There seem to be a lot of people who still don't understand how it is that researchers in 2020 concluded that a lab leak of the COVID virus was implausible just because they had discovered a particular bat virus. Surely the discovery of a bat virus similar to COVID makes a natural origin more plausible but says nothing one way or the other about a lab leak?
That's true. The catch is that the researchers already believed a lab leak was implausible. It went like this:
We believe the evidence is strongly for a natural origin and strongly against a lab leak....
EXCEPT
There's a furin cleavage site in the genome that nature can't explain. This gives us second thoughts about the lab leak.
When nature eventually confirmed that the furin site could indeed arise naturally, their doubts were alleviated and they returned to their initial belief: the lab leak hypothesis was implausible and there was no reason to think otherwise.¹
For most of the people who don't get this, it's because they don't want to get it. However, there are probably a few who don't get it in good faith. This post is for them.
¹This was based on the evidence available at the time. Since then, additional discoveries have made the lab leak hypothesis even less likely.
The problem is that you seem to insist that "lab leak" and "engineered virus" are synonymous.
But I suspect many people (myself included) who have accepted the virus wasn't man-made are assuming that the virus lab that just happened to be next door to ground zero could very plausibly have leaked a natural virus it was studying.
What evidence is giving everyone the ironclad confidence that that's impossible?
Yes, exactly.
The expression "lab leak" could mean either accidental leak of a natural virus, or an engineered virus, and that distinction means everything. It's ambiguous here; in a post trying to clarify the situation Kevin should be more specific.
From the furin cleavage business he mentions it appears that he is talking about engineered viruses, but I'm (kind of) with you: we haven't been able to rule out an accidental leak of a natural virus.
I say "kind of" because the wet market is the simplest hypothesis, and very plausible. After all, the combination of dense human and animal populations in close contact has been producing novel viruses for millennia. That has to be the first guess.
Except that the Chinese government tested all the animals in the market and could not find one carrying the virus. Pangolin? Nope. Raccoon Dog? Nope. And on down the list. Except there is one animal who could have spread the virus without knowing it was sick: a human. And in fact there were reports in the fall of 2019 that some people in Wuhan (a huge city) were sick with a flu related virus that was similar to the SARS virus in China ten years earlier. The jury is still out on this.
You seem to not understand that the word implausible is very different then the word impossible. You have two scenarios, the lab leak, (there has never been a dangerous virus escape a lab and result in community transition in the history of the world), and natural jump from animals to humans (A scenario that occurs every 5 to 10 years and was a priori predicted as inevitable). Even a conservative should see why the second is inherently considered more plausible than the first. (And note, the nature medicine paper implicitly states that a lab leak was possible when it stated evolution in a culture was possible. Combined with almost all of the earliest cases connected to a wet market and no early cases connected to the lab that put the nail in the coffin of lab leak. And the claim of the state department employee identifying two lab researchers getting sick in October is bull crap. The 'state department employees' were political appointees and specifically hacks hired by Pompeo solely to spread lies about the chinese. They have zero biology backgrounds and have long prior careers as professional liars.
Honestly, now that a man-made virus is off the table, I'm not very emotionally invested in the origin one way or the other. You on the other hand I suspect see this as a proxy for giving Trump (who's behavior during the pandemic was in fact demonic) a "win".
It takes about 30 seconds of googling reputable sites, though, to know that your "no lab leaks in the history of the world" statement is comically untrue. In addition to several serious incidents, leaks of less dangerous viruses are far more common.
But let's get real. China has a long history of wanting global respect, and there's simply no way they would ever allow evidence of a lab leak resulting in a global pandemic to be made public. Full stop. So any local "research" of wet markets or wherever should be taken with a MASSIVE grain of salt.
We can trust our own genetic research to prove that the virus wasn't man-made. But anything beyond that we will simply never know. Anyone who insists they know what's plausible, and spends their time owning people on Twitter armed with "data" basically handed to them by the Chinese government, is clearly way too emotionally invested in this.
The problem is that you seem to insist that "lab leak" and "engineered virus" are synonymous.
