Are you looking for the latest and greatest in lab leak journalism? Check out Katherine Eban's 12,000-word magnum opus in Vanity Fair this month. It is a tale of international intrigue, lies, coverups, dueling scientists, and so much more.
In the end, I'm not quite sure it really changes the conversation, though. For example, Eban dives deep into the fights between US scientists from different parts of the State Department. On one side you had officials who thought that virologists were actively covering up evidence of a lab leak because they didn't want their own research jeopardized. On the other side you had officials who thought the lab-leak folks were presenting evidence so thin it "makes us look like the crackpot brigade."
As one senior government official with knowledge of the State Department’s investigation said, “They were writing this for certain customers in the Trump administration. We asked for the reporting behind the statements that were made. It took forever. Then you’d read the report, it would have this reference to a tweet and a date. It was not something you could go back and find.”
After listening to the investigators’ findings, a technical expert in one of the State Department’s bioweapons offices “thought they were bonkers,” [Chris] Ford recalled.
It's a good piece with tons of detail, but in the end we're left mostly where we started: there's circumstantial evidence all over the place, but no smoking gun on either side. It's not clear if that's likely to change anytime soon.
Mike Pompeo set up his own version of the Office of Special Plans in the State Department. You may remember the OSP: it was created by Donald Rumsfeld and run by Douglas Feith to "stovepipe" intelligence to the White House.
And now, the son of one of the chief architects of the Iraq War -- David Feith -- is popping up as a "foreign policy expert" in the WSJ and other rightwing outlets that are pushing this conspiracy theory.
Clearly, the paranoid style in US politics is thriving. The only reason to keep a wary eye on lab leak speculations is that even paranoids sometimes have real enemies.
Paranoids are easy for the elite to control. They backstab themselves.
Paranoia is the motivating factor. There are factions in the political establishment that are hankering for Cold War II with China.
"not" the motivating factor.
This comment section really needs and edit function.
Well actually, you're skipping a few new tidbits. This one seems particularly critical:
"Three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, all connected with gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, had fallen ill in November 2019 and appeared to have visited the hospital with symptoms similar to COVID-19, three government officials told Vanity Fair."
We didn't know previously that the three associates were involved in GoF research on Coronaviruses. It's like I keep saying, that the coincidences keep piling up.
And like I said previously, they were testing S2/Spike on ACE2 at the RBD in mice, who were genetically modified to carry ACE2. This is what's referred to, when VF says, "humanized mice":
"Shi’s own comments to a science journal, and grant information available on a Chinese government database, suggest that in the past three years her team has tested two novel but undisclosed bat coronaviruses on humanized mice, to gauge their infectiousness. "
Understand, WiV was serializing replication of natural transmission, by infecting mice to mice, speeding up the natural process of mutations between generations. Imagine picking RaTG13 as your clade, then going through hundreds of ACE2-carrying mice. Remember, they were testing on ACE2-carrying mice for a *reason*. Get it now? Doesn't seem like an impossible scenario, does it?
The *reason* why natural zoonotic transmission is considered the most likely scenario, is not because of specific circumstantial or direct evidence, but because it happens so often, that it's the first (and usually correct) assumption in every outbreak.
What's different, this time? Aside from the growing circumstantial evidence pointing to accidental release, there has not been any circumstantial or direct evidence pointing to natural zoonotic transmission:
- No ties to *any* wet market.
- No intermediate species has ever been found despite efforts to find one.
- Viruses found in Pangolins might be the closest match to SARS-CoV-2 at the S2/Spike, but it remains genetically *more* distant to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13. (See: my scenario of using RaTG13 as the clade and serializing transmission in ACE2-carrying mice.)
Well into the start of flu season, three workers from the same office building showed flu-like symptoms over the course of a month. Wow. I'll bet that never happened before.
Besides, cases of the "flu" spiked in Italy in November, which has been duly noted as circumstantial evidence.
And it has been documented that people who got the flu in the fall of 2019 were not immune to COVID19 and in fact would later fall ill to it. So unless there's a positive test, this is not even circumstantial evidence.
The classified report seemed quite clear that there were just these three individuals in a facility spanning several acres, affected at the same time. Not dozens of people sick, but just these three.
And just to be clear, we're being told to trust Shi, that all of her colleagues at WiV had been retrospectively tested and *all* came back negative, even though their facility was in the middle of an outbreak that had gone undetected for over a month and for which there would not be an antigen test developed for another month.
IOW, no one caught the highly infectious SARS-CoV-2, but whoa, the much less infectious Influenza was spreading with ease at WiV?
Well into the start of flu season, three workers from the same office building showed flu-like symptoms over the course of a month. Wow. I'll bet that never happened before.
Not only that, we know that covid19 cases were showing up in Wuhan in November. These three scientists lived in Wuhan. Why would they be magically exempt from the illness that was beginning to strike ever-larger numbers of their neighbors?
Your not saying anything. Covid-19 is not unique. Much like the even worse 1889-94 Coronavirus outbreak, it mutated into a very infectious form.
It could have leaped from animal to human years ago. Meandered around the globe before a certain mutation occurred.
There's no ties to the institute, either, none of them tested positive for it.
So the same lack of connection to a wet market is the same lack of connection to the lab.
Tests in November, 2019? That's the date they had the correct test?
They are parsing language. The reason that Fauci claims to have not funded GoF research at WIV:
"Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, for one, believes that the term gain-of-function applies only to enhancements of viruses that infect humans, not to animal viruses."
