I missed a word out, I meant to say
That conclusion doesn’t seem to follow from the text. In fact it would seem to add some credence to it, or at least not make it less likely.
I guess what I wonder is what it is they do wait around for in those labs? I mean, I imagine their research spans years if not decades, and comes at no small cost. I also imagine there’s not something like an international review board where they share in advance all their research proposals. But I have no idea how it works, so that’s just sheer speculation.
I don’t think this idea makes sense for two reasons.
- I don’t think they’re doing broad population surveys of the city to identify new coronaviruses. At least, I’ve never known of a disease lab that worked that way. When an unknown virus shows up (wherever it shows up), they send samples to the lab (wherever it is).
- The disease wasn’t just first detected in Wuhan. It first exploded in Wuhan, showing up in the form of a bunch of people dying of a previously-unknown viral pneumonia. That observable event obviously had nothing to do with where the lab was (unless, of course, the virus came from the lab in the first place)
Also, strong endorsement of everything Reimann has said in this thread.
No, I did not argue that.
No, I argue that that a naturally transmission in any coronavirus-endemic area is a comparatively normal thing to happen. The existence of a lab in that area doesn’t make a natural transmission any less likely.
Think of this chain of events:
- A lab worker happens to obtain a wild sample of a virus
- The lab worker brings the sample to the lab
- A wild recombination happens to occur in the lab (quite rare)
- The sample defeats all handling protocols and escapes lab containment.
vs. this one:
- Viruses recombine in the wild as they’ve always done. The end.
Your scenario needs a number of exceptionally unlikely things to happen, so you need some exceptional evidence to prove that it did. As I said, for thoroughness I’d support asking China to open up the lab to look, just to rule it out. But realistically I don’t see that happening. In the absence of that data, I’m fine just assuming that the most likely event is most likely what actually happened.
You’re conveniently ignoring the fact that I gave this as one of three possible scenarios in which the lab is implicated, and I already pointed out:
No comment on the other two more plausible possibilities that I suggested?
And I see also that you are also conveniently ignoring the straightforward Bayesian analysis of the conditional probability taking into account all the data that I laid out at post #141, in favor of an approach where you take into account only the data that you choose to and ignore the rest.
But that is not what I said. I said absolutely nothing along the lines of “doing broad population surveys of the city to identify new coronaviruses”.
What I said was that the local health agencies may do more testing if they find suspicious diseases.
The first explosion of the diseases was detected in Wuhan. A couple dozen people with pneumonia out of a city of 11 million. If 44 people in NYC got pneumonia, do you think that they would test to see if they had some sort of novel virus?
Anyway, this was simply speculation that I had no strong connection to, and we don’t have nearly the access to information that would lend it any credence, so I’m not all that interested in defending it further. However, I did feel the need to defend it from the gross misrepresentations that you chose to use.
No need to be defensive about this at all, I think this is very much stuff that we should be thinking about carefully. Others are just dismissing the fact that it happened in Wuhan as coincidence, but we should very much be considering carefully all the possible ways in which there might be some causal connection to Wuhan, or reasons why it might be a less improbable coincidence. It doesn’t need to be sinister, it doesn’t need to be negligence. I’d much rather be talking about this than disputing with people who don’t understand probability.
I’d comment that they likewise require things to happen that are significantly less probable than any natural event.
I’m gonna ignore your grousing about my reasoning here except to note that it’s annoying and unhelpful. Instead I’ll say that I’m a bit rusty on Bayesian analysis, but that I understand it applies when pieces of later information condition the probability of things that happen later. It’s not clear to me that any piece of information under discussion here conditions any later probability, unless you’ve first assumed there is a prior relationship between them (which is not proven).
I’ll also say that it’s not really persuasive to compute a probability of 23% from numbers you plucked out of thin air. It tells me you know how to plug numbers into Bayes’ theorem, but I don’t see that this is a suitable application of it.
Bayesian analysis is generally just putting rigorous numbers to common sense. Your desire to just dismiss the proximity of the outbreak to the lab as irrelevant is not just counter to Bayesian probability theory, it is counter to obvious common sense.
The point of showing an example calculation was to show that you cannot just ignore the the fact that the outbreak was near Wuhan, as you want to do.
If you now accept that, we can discuss what the correct prior probabilities should be. But I don’t think the numbers I used in the example calculation are off by orders of magnitude. I don’t think we have enough data to pin it down with any precision, but the point is that the known data that the outbreak occurred near the lab obviously pushes the probability of lab involvement MUCH higher than the prior probability of 0.3%.
