It's a big issue not because "it couldn't possibly have gotten to Wuhan", but because "why *Wuhan*?". Yes, it's easy to get a box of animals from point A to point B even when they're a thousand miles apart, but it's also easy to get that box to points C, D, E, etc, etc.
If there's something suspiciously unique about point B, then "why point B instead of C, D, E...?" is a legitimate question, and one that should update your prior about the suspiciously unique aspect being significant. It's like if the leader of the Proud Boys shows up in the city where the leader of ISIS lives, that's not *proof* of a conspiracy between the two, but neither is it "meh, it's easy for American tourists to visit random cities in the Middle East" and we should probably investigate further.
If Wuhan were next door to rural northeastern Laos, or if it were the main commercial hub for rural northeastern Laos, or if it were the main hub for the entire East Asian bushmeat trade, or something like that, then we'd shift priors back towards "wild animal to wet market", but those things aren't true and Wuhan being the main hub for sketchy East Asian bat-virus research is.
More generally, I obviously looked into that as soon as I started considering the lab leak hypothesis. Guangzhou is frequently cited as the main hub for China as a whole, and nobody ever mentioned Wuhan as being particularly significant.
Yeah I think it would be easy enough to do some phylogenetic analysis and figure out recently it entered the animal population (before or after the human pandemic) by looking at the mutation profile.
Agreed! I say the same thing in Section 5 of the review:
"It’s possible that the Chinese government was trying to cover up a lab leak, but it’s also possible that this was just regular authoritarian government behavior. Interestingly, Chan and Ridley describe similar attempts at obfuscation during the original SARS epidemic in 2003 (which had a natural origin), in which the Chinese government hid infected patients so that they wouldn’t be discovered by international health authorities. So I don’t think these attempts at obfuscation should necessarily be taken as evidence for a lab origin."
Yeah, I think there's a misconception on the pro-lab-leak side that the Chinese government is pushing the natural origins / wildlife trade origins hypothesis. In fact both a lab leak and a pandemic caused by the wildlife trade look bad for the Chinese government, so the hypotheses they're pushing are more fringe and kinda bizarre -- like a lab leak at Fort Detrick in the US, or that the virus arrived in frozen foods shipped to China from other countries.
Given that both stories are bad, the best outcome for the chinese government is an endless "controversy" over which explanation is true. Coming definitively down on one or the other side would require action, whereas endless internet argument over which is true results in the status quo.
In short, those people who advocate the conspiracy theory would in fact the conspiracy's most important servants. Conspiracy squared!
Not sure if it's sampling bias, I had assumed that bats in all the regions of China where they live (just an assumption, I don't really know).
But yes if a bat coronavirus similar to SARS-Cov-2 is found in the wild, close to Wuhan I would consider that circumstantial evidence in favor of natural origins -- it's just that we're now 2.5 years into the pandemic and that hasn't happened yet.
There are certain areas of China (like Guangxi and parts of Guangdong) that are well known for their huge bat caves. You can visit these areas at dusk and see the clouds of bats emerging.
As far as I know, there is nothing like that near Wuhan. There are certainly bats, but not living close together in huge numbers.
Digging around in disease ridden bat shit for dangerous viruses to pull into labs for study is, as I understand it, the keystone of the lab leaker concern about viral research. It would be odd that they'd want us to do more of it.
Doing more of it while being aware of the risks and taking extra precautions may be precisely what is called for. Like surgery to fix an injury caused by shrapnel.
My current belief (based on a steady drip of "related virus found in X" stories from all over E/SE Asia) is that East and South-East Asia is awash with a huge diversity of coronaviruses, of which we have seen only a tiny fraction.
The absence of a confirmed wild animal reservoir, nearly 3 years after the initial outbreak, should update your priors significantly in favour of the lab leak hypothesis.
Both those papers are from 2005. But Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak are authors on the first paper, so perhaps they planted that evidence 14 years in advance to hide the future lab leak conspiracy they intended to commit.
It would be great if someone where to go back out today, take more samples, sequence them, and compare them to SARS-CoV-2. I suspect it would take a lot of luck to find the exact ancestor species, though.
It absolutely is sampling bias. The most closely related bat coronaviruses have been found in those two areas because that's almost exclusively where sampling has been done. We really know comically little about what SARS-like viruses are out there, and where they are distributed.
It's one of those points that the authors willfully misrepresent that makes it very hard to take anything of what they are writing seriously.
I'm not sure about "way more suspicious", but yes if it were conclusively proven that the first super-spreader event occurred at Huanan seafood market that would be suspicious and would be a piece of circumstantial evidence in favor of the natural origins market-spillover hypothesis.
The recently published Worobey et al. paper claims to show this:
But the main critique of the paper is that the early data points may have been collected with ascertainment bias (specifically looking for cases around the market and nearby hospitals):
So the question is, did the first super-spreader event occur at the market? Or did people begin to suspect the market as a potential source and look for cases around it?
But I agree with your logic that if the Worobey et al. paper is right (which I'm not sure about), then the same logic of suspicion about occurring near a virology lab can also be applied to the first super-spreader event occurring in a market.
If you are only adjusting your priors on, "conclusively proven," then you are already living the conspiracy theory. You should be adjusting your priors on, "a reasonable chance," albeit less significantly.
There are way, way, more wet markets in the world than there are virology labs that study bat coronaviruses. This is even more true for virology labs that contain massive collections of samples of bat coronaviruses and do gain of function research on some of them. Because such labs are so rare, it would take much more of a coincidence for the virus to start spreading near one.
To me, the main factor I don’t see much discussed is how likely the Huanan market would be the ground zero for an introduced wildlife virus likely from a distant source. I gather from sources like a pre-pandemic paper on Guandong Province that there are dozens of wildlife markets just there; it makes me imagine that Wuhan would be an unlikely initial landing place for an infected animal from another province. Or was Huanan a sort of epicenter of wildlife markets? (I imagine a foreigner researching an outbreak of furniture beetle traced to a High Point, NC, furniture market might be puzzled as to why a desk shopped into Detroit would end up in a small city in NC unless they knew that High Point was the epicenter of furniture markets in the US.)
If Huanan is literally one of scores or 100s of equally likely destinations for an infected animal most likely gathered from a distant province… my priors have to shift towards that lab, which was THE epicenter of Chinese coronavirus study. Right?
Yeah this argument seems right. If the Huanan market was the epicenter for the trade of wildlife likely to have viruses, then that would make it less surprising that covid happened to spread near WIV. But I don’t think anyone has claimed that is the case.
As for your last comment, I’m not 100% sure that WIV was the epicenter of Chinese bat coronavirus study, but it at least was a very significant player (and as per my current understanding was likely the biggest). As some evidence towards this, I searched ‘bat coronavirus’ on Google scholar for papers from 2017 through 2019 and about half of the papers I looked at had some affiliation to WIV.
Hi everyone! Thanks for reading my book review! I originally wrote the review in March, so I thought I’d leave a comment with an update on how things have progressed since then.
As far as I can tell, there is still no direct, conclusive evidence in favor of either hypothesis, and neither can be ruled out. However, earlier this week one of the pre-prints I linked to in Section 1 (Worobey et al.) was published in the journal Science, and has been getting a lot of coverage in the media and on Twitter. Although it does not offer any direct evidence, it might offer a piece of indirect, circumstantial evidence for the natural origins hypothesis — or it might not.
The main issue appears to be the same as I described in Section 1 — the paper is heavily based on a geospatial analysis of early COVID cases, and shows that they seem to cluster around the Huanan seafood market. Chan claims that this analysis is invalid due to ascertainment bias, since early investigators were specifically searching around the seafood market and surrounding hospitals for cases. Worobey et al. deny this claim of ascertainment bias.
There is also some debate over how well the Worobey et al. paper can distinguish between a scenario in which COVID first spread to humans from animals in the market, and a scenario in which a human brought COVID into the market and caused a super-spreader event.
I’m not knowledgeable enough on these technical issues to know who’s right. To me it looks like the Worobey et al. paper is either moderate, circumstantial (but still inconclusive) evidence in favor of natural origins, or neutral between the hypotheses.
By the way, I still stand by my strongest conclusion from the review — that the people who prematurely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis without sufficient evidence got it wrong, and the people who called for a full, open investigation of both hypotheses got it right. And this is still going to be the case even if the lab leak hypothesis turns out to be incorrect.
Thanks for writing this review! I really enjoyed your reflection on the points of the book, even if toward the end there was a large chunk of 'I don't know enough to update on this' - or especially because of that, I suppose! I really enjoy it when people easily admit to uncertainty and are this transparent as to which parts their uncertainty is about.
Thanks for the kind words! Yeah I think writing a book review (or any kind of review of evidence) is easier than writing a thesis essay, because it's ok to just summarize other people's points, while still remaining uncertain and not pretending otherwise.
One thing you did not address in your review was the question of motivations.
If my friend tries to convince me that the coin is going to come up heads, why would he do that? Why would he claim to know something he does not?
We need to ask the same question about those who tried to claim at the beginning of this incident that the natural origins hypothesis was an open and shut case.
Why would they have been so eager to shut down discussion unless they had, at minimum, very strong suspicions that any real investigation would strongly indicate a lab leak?
This also casts doubt on the integrity and veracity of anything else that comes from these people. Worse, how can I, an educated layman, determine whether any new analysis coming out that argues against the lab leak hypothesis is part of the same misinformation campaign? Heck, your apparently well-reasoned and neutral review could be an effort to move people like me away from assuming lab leak and to a more agnostic position.
At this point, is it worth my time to try to understand this stuff in detail so I can draw my own judgements? Or should I lobby my elected representatives to do an in depth investigation of who was pushing natural origins, why they were doing so, the extent to which this was due to Chinese government influence / pressure, whether any of the people involved were unregistered foreign agents, and whether any violations of US law can be prosecuted? Should I try to figure this stuff out or should I just assume lab leak at this point since any argument or analysis against it is suspect?
Frankly, at this point I am far more interested in understanding why so many scientists seemed to consider it their mission to shut down lab leak speculation and to what extent the Chinese government was controlling them than to find out whether or not the original cause of COVID was a lab leak.
I totally agree that section was the weakest part of the the review and I really liked it overall. If my friend tells me the coin is 100% going to turn up heads, my first reaction isn’t, to get annoyed, it is to assume he is trying to scam/trick me.
And I also definitely wouldn’t update to 50/50, especially if the coin wasn’t one I produced.
> Why would they have been so eager to shut down discussion unless they had, at minimum, very strong suspicions that any real investigation would strongly indicate a lab leak?
Well, that's just standard operating procedure for the CCP. They don't allow anyone to suggest that the government has fucked up, even if they're confident that a full investigation will show that the government hasn't fucked up in this case, because merely making the idea of government fuck-up *thinkable* is dangerous to them.
Besides, the people who are in charge of covering things up aren't necessarily the ones with enough information to know what's true and what isn't. The Chinese government is certainly big enough that the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing. If there was a lab leak then the number of people who know for sure is very small.
I think you could satisfactorily account for most of that with, "It came from a Chinese lab" being sounding right-wing; in early 2020, the respectable position on Covid was that it was all a storm in a teacup and worrying about it was racist against asians.
Daszak himself seems to have been funnelling money to WIV (not the other way round), so may have been keen to cover up his own complicity in creating the virus, and protect his NIH grants. There are undoubtedly people in the West taking money from China/who the CCP have their talons in, but nothing like the scale that the Russians used to. Although I will go to my grave insisting that David Cameron was a Chinese spy (and I love that this is now becoming a proper conspiracy theory, not just a thing I think).
That's pretty uncharitable. America has a state ideology, and if you don't adhere to at least its minima then you don't have a career. The best approach is to quietly discuss what you think the truth might be with your colleagues, make sure there's a consensus and it's not just you, then slowly feed up the food chain that they need to turn the ship. They managed to do that, and have made the lab leak hypothesis acceptable. That's really a massive win, and is down to their commitment to the truth. It's just that not letting the proles in to gawk at everything while it's happening is necessary to actually achieve anything.
The WHO report stinks of meddling, but mostly in the realpolitik "if we say anything else then the PRC will stop co-operating with us which, since China is the source of many pathogens, is very bad" sense rather than the "PRC has suborned WHO" sense.
It's, uh, not good that a government this willing to take hostages is a superpower, and in terms of the WHO's credibility regarding anything involving China it's still a burn notice, but... it's probably not actively controlled by the CPC.
It depends on how cynical you are about these sort of organisations anyway - the WHO was (is?) led by a former Ethiopian apparatchik, and staffed in large part by people connected to similarly dubious regimes. They're not selected for competence or honesty, so you get stuff like this.
If your prior for international organisations is that they'll behave like the average of the countries involved in them, a lot of them (the WHO included) are surprisingly alright. Just pretty rubbish on an objective scale.
If the WHO can't say anything that will offend the CCP because they're too afraid of losing Chinese cooperation, is that really meaningfully different from being controlled by the CCP? I guess the former leaves open the possibility that other powerful countries might also be able to similarly veto any attempt by the WHO to promote conclusions they don't like... is there any evidence that countries other than China have been able to do this?
Honestly I don't know enough about Peter Daszak to speculate on him in particular.
One thing I will say is that the lab leak hypothesis certainly pattern-matches to crazy, if you're not paying attention. The idea that a naturally-occurring disaster was _actually_ caused by some kind of government malfeasance somewhere is a common conspiracy theory trope; for instance hurricanes or earthquakes being cooked up in a lab somewhere in Alaska https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/the-insane-logic-of-weather-truthers-who-think-hurricanes-are-created-by-the-government ... similarly, there were those who claimed that SARS-1 and AIDS were created in a lab too. And even for Covid-19, there were some crazy flavours of lab leak hypothesis (e.g. that it was a deliberate release designed to be a bioweapon against the West).
If you're not _really_ paying attention, it's so easy to pattern match "Covid came from a lab in Wuhan" to all the crazy theories that rhyme with it, without bothering to investigate or think too deeply about it.
Yeah paying attention to the culture war. I swear that is the main concern of a good 35% of academia these days, including a disturbing amount of STEM people.
How will twitter activists feel about my research is practically the first step of an unofficial self-IRB.
I have friends in pretty unrelated fields who are typical professors, liberal etc. They claim no chilling effect, but when presented with scenarios of results in their work they might plausibly find that would be verboten, they to a person say they might not publish, or would have trouble publishing, or it would ruin their career, or they would need to enlist coauthors of the right sort and it still might ruin their career. Some of them are in math departments…
I don't think there's any doubt that Daszak himself was paying very close attention. He's one of the few people outside China who knows with high confidence whether this was a natural or artificial plague. Unfortunately for the rest of us, Daszak almost has to say "perfectly natural, no lab leak, anyone saying otherwise is a nutbar conspiracy theorist" either way. In the one case because it's true and helpful, in the other case because saying the truth would open him up to six million wrongful-death lawsuits.
People like the editors of The Lancet and the administrators of the WHO, should have been paying attention to Daszak's clear conflict of interest before basically putting him in charge of telling the world whether there had been a lab leak, but that's another matter.
In some cases, yes, "I might be on the wrong side of the culture war" is a real concern in academia. The stakes are much higher in this one, at least for Daszak and his team.
Also dont forget Kristian G. Andersen who strongly excluded the lab thesis from the beginning and now is also Co-Author of the new paper. I totally agree that those guys lost credibility by giving those statements without knowledge in the first place.
The US government does not permit gain-of-function virology research, thanks to the lobbying of scientists warning about how dangerous it is. The US government also funded Daszak's EcoHealth alliance, which used such funds at WIV. Even if this wasn't a leak from WIV, I doubt he wanted anyone to notice that the funds were being used for something prohibited.
It isn't forbidden to spend money on such research elsewhere - even if that goes against spirit (but not the letter) of prohibiting such research in US.
Different people had different motivations to shut down investigation into the lab leak hypothesis. But I think anyone who does anything that they think has a potential to be misunderstood by outsiders is going to have an incentive to shut down investigation into them, whether they think the thing the investigation is about is relevant or not.
A school where teachers regularly encourage students to question the religious and political beliefs of their parents doesn’t want an extensive sexual harassment investigation to go on, even if they are confident there was no sexual harassment.
A sausage factory that regularly uses discarded turkey and pig parts in their sausages doesn’t want a highly publicized investigation into alleged food poisoning even if they are confident there was nothing unsanitary about their sources, just distasteful.
A profession that regularly modifies viruses and infects humanized animals with them, and where it is known that researchers often get slaps on the wrist for improper safety practices, doesn’t want a major investigation even if they are confident that this particular pathogen didn’t come from their lab.
> Why would they have been so eager to shut down discussion....?
Try this hypothesis. They started out knowing that the probability this came out of a lab was fairly low, but far from entirely insignificant. They want to get the general public's understanding of the probabilities as close to their own as possible, and this will be effected through what they say and how they say it.
However, they're well aware that communication is not some simple linear function; certain things they say will be enormously amplified because the media emphasises not the most probable points but the most surprising and shocking points, and whatever increases "engagement," and certain groups within the target community will also greatly amplify certain explanations that they prefer for non-scientific reasons.
This is coming out of not just an intellectual understanding of how these things work, but also direct experience with past communications attempts and their ongoing effects. Think about how the _Lancet_ editors and the reviewers of Wakefield's 1998 paper must feel right now. Fair or not, they surely know that if that paper had been rejected there was a much lower possibility that the whole anti-vaccine movement would have been so powerful, and thus they may (correctly or not) feel some responsibility for the many thousands of deaths that can be attributed to that movement.
They're also aware of the well known psychological phenomenon that the initial explanation that people believe, whether it's correct or not, is "sticky"; for some people it will never change no matter how much evidence to the contrary is found.
So put yourself in the shoes of these scientific spokespeople. If you're playing this communications game, your goal is that as much of the public as possible in the long term will settle on the (as-yet unknown) correct explanation, whatever it may be, and you have a decent understanding of how public communications works and how the various scenarios you discuss will be interpreted an amplified. What would you have done differently in your communications, and how do you anticipate the results would have been better in the long run?
"We don't know yet. What we do know is x,y and z. We will continue trying to figure it out."
Results; there's no suppression of a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, millions of people have one less reason to mistrust "the experts" and people are more willing to participate in a vaccination program because they trust that the experts are not politically motivated on this topic.
You mean the way the Wakefield MMR-vaccine-autism paper explained that no causal connection had been proven? And how did that work out for people accepting vaccines?
That wasn't some weird special case. Science communication works very differently when talking to other scientists, people with a science background, and members of the public willing to spend the time and effort (both intellectual and emotional) to come to rational conclusions about these things. Most of the population won't do the work to overcome the psychological biases and other issues related to things like preferring to listen to the most exciting explanation, being unable to change your mind after deciding on an explanation, and so on. Lots of otherwise rational people would _love_ to ignore this (ironically enough), but if we want to avoid things like massive anti-vaccination movements, we need to take this stuff into account.
Given that the "let's play games to manipulate the public" approach led to a massive increase in the anti-vaccine movement with far wider implications than the MMR stuff as well as a massive drain of public trust in scientific institutions, I'd say Ian's approach is still the correct one. I'd liken the anti-vaccine implications of the 2020 approach to be stepping on a landmine to avoid crushing a stinkbug. I think this is a broader issue than just vaccines though, like how everyone seems to update to "how will twitter react to X,Y,Z", which is really just the vocal subset of twitter users who are a subset of the population at large: the tail is wagging the dog. The correct response is to not give a damn how twitter, or cnn, or alex jones will react and go back to figuring out how reasonable people will react like you did before they were around. At it's simplest: you don't build trust through manipulation, that's how you destroy it, and coming up with rational sounding arguments of how the public needs you to manipulate them doesn't change that (and as we've seen: spectacularly backfired). You can craft your message to try and maximize the people you reach, but the overall message should still be one of truth and openness regarding what you do and don't know.
Great review. Not sure if Viral covered the DEFUSE proposal? That was something the computational biologist Nick Patterson recently said swayed him towards considering accidental leak of an engineered virus was the most likely scenario. One response to that is DARPA didn't fund it as it was too risky but Patterson notes work sometimes starts before the funding and could well have gone ahead anyway. It certainly explains the features of the furin site.
In terms of the Science papers, it's hard to take several of those authors seriously after it was shown they privately considered the virus looked unlikely to have arisen naturally but publicly rubbished the lab leak scenario which would be damaging to Chinese-US collaboration and put the NIAID in an awkward position having funded the research in Wuhan. I also wasn't aware there had been a moratorium on gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens like SARS from 2014-2017. Several scientists warned that lifting it would risk a pandemic and here we are.
I would recommend reading the comments of Gilles Demaneuf on some of the ascertainment bias issues with the latest papers. The retrospective case counting often involved a market link requirement so unsurprisingly they found a lot of cases at the market.
The two jump theory also hinges on a single sample of lineage A from a glove. There is a competing analysis from Sridhar Kumar and colleagues that shows a single jump and emergence in September or early October 2019.
Ultimately, the virus backbone had to get from either Yunnan or Laos to Wuhan. The Wuhan Institute of Virology was sampling from both places and across SE Asia. They won't share their virus database but as the chair of the Lancet Covid19 Commission suggested US based agencies may hold information that could shed light on what occurred.
I enjoyed this review, mostly because it roughly matches my pre-existing beliefs, so of course I'd be pre-disposed to like it. I didn't learn much personally, but hopefully it will Knock Some Sense Into Those Other EvilWrong People On The Internet.
The one section I found very frustrating was the vague attacks on "public health officials, scientists, journalists, and tech companies". Instead of looking into any specific claims by specific people and assessing how true they are and whether they were justified based on the evidence available at the time and what different actors motivations might have been, you just sort of gesture vaguely about "elites and institutions" and hope the audience will nod along in outrage (which they usually will, since this is a bias that is common in the rat-sphere.) Sometimes it seems like you go to more trouble to understand the action of the Chinese government than Americans!
I am not an expert, but I know those who are, and we were all convinced by this latest paper. It ties together statistical arguments that:
- Early cases clustered close to the market
- Early cases clustered on the side of the market with mammals
- BOTH early strains are tied to the market
And crucially, it makes the claim that these early cases were not due to ascertainment bias, because they were detected before people even realized there was an outbreak around the market.
If the strain came from a lab worker, it seems unlikely that (a) they'd spread it at the market and not any other possible superspreader site, (b) it would just so happen to be on the side of the market with mammals, and (c) it would have happened TWICE, with TWO STRAINS. It's possible, but implausibly so.
I would have liked a more quantitative argument about how much ascertainment bias would have been needed to get results as extreme as those shown in the paper. But I recognize that would have been a lot of work.
Hi Ted, thank you for the comment! Yes I saw that paper a couple days ago (actually I mentioned it in Section 1 of my review, although that was the pre-print version).
Here is a link to Alina Chan's critiques of the paper:
Basically the main technical critique is still the ascertainment bias issue. Chan says the data were obtained with ascertainment bias, and Worobey et al. say they were not. I'm not sure who to believe, and am not really knowledgeable enough to evaluate the opposing technical claims being made here. My understanding is that the issue is the murkiness of the dataset Worobey et al. used, and how exactly that data was collected.
I would also add that in past coronavirus epidemics like SARS and MERS, things were only resolved when the actual animal source of the disease was found (direct evidence, rather than circumstantial). Here's an article explaining this standard of evidence:
So my understanding is that even if Chan's critiques of the Worobey et al. are wrong and the paper's analysis is valid, it only constitutes circumstantial evidence in favor of natural origins, not definitive proof.
One thing I liked about the Worobey et al. paper though is that it presents a hypothesis for which animal species might have been the intermediary hosts between bats and humans, so maybe that will lead to some investigations of specific farms and wildlife traders, and could yield more definitive proof.
The demand for an animal source is requirimg a burden of proof that is, at this point, impossible to meet. But as you point out, the burden of proof is on the conspiracy theory, and there is zero evidence which requires anything other than a natural explanation.
I'm not sure that "Chinese government had a standard-issue fuck-up and covered it up" counts as a conspiracy theory in anything other than the most pedantic sense. OK, a government coverup would presumably require at least two people to conspire at some point, but it certainly doesn't require the sorts of implausible conspiracies that are usually entailed by the term "conspiracy theory". If there _was_ a lab leak, then a Chinese government coverup would be not only plausible but inevitable.
In a case like this I don't think there's any "burden of proof" either way. This isn't a court of law, where we have to reach near 100% certainty on one hypothesis or accept the other. We can continue to entertain both hypotheses, which seems reasonable because they're both intuitively plausible and I haven't seen any evidence which pushes it strongly one way or the other. (Though I consider myself insufficiently qualified to properly weigh up evidence about furin cleavage sites and the like.)
Going through Scott's list at Too Many People Dare Call It Conspiracy:
A. The CPC is not secret and "covering up things that embarrass China" is a known thing it does
B. Virology researchers do have an interest in not being considered hostis humani generis, but there would be a need for some actual co-ordination in this case.
C. Internal culture of the PRC government is definitely "covering up things that embarrass China is prosocial" - this is not remotely secret.
D. This wouldn't need a huge conspiracy; maybe a couple dozen people actively "in on it" plus some people who follow orders without too many questions.
That's 3/4 heuristics "more plausible", and one somewhat ambiguous but leaning toward "less".
Furthermore, the idea that any theory involving a conspiracy is inconceivable is simply ridiculous for many reasons.
1. Those who hold that belief are the same people who just spent 6 years seriously entertaining the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory (they literally used the synonymous term "collusion theory" to avoid calling it a conspiracy theory).
2. The primary argument against conspiracy theories in general is "that many people couldn't keep a secret for that long, eventually somebody would say something"... and then when people like Haim Eshed, Bob Lazar, the fraudster who talked to Jon Levine, and Brook Jackson blow the whistle on conspiracies, they are dismissed as "crazy conspiracy theorists". When someone blows the whistle on an actual conspiracy, we simply won't believe them, because we've defined the act of blowing the whistle on a conspiracy to itself be evidence of being "a conspiracy theorist" which then makes one inherently untrustworthy.
3. Conspiring is one of the most basic, fundamental human behaviors. People have conspired with each other throughout all of history, and there's no reason to expect that they will stop anytime soon.
"We should assume that my position is correct by default, and you have to prove otherwise" is doing a lot of work here. Is there some reason should we assume you are correct, or is this based on some fundamental principle of rationality that I just haven't heard about?
*The Iron Laws of Reason*
Law 1: Q -> P === ~P -> ~Q
Law 2: P(A|B) = P(B|A) * P(A) / P(B)
Law 3: It is absolutely impossible for people to conspire with each other.
The same argument could be used against an animal source. The non-conspiracy truthers are demanding a burden of proof that is impossible to meet, but there is zero evidence which requires anything other than a lab leak explanation.
You seem to purposely ignore the TWO STRAINS part of the commenter's argument and the Science paper. To me, it is the strongest evidence for the natural origin so far.
Can you explain to me like I'm 5 why two strains is evidence for the first human host being infected by an animal at the market instead of any source inside the lab?
[For bonus points also consider the case where the animal host at the market came from the lab, but I think this is a small fraction of possibility and so fine to ignore so long as it's smaller than other plausible routes coming from the lab.]
1) two different but closely related strains studied in the lab. Why? Scientists generally keep experiments tightly controlled and two strains would complicate the interpretation of any data.
2) The researcher in the lab getting infected with two strains (two low-probability events) or two researchers independently getting infected with different strains and brining to the market (very low probability).
Because transmission in wildlife market is uncontrolled and lead to lots of mutations. Scientists who do specifically do mutations in the lab like too keep things under controlled conditions. Otherwise, the research is unpublishable and worth very little.
Beyond "beware the man of one study" in general, we already know this is a particularly thorny issue where people are pretty partisan; why trust *these authors* in particular, or *this journal* in particular?
As for the paper specifically--I don't buy it, because they test the market compared to a null hypothesis of *the population distribution of Wuhan*. Shouldn't they be comparing it to something like "distance from the WIV"?
Yeah the way Worobey treats their “geospatial analysis” like it’s the Michelson-Morley experiment and not a social science-style statistical analysis with about a thousand researcher degrees of freedom definitely causes me to reduce my trust in any of their results.
There's something about the tone with which these recent studies are being presented that raises my hackles, too - like they're triumphantly smashing an insurgency. That combined with preprints (i.e. documents that are by definition not ready for publication) being widely publicized with aforementioned triumphalism has me fairly certain that objectivity has left the building at this point.
Not sure if I really agree with your second point. It seems to me that if the early case data were collected in an unbiased way (which I'm not sure about), then comparing the early case distribution to the underlying population distribution makes sense. Can you explain further?
Say WIV was located next door to the market. Would the alleged fact that the outbreak was centered on the market prove anything? Obviously not.
If you want to provide evidence against the WIV lab leak hypothesis you have to compare the distribution of cases with distance to market as an independent variable to the distribution of cases with distance to WIV as an independent variable.
In addition, you have to explain how you rule out that the first super spreader event was at the market caused by a WIV researcher infected at work stopping there to buy food.
Why is it more complicated and unlikely that a lab that collects virus samples from bats would have an accident that results in an outbreak of a bat virus than that a bat virus somehow traveled over 1,000 kilometers to a wet market in a city that just happened to have the only facility in China that did this kind of research?
I would actually see it as the reverse.
As an example, if there was an outbreak of Ebola 5 km from Fort Detrick and it was known that Fort Detrick researchers had travelled to Africa and taken samples from Ebola outbreaks, would your default hypothesis be that someone had travelled from Africa to Maryland and spread the virus or that either Fort Detrick had had an accident or a Fort Detrick researcher on a sample acquisition trip had been infected (perhaps asymptomatically) and then passed it on?
I mean, to be clear, we haven't found a close relative to the virus. Yes, the closest one we've found is fairly far away, but that one is many MANY generations distant from COVID. If this is a natural virus it likely didn't come from that population of animals. Noone thinks that COVID evolved from that virus over the lifespan of a single captive animal being transported to a wet market.
Edit: and the real reason our priors should be on a natural source for the virus isn't the relative complexity of the theories (which is pretty subjective.) It's because we know that the vast majority of zoonotic pandemics, including the most closely related one, did have natural origins.
The lab leak people aren't saying the lab leak itself was a conspiracy. They're saying that the PRC conspired to cover it up.
We know the PRC conspired to cover things up in this case (first-off trying to suppress knowledge that COVID was real - this is well-documented, nobody disputes it - and then the issues with the WHO investigation), so "the interference with the WHO investigation was to cover up either a known or a suspected lab leak of COVID" is one of like three plausible hypotheses (the others being "WIV is up to something else that they don't want to come out, like non-COVID-related bioweapons" and "covering up on general principles" - this last is not actually foolish from a game-theoretic point of view, since it reduces the information people gain from the existence of a coverup on a matter).
Even if they were saying it was a conspiracy, what makes a conspiracy inherently less likely than any other type of theory? You'd have to justify that on a theory-by-theory basis.
I don't think this is how "determining what is true" works, in this particular case.
That is: He's not saying "you have to do this if you want us to consider a natural origin", he's saying you have to do this *if you want to show that the paper he's responding to provided good evidence against the lab leak.*
Compare: suppose someone advances a theory that education doesn't actually do anything to improve learning or life outcomes before 8th grade. We publish a rebuttal by pointing out that college students out-earn the general population; the individual replies that "to provide evidence against my theory, you have to compare 'no school before 8th' to 'school before 8th', not 'college vs no college'."
That schooling before 8th grade matters could reasonably be our default position, yes. But if we then say "we don't *have* to do that; the burden of proof is on you!", it would obviously be unreasonable: we have been given a plausible reason why our attempted rebuttal was flawed, and now we do have to provide a response — or we're not actually participating in discovering the truth, just scoring points.