He isn't insisting anything of the kind.
He certainly declined to make the distinction between "lab leak" and "engineered virus", even though several commentators here already pointed it out in previous posts. That is demagoguery.
Do you have any idea what "demagoguery" means?
Yes.
"political activity or practices that seek support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument."
That is a reasonable description of what KD does here.
Kevin Drum and demagoguery really do not belong in the same sentence. He's annoyingly pedantic no matter the topic.
He is obviously not pedantic here, because he doesn't make the distinction between "lab leak" and "engineered virus".
I wouldn't come here if I thought KD is a demagog in general, but on this specific issue he doesn't keep his standards, to be mild.
Not being pedantic enough for a wingnut does not equate to being a "demagogue." Just say you messed up and move on. You might just regain a shred of credibility.
I am not worried about credibility with people that don't answer to the point.
Great, then we're aligned.
"The problem is that you seem to insist that "lab leak" and "engineered virus" are synonymous. "
+1
Exactly what I was going to say. I don't understand why so many people insist on confusing the language this way.
Comes across as they are well aware that lab leak is a viable hypothesis, so let's deliberately confuse the language, claim engineered virus is unlikely, and pretend that gets rid of lab leak as a good explanation...
The people pushing the lab leak hypothesis most strongly are also pushing the engineered virus. That takes two forms: one is the "gain of function" route pursued by Rand Paul (who seems to have no idea what he's talking about when he reads the notes someone else prepared for him), and one is the "Chinese bioweapon" route. People asserting that the lab was benignly studying mammalian coronaviruses, happened upon a mammal with SARS COVID 19, and then somehow managed to let that virus escape from the lab are a minority, and a very quiet one at that.
Thank you for the pie chart, and the helpful reminder that Rand Paul is a fucking moron.
But yeah, the "very quiet" minority or whatever you want to call it is who is actually having this conversation right now. Sorry if that messes up your prepared talking points.
And I'm actually not asserting anything, just saying we have no way of knowing. The only assertions actually being made are from people who claim that there's a 99% chance of it being a natural transmission from the wild, because of reasons.
It's been over a year since I discounted the novelty of the existence of a FCS on the S protein and explained that it is not nearly as uncommon on sarbecoviruses as some had thought.
¯(°_o)/¯
Also, your logic is broken.
I studied math at Iowa State, and once had a class with Dr. Alexander Abian. Yes, that guy, the OG internet crank himself. I noticed he had some traits that you seem to share:
1) Clearly quite intelligent;
2) Able to function rationally in *most* areas of life;
3) But totally committed to a weird idea that he JUST COULD NOT LET GO.
I'll see your Alexander Abian and raise you Archimedes Plutonium. I used to think that D_Ohrk_E1 was deliberately trolling us until someone pointed out he presents as the classic, canonical USENET crank.
I'd mention a few more to see if anyone hails from the same lists I was on back in the day ... but I'm afraid that saying Betelgeuse even once would be considered a fair summoning.
Being committed to a weird idea is not exactly a bad thing, although that's not what I'm doing.
I've never once argued that it was absolutely a lab leak. I've delineated the evidence on different theories. I've said before that I'm 60-40, leaning towards lab leak, and I'm certainly not obstinate on this.
Shown dispositive (eg >99% phylogenic match indicating near-immediate progeny) evidence, I would hope all of us would consider the issue settled. Even if 99% match, I would consider it settled.
Someone below thought that bats had all the ingredients necessary to naturally develop the progeny of SARS-CoV-2. That's not necessarily true. The FCS/S2's higher binding affinity is to hACE2 not b(at)ACE2. Evolutionary biology would suggest that such mutations would have lower odds of surviving in a bat reservoir.
I'm not asking people to buy into a lab leak theory. I'm asking people to keep their minds open.
Why would the odds of survival be any greater in a bat in a laboratory? Are you suggesting that the bat-to-mammal transmission occurred in the lab? Surely an accidental transmission is highly unlikely (one wouldn’t want uncontrolled contacts between individuals, much less between species).
I should of course have said bat-to-other mammal transmission; bats are mammals.
