Peggy Noonan has a remarkable column in the Wall Street Journal today about the COVID lab-leak theory. Before I get to that, though, let's review why we're talking about this at all. A few days ago the Journal reported that:
- The Department of Energy had gathered some new intelligence about the possibility of a lab leak.
- DOE wouldn't tell us what it was.
- Whatever it was, it changed no minds in the other intelligence agencies it was shared with.
- DOE itself said it now believed in the lab-leak theory only with "low confidence."
I believe this is a fair summary of what happened, and it doesn't strike me as something that should push your beliefs very hard in one direction or another.
Now let's return to Noonan. She writes today that "common sense" suggests COVID was leaked from a lab. After all, it originated in a city with an important biological lab. I won't deny that this is provocative, but it's not remotely conclusive to any reasonable person. Noonan sort of admits that, but then says she and other conservatives got increasingly suspicious because experts were all working so hard to debunk the lab-leak hypothesis:
Why were so many others, not in the government but on social media and in the professions, so invested in the idea that the origin had nothing to do with a lab? Part of it was knee-jerk partisan thinking: Our political opposites think it happened in a Chinese lab because they’re xenophobic. Others were thinking diplomatically: Why increase tensions with China when there are already more than enough? Some were thinking practically: If China gets defensive, it’ll only withhold more data just when we need it most. Others appeared mysteriously uninterested in the lab-leak theory because, as we now know, there was something to hide: U.S. funding of the Wuhan lab. The National Institutes of Health admitted in October 2021 that it funded research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
This is quite a list, but Noonan manages to miss the most important possibility: Experts were invested in the idea that the origin had nothing to do with a lab leak because they thought it was wrong. They believed the evidence pointed pretty strongly to a zoonotic spillover, as with SARS and MERS and Ebola and HIV and every other virus dangerous to humans. And like responsible people everywhere, they hated the idea of conspiracy theories spreading that, in their opinion, were both wrong and unhelpful.
Are the experts mistaken? Maybe. It happens. But unless you're a virologist yourself it's really not possible for you to understand the evidence. That's frustrating, but it is what it is. The people who do understand the evidence almost universally believe COVID was produced naturally, just like every other pandemic virus in human history.
And since there have been hundreds of pandemics over the ages, it was inevitable that eventually the lottery would produce one in a city with a large biological research lab. I won't deny that this is a helluva coincidence. I won't deny that Chinese intransigence is suspicious. I won't deny that we haven't yet identified an animal pathway for COVID.
But the virology community pretty unanimously believes the genetic structure of the COVID virus shows no signs of an artificial origin, either engineered or accidental. Any honest discussion of COVID needs to acknowledge this in some depth—without immediately dismissing it by resorting to some juvenile snark about "peer reviewed" being worthless garbage these days.
If you want a personal opinion, I'd say the evidence is 95-5 in favor of a zoonotic origin of COVID. There's a small chance it was produced during routine research in a lab and then accidentally released, and there's nothing wrong with continuing to look into that. But right now there's lots and lots of evidence for a natural origin and virtually none for a lab origin.
As I understand it, the source of virus’ studied in that lab is animals so unless countries want to sue China for lab carelessness being certain of the initial cases infections makes no difference. We are left to deal with a difficult bug that will be with us for a long while either way.
The results in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, etc. etc. show us that it disn't need to be with us for a long time. That was a choice we made.
Have you been living under a rock for the last three months?
COVID is now endemic in China. It is no longer reported and no one bothers testing. There are no more mask requirements.
Its the usual not only sloppy, but intentionally misleading of the word "becuase."
It was completely made up by conservative media that the funding of research had anything to do with Covid-19 and subsequently, the next step was, if anything "double made up" since an administration official would not be worried about something that Fox made up in the first place.
This is a great example of what passes for modern "conservative thought" -- so much of it has no other basis than to be against anything liberals are for that it passes no analytical examination at all.
As someone else pointed out a few days ago… scientists don’t want to believe that their research killed millions. The virologists have an incentive to tell us they weren’t responsible. And then the Chinese are entirely unreliable as a source of info.
So we’ll never know and ultimately it doesn’t really matter. What’s done is done.
I will assert (for fun) that the Chinese government developed this bioweapon and released it. It served their purposes to kill non Chinese and gave them an excuse to exercise control over their own population. Oppression wins. Chaos in the West serves their interests.
