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"Zero evidence", huh? The epicenter of Covid-19 was the middle of a major metropolitan city (instead of a rural area near lots of animals), blocks away from a m

"Zero evidence", huh? The epicenter of Covid-19 was the middle of a major metropolitan city (instead of a rural area near lots of animals), blocks away from a major virology lab which was specifically studying these viruses, collecting hundreds of wild strains from field operations, in research DARPA said before the fact endangers the local community and was banned by NIH, trying to specifically create this virus as closely as possible for the research to be successful... It's like seeing smoke billowing out of a building and refusing to accept that there's a fire until you see the flames. Very convenient that your standard of evidence surpasses anything we can possibly obtain after the CCP scrubbed everything.

fsh 5y ago
SARS was first discovered in a major city too. This makes a lot of sense. If there is an outbreak in a rural village, the chances of it spreading worldwide are slim. It is quite possible that small outbreaks happen occasionally without anyone noticing. Who is going to test a few villagers that got pneumonia for novel coronaviruses? I would also argue that in the age of factory farming it is not so clear if more human-animal contact happens in rural areas or in big population centers. SARS was eventually traced back to palm civets which are farmed animals. In this industry wild animals, many of which are susceptible to SARS-like coronaviruses, are being bred in large numbers. To me this sounds like a perfect breeding ground for the viruses as well.
- stablechaos 5y ago
  It's the totality of the evidence taken together, not a series of things to be considered independently. When a lot of "coincidence" add up, they cease being coincidences. Or, at the very least, if there's no serious investigation by the people in charge of something so significant, an injustice is being done. Also, factory farming is far safer than all other forms of farming. If the outbreak was unrelated to WIV and centered in Wuhan, wet-markets and exotic animal markets are the likely culprit.
  - phreeza 5y ago
    Which other coincidence is there apart from the proximity of the lab to the initial detection site?
    - mcherm 5y ago
      Well, there is the similarity between features of the virus and research being proposed in a grant application written half a world away just a couple of years before the virus spread to humans. That's a coincidence of note.
      - phreeza 5y ago
        Yea agreed this seems like an additional data point, that looks suspicious, but it is very new (at least to me) and I will wait to see what experts make of this.
  - jml7c5 5y ago
    "A lot of small things adding up" is also how conspiracy theories are formed and sustained. Be it Qanon, GME, Pizzagate, 9/11-was-an-inside-job, etc. They all rely on small details that are not individually damning, but in aggregate fit a compelling narrative. You have to be extremely wary of this sort of thinking. I don't think that a lab leak is implausible, but your statement that the small pointers "cease being coincidences" because they fit a narrative imparts far, far too much certainty to the lab leak theory.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    > When a lot of "coincidence" add up, they cease being coincidences. The internet doesn't handle subtlety well, so just to spell it out... If we admit things are coincidences then they can't be added up to get evidence. Lots of coincidences isn't evidence. The point is these things aren't coincidences. If a new coronavirus breaks out next door to a lab studying coronaviruses, then the lab is a possible source of the virus and the proximity is evidence. It is weak evidence and still unlikely, but evidence nonetheless. However, when the lab is very close and the closest known bat virus (RaTG13) is a very long way away as is the case for SARS-CoV-2 then that is starting to get quite murky as evidence goes. It would be much easier for RaTG13 to travel the rather large distance from its natural location to Wuhan in a freezer/test tube than in a bat.
- flavius29663 5y ago
  Was the first SARS discovered in the vecinity of a lab studying SARS?
- krona 5y ago
  You're correct, however after years of examining blood samples from hospital patients it was possible to trace the phylogeny of SARS to a zoonotic origin. This has not been possible for SARS‑CoV‑2, least of all because the government doesn't want such an investigation to take place. I can't think why.
- aga98mtl 5y ago
  >SARS was first discovered in a major city too. How many major cities are there? hundreds. How many with a research center experimenting on coronavirus? (1 china, 2 in the USA) Just in China there are more than 100 cities with 1 millions people. Odds are 99+% that it has something to do with the research center. A very generous take would be that it has 1% chance of being unrelated.
gfodor 5y ago
The “zero evidence” claim is fun because every day there is a failure to discover an origin species is de facto evidence of a non-zootonic origin, since that evidence is not subject to being hidden and is highly incentivized to find given it would be exculpatory.
- zhdc1 5y ago
  > since that evidence is not subject to being hidden and is highly incentivized to find given it would be exculpatory Why? The wet markets in Wuhan were sterilized and emptied (meaning that the animals inside were removed, killed, and their carcasses disposed of) at the very start of the outbreak - several days before anyone had definitive evidence that SARS-CoV-2 could be transmitted by person to person contact. I'm sure that the Chinese government would love to have definitive evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is zoonotic, but that evidence likely went up in smoke (January 1st, 2020) weeks before anyone realized that COVID-19 would turn into a legitimate pandemic (January 23rd, 2020).