I don’t know if the probability of the lab being implicated in some way is 5% or 50%, but I know it’s not 0.3%.
How likely is the natural sequence of events needed to bring this virus to this location? And how did you come to that assessment?
My answers to those questions would be “I don’t know, but not zero”
My answer to the lab escape hypothesis likelihood would also be “I don’t know, but not zero”
I would then proceed to try and reduce my ignorance for all potential explanations and see where that takes me.
What I’m reasoning through is the fact that nature is so enormous, with so many events happening constantly, that it makes it a near certainty that you can observe highly improbable events wherever you look. This is bolstered by the fact that animal to human zoonotic transmission is a lot more commonly observed than we would probably prefer.
It’s not zero, and then we’d have to consider the fact that this scenario requires a number of unlikely human errors to happen, on top of everything that the natural transmission scenario entails.
I don’t know the exact numbers, of course, and I won’t make them up. But just by looking at the number of probabilistic events involved in either scenario, it becomes clear to me that the lab escape scenario involves adding a number of improbable events that we have no evidence for.
So when we have a very probable (and previously observed) explanation ready at hand, how much effort should we invest in a much less likely scenario that’s unsupported by any observed evidence? I’m not saying it’s zero, but in relative terms, intuitively it seems like a lot less.
You have precisely one additional human error required for the lab escape hypothesis. An error that has occurred before and in reference to a lab that has had concerns raised about its practices and protocols.
The pangolin has always been suspected to be the culprit since it harbors coronaviruses in the same subgenera as SARS-CoV-2. In fact the pangolin virus is more related to SARS-CoV-2 than SARS-CoV is related to SARS-CoV-2. While the bat virus is more closely related to the human virus with the exception of the spike protein, the pangolin spike protein is more related to the human spike protein.
A recent communication in Nature confirms that the pangolin virus can infect human cells. The authors even suggest that there are probably lots of mammals out there that have spike proteins well-suited to binding to human ACE2 receptors. Structure and binding properties of Pangolin-CoV spike glycoprotein inform the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 | Nature Communications
All interesting,useful and necessary research but no smoking gun. Until that is found all plausible hypotheses need to remain under investigation.
Okay everyone. To sum up:
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Wuhan is the largest city in East Central China where horseshoe bats that carry two coronaviruses that are 96% and 93% identical to the SARS-CoV-2 genome. A lab is there because of this reason.
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There are two completely independent studies, that I posted, suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 was outside of Wuhan in Sept 2019 AND that the originating strain was found to be less frequent in Wuhan.
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An intermediary species has been found to be a prime suspect and its coronaviruses can infect humans
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GOF research, using a natural selection method in vivo, is expensive and very time consuming. GOF in vitro does not easily provide the immune system challenges to create this virus. GOF using genetic engineering leaves fingerprints.
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The animal market that created the superspreader event happens to have lab that researches coronaviruses. There was an accident. The lab that does this research sequenced all the coronaviruses and said that none existing before the outbreak match SARS-CoV-2. She’s clearly lying.
We’ve provided evidence for the first four which support the hypothesis that this was naturally-derived. What is the evidence for #5 other than what some people find to be a suspicious coincidence (which I don’t agree). Any molecular evidence? Epidemiological evidence?
Here’s how I see the only way that #5 is true. SARS-CoV-2 had already infected humans. Maybe not even in Wuhan. People were already getting Covid-19, so people took samples and sent it to Wuhan. The government was somehow able to keep this contagious disease quiet. A researcher wasn’t being careful, got infected, went to the wet market, and created a superspreader event. There’s no reason to believe this, but this is the most plausible scenario I can think of. It also means that SARS-CoV-2 was already out there waiting for a superspreader event.
Lets be clear at the outset that your “summing up” is not the whole picture and does not necessarily capture the detail, conflicts, complexity and ambiguities of the situation. That’s fine, it is nearly impossible to do so in a 5 point post. e.g.
Yes, the lab is where it is because the viruses and practices of the region provide a potential risk.
But what risk? The risk of a jump to humans in a form that would be deadly.
So ask yourself. What sort of research is the lab likely to be doing that would make it relevant to those viruses? Is it really likely that no research on human transmissibility is being undertaken? Is that not precisely the sort of study that we would expect it to carry out?
I could not find anything in either of those studies that showed SARS-CoV-2 was circulating previously outside of Wuhan. Can you provide a quote from the articles that you think makes that case? If it could be shown that it existed in a precursor form and a plausible pathway of natural transmission plotted out then that would be extremely powerful and helpful.