Obviously, ACE2 is not the same, regardless of both are mammals.
There is, after all, a reason why WIV used hACE2 transgenic mice in their chimeric coronavirus experiments.
I think that's what you were asking?
WIV's the source (in interviews) of information describing the sometimes accidental unprotected contact in the lab between humans and bats.
They're also the same people who conducted serial experiments of chimeric coronaviruses in primarily BSL-2 facilities.
Neither Kevin nor the authors of the Origins paper said it was ‘impossible’; Kevin says ‘improbable’ or ‘implausible’. I am neither a virologist nor epidemiologist, but I am a longtime user of statistics. To address the relative likelihood of events, you start with base rates. There are vastly more bats in the wild than in laboratories, and vastly more outdoor workers than lab workers. So finding that the furin-cleavage mutation occurs naturally means that there are vastly more bats harboring coronovirus particles with that mutation in the wild than (naturally-occurring) in laboratories. Now here it gets fuzzier: bat-human encounters are of course the daily practice of the lab*, but these are supposed to be protected, and even if practices are imperfect, risk is certainly mitigated to whatever extent they are followed. Outside, encounters are almost certainly unprotected, and though improbable, the sheer numbers of bats and humans means that the number of events will be considerable. No doubt the experts have much more data on which to base estimates of the probabilities of unprotected, potentially infectious, encounters in the wild vs. in the lab. But that’s one way to get at the relative likelihoods.
*Certainly not every employee comes into contact with bats or bat materials.
It should also be noted that although bats are everywhere, they are not particularly common in the Wuhan area and the bats with viruses related to COVID were found thousands of kilometres away in southern China in caves that WIV researchers took samples from.
The people in that area with the bats show antibodies to bat corona viruses. Also, that area supplied live animals to the Wuhan wet market.
The other factor, as I understand it, is that the initial cases were centered on the wet market in Wuhan. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
For the lab leak hypothesis to be correct, someone got infected at the lab and went to the wet market where they infected several other people. Someone could have managed it, but Wuhan is a city of about 11 million and the lab and the market are miles from each other. Wouldn't it have been more likely that an infected researcher would transmit it to his friends, family, and neighbors rather than exclusively to a bunch of strangers at the wet market.
There's no absolute proof here, but the majority of scientists who actually work in this field look at the facts they have and conclude that the odds of it being a lab leak of any kind are quite small compared to transmission from animals captured in the wild.
+1.
The epidemiological evidence strongly suggests that the initials outbreak(s) was connected to the market. I say outbreaks because there were two strains of the virus associated with the initial cases. Most of those cases were associated with the market, but some were not. Given what we know about the transmission of the virus this makes sense.
Researchers have also tracked down SARS-CoV-2 RNA to samples taken at the market in cages used for animals (I believe raccoon dogs, but may be wrong here). All in all the evidence points to a zoonotic spillover in late 2019 at the market. It is unlikely that we will ever find the intermediate host, so this is the best that we will have. Nothing certain, but strongly indicative.
One more thing. The lead author of the paper you linked to, which is by no means the last word on this, was a signatory of the famous lab leak letter early on. He did his research and changed his mind in light of new evidence. That's how science works.
The fact that the furin cleavage domain is common in bat coronaviruses means there is no need for an intermediary host. Everything necessary for the existence of the virus already exists in bats.
That's not quite right. FCS can, of course, be found in sarbecoviruses, but SARS-CoV-2 was the first time it was found on the S protein -- a key to why it is able to specifically attach to hACE2 receptor.
IDK if anyone can conclude therefore that "there is no need for an intermediary host". It certainly makes it a lot easier.
Why people latched onto the FCS as a potential smoking gun was because the insertion of a FCS into the S protein region was exactly what the EcoHealth Alliance (which worked with WIV) proposed to DARPA in a grant, to see if it would increase its affinity to hACE2.
That an FCS/S2 is possible through the natural route does not exclude the possibility that the virus was engineered, but it removes the existence of the FCS/S2 as dispositive evidence of a lab-engineered virus.
