As you may recall from Saturday, the four researchers who wrote "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" initially believed that it was quite possible—maybe even likely—that the COVID virus originated in a lab leak. One of the big reasons for this belief was the existence of a furin cleavage site in the virus genome, something that had never before been seen naturally in a SARS-like virus.
However, in late February 2020 they discovered a bat virus that had an insertion in the genome at exactly the point of the furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2. This strongly suggested that the furin cleavage site could indeed be created naturally by evolution, which in turn meant it was no longer necessary to think the virus could only have been created artificially.
But the PO paper didn't say exactly that. It said an artificial origin wasn't plausible. But why say that unless there was explicit evidence that the lab leak theory wasn't just unnecessary, but positively unlikely?
Well, there was. I didn't include this in my timeline of the internal Slack messages exchanged by the authors while they were writing PO, but one of the messages outlines exactly the evidence against a lab leak. It's from Eddie Holmes, and was written after publication of PO when Kristian Andersen was having second thoughts:
To me there is too long a series of implausible events to suggest inadvertent escape via lab passage.
(i) The Shi group sequence and publish their bat viruses all the time, but none of these are the obvious progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. It seems improbable to me that the one that escaped was not one that they had sequenced already. And why do lab passage on a virus that you have not sequenced?
(ii) If there had been a lab escape then we would expect an initial outbreak at the [Wuhan lab]. Where's the evidence of the outbreak? How could this be hidden? That group were also well enough to sequence an early genome of SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13.
(iii) What are the odds that the virus then first appears in the very place — a wildlife market — where we exactly expect a natural species jump to occur? Why not in a far more crowded place in Wuhan of which there are many.
(iv) Why would the Shi group then publish RaTG13 that would only help point the finger at them? Makes no sense.
That was in April 2020. By now, of course, there's far more evidence both in favor of a natural origin of the virus and against a lab leak. But even at the very start, the evidence against a lab leak was pretty strong.
In my opinion the only interesting "lab leak" question, namely if the virus was natural or engineered, has already been answered sufficiently for sane people.
So if we're now just trying to nail down whether the virus jumped via an animal directly from nature, or the lab was somehow involved as in intermediary of a natural virus, it does seem like a pretty pointless exercise.
That said, here's my OMG LAB LEAK THEORY: Some enterprising janitor decided to supplement his income by occasionally sneaking a few animals out of the lab and selling them to the markets. End of theory. Please provide evidence that this couldn't have been the source and I will happily erase this theory from my brain forthwith.
The plot of the movie "Outbreak" in a nutshell. It's a pretty good movie too.
Lab animal cuisine is the bleeding edge of foodie culture.
You get clues on your phone that you have just an hour or so to unravel that bring you to the secret, underground event-kitchen, --which afterward vanishes the instant the door closes behind you, like it was never there at all.
It's all about the experience; very exclusive, very expensive.
I can’t recommend the smallpox rat enough
I disagree with this. Wuhan's virology institute had a history of lapses. Determing if there was an error in execution of protocols or the protocols themselves had a design flaw is important in how to restructure that lab and also labs in general to reduce chances of virus escapes. Why are aircraft safery records good? Because we try to determine what went wrong after every crash and see what could have avoided it for all planes in the future.
Absence of evidence of a conspiracy is itself proof of a conspiracy, duh! And yet deep state liberals like Kevin fall for it every time.
I'll bite on the numbered list as someone who has lived in China.
A) the Shi group weren't the only people sequencing or publishing bat viruses in the Wuhan lab. Also, most of the public databases of the Wuhan lab were removed or made private in November.
2) The evidence could be easily hidden. Covid is an influenza like illness. There are several which regularly kill people. Influenza itself, Respiratory syncytial virus, one of the other 4 sometimes deadly corona viruses. Flu had been the most dangerous influenza like illness until the discovery of Covid 19.
Chinese doctors, when they first encountered people in respiratory distress, would have diagnosed it as one of these other causes. The idea that a novel coronavirus was circulating would take time and lab sequencing to suspect.
From there, it's child's play for the Chinese authorities to take a map of their covid 19 samples and omit the entries that weren't localized around the market. That map didn't come out of China until February if I recall, months after Covid 19 started infecting people.
3) See above. If the Chinese want to hide that a virus was leaked due to poor lab practices they need a plausible alternative explanation.
