So it “just happened “ near where there is a major virology lab??
That is not proof of human engineering or causation but it is one reason why questions persist
“Different “ in that it killed millions of people and shut down the economy because it was unusually infectious in humans
Also, humans can get variants of influenza from pigs or birds.
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The following page suggests two zoonotic spillover events in 1889 and 1899 involved H3N8 flu and what eventually became the common cold coronavirus OC43: Some believe the 1889 Russian flu pandemic was actually caused by a coronavirus – here’s why that’s unlikely
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It is because it was new, so no one had any immunity, and it didn’t cause severe disease or death in most people allowing it to spread. It was an example of a very efficient novel virus, much like Influenza A (Spanish Flu) when it was novel.
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@MWolf , it seems to me there’s an apple to oranges aspect to your evaluation of probabilities as between the Wet Market origin and the Lab origin. Your analysis is highly persuasive if one assumes that the virus had reached the same state in both places - that is, of being able to infect humans. If such a virus was sloshing around the wet market in all these many magnitudes and was being handled by multiple human beings, as against a handful of such instances by a few people in a lab, then, yes, I quite agree that the odds favor the Wet Market over the Lab. That’s one possibility. But consider the other possibility: that the Lab had artificially produced a human-infecting virus through genetic manipulation, a virus that existed in one place only - the Lab. It didn’t exist in the Wet Market ex hypothesi until it travelled there from the Lab. Until that happened, no amount of handling of animal tissues in the Market would count for much. The virus in the Lab would, however, be a sure thing even if it only escaped the Lab in even a few instances.
To be clear, while I am willing to entertain the possibility that it all started in a Lab, I don’t know that it happened that way any more than the proponents of natural cross-over know that it all happened at the Wet Market. Secondly, I’m not suggesting that the virus, if created in the Lab, was purposely released (that seems absurd for many reasons). Anything is possible in that event, but sloppiness seems most likely to me.
We are back to the question of probaility as between natural cross-over and human engineering. Perhaps in the course of time the evidence will make plain what happened. Clearly, most on this board believe in natural cross-over - on the basis that such things have happened for similar viruses at other times in human history, so why not in this one. In my book that’s definitely evidence, cirucumstantial as it may be, for natural cross-over. However, it’s hard for me to ignore the thing that is so different in this case from all previous ones - the existence of a unique virology lab at the very point of origin. One needn’t be racist or paranoid to entertain the possibility, perhaps even the probability, that that Lab had as one of its missions the creation of a human-infecting virus and that it succeeded.
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Why was the 1918 H1N1 virus different? Why was Ebola different, why was the SARS outbreak different?
This is the wrong question. It could have happened in another year, it could have happened in a different wet market. It would, however, eventually have happened.
The “Major Virology Lab” just happened to be in the same city as a giant wet market. The wet market was supposedly the largest seafood wholesale market in China.
The virus SARS-CoV-2 may have indeed originated there, but it also may have been an animal with the virus that came from somewhere else. It was both the center to which a large number of animals were brought, and a place where it was highly likely that an infected animals would infect a person. Many of the animals, including the raccoon dogs, came from farms in which many animals were raised together and with a lot of contact with humans. You also had wildlife, which has been the source of a number of crossovers.
All of these animals, with all of these chances of crossover, were siphoned into the wet market in Wuhan.
When we say that the virus “originated” in the market, that just means that an already sick animal was either infected by a virus that had mutated or the virus mutated in that animal.
Let’s also talk about how a virus can pop up with parts of a different type of virus. This has been used as “proof” that SARS-CoV-2 “MUST” be engineered because otherwise “how can a virus have parts of another type of virus unless people did it?”. It actually happens quite a lot, and it is all down to how viruses infect other organisms.