  - cfn 5y ago
    I can't find the reference right now but the evidence can be gathered from hospital records. There is a progression in cases and some particularities that can be studied to establish the origin of a disease.
    - zhdc1 5y ago
      > I can't find the reference right now but the evidence can be gathered from hospital records. This is why there has been a lot of attention on certain animals, such as raccoon dogs and minks. It turns out that a lot of the early infections linked to the various Wuhan markets were from shop owners and employees who either sold or were in close contact a small number of animal species. It also turns out that these animals can be infected by SARS-CoV-2. See https://ncrc.jhsph.edu/research/animal-sales-from-wuhan-wet-markets-immediately-prior-to-the-covid-19-pandemic/ https://ncrc.jhsph.edu/research/animal-sales-from-wuhan-wet-.... The issue is that (as far as I'm aware) there's no immediate evidence that SARS-CoV-2 jumped to humans from any of these animals, only that there was an (again, as far as I'm aware) unknown intermediary species. However, because the animals at the wet market were disposed of, there's no way to definitively link SARS-CoV-2 to them.
bawolff 5y ago
> It's like seeing smoke billowing out of a building and refusing to accept that there's a fire until you see the flames. The stuff you cite is circumstantial at best. Yes, given the seriousness of covid i would like someone to investigate it, but i would hardly call it billowing smoke. > Very convenient that your standard of evidence surpasses anything we can possibly obtain after the CCP scrubbed everything. Is that really relavent? Say CCP would in theory destroy evidence if such a situation arised. That's not an argument that says it is china's fault, its just an argument that we might not ever know. Its not like the people arguing that it was natural aren't using lack of chinese whistleblower as the evidence for naturalness. At the very least i'd like evidence that suggests there is a higher probability that it was a chinese experiment than a natural occurance. Occam's razor and all. Arguing that it might be impossible to know what happened, increases uncertainty, but doesn't affect the relative probabilities.
- flavius29663 5y ago
  Occam's razor works against your argument...given everything we know so far, the simplest explanation is that a chinese lab leaked a virus and it's covering it. There is no jump in logic needed. It's actually easier to explain why the virus was so close to the Wuhan lab.
  - bunnie 5y ago
    Maybe it's the other way around. They put the lab in Wuhan because it's easy to get many samples of the zoonotic viruses of concern due to the presence of many natural reservoirs and wet markets, and you want a lab near the action because you want to be able to study the hot spots. In other words, your argument is like saying occam's razor concludes that fire extinguishers start fires because they are always found in the vicinity of fires. Also I think many on this thread greatly underestimate the adaptive and evolutionary capabilities of nature. Having done some wet lab myself, I'm impressed at the ability of nature to do lateral gene transfer, and also it's damn hard to make any experiments work. Plus there are multiple layers of safety and containment around any lab experiment. Movies make engineering look like AI robots in labs and biology experiments that work on the first try, and people who say lab near outbreak must implicate the lab have probably spent more time watching movies about outbreaks than trying to engineer organisms themselves. Having spent a lot of time trying and failing to engineer organisms, occam's razor screams to me that the most likely explanation is natural evolution. The real lab of concern are the hundreds of millions of people living in close contact with animal reservoirs, performing millions of competitive, uncontrolled evolution experiments daily, with single hosts sometimes simultaneously infected by multiple viruses, thus facilitating lateral gene transfer... and this continues to be the status quo. If you can accept that MERS and SARS CoV-1 are naturally evolved, then occam's razor would indicate that SARS CoV-2 is just one point in a series, and yet another coronavirus outbreak is likely to emerge in the next decade or so, from a dense urban area near animal reservoirs. Distracting ourselves by fantasizing that only humans could be so devious to create such a virus makes us miss a very important opportunity to try and prevent the next outbreak through careful monitoring and research. So, if you believe that we should have fire departments and fire extinguishers near ignition sources then, maybe we should have /more/ labs like Wuhan's in high risk areas, not less. And we'd want to encourage more cross border cooperation, not antagonize it, because viruses don't give a damn about your politics. It's concerning that threads like this, on a forum as ostensibly pro-science as HN, are pushing ourselves further away from science and transparency...
stefantalpalaru 5y ago
> blocks away from a major virology lab Make that 33 km: https://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=fossgis_osrm_car&route=30.6197%2C114.2567%3B30.3769%2C114.2611#map=11/30.4983/114.2341 https://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=fossgis_osrm... Further more, phylogenetic, epidemiological and pneumonia excess death data all point to an epicentre in Huanan market and an initial spread north of the Yangtze river. See figure 1 in this article: https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674(21)00991-0 https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674(21)00991-... It took a couple of weeks for this virus to spread south of Yangtze and reach the district where Wuhan Institute of Virology is.

