Several diseases have made the jump from animals to humans - over many thousands of years, and all over the world.
It is not too complex to bioengineer increased virulence and infectiousness into known viruses. It can be done by combining certain components of variants of a known virus in the lab. We could re-engineer the 1918 flu virus strain now, if a lab desired to do so.
China has, with good reason, been studying coronaviruses because of SARS, and in that very lab. They were tinkering with coronavirus to plan for the next outbreak - and very likely caused it, through an inadvertent lab leak infecting a worker, who then spread it in that city. That is by far more likely that a coincidental leap from animal to human in the wet market. The variable is time and place - sure, the virus could have made the leap from animal to human, given enough time and enough exposures - but that becomes extremely unlikely when that lab only opened a couple of years before the pandemic began, and in the same city.
I was speaking hypothetically when I spoke about a hypothetical accidental smallpox lab release being blamed on melting permafrost, drawing a hypothetical analogy. But yes, Russia has had cases of release of deliberately weaponized smallpox killing people. 1971 Aral smallpox incident - Wikipedia.
Yes, Wuhan is a big city. But there was only one level 4 virology lab in all of China, it had only been open for a couple of years, it had known lab security problems, and it was known to be tinkering with SARS-like coronaviruses. Plus China actively denied access to investigators, and continues to do so. The chances of it having been a jump from animal to human at a nearby market in the same city at that same time are nil.
I find it strange that youâre trying to Occamâs Razor this (common things happen commonly), but then refusing to acknowledge that it is both simpler and more common for a novel coronavirus to appear in humans via zoonotic transfer than via a lab leak.
Basically, your own reasoning undercuts (or at least should undercut) your belief in the lab leak possibility.
If it was âcompellingâ facts it wouldnât have been an opinion piece. The WSJ would love to win awards for publishing investigative pieces in their news section proving the origin if they could. This is where it is because it didnât rise to the standard of a news article. And the op-ed writer has no credibility. He has a track record of misrepresenting science â itâs kind of his thing.
I would like you to explain exactly how this virus âescapedâ from the lab. Letâs be technical.
Remember that:
A. Viruses cannot move on their own
B. Coronavirus infects as an airborne virus, and
C. What was engineered?
The âevidenceâ is bogus:
A. So, the fact that the virus has a feature which is common among other closely related viruses is proof that itâs artificial? The sheer stupidity of that is monumental. Read it again.
B. Why is this person assuming that there werenât multiple jumps? Because all the people in Wuhan are being monitored for viral infections? Itâs âwe didnât see it happen, therefore it didnât happenâ. Very scientific.
Oh, what else do we have. When is comes out that DEFUSE was never funded, his âscientific methodâ is again on display:
His âsmoking gunâ consists of:
A. SARS-CoV-2 has a furin cleavage site, just like hundreds of similar viruses
B. China didnât detect that there were a small number of people with milder non contagious COVID in a giant population of low income workers during a normal flu season. Therefore, because Chinese doctors are not able to see into the future and identify COVID when there are scattered cases, that means that there were no cases.
C. Because âresearchers in Wuhan might have secured Chinese government fundingâ
This isnât a âsmoking gunâ, this is isnât even a gun. This Is Woody Allenâs soap gun:
I did read it again. He is clearly stating that the feature is NOT common among other viruses. I have no idea if he is correct about it not being common but I believe you have misread him.
Insofar as I can follow that crucial paragraph of the argument, Wade seems to be advancing three different if inter-related arguments.
The âfurin cleavage sitesâ are more than merely âuncommonâ in its family of 1500 members; rather, they are âpossessed by none.â That sounds like a powerful argument. Are these assertions simply incorrect?
The âcodonsâ on the site are âpreferred by humans.â This seems less decisive but still suggestive. Is it correct?
The movement of âmostâ animal viruses to humans requires ârepeated triesâ whereas this one âinfected humans out of the box.â There are at least two assertions here. Is the first of them true (that most viruses require repeated tries)? Is there good evidence for the second (that humans were infected at first try)?
If Wade is correct about these things, it may or may not amount to the smoking gun he claims it to be. I donât have the background to judge. But the points he makes here need to be addressed if I am not to draw the conclusion that he just might be pretty close to right.