Is it correct? Probably not, but I’m happy to hate the evil Chinese and the trumpists. Win win.
"I will assert (for fun) that the Chinese government developed this bioweapon and released it."
Whee! Motivated reasoning is FUN!!! You should hang out with the folks who want to keep using fossil fuels and so choose to believe that climate change is a another Chinese conspiracy--you'd get along great.
Your adherence to this evidence based analysis of our situation will serve you well in Dear Leader DeSatan’s gulag where you will certainly perish.
You’re in a war. And you’re losing.
And you've got shit all over your hands from deliberating pooping into them in the hopes that people will notice you. What else is new?
Sorry, but you are full of crap. The two only realistically possible choices are 1) a wild virus jumped from animals to humans or 2) a wild virus was collected by scientists, brought to a lab and accidentally infected the lab employees. No serious person thinks it originated as a result of genetic manipulations in a lab. (And the wuhan lab , as far as we know, was not doing gain of function research. That claim is just intentional lies by utterly evil people.
As more time passes and we don't find an animal pathway for COVID then it becomes more likely that it was lab created.
I understand enough of this to get myself into trouble.
So I believe the odds are significantly higher than 5%. Maybe as much as 20%. Of course, neither of us can be wrong because we are using percentages for our guesses.
OTOH, the Chinese can't keep the "fact" hidden forever that it is a lab created virus. So as time goes on, it is less likely that it leaked from the lab.
uhhhmmmm, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119
Sigh. Proves nothing.
If you are at all familiar with gain of function research you know that one of the classic methods is serial passaging - just passing the virus from host to host with no genetic manipulation other than that provided by natural selection.
Alternatively, COVID-19 may just have been a virus in one of WiV's bat samples that they had an accident with.
That is not how evidence works.
Also, we have found animal paths.
Really?
Reference?
Likewise, as more time passes and we don't find the immediate precursor of SARS-CoV-2 that a lab would have to have been working with, it becomes more likely that the pandemic resulted from a zoonotic spillover. Labs don't create viruses out of whole cloth.
The one thing every reputable virologist agrees on is that it wasn't a lab created virus. And neither the FBI nor DOE's position differ on that point from all of the other US intelligence agencies.
Worth noting that Wuhan has a population of over 11 million. This isn't like "Podunksville, Montana that's known for a sheep shearing festival and a CDC bioweapons lab" was the origin. This is like New York City or Los Angeles or the state of Georgia.
Something weird happening depends on two things: the odds of something weird happening and the number of opportunities given for something weird to happen. A city with 11 million people interacting in an urban environment is geometrically higher than Podunksville.
There's almost literally a virology lab near every city of ten million plus in China post-SARS, as well.
Peggy Noonan uses an inhaler with some kind of unique blend of psilocybin, opium and fermented tea gas.
Well, maybe fermented potpouri.
That would produce a much better high than she's capable of writing about.
She is stoned beyond her capacity.
We can add virology and epidemiology to the already very long list of stuff Noonan knows f*ckall about.
Not a virologist but I am in health care and used to reading data since I chair a department so have to keep up with literature. The initial claim was that the virus was manufactured in Wuhan and then released there on purpose to hurt the West. That made no sense for lots of reasons and there was nothing that really indicated the virus was manufactured. So the theory changed to it was just a leak of a virus being studied in Wuhan and maybe had something to do with gain of function research. There is no way to prove this is not true but statistical evidence to date points to the market as origin site. We also know that it has taken over 10 years to find zoonotic sources in the past.
No reason this couldn't be a rare instance of a leak but most things are like most things so probably zoonotic and will take a while to find. My prediction is that if a zoonotic origin is found we will quickly have a conspiracy theory formulated that it is a plant. (The regularly crazy part of the gOP all is convinced its a lab leak. The even more crazy faction, see Unz, believes the US created the virus.
Steve
Steve, thank you for noting what Kevin missed - that there is a difference between: 1) a virus created in a lab and released as a bioweapon; and 2) a naturally occurring virus that leaked from a lab where it was being studied. My understanding is that genetic evidence should be present if this was "created" but there simply is no such evidence. If it leaked from the lab, that is important to know so efforts can be made to determine HOW it leaked so procedures can be implemented at labs world-wide to avoid similar leaks.
