Are you wondering why the "accidental lab release" theory of the coronavirus has been getting more attention lately? It's not because there's more evidence in its favor. Just the opposite: It's because the evidence of a zoonotic origin has been getting harder and harder to sustain.
As you may recall, the initial theory for the origin of the coronavirus had to do with transmission via wet markets in Wuhan. That theory was abandoned pretty quickly when it turned out that several of the very first victims had no connection to the wet markets.
The work after that centered on bats, which are huge reservoirs of coronaviruses. However, since there are no bat viruses that are good candidates to be a SARS-CoV-2 precursor, scientists began searching for intermediate hosts. You probably remember this. Palm civits were candidates at first. Raccoon dogs were on the list. Or pangolins. Or minks. Or ferrets.
For various reasons, all of these intermediate hosts had problems that made them unlikely candidates. At first this wasn't a big issue: it was early days and the search continued.
But eventually days turned into months and then into more than a year. And still no likely intermediate hosts had been identified. We're now at a point where it's been nearly a year and a half and we still have no good theory of zoonotic origin.
That doesn't mean the lab release theory is correct. It just means that it's natural for it to get more attention as the zoonotic origin theory becomes more and more difficult to find evidence for. One problem, though, is that even if a bat virus did escape accidentally from the Wuhan lab, it would still need an intermediate host to evolve into something transmissable to humans. So the lab theory faces the same problems as the zoonotic theory.
There's much more to the story, of course, including the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is unusually efficient at infecting humans. However, this cuts against both theories. Even given the fast mutation rate of coronaviruses, it's difficult to figure out how it could become so good so fast in the wild. On the other hand, any lab release theory that assumes the virus was good to begin with implies not just that the Chinese were careless, but that they were deliberately engineering a coronavirus with a spike protein that was designed for maximum harm to humans. There's strong genomic evidence against that, and in any case it requires you to believe that the Chinese were both unbelievably careless and were engineering a bioweapon of some kind. That's kind of hard to swallow.
In other words, it's worthwhile keeping an open mind on this. On the one hand, the Chinese have been so aggressively uncooperative that it's hard to believe they don't have something to hide. This favors the lab theory. On the other hand, we shouldn't let the current lack of success on the zoonotic front provoke us into giving up out of frustration and turning to simpler theories featuring well defined enemies that we never liked much in the first place. Science runs into tough roadblocks all the time, and in another year maybe some genius will have a lightbulb moment and we'll finally have a fleshed-out theory of zoonotic origin that makes perfect sense. This calmer mode of thinking favors the zoonotic theory.
This whole thing might remain a mystery forever. Alternatively, maybe some lab worker from Wuhan will escape to the West with concrete evidence that the virus was manmade. Or else someone will finally come up with a convincing zoonotic story. Stay tuned, and in the meantime don't get too attached to either side.
POSTSCRIPT: Just to be absolutely clear here, my point is that expert opinions about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus haven't just changed for no reason. They've changed because the evidence has changed. The only tricky part is that what changed isn't evidence for the lab theory getting better, but evidence for the opposing theory getting worse.
Another point to add, why bioengineering a disease that only kill old resource money suckers???? The 1889-94 period and now look so similar.
I'm disappointed by the sloppiness of your summary.
The coronavirus currently publicly documented that is genetically closest to SARS2 (shorthand for SARS-CoV2) is RaTG13. That's the bat coronavirus that WIV collected at an abandoned mine in southern China. They collected it after a cluster of severe respiratory infections affected villagers who'd worked at/around the mine clearing up bat guano. That virus was 96.1% similar to SARS2.
The one found in pangolins matches SARS2 at a critical spot, the Spike (S2)/ACE2 protein. But other than that, it is much less similar to SARS2 than RaTG13. RaTG13's still got the same S2/ACE2 protein binding capability, but is attenuated by slight differences.