A virus reproduces by taking over a cell, and hijacking the cell’s system to translate the viruses DNA into the parts that are needed to create a new virus. Organisms can be infected by more than one virus, and even individual cells can be invaded by more than one virus including different types of virus. With different viruses each using the cell’s system for producing proteins based on the viruses’ DNA template, you get viruses which are made up of parts of different types of virus. Some of these, especially ones with small parts of another virus, will go one to become an entire new strain of virus. If that part allows the virus to infect a person, you have an instant zoonotic disease.
When you have many animals from multiple locations, the chances that many will be sick increase, as do the chances that many will be infected with multiple viruses.
Again, like in everything else, it’s a numbers game, and when we are talking about hundreds of thousand of animals and millions of people, the numbers a pretty “good”.
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I suppose you are right that the numbers are “good” for a wet market origin—maybe too good. If they’re that good we maybe should have seen more outbreaks in Wuhan of other viruses? Who knows?
Now compare the probability of an accident at a lab working on this particular virus. Extra precautions must be taken for this kind of work. One thing we should know is that human error is also common
I’m not sure how the amount of seafood sold is relevant, since no one has alleged seafood could be a source of the virus. Isn’t it commonly thought that the ultimate source is bats? Perhaps a comparison of the number of bat samples collected by the lab vs the number of bats sold in the market would be more helpful?
I refer you to my mention of pareidolia upthread—just because something forms a pattern does not mean that there is a meaningful pattern.
Human beings are extremely good at picking patterns out of random noise, but that does not mean that those are patterns that emerged out of anything other than a “just happened”. It is the nature of statistical noise.
We almost certainly did.
The difference with all the others is that they either didn’t transmit easily between humans, or they didn’t produce appreciable symptoms, or any number of other possibilities that mean that they didn’t result in a worldwide pandemic.
Remember: You almost certainly have a very large number (as in trillions) of viruses in your body right now. Unless you have, say, a cold or something chronic going on right now, they aren’t causing symptoms (and likely never will). There are a possibly uncountable number of viruses out there, and it isn’t like any more than a very tiny fraction of a percent are dangerous to humans—but the nature of evolutionary randomness is that if you keep rolling the dice, unlikely combinations will occur.
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You don’t think that has been considered by a bazillion scientists?!? There have been many, MANY publications written on why this was very improbable, with many reasons backing up their assertions, not the least of which, it has features that are completely counterintuitive to what we knew at the time. We don’t just randomly invent stuff the way mother nature does. We rely on past precedent. Now I’m going to put this thread on ignore. It’s fatiguing reading postulations by posters who haven’t the foggiest of what they are actually postulating about.
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That is simply an indication of just how large and central this market was and why this market was a very likely source of a zoonotic disease.
What do you even mean by “too good”?
Are you telling me that strong proof that the source of the SARS-CoV-2 was an animal to human transmission is “too good”, and is therefore actually proof that the virus was engineered by people and leaked from the lab? That is what is sounds like.
Second - why would we expect more outbreaks? The wet market was shut down in January of 2020.
You want outbreaks, I’ll give you outbreaks. We had the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak in China, which started in the food markets. There was no virology lab in Fushan, where the SARS outbreak occurred, but there are wet markets.
We had the MERS, we have the Ebola, we have AIDs, we had the Spanish flu, we had smallpox, we have the bubonic plagues, we have anthrax, and many more zoonotic diseases from farm animals, slaughterhouses, and hunting. None of them happened in or even close to a Chinese virology lab.
It happens again, and again, and again, and again. Yet here you are talking as though zoonosis is So Rare that the far-fetched scenarios that have been proposed are more likely to be true.
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@eyemgh , you are being much more emphatic than the source you cite. It says only that “we determined a natural origin was more likely.” The author produces arguments that I admit I’m not equipped to evaluate, but they must not be definitive (except on this board) if bazillions of scientists continue to give the matter consideration. Not all of them agree with his position. I was asking only that the interlocutor I was addressing, MWolf, consider it in the context of the particular argument he was making. He at least deals in reasons and not merely the argument from authority.
