I would change my opinion if much stronger evidence came out for the opposite side, but what we have so far in favour of a zoonotic origin seems very convincing to me.
You have to dig in to details about furin cleavage, nucleotide insertions, and how CGG codes for arginine etc. But the point is that the pro-zoonotics team makes a very strong case that the extra bits on Covid (a) do look like what we've observed in other naturally occurring viruses, like the flu, and (b) does not look like the techniques that labs use for this kind of thing, which are actually _simpler_ than what Covid does.
A lab leak doesn’t necessarily mean that it was created in a lab; it could also be a natural zoonotic virus that was actively being studied and accidentally infected one or more researchers.
This panel's summary says "The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature", which tells they are not using "lab leak" to mean a natural zoonotic virus.
If you are prepared for long and detailed you can look at Ralph Baric's testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus. He's probably the world's leading authority on coronavirus gain of function research and was involved in proposing research that would have produced something near identical to covid along with the reasons for doing so scientifically. He proposed such research in association with the WIV and it didn't get US funding but it seems very possible they went ahead with what he was suggesting anyway.
From the testemony:
>[The] first part was that we were fundamentally interested in why didn't sarbecoviruses have a furin cleavage site...
>Feline infectious peritonitis virus, it's an enteric form, it's got a furin cleavage site, it replicates, and it got very mild infection. When the furin cleavage site is lost, it kills the cat. So it's a flip, right? Furin cleavage site is the loss of -- it's protecting from virulent disease. So the data going into that proposal, the exact role of furin cleavage site was not clear. We were interested in it because most other coronaviruses in family had those sites. Why didn't sarbecovirus?...
And then about a year after proposing playing around with that, this never found in nature thing, a sarbecovirus with a cleavage site, pops up by the WIV. Bit of a coincidence it seems to me.
Sigh, the title might as well be "Iranian/Russian/North Korean kangaroo court concludes...". It might well have been a lab leak, or it might have not been, but half+1 of the panel already knew what conclusion they're going to reach before they started the work, and this is a discussion of politics and not science.
What incentive does a House of Reps Subcommittee have to get it wrong? That is, why can some government inquiries be trusted to be approximately good-faith scientific inquires, whereas others (perhaps this one) cannot?
(I ask out of genuine naivety to US political research/processes/inquiries)
My main reservation for not buying the outcome of a house panel is qualification. These are just elected politicians. How are any of us supposed to trust that they can grok science? The whole thing would have to come at ELI5 level simplicity.
It depends on who’s running it. If it’s started by a bunch of science deniers who are bitter about losing a fair election and they solicit testimony from conspiracy theorists, you shouldn’t expect more than politics.
If it was started on more even grounds and based on testimony by domain experts with traceable evidence, etc. it’s a lot more reliable. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect - e.g. past testimony on Alzheimer’s disease would have reflected the scientific consensus skewed by Eliezer Masliah’s fraud – but it usually won’t be out of line with what experts in the field agree.
This is why the gold standard government reports are prepared not in the legislature but in dedicated agencies where the people working on them are not political appointees. If NIH or the EPA releases a report, it’ll often be peer-reviewed and will list the people who worked on it and their qualifications – usually advanced degrees in the subject and often a research career prior to becoming a civil servant.
Nobody is above politics but if something is started for political reasons and the people involved are all politically motivated non-experts, you’re only going to get political pieces. If it’s run by people who have subject matter expertise, they can still have political opinions but they’re probably not going to embarrass themselves professionally by taking outrageous positions.
As a concrete example, Republicans made vaccination a highly contentious political litmus test. A lot of doctors are Republicans, but that lead to most of them staying quiet or making very moderate positions – the few exceptions being noteworthy because they represented such a small minority of their peers.
The house panel is more interesting than a North Korean kangaroo court say because most of the virus research which may or may not have caused covid originated in the US and China. The Chinese aren't saying anything much so that leaves the US and the house panel has been about the only body that has been able to compel people to testify. For example Peter Daszak was one of the main funders of the WIV (Wuhan lab) and so you'd want to ask what did you fund but he was replying that he can't say anything because he had a confidentiality agreement with the lab not to disclose. The house panel however had the power to make him testify in spite of the non disclosure stuff so it's been able to get better information.
Maybe it’s somewhere in this report, but I’m much more curious about why there was so much hostility toward anyone conveying the facts related to the so called “lab leak theory” than I am about the theory itself. It seems perfectly obvious that the most likely source of the virus could have been the lab that worked with variants of this virus and was very close to the first known infections.
The government (US and/or China) won’t actually suffer any meaningful consequences if it were known that they were involved in the accidentally leakage of the virus, so why all the effort to make it seem organic?
Banal explanation: there is the red party, and the blue party, and when the red party started claiming it was a lab leak, the blue party doubled down on the opposite.
