I’ve been asked by many to comment on the SARS-CoV-2 origin debate and new Wall Street Journal article. And, honestly, I don’t want to touch this topic with a 10-foot pole. But, I will leave you with a few thoughts:
One thing too often left unsaid here is the fact that virologists have been at the forefront of dismissing the lab-leak as a conspiracy theory, despite the fact that they have an enormous conflict of interest. This conflict arises from the fact that they want to perform the sorts of experiments which make a lab leak much more likely. These include, most notably, gain of function experiments where they take a related virus isolated from animals and investigate whether they can make it able to infect human cells (or humanised mice). These were exactly the sorts of experiments being performed in Wuhan and they are performed all over the world. The rational for them is that they might help us recognize a potentially dangerous pathogen. This is highly unlikely - and it has never actually happened. What is vastly more likely is that these organisms will infect those doing the experiments and then spread in the community.
There is no justification for doing these types of experiments other than scientific vanity and prestige. They are NOT needed to protect us and they are certainly not needed to make vaccines. THEY SHOULD BE BANNED except under truelly exceptional circumstances.
The main reason virologists dismiss the lab leak hypothesis is that they fear they will be stopped from doing this useless and dangerous research.
As an MD and also having an advanced degree in population genetics and evolutionary biology,I think your positions are mistaken. This virus almost certainly underwent modificatins in a lab prior to its emergence as a worldwide pathogen. One can call it "gain of function". I for one do not feel gain of function research is all bad; in fact under its broad definition we are foolish to let politicians define what research can and can not be done as I see no other way we can keep one step ahead of epidemics. Having said this, it must be done with great caution. Was this some sort of intentional leak; i feel not likely. But you appear foolish to hold on to the theory this jumped from bats to humans in the Wuhan wet market. The Covid spike protien's super strong affinity to the human ACE-2 receptor as well as the furin cleavage site show almost certain modification. This ia a case where epidemiologists need to defer to geneticists and evolutionary biologists. The mere fact that the laboratory records from Wuhan appear to have been purged is pretty incriminating. And to date, no matching Covid virus has yet to have been found in any bat in the world. Similar DNA to other bat coronviruses does not cut it. I would remind you we share over 96% of of our human genome with a chimpanzees but we are an entirely distinct species. Covid -19 most likely emerged from an unfortunate lab leak.
As a philosopher, I would say that when there is a state of epistemic uncertainty, the most prudential option available is to make probabilistic estimations and try to triage the most likely origins. But never to assert that X or Y is the cause because that leads to misallocations of resources if you make a mistake. We should do a lessons-learned study and prepare for the next pandemic no matter what origins it has. Finger-pointing is a total waste of time! 🙂
While I largely agree, let me make the case why finger pointing isn't a complete waste of time:
The natural origin hypothesis proposes that after 290 million years of existence, Coronaviruses, long believed to be just a mere nuisance and cause of the common cold, somehow evolved to become a serious threat to civilization. Even though they comingled with the earliest mammals 60 million years ago, with bats 50 million years ago, and the earliest humans 3 million years ago, only now have finally evolved to pose a serious threat, and it is just a coincidence that the point at history where they became serious threats ALSO happens to be when we started making more dangerous versions in labs. Let's assume that was a coincidence, and it just bad luck.
If that is true, it would justify the expenditure of finite resources to monitor, track, combat, and manage the threat. It would justify billions, possibly trillions in funding. It would justify countless scientists to spend their limited research time fighting Coronaviruses rather than any number of other possible areas to research. Maybe promising student who might have made a breakthrough in nanotechnology decides to drop his ME coursework and switch to virology.
On the other hand, if it turns out that Coronaviruses left on their own don't really do much other than cause the common cold, and only become global threats when we alter them in labs to make them more infectious, then all of those billions and trillions would be .... not wasted per se... but inefficiently spent. We could simply have enforced and expanded the Gain of Function moratorium set up during the Obama administration, and then spent those billions to trillions ending world hunger, combating climate change, fixing systemic racism, or colonizing Mars.
Therefore, not necessarily finger pointing, but a firm quest to figure out what the hell happened could help us at the very least do a better job organizing where we invest our limited resources to prevent (or possibly not accidentally cause) another pandemic.
There is another aspect to this, and this is, did the involved parties, e.g., Fauci, Baric, Eco Health Aliance, etc., engage in illegal research and illegal activity using dark money from the NIH which is an entity that most certainly has its hands into what are commonly called 'black ops'. Did they intentionally set up "labs" in foreign, and potentially hostile, countries, whose safety standards are suspect to get around that which they otherwise would have been prohibited from doing.
If the answer is yes, they engaged in illegal and dangerous action, then they need to be held accountable. This goes back to my comment about how it's interesting that all of a sudden one "side" of this "debate" want's everyone to just clam up about it.
Michael, could it be that given the mutability, there was always a tiny chance of a natural jump to the pandemic version? It's like someone at a slot machine doing push after push trying to score the mega jackpot. A misunderstanding of probability makes them think that after a million pushes, the odds are definitely in their favor. They think there is a linkage between their next push and all those that have gone before. But that is incorrect,. Each push is de novo, with exactly the same odds. Casinos make a lot of money on that misconception. So even though a virus might coexist with us tetrapods for 250 million years, the odds of it becoming a version capable of infecting the planet and causing millions of deaths was always minute. So we're left with two possibilities Either the virus finally by blind chance hit the winning push, or someone or something stepped in and changed the odds. In the former theory the virus had to surmount astronomical odds; in the latter theory the odds were substantially reduced by human agency.
It seems unlikely that a virus that’s this contagious could have been hiding in nature for the past 10,000 years.