Recently, Wu and coworkers identified a bat virus (Bat CoV CD35) that harbored a furin cleavage site identical to that found on SARS-CoV-2 (Zhu W, Huang Y, Gong J, et al. A novel bat coronavirus with a polybasic furin-like cleavage site.Virol Sin. 2023 May 2;S1995-820X(23)00047-0). The authors concluded, âThis study deepens our understanding of the diversity of coronaviruses and provides clues about the natural origin of the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2â (abstract).
That is the typical way that the jump happens. However, those are rarely seen.
I mean, nobody observed this happening in AIDS. I guess that it must have been engineered.
Most importantly, we have no records of this for either smallpox and the bubonic plague. I guess that means that these virus and bacteria MUST have been engineered. Maybe by the Atlanteans. The Spanish Flu, AKA H1N1, we have no records of these, it must have been engineered by somebody. Maybe aliens. Maybe a secret Chinese lab in Kansas.
Let us look at one of the closest relatives - the SARS-CoV-1 virus. This also appeared in China, is much deadlier as well. We have no records of the first, unsuccessful jumps to a human either. Based on the level of âresearchâ and âevidenceâ that Mr. Wade uses, I fully expect him to claim âthe Chinese government MIGHT have a SECRET lab in Guangdongâ.
Clearly, the virus saws its way out of the barred windows, with a file baked into a cake from its mommy.
If you read my post, the most likely scenario by far is that a lab worker was accidentally infected with the virus, and then spread it by contagion in Wuhan.
Clearly? Usually when something is clear itâs backed by evidence. Clearly, youâve offered none. All thatâs coming across in your posts is that you want it to be from the lab.
@eyemgh , are you ruling out the possibility of lab origin, or simply saying itâs unlikely based on the evidence? --I ask this because in my attempt to read the various research cited in this thread I donât see any really definitive refutation of the lab hypothesis. On the furin aspect, the language used in these papers is generally not very strong, using such words as âtentative,â âsupports,â âfurin-like,â (as opposed to furin) and other cautious qualifiers. I also canât help noticing that three of the studies were authored by researchers bearing exclusively Chinese names (10, 7 and 3 of them, respectively). Of course that doesnât mean they should be ignored, but it does raise a question of whether this research was done inside China and was either directed or influenced by that government or at the very least by a confirmation bias. How can we be certain that wasnât the case?
You are right. I have absolutely NO evidence that the virus sawed its way out of the barred windows at the lab, using a file baked into a cake from its mommy.
This is how biomedical science is communicated. Itâs standard language for research papers. Itâs how I write all my papers. Suggests, supports, possibly, etc. We are trained to hedge and I have never used the word âproveâ in anything Iâve written. Itâs a good practice and reviewers demand such language anyway.
Several of the papers I linked had no Chinese authors.
These papers treat their evidence of naturally-occurring furin as recent and ânovel,â and it seems the phenomenon itself is not very widespread. Wadeâs statement that it does not occur at all is exaggerated, certainly, and literally inaccurate, but the relative rarity and recentness of its discovery, if it does not âproveâ the alternative hypothesis, at least renders it equally plausible. We seem to me to be in the situation where there are two negatives, neither of which can at this point be proved - that covid DID NOT come out of a lab and that covid DID NOT come by way of natural cross-over. I am genuinely agnostic, but it surprises me how many are not, for reasons that are not purely scientific.
There is no compelling evidence that covid did come out of a lab. There is increasing evidence that covid did come out of zoonotic spillover.
No, you canât âproveâ the independent hypothesis that it did not come out of a lab (since thatâs proving a negative). But there is a lot of support (aka evidence) for the hypothesis that covid came from zoonotic spillover.
People who arenât accustomed to reading and evaluating primary scientific research as part of their job arenât the best sources for opinions. The author of this article certainly is not an expert.
You look for the preponderance of evidence, and you look to the the prevailing opinion of the bulk of experts in a given field. Are they always right? Of course not. But we are trained to be conservative with declaring things and thatâs why weâre trained to hedge. But that hedging can be misinterpreted by others as supporting alternative hypotheses.
