (in which category I include wet markets) where this virus might have arisen, except in the sense that it’s the general vast area, which includes much of southern China and other countries. And it’s a world leader specifically in bat coronaviruses, it’s not as though there are labs like this dotted around the region. It may be a coincidence, but I think it is notable.
If mutant killer tree frogs started eating people a few blocks from the preeminent tree frog research facility in South America, we’d be all over them.
This is a compelling argument against it being designed from scratch (though there’s a non-zero chance that a Chinese scientist knows more than the author of this paper). But it’s not a ironclad argument against it being created randomly as a undirected experiment. Also, this seems to assume that the designer didn’t know about the ACE2 mutation in the pangolin virus. How does this debunk the idea that a scientist who was aware of both strains couldn’t intentionally cause the hybridization?
Knowing about the pangolin and the bat, but never being able to put these two infected populations together in nature is I think a pretty serious gap. These strains, as far as I’ve read, are not widespread in either of those populations and the strain in the pangolin seems to be pretty deadly to them. There’s circumstantial evidence that this could have happened in nature, but we ought to be able to zero in on a place where these two viruses could have crossed paths.
Also, the predominant theory was that these two populations were introduced to one another in the Wuhan wet market, but AFAIK they have found no evidence that pangolins, specifically the sickly pangolins where RBD was observed, were present there.
So either the pangolins and the bats crossed paths somewhere and this new strain infected one of them (or both) before jumping to humans. Or a human was infected by both and it hybridized in a person, which we should have been able to identify from an early case. If the former, we’d be able to find some examples of that wild hybrid in bats or pangolins still circulating in nature.
This is a long way of saying that what has been suggested by the science here should be observable somewhere, i.e. in nature if natural selection occurred. Maybe we haven’t found it yet…
Essentially yes, this is the idea that is getting lost in the argument between the nutters and the conventional thinking. I am still curious about the question above as to why a scientist who knew about the two strains couldn’t engineer it, but I concede this is not where I’d put my money.
The dismissal that you cite triggers my bullshit meter and leads me to question the biases of the authors. It reads a bit like they are trying to prove the conclusion they already reached which casts doubt on all their conclusions.
The fact that scientists found both the viruses in Mojiang in 2012 and in Guangdong in 2019 respectively, and that the lab in Wuhan seems a perfectly likely place to study both, makes this theory every bit as plausible as the idea that the two viruses crossed paths in nature somewhere. Doubly so since the eventual outbreak was in Wuhan and not in Yunnan or Guangdong provinces somewhere.
Yes, the fact that the virus started in a city with a lab that studies this stuff has been at the root of the crazier conspiracies, but it’s not nothing either.
Fair enough, but most of the responses in this thread have been citing the Proximal Origin article in one form or another as a definitive rebuke of the “escaped from a lab” theory in it’s entirety.
I think the OP’s theory about a lab worker pawning sick animals is utter garbage but I’m bristling at the overall dismissiveness in this thread and others. The mainstream/pop science media has done a really effective job and shutting down any questions suggesting a lab accident as a cause. This is observable in this thread.
…the OP doesn’t talk about a “lab accident.” It talks about wet markets and sacrifices. Is the so-called MSM not insisting on one, the other, or both?
And the scientific community is not the MSM, and have been citing the former in this thread, not the latter. Can you link to anything in the MSM that you find particularly problematic?
People who maintain a wholesale skepticism of the mainstream media tend to be quite vulnerable to getting sucked into conspiracy theories. In fact, you night even say that skepticism of anything the MSM broadcasts IS a conspiracy theory.
The big problem with even discussing the lab-leak hypothesis is the continuing conflation of “originating from a lab” with “genetically engineered and purposefully released from a lab”.
The latter seems to be completely ruled out, the former has not and certainly needs to remain on the table as a viable hypothesis.
The WHO’s “investigation” into that piece of the puzzle is severely lacking and likely to remain so as long as a full, independent audit of the facility cannot be carried out. I’ve seen nothing from the WHO that leads me to believe their “extremely unlikely” rating of the the lab leak hypothesis is warranted.