It seems most likely it was a lab leak. Accidental, yes, but not from nature.
I think we can all agree that, regardless of origin, China was not forthcoming during the early days of the pandemic, and failed in their moral duty to alert the world about the novel virus. As a result, if there ever was hope of containment, the world lost its window of opportunity, and now millions are dead.
I can certainly understand why you don't want to touch this topic. It has very unfortunately, become extremely politicized, but at the same time as evidence continues to mount, why does one political side all of a sudden not want to talk about it anymore. Hmm?
I am going to call BS on the idea that this virus was engineered has been "debunked" and a good bit of proof is right in the picture at the link you posted. SARS-CoV2 is clearly RaTG13 with a PRRA insertion which is what make humans susceptible to it. We can go into the weeds about ACE2 receptors and furin cleavage sites, etc. but it's really immaterial because one, no near genetic relatives of RaTG13 have similar protein sequences, two, evolution would be expected to produce protein swaps, not clear insertions, three from what I have read the sequence would likely make bats immune to this bat virus which does not lead to natural evolutionary origins, and lastly the natural origins theory all require us to believe that this happened in Wuhan from a bat population that is about 1,000 miles away in the winter when they would be hibernating.
The natural occurrence theory doesn't hold water, but sure as hell is convenient for the current US administration, which is up to it's eyeballs in causing this pandemic, and it's CCP masters.
Thanks to those commenting and contributing virology information. I would like to contribute some cultural epidemiology information from Thailand, Cambodia, and Lao. I worked for years on avian influenza prevention programs there, helping livestock and health officials disseminate information to each other and to villagers raising poultry. I can speak, read, and write Thai, Lao, and Khmer (Cambodian) languages, so I discussed this information with officials and villagers directly, using interpreters only with other languages, such as Burmese, Hmong, etc.
Some of you commenters were questioning whether gain of function research is worth the risk, and whether it is getting practical results. Yes, virologists and medical staff in those countries, both local and foreign, were following gain of function research. Some knew which characteristics were in pandemic potential viruses a few international-class labs created. For example, I used to print the latest research articles, give them to higher level officials, and explain in their languages. Then they disseminated it to others in their work systems, in meetings, local media, posters, etc. Probably millions knew basic ideas of avian influenza and gain of function research.
When influenza-like illnesses spread among poultry, local livestock staff took samples, and sent them to national-level labs. If the lab found the new sample had H5N1, then local officials and villagers killed every chicken and duck in a several kilometer radius, buried them, and explained the basic virology ideas to people. If the new sample had any similarities to pandemic potential viruses, then they did especially thorough culling and explaining.
Therefore, I hope that governments and scientists place more safety restraints on gain of function research, but do not stop it. People already used the information practically.
I should disclose my conflict of interest; organizations paid me to do this work. I chose to do this, instead of taking other job offers, because I believed these programs were helping people prevent an avian flu pandemic, and because I wanted the money. I would like to work on similar programs again someday.
Thank you for spending Taco Tuesday posting this piece. It’s a very important topic from a preventative, lessons to be learned, going forward what can we do in future basis. There’s nothing we can do to go back into time and change what happened in the past. I like many in the world are glad we got through the worst and the human experts who are credentialed, are trying to move us forward safely , doing their reasonable best in this “novel” environment. I am one who is currently fatigued with the “origins” talk now as it’s too late to put the genie back into the bottle. It’s kind of like revisiting an old trauma event.
Once the CDC went with community level data based on hospitalizations, not cases last spring, I lost all faith that our credentialed experts are trying to move us foreword safely.
I came here to point out the same thing. Statements in that article claiming to “debunk” it are pure conjecture, such as the completely unsupported claim that the virus came via an intermediate host.
Agreed. Both Robert Redfield (former CDC Director and a trained virologist) and Deborah Birx (White House Coronavirus Leader) are on the record that the virus was a lab leak:
And yet it’s very hard to imagine that furin cleavage site getting into that type of virus in any other way. And it’s a simple task that any graduate student has the skills for.
Also lost in the discussion is that it came out of the Chinese lab (most likely) but funded at least in part with US funds, which was the real reason we couldn’t have an open discussion of where this virus came from.
I think another reason the US sidesteps this question is because, if acknowledged, the public would demand some type of response or punishment to China. This is a can of worms our government doesn't want to open. How does one country repay the rest of the world for all the damage done, lives lost and sorrow inflicted?
We should concentrate on the good that came from the pandemic. The demonstration that RNA vaccines work and that they have a huge potential for many other infectious diseases should be celebrated. Not the political discussion. I am quite sure that if it was a lab leak the Chinese have fixed the problem in their lab. If it came from crossover directly from an animal vector we should just all realize the next pandemic will come in the future and we need to be prepared. Spend our energy on that and not on question of origin which will never be settled.
Viral: The Search for the Origins of Covid - Alina Chan and Matt Ridley explore the two competing hypothesis - I've read almost all of the wave of Covid-related novels published the last 3 years, this was by far the most fascinating
This book may have been ghost-written by Ralph Baric, the"titan of coronavirology" and leading expert on Gain of Function, while more high level, it makes the case for Natural Spillover. Author Dan Werb's writing is fantastic at making the seemingly mundane aspect of virology fascinating to the reader
___________________
Opinion piece from Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins from 2011 making their case why Gain of Function is important:
Journalist Katherine Eban did some incredible work in Vanity Fair and ProPublica covering the debate, and while all her pieces are very long, well worth a read
Mathematician/Biologist Alex Washburne I think did a great job explaining the DEFUSE proposal from EcoHealth Alliance where they asked DARPA to fund creation of a chimera coronavirus at the WIV which is eerily similar to the Covid19 virus we would find in Wuhan 2 years later
Hey Michael, I remember you and I agreeing a while back that lab origin was quite possible given the trans-national resources being spent on bioweapon research. A kind of under-the-radar arms race. Perhaps a jaundiced, cynical perspective on human affairs but the conjecture couldn't be discounted out of hand. But it was, and labeled a conspiracy theory to boot. Now above in this thread there ARE some conspiracy theories being bandied about, motivations impugned, etc etc. Which is unfortunate. 🙁. We all should just keep open minds and refrain from guessing motivations. And yes, follow the science and ignore the political nonsense.