When the most likely species to have caused the crossover infection doesn't have habitat within a thousand kilometers of the market and wasn't known to have been sold at the market, it's a bit rich to suggest that lab leak is the more complicated and unlikely explanation.
This is a bit like saying, "Morphine pills were not known to be sold at the open air drug market." Sure, they weren't specifically known to be sold. They are however, a frequently sold drug and are generally sold in locations that sell lots of other drugs.
Like Shanghaied points out, we're trying to compare two different hypotheses: was human patient 0 infected at the lab, or at the market?
The paper instead asks the question: "when we infer a geospatial distribution of reported infections in Dec 2019, where's the center?". The market is near the center; is the WIV *also* near the center? They don't ask, which seems pretty critical to comparing the two hypotheses, instead of just stacking up evidence that seems likely given your favored hypothesis.
As far as I can tell, the WIV is *not* near the center of the distribution, and so it's evidence against the theory that the first major superspreader event was at the WIV. But I don't think anyone was pushing that theory?
In more detail, the right way to do this is to build a bunch of models, assign probabilities of how things would go, and then calculate the posterior. The actual thing that happened is highly conjunctive and so will be unlikely under any hypothesis, and so the question is how the two compare.
For example, if you think 'the pandemic starts at a <wild animal market>", how many wild animal markets are there in China which it could have been? If you think 'the pandemic starts in a lab with a single infected worker, who then spreads it at a <superspreader event>", how many possible places for a superspreader event were there in Wuhan?
Like, in Rasmussen's tweet thread:
> Try fitting this into a lab leak scenario:
> Worker 1 gets infected with lineage B at WIV and immediately goes straight to the market, only infecting other people once there.
> A week later, worker 2 gets infected with lineage A at WIV & also immediately goes straight to Huanan.
> There's a much simpler explanation:
> Human at market 1 gets infected with lineage B from a live animal sold at the market.
> A week later, human at market 2 gets infected with lineage A from another live animal sold at the market.
> This is very plausible, because the animals were kept in such close quarters and were part of a common supply chain. One infected animal would spread virus to others, allowing for the divergence of the two lineages prior to zoonotic transmission to humans.
Alternatively... a human gets infected with lineage B in the lab, infecting both humans and animals at the market, and then lineage A develops at the market (either in an animal or in a human), infecting humans.
Like, if anything, two lineages sounds to me much more like "worker from lab that collected and developed variants" than "business-as-usual at a market". [If the same market had two different strains like this across two weeks, doesn't that seem very unlikely given the background rate of zoonotic transmission at markets like this?]
But they're not building large webs of possibility and trying to integrate; they're looking at something that has a Bayes factor of 1-2 and pretending it's a smoking gun.
>Like, if anything, two lineages sounds to me much more like "worker from lab that collected and developed variants" than "business-as-usual at a market". [If the same market had two different strains like this across two weeks, doesn't that seem very unlikely given the background rate of zoonotic transmission at markets like this?]
Sorry, but I think the idea that a "lab leak of the virus" can only be proved by a Snow-like map of cases concentrically centered on the front steps of the lab itself is comically simplistic, so much so that it's borderline disingenuous.
Whoa, I'm not saying "can only be proved"! I'm being Bayesian about this whole thing.
Think thru this case with me: suppose a tech catches COVID from the stored viruses at the lab, and then keeps going to work / their regular community events / etc.; isn't it a surprise that they *didn't* spread it at the lunch room at the lab?
The hope of reasoning about things in a Bayesian way is that if you carefully keep track of all of the surprises, you can tell which of two stories is more surprising overall. Maybe this is just a small surprise (maybe the virology lab has very generous sick leave, so in fact the tech didn't come back to work, or Chinese work culture often has people eating off-site so there's less worker-to-worker spread, or so on), but it should still go on the pile of surprises so you can accurately weigh the whole stories.
Good point. I have personally eaten lab animals in the US (chickens and lambs), although my only connection with the research was being a friend of a friend of a lab worker. They said they were controls, and they tasted fine. Although there is no evidence for it, it does not sound crazy.
Against that particular hypothesis, the WIV was working on bats and I think cell cultures from other mammals but not live animals. The Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, in spite of its name, sold a fair number of live mammals, but it appears to have not sold bats in the period of interest.
Of course, we also know that Covid can be carried and communicated to humans by dozens of other animals including, cats, dogs, deer, mink, and hamsters. So really, any of a number of animals could have been an intermediary and the bat could have merely been proximate during some part of shipping.
I haven't read the paper, so maybe "geospatial analysis" means something more sophisticated than I think it does. But I don't think that "near the center" in *geographic* terms is particularly relevant, because the disease spreads among humans and humans aren't anything like particles moving by brownian motion in a uniform fluid. What matters is social rather than geographic distance, and weighted by local suitability for superspreader events.
E.g. the Atlanta International Airport is way on the outskirts of Atlanta. But it's a really good place for a superspreader event. And it handles about as many outgoing passengers as incoming. So if there's a disease outbreak there, then a priori it's as likely to have been brought there by someone from Atlanta, as it is by someone on an incoming flight. And if the disease is suspiciously similar to something being researched at the CDC, then "but the CDC is on the other side of the city!", is not a strong counterargument.
Shopping for seafood and the occasional live mammal is something lots of people in China do, in roughly the way airline travel is something lots of people in America do. A laboratory technician might do either, on any given day. And if a someone is going to do that, then they're going to deliberately travel to the place where that thing is done, even if it's on the other side of the city.
There's probably a way to do an analysis that quantifiably addresses actual human patterns of movement and interaction, weighted by probability of airborne virus transmission. But I expect that it would be very hard to do, particularly without the cooperation of a trustworthy Chinese government. And I don't think the results would normally be described as "geospatial".
Can someone who has read the preprint say whether it properly addressed these factors?
Which question are you trying to answer? As noted elsewhere, the paper is answering the question "where was the first superspreader event?", not "where was patient 0 infected?". [Why the commentators or the authors are pretending the second is beyond me.]
I do think the paper is pretty convincing that, of the cases we're familiar with from December, a huge fraction of them are downstream of transmission at the market. [I don't think they have the statistical power to detect whether it's 90% or 100%, especially if some cases were strategically deleted from the records as part of a coverup.]
I would have liked for them to be more quantitative with two main questions to answer something more like "where was patient 0 infected?":
1) what fraction of early cases would you expect to be 'tied to the market' if the disease originated there instead of simply spreading there?
2) is the move towards the population center of Wuhan from Dec to Jan/Feb above, at, or below the expected move if the market were the only early source of infections?
If the only thing the paper is relevant for is the location of the initial superspreader, then what was your "is the WIV *also* near the center" about?
Yes, the initial superspreader event was almost certainly at the market. If someone is claiming that the geographic distance between the WIV and the first superspreader event is in any way relevant, that person is almost certainly wrong. I was unclear as to whether it was you or the authors of the preprint who were making that argument, or if those authors were at least providing something that supported your claim.
"Near" is a relative term, no? To know that you'd need to have things like Wuhan public transit routes and location of staff residences relative to WIV and the market.
For example, I have a coworker whose preferred grocery store is 25 kilometres from our place of work.
> And crucially, it makes the claim that these early cases were not due to ascertainment bias, because they were detected before people even realized there was an outbreak around the market.
Regarding ascertainment bias, there’s a relatively uncontroversial claim that much of the data used for the main analysis is probably subject to ascertainment bias. The “bias free” data is limited to a small number of very early cases (41 cases, 27 linked to the market).
Regarding the claim that these early cases are bias free, I think laypeople can reasonably try to evaluate this claim themselves. It’s not like the paper authors are experts in Chinese medical bureaucracy. My take (based on the preprint): they establish a few cases linked to the market before official mechanisms recognised the disease, but there’s ample evidence that official mechanisms often lag behind informal chats and rumours by a substantial margin, so it’s still quite plausible that a link to the market was presumed when the earlier cases were identified. In short, they present weak evidence (Bayes factor 1.5 ish) against ascertainment bias.
Ascertainment bias would also apply to the first cases being identified in Wuhan at all. There's no way to rule out that earlier cases of covid appeared elsewhere in China but were never identified. Chan appears to want to have it both ways: throw out the wet market connection for ascertainment bias but keep the Wuhan/lab connection, even though the latter has an inherent ascertainment bias mechanism baked into it (the lab would be a very good place to first identify COVID).
Indeed, it might not have originated in Wuhan. However, you can easily check if the virus was discovered by the WIV and you should do things like this before wasting everyone’s time with silly comments.
1. Is the analysis done by people under the control of or influence of the Chinese government?
2. Was the data obtained with Chinese government cooperation?
3. Is the future access to data about the outbreak by these researchers dependent on Chinese government cooperation?
4. Were any of the researchers on the paper part of the early effort to shut down discussion of the lab leak hypothesis?
If any of these are true, how can we trust the analysis?
In addition, how can any of the points you list distinguish between the outbreak starting at the market and the outbreak starting with a WIV researcher who went to the market to buy food and infected someone there? The early strains could have diverged there.
So now we have TWO zoonotic spillover events in the same place within a few days of each other? That itself strikes me as a very improbable event that should reduce our confidence in any hypothesis that requires it. But a lab doing work on two (or more!) infectious strains simultaneously would not be at all surprising, and if their containment protocols are lax enough for one to get out then so could another. You do still have the implausibility of "the infected researchers both go to the wild-animal section of the Huanan Seafood Market, which is not the most convenient market for WIV" though.
You would have to know where all the WIV workers actually live to even start to assess how convenient that market is, though, right? There's a Superstore mere steps outside my office, but I prefer the Safeway near my house (and not even the Safeway nearest my house, since it's in a busy mall and I don't like the fight for parking).
If Hunaan sold exotics then it may have been the only source in Wuhan for many animals. If someone from WIV was planning a special meal they would have gone there to get special meat even if not convenient.
Except, the market origin doesn't even slightly deprecate the chance of lab origin. I'm not sure why the natural-origin advocates believe it does. Market origin != natural source.
Personally, my money is on the casual, incautious, opportunistic disposal of WIV lab animals that didn't seem overtly sick, so (junior lab janitor 7) decides he can make a few bucks selling them to a friend that has a "don't ask questions about where this came from" stall at the wet market.
Animals sold in wet markets are very different from lab animals.
Bats are not eaten in Wuhan and lab mice are a lot smaller than the rats that get eaten. I am not aware of any evidence that WIV worked with dogs or cats, which would otherwise be the best candidate as both a lab animal and a potential dinner.
If the lab leak hypothesis is correct then the most likely route from WIV to the market was people. It could be a researcher. It could also be something as simple as poorly disposed garbage resulting in a refuse collector being infected and his wife worked at the market.
(Never been to Wuhan myself, my only impression is from someone who worked near there for about 4 months which I take as significantly more credible and less prone to 'spin' than professional media sources whose motivations are unclear to me.)
While I appreciate your comment that 'bats aren't eaten in Wuhan'....In my acquaintance's experience of Wuhan and poorer regions of China, and my own experience of such markets in third world countries, I'm pretty sure that attractively-priced meat protein of ANY KIND is eaten in Wuhan and in a certain context, the provenance is basically irrelevant.
But to your latter point, yes, it could also well be an infected worker that just wandered through a hot, damp, crowded, high-throughput place like the Wuhan market. My only take would be that I'd assume the typical safety standards and in/out testing is pretty high at such a facility, so that route would have to inadvertently 'beat' such checks/practices. OTOH, someone doing something shady like selling disposed test animals for a little $ is going to be already and deliberately skirting the rules.
Which is more likely? At that point it's a sheer guess.
To a tangential point, though: pretty much all the comments I've seen to this review, and frankly much of the online commentary in places like Slashdot are rather impressively intelligent people (at least they write so).
So (not to you but generally) from such people, why the oversimplification that:
Wet Market = natural source, and
Lab origin = must be deliberate leak or spread from the Wuhan lab
...as if there aren't tons of ways those could be blended in different narratives?
There are a number of variables in the process that are being conflated, I don't know why...as strawmen, maybe? The only one I think in actual play here is if the virus itself was a natural mutation passed from a natural source with no real human intervention aside from being the recipients, or was the virus (which in any case originally came from a natural source) somehow manipulated/edited by humans?
Was it a deliberate leak by the Chinese, or inadvertent? Personally, I overwhelmingly believe inadvertent. Not just because incompetence is vastly more likely than malice most times, but because if it would have been deliberate it a) pretty certainly wouldn't have been down the street from the lab (lol) and b) the Chinese would have had a far better cover story than their hasty, reflexive fibs, lies, falsehoods, and stonewalling.
I have been to Wuhan several times and my wife is from a nearby town.
1. Wuhan is not poor. It is generally considered a second tier city, one step behind Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, etc. The US equivalent of San Francisco, one step down from NYC, Chicago, LA.
2. Like in most third world countries, what food is on the menu is culturally dependent unless people are starving, and they are not starving in Wuhan. Chinese make fun of southern Chinese for eating anything with its back to the sky (think about it) or anything that flies except an airplane and anything that swims except a submarine. Outside of Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangzi, and parts of Sichuan most "exotic" foods are things like pig brain and dog. Some insects as delicacies. You do not find the exotics in places like Wuhan. In addition, I have been in wet markets all over China including Yunnan, Guangxi, and Guangdong and I have never seen bat. You definitely will not find bat in a Wuhan wet market unless you do some kind of special order (ie. a Guangxi cuisine restaurant ordering it for a special dinner. In a case like that it would also be Guangxi customers.)
3. In general, things like bat, rat, pangolin, cat, dog, centipede, scorpion, etc. are specialty foods. They are more expensive and people want to eat them buy them in recognizable form so they are not cheated. No one buys anonymous unidentifiable meat in a Chinese market - you have no idea what it is, how old it is, etc.
4. I have no idea what "in/out testing" you think goes on at a Chinese wet market or whether you think it applies to people or animals. I can guarantee to you that customers walk in and out with no testing, workers walk in and then go home without any testing, and animals are brought in without testing and animals (alive or dead) leave with no testing.
5. Safety standards are minimal. In a place like Wuhan, they have refrigeration. That is still relatively new. I have been in many smaller wet markets where fresh meat hangs from hooks and you smell it to make sure it has not been out too long. Drainage gutters usually exist. The floor is not particularly clean. Toilets are squatters, there is no soap, and butchers squat down still wearing their work aprons. In supermarkets workers usually wear a mail glove to protect their hands while chopping meat. In markets that is less common.
6. I'm not sure how this blends. Original source was either the wet market or the lab (or, less likely, something else). If it was the lab, then the wet market was one of the earliest super spreader events.
One of my pet peeves about this whole subject is the tendency for people to conflate "it clearly spread from the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market" with "it is clearly a natural zoonotic event". The Huanan market was pretty clearly the first Covid-19 superspreader event, but the Huanan market would have been a really good place for a superspreader event even if it only sold seafood (and gamma-sterilized at that). It's a big crowded noisy poorly-ventilated building(*) with thousands of people coming and going every day.
So either version requires a coincidence. In the lab-leak version, it's certainly possible that a WIV lab technician exposed himself to proto-COVID, went to buy some seafood after work, and then went about his business. But why the seafood market, instead of one of a hundred other places in Wuhan just as suitable for a superspreader event? Unlikely, but not impossible.
In the natural zoonotic version, it's certainly possible that someone shipped an infected [unknown not-bat animal] from Yunnan or Laos to Wuhan, where it was sold in Wuhan's not-exclusively-seafood wet market. But why the *Wuhan* wet market, rather than one of a hundred others at least as closely tied to Yunnan/Laos? Also unlikely, but not impossible.
The existence of two strains doesn't change that, because it requires the same coincidence in both cases. The research being carried out at WIV was likely to create multiple related strains, but someone or someones being infected with both and then visiting the Huanan market is unlikely. OTOH, while a wild reservoir might have two strains in circulation, the odds of animals infected with both being transported to Wuhan but neither to any closer city is also unlikely.
And if, more likely IMHO, the second strain only emerged when the virus first had a chance to play pinball among crowded human hosts, then that's equally likely whether the first strain shows up in an [unknown not-bat animal] or in a recently-infected lab technician.
Both hypotheses are credible and require investigation, even if we are 100% certain that the first superspreader event was at the Huanan market and that there were two early strains.
* Some extrapolation from my experience in other Chinese markets involved; I've never been to Wuhan.
Completely agree. Whether the pandemic was caused by a lab leak or the wildlife trade, it seems like we brought this thing on ourselves either way and need to take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Though in some sense it doesn't matter: since both possibilities are plausible, we should shut down the wild animal trade *and* demand higher biosecurity standards for virology work and tighter controls on gain-of-function research.
I should note that there aren't a lot of easy gains for Westerners trying to improve standards at either Chinese wild animal markets or Chinese research labs, because the PRC just goes "fuck you and fuck your international order".
There is one and only one threat that the PRC will listen to, which is "do this or Global Thermonuclear War", and even then you'd have a substantial likelihood of having to actually follow through on that threat.
Are there things worth going to Global Thermonuclear War over? Yes. Are there biolab things worth going to Global Thermonuclear War over? Also yes (the obvious case is Life 2.0 X-risk). Is specifically "you might do another COVID by accident" worth Global Thermonuclear War? Probably not. Which means the ability of this dialogue to actually produce an order-of-magnitude decrease in the rate of lab leaks is essentially nil - we can improve Western standards, and the PRC may of its own initiative improve Chinese standards, but we can't improve Chinese standards and lots of the low-standards work is in China.
Hence my mention of "order-of-magnitude". Even if you take the West to 0, the sheer amount of biotech research in PRC territory means it's only a moderate downgrade in total risk.
We can stop funding research in Chinese labs, or insist on tighter standards and random inspections as a condition of doing so (which I expect is equivalent to stopping all funding, because CCP).
I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that Chinese research labs are uniquely lax in their security precautions, given the litany of close calls that have happened in the US, UK, Singapore, and Russia.
Covid killed 5 million people; expected casualties in a US-China nuclear war are <500E6 (and most of that is from the possibility of Russia being drawn in against the US). So if we assume that status quo means another Covid sometime in this generation, and there's a 99% probability that China will back down on gain-of-function research and wet markets if seriously threatened with nuclear war, then by strict first-order consequentialism we should seriously threaten nuclear war.
As it turns out, I'm not a strict consequentialist, or even a moderate one; there are other values at play here. And higher-order terms to the consequential math. So I don't think we should actually do that. But it's kind of alarming that the first-order math suggests that this is something we should be at least considering.
Consider that people dead from COVID were mostly old and had just a few QALYs left - let's Fermi estimate as ~2-3 on average, once the "quality" part is taken into account. A nuclear strike would kill indiscriminately.
Also, I'd rather have long COVID than radiation sickness, nevermind the massive economic and logistical disruption of even a limited nuclear exchange. IIRC in a nuclear war you're most likely to die of hunger, not because of nuclear winter (vastly overblown risk) but because all the supply chains collapse at once.
But the funniest thing here is that the US government and scientific establishment both funded the lax Chinese GoF research, and engaged in early coverup of the possibility of the lab leak, so maybe you should consider thermonuclear bombing of them as well, just to be safe?
While I agree with you and John Schilling below, I don't think nuclear war would be necessary even as a threat. The US/Europe could ratchet up sanctions until demands are met, especially if you got the third power (Russia) on board with it. The bigger issue is that the West can't even coordinate their own long-term response to COVID, much less produce a united front to investigate the conditions that created it.
Considering both that there is a certainty that we will have more natural origin diseases, as well as the improbability of "perfect" security in disease research, I'd say it's just as important if not moreso that we understand WHY our ostensibly science driven experts, government, and media were so wedded to a single unproved narrative and (not trivially) the suppression of apostates, heretics, and even agnostics.
I'm not saying there was a conspiracy, that's Alex Jones nutter territory. There certainly was however dogmatic consensus across groups who should, theoretically, be checking each other and weren't.
What I gleaned from my own study of this (including reading a lot of Alina Chan essays) is that while we may never know what caused COVID-19, we have more than enough evidence that the international study of virology resembles Jurassic Park and needs to be much more tightly regulated and supervised.
Funny, I encounter the topic so often I'm totally sick of it, and there's essentially zero value added. Plus it indulges a preexisting love for conspiracy theories which is definitely not healthy.
Zoonotic spillover is the default assumption, since that's how contagious disease works in the overwhelming majority of historical cases (we didn't even have pathogen labs until the last, what, 100 years?). The particular vector is not even that interesting to me, since from a big picture POV 1. zoonotic spillover will continue to happen and 2. interventions to prevent it are not really practical on a level that would actually do anything useful.
Playing whack-a-mole with 1001 flavors of lab leak is not even useful.
Well, the review above has enough examples of lab-originating disease outbreaks to dent one's confidence that natural outbreaks are the only reasonable cause.
And all the risks of pandemic disease research are still there regardless of whether this particular case was of natural origin or not. If the research has a bad risk-reward ratio, we should stop it regardless of where this or that disease happened to come from. If safety standards are lax, we should tighten them. COVID coming from a lab has zero meaningfully different consequences relative to normal zoonotic origin.
Of course it does! If it had a natural origin it means that we should increase disease surveillance of the host reservoirs. If it had a lab origin then a global agreement on proper biolab security, regulation and probably inspection is necessary.
>If the research has a bad risk-reward ratio, we should stop it regardless of where this or that disease happened to come from.
How would we *know* the risk-reward ratio without a thorough investigation of whether a pandemic is natural or a lab accident? I feel like that would be a huge factor in that calculation!
> Zoonotic spillover is the default assumption, since that's how contagious disease works in the overwhelming majority of historical cases (we didn't even have pathogen labs until the last, what, 100 years?).
First and most importantly, do you count it as "zoonotic spillover" if Alice collects a virus from a wild animal, ships the virus to Bob, and then Bob mishandles it and gets infected? In my view, this looks pretty similar to the case where Alice collects the wild animal, ships the animal to Bob, and then Bob gets infected by it. [If you think maybe people shouldn't ship wild animals to cities for disease risk reasons, maybe also you should think people shouldn't ship viruses to cities for disease risk reasons!]
Second, doesn't this logic seem weird to you? Let's pretend we're instead talking about a murder victim.
Suppose I noted that death-by-club is the default assumption, since that's how human-on-human violence works in the overwhelming majority of historical cases (we didn't even have guns until the last, what, 500 years?).
You might fairly call me confused. After all, the invention of guns resulted in a substantial change to the dynamics generating the historical record; we should heavily discount data from the distant past compared to data from the recent past.
How relevant is the example that SARS-COV-1 was a zoonotic spillover in 2003? Well, according to me, it depends on how many labs we had in 2003 and how many we have now.
There are a bunch of papers that talk about this in detail (mostly noting that the explosion in labs happened in the wake of 9/11 and significant anti-terrorism funding), but few of them give the numbers that I want. As an example, let's lookat wikipedia's incomplete list of BSL-4 labs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#List_of_BSL-4_facilities ) that have the date of when they were founded. 13 of them date from before the SARS-COV-1 pandemic and 19 of them date from after the SARS-COV-1 pandemic. Presumably the likelihood of a BSL-4 lab escape increased to 2.5x if the number of labs increased to 2.5x, right?
[Which labs are the relevant ones? I remember hearing that WIV was BSL-2 and was working with viruses designated BSL-3, so maybe the reference class is just "labs doing thought-to-be-unsafe work", which would probably take a research effort to uncover.]
> The particular vector is not even that interesting to me, since from a big picture POV 1. zoonotic spillover will continue to happen and 2. interventions to prevent it are not really practical on a level that would actually do anything useful.
Why do you think interventions are impractical? Can't we just shut down biosafety labs inside cities? Like, if we did all of our virology research on floating research vessels, then we could both 1) still collect lots of viruses for research and 2) keep it away from major population centers, reducing the chances of new pandemics or endemic diseases.
On the contrary, playing whack-a-mole with 1001 flavors of lab leak seems just as useful to me as cancer research, which is playing whack-a-mole with 1001 sources of cancer.
"Hey, maybe we should try to figure out the cause of this thing that killed millions of people and kept billions of people locked down for several years"
"No, don't do that! Why do you even care about this, stop investigating it right now you racist conspiracy theorist!!!"
Be suspicious of people who really don't want you to investigate stuff.
Conspiracy theory patterns of thinking tend to lead away from the truth more often than towards it. "Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular reasoning." The superficial similarity with actual attempts to find truth (such as the scientific method) can fool others into following the conspiracy theorists down this path where "Do your own research" turns into, "play these videos on YouTube and then see where YouTube's suggestion algorithm takes you."
The Wikipedia page on conspiracy theories has plenty of information on the harm, both individual and societal, caused by conspiracy theories and that general type of thinking, along with 153 references you can follow up on, if you like.
This seems to just be a case of reversed stupidity not being intelligence. I still see no reason to update against, or for, a theory just because it sounds like a conspiracy.
How much harm, individual and societal, was caused by following the authorities? How many reasonable Jews obeyed the law right until their death during WW2? (see "The Pianist" for a really good illustration)
"I still see no reason to update against, or for, a theory just because it sounds like a conspiracy."
Quite. That's the vast difference between you and a conspiracy theory lover. Remember, you did ask originally, "What's not healthy about _loving_ conspiracy theories?"
Because it doesn't really matter all that much? Even if tomorrow it was shown beyond any reasonable doubt that COVID-19 had a natural origin, I would *still* think that gain-of-function research is a lot more dangerous than most people thought in 2019 and that it should be much more strictly regulated.
Hard agree. i used to think there are very few examples of truly dangerous research, and certainly no one was actually doing that research anyway, but that was a horribly mistaken view.
So while I agree that the cost-benefit analysis is obvious, and has been obvious basically forever, for some reason virologists don't seem to agree. (Look at the 2014 and 2016 symposia on gain-of-function research, for example.) If we can't agree on forecasts about the future, maybe we can hope to agree on stories about the past, and use them as our forecasts. [Obviously making your predictions about the future by thinking about the future is better, but coordination :( ]
I think if COVID-19 has a lab origin (even if just "oops it was a mistake to put all of the wild viruses we could find in a big city"), then it becomes likely that virology in the last few decades has killed more people than it's saved. I think if COVID-19 has a natural origin, then the retrospective view becomes non-obvious.
It matters geopolitically. Just as Chernobyl hastened the end of the Soviet Union, we could reasonably hope that if Covid-19 is shown to be the result of a massive Chinese Government fuckup and coverup that it might hasten the end of Communist rule in China.
Maybe that's overly hopeful but, hey, it couldn't hurt.
It doesn't matter if we know the truth about the lab leak hypothesis because there's no path from "we know it was a lab leak" to "the Chinese improve safety standards"
If it was a lab leak, the Chinese already know. Their best incentive for improving safety standards is "we caused a massive plague in our own country, and it's genuinely screwing us up".
"Other countries are mad at us" is a comparatively trivial reason for them. If they won't try to avoid a second plague for their *own* sake, they certainly won't do anything for anyone else's.
We might possibly be able to put enough pressure on to make them lie convincingly about it.
My read of some of these revelations is that this is not really a chinese problem. The chinese only have a naturally occurring reservoir of disease. The US brought the know how (Baric), the middleman (Daszak), and probably the money (NIH, NSAID, DARPA) as well.
Sure there is? What kind of bizarre political rearguard statement is that? Bare minimum western governments and firms could (threaten or actually) pull all their experts and money out of that space. That would have SOME impact on Chinese behavior surely.
This almost seems like climate change deniers. Partisans fighting for a year against lab leak, then when they need to grudgingly admit it is possible, they shift to “doesn’t matter anyway”. They why was the party line so important for the last year?
There are 40X as many BSL labs in the US than are in China, and the worrying research at the WIV was paid for by Americans. If labs and this research goes from being subsidized to being taxed, this dramatically changes the landscape (and dramatically reduces risk, if labs are in fact net negative).
Yeah, amid all the speculation and hand-waving she did a great job of laying out exactly what standard of evidence would be required to conclusively show a natural origin.
It’s really helpful, I had no idea what the standard would be or had been and reading what was done for MERS and the first SARS was very interesting. The presence of antibodies in animals and then the presence of antibodies in people who spend time with those animals, at much greater likelihood than the general population. That’s neat.
I can come up with any gradation of conspiracy theory necessary for the different spins on “lab leak” (I admire your resistance there.) So having a standard for “zoonotic” is really good.
While there have been many developments since we published, I don't expect the conclusion to change once we update (hopefully soon).
The nice thing about a good probabilistic model is that it takes into account that some of the evidence will turn out to be wrong, and new evidence will come up, so you rarely get large swings in the likelihoods over time.
Note that as with most of our controversial conclusions, we offer a $100,000 challenge to anyone who can convince unbiased judges that a natural origin is more likely than a lab leak.
None of the experts confidently claiming "case closed", "dispositive evidence", or "99.99% zoonosis" have even inquired about the challenge, despite readers repeatedly pointing them to it. I believe this gives a much stronger indication of their true confidence than their public statements.
We are willing to reduce the stakes as low as $10,000 (or even 0) for applicants already involved in public debate on the issue. The high amount is to discourage time wasting. If we feel a debate with that applicant will promote rationality, we'll gladly do it.
Counterparty risk is negligible. Money will be in escrow.
Yes, we are open to using criteria other than a judged debate, but its conditional probability needs to be roughly equal for both sides. For example "Within 2 years China convicts the scientist responsible for the leak" is not a good one.
Hey Saar, big fan of your work! Rootclaim is awesome.
The $100,000 challenge sounds interesting. Reminds me of the famous James Randi million dollar prize for anyone who could demonstrate a paranormal ability in a legit experiment (of course nobody ever could do it).
Don’t you think the BANAL sequences indicate the analysis of bat/pangolin cohabitation isn’t very relevant, and in particular sars-cov2 could have come from recombination of two bat viruses?
Also, an idle question: if I wanted to challenge you and I think the evidence is more consistent with a 50-50 natural/lab credence, how would you propose deciding who wins? I’m not likely to actually challenge you, I’m just curious.
Definitely. The 'chimera' section in our analysis is no longer relevant. It's normal for some evidence in a Rootclaim analysis to be found as wrong later on. What hasn't happened yet is for a whole analysis to fail. That's the advantage of probabilistic inference over logical inference.
In this case, once we update the analysis I expect the new evidence (for all hypotheses) to compensate for that, and for the likelihoods to remain about the same, but we won't know for sure until it's done.
I really like the format and the amount of work you put into the analysis.
But I do think that the magnitude of a lot of the updates are out of proportion to the presented levels of evidence, and I do think that some of the analysis is prey to a lack of understanding of the underlying biology. These two factors come together strongly in the furin cleavage site section, which I would consider as a ÷5 for bioweapon and even for everything else.
I'm curious, did you have anyone with a strong background in virology and/or biological sequence analysis go through your analysis?
I think you misunderstood the effect analysis of the furin cleavage site. We're giving its existence zero effect, and all the effect is due to it being cleanly inserted rather than mutated, and for using the rarest codons.
As to virology background: Rootclaim is about mapping the existing claims made by experts into a probabilistic framework. Think of it like a judge and expert witnesses. We therefore try to avoid original research. When we do feel it is required, we will consult top experts.
From the review: "According to the US Federal Select Agent Program, which oversees the possession and handling of dangerous biological agents and toxins, there were 219 accidental releases of these 'select agents' in 2019. So, while accidental lab leaks are uncommon, they’re not unheard of."
Am I mis-reading this sentence? Because "uncommon" doesn't seem quite how I would describe over 200 accidental releases per year.
One needs the denominator. The list of items dubbed 'dangerous biological agents and toxins' is quite long and includes multiple naturally occurring pathogens that are found, suspected, or tested for across the country. When one adds testing reagents to the list, the *potential* for bad handling gets surprisingly common.
