Comment by petcat
1 day ago
> made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.
Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
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”.
We’ll never know if the lab in Wuhan originated the virus. 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.
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.
It is very unlikely that the initial superspreader event of a pandemic would be in a wet market that would be the one place for an animal spillover.
And when you look at the documented lab release of SARS-CoV-1, it killed the researcher's mother. If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest to the researchers at the lab who were infected, and the places they visited. Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.
The outbreak looks like a wet market spillover. The fact that it happened in the same city as WIV is an unusual coincidence, but if the virus developed in rural Hubei, it was likely it would spillover in Wuhan.
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The first corona identified. The Wuhan workers got sick around a month before.
They also didn’t find any animal corona samples at the market. Also around 50% of people of the initial cluster had no connection to the market.
Also the hospital where the lab workers were treated was on the corner of this market.
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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.
My understanding is that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was one of only 2 BSL-4 labs in china in 2019, and the only one focused on emergent viruses. This is out of 684 major Chinese cities.
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> 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.
What do you know?
In 2021 the WSJ reported that 3 workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 with symptoms resembling COVID-19 that they sought hospital care. Their source was a U.S. intelligence report.
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/intelligence-on-sick-staff-a...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210622121243/https://www.chann...
The WHO responded by saying the lab leak theory was extremely unlikely, and this line of investigation was dropped (except possibly within the government - this is the sort of information that would be convenient for governments to know but inconvenient for the public to know). But then in a follow-up documentary, a WHO scientist that published that statement says that they were under heavy pressure from the Chinese government to do so:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/12/who-origins-...
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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.
Nobody expected natural zoonotic spillover near Wuhan, and Dr. Shi's lab was not situated with that in mind. In her own words:
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210727042832/https://www.scien...
The virus doesn't seem to have been engineered from any previously known sarbecovirus, but the WIV had the largest collection of novel sarbecoviruses collected from nature in the world, and had proposed in DEFUSE to engineer them in collaboration with Dr. Baric at UNC. DARPA rejected that proposal, in part for safety reasons, but the WIV was technically capable of doing the work alone.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
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Were they first patients?
Well, according to some reports, the first reported incidents happened in November 2019 and the months prior, from people who worked at Wuhan Institute of Virology (according to US government sources) [0]. Those people were: Ben Hu, Yu Ping, Zhu Yan.
[0] https://www.public.news/p/first-people-sickened-by-covid-19
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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 might not have been the best student, but I wouldn't call studying "extraordinarily improbable".
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> Dumbest thing I've heard today.
Not really; "there is probably a connection" probably was supposed to mean "could be studied, maybe a correlation is found", rather than "surely there must be a causation", which is what some people seem to want to take it for.
Chinas actions following the event includes the destruction of evidence, refusal of access and using the WHO as their personal mouthpiece. Unless history is rewritten too, every textbook should clearly point to China.
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.
There's no scenario where a local government knows whether it was a leak or not, and Beijing is kept in the dark. The fear local governments feel when it comes to being subservient to Beijing would entirely rule out hiding anything from them about what actually happened.
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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.
The NSF was funding Gain-of-function research in Wuhan at a lab overseen and managed by an international scientific consortium. All these institutions have incentives to modify the narrative. At the start of the outbreak I would have bet anyone ten bucks that we'd never get to the bottom of it.
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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?
No?
To me it is a difference, if a naturally mutated virus caused a global epidemic, than a lab made one.
They're not seen as equal in China. A virus leaking from a lab would be seen as a failure of the bureaucracy, and people would blame the authorities. If it came from a wet market, people would be more likely to blame the buyers and sellers, while the authorities would take much less of the blame.
Furthermore, within China, alternative conspiracy theories claiming that the virus came from the US were allowed to circulate. A significant number of people in China actually believe that theory.
Agree. Not sure about Internet commenters' fascination with pinpointing lab vs wet market. Both are bad looks for China.
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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.
It’s clear that they knew about the extent of the issue weeks earlier and tried to contain it, rather than letting the world know
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ur username?
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Objection: relevance.
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The German secret service has assessed that 80-95% probability that it was leaked from a lab in Wuhan and presented a report to then Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The assessment was later leaked and was published in a German Newspaper (https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/corona-bnd-china-li.3217...)
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.
To a certain extent I can understand why no country wanted to point fingers at China because they didn't want to piss off their biggest trading partner. Especially by Germany, given how much they relied on China to buy their cars back then.
But the lack of transparency and the coverup to this day has immensely weaken the public trust in the scientific institution and government bodies for public health and safety.
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It’s not even rumors. The MERS/SARS gain of function research started in UNC, US, then paused due to safety concerns, then moved to Wuhan.
The entire thing is very well documented by Nature and Science, among others.