Been following his work closely, but disappointed he doesn't seem to engage and answer criticisms of his work by other qualified people doubting his claims. Alex Washburne has been particularly gracious and charitable to him.
I've been trying to keep on this as much as possible, even resorting to posting on Twitter now, and feels like the Zoonosis proponents don't respond to polite critiques and can't' seem to adequately defend their positions against reasonable skepticism. Also seeing a lot of one-directional "twitter blocking" - Zoonosis proponents blocking Lab Leak theorists but not the other way around.
The lies also appear to be one-directional. There are no emails being disclosed showing lab leakers secretly thought it was zoonosis all along. There are no emails showing Alina Chan secretly organizing papers promoting lab leak like Fauci appears to have done for Proximal Origins. We aren't getting hundreds of entirely redacted emails from lab leak theorists from FOIA like we do from Wet Market theorists as Paul Thacker reported today. https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/how-congress-can-investigate-the
Katherine Eban's reporting has been phenomenal. This type of journalism largely became extinct as we shifted model from paper to internet. Should be in running for Pulitzer.
Thank you for this reasoned response to the origin debacle. As a citizen soft scientist often curious about group discovery of common sense, also a former dumpster diver and currently a serial entrepreneur, I desire that greater attention and effort be placed on the waste cycle when decommissioning failed startup labs. Ok, there's a lot to unpack in the earlier sentence.
I summarize with these assumptions and an outcome for your consideration:
Assumption #1: Failed startups have no cash. If this is extended to a failed or failing startup lab then there is insufficient resources for a proper decommissioning and the smart staff leaders have departed earlier.
Assumption #2: Petri dishes and related lab equipment in dumpsters is cool lures to the uninformed.
Assumption #3: Stuff "disappears" without reasonable "adult" supervision.
Thus: An opportunity for a toxic outcome seems inevitably possible.
"China scoffs at FBI claim that Wuhan lab leak likely caused COVID pandemic"
Now if I were in Intelligence or some other kind of Gummint skullduggery, I'd start wondering how the FBI got involved with international issues. Not their purview, at all.
The fact (or assertion) that it first appeared in a 'wet market' of meats of several wild animal species, including bats..... that just can't be ignored. I would definitely want to see the movie wherein some batsh-t teenage bat hunters go deep into a previously unknown cave and disturb 4-million-year-old batsh-t droppings.
All that aside, I thank all the stars that an mRNA vaccine was developed and has saved millions of lives. mRNA approach should be looked into for a large number of diseases.
>"The fact (or assertion) that it first appeared in a 'wet market' of meats of several wild animal species, including bats..... that just can't be ignored. "<
1) They didn't sell bats at the Wuhan wet market [1] plus we tested thoroughly at the market and found nothing. By contrast within months we easily tracked down intermediary hosts for SARS '03 and MERS with far less scrutiny.
2) Covid is a domestic problem, possibly triggered by the research of domestic scientists like Ralph Baric [2] and Peter Daszak [3], which falls under FBI purview
3) The caves with bat colonies are 1,000 kilometers from the wuhan wet market, which wasn't selling bats or pangolins anyway
4) The scientists pushing the zoonotic jump theory have vested interest in this *not* being lab leak as they have been pushing for Gain of Function research for the past decade+ and this would damage their reputations and cut funding from their projects if the Obama moratorium on GoF was expanded and better enforced. Baric, Zengli, Fauci, Anderson, etc have reputations on the line which may cloud their judgment and explain why through FOI requests they have been caught lying.
Those calling for better investigation and consideration of lab leak do not appear to have a conflict of interest. Richard Ebright doesn't appear to benefit one way or the other.
[2] " In a 2015 research paper, Shi and a University of North Carolina virologist named Ralph Baric proved that the spike protein of a novel coronavirus could be used to infect human cells. Using mice as subjects, they spliced the spike of a novel SARS-like virus from a bat into a version of the 2003 SARS virus, creating a new infectious pathogen. The virus manipulation was completed at Baric’s BSL-3 lab in North Carolina. This gain-of-function experiment was so fraught that the authors essentially put a warning label on it, writing, “scientific review panels may deem similar studies … too risky to pursue.”
"The truth, in the minds of Sachs and his allies, includes an effort organized by top virus researchers and the U.S. government to guide the origins narrative away from a lab leak. “Fauci behaved very badly,” Sachs said, “NIH behaved very badly, a small group of very vocal scientists that were part of that group have behaved very badly. And while we still don’t know definitively what happened, we do know definitively that a narrative was concocted in the first few days that was phony.”
Here's the summary of Richard Ebright's tweet thread with his sources. Still can hope for the buddy comedy in the caves of China.
COVID: summary of lab-origin hypothesis:
1) Pandemic caused by bat SARS-like coronavirus emerged in Wuhan--city 1,000 km from nearest wild bats with SARS-CoV-2-like coronaviruses, but that contains labs conducting world's largest research program on bat SARS-like coronaviruses
2) In 2015-2017, scientists and science-policy specialists expressed concern that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was conducting and contemplating research that posed an unacceptable risk of lab accident and pandemic
3) In 2017-2018, WIV constructed a novel chimeric SARS-like coronavirus that was able to infect and replicate in human airway cells and that had 10,000x enhanced viral growth and 4x enhanced lethality in mice engineered to display human receptors on cells.
