Looks like there is a lab about 40 miles away in Ft. Collins. I don’t know that they study Corona viruses there, but they do study West Nile. So when there is a West Nile outbreak in Colorado, which will happen, we should think “lab escape”, or maybe that the lab studies it because it is endemic to the area?
I found an old reference saying 13 BSL-4 labs in the US, and another old one saying 300 BSL-3 labs. These aren’t exactly rare beasts.
That last link is to a pre-Covid article about pathogens escaping labs. It is certainly possible that the virus came from the lab, but really, the standard of evidence needs to be higher than “not impossible”.
At this point in the research we have very few answers. The choices seem to be SARS-CoV-2 was introduced into humans naturally at a human-wild interface, something that disease experts have been warning about for decades as habitat reduction brings more wild animals into contact with people. Or, that it escaped from a lab, which is specifically designed to not let that happen. Oh, and at this time we don’t have any evidence that it was ever in the lab to begin with. (Cover up!)
No, but if someone says “maybe it escaped from the lab” we shouldn’t call them a racist conspiracy monger. We should say “maybe” and investigate it. Because diseases do escape from labs sometimes, despite intended design to prevent that.
Any such evidence (if it existed) would almost certainly be covered up by the Chinese government.
Imagine for a moment that this variant of coronavirus was being studied in the lab. Do you think there is any chance at all that the Chinese government would openly say to the world “We were studying this variant in our Wuhan lab and experienced a containment failure”? I think that the chances of that are exactly 0, so the fact that no one can point to any evidence of the virus being in the lab should not adjust our priors on the lab theory at all.
In both scenarios (virus in lab, virus not in lab) the evidence available to us would be the same (no evidence of virus in lab). So the lack of evidence in this case means nothing.
That’s a whole lot of hand waving. If there was a West Nile lab in Wuhan, it wouldn’t have been a called a coincidence. But there is a lab that specializes in bat coronaviruses at the centre of a coronavirus pandemic linked to bats, so it is.
Yeah, I think FigNorton misread your post. It’s not handwavy.
The difference between coronavirus in Wuhan and West Nile in Colorado would be that I would have some (not 100%, but some) more confidence in investigation into the lab in the US. The US is definitely not always a good guy, but none of the researchers in the lab who could provide evidence that the virus escaped would remain quiet out of fear of having them and their families disappeared to a remote prison camp overnight, which I think is a legitimate fear in China.
Coverups are harder in places like the US, which means that an absence of evidence should actually make us change our minds. In contrast to China, where I believe the absence of evidence means nothing.
If it evolved in the wild, we’re talking about a vast area where this could have happened, much of southern China, several neighboring countries.
This is the leading lab on this type of virus. It’s not as thought there are dozens of similar labs scattered around the region. And the lab is not located close to any habitat where a natural event would be particularly likely to occur.
Coincidence it may be, but it really is quite a striking coincidence that the first known outbreak was in the vicinity of the Wuhan lab.
I don’t think possible identification of earlier progenitor strains in Yunnan is any basis to dismiss the coincidence. The “lab escape” hypothesis would be that progenitor strains were brought to the Wuhan lab, and then some subsequent recombination perhaps happened in the lab in cell culture, and a lab worker accidentally got infected. Obviously these progenitor strains would have been brought in from somewhere else, such as samples from Yunnan.
As I said above at post #45, either hypothesis (lab escape or natural event) requires that something unlikely happened. The prior probability of the “lab escape” hypothesis is low, it’s far more likely that it evolved in the wild. But the prior probability that the first known outbreak would be close to the lab in Wuhan is also low. And I really don’t think we have enough information to be able to say that one of these two unlikely occurrences is overwhelmingly more unlikely than the other.
Well, it certainly didn’t need to take that! I would have been happy to tell you up front that I don’t.
And so don’t lots of other people who might be interested in this question. So if there’s something you can share with us laypeople that might help us understand it, I for one would be grateful. Really, I would. I would like to understand this better.
What I understand about the argument made here – and I fully recognize there could be things I’m missing, which I’d like to learn about if so – is that it seems to be along the lines of ‘We can definitively say that it’s something human engineered because we know about all the things that presently are being or in the past have been human engineered, and this can be shown to not be one of them’.
I have no reason to doubt the latter part of that statement. It does not seem obvious to me, however, that the former part is necessarily true, that we know we know about all the research going on. Again, I’m sure I’m missing something. Because if I’m not, I just can’t see how that line of reasoning is at all convincing.