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/
“We didn't know previously that the three associates were involved in gain-of-function research on Coronaviruses.”
And perhaps we still don't. There has been other reporting on the researchers falling ill, but I haven't found any that states the researchers were involved in gain-of-function research. Furthermore, Pompeo's January 15 statement (link below) was written after the government allegedly knew that these researchers had been working on gain of function research, but it merely refers to “possible gain of function experiments.”
https://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/news/2021/01/sec-210115-state01.htm
Also, let's stop calling it the "lab leak theory", and instead, refer to it as "accidental release hypothesis".
One error in the press that I see repeatedly is conflating a "leak" from the lab with a "bio-engineered virus." The genomic evidence against the latter is very strong. An incompetent release into the population is plausible, but has a very different take on the Chinese.
> there's circumstantial evidence all over the place
The virus started in a city with a bio lab. Makes one wonder how many metropolitan statistical areas contain a bio lab.
China and Russia will say it started in southwest Europe. They are already been formulating this long game for awhile.
This is just another thing you have said based on no evidence.
One assumption is that the Wuhan lab was able to take a bat virus and then enhance its ability to infect humans by manipulating the spike protein, while at the same time introducing enough other genetic material to vaguely suggest an animal intermediary. And then this particular variant was accidentally or intentionally leaked. It's possible, of course, but it presumes a chain of unlikely events for which there is scant evidence so far.
But how many cities have virus labs that study bar viruses? Not many. But the Wuhan lab is where it is because it is so close to the geographical epicenter for bat viruses.
We don't have a copy of the genome from Patient Zero, so we don't know how it might have mutated in the months prior to its public discovery obscuring its original source.
It took some 14 years to trace the source of the original SARS virus through civets back to bats. Virology has made a lot of progress since then, but the source of this coronavirus is still likely to take a long time to identify definitely. Unless, of course, someone is able to uncover previously unknown communications between the government and the Wuhan virus lab about an accidental release.
"It took some 14 years to trace the source of the original SARS virus through civets back to bats."
They almost immediately found the intermediate hosts in both SARS (civets) and MERS (camels).
It is implied that SARS2 is *already* traced back to bats, by virtue of being classified as SARS, part of the subgenus Sarbecovirus, with code-matching sections identified by Shi, herself, back in 2017 when she outlined the tie of SARS back to horseshoe bats via civets.
"One assumption is that the Wuhan lab was able to take a bat virus and then enhance its ability to infect humans by manipulating the spike protein, while at the same time introducing enough other genetic material to vaguely suggest an animal intermediary."
Let me point back to Shi's own published work in 2017 -- https://bityl.co/7AzW
"Rescue of bat SARSr-CoVs and virus infectivity experiments
In the current study, we successfully cultured an additional novel SARSr-CoV Rs4874 from a single fecal sample using an optimized protocol and Vero E6 cells [17]. Its S protein shared 99.9% aa sequence identity with that of previously isolated WIV16 and it was identical to WIV16 in RBD. Using the reverse genetics technique we previously developed for WIV1 [23], we constructed a group of infectious bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) clones with the backbone of WIV1 and variants of S genes from 8 different bat SARSr-CoVs. Only the infectious clones for Rs4231 and Rs7327 led to cytopathic effects in Vero E6 cells after transfection (S7 Fig). The other six strains with deletions in the RBD region, Rf4075, Rs4081, Rs4085, Rs4235, As6526 and Rp3 (S1 Fig) failed to be rescued, as no cytopathic effects was observed and viral replication cannot be detected by immunofluorescence assay in Vero E6 cells (S7 Fig). In contrast, when Vero E6 cells were respectively infected with the two successfully rescued chimeric SARSr-CoVs, WIV1-Rs4231S and WIV1-Rs7327S, and the newly isolated Rs4874, efficient virus replication was detected in all infections (Fig 7). To assess whether the three novel SARSr-CoVs can use human ACE2 as a cellular entry receptor, we conducted virus infectivity studies using HeLa cells with or without the expression of human ACE2. All viruses replicated efficiently in the human ACE2-expressing cells. The results were further confirmed by quantification of viral RNA using real-time RT-PCR (Fig 8)."
I think we can move this from "assumption" to "in her own words."
Good cite. A number of writers have cited the 2015 Nature Medicine article titled “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence,” but if you read the credits for that article it appears that the lab work was done by researchers at the University of North Carolina. However, the article refers to “successfully rescued” viruses. It's not clear to me whether their method could have produced a virus that wasn't already present in the bats they were getting the viral material from.
I can see justification for research of this kind, but this non-expert wonders if the researchers have unwarranted confidence in their ability to contain these agents. I have had experience in the electric-power-generating industry, where fail-safe design and ‘defense-in-depth’ practice is strong. I would like to know: before conducting ‘gain-of-function’ in infectivity, couldn’t the researchers reduce a virus’ virulence?
The excellent Cheryl Rofer at Balloon Juice has this comment on the Vanity Fair article…
“I might as well add that there is a crappy lab-leak article in Vanity Fair that is not worth your time to read. Not linking.”
I would suggest reading her post on the lab leak BS here…
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2021/06/03/rolling-the-credulous/
Rofer's criticism had nothing to do with addressing any of the circumstantial evidence. Her criticism is best described as logically fallacies, not so much that she's making errors (well, actually, she makes a few, including dumping the baby with the bathwater) but that she never addresses the *points*.
Going after the character of people is a useless distraction. People make mistakes. You make mistakes. I make mistakes. Move on.
How can we have an open discussion about the issues if we don't talk about the issues?