7 ms·

The lab leak hypothesis makes the most sense. The lab in Wuhan which researches coronaviruses conducts experiences on animals, including bats. Like other labs,

The lab leak hypothesis makes the most sense. The lab in Wuhan which researches coronaviruses conducts experiences on animals, including bats. Like other labs, there are dedicated personnel for hydrating and feeding the experimental animals. Notably, there are "wet markets" in Wuhan where live animals are sold, including bats, which harbor coronaviruses. Someone who is working in the facility in charge of maintenance of experimental animals has a choice of either sacrificing the animals as per protocol, or selling them to a wet market to make extra money. The most likely scenario was that someone sold the animal, most likely a bat, to a wet market, which happened to contain a virulent coronavirus strain that then infected humans.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cycrutchfield 4y ago
There were no bats being sold in the Wuhan wet markets. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > On each visit, vendors were asked what species they had sold over the preceding month and in what numbers, along with the prices (US$1:RMB¥6.759) and origin of these goods (wild caught or captive bred/ farmed). It might be true that no bats were sold in Wuhan wet markets, but this methodology doesn't seem the slightest bit credible. Imagine if you were selling bats (is that legal in China?) from a likely illegal source (probably illegal in China?). Would you give honest information about the animals you were selling, particularly knowing how criminals can be treated in China? You might as well ask suspected drug dealers how much crack they're selling in schools: you'll get the same quality of answer.
  - p0pcult 4y ago
    The amount of pure speculation in this post is surprising, coming from a logicalmonster. Are those activites illegal in China, or just in your mind? If it is not the former, then your point collapses like a two legged stool.
    - logicalmonster 4y ago
      I am not a lawyer from China and I doubt many posters here are either. When you have imperfect information, trying to understand a complicated world can never be perfect, but we all still do that anyway because we have to. There's no other way to reason about the world because we're always going to have imperfect information about so many topics. But I can use my limited knowledge of China, and a reasonable understanding of human nature, to understand that the polling methodology seems unlikely to yield trustworthy results. Until proven otherwise, I think it is a perfectly reasonable to think that people in China who might deal in some quasi-legal trades wouldn't be perfectly honest in a poll due to concerns about what might happen to them if they admit to something that might be seen as illegal.
lvl102 4y ago
Deleted
- NegativeK 4y ago
  > It spectacularly backfired on them. Because it's a virus that doesn't discriminate based on race or geography? Yeah, I have doubts (to put it mildly.)
- swatcoder 4y ago
  Release a plague you can’t control through the wet market next to your virology lab, knowing that it will spread among your own people and those of your allies first, and then also probably circle back, hoping that it will be worse for the other guys, sure (somehow) that the war that you started out of nowhere is to your own net benefit. Interesting strategy!
- ineedasername 4y ago
  I doubt it. It was almost immediately clear that the world’s reliance on China for some things was a problem. I think this was a pretty clear outcome, because before COVID there were people already harping on that single point of failure. This is going to hurt China’s long term influence. Countries are diversifying their strategic supply chains, on shoring capacity for thinks like chip fabs. This weakens China’s geopolitical clout because they won’t be able to control the bottleneck.
  - ss108 4y ago
    Well, as the poster said, it backfired on them lol (I do not believe in the intentional malicious leak theory, to be clear)
- rocketbop 4y ago
  > I think they did thinking the West wouldn’t have developed a vaccine so fast. I’m curious. What motivation for purposefully leaking such a virus would ‘they’ have?
- theRealMe 4y ago
cdolan 4y ago
Did I just read this correctly? “janitor steals a highly modified and virulent bat and sells it for $10 in a wet market” Why reach so hard to link this to a Wuhan wet market vs a generic leak? They didn’t sell bats at the market as far as I have read, and what’s the difference? Lab leak is a lab leak.
- awb 4y ago
  > Lab leak is a lab leak. It’s an interesting question though. Working off of a lab leak theory, how did the first known cases all come from the wet market? Is it just coincidence that an infected scientist traveled to the outdoor market and infected others? With human to human transmission, you’d think it would have spread more rapidly among a scientist’s friends & family in an indoor setting. When the US was doing contact tracing early on, I think the number of outdoor transmissions was extremely low.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    We are told that they visited the market. But in reality it doesn’t make much sense why a busy wet market produced only a couple of covid patients.
- dmix 4y ago
  Indeed, you don't need such a complicated theory. 3 doctors researching a coronavirus end up in a regional hospital, but before they get ID'd with a virus they interact with others in the local community helping it quietly spread among people with stronger immune systems. It's a 45min drive between the Hunan market <> WIV building: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/30%C2%B022%E2%80%B235%E2%80%B3N+114%C2%B015%E2%80%B245%E2%80%B3E/30.6196,114.2576/@30.493676,114.0902108,11z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m7!4m6!1m3!2m2!1d114.2625!2d30.3763889!1m0!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/30%C2%B022%E2%80%B235%E2%80%...
  - awb 4y ago
    It’s definitely plausible, but then wouldn’t you expect multiple outbreak sites? * In and around WIV * In and around the scientist’s homes, families and neighborhoods From the news I’ve seen all of the initial known cases were traced back to the market.
mwbajor 4y ago
I don't understand the mental gymnastics to discredit the lab leak hypothesis. The fact that the lab and epicenter of the virus are in the same geographic area make it the likely scenario and warrants the most investigation. The efforts to look past this seem artificial.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  You don't need to "discredit" the hypothesis very much, because it shouldn't have any real "credit" to begin with. The only evidence for it at all seems to be the proximity of the Wuhan lab to the first known outbreak, plus the fact that 3 researchers got sick in November (i.e. flu season) with some unknown virus. If you ask me, that plus $5 might buy you a cup of coffee.
  - ikrenji 4y ago
    it's a hell of coincidence that out of all chinese cities the outbreak started in the one city housing the premiere institute dedicated to researching coronaviruses... so there is no smoking gun evidence, but it's a reasonable hypothesis... anyway, no one apart from the chinese ministry of state security will ever know for sure one way or another
    - yibg 4y ago
      Isn’t that mixing causation with correlation. The lab is there because there are lots of virus sources there.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        This is definitely the most sensible explanation, since it's quite well known that Wuhan is the most important transportation hub in China since even before the lab was a distant dream in some postdoc's imagination. And China does have the world's largest annual human migration, in the Spring Festival. If I was in the planning department at whichever ministry that made the final decision on placement, putting the most prestigious and well funded lab studying dangerous human transmissible viruses at the world's most likely place to originate such a virus is an obvious choice. i.e. during a few weeks every year Wuhan could easily be 10x more likely to be ground zero then any other city ever.
dqpb 4y ago
[flagged]
- dang 4y ago
  We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop. You can't abuse HN like this, regardless of how stupid someone else's theory is or you feel it is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - dqpb 4y ago
    [dead]
stubybubs 4y ago
I don't know if it does make the most sense. Some context: https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html 75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. How many of those do we have start to finish routes from animals to humans? And if we don't have that route, how many of those are we suspecting of being lab leaks? If they wrote in their conclusion that it was "low confidence" I think they have good reason for saying that.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  > 75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. How many of those do we have start to finish routes from animals to humans? And if we don't have that route, how many of those are we suspecting of being lab leaks? None, as far as I know. Nor should it be particularly surprising that no animal origin for COVID-19 has yet been found. The animal origin for SARS was only discovered in 2017: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 The first outbreak was in 2002. We're less than 4 years away from the first known outbreak of COVID-19, so dismissing a wild animal origin at this point is extremely premature at best.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cycrutchfield 4y ago