So I should think of this as I do the ~400 pool drowning per year in the US? Given the number of *opportunities* 200 'select agents' accidental releases in a year is still uncommon?
Yes, exactly. Also nearly all of those "select agent" accidental releases are immediately contained and do not cause any outbreak of anything. Accidental releases that cause outbreaks are even more rare (but still not unheard of).
Eh. I am more dubious on this point, esp considering that China had SARS1 slip out on them more than once.
Both accidents in handling and disease resulting from accidents in handling are more common than one might think, and this was (imo) grossly downplayed in the initial days of the outbreak. Denying the possibility of error by institutions doesn't create a universe where errors are not made by institutions.
(To clarify for the casual listener, this wasn't the huge outbreak in the early 00's, but a smaller one later.)
On edit: it sounds like I am saying one thing and then an opposite thing. Lab release accidents are rare in terms of opportunities and probably not even a daily occurrence, world wide. But they do happen more than once a week and should always be considered a potential player in outbreaks.
I'm not really sure this matters. We aren't trying to evaluate risk *per unit of agent handling*; we're trying to see how reasonable it is to suppose that "this thing happened during a given time period".
That is, if we had 200 potentially catastrophic impact events forecast for the next year, we don't care if impact events are rare *relative to the number of asteroids* in the solar system -- 200 might be a pretty low rate if there are 500,000 similarly-sized celestial bodies flying by without impacting; but in absolute terms, it's not at all uncommon, and there's no reason to penalize any hypothesis that suggests "maybe this happened before too".
(I mean, obviously in that case the evidence wouldn't really be possible to ignore, but it's just an analogy, all right.)
Note that this includes toxins. If I spill botulinum toxin or tetrodotoxin somewhere, that's bad and might get people killed, but it's not self-replicating so there's literal zero chance of an epidemic.
Also, there are a lot of diseases that can kill or sicken you but that don't spread well among humans in reasonably-hygienic conditions (e.g. anthrax, which spreads dead-to-living and is thus only an epidemic risk if corpses are routinely lying around in the street for hours/days - which implies Bigger Problems - or the zillion "abattoir diseases" (leptospirosis, bruscellosis, Q fever...) which you can get easily from working with animals but which humans don't transmit to other humans).
“Accidental release” doesn’t mean an outbreak - it could mean one person infected, or one person spilled it on their skin and didn’t get infected, or one person dropped a beaker in a clean room and it didn’t get on anyone, and maybe even someone using the pipet a second time when they weren’t supposed to.
This is a GREAT review. FYI, I work in an organization directly affected by the pandemic-I spent hundreds of extra hours supporting people responding directly to the pandemic., so I have a bit of an inside view (with all the good and bad that brings). As best I can tell, this is an even-handed, insightful review. Thanks!
Thanks for the kind words! If you liked the review, I also recommend checking out the book itself. It's quite good, although I recommend it with the caveat that it should be read in combination with more pro-natural-origins sources to get a balanced view.
The closing of the cave - a sign that the Chinese themselves suspected the source of their Wuhan samples was the source of (ETA: some version of) the virus, and not the wet market?
I'm not sure. It might be because they suspected the lab leak hypothesis to be correct, but it could also just be regular authoritarian behavior where they're covering up anything that could possibly make them look bad.
An interesting point in the book is that the Chinese government also engaged in coverup attempts during the SARS1 pandemic in 2003, even though that pandemic had a natural origin. So I don't think we can necessarily take coverup attempts as evidence for a lab leak.
The CIA has been suspected of doing this sort of thing as well, launching coverups for things that they weren't actually involved in, because the higher ups couldn't be sure whether they were involved or not.
I think it's just the behavior of many totalitarian states, where any information related to COVID (in this case) was suppressed and classified. They didn't carefully evaluate what each piece of evidence might mean, or guess what could be found. They just hid it all, and punished anyone trying to find out for themselves. Like the Soviet Union and Chernobyl (or anything related to nuclear power, or the military, or many other things).
The geospatial analysis studies are amazing in all the worst ways. Note one of the coauthors on the latest preprint is Kristian Andersen, who (imho) is intent on releasing one misleading study after another to disprove lab origin, but only after: 1) emailing Fauci in early 2020 to express serious concerns COVID-19 has hallmark signs of engineering; 2) joining a private Fauci-convened call with virologists, the majority of whom expressed private concerns this was probably engineered (notes from the call redacted); 3) days later doing a 180 and saying this absolutely couldn't have been engineered because a) pangolins and b) the spike protein isn't what his computer model would've optimized for; 4) receiving millions in subsequent NIH grants; 5) deleting all his tweet history after being called out for hypocrisy and inconsistencies, then claiming he didn't do it but rather Twitter autodeleted his tweets (as they do...?)
I don't know much about Kristian Andersen specifically, but definitely a lot of scientists and public health officials have behaved unethically and incompetently throughout the pandemic.
Still, I think we need to judge the geospatial analysis on its merits, not on the past behavior of some of its co-authors. Unfortunately I don't know enough about the ascertainment bias issue to know which side is right about it.
Normally, one judges a scientific study based on the assumption that the authors are telling the truth - they may be wrong, but they are not deliberately committing scientific fraud.
Should that still be the assumption if @Ido's claim above is correct?
Why should we not just assume this is someone who changed their mind after seeing evidence, and then had some bad behavior on Twitter as even the best of Twitter users are wont to do?
"I guess what I’m trying to say here is that scientific institutions, though probably not as bad as Wall Street"
I'm afraid you got it exactly backwards. A finance guy would have some incentive to lie to you (and themselves) about regulation, but the incentive is mildish as impact of stricter regulations would be distributed over whole industry and unlikely to be devastating to him personally. However scientific institutions have (or feel) their reputation and whole livelihood is tied to being correct on these single issues you are interested in and a good share of people in such situations will do whatever it takes to be "right".
Yeah, I think this has been the main lesson for me from the pandemic. People working for companies have lots of checks on their behavior. Look at Elizabeth Holmes. Bad science and she got caught and punished eventually (sort of). There's incentives to be dishonest of course, but also lots of incentives to be honest. Not just those imposed by governments but also the obvious one that if your science is a lie, the products you build won't work.
Public science has very similar incentives to be dishonest - money, fame, career growth, not having to admit to failure - but there are no incentives to be honest. All the systems that keep private sector workers in check are just missing here. There are no regulators, no court cases filed by defrauded investors, no science police, and of course no bankruptcy.
So we get these incredible levels of corruption, where people like Fauci, Birx, Ferguson etc are willing to just constantly lie to the entire world, on camera, in writing etc. And they get away with it, every time. Acts that would put people in prison if they were company CEOs have no outcomes whatsoever when it comes to government science.
The reality here lies in direct contradiction with the perception of the public, or at least large parts of the public, who seem to assume that if there's no profits involved then there's no corruption. They don't see it as a balance between incentives to be bad and good, but rather a binary switch labelled "company" in which if it's on, there's corruption and if it's off, there's none at all. It's a broken worldview and it's been incredibly destructive.
Pick up any box of standard paper masks. Not the N95s, the standard blue ones. I promise you nowhere on the box will it advertise the product as being capable of preventing, mitigating or slowing the spread of covid. On the three boxes I managed to track down in my house, the strongest claim I could find was the so-vague-as-to-be-meaningless "will block some harmful bacteria". In an era when every (publicly promoted) public health official was swearing up and down that even paper and cloth masks could substantially slow the spread of covid, why were these masks never advertised in those terms?
Because unlike public statements made by health officials, advertising, or at least advertising of many medical products, has to meet certain minimum standards of evidence and if any of those manufacturers claimed to be offering a covid-mitigation product they'd have the shirt sued and fined off their back. That was one thing that was striking to me about the pandemic; Health officials making sweeping statements about the efficacy of various techniques and products that the manufacturers of those products would never dare make, because the FDA would smack them down in a heartbeat if they tried.
A few notes on the points mentioned in the review that touch on the object-level origin debate:
I believe that it isn't that unlikely for diseases to spread long distances like COVID would have had to if it started in the countryside. Poor towns in rural China probably do not get many out of town visitors, so an epidemic could slowly work its way through the countryside until someone visits the city and starts a large outbreak. If I recall correctly, something like this did happen for at least one previous epidemic ( Ebola? Mers?). Relatedly, Wuhan may be far in absolute distance from those remote provinces, but there are not a lot of cities in Western China. Wuhan is not the closest big city, but it is one of the closer ones. And of course, as you note, 96.8% isn't that close--there are almost certainly many, many relatives of the viruses that have already been found in the wild hanging out in caves throughout the countryside, totally undiscovered.
The Furin Cleavage Site doesn't exist in all coronaviruses, but it exists in enough of them (and doesn't exist in others) that it probably evolved multiple times, so it wouldn't be surprising to appear on another one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165
Yes there are certainly some non-lab routes that the virus could have taken to Wuhan (a sick person traveling from the countryside, a wild animal being illegally traded). At the same time, we know for a fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had research expeditions to the Yunnan / Laos area where similar viruses are found and brought back samples. So there are also some lab-relates routes the virus could have taken (getting sampled and leaking, or infecting a researcher in the field who got sick and brought it back). As far as I know, none of these scenarios can currently be ruled out.
1. Wuhan is Eastern - Central China. It is not remotely Western China.
2. There is plenty of traffic between small Chinese villages, larger towns, and larger cities. All of these small areas are either tourist traps or make their money in agriculture or cottage industries with products being trucked to and sold in the big cities.
b. If you are not planning a straight drive to Wuhan but it is more normal diffusion of people, etc. you would expect the route to have been via Chongqing and likely Jingzhou or via Guiyang or Nanning and Changsha.
I wouldn't focus overly much on the specific location of the Mojiang mine. All it shows is that there are places in rural areas where natural spillover might occur. The Mojiang virus seems to have had a much higher fatality rate than COVID, so I don't think anyone suggesting the miners literally had COVID. We don't have anywhere near a complete survey of all possible coronavirus reservoirs in the general region of Wuhan, and I think we would expect that undiscovered closer relatives of COVID exist somewhere.
The assumption seems to be that COVID started as a bat virus.
Wuhan certainly has bats - just about everywhere does - but it does not have big well known bat caves like that area of Southern China. Geology is different.
The SARS 1 pandemic started in Guangdong, which is about as far from Yunnan as Wuhan is. And COVID has a much lower fatality rate, so it is easier to inadvertently transport long distances. Whether it was carried by intermediate animals or humans traveling cross-country, it really is not very strong evidence that Wunan is far away from Southern China.
Many years ago, before COVID, I saw clouds of bats exiting a cave in Guangdong at dusk - it was a local attraction.
I do not know how much bats from different caves interact, but it seems quite reasonable that the bat populations of that entire band of caves are a single breeding ground for bat viruses with reasonably quick propagation through the entire population.
Those caves, as far as I know, do not extend up north to Wuhan. Certainly outside of Yunnan, Guangzi, and Guangdong I have never seen a bat cave or been told of one as an attraction.
That happened for HIV, which IIRC is believed to have spilled over from chimpanzees somewhere in Cameroon and then worked its way downriver to Kinshasa. But on the other hand we've been able to trace HIV back to at least an approximate spillover location and species decades after it happened!
The 2013-16 Ebola outbreak was thousands of kilometers from what had been the only known wild reservoirs. It turns out that some bats in west Africa had been harboring Ebola for almost a decade before then and a kid caught it when his family was out searching for bats.
It's now got to the point where I read this article, that seems to me like a perfectly reasoned and reasonable assessment of the evidence, and I'm clenching because the better it looks, the more I fear it's fooling me in some way. D'oh!
I guess the only conclusion is to strongly endorse the suggestion at the end: "What differentiates science from other ways of knowing is its self-correction mechanisms." If I had the technical expertise to pick my way painstakingly through each claim, I'd do it; I just have to be glad that someone somewhere is doing it, and is making their efforts public for the rest of us to verify.
Incidentally, this is the thing that Chinese politicians don't "get". They think their political censorship can be separated from the country's technical expertise, and that they can have a scientifically and technologically strong nation that loves the Party. They've make a lot of effort to realise this vision. But I can't help thinking that they're doomed to failure, because both scientific knowledge and the scientific process are messy and will spill over into politically sensitive areas. If they're chilled in those areas, the effects can be systemic.
No, we should not endorse claims about science "self correcting". It's nonsense, and unfortunately is one of the many thought-terminating clichés that academia has evolved to stop researchers asking difficult questions of each other (one of the other bad ones being "all models are wrong but some are useful").
Science is not self correcting. Write it out 100 times. When someone publishes a false or misleading scientific claim, someone else has to step up and start a fight about it. Every single time. Then they have to win that fight, and do so publicly, and then other scientific institutions and researchers have to recognize that a fight actually happened and who won, and then do something concrete to penalize the loser like firing them, retracting papers, and so on.
Science is not self correcting. Go read accounts of people who have tried to correct it explicitly and you'll find endless stories of despair and hopelessness. The system fights back. Universities, journals, foundations and really the entire public sector science system is totally oriented around reputation and one of the worst things that can happen to a reputation based institution is admitting that its staff are bullshitters and liars. So, they just never admit it, regardless of how compelling or clear the evidence is.
Science is not self correcting. It is not even explicitly "person with a grudge" correcting. It is an entirely unstable maelstrom of fake, irreproducible and deceptive claims made by people who know they are lying. Look at the field of virology. They were writing emails to each other saying SARS-CoV-2 looked "inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory" and then just days later signing an open letter saying anyone who said it wasn't natural was an evil conspiracy theorist. The fact that the public is now starting to realize they were lied to is NOT an example of self correction because, as the book and review point out, all the corrections here were issued by outsiders who were immediately driven to the margins and systematically banned by media and tech companies. Nothing about that process is in any way a credit to the institutions of science. Instead, it is a credit to the so-called "conspiracy theorists" who realized that there was, in fact, a conspiracy.
So, I think you're falling into the trap of imperfect=bad. Many of the examples you give look bad; some of them may actually be bad (though I'd need a lot more evidence than the third-hand claims of inconsistency that we see here, and you're really not helping your case by saying stuff that isn't true: no one signed a letter claiming that others were "evil conspiracy theorists").
But the fact that some scientists do bad things sometimes is not a reason to think that science as a project or activity is one way or another. The relevant question to ask is: compared to other human institutions, what does science (as it currently operates) do better, worse, differently, the same? And when you make that comparison, the differences seem pretty stark. Compared to governments or churches, science is much more open and able to correct itself. It's also much more creative. The arts are also creative, but by comparison, science is much more cumulative: we generally don't forget scientific basics in the way that scriptwriters seem to regularly forget the basics of storytelling. The most interesting comparison is perhaps with commercial organisations: also highly creative, also self correcting (corrected by market forces); the difference seems to me to be in the type of creativity. Product designers work within the space created for them by scientists and technologists; science seeks to expand that space.
Claims like "science is an entirely unstable maelstrom of fake...claims" are just overblown puff. Open up Science magazine, and you don't find that. If you think there's a maelstrom, you'll have to define it a lot more tightly.
"What differentiates science from other ways of knowing is its self-correction mechanisms."
I'd say that's half of it, and perhaps the lesser half.
Another huge difference is that science generally tries to avoid absolute truths and instead say things like "as best we can tell at the moment, X is more likely than Y" or even, "at this time we can't say whether X or Y is more likely." This not only is different from how, e.g., religion operates but is also in opposition to how the human brain operates; humans very much do not like "we don't know."
This is why science communication is so difficult. People who have trained themselves to be less uncomfortable with not knowing an answer can read scientific papers and statements in the way they were intended to be interpreted. People facing the public have to deal with the fact that if someone hears "one paper found a correlation between vaccines and autism; this has yet to be replicated" that may have large numbers of people rejecting vaccines for decades, even after the paper has been proven to be a complete fabrication.
I loved this book (and all books where Matt Ridley is involved) and after reading I am sure that the Wuhan virus was an accidental release of a gain-of-function strain created at the WIV. The furin cleavage site is just one of smoking gun pieces of evidence - what's the likelihood that a natural FCS would have the same two codons optimized for human expression rather than a random combination of codons? What's the likelihood that an FCS would naturally show up in a virus belonging to a group of viruses that normally do not have an FCS and that this virus would be found across the street from the one lab in the world that just a few years prior published articles on adding and removing FCSs to and from other viruses?
The wet market story was a part of the coverup right from the start. WIV of course knew about the leak as soon as one or more of their workers contracted a pneumonia very similar to the pneumonia seen in the Mojiang mine workers. The researchers were sloppy but not stupid and they went into emergency denial and coverup mode immediately, purging WIV databases and making up stories about the wet market that had nothing to do with their virus. Basically you cannot believe anything that came out of WIV or China in general regarding the Wuhan virus after October 2019, when the leak most likely occurred (or at least when the coverup started).
Read the whole book, it's very instructive, detailed and for me, absolutely convincing about the lab leak theory.
> what's the likelihood that a natural FCS would have the same two codons optimized for human expression rather than a random combination of codons? What's the likelihood that an FCS would naturally show up in a virus belonging to a group of viruses that normally do not have an FCS and that this virus would be found across the street from the one lab in the world that just a few years prior published articles on adding and removing FCSs to and from other viruses?
I don't know, what _is_ the likelihood? I don't know! Do you?
OK let's do some back of the envelope calculations:
-- what's the likelihood that a natural FCS would have the same two codons optimized for human expression rather than a random combination of codons? - two permutations out of 36 possible two codon combinations coding for Arg-Arg = 2/36= 0.055
-- What's the likelihood that an FCS would naturally show up in a virus belonging to a group of viruses that normally do not have an FCS - low. How low? I don't know but the class of coronaviruses that Covid-19 belongs to doesn't have an FCS and it doesn't happen every day that a virus acquires an FCS, so, low. Make it 0.1 (but it could be 0.001 for all I know)
- and that this virus would be found across the street from the one lab in the world that just a few years prior published articles on adding and removing FCSs to and from other viruses? Let's divide the population of Wuhan by the population of the world - 12.6 million/7.8 billion = 0.0016
OK, 0.055 x 0.1 x 0.0016 = 0.0000088. A simple multiplication since the probabilities are independent. That's the rough order-of-magnitude estimate of the probability that a coronavirus with this FCS would naturally show up in Wuhan. Check my math.
Also, there is a lot of additional evidence in favor of the lab-leak explanation, such as the absence of Covid immunity among the wet market workers in Wuhan (which is different from the situation with e.g. SARS, where immunity was found among workers exposed to civets), the suspiciously high binding constant of the Covid spike protein to its receptor (not expected in virus that just jumped to humans from pangolins or something but quite likely in a viral strain that was passaged through human cell lines and humanized mice, as in a standard gain of function approach) and other details.
And of course, the coverup. Almost all conspiracy theories are wrong but this one is not a conspiracy theory, it's a conspiracy fact, where at first WIV and then the full might of the Chinese government acted to suppress information, purge databases, and vilify and stigmatize whistleblowers.
BTW, have you heard that the Chinese government recently banned the sale of used lab animals to wet markets and other human consumption? Apparently enterprising Chinese lab managers used to sell used rabbits, dogs and other edible animals to restaurants and livestock dealers, for a little side income. Mindboggling.
You did the likelihood calculation assuming a single event. That sort of reasoning would also tell us that omicron is very unlikely to have arisen naturally, given the number of changes it has from earlier variants.
But if we think viruses are just out there evolving all the time, and we only notice them when they happen to hit on a combination that leads to quick spread, then some of those factors will disappear.
"the likelihood that an FCS would naturally show up in a virus belonging to a group of viruses that normally do not have an FCS" is the one I was most objecting to. We don't know how often furin cleavage sites show up and disappear in viral lineages (but given their distribution in apparent independent evolutions in other coronavirus lineages, it suggests that this isn't that uncommon - and particularly not if we control for the virus being one that we decided to pay attention to because of its human significance).
The two-codon thing also isn't clear, because people would likely point to several other two-codon pairs as striking in one way or another if they had showed up.
The third factor, about why Wuhan rather than somewhere else, is definitely the one factor that raises actual suspicion - though again, for standard statistical methodology, you'd want to ask not the probability of the virus appearing in Wuhan, but the virus appearing in some place that would make us comparably suspicious to Wuhan. (Presumably, at minimum, we would want to include Atlanta and the cities with former Soviet bioweapon programs.)
Another reason to separate the object-level issue from the institutional issue is our motivation to know / care about it. Whether the virus came from an animal or from a lab changes nothing in my life. I can’t make China change their laws and customs. But the question of whether our institutions are trustworthy impacts me very directly.
It’s pretty scary how low the level of trust is right now. You see those memes like, “What’s the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth?” “About six months”.
I think it’s not low enough in some ways, but way waay waaaaaay too low in others. The problem is that without expertise one doesn’t know how to separate these ways.
This does appear to be the primary point of interest, to such an extent it is hard for me to imagine that much unmotivated reasoning is possible here. The market versus leak debate becomes a proxy for an essentially unrelated and unresolvable conflict. Even if some all-knowing AI could tell us for sure that it came from a wet market that wouldn't make the institutions themselves trustworthy. Contrariwise, the same level of certainty that it was a lab leak and that the institutions in question lied wouldn't change the system.
Well sure, but investigating into how much they were lying would be helpful in figuring out how trustworthy these actors actually are or are not.
So its not like trying to find out more information about what happened is misguided.
It is actually very helpful to know if people can trust "virology" or the "CDC" or the Chinese science establishment, or whatever, quite apart from whether people in fact do or do not trust them (which seems very ideologically driven currently).
It's definitely not misguided, though I can't quite see how it's helpful except in an abstract moral sense of "knowing the truth is helpful". For folks who are already experts in virology and have some free time, it's a good thing to do.
There does seem to be one issue of either clarity or accuracy:
From review (section 5. Lack of institutional transparency and competence):
> Virus sample sequences from early COVID patients in China were originally uploaded to an online database, but later removed in an apparent attempt at obfuscation. However, evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom came up with a clever way to recover this data. [link to June 23, 2021 article]
>Probably the most important – the WIV had previously maintained a database of at least fifteen thousand bat samples, including the dates and locations of samples as well as information about the viruses found in them. This database was taken offline and its contents have not been shared with independent researchers since.
> On July 5, more than a year after the researchers withdrew the sequences from the Sequence Read Archive and two weeks after Dr. Bloom’s report was published online, the sequences were quietly uploaded to a database maintained by China National Center for Bioinformation by Ben Hu, a researcher at Wuhan University and a co-author of the Small paper.
These were two separate online databases -- the one recovered by Jesse Bloom and then quietly re-uploaded by Wuhan University was a database of early patient data from the beginning of the pandemic.
The other one, which was taken down and not shared since, was a database of viruses samples that had been collected from bats in the wild and stored at the WIV. THIS is the interesting one, because if that database were recovered and SARS-CoV-2 were found in it, that would basically be a smoking gun in favor of the lab-leak hypothesis, because it would confirm that SARS-CoV-2 was being studied at the WIV before the start of the pandemic. At the same time, if the WIV had simply left that database up, they could have easily proven that it wasn't a lab leak by showing that the database didn't contain SARS-CoV-2 -- but they didn't do that.
Thanks for the prompt clarification. Where can we read more about this still-missing database? Does it have a standardized name in English which would allow us to search for further discussion of it?
I think it would count more as an argument that stark terminology acts as a barrier to conversation.
It tickles the “lab-leak” cluster, but if the axis of debate had found a slightly different local minima to settle in, we might be arguing that it's evidence for the “humans interacting with wild animals” theory over the “test tubes and animal testing” theory.
>if the WIV had simply left that database up, they could have easily proven that it wasn't a lab leak by showing that the database didn't contain SARS-CoV-2 -- but they didn't do that.
Really? Would anybody trust them not to selectively delete compromising entries?
I think this is my favorite one so far. It's the first one that's been all of (a) well written, (b) on an interesting topic, and (c) (afaict) free of factual errors.
Its one real downside is that it didn't tell me much I didn't already know (though in fairness I've been at least somewhat tracking this debate already). I guess it could have managed that if it had explained some of the technical biology stuff, but maybe that's too hard to do for non-experts and would have gone over my head anyway.
I'm actually a semi-expert myself (computational biologist / data scientist -- not working on virology though), but I still have trouble making sense of the technical debates on this issue (sequence analysis of the furin cleavage site, for example). It's tough because they involve opposing, mutually exclusive claims made by experts on either side and I simply don't have enough time to go down all these rabbit holes to try to figure out who's right.
If people are interested though, I might write a follow-up post on my own blog after this book review contest is over, and maybe dive deeper into some of these technical issues. Even if I don't know which side is getting it right, I can at least try to summarize things and explain where the disagreement is.
Thanks! Worth noting that all of the prediction markets on this topic are about the behavior of institutions as it relates to the investigation -- so kinda related to the object-level question of where the virus came from, but not exactly.
Definitely refreshing to read the only review (so far) about a topic that's Completely Absolutely Undeniably No Refutability topical. Instead of the awkward shell game shoehorn of other reviews "well you see, this is *sort of* related to Russia and Ukraine, or climate change, or EA, or...etc". Those have been the weakest parts of several so far, the stretching-for-relevance, so it's nice not to have to do that here at all. Kind of like the South Park trope of every episode needing a Moral Lecture.
Of course, one trouble with reviewing recent history is not keeping up with the current Jones developments - but you did note those areas in the review, good on you. Otherwise there'd be a whole lot more critical comments already, heh. I like a review written thoughtfully enough to proactively address potential relevant criticism. Shows a good audience-model.
>This artificial scientific consensus was then picked up by tech companies, who used it to label discussion of the lab leak hypothesis as “misinformation”, as well as by media sources and fact checkers. I don’t want to get bogged down in all the convoluted details [...]
This was the most disappointing part for me; I'm unclear whether this was simply not a focus of the book at all, or just the author deciding not to review these (admittedly very-CW) aspects, but it's consistently been *the* most interesting part of the entire Covid Show. Watching - well, living through, in real time - the genesis of a Narrative, impervious to Facts or Criticism, the abuse of "fact checking", the new slur of "misinformation"...again and again and again, with so many people concluding This Is Fine, if they even noticed the smoke at all. Even a few in the Rationalist community, who did not call foul that this is not, in fact, the Way. Partisanship comes even to those who claim to be above it, when the stakes are high enough.
In other words, as some others have already commented, it doesn't really affect my life that much whether the origin is ultimately zoonotic or lab...but the erosion of institutional trust has had extreme ramifications, for me personally and also society-wide. I would still like an "autopsy" report on this failure-cascade at some point. The fact that it sure looks like these patterns are being repeated with monkeypox is not at all reassuring.
That being said, this was a well-written, comprehensive, factual, and even-handed (afaict, not an expert) summary of The Story So Far. Just a pretty solid book review, without any irritating writerly tics, needs-an-editor jankiness, or flat-falling humour. (It is entirely possible to write humour-lite without being academically dry!) I also very much appreciated the epistemic humility of admitting I Don't Know, especially coming from a somewhat-SME. There's a time and a place for big bold postulates and wild reaching claims, but I think still-ongoing history isn't one of those times and places. Can't remember who said it first, but if we know anything about covid, "covid is where intuition goes to die". When constant surprises are the name of the game, it's probably ideal-payoff to hedge on uncertainty, rather than double down or appeal to experts who might well turn out quite biased. Good job, I now have 3 potential finalists to decide my vote between.
Thanks! Yeah I was considering writing more about unreliableness of American institutions on this question, but then I was thinking that will just be too many rabbit holes and the review would turn into a series of 1000-page books or something.
The book (Viral) has a lot about it though, so I recommend checking it out.
If someone withholds, alters, or destroys evidence, as a matter of science, we don't know what the evidence is and can't update our theory. As you said, maybe the person destroys evidence for other reasons.
But in the law, which is the search for truth in messy human affairs, there is a rebuttable presumption that the evidence is bad for the person who did the destroying (it's called "spoliation" if you want to look it up).
If they also offer up an explanation that turns out to be false, the inference becomes stronger.
This approach could lead to the wrong answer, so it should be tempered, but shouldn't we shift the burden this way?
I'm actually not sure. It could be the nature of authoritarian governments to simply cover up anything that could have any potential to make them look bad. So if the Chinese government thought there was maybe 5% chance it was a lab leak, that might still have been enough for them to engage in a coverup.
I think it’s worth looking at the behavior of China’s government in semi-similar national security matters.
For example, in 2001, a Chinese J-8II interceptor jet was performing unsafe manouevres around a US EP-3 turboprop signals intelligence aircraft (for non-aerospace experts, jets colliding with turboprops are almost always the fault of the jet due to their relative agility), resulting in the J-8II crashing and the EP-3 being forced to perform an emergency landing on Hainan Island.
Despite being obviously guilty, China refuses to take any responsibility for the crash, and continues to laud their deceased pilot as a hero.
In 1999, during the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia (Serbia) CIA incompetence led to the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing 3. The US officially apologized for this accident, declassified and investigates the lead-up to it, and provided reparation to China and the victims.
China continues to believe, apparently genuinely, that the bombing was an intentional act by the United States.
What I aim to show here with these examples are two things.
First, China will never, ever admit to any degree of guilt or incompetence regarding their handling of the coronavirus pandemic, regardless of whether it came from a lab or from a zoonotic event. Covid-19 is too internationally embarassing for them to do so, just as the Hainan Island incident was.
Second, China defaults to assuming that other countries are inherently hostile towards it. It does not believe that impartial investigation is possible. Rather, anything that harms China must have been an intentional act against China. Hence, investigations into the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from China’s perspective, are obvious attacks on China’s reputation as a nation, rather than the truth-gathering efforts Western nations view them as.
So, even if there was a 0% chance that the WIV was responsible for releasing Covid-19, there is still a strong possibility that Chinese paranoia, and the desire to distract from their early mismanagement of the pandemic, would lead them to lie about it. From our perspective, this makes China look guilty. But China believes the West has already decided on its guilt, and the only court remaining is public opinion.
Going a step further, the Chinese government isn't a unified entity with well-defined estimates of probabilities of things. The people whose job it is to cover things up (which is, to first approximation, everybody) needn't have the least idea what the relevant probabilities are, they will just attack anyone who says anything bad about the government, whether it's a wacky implausible theory that's ~0% likely to be true or an established historical fact that's ~100% likely to be true.
This is actually a standard trope in mystery novels. Someone has an alibi early on. Then there are holes in their alibi so the reader starts to suspect them. But then it turns out they are covering up something embarrassing and incriminating that is unrelated to the murder.
Those sorts of situations happen in real life fairly commonly. People get caught lying to cops or investigators because they're trying to cover up a marital affair. Then they have to deal with the affair and the lie at the same time.
Yes, I agree. I was not calling the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory in the review, just noting that it was commonly called one by other people in the beginning of the pandemic.
The desperate urge for people who were not members of either the Wuhan lab or one of its controlling agencies to want to pooh-pooh the leak hypothesis is an interesting sociological phenomenon in itself.
Good review and thoughts. On the question of rationality and how to update priors, it seems like there's a missing admission here that your priors were wrong at the start, and although you updated on this specific issue you haven't done any updating of the original bad priors that led you astray.
By the way: "When people talk about trusting the experts, I think they mean trusting people with technical expertise over people without technical expertise"
I don't think that's what it means. When people talk about trusting the "experts" they're using the word "expert" in a very limited way to mean, essentially, public sector bureaucrats or academics. Obviously the two groups overlap significantly. Any people with expertise that is NOT one of those groups, or which contradicts them, is simply dismissed immediately. Thus we can see that exhortions to "trust experts" or "follow the science" are in reality just leftist demands to obey public sector pseudo-intellectuals regardless of merit; the same problem that leftism has had since it first emerged.
