I’ll note at the start that, as @XT already stated, these experiments were with viruses not related to SARS_CoV-2 so the pandemic could not have arisen from them. These were the experiments I was describing in the Rand Paul thread as a “rescue-of-function” as opposed to “gain-of-function”. No experiments were designed to make more virulent or transmissible viruses. They were simply testing out each bat virus spike proteins by making hybrid viruses. They tested in cell culture and in mice. However, one of the constructs made mice more sick than the original WIV1 virus.
Tabak said in his letter that the research plan had been reviewed by the agency before funding, and the agency determined that it did not meet the NIH’s definition of gain-of-function — or what the agency terms [research involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential](Research Involving Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens | National Institutes of Health (NIH)) — “because these bat coronaviruses had not been shown to infect humans.” It therefore was not subject to review under the Department of Health and Human Services’ framework for enhanced pathogens.
But, he added, “out of an abundance of caution and as an additional layer of oversight,” the agency had outlined criteria in the terms and conditions of the grant award for a secondary review, “such as a requirement that the grantee report immediately a one log increase in growth,” meaning a 10-fold increase in viral growth, to “determine whether the research aims should be re-evaluated or new biosafety measures should be enacted.”
“EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant,” the letter reads. “EcoHealth is being notified that they have five days from today to submit to NIH any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted under this award.”
Tabak then spent the bulk of the letter’s second page explaining that bat coronaviruses used in the experiments “could not have been the source of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic,” as we’ve established.
The NIH is simply being extra careful, as they should be. Meanwhile Republicans lie about it to suggest that this caused the pandemic because that’s what they do.
A new commentary in Science by Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona reports investigation of the very first recorded cases of COVID-19 to determine its origin. There is also a CNN article with a quote or two from the author, and some other scientists. The author says the research “tells us that there’s a big red flashing arrow pointing at Huanan Market as the most likely place that the pandemic started.”
Importantly, it looks at cases before the Huanan Market was identified as a hot spot, removing bias that might have existed to identify unknown pneumonia near Huanan Market as COVID-19, but unknown pneumonia away from it as something else.
This map really tells the story. Cases with no obvious link to Huanan Market were still geographically centered around the market, and suggests that community spread was already happening in the second half of December, 2019.
I don’t think anyone has suggested that the market was not at the centre of the original outbreak. How the virus got there remains to be verified. Could be brought there by animals, could be by a single asymptomatic person. Once there it seems like a great place from which to spread.
Also, at this point in the “investigation” I don’t think I’d put too much trust in information gleaned from internal Chinese organisations. What info remains unavailable is just as important as what is, seeing as it is unlikely that anything remotely contrary to China’s official line will be willingly shared.
By ‘anyone’ do you mean in this thread? If so I think that’s true enough. If by ‘anyone’ you mean, well, anyone, I’d say there are plenty of people who have asserted a virus origin outside of the market…or even outside of Wuhan for that matter (and, of course, outside of China).
Especially in the run-up to Chinese New Year and all of the people coming and going. But yes, a market, especially of the type here, would be a huge potential spreading site, especially if you’ve ever been to a Chinese market where they are selling fresh foodstuffs. I don’t know if it’s still a thing, but the ones I’ve been to the customers regularly pick up, touch, and squeeze through a lot of the foodstuffs on display.
Sure, but between the market and the lab there are hundreds of other great places for it to spread. It’s quite a coincidence that it didn’t spread in a mall, or school, or factory etc but the only other place that could conceivably be the origin.
Meanwhile where is the circle of cases around the lab?
The data make one hypothesis look obvious and the other like a pretzel.
We only have the data that China allows us to have. I personally don’t trust that we have anything like a complete picture of what happened in the run up to, and immediate aftermath of, the initial outbreak.
The Worobey article linked above specifically only uses data put into disease tracking systems before the identification of COVID-19 in order to eliminate that sort of influence. These are systems where doctors routinely record information about respiratory disease, pneumonia, and such to allow for early identification of new disease outbreaks.
This tells us that in the week or so before anybody knew about COVID-19 there was a large outbreak of respiratory diseases surrounding the Huanan Market. At this time, there was nothing to cover up, because there was no epidemic.
Of course, as soon as a new disease was suspected and believed to be linked to the market, the Chinese government went in and cleaned up the market and killed all of the animals before samples could be taken.