There were no bats being sold in the Wuhan wet markets. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2

logicalmonster 4y ago
> On each visit, vendors were asked what species they had sold over the preceding month and in what numbers, along with the prices (US$1:RMB¥6.759) and origin of these goods (wild caught or captive bred/ farmed). It might be true that no bats were sold in Wuhan wet markets, but this methodology doesn't seem the slightest bit credible. Imagine if you were selling bats (is that legal in China?) from a likely illegal source (probably illegal in China?). Would you give honest information about the animals you were selling, particularly knowing how criminals can be treated in China? You might as well ask suspected drug dealers how much crack they're selling in schools: you'll get the same quality of answer.
- p0pcult 4y ago
  The amount of pure speculation in this post is surprising, coming from a logicalmonster. Are those activites illegal in China, or just in your mind? If it is not the former, then your point collapses like a two legged stool.
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    I am not a lawyer from China and I doubt many posters here are either. When you have imperfect information, trying to understand a complicated world can never be perfect, but we all still do that anyway because we have to. There's no other way to reason about the world because we're always going to have imperfect information about so many topics. But I can use my limited knowledge of China, and a reasonable understanding of human nature, to understand that the polling methodology seems unlikely to yield trustworthy results. Until proven otherwise, I think it is a perfectly reasonable to think that people in China who might deal in some quasi-legal trades wouldn't be perfectly honest in a poll due to concerns about what might happen to them if they admit to something that might be seen as illegal.

