I have reason to believe that if the outgoing administration claims to have reason to believe something but refuses to provide the evidence behind it, they are lying.
Unfortunately, from my experience, most people are going to believe what they want to believe, based more on political affiliation more than anything else, and the empirical facts don't register too strongly.
That paper is really frustrating - it seems to be written for laypeople like us, but conflates the theory that humans made a containment mistake and COVID escaped from a lab so (we should make research safer) with "COVID is an intentionally engineered bioweapon, so we should stop researching."
And the most critical claim in the paper is not substantiated in any way:
> Gain-of-function research is also subject to intense scrutiny and governmental oversight, precisely because of the high risk involved in conducting it safely; thus, it is extremely unlikely that gain-of-function research on hard-to-obtain coronaviruses (such as bat SARS-like coronaviruses) could occur under the radar.
Or substantiation is hinted at but never delivered:
> This work produced some of the strongest corroborating evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally emergent pathogen, as serological surveys demonstrated that people living in close proximity to colonies of bats had antibodies to bat SARS-like coronaviruses. The NIH has since set impossible conditions for restoring the grant, ensuring that this research will never resume.
Maybe the next place to go is learning more about the initial results from the EcoHealth Alliance grant referenced in the above quote. Still, it's a pretty unsatisfying review.
Thank you for writing this, I was just about to start writing up something similar. The linked paper might be 'serious' in tone but the claims are not convincing.
One of the best articles I have seen on the lab-made hypothesis is here:
Please, when reading these, keep your scientist hat on and evaluate the claims with an open mind.
That being said, if anyone has links to rebuttals of some of the key ideas behind these articles, or further evidence of natural origin beyond the Andersen et al Nature paper, please link it, I'd very much like to change my mind.
"Gain-of-function research is also subject to intense scrutiny and governmental oversight, precisely because of the high risk involved in conducting it safely; thus, it is extremely unlikely that gain-of-function research on hard-to-obtain coronaviruses (such as bat SARS-like coronaviruses) could occur under the radar."
This research was not happening under the radar. WIV has been openly publishing gain of function research on bat Coronaviruses for years. It's quite possible that SARS-CoV-2 was a research project that they fully intended to publish, but was accidentally released during the research.
That seems pretty typical for a paper published in Nature. I thought it was meant to be good but basically every paper to do with disease or biology I've read in Nature over the past 12 months has been like this: it looks superficially scientific and when read carefully it just falls apart. They've also been suppressing critical commentary sent to them. The Flaxman paper was atrocious and they sat on a formal response that was sent to them about it for like 6 months.
I should clarify, neither I nor Dr. Rasmussen are claiming that we know what the true origin is, or that zoonotic spillover is definitely what happened. There is not enough evidence to make such a definitive conclusion. I can see how people might read my comment as implicitly asserting that if people did understand the empirical facts they would come to the conclusion of zoonotic origin.
That said, there are facts, and they are relevant: the fact that COV RaTG13 has 96.2% similarity to SARS-COV-2. The incredible diversity of bat coronaviruses, and the fact that only fraction are studied and understood, despite serious study by the WIV.
Here's another good quote from another good thread: And investigating zoonotic origins can take decades, and you may NEVER find the "smoking bat" or whatever other intermediate species that may be involved. It's like looking for a needle in a planet-sized haystack. --
https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/13497545972759142...
The main point that I was trying to make, which I stand by, is that most people are going to base their beliefs about this question on essentially political considerations: do you trust the CCP or the US State Dept more? Unfortunately, both of those institutions have done terrible damage to objective scientific inquiry, and in my opinion neither one is really deserving of trust. Better to follow the science where it leads, but this is an often frustrating and time consuming process.
Human share 98.5 percent of DNA with shimpanzee. Percentage is just a pop science. Find the missing link and you have a proof.
But for start we could explain how south china wild bat got into wuhan meat market, 500 km from its origin.
I am not from US or China. From my view Wuhan lab was sponsored by US. My concern is how often will current crisis repeat, every 10 years? Nobody is answering this question.
And we do not need "lab origin" to pin blame on China. Wuhan meat market is open again, more bats sold...