fsh 5y ago

SARS was first discovered in a major city too. This makes a lot of sense. If there is an outbreak in a rural village, the chances of it spreading worldwide are slim. It is quite possible that small outbreaks happen occasionally without anyone noticing. Who is going to test a few villagers that got pneumonia for novel coronaviruses? I would also argue that in the age of factory farming it is not so clear if more human-animal contact happens in rural areas or in big population centers. SARS was eventually traced back to palm civets which are farmed animals. In this industry wild animals, many of which are susceptible to SARS-like coronaviruses, are being bred in large numbers. To me this sounds like a perfect breeding ground for the viruses as well.

stablechaos 5y ago
It's the totality of the evidence taken together, not a series of things to be considered independently. When a lot of "coincidence" add up, they cease being coincidences. Or, at the very least, if there's no serious investigation by the people in charge of something so significant, an injustice is being done. Also, factory farming is far safer than all other forms of farming. If the outbreak was unrelated to WIV and centered in Wuhan, wet-markets and exotic animal markets are the likely culprit.
- phreeza 5y ago
  Which other coincidence is there apart from the proximity of the lab to the initial detection site?
  - mcherm 5y ago
    Well, there is the similarity between features of the virus and research being proposed in a grant application written half a world away just a couple of years before the virus spread to humans. That's a coincidence of note.
    - phreeza 5y ago
      Yea agreed this seems like an additional data point, that looks suspicious, but it is very new (at least to me) and I will wait to see what experts make of this.
- jml7c5 5y ago
  "A lot of small things adding up" is also how conspiracy theories are formed and sustained. Be it Qanon, GME, Pizzagate, 9/11-was-an-inside-job, etc. They all rely on small details that are not individually damning, but in aggregate fit a compelling narrative. You have to be extremely wary of this sort of thinking. I don't think that a lab leak is implausible, but your statement that the small pointers "cease being coincidences" because they fit a narrative imparts far, far too much certainty to the lab leak theory.
- roenxi 5y ago
  > When a lot of "coincidence" add up, they cease being coincidences. The internet doesn't handle subtlety well, so just to spell it out... If we admit things are coincidences then they can't be added up to get evidence. Lots of coincidences isn't evidence. The point is these things aren't coincidences. If a new coronavirus breaks out next door to a lab studying coronaviruses, then the lab is a possible source of the virus and the proximity is evidence. It is weak evidence and still unlikely, but evidence nonetheless. However, when the lab is very close and the closest known bat virus (RaTG13) is a very long way away as is the case for SARS-CoV-2 then that is starting to get quite murky as evidence goes. It would be much easier for RaTG13 to travel the rather large distance from its natural location to Wuhan in a freezer/test tube than in a bat.
flavius29663 5y ago
Was the first SARS discovered in the vecinity of a lab studying SARS?
krona 5y ago
You're correct, however after years of examining blood samples from hospital patients it was possible to trace the phylogeny of SARS to a zoonotic origin. This has not been possible for SARS‑CoV‑2, least of all because the government doesn't want such an investigation to take place. I can't think why.
aga98mtl 5y ago
>SARS was first discovered in a major city too. How many major cities are there? hundreds. How many with a research center experimenting on coronavirus? (1 china, 2 in the USA) Just in China there are more than 100 cities with 1 millions people. Odds are 99+% that it has something to do with the research center. A very generous take would be that it has 1% chance of being unrelated.

gfodor 5y ago

The “zero evidence” claim is fun because every day there is a failure to discover an origin species is de facto evidence of a non-zootonic origin, since that evidence is not subject to being hidden and is highly incentivized to find given it would be exculpatory.