lvl102 4y ago

Deleted

NegativeK 4y ago
> It spectacularly backfired on them. Because it's a virus that doesn't discriminate based on race or geography? Yeah, I have doubts (to put it mildly.)
swatcoder 4y ago
Release a plague you can’t control through the wet market next to your virology lab, knowing that it will spread among your own people and those of your allies first, and then also probably circle back, hoping that it will be worse for the other guys, sure (somehow) that the war that you started out of nowhere is to your own net benefit. Interesting strategy!
ineedasername 4y ago
I doubt it. It was almost immediately clear that the world’s reliance on China for some things was a problem. I think this was a pretty clear outcome, because before COVID there were people already harping on that single point of failure. This is going to hurt China’s long term influence. Countries are diversifying their strategic supply chains, on shoring capacity for thinks like chip fabs. This weakens China’s geopolitical clout because they won’t be able to control the bottleneck.
- ss108 4y ago
  Well, as the poster said, it backfired on them lol (I do not believe in the intentional malicious leak theory, to be clear)
rocketbop 4y ago
> I think they did thinking the West wouldn’t have developed a vaccine so fast. I’m curious. What motivation for purposefully leaking such a virus would ‘they’ have?
theRealMe 4y ago

cdolan 4y ago

Did I just read this correctly? “janitor steals a highly modified and virulent bat and sells it for $10 in a wet market” Why reach so hard to link this to a Wuhan wet market vs a generic leak? They didn’t sell bats at the market as far as I have read, and what’s the difference? Lab leak is a lab leak.

awb 4y ago
> Lab leak is a lab leak. It’s an interesting question though. Working off of a lab leak theory, how did the first known cases all come from the wet market? Is it just coincidence that an infected scientist traveled to the outdoor market and infected others? With human to human transmission, you’d think it would have spread more rapidly among a scientist’s friends & family in an indoor setting. When the US was doing contact tracing early on, I think the number of outdoor transmissions was extremely low.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  We are told that they visited the market. But in reality it doesn’t make much sense why a busy wet market produced only a couple of covid patients.
dmix 4y ago
Indeed, you don't need such a complicated theory. 3 doctors researching a coronavirus end up in a regional hospital, but before they get ID'd with a virus they interact with others in the local community helping it quietly spread among people with stronger immune systems. It's a 45min drive between the Hunan market <> WIV building: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/30%C2%B022%E2%80%B235%E2%80%B3N+114%C2%B015%E2%80%B245%E2%80%B3E/30.6196,114.2576/@30.493676,114.0902108,11z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m7!4m6!1m3!2m2!1d114.2625!2d30.3763889!1m0!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/30%C2%B022%E2%80%B235%E2%80%...
- awb 4y ago
  It’s definitely plausible, but then wouldn’t you expect multiple outbreak sites? * In and around WIV * In and around the scientist’s homes, families and neighborhoods From the news I’ve seen all of the initial known cases were traced back to the market.

mwbajor 4y ago

I don't understand the mental gymnastics to discredit the lab leak hypothesis. The fact that the lab and epicenter of the virus are in the same geographic area make it the likely scenario and warrants the most investigation. The efforts to look past this seem artificial.

actually_a_dog 4y ago
You don't need to "discredit" the hypothesis very much, because it shouldn't have any real "credit" to begin with. The only evidence for it at all seems to be the proximity of the Wuhan lab to the first known outbreak, plus the fact that 3 researchers got sick in November (i.e. flu season) with some unknown virus. If you ask me, that plus $5 might buy you a cup of coffee.
- ikrenji 4y ago
  it's a hell of coincidence that out of all chinese cities the outbreak started in the one city housing the premiere institute dedicated to researching coronaviruses... so there is no smoking gun evidence, but it's a reasonable hypothesis... anyway, no one apart from the chinese ministry of state security will ever know for sure one way or another
  - yibg 4y ago
    Isn’t that mixing causation with correlation. The lab is there because there are lots of virus sources there.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      This is definitely the most sensible explanation, since it's quite well known that Wuhan is the most important transportation hub in China since even before the lab was a distant dream in some postdoc's imagination. And China does have the world's largest annual human migration, in the Spring Festival. If I was in the planning department at whichever ministry that made the final decision on placement, putting the most prestigious and well funded lab studying dangerous human transmissible viruses at the world's most likely place to originate such a virus is an obvious choice. i.e. during a few weeks every year Wuhan could easily be 10x more likely to be ground zero then any other city ever.

dqpb 4y ago

[flagged]

dang 4y ago
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop. You can't abuse HN like this, regardless of how stupid someone else's theory is or you feel it is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dqpb 4y ago
  [dead]

stubybubs 4y ago

I don't know if it does make the most sense. Some context: https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html 75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. How many of those do we have start to finish routes from animals to humans? And if we don't have that route, how many of those are we suspecting of being lab leaks? If they wrote in their conclusion that it was "low confidence" I think they have good reason for saying that.

actually_a_dog 4y ago
> 75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. How many of those do we have start to finish routes from animals to humans? And if we don't have that route, how many of those are we suspecting of being lab leaks? None, as far as I know. Nor should it be particularly surprising that no animal origin for COVID-19 has yet been found. The animal origin for SARS was only discovered in 2017: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 The first outbreak was in 2002. We're less than 4 years away from the first known outbreak of COVID-19, so dismissing a wild animal origin at this point is extremely premature at best.