I don’t know, there’s really not much concrete information to go off of at this point. I think any reasonable person would naturally side with the people asking for more evidence and/or transparency. In this case that appears to be the State Dept. I’m not sure if you could call that a political consideration, though the question of origin has garnered plenty of attention in our political theater.
Maybe you’re right and most people today will base their beliefs on politics. I’d still hesitate to label anybody when the facts haven’t landed yet, if only to deescalate the present day’s partisanship.
"The COVID-19 pandemic was avoidable. Any responsible country would have invited world health investigators to Wuhan within days of an outbreak. China instead refused offers of help – including from the United States – and punished brave Chinese doctors, scientists, and journalists who tried to alert the world to the dangers of the virus. Beijing continues today to withhold vital information that scientists need to protect the world from this deadly virus, and the next one."
The above shows this is a political statement.
I happen to agree with this quote. It's also not, as the US administration likes to pretend, any sort of defense of their response to the pandemic. But at the same time, the presence of this quote makes it very clear that this is little more than a political, rather than a fact based statement intended to get to the truth.
It also aligns with what Pompeo is doing in nearly every other delicate situation in the US over the past few weeks. Setting stuff on fire making it as difficult as possible for the incoming administration to deal with.
Pompeo for me seems very narcissistic person. This week alone I already saw his tweets as Sec of State asking people to follow his personal account. Is it normal to do that?
Not to mention having digital photo of him for every announcement tweets reminds me of my country's bureaucrats that keep doing same for every PSA posters.
It's not a political statement if it's factual. Or rather, it's 'always political between states' but the legitimacy of the facts give it credibility.
China's initial dismissal and coverup of the spread of the virus, and their subsequent misinformation and lack of transparency, and finally, their attempts to stop an investigation into COVID origins are really seriously bad things.
To boot - they've made a political appointment to the head of the WHO and have been trying to obtain leverage within that organization of years.
It's actually reasonable that the US demands expulsion of China from the WHO on those grounds, until China plays be the rules. They can't claim 'it's an internal problem' as they always do here. Much like with currency and other things, if they want to be a part of these organizations they have to follow the rules.
I think “The COVID-19 pandemic was avoidable. Any responsible country would have invited world health investigators to Wuhan within days of an outbreak.” is counterfactual by definition.
The United States government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.
I'd wager several researchers in any research institution because sick in autumn 2019 and had symptoms consistent with common seasonal illness. And guess what new virus also has symptoms consistent with common seasonal illness...
Depends exactly what symptoms they had. Rhinorrhea or cough are extremely non-specific, but if they had loss of taste or smell, or significantly abnormal low oxygen saturation, or multifocal pneumonia in young people - those are all a lot more specific given what we now know about covid
We're talking about a BSL-4 lab here, one of ~50 in the world. Aren't there established protocols to quarantine lab techs if they are showing even minor symptoms?
This article discusses how common it is to have accidents/mistakes in these types of research labs, I found it pretty interesting but cannot vouch for it (perhaps it's already been debunked?)
You may or may not have noticed, but there are some real problems we should be thinking about, including the very real probability that the B.1.1.7 variant is going to be much harder to suppress, and how to get our vaccination program on track. Instead we end up talking about these distractions that have much more speculation than evidence behind them.
I'm curious as to why the arrival of developments like a new variant would make it appropriate to halt investigations into the original issue (like where can we find a physical sample of RaTG13, and why wasn't its sequence published until the beginning of last year?).
I don't think we should halt investigations. But the Baker article is not a serious investigation, it's a piece of pop-sci that is quite careless about scientific details. It is not helpful to those trying to understand the truth, but it might be an entertaining read or useful for other purposes.
Absolutely. The great claim that SARS-Cov-2 has a zoonotic origin requires evidence of an animal with a virus similar to SARS-Cov-2. Unlike SARS-1 and MERS, we have not yet found such an animal.
Every single other virus ever has had a zoonotic origin. SARS-CoV-2 has a 96.3% homologue.
The default, as with literally every other of thousands of viruses, is that like all the others it is the product of zoonosis.
For most viruses too, the exact intermediate animal hosts aren't precisely known.
It's really akin to find a new species of bird and trying asking for evidence that it specifically came from evolution and not genetic engineering. Sure, it's possible that it didn't, but every single other species of bird came from it and it's fully expected to happen.
