YES!! Sorry, I didn’t read your post before I said exactly the same thing.
In fact, Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan researcher whose lab sequenced SAR-CoV-2, is called the “Bat Lady” because she goes to the local caves to collect samples from the bats.
YES AGAIN! (Sorry, I have a bad habit of replying to this thread before reading yours and @echoreply post.) I’m saying exactly the same thing.
This thread is full of ignoramuses pontificating with ignoramuses. eg:
No, this is not possible. GOF research is done inside of cell lines, not entire animals. What this means is that the virus rapidly evolves to shed many of the items that makes them optimized to reproduce inside of animals, including structures designed to help it evade the immune system. This makes it immediately obvious whether a gene line is a result of GOF research.
And secondly, the clue is right in the name itself, “Function”. GOF research has to have a criteria it is optimizing towards. Everything we know about COVID is that if you gave the COVID spike protein to any scientist anywhere on the globe, it would be passed over in favor of more promising candidates because the spike looks like it would be poor at binding the ACE. It required entirely new science to figure out how COVID binds and this theory involves China keeping an entire branch of science under wraps for years.
Similarly, the arguments for how lab leaks have happened before are all for previously identified viruses for which they were known to be pathogenic and there were known reasons for labs to be storing infectious versions of them. Nobody is capable of coming up with a plausible explanation for why any lab would be storing infectious versions of a virus which has no prior evidence of being anything distinguishing despite the normal protocol being that this is a bonkers thing to do.
To be clear, all of the lab leak debunkers are not saying that China wouldn’t do anything like this, they are saying that China couldn’t do anything like this. Meanwhile, the “Just Asking Questions” crowd is almost entirely focused on what could the possible motivation be while not at all engaging in the actual scientific implausibility of it because they’re always just leaning on “Well, I haven’t seen enough to convince me it didn’t happen”.
You are flat out wrong.
Serial passaging is form of GOF reasearch that can be done in-vivo.
As understand it Covid-19 has no identified features that rule out such an approach but I’m open to any evidence you have found.
This seems willfully ignorant/hopefull/negligent on your part.
A lab, famous for working on related viruses, in an area where zoonotic transmission to humans is a clear risk, with previously identified failings in protocols, in a country that is famously secretive and evasive about what it is really doing, ends up being at ground zero of a pandemic outbreak.
And you struggle for a plausible reason for properly investigating that hypothesis? I find that incredible
I run investigations in a related industry with similar life, death and criminal impacts arising from the rigour of the output. If I discounted such an explanation out of hand I’d be sacked on the spot. It is basic best practice to run each option to ground and persue the evidence where it goes.
I think the lab hypothesis is less likely than the natural one but that is irrelevant to whether it gets properly considered and investigated.
So what? If your argument is that the probability is low, then that is true of every city in that area. It had to happen somewhere. Lab or no lab, Wuhan is just as valid a place for natural transmission to occur.
I understand that it is a low(er) probability event. But I also understand that low probability events (sometimes astronomically unlikely) are happening around us every moment, and the overwhelming majority of them are just insignificant coincidences.
There’s no natural law that says any given coincidence must have been artificially produced. There simply isn’t. Most coincidences mean nothing.
It’s like there’s some kind of telepath induced block in your brain. That is what a coincidence looks like! If the pandemic had started near a research lab in Alaska, we wouldn’t be talking about a coincidence, we’d just start blaming the lab.
It’s clear to me that you think the concept of “coincidence” has some kind of deeper significance that I don’t, so I don’t think see any point continuing here. And I don’t appreciate your insulting comments about my brain being broken or warped by politics.
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Colibri
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This is my opinion as a non-expert in this field. I think that’s pretty unlikely only because going straight to in vivo for your “natural” selection process is too expensive and much harder to manipulate. If I wanted to design an experiment in which a virus evolves to bind to ACE2 receptors on cells, I’d do it in vitro. Only once that’s established would I test it in vivo. But just as @Shalmanese states, you don’t have all those other selective properties that you would have in an animal.
Another possibility is that they were injecting the bat precursor virus into animals that have coronaviruses capable of binding to the ACE2 receptor. Again, they’d have to wait around for a recombination event that would create the bat precursor virus with spike proteins that bind ACE2 receptors.
Both of those scenarios seem pretty costly and time consuming compared to nature which has tons of mammals with coronaviruses getting exposed to bats with coronaviruses.
On the other hand, you could genetically engineer a virus to do what you want and test it in vivo. That’s what that Dutch scientist did a few years ago with avian flu. This is also considered GOF, but the genetic engineering can be easily identified.
No, that’s not how probability works. The existence of the preeminent coronavirus research lab in Wuhan specifies that city uniquely. Sure, it had to happen somewhere. But it didn’t happen just anywhere, did it? It happen at the uniquely specified city.
If you specify a set of numbers for the lottery, and then those exact numbers come up, that’s a low probability event. The argument that “somebody had to win” does not apply. If the guy who runs the lottery wins it, nobody is going to accept the “somebody had to win” argument without being suspicious that he cheated.
And yet your argument against the “lab escape” hypothesis is nothing more than that it’s a low probability event.
This is your inconsistent argumant:
Low probability event 1: lab escape. Your argument is that it couldn’t have happened because it’s a low probability event.
Low probability event 2: outbreak is near the lab. You accept it as just coincidence despite the fact that it’s a low probability event.
As I pointed out way back at post #45, under either hypothesis, we have to accept that one of two low probability events occurred. And I don’t think we have enough direct evidence to be able to assess whether one is overwhelmingly more unlikely than the other.
Sure, but that’s what you’d do with a specified end point in mind. I don’t think that’s what is being suggested.
What would you do to explore what might be happening in the wild?
