I don’t think that is true. I recall the most closely-related wild virus was identified in bats some hundreds of miles away from Wuhan and these were collected and taken to the Wuhan lab. At which point it may or may not have been worked on. China will not say what happened to it.
This is where I first heard of these studies (that’s a gift article, so it shouldn’t be paywalled):
It’s not definitive and it’s not peer reviewed, but I’m not one to “do my own research” and it looks to me that these scientists did a lot of research and other epidemiologists seem to agree that it’s a good theory.
The actual answer is unknowable at this point, of course, although I think it’s pretty well agreed that even if it did leak from the lab, it was a natural virus that was accidentally leaked, not an engineered virus and not intentionally leaked.
Other than pointing towards better sanitation practices at either the lab or the market, I really can’t fathom why it matters which way this virus got out.
You’re just repeating the exact same thing over and over again. There’s zero new information here. I don’t know if you think the repetition will somehow bore people into accepting your flawed interpretation or what.
Why does anything matter then? If it accidentally leaked out of a lab then we should know that so we can prevent it. If it mutated in a wet market because they mash together hundreds of species of animals, many who are sick or poorly cared for, then we should know that so we can prevent it. If it mutated in the wild and some stupid trapper brought it into the wet market we should know that so we can prevent it. It’s all the same thing. The only reason to say it doesn’t matter is because you don’t happen to like that possible explanation and want to stop considering that possibility.
And while the least scary “alternate” theory is that this was a naturally occurring virus which was brought into the lab for study and accidentally escaped, it’s not the only one worth taking seriously. Functionally it’s not that different than if a trapper brought it into Wuhan from the field and that explanation has the same gap in knowledge…that if a researcher sampled it somewhere in the wild, why haven’t we found it again?
It’s a very real possibility that the lab unwittingly created the conditions where the virus mutated and where these zoonoses occurred. They may not have engineered it intentionally, but in the process of gene editing or cultivating they could have done it unintentionally (most of the arguments against engineering assume that is was designed badly if it was designed, but that doesn’t preclude carelessness or imprecision.) They also could have gotten themselves infected in the field and then caused the subsequent zoonotic event in the lab either by infecting a test subject or themselves again. There’s lots of lab-centric possibilities and they matter. Maybe sending researchers out into the field to harvest hundreds of samples from dozens of species animals and bringing them al back to a central point of analysis and experimentation is a fundamentally stupid thing to do and we should rethink that to better compartmentalize. The dismissiveness of the discussion needs to stop.
OK, well, anyway, the experts are saying that the most likely explanation right now is that it came from animals in the market and that’s good enough for me right now. If new research points to a lab origin and it’s better than the old research (that is, the experts consider it to be more likely), that will be good enough for me, too.
This seems unfounded. I’m happy to follow the research wherever it leads. It seems to be leading to a wet market origin right now. If that changes, fine by me.
I feel like you’re arguing with someone else who you have me confused with. You’re assigning all kinds of motivations to my posts that I don’t think are there.
It took 14 years for the original bat population harboring SARS-CoV (original) to be found, so the fact that the origin of SARS-CoV-2 has not yet been found doesn’t mean much.
SARS-CoV is believed to have gone from the origin bats to an intermediate species, and then to humans. Probably from the origin bats; to civets, raccoon dogs, something else; and then to humans. So, it’s happened before.
The research finding the original source of SARS-CoV (pdf) was done by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In the 2018 paper they warn it could happen again. Perhaps that was a threat?
It means that we don’t have an answer yet. Which is okay, but it’s not meaningless. People here are rushing to judgment that that’s the answer because we’re predicting that someday we’ll find it. We might, but we haven’t yet and repeated assertions that it’s some native wild virus are simply guesses until we have that data.
I don’t think that’s exactly what the research paper is saying. By saying that there were multiple zoonotic events it implies that the progenitor viruses each infected humans at different times, so it might not be a straightforward A to B to C process. The one paper seems to say that in some samples it looks like step B came before step A, which is unexpected.
Ebola has been known since 1976.