I actually read an article about this a while ago (I think it was on science.org), so haven’t looked at your link directly. It is interesting, and I agree, the author did try and use as unbiased data sources as possible. The trouble is, IIRC, the time period the author was looking at that data was either late 2020 or early 2021…which was plenty of time for the data to have been whitewashed. That’s the real trouble here…we don’t know what all the CCP ordered scrubbed or modified, or how complete they were in doing so. Simply, ALL data in the country is subject to the CCP’s modification, including social media posts, news articles, scientific papers, and data…everything. And this is especially true of data that is accessible by foreigners.
The irony here is that in this case, the data may be as clean as the driven snow, and the CCP is actually not covering this up…but, the fact that they have given every indication that they are covering up something, or at least not wanting to give full disclosure because of their usual paranoid reasons makes everything suspect. The further fact that they have, for sure, manipulated other data such as economic data and lied about, well, just about everything any anything also makes them always suspect, even when/if they are telling the truth. That’s the problem when you have such a history as theirs wrt overt and covert data manipulation, lying, stealing, and covering up anything that makes them look bad…basically, if you ever are trying to tell the truth, most of the people who understand your record simply are, by default, going to be skeptical.
Yes, that was the thing about this particular article. I miss-remembered when I said the author used information put in the disease tracking systems. He used information before the disease tracking system was started in January (it was supposed to be running the whole time, but wasn’t, more Chinese shenanigans?).
He looked at individual case reports out of different hospitals, and tracked down the relevant information, such as where the patients had been, and if they had associations with the Huanan Market. Unlike what I said, this is not just the results of a quick search of a database, but rather lots of work to elucidate each specific early case.
Honestly…probably not. That’s the thing in China. There is plenty of honest corruption as well as just sloppy practices and shortcuts. Plus, you have different levels where the CCP operates, often at cross purposes to some monolithic concept of an all-powerful CCP. At the local levels, officials often manipulate things to make themselves look good, even if it’s contrary to the national party levels. One thing that local officials get dinged for (sometimes in extreme ways) is outbreaks of disease that can cause disruption in their local production.
But I agree, when I read the article you mentioned I thought the author did a really good job of trying to gather as unbiased sources of data as one could in that system and circumstance. As I said, the real issue is, it’s hard to know how actually unbiased it really is. Consider economic data. Analysts have tried for years to figure out what is or isn’t unbiased data, and they still don’t really know. I suspect, getting back to what I said earlier, that even the national leaders on the standing committee or just below them don’t REALLY know what is real and what is fantasy wrt the data.
Which again means any CT anyone can think of must be true because “sneaky China”.
With regards to covid, there has been plenty of debunked nonsense at this point. Remember the stories of how people were dropping dead suddenly in the streets and China was covering it up?
More importantly, remember how for the last 18 months or so I had been saying how low case numbers were in China, and people were accusing me of being a commie spy or whatever for believing the propaganda?
Well, most news agencies now, certainly those with actual journalists in China, concede that case numbers have indeed been tiny and none have claimed to have found even one case that was not in the official stats.
The story now has become that maybe China’s “zero cases” approach is not well-suited to a world where Covid is endemic and relatively well tolerated with vaccines. That’s a fair point, but note all the things conceded in that article (i.e. that China’s policy until now has limited cases extremely well).
Anyway, my position is this: I am willing to speculate as much as anyone, I am not saying “trust China” as some would like to strawman my position as.
However: CTs that people pull out of their ass are often not worth the faeces they’re printed on, even when they are about China.
And, in the case of the lab leak hypothesis, it not only lacks supporting evidence where we’d expect a plethora; far more than could be hidden so totally, but also there’s a plethora of data weighing against it.
So “I wouldn’t rule out a lab leak, though it looks extremely unlikely right now” – fine
“The lab leak and market hypotheses are about equal right now” – not fine, not being objective at all.
I’m not saying you said that but that’s what it comes down to.
If a hypothesis with less than zero evidence (in the sense that there’s counter evidence) can be defended with just saying you don’t trust china, then any hypothesis ever can be defended that way.
I don’t trust china – xi literally is Winnie the Pooh!
Some CT-ers will take the untrustworthiness of the Chinese government as sufficient cover for proposing any amount of batshittery, but it doesn’t follow that referencing that (very real) untrustworthiness when putting forward a hypothesis means that the hypothesis is also batshit.
(and I just noticed that I’ve referenced batshit twice, I’m happy with that, I’m leaving it in)
Whatever you think of the lab leak hypothesis, it certainly does not fall under the banner of “less than zero evidence”. The sum total of the defence for that hypothesis is not “I don’t trust China” is it?