Nature has a bigger experimental space sure and that may well be the source. But nature is not necessarily predictable nor controllable and if your concern is how might such zoonotic jumps happen and what might be the result then it may be even more time consuming and expensive to wait for, and search for, such occurances in the wild.
And lets not forget that, as I understand it at the moment, there is no definite natural link between bat and human infection. No intermediary species has been found. If such a species were to be found then sure, that would tilt the balance of probability further in that direction. Until then, it’d be negligent to dismiss any plausible theory.
Of course, China could help the investigation enourmously if they so choose. Full disclosure and a full independent audit would go a long way to either confirming or denying the lab leak hypothesis.
I think the whole discussion about the Wuhan lab doing wild and wacky experiments is silly - it’s extremely unlikely, and a complete red herring.
The hypothesis that the lab is implicated is simply that there is some causal connection between the location of the lab and the location of the first major outbreak, that the outbreak being in Wuhan is not just coincidence. This could happen a number of far more plausible ways.
(1) Progenitor strain samples were brought to the lab. They were in cell culture passage in the lab as part of its routine research work on the properties of coronaviruses. Some of the chance mutation and/or recombination steps took place (unintentionally) in cell culture passage in the lab, and a lab worker subsequently accidentally got infected. This is perhaps the least likely, since there are just a lot more “places” that mutation and recombination can happen in the wild.
(2) The fully evolved SARS-Cov-2 had been encountered in the field by Wuhan researchers, a sample had been brought to the lab for investigation, and accidentally infected a lab worker.
(3) A Wuhan-based researcher had encountered SARS-Cov-2 in the field, accidently became infected, and brought the infection back unknowingly to Wuhan when they returned. Under this account, an accident at the lab itself is not even required, just an accident in the field when collecting samples. The causal connection to Wuhan is that specialist coronavirus researchers are based at the lab.
None of these simple ideas require that the lab and lab personnel were doing anything other than routine research on coronaviruses.
Absolutely. “lab escape” or “lab hypothesis” or “lab connection” cover a wide range of possibilities. The knee-jerk aversion and ridiculing of any hypothesis with the word “lab” in it seems strange in the extreme.
According to The unacceptable risks of a man-made pandemic - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Not sure if this adds any to the topic, seems like A lot.
“A quick search of PubMed, the National Library of Medicine database of medical research, identifies 30 labs that are working with live SARS virus and at least 10 using live 1918 flu virus. Counting the two labs in the Netherlands and United States that created Asian bird flu that is contagious in ferrets (which served as a model for human contagiousness), there are at least 42 facilities engaged in researching live PPPs. The PubMed search was anything but comprehensive, and the actual number is likely higher.”
"Consider the probability for escape from a single lab in a single year to be 0.003 (i.e., 0.3 percent), an estimate that is conservative in light of a variety of government risk assessments for biolabs and actual experience at laboratories studying dangerous pathogens. Calculating from this probability, it would take 536 years for there to be an 80 percent chance of at least one escape from a single lab. But with 42 labs carrying out live PPP research, this basic 0.3 percent probability translates to an 80 percent likelihood of escape from at least one of the 42 labs every 12.8 years, a time interval smaller than those that have separated influenza pandemics in the 20th century. This level of risk is clearly unacceptable. "
If this is true so much for the escape theory.
One point that I think we should make is that the fact that the Chinese would not let the WHO team really investigate the lab is not at all surprising.
The first outbreak occurred near the Wuhan lab. How could the Chinese prove that this was just a coincidence?
Looking closely at the lab really does not help, because you’re trying to prove a negative. You’re trying to prove that a mistake was not made. You’re trying to prove that SARS-CoV-2 or progenitor samples were not brought to the lab in 2019. You’re trying to prove that a lab researcher did not accidentally get infected, either in the field or at the lab. It’s impossible to prove these negatives conclusively. Yet if (say) any imperfect safety procedure were uncovered by the WHO team, it could look bad. It seems to me that a thorough independent investigation of the lab could only produce evidence that might make it look worse, and could never exonerate it.
The only way the Chinese could prove that that lab was not involved would be to find conclusive direct evidence of exactly how the virus got into Wuhan. And that’s a big hurdle, we will probably never know.
So it seems to me that the Chinese being their usual secretive selves about the lab really doesn’t tell us much. That behavior is consistent with a cover-up, of course; but it’s also exactly what they should rationally do even if the lab is completely innocent. It’s quite likely that they just don’t know themselves exactly what happened, even if they know more than they are telling us.
That conclusion doesn’t seem to follow from the text. In fact it would seem to add some to it, or at least not make it less likely.
That’s true, but complete openess from the start would go a long way to showing good faith and due diligence.
So let’s use this number and flesh out the conditional probabillity argument.
Let’s take this as a suitably very low prior probability estimate for the “lab implicated” hypothesis. In other words, let’s assume 0.3% is the probability that the Wuhan lab was implicated in the outbreak WITHOUT the additional information that the actual outbreak occurred near the lab.
Now, what is the probability that the outbreak occurred near the Wuhan lab by chance? The natural habitat for the species involved is vey large, encompassing southern China and neighboring countries so I think it’s reasonable to say that it’s about 100 times larger than the Wuhan area. Let’s say the probability that the outbreak would occur in Wuhan by chance is 1%.
So we have prior probabilities:
Lab implicated 0.3%, Entirely natural 99.7%
Outbreak in Wuhan 1%, anywhere else 99%
What is the posterior probability of the “lab implicated” hypothesis, conditioned on the known data that outbreak occured in Wuhan?
It works out to 23%.
Of course this is not intended to be a precise result, but just illustrative of how you think about conditional probabilities with two low-probability priors, when one of the two low probability events must have occurred.