When the Allies in WW2 wanted to use intelligence from Enigma decrypts to sink a submarine or reroute a convoy, they would always send a recon plane, or have a fishing boat out, or something else that the Germans could point to as a reason. Something that seemed much more likely than "The allies broke our technically sophisticated cypher system and are translating in real time."
Putting the map of early cases around the wet market is that something. If they had put the early cases as all happening around a mall or a school, it wouldn't have been as convincing.
4) The Shi group published that because it was the nearest relative. "A novel bat coronavirus appears in Wuhan and the Wuhan bat coronavirus group says that it has never seen anything similar. Doesn't ring any bells."
The entire world would have been asking some super pointed questions. It is much better for China and the reputation of the Wuhan lab if, after 3 months of radio silence, they start showcasing their transparency.
"Yes, your honor, 3 months after the murder occurred, the defendant handed over a weapon to the officers that was similar to the description of the murder weapon."
"So the officers were able to execute a search warrant and see the defendant's gun collection."
"No, no. Rather the officers gave a description of the murder weapon, a specific kind of 22 caliber pistol. The defendant said he might have something similar in his gun collection. He told the officers to wait for a while and the defendant locked the gun safe, and buried it under a hundred feet of concrete in an undisclosed location. But once the concrete had set, he did give the officers a 22 caliber pistol from that collection and pinky swore that this was the only 22 caliber pistol that he had."
"Was the provided pistol the murder weapon?"
"No, it was similar, but not a match."
"And no match was found in the thousands of other guns in the collection?"
"Well, we never saw those, because of the aforementooned concrete, but he did pinky swear that there was nothing else similar there."
The scientists in the slack are all upset that China reflexively covering everything up is making it impossible to be sure about a lab leak. But they never mention this publicly. They want to find a smoking gun for zoonotic origin so they don't have to point out that they can't be sure that their friends and colleagues in the Wuhan lab, doing similar research, might be the source.
Personally, I don't believe in any Chinese bioweapon nonsense. I do believe that sloppy lab practices allowing either a modified or natural virus, isolated from a bat living a thousand km from Wuhan, to escape is plausible.
The fact that China went scorched earth on all the records from the lab and any outside observers makes me think it is even MORE plausible.
It may be that this is all just reflexive secrecy, but, in that case, the rest of the world, especially the virologist community, shouldn't be publicly covering for the lack of transparency. The line should have been "We find zoonotic origins for Covid 19 to be the most likely, but unfortunately we can't rule out a lab leak without more transparency about the research in the Wuhan lab."
That was what they were saying privately that didn't make it into the paper.
Now, we will likely never be sure. And the reason we can't be sure is that we will never have access to the contemporaneous Chinese records of what was happening in Wuhan from October - December 2020.
The one and only reason why I allow a ~1% chance that lab leak happened is the simple fact that the Chinese have utterly stonewalled every attempt to investigate it. But they would likely do that in any case, so.
In an authoritarian regime like China's there are any number of reasons you would not want to be waving you underwear around in public, even if it was clean or soiled with some completely unrelated stain.
Yes. “But they’re stonewalling!” is the least convincing argument for a lab leak. Stonewalling is SOP for authoritarians — cf. Erdogan’s attempts to control information about enforcement of earthquake-resistance codes.
I'll bite on the numbered list as someone who has lived in China.
I currently live in China. And guess what? That doesn't give me special insight or expertise into this issue. Just like it doesn't give you special insight or expertise into the issue. The people who plausibly claim specialized knowledge regarding the subject at hand—PhD virologists—overwhelmingly hold that natural zoonotic spillover is by far the most likely way the pandemic started.
(And, sure, "by far the most likely" does not equate to "certainty.')
Show me the poll.
I've come across plenty of statements of a preference to not offer an opinion on the matter, on account that it comes with reputational risks.
Fuck off, troll.
(づ￣ ³￣)づ
He's not a troll. He's a crank. Totally different type.
Blink. That ... makes sense. In the context of the old USENET he would map to one of those 'Relativity is wrong!' guys.
I retract that statement. It turns out you're probably not a troll. My apologies. You're a crank.
I don't find the secrecy particularly damning because they always do that shit. I also think there is very little evidence that the virus was modified beyond wild natural evolution. I agree with everything else you said.
Having lived in China for three years, the last six months of which overlapped the SARS epidemic, and been to more than a few wet markets, natural crossover always made the most sense to me.
The most puzzling thing to be about the Lab Leak Theory is why right-wingers are so passionately invested in it.
Is there some Lab Leak => ????? => Trump is president formula that I'm missing?