Any claim that the first outbreak was in the wet market comes from the Chinese government. Why should we trust it?
The Chinese government also claims the Sun rises in the East, you dumb sonuvabitch.
I was going to write a comment, jokingly, about how all the lab leak theory proponents ultimately rest their argument on their firm conviction that "teh Chinese are sneaky!" but then here comes MF and ruins the joke by demonstrating the point.
Like, it doesn't matter how much the scientific community says "lab leak is very unlikely for XYZ series of technical reasons," people like MF will always come back to their belief that They Must Be Up To Something without realizing that what they are doing is presenting a silly and illogical frame for evidence, and not evidence itself.
That's been kind of the point of this comments section. Yes, you can herp de durp about how OMG THE ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY backs what your saying, but if you've actually read the major findings it's simply not true.
Almost every paper is discussing engineered viruses, and yes, in that case it's pretty much unanimous. But I've yet to see research regarding the potential for a lab leak of a natural virus that was much more than hand waving and uncertainty. Feel free to link that slam dunk research you're leaning on, I clearly missed it.
How exactly would you do a 'research paper' on whether or not a lab leak occurred at a specific facility at a specific point in time?
I assume it would be similar to research of an alien mothership shooting the virus on moonbeams?
Or research of Secret Agents from undisclosed evil masterminds releasing the virus?
Or research of Bill Gates and George Soros ordering the dispersal of the virus?
Research is pretty clearly the wrong description for what you are looking for.....
It is claimed that "scientists concluded a COVID lab leak was implausible". Citizen Lehew ask about the research that lead to this conclusion.
Are you such research is not possible even in principle?
If so, how would scientists reach this conclusion?
Lol, so in summary:
Anyone who thinks it's plausible that a natural virus cold have leaked from a lab is an idiot who should listen to the scientists, unless they'd like to see what the scientists actually said on the subject that gives you such certainty, in which case research on this subject is obviously impossible.
Thank you, I totally get it now.
It's pretty funny how you guys reflexively insist someone is a Republican or an idiot (synonyms?) when they ask a question you can't answer.
But it's a legitimate question. Where did all of this ironclad epidemiological evidence regarding the wet markets come from, again?
"It's pretty funny how you guys ..."
Apparently, on this issue you are allowed to be as irrational as required. On other issues this forum looks much saner.
Something else is going on, it seems to me. Maybe it's the election campaign getting going, but comments in recent KD blog threads have gotten increasingly nasty. Lots of chest thumping and not much substantive discussion. More profanity, also, calling other commenters names. Doesn't make for a good discussion IMO.
"Something else is going on, it seems to me. "
Not pbvious.
You get this crap each this subject comes up.
We know that the Sun rise from the east from other sources too, completely independent of the Chinese government. It is therefore a completely different situation.
😂
It comes from a MAP of the actual cases.
"The other factor, as I understand it, is that the initial cases were centered on the wet market in Wuhan. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715"
That is based on data from the Chinese CDC, in other words worthless.
The fact that Science published it without making this point absolutely clear is a disgrace for Science.
Never trust a Chicom -- after all, they killed John Birch!
I missed your point.
Are you suggesting that we can trust the Chinese government to tell the truth?
Whereas the Trump-led government would be much more reliable, eh?
You miss completely.
The discussion here is about a scientific article which relies on data from the Chinese government, but does not even consider the possibility that it is biased. There is no data from the US government involved, so that is just irrelevant.
To your question, once it becomes fully Trump-led government, it will be less reliable than the Chinese. At the moment, though, it is not Trump -led, and even when he was a president, large parts of the US government were still pretty sane and reliable (most importantly, elections were still free and somewhere in the
vicinity of fair).
"The discussion here is about a scientific article which relies on data from the Chinese government, but does not even consider the possibility that it is biased."
This is a stupid fallacy based on your own ignorance. You don't have any idea what goes into an effort like this and have presented nothing to back up the claim that they never considered the possibility that the Chinese government was "biased." As if the government would have known ahead of time which areas to falsely claim were sites of the outbreak so as to fool these dumb dumbs. But not you! You're too sharp to fall for it!