An example of this is when it was discovered early on in the pandemic that epidemiological models were never validated against reality, and the Prof Ferguson Imperial College model was filled with programming errors. Or phrased another way, that academic epidemiology appeared to lack technical expertise. Many professional modellers and programmers from the private sector stated flat out that the Ferguson model was so incompetently made that it was broken to the point of worthlessness, creating entirely different predictions every time it was run even when all inputs were supposed to be controlled. But these claims were completely ignored by the media, government and academia, and in fact were swiftly suppressed via (yet another) academic conspiracy in which ICL found a corrupt academic at Cambridge to claim that he'd tested the model and found the outputs to be replicable. In fact the report he issued (never peer reviewed or submitted to any journal) stated that none of the results he got were the same but he considered the model replicable because the "trends" were the same.
Part of why this happens is that academics are able to talk to the press very freely. Every other kind of expertise works for organizations that long ago learned that the press aren't really trustworthy, and so are banned from talking to the media or can only do so after their statements are vetted very carefully. So journalists end up relying on academics to rapidly provide quotes on any topic, and lend their stories the aura of gravitas and specialist knowledge, but people see through it and so trust in the media falls. Falling trust in science itself is lagging behind but now catching up as people realize that when scientists claim the media is distorting what they said, it's not really true and the root source of the false claims is the academics themselves.
>>>When people talk about trusting the "experts" they're using the word "expert" in a very limited way to mean, essentially, public sector bureaucrats or academics.
It seems to me that the old saying about being "unable to see the wood for the trees" might apply here. A novel virus arise thousands of kilometers from its natural home in Yunnan. But just a few hundred meters from an institute of virology that just happens to study that kind of virus, that has brought hundreds of samples back from Yunnan, one of which is a close genetic match, and which happens to conduct research into gain of function which includes changing the viral genome to make it better at infecting humans, including inserting an FCS, which is not found in other coronaviruses? And did so with grants from an American organisation that led the crusade in advance of any investigation to declare the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory?
Now we can wait for a full investigation (which we all know will never be permitted by the Chinese government), update our priors all day long, and avoid theorising in advance of the evidence. But if I asked you to bet on one side or the other here, would you really bet that it's all a string of the most unlikely co-incidences? I'm not a gambling man, but I can see the odds here. Those aren't just trees: they are together, a wood.
Furin cleavage sites are found in about half of coronaviruses, on many different branches of the family. No known coronaviruses in the immediate family of this one are known to have them, but they are known to have ended up independently in many different branches.
Excellent post. A lot of people in the comments are using the phrase "conspiracy theory" to describe the lab leak and cover-up, but to me that doesn't require much conspiracy. And if somebody came up to me wearing a tin-foil hat talking about an accidental lab leak, I would think "you need more interesting sources".
Actually I'm a bit surprised nobody here has posted a real tin-foil hat conspiracy theory about COVID origins, so in the interest of completeness here's one: what if COVID was deliberately released in Wuhan by a non-chinese malicious actor, with the intention of making it look like a lab leak from the WIV? If somebody did want to release a bio-weapon, Wuhan would be a natural choice because the WIV provides such a convenient scapegoat. With the virus origin unknown, the CCP would likely still engage in the same censorship we saw. And the more people argue about lab leak vs natural origin, the more our hypothetical bio-terrorist would be able to slink back into the shadows.
I don't know how likely that scenario is - more than 5% chance? - but it's worth keeping in mind that the space of possible origins is large, and P(lab leak) + P(natural origin) adds up to less than 1.
Culling their pensioners to save money? - Ok, that also "explains" why they still use the subpar vaccine sinovac. Plus not really pushing all - or at least the elderly -to take it. - But then, why all this extreme and expensive lockdowns in Shanghai et al.? - Anyway, they just "lost" 100 million Chinese due to over-counting. https://twitter.com/fuxianyi/status/1545668143816839170 via Tyler Cowen
And a motive that’s based on news from China that’s getting more popular in the mainstream (their demographic issue).
Now I simply explain off evidence against in ways that are impossible to verify. Covid has already done it’s primary job, the extreme lockdowns are authoritarian practice runs on controlling large populations (maybe if future cullings get out of hand) with Covid just being a plausible excuse.
> Viral was published November 16, 2021, nearly two months after the discovery of BANAL-52 was published. [...] It’s completely unacceptable that BANAL-52 wasn’t mentioned.
Two months before publication mean almost certainly that the book was already off to the printer. Sorry, but production times in the book publication industry are usually quite long, and it's completely unreasonable to expect consideration of research that comes in so shortly before publication.
Methinks you characterize the claims of "conspiracy" too broadly.
Associated with the "lab leak" rhetoric was often the implication or outright claim that a leak was deliberate.. Which in turn was often associated with "big Pharma" conspiracy-mongering.
That was part of what the "conspiracy" claims were directed at, and often there was a spillover effect, where more limited arguments about an unintentional lab leak were mixed in with arguments about a deliberate one.
I think it's also important to discuss the importance of not alienating scientists in China, given the large risks associated with virus spread from China and in particular because of the huge animal trade there. Many assume that pushback against the lab leak argument was merely because of CYA, and I think for much of the scientific community much of the concern was legitimately because of the need to maintain strong institutional collaboration.
Based on your comment, I doubt further discussion will net much that's positive, but here goes one try.
> Not so much "often" as "virtually one hundred percent of the time." Assuming good faith behavior on the part of the censors is a bridge too far; they are entitled to none of that consideration
I remember plenty of reactjon specifically to the intentional leak rhetoric, but regardless the spillover effect was real and meaningful.
I'm not a fan of the "censorship" rhetoric as I think there's a lot of space between "censorship" and legitimate reasons for private sector enterprises to enforce their terms of service agents for a variety of reasons. The "censorship" rhetoric obliterates any of that legitimacy in ways I don't think constructive.
> What value is there in strong institutional collaboration with people who you know aren't telling the truth about the most important question under discussion?
It stands to reason here are plenty of Chinese scientists and Chinese scientific institutions who are in good faith working on complex issues here. Triangulation of them (and anti-china fear-mongering) will only push dangerous negative dynamics even deeper.
Here's a discussion of the significant implications, imo, if you're interested
> but I'd counter that once we're talking about oligopolistic mechanical control over social interaction,..
That doesn't seem a very reasonable description to me. People have been able to get their opinions out all variety of ways. Just because people feel "censored" doesn't make it so. Imo, a lot of pearl clutching about censorship amounts to agenda-convenient self-victimization, that exploits and trivializes a real problem in many places in the world. Some of the people claiming to be so damaged by censorship are some of the most powerful people in the world with the longest reach on the most powerful platforms. They are among the least silenced and powerless people who have ever lived on the planet. Of course,.slippery slopes exist and suboptimal events occur and overreach does happen - but to make this some kind of systemic and injustice is counterproductive in multiple ways, imo.
And blurring distinctions to equate government censorship with a private enterprise exercising a terms of agreement, again, I think obliterates important aspects. For example, Twitter can exercise its right to control its use to protect or satisfy its customer base and its competitive advantage...
> There's also the side note that much of the "enforcement of terms of service" that's been done lately has been in close collaboration with the government.)
When government has excessive influence on that problem it becomes problematic, but hyperbolic advocacy out of self-interest has greatly complicated that assessment.
> "We need to engage with them in good faith, not push them away" in practice is always implemented as "let's be chumps and ignore them kicking us in the junk over and over again."
I think that's way too categorical and uniform and unnuanced to even engage with with much effort.
Listen to the pod of you're interested. Looking aside your sweeping generalizations (that I think are too hyperbolic to merit interogation) which cross myriad domains, I think a good case is made from an informed perspective why cooperation, in this specific context, could be important.
At some point a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.
Yeah, if you've been kicked off Facetwitterstagram and dropped by your hosting provider and payment processor you can still, I dunno, thumbtack your manifesto to a telephone pole.
Again, bypebole. Your arguments is like there was no way to voice opinions before social media, which is used in limited ways by a limited section of the public.
> But can you in good faith claim that such a person's views haven't been suppressed by an effectively hegemonic force?
Yes, if I don't see some grand unification into a "hegemonic force," and simply observe there are myriad other ways to communicate an opinion. In my experience, most people arguing on social media aren't actually trying to engage in actual discussion anyway. They're mostly just confirming biases by back-slapping with their buds about what idiots the people that disagree with them are. And getting comments edited, or even getting banned, fits perfectly with the tribalistic, self=victimizing view of the world. I will admit my perspective is colored by years of seeing people clutch pearls from feinting couches about CENSORSHIP!!!!!!!!! from having a blog proprietor delete their obnoxious, trolling comments. But I think that the pattern mostly holds.
. I submit that you cannot. "There's always some way to get your message out, so no worries" _simply is not true_.
> First off, how does that mean they're not damaged?
How do you define "damage." No, it doesn't mean that they don't experience a consequence. Pass the violin.
> And second, this isn't about the big names anyway, even if they do have valid complaints. Jordan Peterson will be fine. Random nobodies? They can, and are, unpersoned at the press of a button.
"Unpersoned?" I'm not sure exactly what the definition of "unpersoned" might be - but I'm sure that being booted off Twitter wouldn't match my definition. I dunno, it really seems awfully dramatic and hyperbolic to me. And again, I'm not saying that there aren't any issues - but your rhetoric seems to me to embody pretty much the overwrought rhetoric that I think obscures the real issues at hand.
> And oddly these slopes and suboptimal events and overreach all seem to go in the same direction, exactly unlike how you'd expect if it really was just random screwups. Huh. Weird.
Again, the arguments by assertion that seem overwrought to me. By what standard do you determine that the ALL go in "the same direction?" For one example (of many), implied in that assumption is that there is NO collective gain or valid reason to boot anyone off Twitter. You're certainly entitled to such a view - but it just doesn't seem very useful to me.
> As a side note, I find it very strange how arbitrary and non-negotiable terms of service written up by gigantic unaccountable megacorporations have suddenly become regarded as laws of nature or even Papal encyclicals that no one is allowed to have an issue with.
See above regarding your rhetoric.
> I think my sweeping generalizations are extremely relevant. Don't tell me with a straight face that the problem with how we've faced China over the past couple of decades is that we've not been supine _enough_.
I guess I just clearly have a different view regarding the net effect of such measures as "strategic ambiguity" vis-a-vis the alternatives. It's certainly not that I'm going to claim that they're some overwhelming success in all regards, but I think there are certainly many plausible counterfactual scenarios where alternative approaches might certainly have netted far worse outcomes.
Again, given your rhetoric, I don't see much room for meaningful exchange here. As I said above, you're entitled to your views but they seem to me to be so categorical and hyperbolic that at this point it makes sense for me to let it drop.
For some reason edits won't stick when I save them. So I can't correct the typos and such - but I don't think any are terribly important with the exception of
"they are among the silenced..."
Should be
"they are among the LEAST silenced..."
Ah, they did stick when I want back and completely refreshed.
This is one of the things that frustrates me about the whole debate. Endless charity for anyone except the American "elites". Then it's just innuendos and cherrypicking and taking things out of context.
I think I have a second order Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. Whenever I've seen attacks on the media and bothered to investigate it, the claims about what "the media" said are usually false, or at best misleading. Often, the media piece being attacked comes across as more nuanced and reasonable than the one doing the attack! Even Scott is a perpetrator of this.
Yes. "The media" is an easy target, I suppose in some part because you can make that reference without (1) needing to be specific and (2) calling out any one person in particular.
What I find particularly notable is that advocates on both sides of some issues blame bias on the part of "the media" for public opinions not matching their own preferences. Climate change is a good example; advocates on either side blame "the media" (or "the MSM") for public climate demial" or "alarmist hysteria," respectively
I saw a talk by a member of the WHO team in the early days of the pandemic. They were definitely extremely frustrated about not getting access to any actual evidence, and I think some of the premature definiteness of the WHO report can be put down to "we have to say something/absence of evidence is evidence of absence" type failures.
That said, one point that the WHO team member brought up that I haven't seen discussed much is that there are biomarkers for viruses raised in labs that aren't just biomarkers for genetic manipulation. In particular, viruses kept alive in cells in petri dishes often have adaptations specific to fitness in that environment, which can stick around when the virus makes the leap to humans, and COVID-19 lacks those biomarkers.
Since this was pretty early in the pandemic, I don't know whether this argument has since been refuted, though. Anyone know more?
> "So what should we make of this? Well, as I mentioned before, RaTG13 is no longer the closest known genetic match to SARS-CoV-2, so maybe the whole story is less important as it pertains to the origin of the pandemic. But the discovery of BANAL-52 doesn’t really resolve things either [2]. Laos is very far away from Wuhan (actually even further than Yunnan), so we’re left with the same question as before – how did SARS-CoV-2 make it all the way to Wuhan from such a distant natural reservoir without leaving a trail along the way?"
I'm not an expert by any means, but this looks like a standard sample bias issue. Most Chinese caves are not sampled in search of coronaviruses. This was, but only because of the unlikely event of miners getting sick. If natural reservoirs for viruses are not uniformly sampled, closely related viruses aren't going to show up where they are, but where research has been conducted. Probably this have been said already.
Regarding the issue of the virus being first detected in Wuhan. I wouldn't be so sure as to consider this as unlikely or suspicious. IIRC, for unexposed populations SARS-CoV-2 had an R0 of about three, but most people won't transmit the virus to 3 new hosts, in fact the mode was closer to 0 and the mean was driven up by a small number of superspreader events. The virus may have self extinguished in the countryside and only picked up momentum in a large hub like Wuhan.
Even if there was an earlier or simultaneous rural outbreak outside Wuhan, the combination of asymptomatic/mild cases with the virus causing symptoms similar to other respiratory viruses would have made it more likely to be discovered, as a new illness, in Wuhan.
I’m not even close to having a working knowledge of virology let alone and expert, and please correct me if I’m wrong and I’ll delete the comment. But I believe you grossed over a pretty important aspect of the “cleavage site” in that there may have been a grant that was rejected for the WIV to research inserting the cleavage sites into bat corona viruses in the couple of years prior to the outbreak. The idea seems to be that they went ahead with this research anyway, otherwise it would be an insane coincidence.
I believe it was Alina Chan who said something along the lines of “imagine if there was a rejected proposal in a city to put horns on horses, then a year later unicorns started showing up right down the street from the lab that was supposed to be doing this research. It could be a strange coincidence, or more likely they did the research anyway.” Since the “cleavage site” had never been found in nature the comparison isn’t much of a stretch.
Did I hear this correctly or am I talking out of my ass? Lol I believe it was on Coleman Hughes podcast over a year ago and I haven’t revisited this topic.
As this paper points out, infection of humans is largely dependent on the cleavage site--which is presumably why gain of function research was interested in it. Hence, any coronavirus found in nature with a similar mutation... wouldn’t be found in nature. It would be another pandemic.
So the useful analogy isn’t “imagine if there was a rejected proposal in a city to put horns on horses, then a year later unicorns started showing up right down the street from the lab that was supposed to be doing this research.”
This overstates the rarity of the cleavage site, as well as the unlikeliness it could evolve on its own. It’s important to remember evolutionary pressures to infect humans are just as powerful--if not more so--than human engineering. This is the counterargument against teleological creationism, and applies similarly here.
A better analogy would be “a proposal to increase the lethality of lions on human analogues is rejected. A year later, several lions in the vicinity begin to attack humans.” Lions attacking humans isn’t unheard of, or particularly surprising. It is a tad unusual for something to occur so close to this city, but again, not enough to dismiss the possibility of coincidence. The behavior analogue is important here, because we are used to animal behavior changing quite rapidly, but we imagine evolution must be slower. However, viral evolution is often a great deal faster than changes in even human behavior.
It’s a classic case of observer bias. We struggle to observe pandemics capable of infecting humans before they start, but we observe a lot of diseases not capable of infecting humans. This does not mean that all pandemics must be man-made, though neither is it evidence none are.
Ok I get what you’re saying, excuse my ignorance on the subject. So if they finally found that 99% closest relative before it made it jump to humans it wouldn’t contain the cleavage site, because the cleavage site is itself the reason it’s transmissible to humans. Makes sense. That definitely lowers the salience of the concern i was echoing, but I still think it bears mentioning, even if the lion analogy is the correct one.
However, isn’t it possible that the unicorn analogy is still relevant if there are more specific aspects of the virus’s biology related to the cleavage site that stand out, rather than just the mere existence of the cleavage site? I am not at all equipped to answer. I will try to find both the original source of the quote and the time stamp where I heard it! It may have actually been on “the realignment” podcast with saager enjeti of breaking points, and the man was quoting Alina Chan.
I think it’s fine to consider this weak evidence in favor of the Lab Leak Theory, and update accordingly. Unfortunately, the Chinese government, either out of paranoia or active desire to hide guilt, has likely destroyed all of the best evidence, whether exculpatory or damning.
FCSs do emerge in other distantly related coronaviruses, but it is unique to the pandemic virus across all SARS-like viruses discovered to date. Moreover, we know that scientists, including at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had developed an interest in inserting novel cleavage sites into novel coronaviruses (and SARS-like viruses) they found at least as early as 2015. In this sense, it's like saying that there are other 4-legged horse-like mammals with horns, so is a horse with a horn actually unexpected? Especially if the first time we see one is in a city where the scientists said they were putting horns on horses in the lab? It's not impossible that there are some very rare SARS-like viruses in nature that have such an FCS insertion in their spike - so rare that they're currently beyond detection. However, it seems very coincidental that this SARS-like virus with a unique FCS decided to show up in the one metropolitan hub where there is a lab experimenting with unique FCSs in novel SARS-like viruses.
I also think it's important for people outside of research to understand how we write grants. I shared a recent ACX article on impact markets with a colleague, and he said, "That's kind of like how we write grants. We do 70% of the work asking for the money to do the project."
To me, when I saw they had written a grant asking to do this work I thought, "You mean to polish it off." I'll admit that haven't read the grant proposal, though.
Yes, many scientists submit proposals on work that they've at least started and seen promising results for. This helps to boost their grant success rates; if the funder sees that you can consistently deliver on past proposals, you're more likely to be funded in the future. Much of scientific research (especially at the cutting edge) is inherently high risk. If you're always pitching research without having done any preliminary work, you're likely to have to frequently report failure (unless we're talking about bad scientists who manipulate data/omit negative results to make it seem as if their ideas always work out).
It's pretty common in research (at least in the fields I've worked in) to apply for grants for work you've already done (but not published yet)-- that way you know you won't have to send an embarrassing "we tried this and it didn't work" progress report to the funding agency. You apply in 2016 for funding for work you did in 2015, and use the money to do research that you'll apply for funding for in 2017.
I will try to find the original source and explanation for this quote. It may have been around the specific biology of this particular virus rather than the mere existence of the cleavage site. I’m pretty certain Chan was the source of the unicorn quote.
Also that research is by Chinese scientists after the pandemic. Obviously that doesn’t discredit the paper altogether but of course the incentives are there for China to cover their own ass.
"Viral was published November 16, 2021, nearly two months after the discovery of BANAL-52 was published"
This seems like a weak criticism. Publishing involves a lot of lead time devoted to copy editing, proofreading, typesetting, book design, manufacturing, etc. Even if the authors became aware of BANAL-52 before their book was officially released, it may have been too late to correct the first edition.
Re the location of the WIV, yes, it cannot help but be highly suspicious to any sensible person that the first outbreak occurred in the same city as a major research lab that is known to work with exactly this type of virus. However, I've seen statements in print that went too far with this idea, claiming that the lab is literally across the street from the Huanan Seafood Market. It isn't. They're nearly 8 miles apart, on opposite sides of the Yangtze River. Now, 8 miles, admittedly, is not that much, certainly not enough to discredit the lab leak hypothesis, but it's a lot more than "across the street".
This excellent review has caused me revisit how I formed my beliefs about COVID’s origins in the early days of the pandemic.
I now see that i dismissed the lab-origin theory not because I had evaluated the evidence, but because the Trumpers were pushing it.
Disbelieving something solely because you don’t like those who claim to believe it is an easy error to make. In this case, I assumed the Trumpers didn’t really believe the lab-origin theory either but claimed to because it gave Trump the opportunity to sound tough on China and to undercut the science community, both things he and his tribe were particularly keen to do. For that reason, I dismissed it.
I still think I’m right about why the Trump tribe embraced the lab-origin theory, but I was wrong to dismiss it solely for that reason.
It seems like an instance of a stopped clock being right. (For certain values of right - there were a lot of claims in this camp early on about being e.g. a deliberately released bioweapon that can safely be dispensed with even now).
>"As a non-fiction book on current events, an unavoidable weakness of Viral is that it does not include recent developments that have come out after the book’s publication. At least one of these developments is important enough for me to mention in this review. In February 2022, three scientific pre-prints [1, 2, 3] were released ... "
The paperback edition's epilogue does discuss the preprints. (It isn't able to discuss the first two's final published versions, out this week, though.)
<quote>At first I thought maybe the authors didn’t mention BANAL-52 because it was discovered after the book was published, but this isn’t the case – Viral was published November 16, 2021, nearly two months after the discovery of BANAL-52 was published. Although I’m writing an overall-positive review here, I don’t want to go easy on the book where serious criticism is warranted. It’s completely unacceptable that BANAL-52 wasn’t mentioned. Even if it would have been inconvenient from a publishing standpoint, the authors should have rewritten the RaTG13 chapter, or at least included an addendum about the discovery of BANAL-52.</quote>
My understanding of book publishing implies that this criticism is completely off base. The book publishing pipeline does not permit rewriting two months before publication. The period from the text being locked in until the time the book is in customers’ hands is more like four months.
Epistemic status: I’ve dealt with publishers for years, from the author side, and make tens of thousands per year from book royalties. But I’ve never tried a last-minute change to a book, so maybe I’m wrong. I welcome correction from an actual publisher.
> To say there was a lab origin, we would have to postulate that scientific institutions in China are lying and successfully engaged in a coverup, for which there have been no credible whistleblowers.
This is clearly not true; many people believe that the virus originated in a US lab.
I haven't read either document deeply but they seem to at least corroborate that dodgy gain of function research creating similar viruses happened in unsafe conditions at WIV around the same time. Whether this was the source of COVID I don't know, but it's alarming either way.
Hungarian scientists studying soil samples collected in Antarctica in 2018, belatedly noticed that they contained traces of a very early strain of SARS CoV-2. Which is ridiculously implausible. So what really happened is, they sent their samples to Sangon Biotech in Shanghai, China for phylogenetic analysis, and Sangon used a technique that is notoriously susceptible to cross-contamination from other samples being sequenced in parallel. Clearly someone else had sent actual SARS CoV-2 samples to Sangon for sequencing at the same time.
The Hungarians sent their samples to Sangon in December 2019. Exact date unknown, but almost certainly nobody was sending samples from the Wuhan outbreak to Sangon in 2019. The first report of genetic sequencing of suspected Covid-19 was 24 December 2019, but that was by Vision Medicals in Guangzhou, which did a lot of the (known) early Covid sequencing. Wikipedia also says that Beijing Boao Medical Laboratory sequenced Covid-19 on 27 December 2019. The Wuhan Central Hospital doesn't seem to have used Sangon in this area, and they didn't tell the Chinese equivalent of the CDC about any of this until 29 December 2019 so probably nobody else was doing so in 2019 either.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology had been using Sangon Biotech as a contract lab earlier in 2019. For research on bat coronaviruses, even, if I read this correctly: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6521148/
Furthermore, the contamination in the Hungarian samples included not just SARS CoV-2, but also Chinese hamster and Vero E6 green monkey genetic material. The Dazhak/EcoHealth proposal for gain-of-function research in bat coronaviruses at WIV, called for culturing in Chinese hamster and Vero E6 green monkey cell lines. I'm not sure, but I don't think that's standard procedure for "we found this gunk in the lungs of a mystery pneumonia patient; can you tell us what it is?"
This isn't quite smoking-gun proof that WIV was working with proto-Covid shortly before the known outbreak, but that's certainly a plausible interpretation.
Alternately, the Hungarians could be simply wrong. Their research by nature can't be replicated, but it could at least be closely scrutinized by outside experts, and I don't think really has been. I'd expect Sangon Biotech could confirm or deny that the sequences in the Hungarian paper are the ones they sent them, which should rule out "the Hungarians are just plain lying"
Also, it's barely possible to massage the timeline so that the Hungarian samples are delayed in processing to January 2020, and that the WIV or someone else in their early-2020 investigation of a natural COVID outbreak rushed their own samples to Shanghai and jumped the queue to get in the same run as the earlier Hungarian samples. But that would require that WIV do a hasty investigation that involves culturing their unknown virus in green monkey and hamster cells (why?), or that the Hungarian samples have been doubly contaminated, first with SARS CoV-2 and then from some completely different source that coincidentally used the same culture media as the proposed WIV GoF experiments.
Not smoking-gun proof, but a strong hint with some good pointers to where one might find smoking-gun proof. But as far as I know, there's been no real follow-up.
It's been six months with no serious follow-up or publicity; I wouldn't hold my breath. I think the window for serious discussion of the lab leak hypothesis outside the nerd-blogosphere has closed.
To repeat only a few parts relevant to the book review:
"Probably the most important – the WIV had previously maintained a database of at least fifteen thousand bat samples, including the dates and locations of samples as well as information about the viruses found in them. This database was taken offline and its contents have not been shared with independent researchers since."
That database was only really online for a few weeks in August-September 2019, and 5 days in December. This claim came from the DRASTIC group of freelance researchers, who cite the archives of a database monitoring system to claim that the database went offline on September 12, 2019. But the same monitoring system shows that the database only became reliably available on August 23, 2019. Before that, from June to August 23, the database was online sporadically. It would be online for 1–2 days, and then go down for several days or weeks at a time. Before June 2019, there’s no data, because v2 of the database was released in June 2019. After September 2019, it was online from December 12 to December 16, and access was sporadic through February 26, 2020. After that, the database was down for good.
"So it does seem like a pretty remarkable coincidence that the outbreak happened in Wuhan. "
Then it's a far, far more remarkable coincidence that most of the earliest cases have direct ties to the wet market. Out of all possible locations, SARS-CoV-2 just happened to pick a wet market as its first superspreader location--just like its cousin SARS-CoV-1--and it has nothing to do with the animals there? It didn't spread at a cinema, a school, a convention center, a train station, a mall, a grocery store, a university, an office building, a bar, or even the Wuhan Institute of Virology (which is 15 km from the wet market), but at a wet market, and this is totally a coincidence?
"If SARS-CoV-2 originated in an animal somewhere around the Yunnan / Laos area, how did it make it all the way to Wuhan without leaving a trail along the way? "
If SARS-CoV-1 originated in an animal somewhere around the Yunnan area--which we now know it did--how did it make all the way to Guangdong without leaving a trail along the way? And of course, though it's plausible that SARS-CoV-2 originated near Yunnan, we don't know that.
In fact, it's very easy to imagine how both of these viruses could travel thousands of kilometers without leaving a trail along the way. In Yunnan, a villager traps a wild animal and gets infected with the virus. He takes a train to Wuhan--one of China's biggest cities and busiest transport hubs--and sells the animal to the wet market, infecting a few wet market retailers and customers along the way. The animal is sold, butchered, and eaten, but the infected humans start the pandemic.
"Some scientists claim that SARS-CoV-2 reached genetic stability early on, suggesting that it was already well-adapted to spread in humans at the start of the outbreak. Some have interpreted this as evidence that it was engineered for this purpose, or underwent serial passaging to encourage adaptation to human or humanized cells. "
The original virus was moderately transmissible, with R0 of 2-3. Since then, a series of variants have taken over the original strain, making the virus more and more transmissible. Delta had R0=5.1, Omicron BA.1 had R0=9.5, and BA.2, BA.4, and BA.5 are more infectious still. SARS-CoV-2 is now one of the most transmissible diseases in human history. So in what possible way has the virus "reached genetic stability early on", or "was already well-adapted to spread in humans at the start of the outbreak"?
Not sure about your point concerning potential routes for SARS-CoV-2 to get from Laos/Yunnan to Wuhan. Of course it's possible to imagine a variety of routes, of varying degrees of probability; the question is which are actually plausible, and which have direct evidence for them.
I would describe your suggested route as unlikely, in the absence of further evidence. Can you take live pangolins/bats/etc on a direct train from the areas of Yunnan where SARS-CoV-2-like viruses have been found to Wuhan? Would it be economically viable for a villager to do so? Do we have any evidence that anyone actually does so?
On the other hand, we do know one way that bat viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 were being transported from Yunnan and Laos to Wuhan. The WIV was definitely doing so. We don't have to imagine interesting ways that they might have done it.
Unless there's evidence for the Long Distance Villager theory I'm unaware of, the question of transmission to Wuhan remains a point in favour of the lab leak hypothesis, I think.
If a WIV employee was infected while in Yunan and brought it to Wuhan that way, I would count that as zoonotic. But I guess both sides would probably claim vindication in such a scenario.
This is Alina Chan, one of the co-authors of the book VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.
I really enjoyed reading this review and the comments, and I also appreciate the reviewer creating a list of other sources to check out. In particular, this line by the reviewer characterizes many of the moments I've experienced in the past 2 years spent looking into the origin of Covid-19 : “what the hell is going on if some random Twitter users are consistently correcting world-renowned virology institutes on various mistakes and omissions?”
Similar to the reviewer, Matt and I were also late to the lab origin hypothesis. The early information coming out of China seemed to point to a repeat of the 2003 SARS outbreak in China, and I didn't question this, assuming that they would very quickly find the infected animal source as they had in the case of SARS and MERS (I also recommend Laura Kahn's piece in the Bulletin Atomic). It was only later, as key evidence failed to turn up for a market origin, that I was motivated to consider the lab leak hypothesis. By May 2020, the Chinese CDC director had told the press that the market was most likely a victim, ie a sick person had ignited a superspreader event there (the CCDC director recently retired from his position, some speculate it was because he was a "loose cannon" and said too many things about the origin of Covid-19 and China's vaccines that didn't adhere to the official Party line).
One observation that raised my eyebrows (but is still consistent with both natural and lab origin hypotheses) was the highly transmissible nature of the virus right from the get go. And I wasn't the only scientist who was struck by the well adapted/pre-adapted nature of the virus. The natural origin proponents who wrote Proximal Origin in early 2020 were among the first to describe the virus as well adapted for human transmission. They later reversed their stance in their Critical Review in mid 2021. Now, in their latest preprints/papers in Science in mid 2022, they've gone back to saying that the virus needed no adaptive mutations to spread in humans. See my twitter thread for more details: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1513586519159697410
I also liked the coin flip analogy by the reviewer. I've been accurately described as a fence-sitter in the past 2 years. Back in 2020 it was very controversial for a scientist to be a fence-sitter on the origin of Covid-19 issue (and I took a lot of heat from other scientists, the press, and even friends for just saying we have to consider a lab origin, regardless of how likely or unlikely), but now it's become too boring for the media to report that a scientist thinks there's a 50:50 chance of a market vs lab origin. The media prefers to report on scientists who are willing to go so far as to say they can put one hypothesis to rest or that they have "dispositive" or "incontrovertible" evidence of one hypothesis. To do so is, imo, more like a form of gambling rather than science. Like the reviewer argues, whether it turns out that your bet was right or wrong, it doesn't justify shutting down one of the two plausible hypotheses.
I'd like to address the unavoidable weakness of the book raised by the reviewer: The manuscript is "locked" at least a couple of months before physical copies of it magically appear on bookshelves across the US and UK (not being sarcastic, as a first time book author, this truly was a magical experience for me!). This means that any developments in the 2 months before the book is released cannot possibly be written into the book unless the authors had insider information and knew that it was ok to write said information into the book (which then has to spend time being vetted by the publisher's lawyers). For this reason, the newly released paperbacks cover the new developments since mid-Sep 2021: the Laos BANAL viruses, the 3 preprints on the Wuhan market, and more FOIA'ed emails from prominent virologists who privately fretted about a lab origin of Covid-19. If the publishers will allow, I'd like to update the book 5 years from now because I'm optimistic about very compelling evidence being unearthed within this time range (at least this evidence should be more compelling than Western virologists misinterpreting data collected with ascertainment bias).