The most puzzling thing to be about the Lab Leak Theory is why right-wingers are so passionately invested in it.
The right favors Interpretations that reflect Evil Red China in the worst possible light.
That's actually "puzzling" to you?
It's not that simple. And Lab Leak isn't evil, it's incompetence.
More to the point. The right-wingers aren't yelling about Evil Red China, they are arguing something more like:
Lab Leak => ??? => Fauci => ??? => Democrats => Trump is president.
"The most puzzling thing to be about the Lab Leak Theory is why right-wingers are so passionately invested in it."
In part because the people they hate are so passionately invested (as in saying absurdly that the chance it was a lab leak is one in a million) in the lab leak theory being false.
"The null hypothesis has not been falsified." Yeah, real passionate words there.
It's not puzzling at all. Chait:
It became politicized.
IDK why KD keeps this topic up when he's not presenting anything new. Rather, all he's doing is pushing people into accepting a false narrative on pure faith.
No one should accept, as KD has done, that there is 99.9999% certainty that the source of SARS-CoV-2 comes from natural spillover. There are very few experts who make such extreme claims.
I urge people not to get over their skis. Don't accept anyone's claim -- whether lab leak or natural spillover -- that there is near-absolute certainty in this.
Do not feed the troll.
(づ￣ ³￣)づ
The evidence we have strongly suggests a totally natural origin and transmission. But there is a small chance it escaped from a lab that can't be ruled out. That's it.
I do strongly agree that a lot of people on the left treated the idea that it might be a lab leak as akin to Qanon.
I do strongly agree that a lot of people on the left treated the idea that it might be a lab leak as akin to Qanon
At this point the most zealous of the lab leakers aren't hugely different.
One possibility: The logic of authoritarianism is that you support a tough guy who will crush your enemies. Trump supporters are committed to the idea that Trump is the guy to do this. In this framework, when something bad happens--like the pandemic--they search for a villain. But that villain cannot be Trump, which is why they attacked Anthony Fauci, engaging in a sort of double-think to pretend that Fauci rather than Trump was in charge of the executive branch.
Compared to the mental gymnastics required to blame someone other than Trump for the actions of the Trump Administration, blaming China is easy.
The thing is even if Trump had run things competently things probably would not have been that much better. While the US is an outlier among other western nations, when you consider our massively unhealthy and poor population it's not that big of an outlier. More people died under Biden's first year of covid than Trump after all.
If the messaging of TFG’s administration had been better, the outcomes under both his and Biden’s administration would likely have been somewhat better. Of course, the same idiot anti-vaxxers would have opposed the Covid vaccine, but other people might have been less reluctant.
I have said previously that I think the initial deprecation of masks was a mistake. I think that better messaging could have encouraged the use of homemade cloth masks and yet discouraged hoarding of N95’s.
Since at this point the pro-leakers are going with prove-me-wrong, I'm guessing we can put this one to bed.
""The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" " article has literally nothing to do with lab leak versus zoonotic transfer. it literally doesn't even mention lab leak. It meant origin not in the sense of how did the virus infect the first human, but how did the virus come into existence. It argues that it almost surely didn;t arise from human engineering, it must have arisen from evolution. It says it is possible that it arose evolutionary in lab cultures but unlikely as evolving in an the wild is a much simpler explanation. Obviously, this last origin implies lab leak (or intentional release) so the article implicitly includes lab leak as a possibility.
While some may continue to latch onto a specific furin cleavage site's presence in D614G, the fact of the matter is, what you're doing here is rehashing something that most people have already moved on from.
Only the uninformed continue to cling onto the furin cleavage site claim. We know that, while unusual, it is not for lacking of natural existence in coronaviruses.
I made this comment re the false narrative of the furin cleavage site over a year ago.
So, if zoonotic spillover is surely the source of COVID-19, why hasn’t anyone identified the intermediate animal between the bat source and humans? The source of the earlier SARS outbreak was identified. But so far nada for COVID-19 — not pangolin, not raccoon dog, not rat, not panda, not anything. And not for lack of trying. Would be good to nail this down so we know, and so Republicans and Lefties can end their tiresome unproved claims and counterclaims.
If it was a lab leak, it wasn't, it was inadvertent. A worker was infected accidently or through negligence or just handling bats or specimens, and because we know the sequence and variability of the signs and symptoms, walked out of the lab asymptomatic and began normal daily activities squirting virus on everybody they met, including some delicious animals.*
*This is theory, not a good one, nor an informed one.