For the record, if it matters, I hold no opinion at all about which of the scenarios mentioned in this thread seems likeliest – or, for that matter, whether likelihood even matters, What I have an opinion about is whether it’s a valid claim to say ‘We can say it didn’t happen, because we’d have known about it if it did’. That’s why I say I’m sure I must be missing something.
But if those with a background in molecular biology are the only ones qualified to understand the question and its answers, then I don’t think the general public is going to have much of a chance either. And when the general public hears things like ‘gain of function research’, I imagine many different thoughts could come to their minds.
When DNA is changed by natural selection, it tends to target certain expected sites, changing in certain predictable ways, and it results in highly efficient solutions to protein folding. That’s what we see in Sars-Cov-2. When viral sequences are customized, any site is fair game, but typically a known reliable backbone is used because there’s no point in reinventing that wheel. Additionally the folding solutions tend to be less efficient because they were designed and not battle-tested in the wild, as happens in natural selection. So those are 2 pretty compelling ways that Sars-Cov-2 is different from engineered viruses.
When we have a sequence that shows “weathering” consistent with how it happens in nature, and resembles the expected natural sources, this is overwhelmingly more likely than supposing a more elaborate origin. The stubborn-uncle response would be “so you’re saying it’s possible” and I have no response except to say “perhaps, but not in any meaningful sense.”
It’s true of this, and it’s true of the moon landing, and it can’t be helped. If believing the truth requires the effort of self-education, then most people are going to believe what they want to believe.
This is all true but would a virus being worked on in a lab necessarily be expected to show signs of such engineering?
Not all gain-of-function research involves detectable genetic manipulation and certainly not if it sets out to mimic natural selection.
So yes, we need to be clear here - what I think we can rule out is deliberate engineering, by which we mean that someone set out with a plan: I want to make a virus with certain specified properties, and I’m going to carry out deliberate manipulations to achieve that. That is not the origin of this virus.
But viruses mutate and can recombine randomly in cell culture just as they do in the wild in hosts. I would not call that engineering, and we cannot rule that out. Of course, it would depend on progenitor strains being in the lab. A point they make in the paper linked above is that the evolution of SARS-Cov-2 would seem to require natural selection in the presence of an immune system, which is is something that cannot happen in cell culture. But I don’t think we can rule out that some mutation and/or recombination of progenitor strains may have happened in cell culture in the lab, then accidentally infected a worker, then evolved further in the presence of an immune system.
I agree completely. That’s a nice clear statement. Nuanced and open. Unfortunately for the times we live in it is neither short enough nor polarised enough for public consumption.
The unbiased evidence and opinions that I can read and understand lead me to think that the purely natural path is the more likely source of the virus.
However, the same evidence and opinions specifically do not rule out some form of the lab hypothesis you set out above, indeed they consider it to be a very plausible scenario. Hence my surprise when the WHO considered it to be “extremely unlikely” without any real additional argument to back it up.
With no reliable direct evidence about the lab, I think “extremely unlikely” would be a fair probabilistic evaluation just because nature is vastly bigger than any lab. But that probabilistic argument is undermined because it requires the improbable coincidence that the first identified outbreak occurred close to the lab.
I acknowledge that there’s scant evidence supporting the accidental release hypothesis, but it is interesting to see how reluctant Chinese officials are to share information. They’re acting like they have something to hide
I’m not even sure that it is possible to assign a probabilistic judgement. We just don’t know enough.
Of course there is the fact that, if no such research had taken place, or that it had but their protocols were robust, the Chinese authorities would very easily be able to show this by releasing their records and notebooks and opening up to a full independent audit.
They haven’t and they won’t so until a viable fully natural means presents itself the lab hypothesis remains, and for me it remains on a level higher than “extremely unlikely”
It really doesn’t matter what we think the likelihood is. If we find a source besides the Wuhan lab then we can rule out the Wuhan lab. In the mean time we can’t rule in or out any source until we find the actual one. As far as investigating goes, some quiet work in background might get a lab worker to talk, but I wouldn’t otherwise spend any more time looking at the lab, any evidence that was there is now gone.
What I heard was that the commie scientists were having sex with infected animals, and then had more sex with Wuhan prostitutes (male, female, and who-can-tell). Oh, and some of those researchers turned tricks for extra money, and especially targeted foreign visitors. That’s how the plague got started. /sarcasm