Thanks again for the review! I'm providing these links in case other readers are interested.
My peer reviewed analysis of the furin cleavage site:
And my critique of the recent Worobey et al. Science paper, which the reviewer has already linked to - I will update this in a few days to explain the "2 strain 2 spillover" hypothesis that the authors have come up with to support the market origin hypothesis:
Yes, some other commenters have also pointed out that I may have been too harsh on the book over the omission of the BANAL viruses, and that 2 months is actually not enough time to update a book before publication. However, from my perspective as the reader, when I buy a book on current events I have the expectation that they'll be pretty up to date, especially when it comes to major developments. So maybe I was too hard on you and Matt Ridley with that criticism, but in that case I feel like it's still a valid criticism of the book publishing industry if they can't move quick enough to incorporate a minor update 2 months out -- for comparison, major newspapers like the New York Times manage to distribute physical copies all around the world with news updates from the previous day.
Anyway, I agree with your and Ridley's fence-sitter position, and I admire the way you've resisted pressure from both sides to express more certainty than can actually be justified. In my view, you've already gotten it right -- you said that neither hypothesis could be ruled out without further investigation, and that turned out to be correct (I just hope the rest of the scientific community also realizes this). Actually I think it was quite brave and heroic of you guys to point this out early on when it was an extremely unpopular thing to say.
Thanks for your comments. Matt Ridley here. We argued long and hard with our publishers for inserting the latest possible updates to our text, because we knew the book risked being overtaken by events. They were sympathetic and helpful and we managed to push it back by nearly a month, and to a much, much shorter time than I have had with any previous book, but we were confronted with the fact that US publishing in particular was hit by severe supply chain constraints of some kind during 2021, including at one point a claim of a "shortage of paper"!!?? Publishers were having to reserve printing dates further in advance and stick to them more than normal - I think it was also something to do with not outsourcing the printing to China. You're right that newspapers manage much shorter deadlines for printing things, but they have their own printing presses and huge distribution networks designed for last-minute work of this kind and publishers don't. Anyway, as Alina says, the paperback deals extensively with BANAL-52, and crucially the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology also received samples from Laos. Could you perhaps add a note to your review that readers should if possible read the paperback (or kindle) version to get the most updated edition. Thank you again for a perceptive and useful review.
My layman's read, and what educated commentary I have seen, is that this is something significant but not conclusive. But there's been very little followup, and I'd be interested in hearing what someone who has been following the issue more closely than I have, thinks about it.
John, The Hungarian findings are very intriguing and are not the only ones that suggest contamination of sequencing machines might enable us to shed light on what happened. However until we know for sure what date the Antarctic samples were sequenced, we cannot be sure this was not a contamination that occurred in January - ie after the pandemic was recognised in which case they would be of slightly less relevance. Matt
Yeah, I've long since given up on being sure, and am just looking for evidence to shift my priors towards a "probably this, even if we're not sure" assessment one way or another. And this sort of thing, particularly if there are other examples like it, goes a long ways towards doing that IMHO.
I had read elsewhere about WIV receiving samples from Laos that might include BANAL-52. A few interesting comments from the review pointed out that:
1. There's probably another closer relative that was the origin of COVID-19 (probably also from the Laotian region where they found BANAL-52).
2. That relative could have come directly from Laos - without genetic engineering - to WIV.
3. WIV could have accidentally leaked COVID-19 as part of their sample-processing procedures, not just as part of GoF research.
If so, we should consider (regardless of the actual origins of the pandemic) safety controls related to GoF research, but also safety controls for any and all processes that aggregate viral samples for any kind of study. If close human interaction is a risk factor for crossover events into humans, then researchers collecting, cataloging, and studying any virus could lead to such an event.
The UPDATED paperback is out right now. - I seem to be just the 2nd to note - And Matt Ridley IS updating on his blog "rationaloptimist.com" . So to mimic the review: This review was published July 30, nearly three days after the updated paperback was published. Although I’m writing an overall-positive review here, I don’t want to go easy on the review where serious criticism is warranted. It’s completely unacceptable that the updated paperback wasn’t mentioned!* -
I am very glad to finally see the book mentioned in ACX. I found it irritating to be ignored by the "rationalist" blogosphere (except Scott Aaronson). It seems like a rather decent review too. So, many thanks, really appreciated! -
*(Original: "Why Viral was published November 16, 2021, nearly two months after the discovery of BANAL-52 was published. Although I’m writing an overall-positive review here, I don’t want to go easy on the book where serious criticism is warranted. It’s completely unacceptable that BANAL-52 wasn’t mentioned!")
It’s easy to dismiss the ridiculous claim that COVID began as a bioweapon, but other claims are more difficult to evaluate. <- I don't see where this claim was engaged with. Why is it easy to dismiss this claim?
COVID is the exact opposite of what you want in a bioweapon. You want something that is highly lethal but relatively easy to contain (so it doesn't just blow back to your own country too). People talk about smallpox, anthrax, ebola, rather than the flu for a reason. Also, my understanding is that it doesn't look much like an engineered virus would.
I hope no one read that I myself was suggesting that it was a bioweapon. I thought it was an odd editorial choice to have as the thesis that, "people prematurely dismissed the lab leak theory without an inquiry, and that was premature." And then to dismiss the bioweapon theory, without an inquiry."
But at the subject level... yes, COVID doesn't seem like it would be a good bioweapon unless the creator hated every nation-state. I know Ron Unz said he thought it might have been a bioweapon leaked against China, with the expectation (hope?) that China was going to contain it at massive cost. I didn't find what I read on it very persuasive though.
Regarding not looking like an engineered virus would... I would need that explained like I'm 5.
"experts make decisions based on ass-covering, career advancement, and personal risk mitigation. autists make decisions based on spreadsheets. the natural result of this is that experts are useless and autists are good at things that are tractable with spreadsheets"
I think a lot of internet sleuthing is a sort of million monkeys effect as well. Crowds are always going to be better at random search than a small number of experts would be.
Great review but (and this is arguably the books fault not the review's fault) I'd have loved to have seen some base rate information. For instance, what fraction of unusual or novel viruses (just on some measure) are lab leaks given our best information.
If even the people warning us about lab leaks are going to say that it's 1000 to 1 or something that seems pretty conclusive.
This base rate changes depending on the location and circumstances of each outbreak.
For example, what are the odds of someone drowning in a natural body of water as compared to a manmade swimming pool? This would change depending on the location, e.g., a seaside area vs the desert.
I lay out the balance of evidence for the Wuhan outbreak here:
> This is basically how I think we should handle this unwarranted overconfidence from respected institutions – it should decrease our trust in these institutions, but we need to be careful not to start favoring the lab leak hypothesis out of spite. In my opinion this loss of trust should not really affect our view of the object-level question of the virus’s origin at all (although it would be nice to see some of the data being hidden, like that WIV database that was taken offline).
I don't think this amount of compartmentalization is justifiable. Actions of public officials can be important pieces of evidence. They might reflect on the object-level question of whether there was a lab leak, or they might not; in order to find out whether they weigh on the question, we can apply everyone around here's favorite theorem.
P(A|B) = P(A)*P(B|A)/P(B), where A = "lab leak is true" and B = "database deleted". You have some prior credence in the lab leak P(A). Even if that's initially very low, you should ask yourself - if the lab leak were true, would that make it *more likely* or *less likely* that they would delete that database? I think the answer is pretty clearly that this would render the WIV *more likely* to delete the database, so P(B|A) / P(B) is above 1. That means that P(A|B) > P(A), which is to say, learning the database was actually deleted should cause you to update in favor of the lab leak theory.
It's not *conclusive* evidence. It might not even be the strongest evidence out there on the question. But it *is* evidence, and it means these two questions - the one about the origin of COVID, and the one about the trustworthiness of the authorities - can't be fully disentangled. Bayes' Theorem applies here too - why would it not?
Why is it a ridiculous, easy to dismiss claim that it started as a bioweapon?
I don't know anything about the subject, and it sounds ridiculous to me, but on the other hand without any justification it sounds like you're doing the same thing you rightly criticise others for doing with the lab leak hypothesis- dismissing it based on superficial weirdness. I'm sure you're not, but I think it'd be worth briefly explaining why it can be dismissed
Of course RaTG13 and its derivatives like SARS-COV-2 would have been investigated and funded under CCP bureaucracy partially as a bioweapon. And of course these are dual use technologies, so any public facing claims would advertise their harm reduction intent.
If you listen to the shot callers when they think they're speaking in private, many attempt to rationalize the decision of Fauci and NIH to fund GoF at WIV as a strategy of gaining access to spy on China's capabilities and arsenal of bioweapons. I'm skeptical that the decision was anything like a Coventry gambit, but clearly when China is doing GoF on human pathogens, their military is looped in.
If you think about what a good bioweapon for CCP purposes would be: it would be a transmissible virus, for which the releasing party has already developed, manufactured, and administered a vaccine to their military. The virus would be ideally novel, so that any other nation would be puzzled about how to treat it clinically, and how to develop pharmacologic products to defeat it.
It's worth noting that the "military games" - an olympic type competition of soldiers from around the world - took place in October 2019 in Wuhan. Also interesting is the mystery product Moderna had been developing since about 2018; four out five products it was developing were well known, one was never revealed.
COVID is the exact opposite of what you want in a bioweapon. You want something that is highly lethal but relatively easy to contain (so it doesn't just blow back to your own country too). People talk about smallpox, anthrax, ebola as bioweapons, rather than the flu for a reason. Also, my understanding is that it doesn't look much like an engineered virus would.
But why wouldn't they want it to blow back to their country? Killing lots of old people and leaving young healthy people largely unaffected seems like a state's dream outcome.
1. The PRC - the real one, not the one ruled by Fu Manchu inscrutable oriental stereotypes - has no real use for biological weapons. Biological weapons are mostly a crutch for people who don't have nuclear weapons, or don't think they can afford enough nuclear weapons for their purposes. The Chinese can easily afford lots more nuclear weapons than they have, but have instead invested in geopolitical strategies optimized around the existence of a healthy global economy.
2. People who do see a use for biological weapons, want biological weapons they can control. Often that means things like anthrax, which is basically never transmitted between humans. So wherever you dust with anthrax spores, people will get sick, but that's it. If you do use human-transmissible pathogens, you want something other than airborne transmission and you want to have an effective vaccine for your own people.
3. If you're going to use an uncontrolled biological weapon, which inherently risks people figuring out that you did that and deciding to go to war with you over it, the last thing you want is a disease that kills a million or so of their beloved grandparents while giving their military-age males and factory workers a bad case of the sniffles for a week or so.
Who said they were targeting it at foreign nations? For the reasons you outline in point 3, it might be quite useful to inflict on yourself. Which neatly wipes out your points 2 and 3.
As for 1, I think the idea that they have no use for biological weapons needs a lot more justification than a blithe insinuation of racism. It seems reasonable to me that you might want lots of nuclear weapons AND biological ones, and you haven't really attempted to explain why that's not true.
That would be the "Fu Manchu inscrutable Oriental stereotype" China. Well, OK, your scruting them or whatever, but you're casting them in the role of comic-book villains. Real people, and real governments, don't act that way.
Can we talk Dr. Limeng Yan for a minute and how she is like Edward Snowden, Rachel Carson, and Bob Woodward rolled into one. I would build a statue to this woman the size of Lady Liberty but I guess I would settle for like a Google Doodle one day?
To be clear, the author, reviewer, and everyone else are all in agreement of certain facts: Tedros, Daszak, and Fauci - and every other academic, public health official and NGO-er - all spouted "no evidence of community spread" (while knowing the opposite to be true), in February 2020 while Yan literally put her life on the line to blow the whistle that this thing was spreading like fire and is the reason all these officials were forced to recant the lie.
Let's see what the reviewer has to say about this doctor: "This is a sad story about a scientist who tried to do the right thing, but ended up intellectually corrupted by forces beyond her control." He writes this about Yan! Whose career is ruined, must be looking over her shoulder everyday for CCP payback, and she's the *one* scientist who had the courage to speak the truth to power make these sacrifices to save millions of lives. Meanwhile if the reviewer ever calls the aforementioned liars "corrupt" or anything half as disparaging, I didn't catch it.
Look, the review itself is excellent, and the reviewer does display a healthy amount of prior updating and introspection into personal bias that were blinding him. Dear reviewer, there is still work to done: If Bob Woodward gives an interview to a left wing source like Mother Jones or worked for left aligned institution like Berkley would you dismiss him as no longer credible? Of course not. The sad fact that shines through every dive into question is that the only journalists or politicians who were ever asking asking questions about this incident are going to be on the right. It was probably the same situation is the 60's for the left looking into ecological concerns of big agriculture or nuclear power. Hopefully one day this balances out, but for now we live in the world that exists.
> Tedros, Daszak, and Fauci - and every other academic, public health official and NGO-er - all spouted "no evidence of community spread" (while knowing the opposite to be true), in February 2020
Really? The strong version of your claim is trivially falisfiable, but I'd be surprised if even one of those people said "no community spread" in February. Rembember, that would be *after* the border closures, the cover issue of The Economist saying "the next global pandemic", the Diamond Princess outbreak, etc.
I enjoyed this review, mostly because it roughly matches my pre-existing beliefs, so of course I'd be pre-disposed to like it. I didn't learn much, but hopefully it will Knock Some Sense Into Those Other EvilWrong People On The Internet.
The one section I found very frustrating was the vague attacks on "public health officials, scientists, journalists, and tech companies". Instead of looking into any specific claims by specific people and assessing how true they are and whether they were justified based on the evidence available at the time and what different actors motivations might have been, you just sort of gesture vaguely about "elites and institutions" and hope the audience will nod along in outrage (which they usually will, since this is a bias that is common in the rat-sphere.) Sometimes it seems like you go to more trouble to understand the action of the Chinese government than Americans!
I can't object to anything about this review's conclusions. I find the lab leak theory plausible but not probable. The only clear evidence pointing that direction is the pandemic's Wuhan origin, which would be roughly like a US origin happening to be in Atlanta-- a striking coincidence, but not so unlikely that it demands a causal explanation. And like the reviewer I'm more concerned about institutions not having trustworthy truth-finding processes than about the actual answer they get.
That being said, I'm not satisfied with the reviewer's truth-finding process either. The analysis is a bit too shallow and disorganized to actually reach confident conclusions or contribute to the discussion beyond summarizing the book's points. Nor does it present the evidence in a particularly striking or exciting way, as ACX reviews often do. Also, maybe this is just my filter bubble but I didn't find anything particularly surprising here-- "lab leak has to be acknowledged as a possibility given the evidence" has been well inside my Overton window since the theory was first proposed.
In short, I'm satisfied with this review as far as it goes but it left me wanting considerably more. As always, many thanks for contributing!
"... To say there was a lab origin, we would have to postulate that scientific institutions in China are lying and successfully engaged in a coverup, for which there have been no credible whistleblowers."
Stunning naivete. Countries that maintain gulags where ordinary people are sent to be slaves in the cotton fields, are not to be believed without the weightiest evidence.
Whether it was a lab leak or a virus that jumped out of the endangered species being butchered in a public market without any pretense of sanitation, it makes China look bad. As a propaganda move, the best possibility is to shut up all of the witnesses and destroy all of the evidence, and let the poisonous culture war politics of the US work its magic.
As far as the US is concerned, the real issue is not what happened in China. At best it is item number 10 on the bill of particulars against the regime. The real issue is what Saint Anthony Fauci did in funding research at WIV in apparent violation of Obama administration policy.
"Viral was published November 16, 2021, nearly two months after the discovery of BANAL-52 was published."
Book publishing has a much longer lead time than blogging. My wife just completed the final proof reading of her book in mid July. It will be published in October.
"a 96.8% match is still a long way off in genomic space, and does not imply that this is the same virus as SARS-CoV-2, or even necessarily a progenitor."
It's a big issue not because "it couldn't possibly have gotten to Wuhan", but because "why *Wuhan*?". Yes, it's easy to get a box of animals from point A to point B even when they're a thousand miles apart, but it's also easy to get that box to points C, D, E, etc, etc.
If there's something suspiciously unique about point B, then "why point B instead of C, D, E...?" is a legitimate question, and one that should update your prior about the suspiciously unique aspect being significant. It's like if the leader of the Proud Boys shows up in the city where the leader of ISIS lives, that's not *proof* of a conspiracy between the two, but neither is it "meh, it's easy for American tourists to visit random cities in the Middle East" and we should probably investigate further.
If Wuhan were next door to rural northeastern Laos, or if it were the main commercial hub for rural northeastern Laos, or if it were the main hub for the entire East Asian bushmeat trade, or something like that, then we'd shift priors back towards "wild animal to wet market", but those things aren't true and Wuhan being the main hub for sketchy East Asian bat-virus research is.
Nothing really great, but there's this:: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Li-Zhang-9/publication/225329213/figure/fig2/AS:393615370145797@1470856625759/Map-of-the-wildlife-trade-routes-in-key-regions-in-southwest-China.png
More generally, I obviously looked into that as soon as I started considering the lab leak hypothesis. Guangzhou is frequently cited as the main hub for China as a whole, and nobody ever mentioned Wuhan as being particularly significant.
Yeah I think it would be easy enough to do some phylogenetic analysis and figure out recently it entered the animal population (before or after the human pandemic) by looking at the mutation profile.
Agreed! I say the same thing in Section 5 of the review:
"It’s possible that the Chinese government was trying to cover up a lab leak, but it’s also possible that this was just regular authoritarian government behavior. Interestingly, Chan and Ridley describe similar attempts at obfuscation during the original SARS epidemic in 2003 (which had a natural origin), in which the Chinese government hid infected patients so that they wouldn’t be discovered by international health authorities. So I don’t think these attempts at obfuscation should necessarily be taken as evidence for a lab origin."
Yeah, I think there's a misconception on the pro-lab-leak side that the Chinese government is pushing the natural origins / wildlife trade origins hypothesis. In fact both a lab leak and a pandemic caused by the wildlife trade look bad for the Chinese government, so the hypotheses they're pushing are more fringe and kinda bizarre -- like a lab leak at Fort Detrick in the US, or that the virus arrived in frozen foods shipped to China from other countries.
Given that both stories are bad, the best outcome for the chinese government is an endless "controversy" over which explanation is true. Coming definitively down on one or the other side would require action, whereas endless internet argument over which is true results in the status quo.
In short, those people who advocate the conspiracy theory would in fact the conspiracy's most important servants. Conspiracy squared!
I mean, who doesn't take a deep breath of air filtered through their frozen meat when it arrives.
Certainly not me.
‹looks guiltily at his freezer stuffed with chicken repackaged into human-vacuum-packed freezer bags from the giant box it came in›
Not sure if it's sampling bias, I had assumed that bats in all the regions of China where they live (just an assumption, I don't really know).
But yes if a bat coronavirus similar to SARS-Cov-2 is found in the wild, close to Wuhan I would consider that circumstantial evidence in favor of natural origins -- it's just that we're now 2.5 years into the pandemic and that hasn't happened yet.
There are certain areas of China (like Guangxi and parts of Guangdong) that are well known for their huge bat caves. You can visit these areas at dusk and see the clouds of bats emerging.
As far as I know, there is nothing like that near Wuhan. There are certainly bats, but not living close together in huge numbers.
Digging around in disease ridden bat shit for dangerous viruses to pull into labs for study is, as I understand it, the keystone of the lab leaker concern about viral research. It would be odd that they'd want us to do more of it.
If it got the Wuhan lab off the hook, then the CCP would be shoveling through guano like a good 'un.
Doing more of it while being aware of the risks and taking extra precautions may be precisely what is called for. Like surgery to fix an injury caused by shrapnel.
It's worth noting that the lineages of SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 are believed to have diverged in 1969: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4#Sec2
My current belief (based on a steady drip of "related virus found in X" stories from all over E/SE Asia) is that East and South-East Asia is awash with a huge diversity of coronaviruses, of which we have seen only a tiny fraction.
The absence of a confirmed wild animal reservoir, nearly 3 years after the initial outbreak, should update your priors significantly in favour of the lab leak hypothesis.
I would think that a lab leak would need a wild animal reservoir too.
Only if it is unmodified.
Even a modified one needs a wild source to have been modified!
Yes, but has it been modified so much that the wild source is no longer obvious? (Like many agricultural cultivars for example.)
We don’t know the reservoir for Ebola and we’ve been looking for decades. It can be quite hard to determine the reservoir.
Lab Leak!!! It's proof!!
Bats in Hubei province have been found to have antibodies to SARS-like viruses:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1118391
And masked palm civets in Hubei have also been to be PCR positive for a SARS-like virus:
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/JCM.43.5.2041-2046.2005
Both those papers are from 2005. But Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak are authors on the first paper, so perhaps they planted that evidence 14 years in advance to hide the future lab leak conspiracy they intended to commit.
It would be great if someone where to go back out today, take more samples, sequence them, and compare them to SARS-CoV-2. I suspect it would take a lot of luck to find the exact ancestor species, though.
It absolutely is sampling bias. The most closely related bat coronaviruses have been found in those two areas because that's almost exclusively where sampling has been done. We really know comically little about what SARS-like viruses are out there, and where they are distributed.
It's one of those points that the authors willfully misrepresent that makes it very hard to take anything of what they are writing seriously.
I'm not sure about "way more suspicious", but yes if it were conclusively proven that the first super-spreader event occurred at Huanan seafood market that would be suspicious and would be a piece of circumstantial evidence in favor of the natural origins market-spillover hypothesis.
The recently published Worobey et al. paper claims to show this:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
But the main critique of the paper is that the early data points may have been collected with ascertainment bias (specifically looking for cases around the market and nearby hospitals):
https://ayjchan.medium.com/evidence-for-a-natural-origin-of-covid-19-no-longer-dispositive-after-scientific-peer-review-af95b52499e1
So the question is, did the first super-spreader event occur at the market? Or did people begin to suspect the market as a potential source and look for cases around it?
But I agree with your logic that if the Worobey et al. paper is right (which I'm not sure about), then the same logic of suspicion about occurring near a virology lab can also be applied to the first super-spreader event occurring in a market.
If you are only adjusting your priors on, "conclusively proven," then you are already living the conspiracy theory. You should be adjusting your priors on, "a reasonable chance," albeit less significantly.
There are way, way, more wet markets in the world than there are virology labs that study bat coronaviruses. This is even more true for virology labs that contain massive collections of samples of bat coronaviruses and do gain of function research on some of them. Because such labs are so rare, it would take much more of a coincidence for the virus to start spreading near one.
Excellent review!
To me, the main factor I don’t see much discussed is how likely the Huanan market would be the ground zero for an introduced wildlife virus likely from a distant source. I gather from sources like a pre-pandemic paper on Guandong Province that there are dozens of wildlife markets just there; it makes me imagine that Wuhan would be an unlikely initial landing place for an infected animal from another province. Or was Huanan a sort of epicenter of wildlife markets? (I imagine a foreigner researching an outbreak of furniture beetle traced to a High Point, NC, furniture market might be puzzled as to why a desk shopped into Detroit would end up in a small city in NC unless they knew that High Point was the epicenter of furniture markets in the US.)
If Huanan is literally one of scores or 100s of equally likely destinations for an infected animal most likely gathered from a distant province… my priors have to shift towards that lab, which was THE epicenter of Chinese coronavirus study. Right?
Yeah this argument seems right. If the Huanan market was the epicenter for the trade of wildlife likely to have viruses, then that would make it less surprising that covid happened to spread near WIV. But I don’t think anyone has claimed that is the case.
As for your last comment, I’m not 100% sure that WIV was the epicenter of Chinese bat coronavirus study, but it at least was a very significant player (and as per my current understanding was likely the biggest). As some evidence towards this, I searched ‘bat coronavirus’ on Google scholar for papers from 2017 through 2019 and about half of the papers I looked at had some affiliation to WIV.
Huanan was not the only market based super spreader event.
Given this, the fact that a super spreader event happens at a market proves little. It could have spread from wildlife to humans there or elsewhere.
Hi everyone! Thanks for reading my book review! I originally wrote the review in March, so I thought I’d leave a comment with an update on how things have progressed since then.
As far as I can tell, there is still no direct, conclusive evidence in favor of either hypothesis, and neither can be ruled out. However, earlier this week one of the pre-prints I linked to in Section 1 (Worobey et al.) was published in the journal Science, and has been getting a lot of coverage in the media and on Twitter. Although it does not offer any direct evidence, it might offer a piece of indirect, circumstantial evidence for the natural origins hypothesis — or it might not.
Here’s the paper:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
And here’s a post by Alina Chan (author of Viral) with technical critiques of the paper:
https://ayjchan.medium.com/evidence-for-a-natural-origin-of-covid-19-no-longer-dispositive-after-scientific-peer-review-af95b52499e1
The main issue appears to be the same as I described in Section 1 — the paper is heavily based on a geospatial analysis of early COVID cases, and shows that they seem to cluster around the Huanan seafood market. Chan claims that this analysis is invalid due to ascertainment bias, since early investigators were specifically searching around the seafood market and surrounding hospitals for cases. Worobey et al. deny this claim of ascertainment bias.
There is also some debate over how well the Worobey et al. paper can distinguish between a scenario in which COVID first spread to humans from animals in the market, and a scenario in which a human brought COVID into the market and caused a super-spreader event.
I’m not knowledgeable enough on these technical issues to know who’s right. To me it looks like the Worobey et al. paper is either moderate, circumstantial (but still inconclusive) evidence in favor of natural origins, or neutral between the hypotheses.
By the way, I still stand by my strongest conclusion from the review — that the people who prematurely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis without sufficient evidence got it wrong, and the people who called for a full, open investigation of both hypotheses got it right. And this is still going to be the case even if the lab leak hypothesis turns out to be incorrect.
Thanks for writing this review! I really enjoyed your reflection on the points of the book, even if toward the end there was a large chunk of 'I don't know enough to update on this' - or especially because of that, I suppose! I really enjoy it when people easily admit to uncertainty and are this transparent as to which parts their uncertainty is about.
Thanks for the kind words! Yeah I think writing a book review (or any kind of review of evidence) is easier than writing a thesis essay, because it's ok to just summarize other people's points, while still remaining uncertain and not pretending otherwise.
One thing you did not address in your review was the question of motivations.
If my friend tries to convince me that the coin is going to come up heads, why would he do that? Why would he claim to know something he does not?
We need to ask the same question about those who tried to claim at the beginning of this incident that the natural origins hypothesis was an open and shut case.
Why would they have been so eager to shut down discussion unless they had, at minimum, very strong suspicions that any real investigation would strongly indicate a lab leak?
This also casts doubt on the integrity and veracity of anything else that comes from these people. Worse, how can I, an educated layman, determine whether any new analysis coming out that argues against the lab leak hypothesis is part of the same misinformation campaign? Heck, your apparently well-reasoned and neutral review could be an effort to move people like me away from assuming lab leak and to a more agnostic position.
At this point, is it worth my time to try to understand this stuff in detail so I can draw my own judgements? Or should I lobby my elected representatives to do an in depth investigation of who was pushing natural origins, why they were doing so, the extent to which this was due to Chinese government influence / pressure, whether any of the people involved were unregistered foreign agents, and whether any violations of US law can be prosecuted? Should I try to figure this stuff out or should I just assume lab leak at this point since any argument or analysis against it is suspect?
Frankly, at this point I am far more interested in understanding why so many scientists seemed to consider it their mission to shut down lab leak speculation and to what extent the Chinese government was controlling them than to find out whether or not the original cause of COVID was a lab leak.
I totally agree that section was the weakest part of the the review and I really liked it overall. If my friend tells me the coin is 100% going to turn up heads, my first reaction isn’t, to get annoyed, it is to assume he is trying to scam/trick me.
And I also definitely wouldn’t update to 50/50, especially if the coin wasn’t one I produced.
> Why would they have been so eager to shut down discussion unless they had, at minimum, very strong suspicions that any real investigation would strongly indicate a lab leak?
Well, that's just standard operating procedure for the CCP. They don't allow anyone to suggest that the government has fucked up, even if they're confident that a full investigation will show that the government hasn't fucked up in this case, because merely making the idea of government fuck-up *thinkable* is dangerous to them.
Besides, the people who are in charge of covering things up aren't necessarily the ones with enough information to know what's true and what isn't. The Chinese government is certainly big enough that the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing. If there was a lab leak then the number of people who know for sure is very small.
I am not talking about China or the CCP. I am talking about the US researchers - people like Peter Daszak.
I think you could satisfactorily account for most of that with, "It came from a Chinese lab" being sounding right-wing; in early 2020, the respectable position on Covid was that it was all a storm in a teacup and worrying about it was racist against asians.
Daszak himself seems to have been funnelling money to WIV (not the other way round), so may have been keen to cover up his own complicity in creating the virus, and protect his NIH grants. There are undoubtedly people in the West taking money from China/who the CCP have their talons in, but nothing like the scale that the Russians used to. Although I will go to my grave insisting that David Cameron was a Chinese spy (and I love that this is now becoming a proper conspiracy theory, not just a thing I think).
That's pretty uncharitable. America has a state ideology, and if you don't adhere to at least its minima then you don't have a career. The best approach is to quietly discuss what you think the truth might be with your colleagues, make sure there's a consensus and it's not just you, then slowly feed up the food chain that they need to turn the ship. They managed to do that, and have made the lab leak hypothesis acceptable. That's really a massive win, and is down to their commitment to the truth. It's just that not letting the proles in to gawk at everything while it's happening is necessary to actually achieve anything.
The WHO report stinks of meddling, but mostly in the realpolitik "if we say anything else then the PRC will stop co-operating with us which, since China is the source of many pathogens, is very bad" sense rather than the "PRC has suborned WHO" sense.
It's, uh, not good that a government this willing to take hostages is a superpower, and in terms of the WHO's credibility regarding anything involving China it's still a burn notice, but... it's probably not actively controlled by the CPC.
It depends on how cynical you are about these sort of organisations anyway - the WHO was (is?) led by a former Ethiopian apparatchik, and staffed in large part by people connected to similarly dubious regimes. They're not selected for competence or honesty, so you get stuff like this.
If your prior for international organisations is that they'll behave like the average of the countries involved in them, a lot of them (the WHO included) are surprisingly alright. Just pretty rubbish on an objective scale.
If the WHO can't say anything that will offend the CCP because they're too afraid of losing Chinese cooperation, is that really meaningfully different from being controlled by the CCP? I guess the former leaves open the possibility that other powerful countries might also be able to similarly veto any attempt by the WHO to promote conclusions they don't like... is there any evidence that countries other than China have been able to do this?
Honestly I don't know enough about Peter Daszak to speculate on him in particular.
One thing I will say is that the lab leak hypothesis certainly pattern-matches to crazy, if you're not paying attention. The idea that a naturally-occurring disaster was _actually_ caused by some kind of government malfeasance somewhere is a common conspiracy theory trope; for instance hurricanes or earthquakes being cooked up in a lab somewhere in Alaska https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/the-insane-logic-of-weather-truthers-who-think-hurricanes-are-created-by-the-government ... similarly, there were those who claimed that SARS-1 and AIDS were created in a lab too. And even for Covid-19, there were some crazy flavours of lab leak hypothesis (e.g. that it was a deliberate release designed to be a bioweapon against the West).
If you're not _really_ paying attention, it's so easy to pattern match "Covid came from a lab in Wuhan" to all the crazy theories that rhyme with it, without bothering to investigate or think too deeply about it.