4) In 2018, in an NIH grant proposal, WIV and collaborators proposed to construct more novel chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses, targeting chimeras that replace natural spike gene with novel spike genes encoding spikes that have higher binding affinities to human cells.
5) Also in 2018, in a DARPA grant proposal, WIV and collaborators proposed to construct novel "consensus" bat SARS-like coronaviruses, and to insert furin cleavage site (FCS) sequences at the spike gene S1-S2 border of bat SARS-like coronaviruses.
6) In 2017-2019, WIV constructed and characterized novel SARS-like coronaviruses at biosafety level 2, a biosafety level patently inadequate for work with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and patently inadequate to contain a virus having transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2
7) In 2019 a novel SARS-like coronavirus having a spike with high binding affinity for human cells, and having an FCS at the spike S1-S2 border--a virus having the properties set forth in the 2018 WIV NIH and DARPA grant proposals--emerges on the doorstep of WIV.
8) SARS-CoV-2 is the only one of more than 100 known SARS-like coronaviruses that contains an FCS. This is a feature that does not rule out a natural origin, but that is more easily explained by a lab origin. Especially since insertion of FCS had been explicitly proposed in 2018
9) The FCS of SARS-CoV-2 has codon usage unusual for bat SARS-related coronaviruses and has an 8-of-8 amino-acid-sequence identity to the FCS of human ENaCa. These are features that do not rule out a natural origin, but that are more--much more--easily explained by a lab origin.
10) In 2020-present, WIV and its funders/collaborators at EcoHealth Alliance have withheld information, misrepresented facts, and obstructed investigation...even though, if not connected to origin, they most easily could clear their name though cooperation with investigation
Do we know if the sensitivity of home antigen tests is LESS if you have been fully vaccinated or have had previous Covid? I.E. do you have more false negatives? Or is it simply that milder cases are less likely to be positive? Thanks
Dogmatic statements and positions, secrecy, and rapid changes in expert recommendations contribute to "conspiracy theories". Not to mention total reversals. If interested in the experience of clinicians flccc.net is a source of those who have very different conclusions thanthose here. I have long held that the biggest oxymoron in English is "Homo sapiens". Not much sapiens about Homo.
If your question is "why does it matter where it came from" (which is reasonable), it would direct us on how best to prevent a future pandemic.
For example, if it is Lab Leak, then that may affirm the previous consensus that Coronaviruses are mostly harmless viruses that only cause the common cold, and to prevent them from causing worldwide pandemics we merely need to stop making more lethal/transmissible versions in Labatories which have a history of accidental leaks. That wouldn't require that much money, just enforcement.
If it was natural origin, than we would be justified spending the trillions of dollars monitoring, developing therapeutics, tracking, testing, etc.
The problem is that the people who benefit professionally and financially from the natural origin hypothesis are disincentivized from conceding that aside from the lab brown bad Coronaviruses, they aren't that big of a problem.
Ralph Baric spent his career, for example, theorizing that Coronaviruses might someday mutate from the nuisance virus we know and lived with for 3 million years into a super bug. He believed this so completely that he reasoned he needed to develop unnatural super coronaviruses in his lab, and convinced other scientists this was necessary to fight the upcoming threat they posed.
When you are that invested, I imagine it's hard to turn down the funding and the prestige.
I can't imagine after dedicating 20 years to studying Coronaviruses Ralph would have announced "no big deal, we were right all along, they just cause the common cold".
And the logical conclusion the rest of the world would have: “ban the type of research that is your life’s work” not to mention the personal security risk to the handful of named individuals involved (Fauci already needs a security detail based on unfounded nonsense, imagine if Baric/Daszak/Zhengli were clearly the cause of this virus being created, whether it escaped the lab accidentally or not).
One thing too often left unsaid here is the fact that virologists have been at the forefront of dismissing the lab-leak as a conspiracy theory, despite the fact that they have an enormous conflict of interest. This conflict arises from the fact that they want to perform the sorts of experiments which make a lab leak much more likely. These include, most notably, gain of function experiments where they take a related virus isolated from animals and investigate whether they can make it able to infect human cells (or humanised mice). These were exactly the sorts of experiments being performed in Wuhan and they are performed all over the world. The rational for them is that they might help us recognize a potentially dangerous pathogen. This is highly unlikely - and it has never actually happened. What is vastly more likely is that these organisms will infect those doing the experiments and then spread in the community.
There is no justification for doing these types of experiments other than scientific vanity and prestige. They are NOT needed to protect us and they are certainly not needed to make vaccines. THEY SHOULD BE BANNED except under truelly exceptional circumstances.
The main reason virologists dismiss the lab leak hypothesis is that they fear they will be stopped from doing this useless and dangerous research.
As an MD and also having an advanced degree in population genetics and evolutionary biology,I think your positions are mistaken. This virus almost certainly underwent modificatins in a lab prior to its emergence as a worldwide pathogen. One can call it "gain of function". I for one do not feel gain of function research is all bad; in fact under its broad definition we are foolish to let politicians define what research can and can not be done as I see no other way we can keep one step ahead of epidemics. Having said this, it must be done with great caution. Was this some sort of intentional leak; i feel not likely. But you appear foolish to hold on to the theory this jumped from bats to humans in the Wuhan wet market. The Covid spike protien's super strong affinity to the human ACE-2 receptor as well as the furin cleavage site show almost certain modification. This ia a case where epidemiologists need to defer to geneticists and evolutionary biologists. The mere fact that the laboratory records from Wuhan appear to have been purged is pretty incriminating. And to date, no matching Covid virus has yet to have been found in any bat in the world. Similar DNA to other bat coronviruses does not cut it. I would remind you we share over 96% of of our human genome with a chimpanzees but we are an entirely distinct species. Covid -19 most likely emerged from an unfortunate lab leak.