Dr. Shi Zhengli of WIV was involved in the original UNC research prior to 2014 defunding.
In 2017 she had combined DNA of few different bat coronaviruses to “study their virulence”.
In 2019 she published a paper forecasting a new virus outbreak likely to originate in China.
You know the rest of the story.
I mean it’s definitely rumours if “the rest of the story” is “Covid then happened”
That was exactly the strain of Coronavirus that the lab was working with, and exactly the kinds of mutations you'd expect them to make.
But no, I'm sure it was the wombats.
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.
There is still no conclusive explanation. You can find reputable sources for either theory.
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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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I believe it was zoonosis, not a lab leak: https://marketwise.substack.com/p/did-covid-19-come-from-a-l...
Man, you started an off-topic subthread which, at the moment, contains 100 out of the 165 total comments.
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.
> Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
If you enjoy diving deep on the topic I highly recommend watching the entire Rootclaim Covid Lab Leak debate https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r...
I expected that arguing for Lab Leak would be a huge uphill battle but it was surprisingly almost the exact opposite. Some of the biological arguments are above my head, but they decompose into timelines and other consequences that make it hard for a Lab Leak origin to be coherent.
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almost nobody who understands the science and how viruses spread gives more credence to the lab leak theory over a zoonotic source. There are huge leaps of faith required by the lab leak theory that don't hold up against slight scrutiny. People will get into the weeds about "furin cleavage sites" etc. when none of that argumentation is necessary to determine the most likely source.
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.
>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 said those things before publishing their paper.
You can read the messages here:
https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Proximal_Origin...
From what I can see, they start off by saying that the lab leak seems likely, and then re-evaluate in light of new evidence (see page 65, page 67 "again, it doesn't rule out lab infection/release, however, there is now no longer any ‘mysteries’ to explain"). This is just science being done. You can see them discover new evidence and update their beliefs. You can read how they revise their paper over time.
You can also see that they criticize other researchers for publicly decrying the lab leak theory absent sufficient evidence (page 23).
Here is the statement from the paper that you claim is a lie:
"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
I think that statement is measured and supported by the available evidence. They state that they can't rule out a lab origin but that it does not seem likely. If you don't buy the conclusion, the evidence to support that conclusion is all accurately laid out in the paper. You are free to draw your own conclusions.
do you realize that the entirety of the "evidence" you have presented is just hearsay? Slack messages and a diary? Seriously?
> 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.
the irony
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>"it's so friggin likely it came from the lab", even after they published a paper
This particular was over a month before it was published, who's lying again? But this is discussions between colleagues as new evidence was coming in. If the investigation was tilted in the direction of the wet market we would have seen evidence of that, instead we see different people having different opinions on early and incomplete evidence and eventually coming to an agreement on what is more likely based on evidence they had at the end.
>"now we know the wet market was not the source, it was an amplifier"
Doesn't exclude that it was from natural origin. Amplifier meaning where it entered the human population and started spreading widely.
> The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong
There is a lot of conjecture for the lab leak theory, no real evidence. Meanwhile there's plenty of actual evidence that points to the wet market, such as the initial spread was clustered around the market.
>to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning.
This sentence alone is rather telling...
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Pretty much confirmed by western intelligence including the German BND
Source?
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A near guarantee when it shows up in the city that hosts the only lab in the world doing advanced research and gain of function on coronavirus... but the reason the US hasn't made too big of a stink (and early on perpetuated the "wetvmarket" nonsense) is that the research was funded by the US and essentially outsourced to this lab with less sophisticated safety standards. So there was blame and humiliation all around.
Asking this question on an internet forum is like dumping a pound of sodium chloride in a bathtub: explosive, and highly unlikely to inform anybody.
It's difficult to say for sure, but the consensus is leaning towards zoonotic origin from a bat or pangolin in a wet market. (I'm not very well researched on this topic and don't have any formal background in it, so hedge accordingly)
>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!
it turns out it's possible to believe something out of racist and xenophobic furor that also ends up being true
Calling it the “Chinavirus” was obviously racist and weird. It was an ex posto facto thing to claim saying it was a lab leak was racist. I’m sure someone said that, however, no one serious was nor was it a common position.
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> Does anyone else remember when claiming it was a lab in China that leaked was “racist”
No. I remember it being called a conspiracy theory. And it still is.
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We should not be eating animals period
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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
This says there’s 0 evidence to claim it’s a lab leak, and plenty of evidence, literal contact tracing from the wet market. They took the lab leak seriously and were emotionally resonant with you and I, however, they must deal in facts when they write.
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Bill Gurley has a presentation about it, asking questions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49765794
There was endless discussion about how unlikely or reasonable it was with furin cleavage sites and whatnot. I wouldn't trust authoritative summaries.
Def not confirmed, just assumed. People act like it's a fact though because it's plausible.