Absolutely
Viruses are studied in labs. Labs make mistakes. Rarely this bad but hey, the US once dropped live nukes off the Carolina coast. Shit happens
Mistakes on this scale tend to be covered up, but that doesn’t make the initial mistake an intentional act
Yes. If not the animal market then this is the most likely explanation.
+1
Labs make mistakes because people make mistakes, even when they're trying to be very careful.
It should also be pointed out that while deadly viruses have leaked from labs in the past, in the sense that lab personnel, and other occupants in the same building have been infected, there is not one example of this resulting in a sustained chain of infections. On the other hand, zoonotic infections happen on an near annual basis. That's literally infinitely more often.
Evidently the FBI believes that Covid-19 a deliberately engineered bio weapon that was released either on purpose or accidentally. The difficulty that I have with this is that you have top scientists all in agreement on the natural origins of the virus and doing so on the basis of publicly available evidence. By contrast, the FBI and the DOE won’t release the information which they claim supports this theory so that’s really the choice you either believe scientist and publicly available information or you believe the intelligence agencies.
"Evidently the FBI believes that Covid-19 a deliberately engineered bio weapon that was released either on purpose or accidentally. " That's two flat out lies. The FBI believes it's a natural virus that was definitely accidentally leaked.
Well, not all of them. Some of them, including the lead author on many papers attempting to prove zoonotic transmission -- which are then cited as authoritative by the studies you point to -- worked with WIV on SARS.
Is it too hard for most people to figure out? Perhaps. It doesn't mean that it's "really not possible for you to understand", however. You're constantly weighing in. How's that work?
Have there been hundreds of pandemics? Without needing to resort to hyperbole, there have been dozens of biosecurity breaches over the last several decades of biological research. https://bityl.co/HS5k (Note not all of the incidents are confirmed.)
Remember when you wrote that it's not possible for you to understand the evidence? Well, here you go. What does "artificial origin" mean anyway? Almost everyone agrees that the virus wasn't bioengineered. Specifically, they're talking about the cleavage site which, upon first review, did not seem to be possible by nature alone. This does not discount the lab leak theory. It may -- or may not -- discount the gain of function route, but almost no one is arguing that it was a bioengineered virus.
There you go again. If we consider the US intelligence nomenclature of the quality of evidence, what you're saying is, you have high confidence in zoonotic transmission. Not a single US agency supports this. But you, qualified as you are, have put the percentage at 95-5? Okay then.
Oh, and Noonan is an empty talking head.
"Have there been hundreds of pandemics?"
Probably there have been thousands over the course of human history. There haven't been large biological research labs for nearly all of that history, of course, but Kevin's point is a good one--we have labs everywhere, and lots of new diseases. It's not that crazy of a coincidence.
It's the usage of hyperbole to make it pandemics appear to be business as usual that is questionable.
The world spends a few billion dollars to prevent pandemics. Are you suggesting that it's all for naught?
How is it questionable? There are many epidemics every year. Pandemics seem to be a once every hundred years sorta thing, and onky going to get more common as we have more people (and less common as we get better at preventing them).
So there have been hundreds (probably thousands) in written history, mostly dependent on how you count.
This is hyperbole within the context.
Given that biological research labs have been a fairly recent invention, even crude ones, in the last 200 years, give or take.
The inevitability of this coincidence may make sense a thousand years from now, but from within this context and the limited number of pandemics, it is pure hyperbole.
It isnt hyperbole.
It is an accurate piece of information which is useful in understanding that pandemics have occurred with some regularity prior to the existence of bio labs. It might be inconvenient for your priors, but it isnt hyperbole just because you dont like it.
In your first post you make a bizarre argument stating that Kevin must be a virologist in order to accept the opinions of virologists. This makes no sense at all.
Hes also not a cardiologist, so is he not allowed to write that cardiologists have best practices or recommendations after reminding readers that they are likely not experts in cardiology?
I count 7 pandemics in just over the last century -- influenza (1918, 1957, 1968, 2009), Zika, HIV, SARS-CoV2.
"The world spends a few billion dollars to prevent pandemics. Are you suggesting that it's all for naught?"
What? Of course not. FWIW, I think we should spend more. What's your point?
Do you not even know how fractions work!?!?! Truly you are to be pitied.