People like Daszak and any scientist who speaks on this issue are supposed to be _really_ paying attention.
Yeah paying attention to the culture war. I swear that is the main concern of a good 35% of academia these days, including a disturbing amount of STEM people.
How will twitter activists feel about my research is practically the first step of an unofficial self-IRB.
I have friends in pretty unrelated fields who are typical professors, liberal etc. They claim no chilling effect, but when presented with scenarios of results in their work they might plausibly find that would be verboten, they to a person say they might not publish, or would have trouble publishing, or it would ruin their career, or they would need to enlist coauthors of the right sort and it still might ruin their career. Some of them are in math departments…
I don't think there's any doubt that Daszak himself was paying very close attention. He's one of the few people outside China who knows with high confidence whether this was a natural or artificial plague. Unfortunately for the rest of us, Daszak almost has to say "perfectly natural, no lab leak, anyone saying otherwise is a nutbar conspiracy theorist" either way. In the one case because it's true and helpful, in the other case because saying the truth would open him up to six million wrongful-death lawsuits.
People like the editors of The Lancet and the administrators of the WHO, should have been paying attention to Daszak's clear conflict of interest before basically putting him in charge of telling the world whether there had been a lab leak, but that's another matter.
In some cases, yes, "I might be on the wrong side of the culture war" is a real concern in academia. The stakes are much higher in this one, at least for Daszak and his team.
Also dont forget Kristian G. Andersen who strongly excluded the lab thesis from the beginning and now is also Co-Author of the new paper. I totally agree that those guys lost credibility by giving those statements without knowledge in the first place.
The US government does not permit gain-of-function virology research, thanks to the lobbying of scientists warning about how dangerous it is. The US government also funded Daszak's EcoHealth alliance, which used such funds at WIV. Even if this wasn't a leak from WIV, I doubt he wanted anyone to notice that the funds were being used for something prohibited.
This suggests potentially criminal acts. Where is the criminal investigation?
It isn't forbidden to spend money on such research elsewhere - even if that goes against spirit (but not the letter) of prohibiting such research in US.
Arguing from personal incredulity should be done with great care.
I wrote a related comment:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-viral/comment/8068083
Different people had different motivations to shut down investigation into the lab leak hypothesis. But I think anyone who does anything that they think has a potential to be misunderstood by outsiders is going to have an incentive to shut down investigation into them, whether they think the thing the investigation is about is relevant or not.
A school where teachers regularly encourage students to question the religious and political beliefs of their parents doesn’t want an extensive sexual harassment investigation to go on, even if they are confident there was no sexual harassment.
A sausage factory that regularly uses discarded turkey and pig parts in their sausages doesn’t want a highly publicized investigation into alleged food poisoning even if they are confident there was nothing unsanitary about their sources, just distasteful.
A profession that regularly modifies viruses and infects humanized animals with them, and where it is known that researchers often get slaps on the wrist for improper safety practices, doesn’t want a major investigation even if they are confident that this particular pathogen didn’t come from their lab.
> Why would they have been so eager to shut down discussion....?
Try this hypothesis. They started out knowing that the probability this came out of a lab was fairly low, but far from entirely insignificant. They want to get the general public's understanding of the probabilities as close to their own as possible, and this will be effected through what they say and how they say it.
However, they're well aware that communication is not some simple linear function; certain things they say will be enormously amplified because the media emphasises not the most probable points but the most surprising and shocking points, and whatever increases "engagement," and certain groups within the target community will also greatly amplify certain explanations that they prefer for non-scientific reasons.
This is coming out of not just an intellectual understanding of how these things work, but also direct experience with past communications attempts and their ongoing effects. Think about how the _Lancet_ editors and the reviewers of Wakefield's 1998 paper must feel right now. Fair or not, they surely know that if that paper had been rejected there was a much lower possibility that the whole anti-vaccine movement would have been so powerful, and thus they may (correctly or not) feel some responsibility for the many thousands of deaths that can be attributed to that movement.
They're also aware of the well known psychological phenomenon that the initial explanation that people believe, whether it's correct or not, is "sticky"; for some people it will never change no matter how much evidence to the contrary is found.
So put yourself in the shoes of these scientific spokespeople. If you're playing this communications game, your goal is that as much of the public as possible in the long term will settle on the (as-yet unknown) correct explanation, whatever it may be, and you have a decent understanding of how public communications works and how the various scenarios you discuss will be interpreted an amplified. What would you have done differently in your communications, and how do you anticipate the results would have been better in the long run?
"We don't know yet. What we do know is x,y and z. We will continue trying to figure it out."
Results; there's no suppression of a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, millions of people have one less reason to mistrust "the experts" and people are more willing to participate in a vaccination program because they trust that the experts are not politically motivated on this topic.
You mean the way the Wakefield MMR-vaccine-autism paper explained that no causal connection had been proven? And how did that work out for people accepting vaccines?
That wasn't some weird special case. Science communication works very differently when talking to other scientists, people with a science background, and members of the public willing to spend the time and effort (both intellectual and emotional) to come to rational conclusions about these things. Most of the population won't do the work to overcome the psychological biases and other issues related to things like preferring to listen to the most exciting explanation, being unable to change your mind after deciding on an explanation, and so on. Lots of otherwise rational people would _love_ to ignore this (ironically enough), but if we want to avoid things like massive anti-vaccination movements, we need to take this stuff into account.
Given that the "let's play games to manipulate the public" approach led to a massive increase in the anti-vaccine movement with far wider implications than the MMR stuff as well as a massive drain of public trust in scientific institutions, I'd say Ian's approach is still the correct one. I'd liken the anti-vaccine implications of the 2020 approach to be stepping on a landmine to avoid crushing a stinkbug. I think this is a broader issue than just vaccines though, like how everyone seems to update to "how will twitter react to X,Y,Z", which is really just the vocal subset of twitter users who are a subset of the population at large: the tail is wagging the dog. The correct response is to not give a damn how twitter, or cnn, or alex jones will react and go back to figuring out how reasonable people will react like you did before they were around. At it's simplest: you don't build trust through manipulation, that's how you destroy it, and coming up with rational sounding arguments of how the public needs you to manipulate them doesn't change that (and as we've seen: spectacularly backfired). You can craft your message to try and maximize the people you reach, but the overall message should still be one of truth and openness regarding what you do and don't know.
+1
Great review. Not sure if Viral covered the DEFUSE proposal? That was something the computational biologist Nick Patterson recently said swayed him towards considering accidental leak of an engineered virus was the most likely scenario. One response to that is DARPA didn't fund it as it was too risky but Patterson notes work sometimes starts before the funding and could well have gone ahead anyway. It certainly explains the features of the furin site.
https://npatterson.substack.com/p/more-regulation-please
In terms of the Science papers, it's hard to take several of those authors seriously after it was shown they privately considered the virus looked unlikely to have arisen naturally but publicly rubbished the lab leak scenario which would be damaging to Chinese-US collaboration and put the NIAID in an awkward position having funded the research in Wuhan. I also wasn't aware there had been a moratorium on gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens like SARS from 2014-2017. Several scientists warned that lifting it would risk a pandemic and here we are.
I would recommend reading the comments of Gilles Demaneuf on some of the ascertainment bias issues with the latest papers. The retrospective case counting often involved a market link requirement so unsurprisingly they found a lot of cases at the market.
The two jump theory also hinges on a single sample of lineage A from a glove. There is a competing analysis from Sridhar Kumar and colleagues that shows a single jump and emergence in September or early October 2019.
Ultimately, the virus backbone had to get from either Yunnan or Laos to Wuhan. The Wuhan Institute of Virology was sampling from both places and across SE Asia. They won't share their virus database but as the chair of the Lancet Covid19 Commission suggested US based agencies may hold information that could shed light on what occurred.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/did-us-technology-help-create-covid-19-in-china-by-neil-l-harrison-and-jeffrey-d-sachs-2022-05
I enjoyed this review, mostly because it roughly matches my pre-existing beliefs, so of course I'd be pre-disposed to like it. I didn't learn much personally, but hopefully it will Knock Some Sense Into Those Other EvilWrong People On The Internet.
The one section I found very frustrating was the vague attacks on "public health officials, scientists, journalists, and tech companies". Instead of looking into any specific claims by specific people and assessing how true they are and whether they were justified based on the evidence available at the time and what different actors motivations might have been, you just sort of gesture vaguely about "elites and institutions" and hope the audience will nod along in outrage (which they usually will, since this is a bias that is common in the rat-sphere.) Sometimes it seems like you go to more trouble to understand the action of the Chinese government than Americans!
One unfortunate aspect of writing is that published words are frozen in time but our understanding of reality is not.
Just three days ago, work was published in Science that seems to strongly support the natural origins hypothesis: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
I am not an expert, but I know those who are, and we were all convinced by this latest paper. It ties together statistical arguments that:
- Early cases clustered close to the market
- Early cases clustered on the side of the market with mammals
- BOTH early strains are tied to the market
And crucially, it makes the claim that these early cases were not due to ascertainment bias, because they were detected before people even realized there was an outbreak around the market.
If the strain came from a lab worker, it seems unlikely that (a) they'd spread it at the market and not any other possible superspreader site, (b) it would just so happen to be on the side of the market with mammals, and (c) it would have happened TWICE, with TWO STRAINS. It's possible, but implausibly so.
Twitter summary for those who don't want to read the article: https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1551937826580824070?fbclid=IwAR3-tllY2CsR4UWE2812f1pGt-2Jr3x0jmVFyZhbO1x63Rh0L0Zy33-xvBA
Before this Science article I was open-minded to both possibilities. After it, I am convinced.
That said, the author of Viral is skeptical that the December 2019 data are free of ascertainment bias and therefore thinks COVID's origins are still a open question: https://ayjchan.medium.com/evidence-for-a-natural-origin-of-covid-19-no-longer-dispositive-after-scientific-peer-review-af95b52499e1
I would have liked a more quantitative argument about how much ascertainment bias would have been needed to get results as extreme as those shown in the paper. But I recognize that would have been a lot of work.
Hi Ted, thank you for the comment! Yes I saw that paper a couple days ago (actually I mentioned it in Section 1 of my review, although that was the pre-print version).
Here is a link to Alina Chan's critiques of the paper:
https://ayjchan.medium.com/evidence-for-a-natural-origin-of-covid-19-no-longer-dispositive-after-scientific-peer-review-af95b52499e1
Basically the main technical critique is still the ascertainment bias issue. Chan says the data were obtained with ascertainment bias, and Worobey et al. say they were not. I'm not sure who to believe, and am not really knowledgeable enough to evaluate the opposing technical claims being made here. My understanding is that the issue is the murkiness of the dataset Worobey et al. used, and how exactly that data was collected.
I would also add that in past coronavirus epidemics like SARS and MERS, things were only resolved when the actual animal source of the disease was found (direct evidence, rather than circumstantial). Here's an article explaining this standard of evidence:
https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/the-origins-of-sars-cov-2-still-to-be-determined/
So my understanding is that even if Chan's critiques of the Worobey et al. are wrong and the paper's analysis is valid, it only constitutes circumstantial evidence in favor of natural origins, not definitive proof.
One thing I liked about the Worobey et al. paper though is that it presents a hypothesis for which animal species might have been the intermediary hosts between bats and humans, so maybe that will lead to some investigations of specific farms and wildlife traders, and could yield more definitive proof.
The demand for an animal source is requirimg a burden of proof that is, at this point, impossible to meet. But as you point out, the burden of proof is on the conspiracy theory, and there is zero evidence which requires anything other than a natural explanation.
I'm not sure that "Chinese government had a standard-issue fuck-up and covered it up" counts as a conspiracy theory in anything other than the most pedantic sense. OK, a government coverup would presumably require at least two people to conspire at some point, but it certainly doesn't require the sorts of implausible conspiracies that are usually entailed by the term "conspiracy theory". If there _was_ a lab leak, then a Chinese government coverup would be not only plausible but inevitable.
In a case like this I don't think there's any "burden of proof" either way. This isn't a court of law, where we have to reach near 100% certainty on one hypothesis or accept the other. We can continue to entertain both hypotheses, which seems reasonable because they're both intuitively plausible and I haven't seen any evidence which pushes it strongly one way or the other. (Though I consider myself insufficiently qualified to properly weigh up evidence about furin cleavage sites and the like.)
Going through Scott's list at Too Many People Dare Call It Conspiracy:
A. The CPC is not secret and "covering up things that embarrass China" is a known thing it does
B. Virology researchers do have an interest in not being considered hostis humani generis, but there would be a need for some actual co-ordination in this case.
C. Internal culture of the PRC government is definitely "covering up things that embarrass China is prosocial" - this is not remotely secret.
D. This wouldn't need a huge conspiracy; maybe a couple dozen people actively "in on it" plus some people who follow orders without too many questions.
That's 3/4 heuristics "more plausible", and one somewhat ambiguous but leaning toward "less".
Furthermore, the idea that any theory involving a conspiracy is inconceivable is simply ridiculous for many reasons.
1. Those who hold that belief are the same people who just spent 6 years seriously entertaining the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory (they literally used the synonymous term "collusion theory" to avoid calling it a conspiracy theory).
2. The primary argument against conspiracy theories in general is "that many people couldn't keep a secret for that long, eventually somebody would say something"... and then when people like Haim Eshed, Bob Lazar, the fraudster who talked to Jon Levine, and Brook Jackson blow the whistle on conspiracies, they are dismissed as "crazy conspiracy theorists". When someone blows the whistle on an actual conspiracy, we simply won't believe them, because we've defined the act of blowing the whistle on a conspiracy to itself be evidence of being "a conspiracy theorist" which then makes one inherently untrustworthy.
3. Conspiring is one of the most basic, fundamental human behaviors. People have conspired with each other throughout all of history, and there's no reason to expect that they will stop anytime soon.
This is why there actually _is_ a 10% or 15% chance of non-natural origin. \S
"We should assume that my position is correct by default, and you have to prove otherwise" is doing a lot of work here. Is there some reason should we assume you are correct, or is this based on some fundamental principle of rationality that I just haven't heard about?
*The Iron Laws of Reason*
Law 1: Q -> P === ~P -> ~Q
Law 2: P(A|B) = P(B|A) * P(A) / P(B)
Law 3: It is absolutely impossible for people to conspire with each other.
The same argument could be used against an animal source. The non-conspiracy truthers are demanding a burden of proof that is impossible to meet, but there is zero evidence which requires anything other than a lab leak explanation.
You seem to purposely ignore the TWO STRAINS part of the commenter's argument and the Science paper. To me, it is the strongest evidence for the natural origin so far.
Can you explain to me like I'm 5 why two strains is evidence for the first human host being infected by an animal at the market instead of any source inside the lab?
[For bonus points also consider the case where the animal host at the market came from the lab, but I think this is a small fraction of possibility and so fine to ignore so long as it's smaller than other plausible routes coming from the lab.]
It doesn't make any sense.
Lab leak of two strains would imply
1) two different but closely related strains studied in the lab. Why? Scientists generally keep experiments tightly controlled and two strains would complicate the interpretation of any data.
2) The researcher in the lab getting infected with two strains (two low-probability events) or two researchers independently getting infected with different strains and brining to the market (very low probability).
I don't know why 2 strains is less parsimonious inside a lab but magically more parsimonious outside a lab.
Because transmission in wildlife market is uncontrolled and lead to lots of mutations. Scientists who do specifically do mutations in the lab like too keep things under controlled conditions. Otherwise, the research is unpublishable and worth very little.
Beyond "beware the man of one study" in general, we already know this is a particularly thorny issue where people are pretty partisan; why trust *these authors* in particular, or *this journal* in particular?
As for the paper specifically--I don't buy it, because they test the market compared to a null hypothesis of *the population distribution of Wuhan*. Shouldn't they be comparing it to something like "distance from the WIV"?
Yeah the way Worobey treats their “geospatial analysis” like it’s the Michelson-Morley experiment and not a social science-style statistical analysis with about a thousand researcher degrees of freedom definitely causes me to reduce my trust in any of their results.
Beautifully put, thanks :-)
My thought as well.
There's something about the tone with which these recent studies are being presented that raises my hackles, too - like they're triumphantly smashing an insurgency. That combined with preprints (i.e. documents that are by definition not ready for publication) being widely publicized with aforementioned triumphalism has me fairly certain that objectivity has left the building at this point.
Agreed. It looks like peer-review has resulted in them toning down their claims, but not in them addressing the actual methodological and data problems: https://ayjchan.medium.com/evidence-for-a-natural-origin-of-covid-19-no-longer-dispositive-after-scientific-peer-review-af95b52499e1
Not sure if I really agree with your second point. It seems to me that if the early case data were collected in an unbiased way (which I'm not sure about), then comparing the early case distribution to the underlying population distribution makes sense. Can you explain further?
Say WIV was located next door to the market. Would the alleged fact that the outbreak was centered on the market prove anything? Obviously not.
If you want to provide evidence against the WIV lab leak hypothesis you have to compare the distribution of cases with distance to market as an independent variable to the distribution of cases with distance to WIV as an independent variable.
In addition, you have to explain how you rule out that the first super spreader event was at the market caused by a WIV researcher infected at work stopping there to buy food.
Nobody has to provide evidence AGAINST lab leak. Being the more complicated and unlikely explanation, the burden of proof lies with the conspiracists.
I've heard this claim before.
Can you please explain in more detail?
Why is it more complicated and unlikely that a lab that collects virus samples from bats would have an accident that results in an outbreak of a bat virus than that a bat virus somehow traveled over 1,000 kilometers to a wet market in a city that just happened to have the only facility in China that did this kind of research?
I would actually see it as the reverse.
As an example, if there was an outbreak of Ebola 5 km from Fort Detrick and it was known that Fort Detrick researchers had travelled to Africa and taken samples from Ebola outbreaks, would your default hypothesis be that someone had travelled from Africa to Maryland and spread the virus or that either Fort Detrick had had an accident or a Fort Detrick researcher on a sample acquisition trip had been infected (perhaps asymptomatically) and then passed it on?
I mean, to be clear, we haven't found a close relative to the virus. Yes, the closest one we've found is fairly far away, but that one is many MANY generations distant from COVID. If this is a natural virus it likely didn't come from that population of animals. Noone thinks that COVID evolved from that virus over the lifespan of a single captive animal being transported to a wet market.
Edit: and the real reason our priors should be on a natural source for the virus isn't the relative complexity of the theories (which is pretty subjective.) It's because we know that the vast majority of zoonotic pandemics, including the most closely related one, did have natural origins.
The lab leak people aren't saying the lab leak itself was a conspiracy. They're saying that the PRC conspired to cover it up.
We know the PRC conspired to cover things up in this case (first-off trying to suppress knowledge that COVID was real - this is well-documented, nobody disputes it - and then the issues with the WHO investigation), so "the interference with the WHO investigation was to cover up either a known or a suspected lab leak of COVID" is one of like three plausible hypotheses (the others being "WIV is up to something else that they don't want to come out, like non-COVID-related bioweapons" and "covering up on general principles" - this last is not actually foolish from a game-theoretic point of view, since it reduces the information people gain from the existence of a coverup on a matter).
Even if they were saying it was a conspiracy, what makes a conspiracy inherently less likely than any other type of theory? You'd have to justify that on a theory-by-theory basis.
Why is it more unlikely?
I don't think this is how "determining what is true" works, in this particular case.
That is: He's not saying "you have to do this if you want us to consider a natural origin", he's saying you have to do this *if you want to show that the paper he's responding to provided good evidence against the lab leak.*
Compare: suppose someone advances a theory that education doesn't actually do anything to improve learning or life outcomes before 8th grade. We publish a rebuttal by pointing out that college students out-earn the general population; the individual replies that "to provide evidence against my theory, you have to compare 'no school before 8th' to 'school before 8th', not 'college vs no college'."
That schooling before 8th grade matters could reasonably be our default position, yes. But if we then say "we don't *have* to do that; the burden of proof is on you!", it would obviously be unreasonable: we have been given a plausible reason why our attempted rebuttal was flawed, and now we do have to provide a response — or we're not actually participating in discovering the truth, just scoring points.
But twitter told me scoring rhetorical points is all that matters anymore, and my department meetings reinforce that message?
When the most likely species to have caused the crossover infection doesn't have habitat within a thousand kilometers of the market and wasn't known to have been sold at the market, it's a bit rich to suggest that lab leak is the more complicated and unlikely explanation.
This is a bit like saying, "Morphine pills were not known to be sold at the open air drug market." Sure, they weren't specifically known to be sold. They are however, a frequently sold drug and are generally sold in locations that sell lots of other drugs.
Like Shanghaied points out, we're trying to compare two different hypotheses: was human patient 0 infected at the lab, or at the market?
The paper instead asks the question: "when we infer a geospatial distribution of reported infections in Dec 2019, where's the center?". The market is near the center; is the WIV *also* near the center? They don't ask, which seems pretty critical to comparing the two hypotheses, instead of just stacking up evidence that seems likely given your favored hypothesis.
As far as I can tell, the WIV is *not* near the center of the distribution, and so it's evidence against the theory that the first major superspreader event was at the WIV. But I don't think anyone was pushing that theory?
In more detail, the right way to do this is to build a bunch of models, assign probabilities of how things would go, and then calculate the posterior. The actual thing that happened is highly conjunctive and so will be unlikely under any hypothesis, and so the question is how the two compare.
For example, if you think 'the pandemic starts at a <wild animal market>", how many wild animal markets are there in China which it could have been? If you think 'the pandemic starts in a lab with a single infected worker, who then spreads it at a <superspreader event>", how many possible places for a superspreader event were there in Wuhan?
Like, in Rasmussen's tweet thread:
> Try fitting this into a lab leak scenario:
> Worker 1 gets infected with lineage B at WIV and immediately goes straight to the market, only infecting other people once there.
> A week later, worker 2 gets infected with lineage A at WIV & also immediately goes straight to Huanan.
> There's a much simpler explanation:
> Human at market 1 gets infected with lineage B from a live animal sold at the market.
> A week later, human at market 2 gets infected with lineage A from another live animal sold at the market.
> This is very plausible, because the animals were kept in such close quarters and were part of a common supply chain. One infected animal would spread virus to others, allowing for the divergence of the two lineages prior to zoonotic transmission to humans.
Alternatively... a human gets infected with lineage B in the lab, infecting both humans and animals at the market, and then lineage A develops at the market (either in an animal or in a human), infecting humans.
Like, if anything, two lineages sounds to me much more like "worker from lab that collected and developed variants" than "business-as-usual at a market". [If the same market had two different strains like this across two weeks, doesn't that seem very unlikely given the background rate of zoonotic transmission at markets like this?]
But they're not building large webs of possibility and trying to integrate; they're looking at something that has a Bayes factor of 1-2 and pretending it's a smoking gun.
>Like, if anything, two lineages sounds to me much more like "worker from lab that collected and developed variants" than "business-as-usual at a market". [If the same market had two different strains like this across two weeks, doesn't that seem very unlikely given the background rate of zoonotic transmission at markets like this?]
This is a very good point.
Sorry, but I think the idea that a "lab leak of the virus" can only be proved by a Snow-like map of cases concentrically centered on the front steps of the lab itself is comically simplistic, so much so that it's borderline disingenuous.
Whoa, I'm not saying "can only be proved"! I'm being Bayesian about this whole thing.
Think thru this case with me: suppose a tech catches COVID from the stored viruses at the lab, and then keeps going to work / their regular community events / etc.; isn't it a surprise that they *didn't* spread it at the lunch room at the lab?
The hope of reasoning about things in a Bayesian way is that if you carefully keep track of all of the surprises, you can tell which of two stories is more surprising overall. Maybe this is just a small surprise (maybe the virology lab has very generous sick leave, so in fact the tech didn't come back to work, or Chinese work culture often has people eating off-site so there's less worker-to-worker spread, or so on), but it should still go on the pile of surprises so you can accurately weigh the whole stories.
What about the "worker sells animals used for research at WIV to someone at the market on the sly" hypothesis?
Good point. I have personally eaten lab animals in the US (chickens and lambs), although my only connection with the research was being a friend of a friend of a lab worker. They said they were controls, and they tasted fine. Although there is no evidence for it, it does not sound crazy.
Against that particular hypothesis, the WIV was working on bats and I think cell cultures from other mammals but not live animals. The Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, in spite of its name, sold a fair number of live mammals, but it appears to have not sold bats in the period of interest.
Of course, we also know that Covid can be carried and communicated to humans by dozens of other animals including, cats, dogs, deer, mink, and hamsters. So really, any of a number of animals could have been an intermediary and the bat could have merely been proximate during some part of shipping.
My understanding is that the two strains are different enough that it would have taken longer than a week or two evolve.
I haven't read the paper, so maybe "geospatial analysis" means something more sophisticated than I think it does. But I don't think that "near the center" in *geographic* terms is particularly relevant, because the disease spreads among humans and humans aren't anything like particles moving by brownian motion in a uniform fluid. What matters is social rather than geographic distance, and weighted by local suitability for superspreader events.
E.g. the Atlanta International Airport is way on the outskirts of Atlanta. But it's a really good place for a superspreader event. And it handles about as many outgoing passengers as incoming. So if there's a disease outbreak there, then a priori it's as likely to have been brought there by someone from Atlanta, as it is by someone on an incoming flight. And if the disease is suspiciously similar to something being researched at the CDC, then "but the CDC is on the other side of the city!", is not a strong counterargument.
Shopping for seafood and the occasional live mammal is something lots of people in China do, in roughly the way airline travel is something lots of people in America do. A laboratory technician might do either, on any given day. And if a someone is going to do that, then they're going to deliberately travel to the place where that thing is done, even if it's on the other side of the city.
There's probably a way to do an analysis that quantifiably addresses actual human patterns of movement and interaction, weighted by probability of airborne virus transmission. But I expect that it would be very hard to do, particularly without the cooperation of a trustworthy Chinese government. And I don't think the results would normally be described as "geospatial".
Can someone who has read the preprint say whether it properly addressed these factors?
Which question are you trying to answer? As noted elsewhere, the paper is answering the question "where was the first superspreader event?", not "where was patient 0 infected?". [Why the commentators or the authors are pretending the second is beyond me.]
I do think the paper is pretty convincing that, of the cases we're familiar with from December, a huge fraction of them are downstream of transmission at the market. [I don't think they have the statistical power to detect whether it's 90% or 100%, especially if some cases were strategically deleted from the records as part of a coverup.]
I would have liked for them to be more quantitative with two main questions to answer something more like "where was patient 0 infected?":
1) what fraction of early cases would you expect to be 'tied to the market' if the disease originated there instead of simply spreading there?
2) is the move towards the population center of Wuhan from Dec to Jan/Feb above, at, or below the expected move if the market were the only early source of infections?
If the only thing the paper is relevant for is the location of the initial superspreader, then what was your "is the WIV *also* near the center" about?
Yes, the initial superspreader event was almost certainly at the market. If someone is claiming that the geographic distance between the WIV and the first superspreader event is in any way relevant, that person is almost certainly wrong. I was unclear as to whether it was you or the authors of the preprint who were making that argument, or if those authors were at least providing something that supported your claim.
"Near" is a relative term, no? To know that you'd need to have things like Wuhan public transit routes and location of staff residences relative to WIV and the market.
For example, I have a coworker whose preferred grocery store is 25 kilometres from our place of work.
> And crucially, it makes the claim that these early cases were not due to ascertainment bias, because they were detected before people even realized there was an outbreak around the market.
Regarding ascertainment bias, there’s a relatively uncontroversial claim that much of the data used for the main analysis is probably subject to ascertainment bias. The “bias free” data is limited to a small number of very early cases (41 cases, 27 linked to the market).
Regarding the claim that these early cases are bias free, I think laypeople can reasonably try to evaluate this claim themselves. It’s not like the paper authors are experts in Chinese medical bureaucracy. My take (based on the preprint): they establish a few cases linked to the market before official mechanisms recognised the disease, but there’s ample evidence that official mechanisms often lag behind informal chats and rumours by a substantial margin, so it’s still quite plausible that a link to the market was presumed when the earlier cases were identified. In short, they present weak evidence (Bayes factor 1.5 ish) against ascertainment bias.
Ascertainment bias would also apply to the first cases being identified in Wuhan at all. There's no way to rule out that earlier cases of covid appeared elsewhere in China but were never identified. Chan appears to want to have it both ways: throw out the wet market connection for ascertainment bias but keep the Wuhan/lab connection, even though the latter has an inherent ascertainment bias mechanism baked into it (the lab would be a very good place to first identify COVID).
Indeed, it might not have originated in Wuhan. However, you can easily check if the virus was discovered by the WIV and you should do things like this before wasting everyone’s time with silly comments.
This whole topic is a massive waste of time, sooooo
1. Is the analysis done by people under the control of or influence of the Chinese government?
2. Was the data obtained with Chinese government cooperation?
3. Is the future access to data about the outbreak by these researchers dependent on Chinese government cooperation?
4. Were any of the researchers on the paper part of the early effort to shut down discussion of the lab leak hypothesis?
If any of these are true, how can we trust the analysis?
In addition, how can any of the points you list distinguish between the outbreak starting at the market and the outbreak starting with a WIV researcher who went to the market to buy food and infected someone there? The early strains could have diverged there.
So now we have TWO zoonotic spillover events in the same place within a few days of each other? That itself strikes me as a very improbable event that should reduce our confidence in any hypothesis that requires it. But a lab doing work on two (or more!) infectious strains simultaneously would not be at all surprising, and if their containment protocols are lax enough for one to get out then so could another. You do still have the implausibility of "the infected researchers both go to the wild-animal section of the Huanan Seafood Market, which is not the most convenient market for WIV" though.
Wouldn't it make more sense that it was one researcher who was infected with both strains in a single accident?
Two accidents in close succession seems unlikely.
Easy to account for this by someone at WIV making renminbi on the side by selling no longer needed research animals.
Unlikely. Bats are not eaten in Wuhan and lab mice aren't the type of rats that people might eat.
But would it make sense to feed the "no longer needed" lab mice to some of the animals sold in the wildlife market?
No.
1. Humans rarely eat carnivores
2. For the most common ones (ie. dogs and cata) you do not need to feed them live meat.
You would have to know where all the WIV workers actually live to even start to assess how convenient that market is, though, right? There's a Superstore mere steps outside my office, but I prefer the Safeway near my house (and not even the Safeway nearest my house, since it's in a busy mall and I don't like the fight for parking).
Even that would not help.
If Hunaan sold exotics then it may have been the only source in Wuhan for many animals. If someone from WIV was planning a special meal they would have gone there to get special meat even if not convenient.
Except, the market origin doesn't even slightly deprecate the chance of lab origin. I'm not sure why the natural-origin advocates believe it does. Market origin != natural source.
Personally, my money is on the casual, incautious, opportunistic disposal of WIV lab animals that didn't seem overtly sick, so (junior lab janitor 7) decides he can make a few bucks selling them to a friend that has a "don't ask questions about where this came from" stall at the wet market.
This is unlikely.
Animals sold in wet markets are very different from lab animals.
Bats are not eaten in Wuhan and lab mice are a lot smaller than the rats that get eaten. I am not aware of any evidence that WIV worked with dogs or cats, which would otherwise be the best candidate as both a lab animal and a potential dinner.
If the lab leak hypothesis is correct then the most likely route from WIV to the market was people. It could be a researcher. It could also be something as simple as poorly disposed garbage resulting in a refuse collector being infected and his wife worked at the market.
(Never been to Wuhan myself, my only impression is from someone who worked near there for about 4 months which I take as significantly more credible and less prone to 'spin' than professional media sources whose motivations are unclear to me.)