Of course, the involvement of a lab is not necessarily excluded were that shown to be the case.
“prime suspect” is doing a lot of work here and no research has yet thrown up solid evidence to make that case.
Lots of things that are expensive and time-consuming are carried out. Medical research is the epitome of “time consuming and expensive” The time taken to get a drug even to the point of clinical testing is measured in years and many hundreds of millions.
Also, no-one that I’m aware of is making the case that a purposeful attempt to engineer this virus was made.
Here’s where we run into the problem with China’s secretive approach. The labs are not open to independent investigation and cannot be trusted to tell the world what they know and what, if anything, they did.
I’m not convinced by the strength of 1-4 and 5 is not evidence at all.
Here’s a succinct statement of the lab hypothesis in a nutshell, it touches upon two points of evidence that would be expected in the case of a lab leak. The lack of diversity in initial samples and the immediate fully functioning transmissibility in humans.
That is only one of myriad ways in which a lab may be involved. It is very far from the “only” way.
I don’t know if it has already been posted but here is the wiki page for the lab leak hypothesis. It has been taken off wiki for some reason but on reading it it is hard to see why.
It gives a lot of leads to follow but it is hardly mouth-frothing conspiracy-theory material.
Here’s one little nugget, I’d be interested to hear the opinions of those directly opposed to the lab-leak hypothesis.
On 17 November 2020, Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology made an addendum to a study on the bat-origins of SARS-CoV-2 in Nature, clarifying that CoV/4991 was indeed RaTG13, and that it was found in 2012-2013 “in an abandoned mineshaft in Mojiang County in Yunnan Province”, confirming that the virus closest to the SARS-CoV-2 was linked to the mine-shaft in Mòjiāng, and that the Wuhan Institue of Virology had stored it since 2013 and worked on in undisclosed ways. The addendum also revealed eight more SARS viruses sampled from bats in the mine, which had not been previously disclosed
Is that evidence in direct support of a lab leak? No. Does it place the most closely related virus in the Wuhan lab? yes, (along with others) since 2013 apparently and being studied in ways that we aren’t able to investigate.
Not a smoking gun by any means but not irrelevant either.
ETA - Tfletch1 - the statement above is pretty much exactly the scenario you set out, minus only the possibility of a lab-leak.
Yes, I posted that article in an earlier post. It was the Wuhan lab that published in Nature that SARS-CoC-2 is a close relative to RaTG13 (96% sequence identity). However, the spike protein of RaTG13 has very poor affinity to ACE2. On the other hand the spike protein of a pangolin coronavirus binds very well to the receptor and can infect humans.
And yet even after searching for the Pangolin link it has not been found. I’d imagine that the search would be deep and intensive seeing as such a link would harden up the evidence for a purely natural pathway.
And note that right there in the article we’ve both linked to is definite evidence of evasion and opacity from the Wuhan lab leaders. I remind you again that this lab was specifically criticised in 2018 over its practices and protocols.
It is worth stating again that the lab hypothesis is not my favoured one. However I can’t stay quiet when I see plausible explanations being dismissed out of hand without applying the required degree of critical analysis.
I’ve seen too many investigations in my time where slightly left-of-centre explanations were ignored in favour of pre-conceived explanations that were in some way more palatable, only for more rigourous investigation to show them to be true.
Occam’s razor is a fair enough rule of thumb but it relies upon us being able to assess and compare the uncertainties of some complex issues. Same with Conan-Doyle’s words on elimination of the impossible leaving us with the solution. Yeah, sort of…as long as you are certain that you have managed to identify and assess all of the potential solutions in the first place. Life does not necessarily ring-fence and present to us neatly all of those potential solutions.
Yes. Like in the circumstances, where it’s not just some people getting pneumonia, but increasing numbers of them each day, and it doesn’t respond to antibiotics, oh and now the doctors who saw the first patients are getting it. That sounds like something any hospital or public health department would pay a lot of attention to.
But I could be wrong about that.
Do you think they would not?
Sorry for misinterpreting. I guess I’m not that clear on what you think is happening. You think local public health authorities are performing extra due diligence in testing for new diseases? I don’t think that happens but I guess it could. Maybe just social connections, like a doctor at the hospital knows a researcher at the lab and just sends stuff over because it’s easy and close? If this interpretation is also wrong maybe give me a concrete example what you’re suggesting.