The article you cite dates from over three years ago, the height of the health crisis, and reflects some of the attitudes of the times - that “lab leak theories are often bolstered by racist tropes”; that some of its proponents have long-standing positions that virology research is risky “and criticize the NIH Administration [for] overuse of virology funding”; that assertions of lab origin “not only unfairly places blame on ethical research and researchers but also fails to advance public health.” The author protests that “NIH Administrators did not influence or edit our work,” but one could be pardoned for thinking so.
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There are over 40,000 wet markets in China alone and fewer than 60 virology labs in the entire world that deal with deadly pathogens similar to those having been experimented upon at the Wuhan lab. Wuhan was and is the largest BSL4 lab in operation.
Not offering an opinion just providing some facts.
Nearly all the reasons advanced against the Lab hypothesis come down to this: that Mother Nature has produced cross-over human viruses in the past - ergo that’s what’s happening in the present instance. That argument has a good deal of persuasiveness with me. I would not stigmatize it by a fancy Greek word, but what is it but a pattern? Why, then, is it considered a decisive putdown of the Lab hypothesis that the proximity of China’s most important virology lab to ground zero of the outbreak can be dismissed as a mere “pattern,” as noise without meaning? Unless, of couse, some patterns are created more equal than others.
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Seriously? Just “a pattern”?
This has been happening for tens of thousands of years, since humans started domesticating animals. It is a major reason for the worst plagues and pandemics in human history.
It is not “correlation”, it is “causation”. We have animal pathogens, and we have derived human pathogens. We have tens of thousands of years of this, and never a virology lab yet.
It’s not a Greek word, but an English term - “Occam’s Razor”
If we are comparing a zoonosis event to a lab leak: on one hand, we have A, a phenomenon that has happened hundreds of times in the past tens of thousands of years, and on the other hand, we have B, something that theoretically may happen, but has not happened yet.
You are telling us that scenario B is more likely.
When we are comparing a natural recombination event versus engineering, we are going even further, since we have multiple scenarios:
A.
- Among the thousands of animals infected with dozens of viruses each, all of which are constantly mutating, there was one mutation which resulted in the SARS-CoV-2 virus, or
- Among the thousands of animals infected with dozens of viruses each, which often recombine, there was one recombination, which resulted in the SARS-CoV-2 virus
And then a jump to humans, which has happened dozens to hundreds of times in the past,
Proof -
there are similar viruses to SARS-CoV-2 found in nature, AND
mammal species which carry these viruses were sold in the wet market, AND
the virus was found on samples from the wet market, AND
The first cases were found associated with the wet market.
Or,
B. the virus was engineered,
Which cost millions, AND
required a huge number of personnel hours, AND
And then somebody did not seal a live sample, AND
Somebody handled that sample, AND
That person handling the samples was not wearing protective gear, AND
That person inhaled some of that virus, AND
They were infected, AND
They did not infect anybody in their immediate family, any of their friends and colleagues, AND
They just happened to only infect people associated with the Wet Market
Proof -
There is a lab in Wuhan,
there was work on a different SARS virus in the lab years before, AND
safety protocols seem to have been lax, AND
there MAY have been virus research that MAY have been funded.
So, one one hand, we have a sequence of events, each which is highly likely, and each which has been recorded multiple times before.
On the other hand, we have a sequence of unlikely events, which are possible, but most have never been demonstrated to have happened, and a few which are extremely unlikely (such as the fact that the first cases were not associated with the lab).
As for proof, on one hand, we have direct links of the virus to the wet market, on the other hand, we have a bunch of “Maybe” and “in the past”.
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(a) Scientific papers do not traffic in definitive statements. They traffic in relative likelihoods. The phrase more likely references a strong result.
(b) Part of good science is questioning and requestioning the same topic over and over. (Consider the very large number of physicists working on how gravity works!) The simple fact that data is being evaluated multiple times and in multiple ways provides absolutely no evidence that a question is unresolved.