It cannot be both true that the pangolin variant(s) having closer similarity at the Spike makes it more likely to be the key phylogenic branch of SARS2, but RaTG13 isn't, solely because it would take too long for RaTG13 to mutate to match SARS2. After all, the pangolin variant(s) are more distant to SARS2 than RaTG13.
We don't have any transparency from WIV:
They failed to mention that RaTG13 came from the same location as the mine where workers had gotten sick from exposure, until *after* people noted the timing of the sampling and the mine incident.
They once claimed to be working specifically on Spike, regarding beta coronaviruses, by way of mice carrying ACE2. Now, they're claiming that they did not do any GoF work?
They have shut down access to their compilation of genetic profiles of their research.
They have claimed that none of their workers had had antigen confirmation of SARS2 infections at the time, and refuse to let anyone review and test workers. Think about it. They're in the middle of a major, uncontrolled outbreak, and none of them caught it? Not a single person out of hundreds working at WIV?
They have *never* shown any video of a missing WIV employee that many consider to be the actual patient zero. State media and the WIV director have told the world, "trust us", that a post they're putting out there is, in fact, from a colleague of hers. No one knows where she is.
They have said that they used the highest safety. It turns out they weren't using BSL4; they were using BSL2/3 when working with coronaviruses.
Did they publish the genetic code as soon as it was decoded? Nope. They took days. You'd think something as critical as an unknown, deadly virus would be published as soon as it was decoded. Nope.
Stop giving them the benefit of the doubt; they have failed the trust test at *every* step.
The fact that it "took days" for them publish the genome once it was decoded seems like a pretty quick turnaround to me. Since WIV works under the National Health Commission of the PRC (similar to the way the CDC works under the NIH), it would probably take a few days to get the required approval from the layers of bureaucracy.
As a US comparison, the CDC sat on the approval of the Pfizer vaccine for almost 3 weeks, and then they took three days to publish their approval — meanwhile at least 2K people were dying per day while the CDC dragged its feet because of their bureaucratic overhead. And I bet if we as US citizens were to demand an investigation into why approximately 48,000 died due to those delays? I can guarantee you that there would be a lot of resistance to that sort of investigation and whole lot of ass-covering.
We regard China as an enemy, and they regard us an enemy. Why should we be surprised if they balk our demands to get access to the WIV labs?
I read on Dr Angela Rasmussen's twitter feed today that she knows of five documented accidental leaks of SARS from Western labs. So it's not a stretch to suppose that there might have been a lab leak from the WIV facility in Wuhan. But there are many holes in the scientific arguments that there was a lab leak. And I don't think there's any way to prove or disprove the lab leak hypothesis without a detailed audit of their security records. That's not going to happen.
So, why is this front and center in the news cycle right now? Answer, because of an unsubstantiated story in The Australian back in March that two lab workers *may* have been infected with SARS-CoV-2. Then the WSJ picked up the story. Both of these papers are Murdoch owned. So my question is: how do we know this isn't Murdoch stirring up anti-China sentiment?
I'll raise another theory here.
Let's assume the Wuhan Lab did things somewhat correctly.
Is it plausible that they had the virus under study for MONTHs leading up to the release?
We know that it takes quite a while for some victims to show signs of infection by the virus. Some up to 21 days. Does this mean that the 3 Chinese lab workers who were hospitalized were exposed in October?
Since a small amount of folks (overall) require hospitalization, how many others were sick but didn't NEED hospitalization before these 3 got that bad? Did they not think it was related to SARS-COVID research? Or did they take it as a seasonal flu cold illness?
My problem with this is as follows:
We are addressing our "look back" with what we know now about the disease. If you can think back to October 2019 with absolutely NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of COVID which is a novel virus.
Think about those lab workers who may have gotten mild symptoms - possibly for months prior to 3 of them getting sick enough to require hospital treatment.
If I'm a Chinese lab director I'd be hiding this stuff too !!!
Our look back is being clouded by our current level of knowledge