I have some sympathy for the blue party here, as the red party came up with the idea of "alternative facts" and the evidence for a lab leak, unless there was some top secret government material we don't know about, was sketchy at best so the red party was much more certain of their claim than the evidence would have allowed for. But that doesn't prove the claim either right or wrong.
It matters because it affects who we prepare for the next pandemics. Should we tighten regulations for labs? Should we ban wet markets? Where should we monitor how closely?
That's not a good reason for mattering. All of lab leaks and wet markets and factory farms and free range farms and more are all plausible vectors for future pandemics. We luckily don't have enough pandemics for past ones to be particularly statistically significant, we must use modelling.
There is a claim that a couple of researchers at the WiV got unwell with Covid a few days before anyone else. That would be an argument in favour of a lab leak. But I don't think it's established beyond doubt that this claim is true, and it's not a knockdown argument on its own.
The NSA might have access to Chinese top secret government records saying "oh shit, one of our experiments got out into the wild, cover it up!". Without seeing a smoking gun like this though, I remain on the pro-zoonotic side.
I think it's fairly safe to let go of this claim. The WHO did an extensive report in Feb 2021 into 92 cases of potential early COVID. This included staff at WIV and used COVID tests on preserved samples. They found that none of the cases were actually COVID.
I agree with you (and so does the ACX post I cited elsewhere). I'm just saying it is a claim made by the pro-leak crowd that, if true, would be more credible than "A virus research lab was located in an area where novel viruses have tended to emerge".
National health authorities are structured to communicate WHO health advice and policies. WHO in theory is an international health policy body but as many international institutions its mission gets distorted by bad actors who were granted membership.
I think it starts with recognizing that there isn’t a single theory but two: the simple one is that someone working with animals had a breach of safety protocols and got infected. That one was never controversial - literally everyone who works with lab animals has safety training about this – and a number of different scientific groups looked for evidence which could support or undercut that theory.
The second one is that it was a deliberately developed strain (a few variations: genetically engineered weapon, “gain of function” research gone wrong, etc.) which was released, often with claims that it was intended to attack the west or force government control of everyone. Those claims were not made scientifically and were often accompanied by racist and/or false political claims or abuse directed at political opponents which strongly suggested that the motive was not understanding but political damage control (Trump was running for re-election on economic grounds until this upset the race). The few people who suffered any consequences for this almost uniformly claimed they were being “censored” for the first part, but we know that it was the latter because many people who asked the same questions without the abusive behavior had no consequences - there were multiple scientific papers, for example, looking at evidence of human modification in the viral genome.
This divide lead to the dynamic you’re seeing: pretty much everyone who isn’t primarily motivated by exonerating Trump looked at the evidence, saw that there isn’t any support for claims of artificial modification or intent, and moved on. The people still banging on about it aren’t adding new information or insight, and that means everyone who isn’t politically aligned with them is tired of hearing the same old things.
the thing is, theory one could happen so often that it is quite strange we had just one pandemic like COVID while theory two fits much better the experience we had. If you apply Occam's Razor to this problem it is quite difficult to think the theory one is correct. It is the best one to keep society in a fear loop tho.
I can think of a few reasons why it was important to tackle misinformation around the lab leak hypothesis:
* Racism. In the wake of COVID, xenophobic attacks increased against Asian people - particularly the Chinese - in many countries including the US. The idea that the virus may have been created by people from China would only exacerbate this.
* Phobia of science. If virology labs are seen as a threat to society, they may well get less research funding and less entry to market. We see this in the EU where people are terrified of GMOs for largely misconceived reasons.
* General information quality and politicisation. The lab leak hypothesis is one of a great number of dubious conjectures and conspiracy theories that have their claws in political debate in the US. Other examples include climate denial, vaccines causing autism, the birther and truther conspiracies etc... . The collective consequence of this is a lot of wasted money, air time, and energy debunking increasingly bizarre and contrived claims, and a lot of political advantages gained by unscrupulous figures taking advantage of public gullibility.
I haven't 100% fact-checked this, but I believe in late 2019 when the first claims started floating around that some new kind of SARS had started going around in China, a lot of people went around saying that's definitely not true and the only reason someone could be claiming this is to stir up racism against Asians.
I agree, "racism" is often used as a scapegoat for the sake of diverting attention from certain details for the sake of reputation laundering. These organizations will stoop to any low because they could face jail time.
No, people said it would not go outside of China, then that it wasn't _that_ dangerous, then when it decimated Bergame they said that it wouldn't stay for spring, then confinement, then mask are useless, then masks are ultra usefull.
I also remember that getting vaccinated would kill me in less than 3 years, so far so good, only a few month to go.
I never quite got how it was racist to say it was a mistake at a cutting edge lab in China doing research that went wrong but not racist to say it happened in one of those filthy illegal Chinese wild animal markets.
It's a good question. I think the fact that it's a state-funded institute lends credence to the idea that Chinese are collectively responsible. Also, it feeds into paranoias around secretive biological warfare and Chinese desire for world domination.