Also, as a postscript, I don’t know why you seem to be caught up on my couple of references to pareidolia, which I’m guessing is the “fancy Greek word” you have dismissed a couple times. It is not a fancy Greek word, it is a very precise English word (with, yes, Greek roots, just like telephone and antique) that describes the human drive to find patterns even where they don’t exist—and one of the reasons we’ve developed science is because we as a species are pretty smart, and we’ve realized that we need something to help us figure out when those patterns we’ve found are meaningful and when they aren’t.
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@MWolf , I am not asserting that the Lab scenario is “more likely.” I’m agnostic, as I’ve said several times. But you are not. Fair enough; your summation leaves no doubt that the Lab origin is vanishingly unlikely. However, like any good prosecutor, you are stressing the strengths of your preferred position and downplaying the case for the alternative.
Granted that there is a long history of natural cross-over. That’s the strength of its case. But what you say about the case for engineering hardly gives that position a fair shake. I reply to your points as follows:
- It cost millions… What would this matter to a government that was on a mission to perfect a weapon as unique and powerful as this one? What was spent on the Manhattan Project?
- Required a huge number of personnel hours… Ditto.
- Somebody did not seal a live sample… Have mistakes never been known to happen in any lab?
- Person was not wearing protective gear… Ditto.
- Person inhaled the virus… That would follow easily enough absent the protective gear.
- They were infected… Ditto.
- The infection spread to the Wet Market rather than the immediate family… This is a good point, though can we be sure that there was no spreading to family? Or no visit to the wet market by the infected person?
I give these objections some weight, but they do not seem decisive to me. Occam’s poor old overused razor is not required here; this is not a complex chain of events. Rather, these seem to me to be very plausible happenings among fallible human beings who just happen to be creating a new killer virus.
And that supposition brings me to the crux of what I believe to be your understatement of the Lab case. During all the previous human history that you recite there was no technology that would have permitted the development of just such a weapon. But history is full of new weapons - at least as full of them as it is of new viruses. If nature abhors a vacuum, so do great nations bent on weaponry to dominate their neighbors and defend themselves. Why would we assume that a country that had the capacity to develop such a weapon as this - and I believe you accept that China has such a capacity - have been uninterested or unsuccessful in doing so? Genetic modifications of many kinds is going on every day in labs everywhere. And there’s this to consider: This Lab in Wuhan, if I understand correctly, was the most sophisticated and specialized in China in this field of virology. If that is correct and if work of such importance was to be done anywhere in the nation, surely it would be here. You can dress up this connection between the virus and the pre-eminent virus lab in the nation as pareidolia and dismiss it as a mere coincidence, and, sure, there are coincidences that aren’t causes, but you need to give the remarkableness of this particular one some real weight in your assessment of probabilities.
I would summarize the case for the Lab in its broadest terms as follows: That this outbreak of an especially deadly disease happened at perhaps the first moment in human history in which such a disease could have been engineered; that there was an incentive for a large nation to do whatever was necessary to create this disease as a weapon; and the outbreak happened next door to the Lab in that large country that would have been the very one tasked with such a mission.
My summation doesn’t cancel yours, of course. Both have considerable cogency, it seems to me. In my humble submission it seems unreasonable to rule out either. I have a hard time understanding the reluctance of many on this board to give any credence at all to one of the hypotheses. That sounds more like dogmatic belief than science.
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Not only is your scenario relying on multiple consecutive events, each of which is highly unlikely, you have now added on a few more unsupported assumptions:
A. That the Chinese government s actively looking to weaponize viruses, and
B. that they were using the Wuhan lab for that purpose, and
C. That this virus is even a good candidate for weaponization.
The first may or may not be true, but the second is really unlikely. Until 2019, the Wuhan lab was used extensively in collaborative research with Western universities. I find it extremely unlikely that the Chinese government would use this particular lab for their most classified research.
If they have a lab that is engaged in biological warfare research, and that is a large “IF”, it would most likely be in a high classified location, and in a lab which has no foreigners hanging around and visiting.