"Have there been hundreds of pandemics? " Wow. Are you ever stupid It wouldn't take you any effort to determine the answer is yes. If you've made the slightest effort to consider this topic you could name dozens just in the 20th century.
"Lab leak" does not mean "produced in a lab". It simply means that a lab where studies on coronaviruses were being performed ended up leaking one or more of the viruses under study outside of the lab.
I'm not sure how any experts would be able to tell the difference between a random coronavirus being studied in a lab that leaked from one that was transmitted naturally outside of a laboratory context. I haven't heard a convincing explanation of this.
...A) a virus being studied in a lab would have ahh,,. Been studied? There would be samples and evidence. Labs don't hoard these things because that's not how science works. Sequencing things takes many tries and often, many labs.
B) We know how viruses in labs can be altered or developed.
C) Labs can only simulate a limited number of genetic leaps, or encourage a certain number of generations. The wild can still do millions more at a time than all our lans combined.
Each of which make the 'lab leak' theory less likely.
The FBI claims differently. It says Covid-19 was a bio weapon that “leaked” from an unidentified Chinese lab. But you’ll have to take their word for it because they won’t release or even describe the evidence.
But is a SARS virus a reasonable basis of a bioweapon? As it demonstrated it can spread everywhere indiscriminately.
Logically, no. But the FBI seems committed to the Chinese bio weapon theory and since they won’t show their work, it’s hard to disagree with them.
You mean to say that since they won't show their work it's hard to agree with them. Burden of proof standards and all that.
Wouldn't it be reckless to engineer an infectious bioweapon and not develop and be prepared to produce an effective vaccine for one's own population? China seems to have been unprepared to vaccinate large numbers of people, and is still having difficulty.
The only way to distinguish the two cases would be that the earlieet infections in the lab leak case would be in people associated with the lab. In the covid 19 case, none of the earliest infections had any connection to the lab and weren't within the closest few million people to the lab.
"Common sense", yeah. Like it's "common sense" that the world is flat. I mean, just look at it!
If someone wanted to release a pandemic-causing, lethal virus, it would be smarter to use the "Twelve Monkeys" strategy. Take a long, long plane trip with stops all over the world, releasing virus into the air at every intermediate airport. And not, I repeat NOT, releasing it in your own country at its point of origin. That would just be dumb.
Voilà !
https://youtu.be/fU99W-ZrIHQ
Wow! Thanks!!
Several things going on here.
1. There is a clear and active media campaign to gin up fear of China right now. Peggy Noonan is apparently on board. NPR is on board (every morning I drive my son to school the same time and this week the main story every day is China). Republicans in Congress. FBI Director C. Wray is way on board (read Josh Marshall about the Wray interview on Fox this week). We are getting "prepped." For what? I guess we'll find out soon. Meanwhile, the lab-leak skeptics are getting steamrolled in the media. It is now becoming accepted wisdom that China needs to be blamed for the pandemic.
2. Aside from the politically motivated reasoning, there is the story of what actually happened.
KD: "If you want a personal opinion, I'd say the evidence is 95-5 in favor of a zoonotic origin of COVID."
I think that way overstates the opinion/consensus of the scientific community. Many are in the "we don't know" camp. My guess it's about 60/40 one way or the other.
This end part of a longish thread (filled with lots of good info) is a worthwhile read on the issue:
This notion that “scientists” are all one side of a concluded debate is the maybe the stupidest Twitter/media outcome.
Many of them who have publicly expressed that they don’t think there’s a final conclusion with the available data. “We don’t know yet” is perfectly scientific.
...
Maybe we can hold off the Twitter groupthink for once? Nobody has to buy what the FBI director thinks. But the Chinese government has greatly hampered this investigation. The publicly available data is censored and limited. And it’s just not enough to conclusively prove anything.
...
Most scientists with relevant expertise aren’t going around tweeting all day on pandemic origins. The available data is severely limited. No public info on the November cases, key details of the market and the animals, or lab inventories.
How hard is “we don’t know for sure”?
We don't know for sure.
But we do know which is more likely than the other,
And which has political reasons to exist.
I stand against those pushing a conclusion for political reasons.
I'm not convinced we know the answer, and especially not with 95% probability.