I don't need to present evidence abotu whatthe article says. If you think the article considers the possibility of bias, point to it in the article.
I actaully read it, and it doesn't discuss it.
You didn't read it (obviously), but you still think you know better. Why?
Because I'm smart enough to know that while I'm an expert in my field, I know next to nothing about virology, and certainly not enough to think I know better than people who do this for a living. That's the mark of a stupid person. All conspiracy theorists talk like you. They assume that experts don't consider obvious things and that they, armchair morons, have cracked the case wide open.
Newsflash: you didn't.
So you really think that youcan know better about the paper without even reading it?
Wow.
I think that I, as a layman, am not qualified to understand the underlying science and assumptions enough to grok the nuances of what I'm reading, any more than you are able to understand why Rust is faster than JavaScript in an ECS container running behind an ALB in Fargate.
But yo can still read the paper and check their sources of data.
And if that toomuch, you need to simply admit that you don't actually know.
As I already, I can read and understand the paper, and certainly can figure where they took their data from.
You can't even fix your own typos. So I highly doubt you can read a scientific paper and deduce the nuances and underlying science (that you've never studied) and come to a correct conclusion. All conspiracy nuts talk just like you. It's stupid.
"There seem to be a lot of people who still don't understand how it is that researchers in 2020 concluded that a lab leak of the COVID virus was implausible"
That's because they don't want to understand it. They are completely wrapped up in an argument that Lab Leak => Fauci arrested => Trump is president. Or some similar formula. These are people who took horse de-worming paste rather than get a vaccine.
The Chinese and Russians are evil people with evil governments. This is common enough… see Middle East, Africa, West Virginia etc.
That’s my formula though. Why would we give them the benefit of the doubt? They eat bats, cats, rodents and use rhino horns as magic dust… sorry, “traditional medicine”.
Barbarians!
"That’s my formula though. Why would we give them the benefit of the doubt?"
For the same reason that I don't shake my fist at the Chinese when I stub my toe or curse the Russians when I get a flat tire. Sure, China and Russia have awful governments who do bad things, but it'd be moronic to assume as a consequence that any particular bad thing is their doing.
Some of us around these parts are concerned with accurately assessing reality, and thus aren't too keen on your particular brand of nihilistically assuming that whatever conclusion that is convenient to your beliefs also *is*.
Then maybe you and Mr. Drum should stop talking / writing about it. I’m not sure this is a useful discussion… never was. What would we we do with information confirming the source?
I’m not a nihilist and my commentary is not either.
Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.
It's a desperate attempt to avoid admitting that Trump absolutely botched the US response because he is insane. Injecting bleach, ivermectin, demanding everyone around him not wear masks, holding giant indoor rallies and killing Herman Cain, and the list goes on.
If the whole thing was a hoax by Fauci or a plot by the commies, then Trump is exonerated and they can go back to sleep.
I actually think Fauci deserves a 50 foot bronze statue in front of an NIH building for the crap he endured.
But the fact that Fauci and Trump is where your mind goes when discussing this topic is exactly why your reasoning about what's "plausible" is just as irrational as the wingnuts.
Suddenly, Drum is using the word "implausible"
I, myself, allow a ~1% likelihood of lab leak, simply because China has utterly stonewalled every attempt to investigate it. But they would absolutely do that under any circumstances at all, so.
Yep. I think the bulk of the controversy (at least among people operating in good faith) is the conflation of A) "not impossible" with B) "likely" or "highly plausible"
"Not impossible but extremely unlikely" is the the proper way to view the lab leak hypothesis.
No, the bulk of the controversy is that you're using slight of hand to take a scientific consensus that the virus was not man-made and then using that to declare that a similar consensus exists (it doesn't) that a natural virus didn't leak from the lab.
The only source of epidemiological data relies heavily on the Chinese government's cooperation, and they have a very strong incentive to not be responsible for a global pandemic. The only "good faith" argument to be had here is that we'll probably never know.
Please. No one is confused about this or conflating different things. The scenarios are:
1) COVID was engineered in a lab. Exactly 0% likely.