The main suspects if it was a leak did an active disinfo campaign to stop people accusing them. These being the Chinese government, Fauci and associates and Peter Daszak.
There's info on that and what went on from Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the time who naturally was involved in trying to control it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMlhvnMpRU0&t=119s
That mentions the Chinese and Fauci but not Daszak.
It seems a lot of the reason the weirdness is that back in the 1960s and 70s the US did bioweapons/defence research and then in 1975 ratified the Biological Weapons Convention outlawing that.
But come the 9/11 attacks Cheney and others thought oh dear maybe Bin Laden will do a bio attack next and transferred the defence budget to Fauci to keep on doing biodefense covertly.
This continued until covid and then it was all a bit - how dare you suggest we were doing what we were doing.
There is also hostility towards Redfield for saying what happened but as well as being the CDC head at the time and about the only person in communication with the Chinese CDC when Wuhan happened, is a published virologist, a medical doctor and also he used to be in the military and run the US biodefence program so he's not your average crank.
> Democrats on the panel released their own report challenging many of their colleagues’ conclusions about COVID-19 origins. They conclude, for example, that the viruses studied at WIV with EcoHealth funding were too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to cause the pandemic. They also strongly defended Fauci.
That makes it sound like wilful ignorance. There’s other groups operating there (it has five research institutes). Can you even trust the wuhan lab to be honest? Have they proven to be forthcoming? A detective wouldn’t trust a sole witness who’s also a suspect. I don’t have a horse in the race, but would prefer to know the truth
From the ACX post I linked in another comment, it seems that pre-pandemic the WiV was very much forthcoming and sent around notes of what viruses they'd collected and what they were doing to other countries' researchers:
> Are we sure they had neither [BANAL-52, which is one mutation away from COVID, and some other related virus]? Yes. Remember, WIV’s whole job was looking for new coronaviruses. They published lists of which ones they had found pretty regularly. They published their last list in mid-2019, just a few months before the pandemic. Although lab leak proponents claimed these lists showed weird discrepancies, this was just their inability to keep names consistent, and all the lists showed basically the same viruses (plus a few extra on the later ones, as they kept discovering more). The lists didn’t include BANAL-52 or any other suitable COVID relatives - only RATG-13, which isn’t close enough to work.
>
> Could they have been keeping their discovery of BANAL-52 secret? No. Pre-pandemic, there was nothing interesting about it; our understanding of virology wasn’t good enough to point this out as a potential pandemic candidate. WIV did its gain-of-function research openly and proudly (before the pandemic, gain-of-function wasn’t as unpopular as it is now) so it’s not like they wanted to keep it secret because they might gain-of-function it later. Their lists very clearly showed they had no virus they could create COVID from, and they had no reason to hide it if they did.
They haven't been at all forthcoming. They took down their databases, largely refused to provide detailed information, and it turned out in testimony I think they have over 2000 unpublished viruses in storage. Which to this day they refuse to provide information on or records or the like.
Apparently the viral dna/rna sequencing machines record a lot of data to disk and then software tries to reduce that to the info you want but the raw data contains sequences from everything around including odd bits of dust etc that got in. That data would show fairly conclusively whether they were guilty of not but will they share it? Oh no. I think they'd rather burn the lab down first.
Cool. Now they should investigate Purdue Pharma's lies and reputation laundering and their connection to prominent republican politicians with regards to the opioid epidemic and how they misrepresented their drugs that were arguably worse than morphine for the body as "less harmful".
Never going to happen. There are loads of these situations where pharma corporations will screw up and resort to public relation firms for "cleaning" their screw up. It's Orwellian how bad the situation really is.
From memory wikileaks leaked an email from someone involved in pharma talking about "threatening leakers" for leaking their lies. I'm not talking mere legal threats, they were talking blatant blackmail in an Epstein fashion.
Nobel in chemistry winner Kary Mullis died in Nov 2019 and spoke before then about how the pcr test he invented was not a proper viral diagnostic tool.
Did you read the LA times? They were in full damage control mode. I wonder who sponsors them the most nowadays? It's not like the government just funded millions and billions post covid into pharma corporations (to the point where they became the dominant component of government funding and to the point where these corporations began to compete with the MIC for funding) that could just use that money to get journalists to "sweeten up" the blowback to their dangerous and negligent practices.
But that said, I still take the republican biased report with caveats. They were washing up their own vaccine related leveraging as a "success" in it, even though it also contributed to many problems.
I would change my opinion if much stronger evidence came out for the opposite side, but what we have so far in favour of a zoonotic origin seems very convincing to me.
You have to dig in to details about furin cleavage, nucleotide insertions, and how CGG codes for arginine etc. But the point is that the pro-zoonotics team makes a very strong case that the extra bits on Covid (a) do look like what we've observed in other naturally occurring viruses, like the flu, and (b) does not look like the techniques that labs use for this kind of thing, which are actually _simpler_ than what Covid does.