zhdc1 5y ago
> since that evidence is not subject to being hidden and is highly incentivized to find given it would be exculpatory Why? The wet markets in Wuhan were sterilized and emptied (meaning that the animals inside were removed, killed, and their carcasses disposed of) at the very start of the outbreak - several days before anyone had definitive evidence that SARS-CoV-2 could be transmitted by person to person contact. I'm sure that the Chinese government would love to have definitive evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is zoonotic, but that evidence likely went up in smoke (January 1st, 2020) weeks before anyone realized that COVID-19 would turn into a legitimate pandemic (January 23rd, 2020).
- cfn 5y ago
  I can't find the reference right now but the evidence can be gathered from hospital records. There is a progression in cases and some particularities that can be studied to establish the origin of a disease.
  - zhdc1 5y ago
    > I can't find the reference right now but the evidence can be gathered from hospital records. This is why there has been a lot of attention on certain animals, such as raccoon dogs and minks. It turns out that a lot of the early infections linked to the various Wuhan markets were from shop owners and employees who either sold or were in close contact a small number of animal species. It also turns out that these animals can be infected by SARS-CoV-2. See https://ncrc.jhsph.edu/research/animal-sales-from-wuhan-wet-markets-immediately-prior-to-the-covid-19-pandemic/ https://ncrc.jhsph.edu/research/animal-sales-from-wuhan-wet-.... The issue is that (as far as I'm aware) there's no immediate evidence that SARS-CoV-2 jumped to humans from any of these animals, only that there was an (again, as far as I'm aware) unknown intermediary species. However, because the animals at the wet market were disposed of, there's no way to definitively link SARS-CoV-2 to them.

bawolff 5y ago

> It's like seeing smoke billowing out of a building and refusing to accept that there's a fire until you see the flames. The stuff you cite is circumstantial at best. Yes, given the seriousness of covid i would like someone to investigate it, but i would hardly call it billowing smoke. > Very convenient that your standard of evidence surpasses anything we can possibly obtain after the CCP scrubbed everything. Is that really relavent? Say CCP would in theory destroy evidence if such a situation arised. That's not an argument that says it is china's fault, its just an argument that we might not ever know. Its not like the people arguing that it was natural aren't using lack of chinese whistleblower as the evidence for naturalness. At the very least i'd like evidence that suggests there is a higher probability that it was a chinese experiment than a natural occurance. Occam's razor and all. Arguing that it might be impossible to know what happened, increases uncertainty, but doesn't affect the relative probabilities.

flavius29663 5y ago
Occam's razor works against your argument...given everything we know so far, the simplest explanation is that a chinese lab leaked a virus and it's covering it. There is no jump in logic needed. It's actually easier to explain why the virus was so close to the Wuhan lab.
- bunnie 5y ago
  Maybe it's the other way around. They put the lab in Wuhan because it's easy to get many samples of the zoonotic viruses of concern due to the presence of many natural reservoirs and wet markets, and you want a lab near the action because you want to be able to study the hot spots. In other words, your argument is like saying occam's razor concludes that fire extinguishers start fires because they are always found in the vicinity of fires. Also I think many on this thread greatly underestimate the adaptive and evolutionary capabilities of nature. Having done some wet lab myself, I'm impressed at the ability of nature to do lateral gene transfer, and also it's damn hard to make any experiments work. Plus there are multiple layers of safety and containment around any lab experiment. Movies make engineering look like AI robots in labs and biology experiments that work on the first try, and people who say lab near outbreak must implicate the lab have probably spent more time watching movies about outbreaks than trying to engineer organisms themselves. Having spent a lot of time trying and failing to engineer organisms, occam's razor screams to me that the most likely explanation is natural evolution. The real lab of concern are the hundreds of millions of people living in close contact with animal reservoirs, performing millions of competitive, uncontrolled evolution experiments daily, with single hosts sometimes simultaneously infected by multiple viruses, thus facilitating lateral gene transfer... and this continues to be the status quo. If you can accept that MERS and SARS CoV-1 are naturally evolved, then occam's razor would indicate that SARS CoV-2 is just one point in a series, and yet another coronavirus outbreak is likely to emerge in the next decade or so, from a dense urban area near animal reservoirs. Distracting ourselves by fantasizing that only humans could be so devious to create such a virus makes us miss a very important opportunity to try and prevent the next outbreak through careful monitoring and research. So, if you believe that we should have fire departments and fire extinguishers near ignition sources then, maybe we should have /more/ labs like Wuhan's in high risk areas, not less. And we'd want to encourage more cross border cooperation, not antagonize it, because viruses don't give a damn about your politics. It's concerning that threads like this, on a forum as ostensibly pro-science as HN, are pushing ourselves further away from science and transparency...

stefantalpalaru 5y ago

> blocks away from a major virology lab Make that 33 km: https://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=fossgis_osrm_car&route=30.6197%2C114.2567%3B30.3769%2C114.2611#map=11/30.4983/114.2341 https://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=fossgis_osrm... Further more, phylogenetic, epidemiological and pneumonia excess death data all point to an epicentre in Huanan market and an initial spread north of the Yangtze river. See figure 1 in this article: https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674(21)00991-0 https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674(21)00991-... It took a couple of weeks for this virus to spread south of Yangtze and reach the district where Wuhan Institute of Virology is.