It is unfortunate that to even raise this possibility gets people tarred as “conspiracy theorists” when the actual hypothesis put forward is nothing of the sort, the “accidental release” hypothesis is by far the common version and is valid.
Were they studying viruses of this type in the lab? Almost certainly yes.
Would the research involve seeing how such viruses mutate, combine and spread? Almost certainly yes.
Have such diseases escaped from labs before? Absolutely yes.
I know from professional experience what level of access and autonomy is required to uncover potential issues in such settings. The WHO have not been given such access and such an audit has not been completed. Nothing meaningful can be done in a 3 1/2 hour visit wholly under the control of the hosts and no solid conclusions can or should be drawn yet.
All of these lab leak hypotheses share the common trait of mixing a stubbornness to consider the most plausible explanation because it’s not exciting enough with a large degrees of ignorance over how biomedical research is done with a healthy dose of unfounded stereotyping of the Chinese.
No, lab workers weren’t selling dead bats at the local wet market for the simple reason that… virological research isn’t done on live bats*. Workers go out into the field and collect samples which are frozen and then shipped back to be analyzed. The bats aren’t transported back to Wuhan because that would be a massive pain in the ass for not much gain. The samples are sterilized in the field before they get shipped back to Wuhan to a) stabilize them and b) make them less dangerous to work on so at no point, are live bat viruses entering into Wuhan from the WIV.
Yes, it’s possible that there was a sooper sekret bioweapons project also going on at the WIV under the covers doing god knows what but even if you had tasked a bioweapons division to deliberately try and cause a zoonotic COVID spillover and gave them a 10 billion dollar budget, they still couldn’t have accomplished it in less than a few decades. Remember, there’s no way to tell just by testing a bat that it contained a coronavirus that was especially effective at infecting humans. You would have had to import millions of bats into Wuhan every year and rub each bat on a human volunteer until they got sick from something and then had each volunteer try and get another healthy volunteer sick and then that second volunteer had to escape quarantine and wander around in public before you found COVID. This is, uh… probably not something that any government does.
In contrast, a natural zoonotic spillover pandemic is what experts have been warning is inevitable for multiple decades and simply a matter of time. In some Southern Chinese villages, 3% of all the villagers tested had antibodies for some kind of bat coronavirus. Hundreds of millions of people are living in wildlife interfaces where they have regular interactions with wild animals every single day. A zoonotic spillover of some kind is happening somewhere in the world on a regular basis and each one is a dice roll. It’s literally the most boring thing that could have happened which did happen but people resist it as an explanation because it’s too boring for them.
But no, simply the lack of evidence that it wasn’t a lab leak is enough for some people to consider it “plausible”.
* Yes, yes, I know, some research is done on live bats but it comprises a tiny proportion of research that any lab does using a tiny number of bats that are confirmed healthy before they are used in the lab.
That is specifically not what the most common Lab leak hypothesis is proposing.
And if anyone decides to take a completely natural zoonotic spillover off the table as well I’d be very quick to criticise them as well. Of course if what you say is true (it is) and the risk of such events is high (it is) and the region involved is at high risk of such an event (potentially true) then why would it be surprising to find out that research on exactly these types of viruses is being undertaken? I’d be more surprised to find out it wasn’t being done.
For the sake of scientific rigour the hypothesis (of an accidental release) should be considered up until the point where a more complete pathway has been shown. I can’t see any good reason to take it off the table yet. certainly not based on what the WHO has uncovered. Accidental release has happened before, it remains a plausible hypothesis at this time. What evidence has convinced you otherwise.?
Oh shit! I was going to reply, but saw that thoughts on the theory were intended for the hivemind, and god dammit, I’m not real sure if I’m part of that or not. (I’ve never fit well into groups, so it goes.) Anyway, could someone please judge my hivemind potential or status? Don’t need answer fast.