P. Flexon MD
As a philosopher, I would say that when there is a state of epistemic uncertainty, the most prudential option available is to make probabilistic estimations and try to triage the most likely origins. But never to assert that X or Y is the cause because that leads to misallocations of resources if you make a mistake. We should do a lessons-learned study and prepare for the next pandemic no matter what origins it has. Finger-pointing is a total waste of time! 🙂
While I largely agree, let me make the case why finger pointing isn't a complete waste of time:
The natural origin hypothesis proposes that after 290 million years of existence, Coronaviruses, long believed to be just a mere nuisance and cause of the common cold, somehow evolved to become a serious threat to civilization. Even though they comingled with the earliest mammals 60 million years ago, with bats 50 million years ago, and the earliest humans 3 million years ago, only now have finally evolved to pose a serious threat, and it is just a coincidence that the point at history where they became serious threats ALSO happens to be when we started making more dangerous versions in labs. Let's assume that was a coincidence, and it just bad luck.
If that is true, it would justify the expenditure of finite resources to monitor, track, combat, and manage the threat. It would justify billions, possibly trillions in funding. It would justify countless scientists to spend their limited research time fighting Coronaviruses rather than any number of other possible areas to research. Maybe promising student who might have made a breakthrough in nanotechnology decides to drop his ME coursework and switch to virology.
On the other hand, if it turns out that Coronaviruses left on their own don't really do much other than cause the common cold, and only become global threats when we alter them in labs to make them more infectious, then all of those billions and trillions would be .... not wasted per se... but inefficiently spent. We could simply have enforced and expanded the Gain of Function moratorium set up during the Obama administration, and then spent those billions to trillions ending world hunger, combating climate change, fixing systemic racism, or colonizing Mars.
Therefore, not necessarily finger pointing, but a firm quest to figure out what the hell happened could help us at the very least do a better job organizing where we invest our limited resources to prevent (or possibly not accidentally cause) another pandemic.
There is another aspect to this, and this is, did the involved parties, e.g., Fauci, Baric, Eco Health Aliance, etc., engage in illegal research and illegal activity using dark money from the NIH which is an entity that most certainly has its hands into what are commonly called 'black ops'. Did they intentionally set up "labs" in foreign, and potentially hostile, countries, whose safety standards are suspect to get around that which they otherwise would have been prohibited from doing.
If the answer is yes, they engaged in illegal and dangerous action, then they need to be held accountable. This goes back to my comment about how it's interesting that all of a sudden one "side" of this "debate" want's everyone to just clam up about it.
Michael, could it be that given the mutability, there was always a tiny chance of a natural jump to the pandemic version? It's like someone at a slot machine doing push after push trying to score the mega jackpot. A misunderstanding of probability makes them think that after a million pushes, the odds are definitely in their favor. They think there is a linkage between their next push and all those that have gone before. But that is incorrect,. Each push is de novo, with exactly the same odds. Casinos make a lot of money on that misconception. So even though a virus might coexist with us tetrapods for 250 million years, the odds of it becoming a version capable of infecting the planet and causing millions of deaths was always minute. So we're left with two possibilities Either the virus finally by blind chance hit the winning push, or someone or something stepped in and changed the odds. In the former theory the virus had to surmount astronomical odds; in the latter theory the odds were substantially reduced by human agency.
It seems unlikely that a virus that’s this contagious could have been hiding in nature for the past 10,000 years.
It seems most likely it was a lab leak. Accidental, yes, but not from nature.
I think we can all agree that, regardless of origin, China was not forthcoming during the early days of the pandemic, and failed in their moral duty to alert the world about the novel virus. As a result, if there ever was hope of containment, the world lost its window of opportunity, and now millions are dead.
I can certainly understand why you don't want to touch this topic. It has very unfortunately, become extremely politicized, but at the same time as evidence continues to mount, why does one political side all of a sudden not want to talk about it anymore. Hmm?
I am going to call BS on the idea that this virus was engineered has been "debunked" and a good bit of proof is right in the picture at the link you posted. SARS-CoV2 is clearly RaTG13 with a PRRA insertion which is what make humans susceptible to it. We can go into the weeds about ACE2 receptors and furin cleavage sites, etc. but it's really immaterial because one, no near genetic relatives of RaTG13 have similar protein sequences, two, evolution would be expected to produce protein swaps, not clear insertions, three from what I have read the sequence would likely make bats immune to this bat virus which does not lead to natural evolutionary origins, and lastly the natural origins theory all require us to believe that this happened in Wuhan from a bat population that is about 1,000 miles away in the winter when they would be hibernating.
The natural occurrence theory doesn't hold water, but sure as hell is convenient for the current US administration, which is up to it's eyeballs in causing this pandemic, and it's CCP masters.
Thanks to those commenting and contributing virology information. I would like to contribute some cultural epidemiology information from Thailand, Cambodia, and Lao. I worked for years on avian influenza prevention programs there, helping livestock and health officials disseminate information to each other and to villagers raising poultry. I can speak, read, and write Thai, Lao, and Khmer (Cambodian) languages, so I discussed this information with officials and villagers directly, using interpreters only with other languages, such as Burmese, Hmong, etc.