And to put things in perspective, here's Nikki Haley:
"Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic, hands down"
China is the boogeyman of the week but hardly the biggest enemy they see.
.
.
" FBI Director C. Wray is way on board…"
I'd like to know how the FBI is in on this? Does the FBI now have agents in Wuhan?
Good question. Here's Wray:
“The origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan. Let me step back for a second. The FBI has folks — agents, professionals, analysts, virologists, microbiologists, etc. — who focus specifically on the dangers of biological threats, which include things like novel viruses like Covid. And the concerns that they’re in the wrong hands — some bad guys, a hostile nation-state a terrorist or criminal — the threats that those could pose. So here you’re talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab that killed millions of Americans and that’s precisely what that capability was designed for. I should add that our work related to this continues. And there are not a whole lot of details I can share that aren’t classified."
...concerns that they’re in the wrong hands — some bad guys? Figure the Fox audience knows where this is going.
I’m still trying to understand how the FBI went from being a law enforcement agency to an intelligence agency with all these different experts on the payroll.
"I think that way overstates the opinion/consensus of the scientific community. Many are in the "we don't know" camp. My guess it's about 60/40 one way or the other." This is just plain wrong. 95-5 overstates the probability of it being a lab leak. Not a single one of the earliest known cases has any connection to the lab or was closer to the lab than several million other people. There has never once been a lab leak of a dangerous virus (there have been a dozen or so leaks) from a lab that resulted in a successful chain of infections. Zoonotic leaps of viruses to humans happens on a near annual basis.
I would think that, if it were zoonotic in nature, the Chinese would desperately want to find the reservoir of the variant that crossed over into humans, and do something about it. Isolate the virus and engineer a vaccine to inoculate the species? Ban that species from wet markets? Implement a surveillance program centered on that species?
I mean, do you really think it's smart to consider this just a one-off?
By definition, every pandemic is one off. Technically, if you squint real hard and twist some meanings of words, isn't the flu pandemic of 1918 still ongoing?
To the extent that a new variant that is both highly contagious and virulent, that escapes immunity that was imprinted by either vaccination or prior infection?
Yes.
This does not concern you, knowing that there is a reservoir of virus that has escaped surveillance because the Chinese seem fit to ignore it as a one-off?
It does concern me, but currently I'm on the all natural zoonotic market transmission train. The Chinese have been warned about the market being a reservoir in the past and to tighten its viral security. Place ourselves a century ago, and it would be sure thing that the virus sprang from the market. Currently the lab has safeguards many orders greater than the market. Are you suggesting mass inspections for novel virus and bacteria on wildlife captured and sold in a market that would probably be akin to Back of the Yards of a century ago? We've just been lucky that we haven't had an annual plague.
Spoiler alert......this virus already escaped the animal reservoir. We are a bit late on inoculating the host species. Absent a time machine of course.
Your argument would be better applied to the search for the animal that hosts the next pandemic virus.
For reference, finding the host of SARS didnt help stop Covid19. Agencies around the world are monitoring animals to identify new reservoirs and new risks. Covid19b has spread to many animal species and there are worldwide attempts to identify and monitor the spread and evolution of the virus.
hope that helps!
At this point, does the original host just prior to moving to humans really matter?
There is evidence that covid jumped to rodents and then back to humans as omicron.
Focusing on a single species, just because it was important to transmission in 2019, likely makes no sense now or in the future.
" Ban that species from wet markets?" They've banned all wet markets. How's that worked out? And of course the chinese would love to find the animal origin. But as many people have pointed out here, that has always taken years in the past, and routinely is never found. We didn't find that the origin of spanish influenza was pigs in kansas til les than 10 years ago, despite the epidemic being more than 100 years ago.
It's common human behavior to want to assign cause to effect. The pandemic was are very torturous time. Death, uncertainty, fear, panic, sorrow, powerlessness. These drive us just as all the positive aspects of life do. But when you are used to a certain amount of freedom and then it's curtailed without "your consent," defensiveness is almost automatic. And that compounds bad behavior because it's self-centered.
We will have to bend a flat Earth into a sphere before any amount of evidence, expertise, and common sense will make any difference.
For what it's worth: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/covid-lab-leak-theory-rises-again/
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/new-studies-on-the-origin-of-covid-19/
I personally witnessed grown, rational adults flit from hair brained idea to conspiracy to quack cure because they weren't expert, they were scared, and ultimately powerless against nature. Why wouldn't anyone that survives on clicks NOT perform the deeds necessary to acquire them?