Last I saw, plausible, unconfirmed, nobody is willing/able to provide enough information to be able to confirm one way or another.
The Science community says no. And Statisically I say no as well. The strongest piece of evidence in my opinon is that for this virus to NOT have come from the lab is this.
A lab worker would need to have taken public transit for 7 miles through a place more densely populated than Manhattan infect no one arrive at the wet market infect 1 person than leave and go several miles home without infecting anyone. This basically seems impossible and if it did happen it would have radically changed the infection pattern and with how we know how covid works seems impossible. Its not bullet proof but it basically requires us abandoning everything we know about epidemology for it to have come from that lab.
Now there are issues we never found the animal of origin but its hard because China killed and bleached the whole market trying to hid evidence. It seems very consistent though with China trying to perserve reputation. There could be scheme to sell infected dead animals from the lab to the wet market but its conspiry theory seeking as there is no evidence supporting lab leak besides China bad. (And Trust me I think China is bad they are a horrible government who definitely hid covids existence and that behavior propably enhanced the likelyhood of it become the pandemic it was but there is just no hard evidence that lab leak as theory is true just scary hypothetic and stories. I hate that I sound like a China shill here)
> The Science community says no
You mean Dr. Fauci?
We knew it was from day one, but the nudge unit was just suppressing it so that people wouldn’t be mean to China.
It’s like when Russia bombed the olympics in Paris and the story got nudged to “mysterious explosions happen across France for no reason, move along citizen”
I don’t know why we keep doing it. People should be mad at these countries.
All the evidence was destroyed (probably just a coincidence, LOL), so it can't be proved either way.
Well, Americans were essentially prohibited from discussing this (most obvious) possibility because of fears that doing so would incite racist feelings towards Chinese people.
Then it was made worse by Trump's insistence on calling it the Chinavirus (just to make it "not my fault!") and predictably then the anti-Trump left reacted by censoring any connection between the lab and the outbreak.
Last thing I read on it, it was confirmed to originate from a wet market. The Wuhan lab theory has become a conspiracy theory lacking substance.
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> Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
Official report mandated by US Congress (under Biden btw): says it's likely it's a lab leak of a modified virus. CIA also changed its official stance and consider it's likely a lab leak.
The international expert who everybody based its idea that "it cannot possibly be a lab leak" has been debarred and cannot ever get funding from the US for research on modified viruses.
To me there's "something" off and it is a lab leak. And I always felt like this.
> 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.
> I'm going to go with their majority opinion
It seems like which of these two is the majority opinion heavily depends on the language/country you read information in and also whether there are still in service or not.
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Just read the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory
The summary does not mention lab leak of a natural virus at all but the body of the article says it's perfectly consistent with the best independent evidence / investigation:
> The leader of the WHO investigatory team, Peter Ben Embarek, said "An employee of the lab gets infected while working in a bat cave collecting samples. Such a scenario, while being a lab leak, would also fit our first hypothesis of direct transmission of the virus from bat to human."[114]
Seems a little dishonest, no? Pretending that lab leak == bioweapon conspiracy is just deliberate distraction.
There's simply no hard evidence one way or the other - it's a natural bat coronavirus, but we don't know how it got to Wuhan (a city with a world class coronavirus laboratory which just so happens to be the only institute on the planet which worked on isolating, sequencing, and culturing novel SARS-like bat coronaviruses from field samples - literally the only one.).
> 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.
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I get downvoted every time I say this but the evidence doesn’t even prove it started in wuhan, or even China. It could of easily been brought here by the military games that happened before that
Do you have any thoughts as to why the FBI disagrees with your perspective?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64806903
Is the US FBI a credible investigator for something like this?
a) I don't know that they have the right skills to track down patient zero of a disease.
b) They certainly don't have jurisdiction to do such an investigation in a foreign country, unless invited, and there's no way they were invited.
I strongly doubt we'll ever see a good answer on this, unless we get very lucky and some random research sample is looked at later that shows detection months earlier in a different location or if the Chinese did a good investigation and kept it quiet, but it leaks in a couple decades.
A timely and thorough investigation might have been able to determine an origin, but the US FBI certainly didn't do one.
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I don’t but this guy in your article does
> A natural origin is still the more likely theory, said Professor David Robertson, head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at University of Glasgow.
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Your link also says
>> And other US government agencies have drawn differing conclusions to the FBI's.
They don’t disagree. They don’t know. They just said what’s most likely. They don’t even give a %
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you get (rightly) downvoted for just saying nonsense.
Half the people downvote cause they know it’s from animals. Other people know it was a lab leak. Meanwhile I get downvoted by saying the evidence doesn’t prove anything or people would be shouting it from the hills note I have no dog in this race , just pointing out there’s uncertainty