Some of you commenters were questioning whether gain of function research is worth the risk, and whether it is getting practical results. Yes, virologists and medical staff in those countries, both local and foreign, were following gain of function research. Some knew which characteristics were in pandemic potential viruses a few international-class labs created. For example, I used to print the latest research articles, give them to higher level officials, and explain in their languages. Then they disseminated it to others in their work systems, in meetings, local media, posters, etc. Probably millions knew basic ideas of avian influenza and gain of function research.
When influenza-like illnesses spread among poultry, local livestock staff took samples, and sent them to national-level labs. If the lab found the new sample had H5N1, then local officials and villagers killed every chicken and duck in a several kilometer radius, buried them, and explained the basic virology ideas to people. If the new sample had any similarities to pandemic potential viruses, then they did especially thorough culling and explaining.
Therefore, I hope that governments and scientists place more safety restraints on gain of function research, but do not stop it. People already used the information practically.
I should disclose my conflict of interest; organizations paid me to do this work. I chose to do this, instead of taking other job offers, because I believed these programs were helping people prevent an avian flu pandemic, and because I wanted the money. I would like to work on similar programs again someday.
Thank you for spending Taco Tuesday posting this piece. It’s a very important topic from a preventative, lessons to be learned, going forward what can we do in future basis. There’s nothing we can do to go back into time and change what happened in the past. I like many in the world are glad we got through the worst and the human experts who are credentialed, are trying to move us forward safely , doing their reasonable best in this “novel” environment. I am one who is currently fatigued with the “origins” talk now as it’s too late to put the genie back into the bottle. It’s kind of like revisiting an old trauma event.
Once the CDC went with community level data based on hospitalizations, not cases last spring, I lost all faith that our credentialed experts are trying to move us foreword safely.
"The claim that the virus was engineered is clearly debunked. There’s scientific evidence that it wasn’t an intentional event."
Perhaps not so clearly debunked, and still not settled at all, according to this reply to the article you cited:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9659384/
I came here to point out the same thing. Statements in that article claiming to “debunk” it are pure conjecture, such as the completely unsupported claim that the virus came via an intermediate host.
Nothing has been debunked.
Agreed. Both Robert Redfield (former CDC Director and a trained virologist) and Deborah Birx (White House Coronavirus Leader) are on the record that the virus was a lab leak:
https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/coronavirus-likely-escaped-wuhan-lab-says-former-cdc-director-robert-redfield
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11021329/amp/Trump-aide-claims-Covid-came-box-ready-infect.html
Lab leak does not mean engineered.
True. But engineered means lab leak. Redfield and Birx both seem to be saying “engineered.”
And yet it’s very hard to imagine that furin cleavage site getting into that type of virus in any other way. And it’s a simple task that any graduate student has the skills for.
Also lost in the discussion is that it came out of the Chinese lab (most likely) but funded at least in part with US funds, which was the real reason we couldn’t have an open discussion of where this virus came from.
US money was completely in the mix.
I think another reason the US sidesteps this question is because, if acknowledged, the public would demand some type of response or punishment to China. This is a can of worms our government doesn't want to open. How does one country repay the rest of the world for all the damage done, lives lost and sorrow inflicted?
We should concentrate on the good that came from the pandemic. The demonstration that RNA vaccines work and that they have a huge potential for many other infectious diseases should be celebrated. Not the political discussion. I am quite sure that if it was a lab leak the Chinese have fixed the problem in their lab. If it came from crossover directly from an animal vector we should just all realize the next pandemic will come in the future and we need to be prepared. Spend our energy on that and not on question of origin which will never be settled.
Further reading for anyone interested:
Viral: The Search for the Origins of Covid - Alina Chan and Matt Ridley explore the two competing hypothesis - I've read almost all of the wave of Covid-related novels published the last 3 years, this was by far the most fascinating
https://www.amazon.com/Audible-Viral-Search-Origin-COVID-19/dp/B097CLV3QP
I think this review is fairly balanced, I found the book absolutely fascinating:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-viral
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The Invisible Siege
https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Siege-Rise-Coronaviruses-Search/dp/0593239237/
This book may have been ghost-written by Ralph Baric, the"titan of coronavirology" and leading expert on Gain of Function, while more high level, it makes the case for Natural Spillover. Author Dan Werb's writing is fantastic at making the seemingly mundane aspect of virology fascinating to the reader
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Opinion piece from Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins from 2011 making their case why Gain of Function is important:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-worth-taking/2011/12/30/gIQAM9sNRP_story.html
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Richard Ebright, a harsh critic of Gain of Function research summarizes his stance in this tweet -thread
https://twitter.com/r_h_ebright/status/1615386300751949824
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From 2015, excerpt on Gain of Function background and Alternatives, I found this very informative as it's not weighed down by the politics of GoF
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK285579/
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Journalist Katherine Eban did some incredible work in Vanity Fair and ProPublica covering the debate, and while all her pieces are very long, well worth a read
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-risky-virus-research-in-wuhan
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy
https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-origin-wuhan-lab
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Paul Thacker, in BMJ, makes case that media fell for a disinformation campaign
The covid-19 lab leak hypothesis: did the media fall victim to a misinformation campaign?
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656
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Mathematician/Biologist Alex Washburne I think did a great job explaining the DEFUSE proposal from EcoHealth Alliance where they asked DARPA to fund creation of a chimera coronavirus at the WIV which is eerily similar to the Covid19 virus we would find in Wuhan 2 years later
https://alexwasburne.substack.com/p/the-totality-of-the-circumstances
Have about ~100 articles saved in this file, but these are among the most accessible and interesting to me
Hey Michael, I remember you and I agreeing a while back that lab origin was quite possible given the trans-national resources being spent on bioweapon research. A kind of under-the-radar arms race. Perhaps a jaundiced, cynical perspective on human affairs but the conjecture couldn't be discounted out of hand. But it was, and labeled a conspiracy theory to boot. Now above in this thread there ARE some conspiracy theories being bandied about, motivations impugned, etc etc. Which is unfortunate. 🙁. We all should just keep open minds and refrain from guessing motivations. And yes, follow the science and ignore the political nonsense.