It’s definitely not zero, but much of the evidence is circumstantial…which means there is not a lot of hard evidence, especially if one is constantly pushing for hard evidence only. Of course, much of the evidence for zoonotic initial infection is also circumstantial at this point, but there is more of it and it’s more accepted…probably because, in the end, this is probably what actually happened. Of course, a posited zoonotic infection didn’t have to necessarily come from an animal in one of the wet markets, it could have also come from the lab. The real issue, as always, is we don’t know. An independent and international investigation hasn’t and won’t happen. The WHO investigation was a total farce. And even THEY want a do-over and have been shut down by the CCP. At this point, I think it’s unlikely we will ever get the real data or actually know what happened, as I think it’s been mainly purged.
I’m on record, from the beginning, stating that the natural explanation is the more likely one, given the evidence that is currently available to us.
What I push back against is an eagerness, by some, to hand-wave competing theories away before a full and proper investigation has been done and before any other theory has been substantiated.
That eagerness should be tempered even more by the certain knowledge we have of the organisation best placed to help being actively seeking to cover-up, deflect and push a predetermined conclusion.
That fact doesn’t make any alternative hypothesis more likely but it should make us all very wary of firmly backing or ruling anything out.
I’m on record as saying I think it’s the most likely. Because it still is the most likely.
Yes, agreed. The fact that even discussing this theory in the past led to huge attacks and claims of CT was, to me, distressing. There are a number of circumstantial evidence points that seem to indicate it COULD have been a lab leak. The issue was that this was conflated with the assertions that it was deliberately leaked, or that this was an engineered virus that was leaked, etc…which wasn’t what the original lab leak theory was about.
The real issue here is the information vacuum we are and have been in wrt the early data in China and lack of transparency coupled with the CCP basically blocking any international effort to investigate except for their dog and pony show WHO ‘investigation’. All of this makes it really hard to trust or believe anything the Chinese are saying wrt what happened or trust their data. Data in China is written on sand, even at the best of times, and is always subject to modification if the CCP wants to do it.
No, it doesn’t. Again, I agree. It’s why despite my perhaps well-known antipathy to the CCP and its shills I STILL think the zoonotic theory is still the most plausible. I do think that the lab leak theory is viable, and I do think it should be investigated, but then I think the zoonotic theory needs to be investigated as well. We should have the actual animal and patient zero information by now…but we don’t, not really. And, as I said, at this point I have serious doubts we ever will. This whole mess has been so covered up and whitewashed by the CCP…and by their various international lackeys in high places such as the WHO top leadership…that I don’t think we will ever, really, know.
There were a ton of theories in the early days. Some were BSC (Bat Shit Crazy), some less so…and some were viable theories. On the lab leak side, there was and still is a lot of folks who thought this was an engineered virus, deliberately let loose by the CCP (or, by the US as part of a deep false flag or something) to wreak havoc on the world. This was certainly conflated, along with some other BSC type theories, with the lab leak theory which was saying that this was an accidental leak from a lab, either due to an infection of lab personnel working with infected animals or working with infected samples that simply got out due to sloppy standards. I remember trying to explain to people in the early discussions that they were separate, but at that time no one seemed interested in any sort of nuance, and all were deemed CT whackadoodle dandy talk, plus must be a Trump supporter, etc etc. The media was equally conflating all together into a melange of crazy that they then dismissed completely as CT nonsense.
If there’s other evidence then I haven’t heard it. I’m only aware of:
3 workers at WIV went to hospital with flu-like symptoms – which isn’t actually anomalous, once you’re aware that they weren’t actually admitted, and hospitals in China are also the places for primary care (e.g. you could go to hospital to get a traditional chinese remedy for your sore throat).
A report on safety procedures at the lab made several recommendations for improvement – for this you have to know that such inspections frequently find areas of improvement, and the head of that (French) group has said that there’s no way a virus could have escaped the lab. Why are we being selective in what we choose to listen to?
Versus the wet market being the clear epicenter early on.
Imagine a reality where 2/3 of cases had come from WIV, and the remaining third were also found to have a link there following an investigation. You really think people would be saying Hey, let’s look more at the wet market across town?
Granted one difference between those two scenarios is motive: China has motive to not want the WIV to the center of the outbreak. But there’s no doubt in terms of evidence which way the data point.
Agreed. I would be more forceful than “probable” or “more likely” but I think this difference in degree in not worth arguing over.
We all agree that the wet market is some flavor of more likely and the lab leak hypothesis hasn’t been entirely ruled out (and may never be).
Agreed. That is to say, the hypothesis that it was an engineered virus got a lot of play on news outlets and among politicians, particularly on the American right, early on, before scientists’ repeated insistence of the extreme unlikeliness of this finally beat it down.
But still Fauci gets a lot of flak over gain of function research (which is a fine discussion to have in general, but it’s clearly motivated here by trying to project a particular image of what happened).