And by the way, the exact intermediate host for the original SARS was also never determined conclusively until fifteen years after the first outbreak.
I do find it slightly bizarre that on HN, a website run by ycombinator i.e. Americana, seemingly the Russians always get the benefit of the doubt. Similarly with the President actually. The politics here is quite hard to characterise.
Personally I just give everything the Trump administration says high scrutiny. Just lie after lie, mistruth after mistruth, so that it's hard to believe anything that someone outside them doesn't back up. Especially on computer security... the absolute level of obvious falsehood and idiotic statements from Trump and his supporters about election security would be farcical if it wasn't so destructive to American democracy and democratic norms.
But I believe that, while legitimate election security researchers have all basically said there is no reason to doubt the election or believe there was any sort of widespread fraud or abuse (and such statements conform to what was said in court, where lawyers can face consequences for stating falsehoods), legitimate computer security researchers outside the Trump Administration have pointed to Russia on the Solarwinds hack, so I give that claim more credence.
Following with interest. I have a basic level of trust towards Uncle Sam and a basic level of distrust towards the CCP, but we are still very far from a reasonable bar of evidence to be cleared here yet.
When I read the "teaser" of this announcement in a few UK tabloids (Daily Mail/Telegraph), the title seems bombastic ("UK diplomats brace for Pompeo's bombshell" or something like that).
Yet for me the announcement seems lukewarm. The 3 points are rehash of theories that's been surfacing since March last year, it adds nothing new.
I assume the announcement is made because Pompeo's want to stay relevant and WHO team has just arrived in China.
I’m trying to piece together how any of this makes sense.
The implication is that Covid was a biological weapon accidentally released? Wouldn’t this be a pretty idiotic biological weapon? An especially bad one for a heavily urbanized country to release? Not to mention the main outcome of this “weapon” would be hurt China’s top importers?
Let me spell it out: China was knowingly playing with fire - conducting gain-of-function experiments on humanized mice and coronaviruses. This research may or may not be weaponizable, but China was willing to try.
Unlike the US where a moratorium was put in place from 2014 to late 2017 after IIRC a National Academies report (the moratorium was lifted after setting up stricter controls, and no, it had nothing to do with the orange one).
This is exactly why trust and credibility is so essential.
I want to believe that they have the evidence to back this up, and that we can trust what the administration says. But the United States has been trashing its own credibility on the international stage ever since 9/11 & weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The Trump administration did nothing to help this.
It's so easy to lose credibility and so hard to build it back. I wish we would stop blowing our credibility by making politically motivated statements without the evidence to back them up.
This one obviously has a result in mind (i.e. Trump almost definitely believes his own rhetoric if Tillerson's statements are anything to by), but if they end up publishing a properly weighty document like the Mueller report I will take it seriously.
China, right now, is an adversary of the United States, and the current administration has been doing everything it could to pin the "China virus" on them.
The fact that they are now willing, immediately before a change in administration, to make the allegation in a slightly-more-official capacity means nothing to me. They beat that drum for the past six months with no evidence and no consistent story, and now they issue a statement full of supposition and loose circumstantial evidence. So what?
> The truth track record of State Department is still much better than that of CCP.
Maybe over the long run, but maybe not the current State Department at this moment. IIRC, over the last month it's literally been trying to stir up shit however it can to make things difficult for the incoming Biden administration.
The current administration seems to think it makes sense to burn US national credibility for petty, self-interested not-even-wins.
> it's literally been trying to stir up shit however it can to make things difficult for the incoming Biden administration
Examples, please? Pompeo certainly taking a more hawkish and strident stance of late, but I’m yet to see anything that suggests they’re salting the earth rather than just trying to ram through some policy aims at the end of an administration
Ramming through foreign policy changes at the end of an administration (unless it is coordinated with the incoming administration) is salting the earth.
> WASHINGTON — The United States said on Saturday that it would relax its restrictions on interactions between American officials and their counterparts in Taiwan as the Trump administration seeks to lock in a tougher line against Beijing in its final days.
> ...The moves, some outside experts said, are meant to lay a trap for Mr. Biden, forcing him either to pay a domestic political cost if he unwinds them or to sour relations with Beijing if he does not.