Agree!
Been following his work closely, but disappointed he doesn't seem to engage and answer criticisms of his work by other qualified people doubting his claims. Alex Washburne has been particularly gracious and charitable to him.
https://alexwasburne.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-lab-origin-of-sars
I've been trying to keep on this as much as possible, even resorting to posting on Twitter now, and feels like the Zoonosis proponents don't respond to polite critiques and can't' seem to adequately defend their positions against reasonable skepticism. Also seeing a lot of one-directional "twitter blocking" - Zoonosis proponents blocking Lab Leak theorists but not the other way around.
The lies also appear to be one-directional. There are no emails being disclosed showing lab leakers secretly thought it was zoonosis all along. There are no emails showing Alina Chan secretly organizing papers promoting lab leak like Fauci appears to have done for Proximal Origins. We aren't getting hundreds of entirely redacted emails from lab leak theorists from FOIA like we do from Wet Market theorists as Paul Thacker reported today. https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/how-congress-can-investigate-the
Doesn’t need much debate - read this highly-researched primary source article on the topic and decide for yourself:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy
Katherine Eban's reporting has been phenomenal. This type of journalism largely became extinct as we shifted model from paper to internet. Should be in running for Pulitzer.
Reposting her other pieces, all worth a read.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-risky-virus-research-in-wuhan
https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-origin-wuhan-lab
Thank you for this reasoned response to the origin debacle. As a citizen soft scientist often curious about group discovery of common sense, also a former dumpster diver and currently a serial entrepreneur, I desire that greater attention and effort be placed on the waste cycle when decommissioning failed startup labs. Ok, there's a lot to unpack in the earlier sentence.
I summarize with these assumptions and an outcome for your consideration:
Assumption #1: Failed startups have no cash. If this is extended to a failed or failing startup lab then there is insufficient resources for a proper decommissioning and the smart staff leaders have departed earlier.
Assumption #2: Petri dishes and related lab equipment in dumpsters is cool lures to the uninformed.
Assumption #3: Stuff "disappears" without reasonable "adult" supervision.
Thus: An opportunity for a toxic outcome seems inevitably possible.
Love, SMB
And now, the headlne is....
"China scoffs at FBI claim that Wuhan lab leak likely caused COVID pandemic"
Now if I were in Intelligence or some other kind of Gummint skullduggery, I'd start wondering how the FBI got involved with international issues. Not their purview, at all.
The fact (or assertion) that it first appeared in a 'wet market' of meats of several wild animal species, including bats..... that just can't be ignored. I would definitely want to see the movie wherein some batsh-t teenage bat hunters go deep into a previously unknown cave and disturb 4-million-year-old batsh-t droppings.
All that aside, I thank all the stars that an mRNA vaccine was developed and has saved millions of lives. mRNA approach should be looked into for a large number of diseases.
>"The fact (or assertion) that it first appeared in a 'wet market' of meats of several wild animal species, including bats..... that just can't be ignored. "<
1) They didn't sell bats at the Wuhan wet market [1] plus we tested thoroughly at the market and found nothing. By contrast within months we easily tracked down intermediary hosts for SARS '03 and MERS with far less scrutiny.
2) Covid is a domestic problem, possibly triggered by the research of domestic scientists like Ralph Baric [2] and Peter Daszak [3], which falls under FBI purview
3) The caves with bat colonies are 1,000 kilometers from the wuhan wet market, which wasn't selling bats or pangolins anyway
4) The scientists pushing the zoonotic jump theory have vested interest in this *not* being lab leak as they have been pushing for Gain of Function research for the past decade+ and this would damage their reputations and cut funding from their projects if the Obama moratorium on GoF was expanded and better enforced. Baric, Zengli, Fauci, Anderson, etc have reputations on the line which may cloud their judgment and explain why through FOI requests they have been caught lying.
Those calling for better investigation and consideration of lab leak do not appear to have a conflict of interest. Richard Ebright doesn't appear to benefit one way or the other.
https://twitter.com/r_h_ebright/status/1615386300751949824
5) Highly recommend the reading the thorough reporting by Katherine Eban who has done an excellent job digging through the story:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-risky-virus-research-in-wuhan
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy
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[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2
[2] " In a 2015 research paper, Shi and a University of North Carolina virologist named Ralph Baric proved that the spike protein of a novel coronavirus could be used to infect human cells. Using mice as subjects, they spliced the spike of a novel SARS-like virus from a bat into a version of the 2003 SARS virus, creating a new infectious pathogen. The virus manipulation was completed at Baric’s BSL-3 lab in North Carolina. This gain-of-function experiment was so fraught that the authors essentially put a warning label on it, writing, “scientific review panels may deem similar studies … too risky to pursue.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-origin-wuhan-lab
[3] Peter Daszak, describing how his colleagues in China manipulate viruses to be more infectious to humans, in case someday those viruses mutate on their own to be more infectious to humans (never mind they already had 3 million years to do so) https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4966587/user-clip-peter-daszak-describes-colleagues-china-manipulating-viruses
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-worth-taking/2011/12/30/gIQAM9sNRP_story.html
Got it. Not going on twitter, but will read the Vanityfair articles by Katherine Eban.
