I could see an increasingly large scientific consensus building over the years that points to the lab leak. At some point this could be the accepted theory.
Need to know more variables before talking about odds imo. Ie. What are the odds that any bat-virus could evolve into any virus that is super infectious among humans? (Especially if we can’t find any other hosts.)
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It’s like talking about the odds of aliens in the milky way. It’s all based on your assumptions.
The WaPo has a story giving timelines with links to stories discussing the possibility of a lab based origin that go back to 12/2020.
Here are a couple of the latest that seem to indicate some scientists are becoming more convinced. One even indicates there is a “smoking gun”.
May 5: Former New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reviews the evidence and makes a strong case for the lab-leak theory. He focuses in particular on the furin cleavage site, which increases viral infectivity for human cells. His analysis yields this quote from David Baltimore, a virologist and former president of the California Institute of Technology: “When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus. These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2.”
May 14: Eighteen prominent scientists publish a letter in the journal Science, saying a new investigation is needed because “theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.” One signer is Ralph Baric, a virologist who worked closely with Shi.
May 17: Another former New York Times science reporter, Donald G. McNeil Jr., posts on Medium: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory.” He quotes W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University — who had signed the March 2020 letter in Nature Medicine — as saying his mind had changed in light of new information.
Was the lab put in that particular region because it had lots of cool bat viruses around to study? If so, sure - natural bat-to-human transmission seems likely enough.
If the area doesn’t have an abnormally large number of bat viruses around (outside of the lab where they are brought in and studied), then lab leak seems like the obvious explanation.
The bat-virus lab in Wuhan is a thousand miles from the bats… So…
But that still leaves an open question of whether it was engineered somehow, or natural.
I recommend reading my lab-leak hypothesis article when you have time. It’s very long, it’s also just very interesting IMHO.
Yeah - that’s the important question.
It is called “gain-of-function”. And that type of experimentation was done at that lab in Wuhan.
Seems like some fairly large footprints that are almost always used by labs, and never found naturally.
Seems like physists need to learn how to stay in their lanes.
(Not to dis your article entirely, but I would love to see what others think of it first.)
The article you posted doesnt debunk the very specific point they were making in the article I posted - that there’s a marker called CGG-CGG which is used extensively in labs, and almost never found in the wild.
Without that marker, I agree that most of what I’ve read leaves it open to interpretation. But this marker seems to make things much more probable.
Sorry, I was making a weird joke to myself. I think your article might have merit, and mine is definitely stupid. What they have in common is that they are both opinion pieces by Physicists.
Here’s another long one in case anyone feels like reading a lot. It centers around recently unearthed Chinese Masters and PhD theses that both say the poop shoveling miners who died of (‘mysterious fungal infection’) pneumonia actually tested positive for SARS antibodies… Which contradicts Shi’s response. They were also both written before 2020.
This would explain why coronaviruses were pulled from the mine --including ratg13 and other bat coronaviruses that Shi’s lab has apparently never shared.
Further the PhD was under the director of China’s CDC, who can confirm that the SARS antibodies were found.
The paper also makes a concrete point-- which is that if the miners really did test positive for SARS antibodies (at the various labs listed) then it --should-- have been really big news. Not something you could just forget to mention. Especially not if your career was about bat-coronavirus spillovers.
TLDR: This all points towards a more specific/falsifiable conspiracy theory in academia, in labs samples, and in a scientist who (while still living) is a living puzzle of true and false and half-spoken secrets.
A Chinese PhD thesis under the supervision of China’s CDC concludes it was horribly unlucky, huh.
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Summary
U.S. intelligence agencies on Friday offered their most detailed explanations to date about the possible origins of the coronavirus that spawned the covid-19 pandemic, including why some analysts think an accident in a lab may be the most plausible source.
The intelligence community’s unclassified assessment didn’t change the summary of its conclusions that were reported last August, which reached few definitive answers about the origins of the virus, a question that has vexed scientists and become a political flash point.
Ultimately, the newly released intelligence assessment shows government analysts puzzling over the same questions and pursuing the same inconclusive leads as scientists who’ve been working for nearly two years without the benefit of secret intelligence.