> WASHINGTON — The State Department designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism on Monday in a last-minute foreign policy stroke that will complicate the incoming Biden administration’s plans to restore friendlier relations with Havana.
> ...On the campaign trail, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. spoke of a return to Mr. Obama’s more open approach to Havana, pledging to “promptly reverse the failed Trump policies that have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.”
> While the Biden administration can remove Cuba from the terrorism list, doing so will require a review process that could take months.
> WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda’s new base of operations is in Iran, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Tuesday, using his last days in office to tie together two of what he called the world’s greatest terrorism threats but offering no underlying intelligence as evidence.
> But Mr. Pompeo has not been idle. Over the past week, he unleashed a series of actions whose only real purpose appears to be to make life as difficult as possible for his successor at the State Department. He put Cuba back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, he plans to designate the Houthi rebels in Yemen as a foreign terrorist organization, he eased restrictions on contacts between American diplomats and Taiwan officials and he claimed that Iran is a “home base” for Al Qaeda.
> ...Some of the actions Mr. Pompeo took over the past week might be defensible, were they taken in the context of a coherent foreign policy. But coming days before a change in administration, their sole identifiable purpose is to maliciously plant obstacles — some commentators have called them time bombs or booby traps — before the incoming administration and President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for Mr. Pompeo’s successor at State, Antony Blinken, are in place.
> Normalising relationships with Taiwan is a great idea, and Iran stirs conflict throughout the region.
I personally, I'd agree with the Taiwan thing in isolation, but this last minute decision is clearly intended to put Biden in a bind: reverse it, and he pisses off Americans who reasonably have favorable feelings towards Taiwan; keep it, and diplomacy with China gets a lot harder.
I'm speculating, but my guess is the Iran thing is meant to throw a wrench into any attempt to restart the Iran nuclear deal. Also, note the Iran thing was actually nonsense about Al Qaeda, not Iran's own conflict-stirring.
did you even read the article? It literally starts with: "Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab..."
I know how fashionable it is to shit on the USA, at least for another week. But you are implying the CCP does have credibility in their claims this is not true?
What advantage do you think the state dept has to put this out if it is not true? The new admin can walk it back in 1/2 a second if that’s the case.
Note that Pompeo is also alleging a link between Iran and al-Qaeda (see the https://www.state.gov home page, for instance), which is another "extraordinary claim" - nobody has been seriously worried about al-Qaeda in a long while, and Iran has not been historically aligned with them.
If Pompeo is running for president in 2024, a war with Iran will benefit him in much the same way the war with Iraq (which was based on untrue claims) benefited Bush. It's in his interest (both in the sense of a personal interest and in the sense of consistent with his neoconservative / hawkish beliefs, which are much stronger than Trump's) to sour the relationship with Iran and also to prepare the American people for the idea that we should be going to war with them.
> If Pompeo is running for president in 2024, a war with Iran will benefit him in much the same way the war with Iraq (which was based on untrue claims) benefited Bush.
Was the war Dick Cheney started going years before Bush announced he was running? How would this be comparable at all to Bush/Iraq?
> After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cheney worried about the dangers of nuclear proliferation and effective control of nuclear weapons from the Soviet nuclear arsenal that had come under the control of newly independent republics-Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan-as well as in Russia itself. Cheney warned about the possibility that other nations, such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, would acquire nuclear components after the Soviet collapse.
and later in that biography:
> A draft Defense Planning Guidance issued early in 1992 envisioned several scenarios in which the United States might have to fight two large regional wars at one time–for example, against Iraq again, against North Korea, or in Europe against a resurgent, expansionist Russia.
Come Cheney's vice presidency, there was all of a sudden talk about an "axis of evil" - Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
Anyway, obviously Pompeo hasn't announced, but there is widespread speculation based on concrete actions by him - see e.g. https://www.usnews.com/news/elections/articles/2020-12-09/mi... - so I don't think it's unreasonable for me to say "If Pompeo is running."
And the most direct way it would be comparable to Bush/Iraq is that it would falsely allege that al-Qaeda is linked to the government of a Middle Eastern country and use it as an excuse for regime change in that country.
The new part is the assertion that lab researchers got sick in the fall of 2019.