“We have these top secret research projects that we don’t want anybody in the world to know about, where should we do this research? Oh, here is a great place - smack in the middle of a giant city. You know what? Let’s hire locals who go home in the city every day, we’ll invite thousands of foreign scientists to visit, and we will even invite foreign scientists to do research here’”
“Don’t you think that it would be better to build the biological warfare lab far in the mountains where nobody visits, and have the scientists all live on base with their families, so that nobody blurts something out by accident, not let them interact with foreign scientists so they don’t accidentally blurt something out, and never invite foreign scientists, so they won’t accidentally see something that they shouldn’t”
“No, that’s stupid”
That sounds like an overly complex plot of a cheap spy thriller. It sounds like a Bond villain plan “well Mr Bond, we do have a giant country with thousands of locations to run our top secret research, but we have chosen this easily accessible location and allowed access to thousands of potential enemy spies”.
“Hiding in plain sight” is a common spy movie trope, but that is because the spy movie has to end with the good guys winning.
As for choosing this virus?
Dude, Smallpox and measles are far far deadlier and far far more contagious. Worse, what sort of idiot works on a biological agent aimed at crippling their enemy’s military that only kills the elderly “you know what would work REALLY WELL in a war? A virus which barely affects the soldiers, but kills their grandparents”?
The scenario that you are building is relying increasingly on film tropes, unsupported assumptions, and multiple consecutive highly unlikely events.
Sorry, but biological warfare doesn’t work like that, secret scientific research doesn’t work like that, and sciences doesn’t work like that.
Your “virus escape” scenario does not, in fact, make any sense.
It was deadly, but not even near deadly enough to be of the slightest use to a military. Or do you think that China had a nefarious plan to murder all the elderly people in world, and therefore achieve geriatric supremacy?
Please tell me what this incentive happened to be.
Why would any country run top-secret biological warfare research in a central place in a lab to which so many foreigners had access? It’s a giant country with so many more secret locations.
Re: the Manhattan project. As we know, the Manhattan project was run in the middle of Los Angeles, and they had multiple collaborative research projects with foreign scientists. They invited scientists from across the world to tour the facilities, and they publicized the opening of the Labs on all major news networks. The scientists working on the Manhattan Project went home in the suburbs of LA every evening, attended church/synagogue, went to social events in the city, hung around in bars, and in general were not even secluded at all.
After all, nobody would ever have thought that people engaged in working on a top-secret project be living in a lab complex in the middle of the desert, live only on base, be isolated from their family members outside of the base, and not be allowed to speak with their colleagues, right?
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Once I wipe the spittle off my face, I detect two points here:
-
That this particular virus wouldn’t make a very good weapon… Tell that to the economists who have attempted to quantify the incalculable damage the covid shutdowns did to the world. We live in an age that’s rather different from the age of the Black Death or even the influenza epidemic of 1919. The nations of the world regard the lives of all their citizens as very precious, even the lives - it may surprise you to hear - of the elderly. The world went into a collective funk over the dire possibilities that this unknown virus would be the end of life as we know it. Do you not remember any of this? We were assailed with warnings and threats of apocalypse from dawn to dusk - that the only way out was to stay locked away in our houses and unable to work or see our families, deprived of the necessities of life, fearful of all human contact. It felt like Armageddon. If you believe these effects were trivial, you were living in a different world than I was.
-
As to the suitability of the Wuhan lab, there seems to me to be an obvious difference between the sort of site a nation would choose to develop a weapon guaranteed to produce unimaginably large physical effects like those of the first atomic bomb and a site that was intended to produce no effects beyond the lab itself. Of course I don’t know the precise protocols of visitors to the Wuhan lab, but are you suggesting that westerners had the run of the place? Is it unimaginable that there would be off-limits portions? I have not previously heard anyone assert the argument that secrecy would have been difficult to maintain, and it frankly doesn’t seem plausible.
Life sometimes imitates the movies, @MWolf .
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