While I appreciate your comment that 'bats aren't eaten in Wuhan'....In my acquaintance's experience of Wuhan and poorer regions of China, and my own experience of such markets in third world countries, I'm pretty sure that attractively-priced meat protein of ANY KIND is eaten in Wuhan and in a certain context, the provenance is basically irrelevant.
But to your latter point, yes, it could also well be an infected worker that just wandered through a hot, damp, crowded, high-throughput place like the Wuhan market. My only take would be that I'd assume the typical safety standards and in/out testing is pretty high at such a facility, so that route would have to inadvertently 'beat' such checks/practices. OTOH, someone doing something shady like selling disposed test animals for a little $ is going to be already and deliberately skirting the rules.
Which is more likely? At that point it's a sheer guess.
To a tangential point, though: pretty much all the comments I've seen to this review, and frankly much of the online commentary in places like Slashdot are rather impressively intelligent people (at least they write so).
So (not to you but generally) from such people, why the oversimplification that:
Wet Market = natural source, and
Lab origin = must be deliberate leak or spread from the Wuhan lab
...as if there aren't tons of ways those could be blended in different narratives?
There are a number of variables in the process that are being conflated, I don't know why...as strawmen, maybe? The only one I think in actual play here is if the virus itself was a natural mutation passed from a natural source with no real human intervention aside from being the recipients, or was the virus (which in any case originally came from a natural source) somehow manipulated/edited by humans?
Was it a deliberate leak by the Chinese, or inadvertent? Personally, I overwhelmingly believe inadvertent. Not just because incompetence is vastly more likely than malice most times, but because if it would have been deliberate it a) pretty certainly wouldn't have been down the street from the lab (lol) and b) the Chinese would have had a far better cover story than their hasty, reflexive fibs, lies, falsehoods, and stonewalling.
I have been to Wuhan several times and my wife is from a nearby town.
1. Wuhan is not poor. It is generally considered a second tier city, one step behind Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, etc. The US equivalent of San Francisco, one step down from NYC, Chicago, LA.
2. Like in most third world countries, what food is on the menu is culturally dependent unless people are starving, and they are not starving in Wuhan. Chinese make fun of southern Chinese for eating anything with its back to the sky (think about it) or anything that flies except an airplane and anything that swims except a submarine. Outside of Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangzi, and parts of Sichuan most "exotic" foods are things like pig brain and dog. Some insects as delicacies. You do not find the exotics in places like Wuhan. In addition, I have been in wet markets all over China including Yunnan, Guangxi, and Guangdong and I have never seen bat. You definitely will not find bat in a Wuhan wet market unless you do some kind of special order (ie. a Guangxi cuisine restaurant ordering it for a special dinner. In a case like that it would also be Guangxi customers.)
3. In general, things like bat, rat, pangolin, cat, dog, centipede, scorpion, etc. are specialty foods. They are more expensive and people want to eat them buy them in recognizable form so they are not cheated. No one buys anonymous unidentifiable meat in a Chinese market - you have no idea what it is, how old it is, etc.
4. I have no idea what "in/out testing" you think goes on at a Chinese wet market or whether you think it applies to people or animals. I can guarantee to you that customers walk in and out with no testing, workers walk in and then go home without any testing, and animals are brought in without testing and animals (alive or dead) leave with no testing.
5. Safety standards are minimal. In a place like Wuhan, they have refrigeration. That is still relatively new. I have been in many smaller wet markets where fresh meat hangs from hooks and you smell it to make sure it has not been out too long. Drainage gutters usually exist. The floor is not particularly clean. Toilets are squatters, there is no soap, and butchers squat down still wearing their work aprons. In supermarkets workers usually wear a mail glove to protect their hands while chopping meat. In markets that is less common.
6. I'm not sure how this blends. Original source was either the wet market or the lab (or, less likely, something else). If it was the lab, then the wet market was one of the earliest super spreader events.
One of my pet peeves about this whole subject is the tendency for people to conflate "it clearly spread from the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market" with "it is clearly a natural zoonotic event". The Huanan market was pretty clearly the first Covid-19 superspreader event, but the Huanan market would have been a really good place for a superspreader event even if it only sold seafood (and gamma-sterilized at that). It's a big crowded noisy poorly-ventilated building(*) with thousands of people coming and going every day.
So either version requires a coincidence. In the lab-leak version, it's certainly possible that a WIV lab technician exposed himself to proto-COVID, went to buy some seafood after work, and then went about his business. But why the seafood market, instead of one of a hundred other places in Wuhan just as suitable for a superspreader event? Unlikely, but not impossible.
In the natural zoonotic version, it's certainly possible that someone shipped an infected [unknown not-bat animal] from Yunnan or Laos to Wuhan, where it was sold in Wuhan's not-exclusively-seafood wet market. But why the *Wuhan* wet market, rather than one of a hundred others at least as closely tied to Yunnan/Laos? Also unlikely, but not impossible.
The existence of two strains doesn't change that, because it requires the same coincidence in both cases. The research being carried out at WIV was likely to create multiple related strains, but someone or someones being infected with both and then visiting the Huanan market is unlikely. OTOH, while a wild reservoir might have two strains in circulation, the odds of animals infected with both being transported to Wuhan but neither to any closer city is also unlikely.
And if, more likely IMHO, the second strain only emerged when the virus first had a chance to play pinball among crowded human hosts, then that's equally likely whether the first strain shows up in an [unknown not-bat animal] or in a recently-infected lab technician.
Both hypotheses are credible and require investigation, even if we are 100% certain that the first superspreader event was at the Huanan market and that there were two early strains.
* Some extrapolation from my experience in other Chinese markets involved; I've never been to Wuhan.
I'm still not sure why this isn't the only thing people are talking about.
Completely agree. Whether the pandemic was caused by a lab leak or the wildlife trade, it seems like we brought this thing on ourselves either way and need to take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Though in some sense it doesn't matter: since both possibilities are plausible, we should shut down the wild animal trade *and* demand higher biosecurity standards for virology work and tighter controls on gain-of-function research.
I should note that there aren't a lot of easy gains for Westerners trying to improve standards at either Chinese wild animal markets or Chinese research labs, because the PRC just goes "fuck you and fuck your international order".
There is one and only one threat that the PRC will listen to, which is "do this or Global Thermonuclear War", and even then you'd have a substantial likelihood of having to actually follow through on that threat.
Are there things worth going to Global Thermonuclear War over? Yes. Are there biolab things worth going to Global Thermonuclear War over? Also yes (the obvious case is Life 2.0 X-risk). Is specifically "you might do another COVID by accident" worth Global Thermonuclear War? Probably not. Which means the ability of this dialogue to actually produce an order-of-magnitude decrease in the rate of lab leaks is essentially nil - we can improve Western standards, and the PRC may of its own initiative improve Chinese standards, but we can't improve Chinese standards and lots of the low-standards work is in China.
I don’t think improving western lab standards is a waste of time at all.
Hence my mention of "order-of-magnitude". Even if you take the West to 0, the sheer amount of biotech research in PRC territory means it's only a moderate downgrade in total risk.
We can stop funding research in Chinese labs, or insist on tighter standards and random inspections as a condition of doing so (which I expect is equivalent to stopping all funding, because CCP).
A ten to twenty percent tariff on all Chinese exports would also probably work. No need to start a war.
I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that Chinese research labs are uniquely lax in their security precautions, given the litany of close calls that have happened in the US, UK, Singapore, and Russia.
Covid killed 5 million people; expected casualties in a US-China nuclear war are <500E6 (and most of that is from the possibility of Russia being drawn in against the US). So if we assume that status quo means another Covid sometime in this generation, and there's a 99% probability that China will back down on gain-of-function research and wet markets if seriously threatened with nuclear war, then by strict first-order consequentialism we should seriously threaten nuclear war.
As it turns out, I'm not a strict consequentialist, or even a moderate one; there are other values at play here. And higher-order terms to the consequential math. So I don't think we should actually do that. But it's kind of alarming that the first-order math suggests that this is something we should be at least considering.
I'm more pessimistic about both likelihood and casualties of nuclear war given the hawk option.
But yes, I was that specific for a reason and this is pretty disquieting.
First-order math is misleading.
Consider that people dead from COVID were mostly old and had just a few QALYs left - let's Fermi estimate as ~2-3 on average, once the "quality" part is taken into account. A nuclear strike would kill indiscriminately.
Also, I'd rather have long COVID than radiation sickness, nevermind the massive economic and logistical disruption of even a limited nuclear exchange. IIRC in a nuclear war you're most likely to die of hunger, not because of nuclear winter (vastly overblown risk) but because all the supply chains collapse at once.
Covid killed 22 million, and counting. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-economist-single-entity?country=~OWID_WRL
OTH, " a real dog" is correct that those deaths were seldom among kids or healthy working-age population.
But the funniest thing here is that the US government and scientific establishment both funded the lax Chinese GoF research, and engaged in early coverup of the possibility of the lab leak, so maybe you should consider thermonuclear bombing of them as well, just to be safe?
While I agree with you and John Schilling below, I don't think nuclear war would be necessary even as a threat. The US/Europe could ratchet up sanctions until demands are met, especially if you got the third power (Russia) on board with it. The bigger issue is that the West can't even coordinate their own long-term response to COVID, much less produce a united front to investigate the conditions that created it.
Considering both that there is a certainty that we will have more natural origin diseases, as well as the improbability of "perfect" security in disease research, I'd say it's just as important if not moreso that we understand WHY our ostensibly science driven experts, government, and media were so wedded to a single unproved narrative and (not trivially) the suppression of apostates, heretics, and even agnostics.
I'm not saying there was a conspiracy, that's Alex Jones nutter territory. There certainly was however dogmatic consensus across groups who should, theoretically, be checking each other and weren't.
What I gleaned from my own study of this (including reading a lot of Alina Chan essays) is that while we may never know what caused COVID-19, we have more than enough evidence that the international study of virology resembles Jurassic Park and needs to be much more tightly regulated and supervised.
Funny, I encounter the topic so often I'm totally sick of it, and there's essentially zero value added. Plus it indulges a preexisting love for conspiracy theories which is definitely not healthy.
What was the evidence that convinced you that zoonotic spillover in the wild was definitely the origin of the outbreak?
Zoonotic spillover is the default assumption, since that's how contagious disease works in the overwhelming majority of historical cases (we didn't even have pathogen labs until the last, what, 100 years?). The particular vector is not even that interesting to me, since from a big picture POV 1. zoonotic spillover will continue to happen and 2. interventions to prevent it are not really practical on a level that would actually do anything useful.
Playing whack-a-mole with 1001 flavors of lab leak is not even useful.
Well, the review above has enough examples of lab-originating disease outbreaks to dent one's confidence that natural outbreaks are the only reasonable cause.
And all the risks of pandemic disease research are still there regardless of whether this particular case was of natural origin or not. If the research has a bad risk-reward ratio, we should stop it regardless of where this or that disease happened to come from. If safety standards are lax, we should tighten them. COVID coming from a lab has zero meaningfully different consequences relative to normal zoonotic origin.
Of course it does! If it had a natural origin it means that we should increase disease surveillance of the host reservoirs. If it had a lab origin then a global agreement on proper biolab security, regulation and probably inspection is necessary.
>If the research has a bad risk-reward ratio, we should stop it regardless of where this or that disease happened to come from.
How would we *know* the risk-reward ratio without a thorough investigation of whether a pandemic is natural or a lab accident? I feel like that would be a huge factor in that calculation!
> Zoonotic spillover is the default assumption, since that's how contagious disease works in the overwhelming majority of historical cases (we didn't even have pathogen labs until the last, what, 100 years?).
First and most importantly, do you count it as "zoonotic spillover" if Alice collects a virus from a wild animal, ships the virus to Bob, and then Bob mishandles it and gets infected? In my view, this looks pretty similar to the case where Alice collects the wild animal, ships the animal to Bob, and then Bob gets infected by it. [If you think maybe people shouldn't ship wild animals to cities for disease risk reasons, maybe also you should think people shouldn't ship viruses to cities for disease risk reasons!]
Second, doesn't this logic seem weird to you? Let's pretend we're instead talking about a murder victim.
Suppose I noted that death-by-club is the default assumption, since that's how human-on-human violence works in the overwhelming majority of historical cases (we didn't even have guns until the last, what, 500 years?).
You might fairly call me confused. After all, the invention of guns resulted in a substantial change to the dynamics generating the historical record; we should heavily discount data from the distant past compared to data from the recent past.
How relevant is the example that SARS-COV-1 was a zoonotic spillover in 2003? Well, according to me, it depends on how many labs we had in 2003 and how many we have now.
There are a bunch of papers that talk about this in detail (mostly noting that the explosion in labs happened in the wake of 9/11 and significant anti-terrorism funding), but few of them give the numbers that I want. As an example, let's lookat wikipedia's incomplete list of BSL-4 labs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#List_of_BSL-4_facilities ) that have the date of when they were founded. 13 of them date from before the SARS-COV-1 pandemic and 19 of them date from after the SARS-COV-1 pandemic. Presumably the likelihood of a BSL-4 lab escape increased to 2.5x if the number of labs increased to 2.5x, right?
[Which labs are the relevant ones? I remember hearing that WIV was BSL-2 and was working with viruses designated BSL-3, so maybe the reference class is just "labs doing thought-to-be-unsafe work", which would probably take a research effort to uncover.]
> The particular vector is not even that interesting to me, since from a big picture POV 1. zoonotic spillover will continue to happen and 2. interventions to prevent it are not really practical on a level that would actually do anything useful.
Why do you think interventions are impractical? Can't we just shut down biosafety labs inside cities? Like, if we did all of our virology research on floating research vessels, then we could both 1) still collect lots of viruses for research and 2) keep it away from major population centers, reducing the chances of new pandemics or endemic diseases.
On the contrary, playing whack-a-mole with 1001 flavors of lab leak seems just as useful to me as cancer research, which is playing whack-a-mole with 1001 sources of cancer.
Nothing about this is a conspiracy theory.
"Hey, maybe we should try to figure out the cause of this thing that killed millions of people and kept billions of people locked down for several years"
"No, don't do that! Why do you even care about this, stop investigating it right now you racist conspiracy theorist!!!"
Be suspicious of people who really don't want you to investigate stuff.
the deadliest fuckup in human history, potentially.
What's not healthy about loving conspiracy theories, and how does it compare to repeating whatever is convenient for the current authorities?
Conspiracy theory patterns of thinking tend to lead away from the truth more often than towards it. "Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular reasoning." The superficial similarity with actual attempts to find truth (such as the scientific method) can fool others into following the conspiracy theorists down this path where "Do your own research" turns into, "play these videos on YouTube and then see where YouTube's suggestion algorithm takes you."
The Wikipedia page on conspiracy theories has plenty of information on the harm, both individual and societal, caused by conspiracy theories and that general type of thinking, along with 153 references you can follow up on, if you like.
This seems to just be a case of reversed stupidity not being intelligence. I still see no reason to update against, or for, a theory just because it sounds like a conspiracy.
How much harm, individual and societal, was caused by following the authorities? How many reasonable Jews obeyed the law right until their death during WW2? (see "The Pianist" for a really good illustration)
"I still see no reason to update against, or for, a theory just because it sounds like a conspiracy."
Quite. That's the vast difference between you and a conspiracy theory lover. Remember, you did ask originally, "What's not healthy about _loving_ conspiracy theories?"
Because it doesn't really matter all that much? Even if tomorrow it was shown beyond any reasonable doubt that COVID-19 had a natural origin, I would *still* think that gain-of-function research is a lot more dangerous than most people thought in 2019 and that it should be much more strictly regulated.
Hard agree. i used to think there are very few examples of truly dangerous research, and certainly no one was actually doing that research anyway, but that was a horribly mistaken view.
So while I agree that the cost-benefit analysis is obvious, and has been obvious basically forever, for some reason virologists don't seem to agree. (Look at the 2014 and 2016 symposia on gain-of-function research, for example.) If we can't agree on forecasts about the future, maybe we can hope to agree on stories about the past, and use them as our forecasts. [Obviously making your predictions about the future by thinking about the future is better, but coordination :( ]
I think if COVID-19 has a lab origin (even if just "oops it was a mistake to put all of the wild viruses we could find in a big city"), then it becomes likely that virology in the last few decades has killed more people than it's saved. I think if COVID-19 has a natural origin, then the retrospective view becomes non-obvious.
it’s not obvious to experts because experts, by definition, need funding.
It matters geopolitically. Just as Chernobyl hastened the end of the Soviet Union, we could reasonably hope that if Covid-19 is shown to be the result of a massive Chinese Government fuckup and coverup that it might hasten the end of Communist rule in China.
Maybe that's overly hopeful but, hey, it couldn't hurt.
It doesn't matter if we know the truth about the lab leak hypothesis because there's no path from "we know it was a lab leak" to "the Chinese improve safety standards"
If it was a lab leak, the Chinese already know. Their best incentive for improving safety standards is "we caused a massive plague in our own country, and it's genuinely screwing us up".
"Other countries are mad at us" is a comparatively trivial reason for them. If they won't try to avoid a second plague for their *own* sake, they certainly won't do anything for anyone else's.
We might possibly be able to put enough pressure on to make them lie convincingly about it.
My read of some of these revelations is that this is not really a chinese problem. The chinese only have a naturally occurring reservoir of disease. The US brought the know how (Baric), the middleman (Daszak), and probably the money (NIH, NSAID, DARPA) as well.
Sure there is? What kind of bizarre political rearguard statement is that? Bare minimum western governments and firms could (threaten or actually) pull all their experts and money out of that space. That would have SOME impact on Chinese behavior surely.
This almost seems like climate change deniers. Partisans fighting for a year against lab leak, then when they need to grudgingly admit it is possible, they shift to “doesn’t matter anyway”. They why was the party line so important for the last year?
There are 40X as many BSL labs in the US than are in China, and the worrying research at the WIV was paid for by Americans. If labs and this research goes from being subsidized to being taxed, this dramatically changes the landscape (and dramatically reduces risk, if labs are in fact net negative).
Laura Kahn’s article is great, thank you for linking to it.
Yeah, amid all the speculation and hand-waving she did a great job of laying out exactly what standard of evidence would be required to conclusively show a natural origin.
It’s really helpful, I had no idea what the standard would be or had been and reading what was done for MERS and the first SARS was very interesting. The presence of antibodies in animals and then the presence of antibodies in people who spend time with those animals, at much greater likelihood than the general population. That’s neat.
I can come up with any gradation of conspiracy theory necessary for the different spins on “lab leak” (I admire your resistance there.) So having a standard for “zoonotic” is really good.
Saar from Rootclaim here. Thanks for the mention!
While there have been many developments since we published, I don't expect the conclusion to change once we update (hopefully soon).
The nice thing about a good probabilistic model is that it takes into account that some of the evidence will turn out to be wrong, and new evidence will come up, so you rarely get large swings in the likelihoods over time.
Note that as with most of our controversial conclusions, we offer a $100,000 challenge to anyone who can convince unbiased judges that a natural origin is more likely than a lab leak.
None of the experts confidently claiming "case closed", "dispositive evidence", or "99.99% zoonosis" have even inquired about the challenge, despite readers repeatedly pointing them to it. I believe this gives a much stronger indication of their true confidence than their public statements.
We are willing to reduce the stakes as low as $10,000 (or even 0) for applicants already involved in public debate on the issue. The high amount is to discourage time wasting. If we feel a debate with that applicant will promote rationality, we'll gladly do it.
Counterparty risk is negligible. Money will be in escrow.
Yes, we are open to using criteria other than a judged debate, but its conditional probability needs to be roughly equal for both sides. For example "Within 2 years China convicts the scientist responsible for the leak" is not a good one.
Hey Saar, big fan of your work! Rootclaim is awesome.
The $100,000 challenge sounds interesting. Reminds me of the famous James Randi million dollar prize for anyone who could demonstrate a paranormal ability in a legit experiment (of course nobody ever could do it).
That was exactly the inspiration!
Don’t you think the BANAL sequences indicate the analysis of bat/pangolin cohabitation isn’t very relevant, and in particular sars-cov2 could have come from recombination of two bat viruses?
Also, an idle question: if I wanted to challenge you and I think the evidence is more consistent with a 50-50 natural/lab credence, how would you propose deciding who wins? I’m not likely to actually challenge you, I’m just curious.
Definitely. The 'chimera' section in our analysis is no longer relevant. It's normal for some evidence in a Rootclaim analysis to be found as wrong later on. What hasn't happened yet is for a whole analysis to fail. That's the advantage of probabilistic inference over logical inference.
In this case, once we update the analysis I expect the new evidence (for all hypotheses) to compensate for that, and for the likelihoods to remain about the same, but we won't know for sure until it's done.
How do you define unbiased and who applies that filter to the judge selection process?
Both sides agree on the judges, and the selection process is done publicly, so it is clear if one of the parties is trying to manipulate the process.
I really like the format and the amount of work you put into the analysis.
But I do think that the magnitude of a lot of the updates are out of proportion to the presented levels of evidence, and I do think that some of the analysis is prey to a lack of understanding of the underlying biology. These two factors come together strongly in the furin cleavage site section, which I would consider as a ÷5 for bioweapon and even for everything else.
I'm curious, did you have anyone with a strong background in virology and/or biological sequence analysis go through your analysis?
I think you misunderstood the effect analysis of the furin cleavage site. We're giving its existence zero effect, and all the effect is due to it being cleanly inserted rather than mutated, and for using the rarest codons.
As to virology background: Rootclaim is about mapping the existing claims made by experts into a probabilistic framework. Think of it like a judge and expert witnesses. We therefore try to avoid original research. When we do feel it is required, we will consult top experts.
From the review: "According to the US Federal Select Agent Program, which oversees the possession and handling of dangerous biological agents and toxins, there were 219 accidental releases of these 'select agents' in 2019. So, while accidental lab leaks are uncommon, they’re not unheard of."
Am I mis-reading this sentence? Because "uncommon" doesn't seem quite how I would describe over 200 accidental releases per year.
One needs the denominator. The list of items dubbed 'dangerous biological agents and toxins' is quite long and includes multiple naturally occurring pathogens that are found, suspected, or tested for across the country. When one adds testing reagents to the list, the *potential* for bad handling gets surprisingly common.
So I should think of this as I do the ~400 pool drowning per year in the US? Given the number of *opportunities* 200 'select agents' accidental releases in a year is still uncommon?
Yes, exactly. Also nearly all of those "select agent" accidental releases are immediately contained and do not cause any outbreak of anything. Accidental releases that cause outbreaks are even more rare (but still not unheard of).
Eh. I am more dubious on this point, esp considering that China had SARS1 slip out on them more than once.
Both accidents in handling and disease resulting from accidents in handling are more common than one might think, and this was (imo) grossly downplayed in the initial days of the outbreak. Denying the possibility of error by institutions doesn't create a universe where errors are not made by institutions.
(And it's not a case of "oh, those ChiComs, so incompetent" - the UK had a fairly devastating example with FMD - https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2007/08/report-lab-leak-likely-caused-uk-foot-and-mouth-outbreak.)
(To clarify for the casual listener, this wasn't the huge outbreak in the early 00's, but a smaller one later.)
On edit: it sounds like I am saying one thing and then an opposite thing. Lab release accidents are rare in terms of opportunities and probably not even a daily occurrence, world wide. But they do happen more than once a week and should always be considered a potential player in outbreaks.
I'm not really sure this matters. We aren't trying to evaluate risk *per unit of agent handling*; we're trying to see how reasonable it is to suppose that "this thing happened during a given time period".
That is, if we had 200 potentially catastrophic impact events forecast for the next year, we don't care if impact events are rare *relative to the number of asteroids* in the solar system -- 200 might be a pretty low rate if there are 500,000 similarly-sized celestial bodies flying by without impacting; but in absolute terms, it's not at all uncommon, and there's no reason to penalize any hypothesis that suggests "maybe this happened before too".
(I mean, obviously in that case the evidence wouldn't really be possible to ignore, but it's just an analogy, all right.)
Note that this includes toxins. If I spill botulinum toxin or tetrodotoxin somewhere, that's bad and might get people killed, but it's not self-replicating so there's literal zero chance of an epidemic.
Also, there are a lot of diseases that can kill or sicken you but that don't spread well among humans in reasonably-hygienic conditions (e.g. anthrax, which spreads dead-to-living and is thus only an epidemic risk if corpses are routinely lying around in the street for hours/days - which implies Bigger Problems - or the zillion "abattoir diseases" (leptospirosis, bruscellosis, Q fever...) which you can get easily from working with animals but which humans don't transmit to other humans).
“Accidental release” doesn’t mean an outbreak - it could mean one person infected, or one person spilled it on their skin and didn’t get infected, or one person dropped a beaker in a clean room and it didn’t get on anyone, and maybe even someone using the pipet a second time when they weren’t supposed to.
Well done.
Thanks for reading Shaun!
This is a GREAT review. FYI, I work in an organization directly affected by the pandemic-I spent hundreds of extra hours supporting people responding directly to the pandemic., so I have a bit of an inside view (with all the good and bad that brings). As best I can tell, this is an even-handed, insightful review. Thanks!
Thanks for the kind words! If you liked the review, I also recommend checking out the book itself. It's quite good, although I recommend it with the caveat that it should be read in combination with more pro-natural-origins sources to get a balanced view.
The closing of the cave - a sign that the Chinese themselves suspected the source of their Wuhan samples was the source of (ETA: some version of) the virus, and not the wet market?
I'm not sure. It might be because they suspected the lab leak hypothesis to be correct, but it could also just be regular authoritarian behavior where they're covering up anything that could possibly make them look bad.
An interesting point in the book is that the Chinese government also engaged in coverup attempts during the SARS1 pandemic in 2003, even though that pandemic had a natural origin. So I don't think we can necessarily take coverup attempts as evidence for a lab leak.
The CIA has been suspected of doing this sort of thing as well, launching coverups for things that they weren't actually involved in, because the higher ups couldn't be sure whether they were involved or not.
I think it's just the behavior of many totalitarian states, where any information related to COVID (in this case) was suppressed and classified. They didn't carefully evaluate what each piece of evidence might mean, or guess what could be found. They just hid it all, and punished anyone trying to find out for themselves. Like the Soviet Union and Chernobyl (or anything related to nuclear power, or the military, or many other things).
The geospatial analysis studies are amazing in all the worst ways. Note one of the coauthors on the latest preprint is Kristian Andersen, who (imho) is intent on releasing one misleading study after another to disprove lab origin, but only after: 1) emailing Fauci in early 2020 to express serious concerns COVID-19 has hallmark signs of engineering; 2) joining a private Fauci-convened call with virologists, the majority of whom expressed private concerns this was probably engineered (notes from the call redacted); 3) days later doing a 180 and saying this absolutely couldn't have been engineered because a) pangolins and b) the spike protein isn't what his computer model would've optimized for; 4) receiving millions in subsequent NIH grants; 5) deleting all his tweet history after being called out for hypocrisy and inconsistencies, then claiming he didn't do it but rather Twitter autodeleted his tweets (as they do...?)
I don't know much about Kristian Andersen specifically, but definitely a lot of scientists and public health officials have behaved unethically and incompetently throughout the pandemic.
Still, I think we need to judge the geospatial analysis on its merits, not on the past behavior of some of its co-authors. Unfortunately I don't know enough about the ascertainment bias issue to know which side is right about it.
Normally, one judges a scientific study based on the assumption that the authors are telling the truth - they may be wrong, but they are not deliberately committing scientific fraud.
Should that still be the assumption if @Ido's claim above is correct?
I mean the past behavior of coauthors matters a lot in areas where we are trusting experts and not in a position to redo their work.
This guy is going to end up in front of congress, someday, hopefully.
Why should we not just assume this is someone who changed their mind after seeing evidence, and then had some bad behavior on Twitter as even the best of Twitter users are wont to do?
because he’s an elite scientist and the timeline around these events doesn’t make sense.
"I guess what I’m trying to say here is that scientific institutions, though probably not as bad as Wall Street"
I'm afraid you got it exactly backwards. A finance guy would have some incentive to lie to you (and themselves) about regulation, but the incentive is mildish as impact of stricter regulations would be distributed over whole industry and unlikely to be devastating to him personally. However scientific institutions have (or feel) their reputation and whole livelihood is tied to being correct on these single issues you are interested in and a good share of people in such situations will do whatever it takes to be "right".
A culture of truth-seeking gradually evolved into a culture of being-known-for-truth-seeking.
Yeah, I think this has been the main lesson for me from the pandemic. People working for companies have lots of checks on their behavior. Look at Elizabeth Holmes. Bad science and she got caught and punished eventually (sort of). There's incentives to be dishonest of course, but also lots of incentives to be honest. Not just those imposed by governments but also the obvious one that if your science is a lie, the products you build won't work.
Public science has very similar incentives to be dishonest - money, fame, career growth, not having to admit to failure - but there are no incentives to be honest. All the systems that keep private sector workers in check are just missing here. There are no regulators, no court cases filed by defrauded investors, no science police, and of course no bankruptcy.
So we get these incredible levels of corruption, where people like Fauci, Birx, Ferguson etc are willing to just constantly lie to the entire world, on camera, in writing etc. And they get away with it, every time. Acts that would put people in prison if they were company CEOs have no outcomes whatsoever when it comes to government science.
The reality here lies in direct contradiction with the perception of the public, or at least large parts of the public, who seem to assume that if there's no profits involved then there's no corruption. They don't see it as a balance between incentives to be bad and good, but rather a binary switch labelled "company" in which if it's on, there's corruption and if it's off, there's none at all. It's a broken worldview and it's been incredibly destructive.
Pick up any box of standard paper masks. Not the N95s, the standard blue ones. I promise you nowhere on the box will it advertise the product as being capable of preventing, mitigating or slowing the spread of covid. On the three boxes I managed to track down in my house, the strongest claim I could find was the so-vague-as-to-be-meaningless "will block some harmful bacteria". In an era when every (publicly promoted) public health official was swearing up and down that even paper and cloth masks could substantially slow the spread of covid, why were these masks never advertised in those terms?
Because unlike public statements made by health officials, advertising, or at least advertising of many medical products, has to meet certain minimum standards of evidence and if any of those manufacturers claimed to be offering a covid-mitigation product they'd have the shirt sued and fined off their back. That was one thing that was striking to me about the pandemic; Health officials making sweeping statements about the efficacy of various techniques and products that the manufacturers of those products would never dare make, because the FDA would smack them down in a heartbeat if they tried.
"...but there are no incentives to be honest."
Right! Look at how Andrew Wakefield suffered absolutely no consequences for his dishonesty!
A few notes on the points mentioned in the review that touch on the object-level origin debate:
I believe that it isn't that unlikely for diseases to spread long distances like COVID would have had to if it started in the countryside. Poor towns in rural China probably do not get many out of town visitors, so an epidemic could slowly work its way through the countryside until someone visits the city and starts a large outbreak. If I recall correctly, something like this did happen for at least one previous epidemic ( Ebola? Mers?). Relatedly, Wuhan may be far in absolute distance from those remote provinces, but there are not a lot of cities in Western China. Wuhan is not the closest big city, but it is one of the closer ones. And of course, as you note, 96.8% isn't that close--there are almost certainly many, many relatives of the viruses that have already been found in the wild hanging out in caves throughout the countryside, totally undiscovered.
Also related, finding the natural reservoir of a disease is quite hard. MERS and SARS-1 were much deadlier, which made tracking the disease easier. Apparently we still haven't found the origin for Ebola, despite decades of searching (https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gehvui/why_do_viruses_often_come_from_bats_a_discussion/fpp3lzv/?context=999). Also, if the Chinese government isn't cooperating, would we expect a thorough search to ever really happen?
The Furin Cleavage Site doesn't exist in all coronaviruses, but it exists in enough of them (and doesn't exist in others) that it probably evolved multiple times, so it wouldn't be surprising to appear on another one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165
Good points, thank you!
