Comment by robmusial

This is not an accurate description. The first identified patients were people working in or living near a "wet market" where (among other things) various wild animals were sold. It's plausible that someone was infected somewhere else and the market was only the site of a "superspreader event" (rather than the earliest jump from some other animal to humans), but further details are speculative, informed by indirect phylogenetic evidence rather than direct forensic evidence.

It's not unusual/unexpected that there were labs working on coronavirus research in several major Chinese cities: the 2002 SARS outbreak, which began in southern China and caught researchers and public health officials off guard, led to significant investment in the study of coronaviruses.

Virus outbreaks are usually first recognized in large cities. Most large Chinese cities have labs that study coronaviruses. They were established in response to SARS-CoV-1 in the early 2000s.

So no matter where it comes from the chances are good a coronavirus outbreak will first be detected in a city that has a coronavirus lab.

> But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.

Except - as far as I know - the first patients weren’t.

Even when there’s not a direct connection, it’s usually a good sign to take a look at what’s going on. In this case, even if COVID was a random isolated mutation in an unrelated marketplace nearby, it shone a spotlight on a place doing gain of function research on novel coronaviruses where if one did escape lab confinement, we were woefully unprepared to deal with the full consequences of that outbreak (eg: COVID). Whether or not the lab leak theory is true, we should be taking exactly the same precautions as if it were.

> when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection

If the alternative hypothesis is that the events are independent, yes. But it is somewhat more common to have labs studying viruses in regions where there are virus reservoirs. So the events "lab studying viruses" and "virus outbreak in local area" are not independent, as both are more likely in regions with viral reservoirs, and in particular, in dense urban areas thereof. A coincidence is not as extraordinary as it may seem.

Thing is, it is not possible to know at this point, as long as the virus does not seem to be bioengineered, whether it was a lab accident while studying animal samples or an outbreak starting in the market.

Were they first patients?

What are the two extraordinarily improbable events here? There's a novel virus capable of causing a pandemic getting into humans, and then... what's the other one?

Beyond reasonable doubt doesn't mean impossible,any more than on the balance of probabilities means beyond reasonable doubt.

> “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”

That's how people start believing in supernatural explanations and conspiracy theories, though. Improbable events happen all the time; just because each event is improbable doesn't mean the set of improbable events that can occur isn't large.

Weird shit happens all the time, and we should expect it as a matter of random chance.

I think we've overcorrected.

For what it's worth, the "first patients were lab workers" part isn't established. What is documented is that the earliest cases cluster around the Huanan market. The lab workers attribution shouldn't be carrying the argument.

Before COVID, people were just unable to be roused out of their sleep about the dangers of cross-species virus transmission. "Wake me up when something important happens." By a certain standard nothing important had ever happened: so people slept on.

Then COVID hit. "Time to wake up." Suddenly people went from basically unconscious to hypervigilant overnight. Something which was a clear and present danger - the wet markets - looked uninteresting compared to the lab. Environmental samples taken there tested positive. In other words: don't sleep on the wet markets again - they are dangerous, then and now.

While paying attention was arguably an improvement over complete indifference, I don't think we landed in the right place.

Source on first patients being WIV workers? I think there was a US intelligence report that claimed several fell ill in Nov., some with incompatible symptoms, and with claims from WIV they didn't test positive for antibodies (not saying take those at face value). There's also the wet market and the sampling done in gutters around the different stalls and a whole competing story there, which is also the kind of scenario in the 2002 SARS outbreak.

> But it is awfully strange

Lazy, anti-science, conspiratorial way of going about it

>...were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus...

...with funding from a US group that discussed conducting this gain of function research in China using a spike protein at the furin cleavage site, a group whose members were appointed to come up with an explanation for what had happened.

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> I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.

Dumbest thing I've heard today.

Ever since we started studying autism, we found it! Therefore studying causes autism.

I feel it's more complicated than that. I wouldn't be surprise if Beijing does not actually know whether this was a lab leak or not.

The local government might know. They would have started a cover up reflexively.

But in either case, it could be that neither the local government nor central government wants to know or to find out. Ultimately, destroying the evidence and failing to cooperate with foreign investigators has cost China very little or nothing, even.

In short, I feel China should be admonished for covering things up, but not that the cover up proves the lab leak.

In a state like China, this would probably happen as a panic response, not because the people covering up and destroying evidence know that their institution has done something bad/embarrassing, but because they fear it might be so and it's far better for their personal careers to suppress too much than to suppress too little. It's quite possible the people running cover-ups knew as little as us.

And that goes for western spy agencies too, by the way. Headless chickens all around.

Also the head of the US CDC at the time saying it was a lab leak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMlhvnMpRU0&t=119s

this is one of the leaps of faith I allude to in my top level comment - just because a bad actor is involved and would be incentivized to cover something up, doesn't mean that the lab leak theory is correct. Those two ideas are not connected.

A really easy knockdown for this kind of argument is - why did they close down, sanitize, and dispose of all animals and items at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market? If your argument is that a coverup points to the source, why wouldn't that mean the wet market was the origin?

But isn't the wet market hypothesis equally bad looking for China?

Of course, it should point to China. They're the ones who didn't shut down the wet markets after SARS-CoV-1.

Source? Your account is no better hearsay.

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For about two years the vitriol people received for daring to suggest the virus might have leaked from a poorly secured lab near the origination site was unbelievable. I would like to believe everyone involved would take a long, hard look at themselves but I highly doubt they will. My favourite bit from the time was from [Jon Stewart on Colbert.](https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8?si=qypQLgxKq2IbagfN) I've never seen Colbert so uncomfortable.