So no batsh*t teenage movie? ;)
Another interesting piece today
"Nowhere is the lab-leak debate more personal than among the experts investigating the origins of COVID."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/covid-lab-leak-theory-jeffrey-sachs-peter-daszak.html?utm_source=tw
"The truth, in the minds of Sachs and his allies, includes an effort organized by top virus researchers and the U.S. government to guide the origins narrative away from a lab leak. “Fauci behaved very badly,” Sachs said, “NIH behaved very badly, a small group of very vocal scientists that were part of that group have behaved very badly. And while we still don’t know definitively what happened, we do know definitively that a narrative was concocted in the first few days that was phony.”
Here's the summary of Richard Ebright's tweet thread with his sources. Still can hope for the buddy comedy in the caves of China.
COVID: summary of lab-origin hypothesis:
1) Pandemic caused by bat SARS-like coronavirus emerged in Wuhan--city 1,000 km from nearest wild bats with SARS-CoV-2-like coronaviruses, but that contains labs conducting world's largest research program on bat SARS-like coronaviruses
2) In 2015-2017, scientists and science-policy specialists expressed concern that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was conducting and contemplating research that posed an unacceptable risk of lab accident and pandemic
3) In 2017-2018, WIV constructed a novel chimeric SARS-like coronavirus that was able to infect and replicate in human airway cells and that had 10,000x enhanced viral growth and 4x enhanced lethality in mice engineered to display human receptors on cells.
4) In 2018, in an NIH grant proposal, WIV and collaborators proposed to construct more novel chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses, targeting chimeras that replace natural spike gene with novel spike genes encoding spikes that have higher binding affinities to human cells.
5) Also in 2018, in a DARPA grant proposal, WIV and collaborators proposed to construct novel "consensus" bat SARS-like coronaviruses, and to insert furin cleavage site (FCS) sequences at the spike gene S1-S2 border of bat SARS-like coronaviruses.
6) In 2017-2019, WIV constructed and characterized novel SARS-like coronaviruses at biosafety level 2, a biosafety level patently inadequate for work with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and patently inadequate to contain a virus having transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2
7) In 2019 a novel SARS-like coronavirus having a spike with high binding affinity for human cells, and having an FCS at the spike S1-S2 border--a virus having the properties set forth in the 2018 WIV NIH and DARPA grant proposals--emerges on the doorstep of WIV.
8) SARS-CoV-2 is the only one of more than 100 known SARS-like coronaviruses that contains an FCS. This is a feature that does not rule out a natural origin, but that is more easily explained by a lab origin. Especially since insertion of FCS had been explicitly proposed in 2018
9) The FCS of SARS-CoV-2 has codon usage unusual for bat SARS-related coronaviruses and has an 8-of-8 amino-acid-sequence identity to the FCS of human ENaCa. These are features that do not rule out a natural origin, but that are more--much more--easily explained by a lab origin.
10) In 2020-present, WIV and its funders/collaborators at EcoHealth Alliance have withheld information, misrepresented facts, and obstructed investigation...even though, if not connected to origin, they most easily could clear their name though cooperation with investigation
Sources:
1) Shi Zengli Interview: https://www.science.org/pb-assets/PDF/News%20PDFs/Shi%20Zhengli%20Q&A-1630433861.pdf
2) https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.21487
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787
3) https://archive.ph/9aSY5
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Year-5-EHAv.pdf
4) https://archive.ph/9aSY5
5) https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal
6) https://www.science.org/pb-assets/PDF/News%20PDFs/Shi%20Zhengli%20Q&A-1630433861.pdf
7) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7
8) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2202769119
9) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2202769119
10) https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/January-2022-EHA-SAC-CAP-letter-final1.pdf
11) https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/NIH-EHA-Production-8.19.22.pdf
12) https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/imo/media/doc/Ebright%20Testimony%20Updated.pdf
Do we know if the sensitivity of home antigen tests is LESS if you have been fully vaccinated or have had previous Covid? I.E. do you have more false negatives? Or is it simply that milder cases are less likely to be positive? Thanks
Dogmatic statements and positions, secrecy, and rapid changes in expert recommendations contribute to "conspiracy theories". Not to mention total reversals. If interested in the experience of clinicians flccc.net is a source of those who have very different conclusions thanthose here. I have long held that the biggest oxymoron in English is "Homo sapiens". Not much sapiens about Homo.
Er.. what's the difference between "natural spillover" and a "lab leak" , in this case?
If your question is "why does it matter where it came from" (which is reasonable), it would direct us on how best to prevent a future pandemic.
For example, if it is Lab Leak, then that may affirm the previous consensus that Coronaviruses are mostly harmless viruses that only cause the common cold, and to prevent them from causing worldwide pandemics we merely need to stop making more lethal/transmissible versions in Labatories which have a history of accidental leaks. That wouldn't require that much money, just enforcement.
If it was natural origin, than we would be justified spending the trillions of dollars monitoring, developing therapeutics, tracking, testing, etc.
The problem is that the people who benefit professionally and financially from the natural origin hypothesis are disincentivized from conceding that aside from the lab brown bad Coronaviruses, they aren't that big of a problem.
Ralph Baric spent his career, for example, theorizing that Coronaviruses might someday mutate from the nuisance virus we know and lived with for 3 million years into a super bug. He believed this so completely that he reasoned he needed to develop unnatural super coronaviruses in his lab, and convinced other scientists this was necessary to fight the upcoming threat they posed.
When you are that invested, I imagine it's hard to turn down the funding and the prestige.
I can't imagine after dedicating 20 years to studying Coronaviruses Ralph would have announced "no big deal, we were right all along, they just cause the common cold".
And the logical conclusion the rest of the world would have: “ban the type of research that is your life’s work” not to mention the personal security risk to the handful of named individuals involved (Fauci already needs a security detail based on unfounded nonsense, imagine if Baric/Daszak/Zhengli were clearly the cause of this virus being created, whether it escaped the lab accidentally or not).