Not from my perspective. I started from the point of zoonotic transmission and skipped the bioweapon theory. It never made any sense that they would research a bioweapon in BSL2 and BSL3 facilities, knowing that it could easily escape and kill their own researchers. I mean, they could be careless but they're not stupid.
Instead, I jumped to the accidental leak on account that the closest genetic neighbor to SARS-CoV-2 was a bat coronavirus -- as documented in a published paper by the WIV.
The cleavage site is something of a red herring. All it does is demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 could (and did) come naturally. Now, whether or not it came from an accidental leak from a lab or a wet market is unknown, but, it the cleavage evidence does not exclude a lab leak.
Great. Nor does it support it. Unless you have some sort of inside information otherwise, and the fact that you're commenting on KD's personal blog means you don't, the experts say it's not a leak from a lab but a zoonotic spillover, as you've said, most likely from a secondary host from an animal market that of most likely many serves 11 million persons.
I harbored the thought that it came from a lab but now after reading further there seems to be an intermediate host from the bat population because of the cleavage data - there's no link to what the lab was finding and what was ravaging the human population except this ghostly intermediate host. And there lies the problem.
Somehow the FBI has more information than everyone else and is not sharing it.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Most of what you wrote was true and very perceptive. The problem is that there are no known early cases with any connection to the lab. When China announced the virus, they based it on `~59people who had hard to treat pneumonia, 2/3rds of whom tested positive for the covid virus. 2/3rds of the people with covid had a known connection to the wet market, none had a known connection to the lab. All lived closer to the wet market then to the lab (Which are about as far apart as harlam to the staten island ferry terminal in manhatten. And the yangtze river separates the lab from the wet market.)
Nooners is drunk-posting again. Why bother with this nonsense?
Nooners is simply fulfilling her obligations as a professional liar, and all evidence is that she is extremely good at that job.
Kevin, you seem to have shifted from the virus leaking from a lab to the virus being created in a lab.
Yes, because that's the implied lab leak theory.
"I won't deny that Chinese intransigence is suspicious."
I don't think this is suspicious at all. I think most countries on Earth would oppose resistance to other nations trying to figure out if they screwed up in a way that affected the whole world. Especially nations with authoritarian governments like China's. It is no different to how a lot of individual people respond to any attempt at being searched/audited/whatever even when an authority has some reasonable motive to do it, and the person truly has done nothing wrong. Not being willing to cooperate is a fairly common response regardless of guilt.
"would oppose resistance"
would pose resistance.
Damn typos, even with the edit function they still get through.
"Especially nations with authoritarian governments like China's. " When did the USA alert the world that swine flu had arisen on it's territory in 2009? (The correct answer is never.) And only one nation is known to have knowingly spread a virus that ultimately killed 100million people. Again , the USA, with spanish influenza in 1918. Yes, the US army knowingly and routinel shipped US soldiers infected with a severe flu strain to europe and elsewhere in the spring and summer of 1918. No, they did not know it would become so severe as to kill 100million.
"When did the USA alert the world that swine flu had arisen on it's territory in 2009? (The correct answer is never.)"
Don't be shitty, and don't be a politically-motivated liar. The CDC had already published an article identifying swine flu cases within 14 days of the first detected case, and in fact alerted the WHO, the Pan American Health Organization, and Mexico and Canada within *three days* of the first case. See https://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/cdcresponse.htm
"And only one nation is known to have knowingly spread a virus that ultimately killed 100million people. Again , the USA, with spanish influenza in 1918."
Uh-huh. FWIW, 1918 was just 20 years after the word "virus" was coined, and a full 9 years before the first human-infecting virus was isolated. Even if 1918 wasn't in the middle of the World War I, events from over a century ago when humanity had such limited understanding of what viral infections even were aren't really good examples of much of anything.
Not a virologist per se, but my PhD is in Quantitative BioSciences and I do research on bacterial pathogens, so to get my own thoughts out of the way:
- I have not seen any credible evidence that SARS-COV2 leaked from a lab.
- There is no need to resort to a lab leak to explain the pandemic (i.e. natural origin outside of a lab fits with all the current data)
- By parsimony, natural origin is the most likely explanation.