They still haven’t positively identified the wild reservoir.
https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/history/summaries.html#_ftn2
African fruit bats are likely involved in the spread of Ebola virus and may even be the source animal (reservoir host). Scientists continue to search for conclusive evidence of the bat’s role in transmission of Ebola. 1 The most recent Ebola virus to be detected, Bombali virus, was identified in samples from bats collected in Sierra Leone.2
Lineage, A and B, not steps. They hypothesize that there were probably several lineages that were circulating in animals at the market at the time. More than the two lineages, A and B, were likely transmitted to humans, but they didn’t survive a chain of transmission as is typical of most zoonotic events. The first recorded case had lineage B, but lineage A is genetically closer to the most recent common ancestor.
They also suggest that the bat progenitor was probably already capable of infecting humans. An important quote from the article.
However, once a virus is capable of human infection and transmission, the remaining barriers to spillover are pervasiveness of the virus among animal hosts and
extended host - human contact (54) . Thereafter, a single zoonotic transmission event portends additional jumps, because all previous conditions leading up to a successful zoonotic jump have necessarily been met. For example, the reverse - zoonosis of SARS - CoV - 2 from humans to minks on Dutch fur farms was followed by repeated reintroduction of SARS - CoV - 2 from minks to humans (46, 47). Indeed, we can see multiple cross - species transmissions from minks to humans from a shallow genetic reservoir on multiple farms in the Netherlands (8, 46). Further, multiple introductions of SARS - CoV - 2 from a small population of imported Syrian hamsters to humans were recently reported in Hong Kong (49) . Notably, the genomic diversity of the the putative animal reservoir at the Huanan market
Another very interesting quote showing that, while epidemics are rare, zoonotic transmission happens a lot.
People living in the vicinity of horseshoe bat species (Rhinolophus spp.) are more likely to show serological evidence of infection by SARS - related CoVs (34, 55 , 56) . This observation underscores the continued threat of emergence of novel viruses from animal reservoirs, with wildlife markets posing a particularly high risk (57 – 60).
That feels a bit like shutting the barn door after the horse has left. All of those are moderately likely ways to create new human pandemics. We should be concerned about them all.
We’re in agreement here. However I take issue with any statement that presents this as a resolved issue. And as cited upthread it might be a long time before any clarity on it comes. I think we should be okay with that and if that leads to some wild-ass conspiracy theories we simply need to refute them on their merits (lack thereof) instead of yelling “we know what happened” when we only have a strong assumption about what happened.
That’s precisely my point. Not sure if you’re intending to contradict me here…the poster I responded to argued otherwise.
Me? Where did I argue otherwise? I think we should follow best practices in wet markets and in laboratories, since they can both be sources of infection. I would have thought that labs were already pretty good at this (I’m sure there is room for improvement). Wet markets cause diseases all the time.
I literally quoted the statement you made which does exactly that.
Do you mean this part:
The Wall Street Journal Feb. 26, 2023
Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says
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WASHINGTON—The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.
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The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.
I’m not sure If I’m supposed to feel better or worse if we can establish the Pandemic originated from a leak at a lab?
While I’m sure it’s important to people studying things like that, what difference does it make to the average human. Why has this question become political? (apologies if this was handled last year, I have not revisited 475 posts)
If we can learn how COVID-19 escaped from the lab (assuming that it did), perhaps we can prevent something similar from happening again.
Sure, I get that. That’s why I said “important to people studying things like that.” I’m talking about the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, who are insistent this is a pandemic caused by the lab in China. If true, we should still mask and vaccinate, right?
That’s a paywalled link. Here’s a gift link to the New York Times article.
Some nuance either missing from the Wall Street Journal article, or your quoting from it:
Some officials briefed on the intelligence said that it was relatively weak and that the Energy Department’s conclusion was made with “low confidence,” suggesting its level of certainty was not high. While the department shared the information with other agencies, none of them changed their conclusions, officials said.
and
In addition to the Energy Department, the F.B.I. has also concluded, with moderate confidence, that the virus first emerged accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese lab that worked on coronaviruses. Four other intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council have concluded, with low confidence, that the virus most likely emerged through natural transmission, the director of national intelligence’s office announced in October 2021.
Mr. Sullivan said those divisions remain.
Didn’t Fauci say that was a conspiracy theory? Now he’s been proven wrong.