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I mean it’s definitely rumours if “the rest of the story” is “Covid then happened”

It wasn’t the exact strain, the mutations were nothing like you’d expect them to make, and good lord people on HN need better news and science sources if this is still the level of discussion on the topic.

The english indie rock band that formed in liverpool in 2003 did covid-19?

Pangolins actually - they carried a strain of the virus that had the ability to infect human cells via ACE2 receptor.

The bat variant did not have that - wet market - close proximity - a fortuitous gene swap and hey presto.

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Because people who spewed all manner of vitriol on pretenses that now with hindsight should have been visible as shaky at the time would rather bicker trying to justify it than examine how they could've done that.

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Quite the opposite. We have the Slack chat logs where virologists themselves say things like "it's so friggin likely it came from the lab", even after they published a paper claiming it was absolutely of natural origin. They were lying and knew they were lying, and the entirety of academia went along with it because they didn't want to take the blame for COVID or risk the funding that Fauci controlled.

Even Fauci himself kept a private diary where he wrote, "now we know the wet market was not the source, it was an amplifier" - while telling the public the opposite.

The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning. It's not just one line of evidence or inference, it's dozens. The only people I've met who still cling to the idea it wasn't a man-made pandemic tend to be people who work in public sector science themselves.

Source?

>but the consensus is leaning towards zoonotic origin from a bat or pangolin in a wet market

I literally had to check the date on this post.

Does anyone else remember when claiming it was a lab in China that leaked was “racist”… but “they eat tainted exotic animals at wet markets” was “the consensus”?

Wild times!

there is zero evidence for zoonotic origin, and messages have been found and made public showing that the public proponents of a zoonotic origin hypothesis were in private saying "lab leak".

https://archive.ph/WTsga

> The Science community says no

You mean Dr. Fauci?

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> And I always felt like this.

Hence you looked for evidence that matched and dismissed evidence that doesn't match.

Unless you can tell me that the majority of virologists agree it was a lab leak, I'm going to go with their majority opinion - which last I checked was that it couldn't possibly be a lab leak for specific genetic reasons.

> cannot ever get funding from the US for research on modified viruses.

So a guy who disagreed with the official CIA stance has been barred from obtaining funding for research from the US.

I mean, that just makes them seem more trustworthy.

Do you have any thoughts as to why the FBI disagrees with your perspective?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64806903

you get (rightly) downvoted for just saying nonsense.

I am listening, please explain what else would show competence in the regard of biodefense, than that the people in charge of Russian biodefense can and will reliably identify and contain outbreaks of dangerous pathogens in time to prevent a national or even global outbreak reliably, since at least ’79?

If you want to go down the incompetence route with potential weapons of mass destruction, you could also ask why US Americans allow their army to have access to nuclear weapons.

There were multiple recorded incidents where American citizens almost got atomised on American soil (Broken Arrow operations). Not because of individual mistakes but institutional incompetence.

But you see no one fearmongering about that in public. Because they have proven they can lose a nuclear weapon and recover it, without harming the public.

Just like a single young Russian woman can fuck up and they contain the fuckup without harming the public.

There are about 1000 competent people in an army of the size of Russia, China or the US and that’s it.

It’s expected that most soldiers are incompetent, and just need to follow orders, and in ideal case be patriotic enough to believe they sacrifice themselves for the greater good if they get sent on a suicide mission. Russia is no different from any other army in that regard.

But I honestly consider the Russian forces tasked with biodefense and nuclear more competent than most of their other counterparts in other nations. They frequently train and you get hung by the neck if you leave a blast door open to let the pizza guy in.

In Wyoming you get promoted to three-star nuclear doofus in charge if you do that.

Feel free to read this if you want to know more about the people tasked with preventing nuclear incidents on American soil.

I would link the official page on the Air Force website (https://www.compliance.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-1312...), but the Trump administration is silently deleting all of these documents.

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/963093/afd-131219-045...

Just one of the highlights.

[Maj Gen Carey] insists that we go to this place called La Cantina, I think it was... it was a Mexican place. And I was kind of surprised... I wouldn't pick a Mexican place to go to in Russia but all right, if that's where he wants to go, we'll go there.

So we show up and it turns out that I guess he somehow found out that this place had a band that plays and so he was really intent on singing with the band. He wanted to sing with the band. So we get in and it's extremely loud and the band is playing and he keeps asking the waitress and the bartender if he can sing with the band and they want nothing to do with this. And so he kept having our translator go up with him and ask them well can I sing with the band.

[Maj Gen Carey] said, "go ask them if I could play the guitar." I said okay, I, I asked one of the band members and the guy said, no, I mean, you know, I can't do that.

He goes if you really want to play this guitar go ahead and talk to the restaurant owner or the administrator or the manager, the restaurant manager and I didn't feel like doing that because I didn't want to go find the manager so I, told the General that basically, uh, you know, that he can't, he can't play the guitars and then he said, well try again, so I asked him to get up and we both stood next to this rock band and watched them up close.

I was hoping to keep his interest in doing so and, uh, he, um, and then I said, listen if you really want to play the guitar maybe if you ask him, you know, um, maybe they'd listen to you more than would to me. And I'm not sure if he asked him or not because I, I, you know, I, I sat back down at the table, but he stood there for a while in front of this band and then he came back to the table a little later also, he came back later and sat down also, and said well, no they won't let me play.

That shit is indeed funny.