2) COVID arose naturally, was being studied in a lab, and leaked from there. Perhaps 1% likely.
3) COVID arose naturally, and jumped to the human population naturally. About 99% likely.
What are the grounds for the 99% and 1% likelihoods?
If it is supposed to be something that scientists said, give references.
Kevin claims:
"(the experts believed) the lab leak hypothesis was implausible and there was no reason to think otherwise."
The conspiracy theorists that have replied so far have posted a lot of words without providing a reason to think otherwise.
We are all still in agreement that there is no actual reason to believe a lab leak occurred...but the conspiracy theorists insist that this lack of any known reason is actually the reason to believe it.
If like to assume bad faith by the conspiracy nutters.....
Assigning blame for the outbreak is a waste of time. The real issue is that - however it happened - a virus outbreak occurred and killed over a million Americans and many millions more worldwide. Assigning blame is precisely what Trump chose to do instead of treating covid as a public health emergency. Trump poisoned the well by pretending it was a hoax or political gambit, undermining Fauci and other public health experts, and trumpeting fake treatments like bleach and horse paste. All this despite nearly dying of covid himself. People forget today that Trump could have died in office years ago.
Go ahead and flog the various "first case" theories all you want. It's just wanking.
Please. Figuring out the origins of COVID could help us find ways to treat it and slow its spread and, more importantly, prevent other diseases from arising in the future. There are very good reasons why scientists are looking into the origins of COVID. Your conflating that effort with "assigning blame" is unhelpful.
Please. The scientists have been looking for years now and have long been of the opinion (more or less) that covid is a natural virus and not engineered in a bio lab. There are only two options for the original infections: 1) the wet-meat market, and 2) accidental release from the bio lab. Preparing for the next outbreak does not depend which of the two is the actual culprit. A large portion of the push for the bio lab explanation is so that we can blame China for incompetance and overall evilness, which would give us an excuse to "do something," whatever that is.
While taking risks and visiting far-flung locations, I make $100 per hour. Last week, I travelled to Rome, Monte Carlo, and ultimately Paris while working remotely. This week, I’m back in the USA. I only use this one fantastic website for easy tasks.
Let's remember that it took more than 10 years to figure out where the original SARS came from (link).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747529/
So I'm not bothered that we haven't been able to nail this down yet, except it seems clear that it was not an engineered virus, either as a bioweapon or gain of function research.
In that vacuum of information, I'll take the default hypothesis to be the simplest (the wet market). Occam's Razor and all that. That has the huge advantage of having happened multiple times throughout history, ever since humans and animals congregated together in ancient middle east villages.
I'll give you that we can't absolutely rule out a lab leak of a natural virus, and that Chinese govt sources are biased and opaque. Fine, but since no one here or anywhere has any evidence that the wet market wasn't the source, why waste time looking for complicated possibilities when the simple one works perfectly well?
I hear what you're saying. I guess I've just seen the movie a hundred times where a factory gives everyone in town cancer, and then of course denies it. So when someone says "Hey, a novel coronavirus popped up in a town, and there happens to be a lab studying coronaviruses a few blocks away" that definitely jumps out as the prime Occam's Razor candidate to me.
Anyhoo, if it weren't for the fact that Kevin keeps bringing this up and conflating evidence about lab leaks and engineered viruses I don't think I would have wasted a minute thinking about it at all. 😛
"..why waste time looking for complicated possibilities when the simple one works perfectly well?"
The fact that it was so contagious right from the start (less than 2 months after the initial jump, if we believe the Science paper mentioned above) is actualy very surprising. Viruses that just did the jump are normally quite sluggish to start with.
I don't think this suggests a lab leak, my guess is that it actually circulated in China for months (or even years) as a low-transmissibility and low-pathogenicity strain, becoming better and better in infecting humans, until it became highly transmissible and pretty pathogenic. That explains the high transmissibility.
The fact that the Chinese government blocked any access to any data that good tell us something about earlier transmission of the virsus is there was any is, I woudl say, weakly supportive for this.