- However, I have seen no credible evidence that *rules out* a lab leak; indeed, I doubt such evidence is possible.
- The Chinese authorities seem to have acted in ways to obscure the pandemic origins, but that might just be a reluctance to acknowledge the extent of the wet market in Wuhan (which would have technically been illegal as I'm led to understand Chinese law).
So my current priors are more like 80/20 against a lab leak.
Having said that, my real question is "So what?" Why does the source of the virus matter? Would we, or even the Chinese, do anything differently now given one origin or the other? Viruses jump from other species to humans all the time, and (nearly?) all serious viral human pathogens are or were zoonotic. So even if SARS-COV2 wasn't zoonotic, there *will* be zoonotic viruses in the future. Maybe we should worry about them (cough, cough, Avian Influenza).
"...Why does the source of the virus matter? ..."
Why does the cause of a plane crash matter? Because it might be something we can prevent (or at least make less likely) in the future.
And there are also ways to make jumps from animals to humans less likely. So the exact cause matters even if it wasn't a lab leak.
I'm just a lawyer, but my response to the lab origin hypothesis pretty much matched yours. Where's the evidence? Where I disagree with both you and Kevin is in your probability estimates. There is no evidence either for or against the lab origin hypothesis. That absence of evidence means to me that it is not possible to meaningfully assign a probability to the hypothesis.
There is no evidence either for or against the lab origin hypothesis
Actually, one piece of evidence against the lab leak hypotheis does exist: the complete absence of discussion, research results or mention of the new coronavirus before the end of 2019. The Wuhan lab wasn't, contrary to some speculation, some kind of top secret facility whose researchers had zero interraction with the global scientific community. These people were normal scientists. They published. They attended science conferences. They participated in exchanges. They worked with foriegn researchers. And so on.
I suppose it cannot be absolutely ruled out that they discovered the virus in question some time well before 2020 and kept it top secret. But you mentioned "evidence" and I've just provided an example.
You know what else doesn't exist, well doesn't exist in great quantity: official discussion of interplanetary beings visiting our star system. And since that it didn't exist yet so many people are taking about it, that's the evidence I need to propose they exist.
Looks like a whole lot of motivated epistemology goin on. And you ain't the only one.
" However, I have seen no credible evidence that *rules out* a lab leak; indeed, I doubt such evidence is possible." There is lots of evidence that makes a lab leak unlikely. FAct, not one of the earliest casees has any known connection to the lab. None of the early connections lived or worked close to the lab. An overwhlming majority of the 59 cases that led to the identification of the new virus had a known connection one specific wet market. The a prioris for this in the case of a lab leak origin would be on the order of 1 in a million.
I wonder if Noonan bought that whole Iraq WMD business.
While its understandable, by the way, for Noonan to have a weekly column at the WSJ, I mean, why in the world would I take Peggy Noonan's opinion about any scientific issue? Why?
What is it, actual scientists can't be located on short notice?
Ugh.
A logical way of looking at this is simply probabilities. Thanks to inexpensive travel, especially air travel, and a human population of almost 8 billion the planet has, for all practical purposes, become comparable to a large city with respect to the spread of communicable diseases. Moreover, the large human population puts large numbers of mobile humans in contact with wildlife and their diseases. Additionally, over 60 per cent of infectious diseases that we get are zoonotic, and 75 per cent of new, "emerging" infectious diseases are zoonotic (Govt. of Canada).
Arguing about whether Covid came from contact with wildlife or a lab leak is pointless simply because humans have a very long history of picking up diseases from wildlife even when human populations, international trade and ease of international travel were all tiny compared to today. Lab leaks are not the problem. The problem of recurrent pandemics is a result of an enormous human population that has infiltrated what little is left of the natural environment combined with the mobility of humans across the planet. This is simply common sense from an epidemiological perspective. Lab leaks, even if they occur, are a distraction from the real problem. Blaming virologists, the very people whose research is saving our arses from our own stupidity is delusional.
How about the possibility that, the virus was of zoonotic origin, was being studied in the Wuhan lab, and then was accidentally released? No reason to think that the lab manipulated the virus, just had it around for study. Lab leaks happen all the time.
See @Crissa's comment above.