But the document provides a fuller explanation for why some intelligence analysts ultimately came down in favor of a “lab-leak” hypothesis as the most likely explanation and others determined that the virus probably emerged in nature, when an infected animal passed the pathogen to a human.
The document doesn’t identify where the analysts work and refers to intelligence “elements” rather than agencies by name.
Analysts who had moderate confidence in the lab-leak scenario emphasized that employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the Chinese city where the first covid cases were found in late 2019, had conducted research on other coronaviruses.
These analysts, after examining academic articles, said lab employees worked under what the literature indicated were “inadequate biosafety conditions that could have led to opportunities for a laboratory-associated incident,” the assessment revealed.
Two years before the coronavirus outbreak, U.S. officials had warned in classified diplomatic cables about inadequate safety at the lab. The newly released assessment doesn’t mention the cables, but they would almost certainly have been available to all analysts studying the origins question.
The analysts who favored the lab-leak hypothesis also took into account the fact that the initial clusters of covid-19 cases “occurred only in Wuhan” and that the researchers at the lab had taken samples of coronaviruses from animals throughout China and thus “provided a node for the virus to enter the city,” according to the assessment.
These analysts judged that the researchers’ work with infected animals was “inherently risky” and “provided numerous opportunities for them to unwittingly become infected with SARS-CoV-2,” the virus that causes covid-19.
However, the intelligence community “has no indications that [the lab’s] research involved SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor virus,” the assessment stated. Despite that lack of physical evidence, the pro-lab-leak analysts noted that “it is plausible that researchers may have unwittingly exposed themselves to the virus without sequencing it during experiments or sampling activities, possibly resulting in asymptomatic or mild infection.”
In that respect, the assessment is notable because it suggests those analysts who believe the virus emanated from a lab have based their conclusions largely on speculation and circumstantial evidence.
One former U.S. official who has recently taken part in discussions with analysts examining classified information — which is not detailed in the public assessment — said nothing they’ve seen points conclusively to a lab-leak or a natural origin.
The assessment also undercut one of the key pieces of information that lab-leak proponents have used to bolster their case.
In November 2020, a State Department team searching for the origins obtained classified intelligence it thought was a breakthrough: One year earlier, three researchers at the Wuhan lab had gone to a hospital with symptoms similar to those associated with covid-19 and other seasonal illnesses, such as the flu.
But the assessment found that reports about sick workers were “not diagnostic of the pandemic’s origins,” adding: “Even if confirmed, hospital admission alone would not be diagnostic of covid-19 infection.”
Those analysts who think the virus is more likely to have emerged in nature also lack any definitive evidence.
Among the factors they considered was “China’s officials’ lack of foreknowledge” that the virus existed before researchers at the Wuhan lab isolated it after it was seen in the general population, the assessment said.
The entire intelligence community agreed that Chinese officials probably didn’t have any advance knowledge of the virus, and that accordingly if it did emanate from an incident associated with the lab, officials probably were unaware in the initial months of spread that such a lab-leak had occurred.
U.S. intelligence reporting in early 2020 — before the virus began to tear through U.S. cities — did find that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak after it had begun, The Washington Post previously reported.
The analysts who favored the natural-transmission hypothesis pointed to precedent: Earlier infectious-disease outbreaks also have zoonotic origins. A wide diversity of animals also are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection, and animal trafficking, farming, sale and rescue, which all occur in China, could enable animal-to-human transmission, the analysts found.
Although no confirmed animal source for the virus has been found, the analysts noted that “in many previous zoonotic outbreaks, the identification of animal sources has taken years, and in some cases, animal sources have not been identified.”
And now it seems it’s no longer “fake news” to suspect that the virus might have originated in the Wuhan lab.
It is certainly a topic that is easier to discuss now that it is no longer tied to the President tweeting daily about the Wuhan Flu/China Virus.
or best of all Kung Flu
It has never been fake news that the virus might have been accidentally released from the lab, probably via an interested lab worker. What is fake news is that China created the virus in the lab.
The actual source seems to have been bats. Whether it traveled from the bats to the public via other animals, via catching and eating bats, or via sloppy lab protocols is the current question.
I do wonder what would have happened if it hadn’t been for our very stable genius.
Of course, we haven’t trusted fed intel since Iraq.