This is consistent with evidence of the virus in Italy in the same time period.
Due to the large number of Chinese working in Italy, there was a direct flight between Italy and Wuhan at the time.
The new Biden administration has no reason to cover this up further, due to the obvious danger that another pandemic results from a lab accident involving designer lethal virus.
"leaked from lab" claim absolutely does not imply "designer". The virus could have been natural, collected for study (possibly in animal) by a lab which studies such viruses and still leaked via an accident (unexpected human transmission).
To prove that it is "designer virus", additional, different kind of evidence is needed.
> The new Biden administration has no reason to cover this up further, due to the obvious danger that another pandemic results from a lab accident involving designer lethal virus.
This is true - but the implication, then, is that if they don't follow through with it, it is most likely to be because they don't feel the evidence is strong enough for it, as opposed to that they do believe it and are inexplicably covering it up.
IIRC, yes, ZeroHedge was. They claimed it came from scientists at Wuhan and many called it a conspiracy theory. They were banned from twitter if nothing else.
Now, I don't read that site. I don't know what evidence the state dept has now. I don't know where the virus came from. —- BUT, I do know CBS/Media, Twitter and critics didn't know then nor now either. To be fair ZeroHedge was guessing too.
At the end of December 2019, A friend had a layover in the business lounge in Seattle on a return flight from Europe to San Francisco. At the same time, a direct flight from Wuhan came in. He spent 3 hours in the lounge waiting for the flight to SFO, ate at the buffet.
A few days later, he said he became deathly sick. Fever, coughing, and said he felt like he was going to die. His wife became very sick shortly after his illness began, and his 8 year old son as well. His symptoms did not completely clear up for him for a month. His wife was seeing one specialist after another for months with after-effects. His son got through it in 3 days.
All of this was before the first cases was officially reported by the CDC as diagnosed in Seattle on January 20th.
My friend's doctors did not know what they were dealing with at the time and did not test for COVID. After COVID became known, he looked into anti body tests. They were expensive ($700+ at that time) and he did not have one.
There are a lot of anecdotal stories like these, but the idea that Covid was circulating widely in the US before January just isn't consistent with the evidence on the ground. Trevor Bedford has written about this several times [1], and he would know, the phylogenetic work he and his team have been doing is one of the most sensitive instruments we have in figuring out how this thing spreads.
So this basically boils down to who to trust, your friend's uncle who works at Nintendo, or a highly regarded evolutionary biologist.
It baffles me that we can't scrutinize the claims of "highly regarded" people when they run counter to the someone's experience or even intuition. I'm not saying we should base policy or decisions on this scrutiny, but it's not unreasonable to have doubts. Highly regarded virologists were tweeting earlier in 2020 about how stupid masks were because they couldn't be effective in preventing the spread of a disease which was "not airborne"
Of course we can and should scrutinize the claims of highly regarded people. For example, Michael Levitt has a Nobel Prize and I've publicly criticized him when I was convinced he was utterly wrong: https://twitter.com/raphlinus/status/1297182969514270721
The mask issue was a debacle from a scientific communications point of view. In the early days, there was legitimate debate among scientists regarding the value of masks. But I think the main thing that went wrong was a paternalistic attitude, trying to address supply chain issues of N95 mask usage by medical and other frontline workers by convincing people that masks weren't effective. That, I think most agree, was a huge mistake.
Of course, your actual statement that highly regarded virologists tweeting that masks were "stupid" and "couldn't be effective" is false, and you probably know that.
He's not suggesting that it was widely circulating in the U.S. He's suggesting that someone coming off a flight from Wuhan might have passed it to him. At the end of December, we know for certain that there were numerous cases in Wuhan, so it's entirely possible that he caught it, passed it to his family, but they never infected anyone else.
Now would I bet on this? No, but it is entirely possible without resorting to anything that's not established scientific fact.
I have reason to believe that if the outgoing administration claims to have reason to believe something but refuses to provide the evidence behind it, they are lying.
https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1350292056782954498
Here's a very serious, legitimate review of the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01205-5
Unfortunately, from my experience, most people are going to believe what they want to believe, based more on political affiliation more than anything else, and the empirical facts don't register too strongly.