If it was being studied at the Wuhan Institute, there would be publications, posters and talks at scientific meetings, lectures, etc. Remember that before covid, scientists went to meetings all the time and exchanges were common. This work would have been known then among scientists, and would now be known by everyone ... if it had been happening.
The animal market fits the evidence most straightforwardly. A lab leak can't be ruled out, but I'll stick with simplicity until we learn something more.
Out of curiosity, how would a lab leak of covid possibly happen? People keep commenting about how central it is to know the details, if it was a lab leak, but what could we possibly learn from that knowledge that we don't already know about lab safety?
Let's face it, a lab leak would most likely be a situation where a worker did not follow the rules. We already know that following the rules in labs is very important.
What else could it be? Aerosols from open animal cages allowing the virus to travel from cage to the surrounding workers? If the animals were known to have a SARS-like respiratory virus, open cages seem unlikely. If it was animals that were not known to be ill, then I'm not sure it matters. It's not like every animal researcher on the planet is going to keep every research animal in airtight cages just on the off chance one critter has a secret case of SARS or bird flu.
Covid mutates so fast, while the origins are interesting, I doubt that we'll ever be able to do much that is useful with that information. Too many different kids of animals can spread covid, and it mutates too fast. We just have to accept that we will need to monitor everything, everywhere.
Even if it was a lab leak, we'd still have to do surveillance of wild animals, livestock, and pets today. Just as a wet market transmission means we still have to encourage lab safety.
I think an important point everyone is eliding is that the FBI is --highly sensitive-- to wingnut 'concerns'.
Why, would be a great question people could ask.
That Republicans have been serving much sport with the baboon colony by attacking the FBI is just icing on the cake.
This Jonathan Katz article is pretty good about the known evidence and the context of the report and the lab leak theories:
https://theracket.news/p/there-is-no-lab-leak-theory
One notable thing is that the lab the DOE thinks it came from is DIFFERENT from the lab we all found so suspicious. And while the CCDC lab kind of fits the location better, it also wouldn't have been a lab where viral engineering would have happened. (Of course experts feel strongly it wasn't engineered anyway, but lab leak fans seem to be hoping for this.) So even if the DOE was right, it was still a natural virus.
Also, I can believe the government could and would conceal evidence of a foreign power's involvement, I don't believe independent scientists would all go along with it or that the government would trust it wouldn't get out. The experts might all be wrong. That happens. But I don't believe they're involved in a massive coverup.
But the virology community pretty unanimously believes the genetic structure of the COVID virus shows no signs of an artificial origin, either engineered or accidental.
Kevin seems to be conflating the possibility of the leak of an artificially-bioengineered virus with the leak of a naturally evolved virus.
I agree with him that the available evidence as sifted by the virology community suggests a truly "natural" zoonotic spillover event (ie, no involvement of a lab at all), but lack of evidence of bioengineering doesn't say anything one way or another about the probability of lab leak of a virus that was not bioengineered.
I see Crissa addresses this above in the comments. I hadn't read this yet when I posted mine...
Just acknowledging the issue has been addressed
There have been hundreds of pandemics over the ages. It was inevitable that eventually the lottery would produce one in a city with a large biological research lab.
I'm glad Kevin brought this up, because I think humans (who tend to be fuck all bad at probablity calculus) have wrongly seized on the "importance" of this coincidence.
I'd like to see some further analysis of this topic. I'd guess some kind of virological research are also being done in Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, Changsha and Chengdu. And also Boston, London, San Francisco, Washington, Paris and Mumbai for that matter.
I have a feeling if the spillover event had occurred in a different Chinese city, the wingnuts would be pointing to suspicious evidence involving that city's virus labs.
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The telling point about all of this is that the language being used is "lab leak" when the meaning is "accidental leak". By calling it a "lab leak" they are insinuating China did this intentionally. If the language the media had adopted was "accidental leak" the right wouldn't even bother with this. It's all about shifting blame away from Trump.
What there is no evidence for is that it was tinkered with by humans. The only evidence for spillover is circumstancial but it has problems. Lab leak evidence also circumstancial with problems.
I view spillover as more likely but their are weird coincidences either way. Regardless we need to tighten up lab bio safety eforcement and seriously scrutinize gain of function.
If it were up to me I'd outlaw gain of function and summarily execute anyone who violated the law. But its not up to me.