Yes there are certainly some non-lab routes that the virus could have taken to Wuhan (a sick person traveling from the countryside, a wild animal being illegally traded). At the same time, we know for a fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had research expeditions to the Yunnan / Laos area where similar viruses are found and brought back samples. So there are also some lab-relates routes the virus could have taken (getting sampled and leaking, or infecting a researcher in the field who got sick and brought it back). As far as I know, none of these scenarios can currently be ruled out.
Oh OUCH!
These are not good points.
1. Wuhan is Eastern - Central China. It is not remotely Western China.
2. There is plenty of traffic between small Chinese villages, larger towns, and larger cities. All of these small areas are either tourist traps or make their money in agriculture or cottage industries with products being trucked to and sold in the big cities.
3. Here is a link to a map showing the care route from Mojiang to Wuhan. https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Mojiang+Hani+Autonomous+County,+Puer,+Yunnan,+China/Wuhan,+Hubei,+China/@27.2424275,103.4977056,6z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x36d42450b883d227:0x2b44c79cc0bd0ff7!2m2!1d101.69223!2d23.4318499!1m5!1m1!1s0x342eaef8dd85f26f:0x39c2c9ac6c582210!2m2!1d114.30525!2d30.5927599!3e0
a. You will definitely go through Kunming
b. If you are not planning a straight drive to Wuhan but it is more normal diffusion of people, etc. you would expect the route to have been via Chongqing and likely Jingzhou or via Guiyang or Nanning and Changsha.
I wouldn't focus overly much on the specific location of the Mojiang mine. All it shows is that there are places in rural areas where natural spillover might occur. The Mojiang virus seems to have had a much higher fatality rate than COVID, so I don't think anyone suggesting the miners literally had COVID. We don't have anywhere near a complete survey of all possible coronavirus reservoirs in the general region of Wuhan, and I think we would expect that undiscovered closer relatives of COVID exist somewhere.
The assumption seems to be that COVID started as a bat virus.
Wuhan certainly has bats - just about everywhere does - but it does not have big well known bat caves like that area of Southern China. Geology is different.
The SARS 1 pandemic started in Guangdong, which is about as far from Yunnan as Wuhan is. And COVID has a much lower fatality rate, so it is easier to inadvertently transport long distances. Whether it was carried by intermediate animals or humans traveling cross-country, it really is not very strong evidence that Wunan is far away from Southern China.
The karst caves full of bats extend in a band along the southern Chinese border (including Cambodia and Laos) and definitely extend into Guangdong. See https://journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1128/mbio.00463-22.
Many years ago, before COVID, I saw clouds of bats exiting a cave in Guangdong at dusk - it was a local attraction.
I do not know how much bats from different caves interact, but it seems quite reasonable that the bat populations of that entire band of caves are a single breeding ground for bat viruses with reasonably quick propagation through the entire population.
Those caves, as far as I know, do not extend up north to Wuhan. Certainly outside of Yunnan, Guangzi, and Guangdong I have never seen a bat cave or been told of one as an attraction.
That happened for HIV, which IIRC is believed to have spilled over from chimpanzees somewhere in Cameroon and then worked its way downriver to Kinshasa. But on the other hand we've been able to trace HIV back to at least an approximate spillover location and species decades after it happened!
The 2013-16 Ebola outbreak was thousands of kilometers from what had been the only known wild reservoirs. It turns out that some bats in west Africa had been harboring Ebola for almost a decade before then and a kid caught it when his family was out searching for bats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_African_Ebola_virus_epidemic
It's now got to the point where I read this article, that seems to me like a perfectly reasoned and reasonable assessment of the evidence, and I'm clenching because the better it looks, the more I fear it's fooling me in some way. D'oh!
I guess the only conclusion is to strongly endorse the suggestion at the end: "What differentiates science from other ways of knowing is its self-correction mechanisms." If I had the technical expertise to pick my way painstakingly through each claim, I'd do it; I just have to be glad that someone somewhere is doing it, and is making their efforts public for the rest of us to verify.
Incidentally, this is the thing that Chinese politicians don't "get". They think their political censorship can be separated from the country's technical expertise, and that they can have a scientifically and technologically strong nation that loves the Party. They've make a lot of effort to realise this vision. But I can't help thinking that they're doomed to failure, because both scientific knowledge and the scientific process are messy and will spill over into politically sensitive areas. If they're chilled in those areas, the effects can be systemic.
No, we should not endorse claims about science "self correcting". It's nonsense, and unfortunately is one of the many thought-terminating clichés that academia has evolved to stop researchers asking difficult questions of each other (one of the other bad ones being "all models are wrong but some are useful").
Science is not self correcting. Write it out 100 times. When someone publishes a false or misleading scientific claim, someone else has to step up and start a fight about it. Every single time. Then they have to win that fight, and do so publicly, and then other scientific institutions and researchers have to recognize that a fight actually happened and who won, and then do something concrete to penalize the loser like firing them, retracting papers, and so on.
Science is not self correcting. Go read accounts of people who have tried to correct it explicitly and you'll find endless stories of despair and hopelessness. The system fights back. Universities, journals, foundations and really the entire public sector science system is totally oriented around reputation and one of the worst things that can happen to a reputation based institution is admitting that its staff are bullshitters and liars. So, they just never admit it, regardless of how compelling or clear the evidence is.
Science is not self correcting. It is not even explicitly "person with a grudge" correcting. It is an entirely unstable maelstrom of fake, irreproducible and deceptive claims made by people who know they are lying. Look at the field of virology. They were writing emails to each other saying SARS-CoV-2 looked "inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory" and then just days later signing an open letter saying anyone who said it wasn't natural was an evil conspiracy theorist. The fact that the public is now starting to realize they were lied to is NOT an example of self correction because, as the book and review point out, all the corrections here were issued by outsiders who were immediately driven to the margins and systematically banned by media and tech companies. Nothing about that process is in any way a credit to the institutions of science. Instead, it is a credit to the so-called "conspiracy theorists" who realized that there was, in fact, a conspiracy.
So, I think you're falling into the trap of imperfect=bad. Many of the examples you give look bad; some of them may actually be bad (though I'd need a lot more evidence than the third-hand claims of inconsistency that we see here, and you're really not helping your case by saying stuff that isn't true: no one signed a letter claiming that others were "evil conspiracy theorists").
But the fact that some scientists do bad things sometimes is not a reason to think that science as a project or activity is one way or another. The relevant question to ask is: compared to other human institutions, what does science (as it currently operates) do better, worse, differently, the same? And when you make that comparison, the differences seem pretty stark. Compared to governments or churches, science is much more open and able to correct itself. It's also much more creative. The arts are also creative, but by comparison, science is much more cumulative: we generally don't forget scientific basics in the way that scriptwriters seem to regularly forget the basics of storytelling. The most interesting comparison is perhaps with commercial organisations: also highly creative, also self correcting (corrected by market forces); the difference seems to me to be in the type of creativity. Product designers work within the space created for them by scientists and technologists; science seeks to expand that space.
Claims like "science is an entirely unstable maelstrom of fake...claims" are just overblown puff. Open up Science magazine, and you don't find that. If you think there's a maelstrom, you'll have to define it a lot more tightly.
"What differentiates science from other ways of knowing is its self-correction mechanisms."
I'd say that's half of it, and perhaps the lesser half.
Another huge difference is that science generally tries to avoid absolute truths and instead say things like "as best we can tell at the moment, X is more likely than Y" or even, "at this time we can't say whether X or Y is more likely." This not only is different from how, e.g., religion operates but is also in opposition to how the human brain operates; humans very much do not like "we don't know."
This is why science communication is so difficult. People who have trained themselves to be less uncomfortable with not knowing an answer can read scientific papers and statements in the way they were intended to be interpreted. People facing the public have to deal with the fact that if someone hears "one paper found a correlation between vaccines and autism; this has yet to be replicated" that may have large numbers of people rejecting vaccines for decades, even after the paper has been proven to be a complete fabrication.
I loved this book (and all books where Matt Ridley is involved) and after reading I am sure that the Wuhan virus was an accidental release of a gain-of-function strain created at the WIV. The furin cleavage site is just one of smoking gun pieces of evidence - what's the likelihood that a natural FCS would have the same two codons optimized for human expression rather than a random combination of codons? What's the likelihood that an FCS would naturally show up in a virus belonging to a group of viruses that normally do not have an FCS and that this virus would be found across the street from the one lab in the world that just a few years prior published articles on adding and removing FCSs to and from other viruses?
The wet market story was a part of the coverup right from the start. WIV of course knew about the leak as soon as one or more of their workers contracted a pneumonia very similar to the pneumonia seen in the Mojiang mine workers. The researchers were sloppy but not stupid and they went into emergency denial and coverup mode immediately, purging WIV databases and making up stories about the wet market that had nothing to do with their virus. Basically you cannot believe anything that came out of WIV or China in general regarding the Wuhan virus after October 2019, when the leak most likely occurred (or at least when the coverup started).
Read the whole book, it's very instructive, detailed and for me, absolutely convincing about the lab leak theory.
> what's the likelihood that a natural FCS would have the same two codons optimized for human expression rather than a random combination of codons? What's the likelihood that an FCS would naturally show up in a virus belonging to a group of viruses that normally do not have an FCS and that this virus would be found across the street from the one lab in the world that just a few years prior published articles on adding and removing FCSs to and from other viruses?
I don't know, what _is_ the likelihood? I don't know! Do you?
OK let's do some back of the envelope calculations:
-- what's the likelihood that a natural FCS would have the same two codons optimized for human expression rather than a random combination of codons? - two permutations out of 36 possible two codon combinations coding for Arg-Arg = 2/36= 0.055
-- What's the likelihood that an FCS would naturally show up in a virus belonging to a group of viruses that normally do not have an FCS - low. How low? I don't know but the class of coronaviruses that Covid-19 belongs to doesn't have an FCS and it doesn't happen every day that a virus acquires an FCS, so, low. Make it 0.1 (but it could be 0.001 for all I know)
- and that this virus would be found across the street from the one lab in the world that just a few years prior published articles on adding and removing FCSs to and from other viruses? Let's divide the population of Wuhan by the population of the world - 12.6 million/7.8 billion = 0.0016
OK, 0.055 x 0.1 x 0.0016 = 0.0000088. A simple multiplication since the probabilities are independent. That's the rough order-of-magnitude estimate of the probability that a coronavirus with this FCS would naturally show up in Wuhan. Check my math.
Also, there is a lot of additional evidence in favor of the lab-leak explanation, such as the absence of Covid immunity among the wet market workers in Wuhan (which is different from the situation with e.g. SARS, where immunity was found among workers exposed to civets), the suspiciously high binding constant of the Covid spike protein to its receptor (not expected in virus that just jumped to humans from pangolins or something but quite likely in a viral strain that was passaged through human cell lines and humanized mice, as in a standard gain of function approach) and other details.
And of course, the coverup. Almost all conspiracy theories are wrong but this one is not a conspiracy theory, it's a conspiracy fact, where at first WIV and then the full might of the Chinese government acted to suppress information, purge databases, and vilify and stigmatize whistleblowers.
BTW, have you heard that the Chinese government recently banned the sale of used lab animals to wet markets and other human consumption? Apparently enterprising Chinese lab managers used to sell used rabbits, dogs and other edible animals to restaurants and livestock dealers, for a little side income. Mindboggling.
You did the likelihood calculation assuming a single event. That sort of reasoning would also tell us that omicron is very unlikely to have arisen naturally, given the number of changes it has from earlier variants.
But if we think viruses are just out there evolving all the time, and we only notice them when they happen to hit on a combination that leads to quick spread, then some of those factors will disappear.
Which calculation do you mean? The likelihood of a specific combination of codons in the FCS? Other calculations?
"the likelihood that an FCS would naturally show up in a virus belonging to a group of viruses that normally do not have an FCS" is the one I was most objecting to. We don't know how often furin cleavage sites show up and disappear in viral lineages (but given their distribution in apparent independent evolutions in other coronavirus lineages, it suggests that this isn't that uncommon - and particularly not if we control for the virus being one that we decided to pay attention to because of its human significance).
The two-codon thing also isn't clear, because people would likely point to several other two-codon pairs as striking in one way or another if they had showed up.
The third factor, about why Wuhan rather than somewhere else, is definitely the one factor that raises actual suspicion - though again, for standard statistical methodology, you'd want to ask not the probability of the virus appearing in Wuhan, but the virus appearing in some place that would make us comparably suspicious to Wuhan. (Presumably, at minimum, we would want to include Atlanta and the cities with former Soviet bioweapon programs.)
Another reason to separate the object-level issue from the institutional issue is our motivation to know / care about it. Whether the virus came from an animal or from a lab changes nothing in my life. I can’t make China change their laws and customs. But the question of whether our institutions are trustworthy impacts me very directly.
It’s pretty scary how low the level of trust is right now. You see those memes like, “What’s the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth?” “About six months”.
The bad thing is the level of trust is atrocious, and honestly, it might not actually be low enough.
I think it’s not low enough in some ways, but way waay waaaaaay too low in others. The problem is that without expertise one doesn’t know how to separate these ways.
This does appear to be the primary point of interest, to such an extent it is hard for me to imagine that much unmotivated reasoning is possible here. The market versus leak debate becomes a proxy for an essentially unrelated and unresolvable conflict. Even if some all-knowing AI could tell us for sure that it came from a wet market that wouldn't make the institutions themselves trustworthy. Contrariwise, the same level of certainty that it was a lab leak and that the institutions in question lied wouldn't change the system.
Well sure, but investigating into how much they were lying would be helpful in figuring out how trustworthy these actors actually are or are not.
So its not like trying to find out more information about what happened is misguided.
It is actually very helpful to know if people can trust "virology" or the "CDC" or the Chinese science establishment, or whatever, quite apart from whether people in fact do or do not trust them (which seems very ideologically driven currently).
It's definitely not misguided, though I can't quite see how it's helpful except in an abstract moral sense of "knowing the truth is helpful". For folks who are already experts in virology and have some free time, it's a good thing to do.
There does seem to be one issue of either clarity or accuracy:
From review (section 5. Lack of institutional transparency and competence):
> Virus sample sequences from early COVID patients in China were originally uploaded to an online database, but later removed in an apparent attempt at obfuscation. However, evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom came up with a clever way to recover this data. [link to June 23, 2021 article]
>Probably the most important – the WIV had previously maintained a database of at least fifteen thousand bat samples, including the dates and locations of samples as well as information about the viruses found in them. This database was taken offline and its contents have not been shared with independent researchers since.
That seems to contradict the following:
(https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/science/coronavirus-sequences-lab-leak.html):
> On July 5, more than a year after the researchers withdrew the sequences from the Sequence Read Archive and two weeks after Dr. Bloom’s report was published online, the sequences were quietly uploaded to a database maintained by China National Center for Bioinformation by Ben Hu, a researcher at Wuhan University and a co-author of the Small paper.
Supposedly the data is now found here: https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/search/?dbId=gsa&q=CRA004499
Have I misunderstood something?
These were two separate online databases -- the one recovered by Jesse Bloom and then quietly re-uploaded by Wuhan University was a database of early patient data from the beginning of the pandemic.
The other one, which was taken down and not shared since, was a database of viruses samples that had been collected from bats in the wild and stored at the WIV. THIS is the interesting one, because if that database were recovered and SARS-CoV-2 were found in it, that would basically be a smoking gun in favor of the lab-leak hypothesis, because it would confirm that SARS-CoV-2 was being studied at the WIV before the start of the pandemic. At the same time, if the WIV had simply left that database up, they could have easily proven that it wasn't a lab leak by showing that the database didn't contain SARS-CoV-2 -- but they didn't do that.
Thanks for the prompt clarification. Where can we read more about this still-missing database? Does it have a standardized name in English which would allow us to search for further discussion of it?
I still feel like I'm not understanding why this isn't playing a larger role in lab-leak proponents' arguments. Where is Rootclaim's discussion, for instance? (https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COVID-19-SARS-CoV-2)
Here's a research paper about the still-missing database:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349073738_An_investigation_into_the_WIV_databases_that_were_taken_offline
The DB could be smoking gun.
It could not disprove the lab leak hypothesis since they might have the virus without having isolated it.
For example, if a researcher at WIV was infected while collecting bats in Yunnan does that count as lab leak? I think it does.
I think it would count more as an argument that stark terminology acts as a barrier to conversation.
It tickles the “lab-leak” cluster, but if the axis of debate had found a slightly different local minima to settle in, we might be arguing that it's evidence for the “humans interacting with wild animals” theory over the “test tubes and animal testing” theory.
>if the WIV had simply left that database up, they could have easily proven that it wasn't a lab leak by showing that the database didn't contain SARS-CoV-2 -- but they didn't do that.
Really? Would anybody trust them not to selectively delete compromising entries?
I think this is my favorite one so far. It's the first one that's been all of (a) well written, (b) on an interesting topic, and (c) (afaict) free of factual errors.
Its one real downside is that it didn't tell me much I didn't already know (though in fairness I've been at least somewhat tracking this debate already). I guess it could have managed that if it had explained some of the technical biology stuff, but maybe that's too hard to do for non-experts and would have gone over my head anyway.
Thank you!
I'm actually a semi-expert myself (computational biologist / data scientist -- not working on virology though), but I still have trouble making sense of the technical debates on this issue (sequence analysis of the furin cleavage site, for example). It's tough because they involve opposing, mutually exclusive claims made by experts on either side and I simply don't have enough time to go down all these rabbit holes to try to figure out who's right.
If people are interested though, I might write a follow-up post on my own blog after this book review contest is over, and maybe dive deeper into some of these technical issues. Even if I don't know which side is getting it right, I can at least try to summarize things and explain where the disagreement is.
Please do.
Yeah this is the best one so far, and actually a book review to boot!
Thanks!
Obligatory link to forecasts on this topic: <https://metaforecast.org/?query=covid+laboratory>
I will also note that when asking forecaster friends, some tended to be be pretty high.
Thanks! Worth noting that all of the prediction markets on this topic are about the behavior of institutions as it relates to the investigation -- so kinda related to the object-level question of where the virus came from, but not exactly.
Definitely refreshing to read the only review (so far) about a topic that's Completely Absolutely Undeniably No Refutability topical. Instead of the awkward shell game shoehorn of other reviews "well you see, this is *sort of* related to Russia and Ukraine, or climate change, or EA, or...etc". Those have been the weakest parts of several so far, the stretching-for-relevance, so it's nice not to have to do that here at all. Kind of like the South Park trope of every episode needing a Moral Lecture.
Of course, one trouble with reviewing recent history is not keeping up with the current Jones developments - but you did note those areas in the review, good on you. Otherwise there'd be a whole lot more critical comments already, heh. I like a review written thoughtfully enough to proactively address potential relevant criticism. Shows a good audience-model.
>This artificial scientific consensus was then picked up by tech companies, who used it to label discussion of the lab leak hypothesis as “misinformation”, as well as by media sources and fact checkers. I don’t want to get bogged down in all the convoluted details [...]
This was the most disappointing part for me; I'm unclear whether this was simply not a focus of the book at all, or just the author deciding not to review these (admittedly very-CW) aspects, but it's consistently been *the* most interesting part of the entire Covid Show. Watching - well, living through, in real time - the genesis of a Narrative, impervious to Facts or Criticism, the abuse of "fact checking", the new slur of "misinformation"...again and again and again, with so many people concluding This Is Fine, if they even noticed the smoke at all. Even a few in the Rationalist community, who did not call foul that this is not, in fact, the Way. Partisanship comes even to those who claim to be above it, when the stakes are high enough.
In other words, as some others have already commented, it doesn't really affect my life that much whether the origin is ultimately zoonotic or lab...but the erosion of institutional trust has had extreme ramifications, for me personally and also society-wide. I would still like an "autopsy" report on this failure-cascade at some point. The fact that it sure looks like these patterns are being repeated with monkeypox is not at all reassuring.
That being said, this was a well-written, comprehensive, factual, and even-handed (afaict, not an expert) summary of The Story So Far. Just a pretty solid book review, without any irritating writerly tics, needs-an-editor jankiness, or flat-falling humour. (It is entirely possible to write humour-lite without being academically dry!) I also very much appreciated the epistemic humility of admitting I Don't Know, especially coming from a somewhat-SME. There's a time and a place for big bold postulates and wild reaching claims, but I think still-ongoing history isn't one of those times and places. Can't remember who said it first, but if we know anything about covid, "covid is where intuition goes to die". When constant surprises are the name of the game, it's probably ideal-payoff to hedge on uncertainty, rather than double down or appeal to experts who might well turn out quite biased. Good job, I now have 3 potential finalists to decide my vote between.
Agree with this. Especially the "Partisanship comes even to those who claim to be above it".. Depressing/sobering.
Thanks! Yeah I was considering writing more about unreliableness of American institutions on this question, but then I was thinking that will just be too many rabbit holes and the review would turn into a series of 1000-page books or something.
The book (Viral) has a lot about it though, so I recommend checking it out.
If someone withholds, alters, or destroys evidence, as a matter of science, we don't know what the evidence is and can't update our theory. As you said, maybe the person destroys evidence for other reasons.
But in the law, which is the search for truth in messy human affairs, there is a rebuttable presumption that the evidence is bad for the person who did the destroying (it's called "spoliation" if you want to look it up).
If they also offer up an explanation that turns out to be false, the inference becomes stronger.
This approach could lead to the wrong answer, so it should be tempered, but shouldn't we shift the burden this way?
I'm actually not sure. It could be the nature of authoritarian governments to simply cover up anything that could have any potential to make them look bad. So if the Chinese government thought there was maybe 5% chance it was a lab leak, that might still have been enough for them to engage in a coverup.
I think it’s worth looking at the behavior of China’s government in semi-similar national security matters.
For example, in 2001, a Chinese J-8II interceptor jet was performing unsafe manouevres around a US EP-3 turboprop signals intelligence aircraft (for non-aerospace experts, jets colliding with turboprops are almost always the fault of the jet due to their relative agility), resulting in the J-8II crashing and the EP-3 being forced to perform an emergency landing on Hainan Island.
Despite being obviously guilty, China refuses to take any responsibility for the crash, and continues to laud their deceased pilot as a hero.
In 1999, during the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia (Serbia) CIA incompetence led to the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing 3. The US officially apologized for this accident, declassified and investigates the lead-up to it, and provided reparation to China and the victims.
China continues to believe, apparently genuinely, that the bombing was an intentional act by the United States.
What I aim to show here with these examples are two things.
First, China will never, ever admit to any degree of guilt or incompetence regarding their handling of the coronavirus pandemic, regardless of whether it came from a lab or from a zoonotic event. Covid-19 is too internationally embarassing for them to do so, just as the Hainan Island incident was.
Second, China defaults to assuming that other countries are inherently hostile towards it. It does not believe that impartial investigation is possible. Rather, anything that harms China must have been an intentional act against China. Hence, investigations into the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from China’s perspective, are obvious attacks on China’s reputation as a nation, rather than the truth-gathering efforts Western nations view them as.
So, even if there was a 0% chance that the WIV was responsible for releasing Covid-19, there is still a strong possibility that Chinese paranoia, and the desire to distract from their early mismanagement of the pandemic, would lead them to lie about it. From our perspective, this makes China look guilty. But China believes the West has already decided on its guilt, and the only court remaining is public opinion.
Going a step further, the Chinese government isn't a unified entity with well-defined estimates of probabilities of things. The people whose job it is to cover things up (which is, to first approximation, everybody) needn't have the least idea what the relevant probabilities are, they will just attack anyone who says anything bad about the government, whether it's a wacky implausible theory that's ~0% likely to be true or an established historical fact that's ~100% likely to be true.
This is actually a standard trope in mystery novels. Someone has an alibi early on. Then there are holes in their alibi so the reader starts to suspect them. But then it turns out they are covering up something embarrassing and incriminating that is unrelated to the murder.
Those sorts of situations happen in real life fairly commonly. People get caught lying to cops or investigators because they're trying to cover up a marital affair. Then they have to deal with the affair and the lie at the same time.
Quick point. The lab-leak theory isn't a conspiracy theory. By definition, an accident isn't a conspiracy.
Deliberately covering it up would be a conspiracy.
Yes, I agree. I was not calling the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory in the review, just noting that it was commonly called one by other people in the beginning of the pandemic.
The desperate urge for people who were not members of either the Wuhan lab or one of its controlling agencies to want to pooh-pooh the leak hypothesis is an interesting sociological phenomenon in itself.
The GoF research there was funded by US government grant money, and there was the whole Trump thing, so it's not exactly surprising.
Oh, and I found your review very readable. You have a nice, flowing style.
Thank you!
Good review and thoughts. On the question of rationality and how to update priors, it seems like there's a missing admission here that your priors were wrong at the start, and although you updated on this specific issue you haven't done any updating of the original bad priors that led you astray.
By the way: "When people talk about trusting the experts, I think they mean trusting people with technical expertise over people without technical expertise"
I don't think that's what it means. When people talk about trusting the "experts" they're using the word "expert" in a very limited way to mean, essentially, public sector bureaucrats or academics. Obviously the two groups overlap significantly. Any people with expertise that is NOT one of those groups, or which contradicts them, is simply dismissed immediately. Thus we can see that exhortions to "trust experts" or "follow the science" are in reality just leftist demands to obey public sector pseudo-intellectuals regardless of merit; the same problem that leftism has had since it first emerged.
An example of this is when it was discovered early on in the pandemic that epidemiological models were never validated against reality, and the Prof Ferguson Imperial College model was filled with programming errors. Or phrased another way, that academic epidemiology appeared to lack technical expertise. Many professional modellers and programmers from the private sector stated flat out that the Ferguson model was so incompetently made that it was broken to the point of worthlessness, creating entirely different predictions every time it was run even when all inputs were supposed to be controlled. But these claims were completely ignored by the media, government and academia, and in fact were swiftly suppressed via (yet another) academic conspiracy in which ICL found a corrupt academic at Cambridge to claim that he'd tested the model and found the outputs to be replicable. In fact the report he issued (never peer reviewed or submitted to any journal) stated that none of the results he got were the same but he considered the model replicable because the "trends" were the same.
Part of why this happens is that academics are able to talk to the press very freely. Every other kind of expertise works for organizations that long ago learned that the press aren't really trustworthy, and so are banned from talking to the media or can only do so after their statements are vetted very carefully. So journalists end up relying on academics to rapidly provide quotes on any topic, and lend their stories the aura of gravitas and specialist knowledge, but people see through it and so trust in the media falls. Falling trust in science itself is lagging behind but now catching up as people realize that when scientists claim the media is distorting what they said, it's not really true and the root source of the false claims is the academics themselves.
>>>When people talk about trusting the "experts" they're using the word "expert" in a very limited way to mean, essentially, public sector bureaucrats or academics.
Top. Men.
It seems to me that the old saying about being "unable to see the wood for the trees" might apply here. A novel virus arise thousands of kilometers from its natural home in Yunnan. But just a few hundred meters from an institute of virology that just happens to study that kind of virus, that has brought hundreds of samples back from Yunnan, one of which is a close genetic match, and which happens to conduct research into gain of function which includes changing the viral genome to make it better at infecting humans, including inserting an FCS, which is not found in other coronaviruses? And did so with grants from an American organisation that led the crusade in advance of any investigation to declare the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory?
Now we can wait for a full investigation (which we all know will never be permitted by the Chinese government), update our priors all day long, and avoid theorising in advance of the evidence. But if I asked you to bet on one side or the other here, would you really bet that it's all a string of the most unlikely co-incidences? I'm not a gambling man, but I can see the odds here. Those aren't just trees: they are together, a wood.
Furin cleavage sites are found in about half of coronaviruses, on many different branches of the family. No known coronaviruses in the immediate family of this one are known to have them, but they are known to have ended up independently in many different branches.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165
Are you familiar with Dan Sirotkin's work? Here's his paper from August 2020 about the virus being possibly man-made:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7435492/
Thanks, note the date, and why was this dismissed for so long?
I don't know why it's still being dismissed. He's been complaining about that as well: https://harvard2thebighouse.substack.com/p/the-last-interview-the-sirotkins
Was hoping that Scott might have had some insight.
Excellent post. A lot of people in the comments are using the phrase "conspiracy theory" to describe the lab leak and cover-up, but to me that doesn't require much conspiracy. And if somebody came up to me wearing a tin-foil hat talking about an accidental lab leak, I would think "you need more interesting sources".
Actually I'm a bit surprised nobody here has posted a real tin-foil hat conspiracy theory about COVID origins, so in the interest of completeness here's one: what if COVID was deliberately released in Wuhan by a non-chinese malicious actor, with the intention of making it look like a lab leak from the WIV? If somebody did want to release a bio-weapon, Wuhan would be a natural choice because the WIV provides such a convenient scapegoat. With the virus origin unknown, the CCP would likely still engage in the same censorship we saw. And the more people argue about lab leak vs natural origin, the more our hypothetical bio-terrorist would be able to slink back into the shadows.
I don't know how likely that scenario is - more than 5% chance? - but it's worth keeping in mind that the space of possible origins is large, and P(lab leak) + P(natural origin) adds up to less than 1.
If I got paid to stir up shit I’d go with it was released by the CCP as the first step in fixing a very serious demographic issue.
Culling their pensioners to save money? - Ok, that also "explains" why they still use the subpar vaccine sinovac. Plus not really pushing all - or at least the elderly -to take it. - But then, why all this extreme and expensive lockdowns in Shanghai et al.? - Anyway, they just "lost" 100 million Chinese due to over-counting. https://twitter.com/fuxianyi/status/1545668143816839170 via Tyler Cowen
It’s a great conspiracy:
A few facts
Some widely held beliefs about the CCP being evil
And a motive that’s based on news from China that’s getting more popular in the mainstream (their demographic issue).
Now I simply explain off evidence against in ways that are impossible to verify. Covid has already done it’s primary job, the extreme lockdowns are authoritarian practice runs on controlling large populations (maybe if future cullings get out of hand) with Covid just being a plausible excuse.
> Viral was published November 16, 2021, nearly two months after the discovery of BANAL-52 was published. [...] It’s completely unacceptable that BANAL-52 wasn’t mentioned.
Two months before publication mean almost certainly that the book was already off to the printer. Sorry, but production times in the book publication industry are usually quite long, and it's completely unreasonable to expect consideration of research that comes in so shortly before publication.
There was also this Covid lab leak in Taiwan in 2021
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/10/mouse-bite-infected-taiwan-lab-woker-covid
Methinks you characterize the claims of "conspiracy" too broadly.
Associated with the "lab leak" rhetoric was often the implication or outright claim that a leak was deliberate.. Which in turn was often associated with "big Pharma" conspiracy-mongering.
That was part of what the "conspiracy" claims were directed at, and often there was a spillover effect, where more limited arguments about an unintentional lab leak were mixed in with arguments about a deliberate one.
I think it's also important to discuss the importance of not alienating scientists in China, given the large risks associated with virus spread from China and in particular because of the huge animal trade there. Many assume that pushback against the lab leak argument was merely because of CYA, and I think for much of the scientific community much of the concern was legitimately because of the need to maintain strong institutional collaboration.
Based on your comment, I doubt further discussion will net much that's positive, but here goes one try.
> Not so much "often" as "virtually one hundred percent of the time." Assuming good faith behavior on the part of the censors is a bridge too far; they are entitled to none of that consideration
I remember plenty of reactjon specifically to the intentional leak rhetoric, but regardless the spillover effect was real and meaningful.
I'm not a fan of the "censorship" rhetoric as I think there's a lot of space between "censorship" and legitimate reasons for private sector enterprises to enforce their terms of service agents for a variety of reasons. The "censorship" rhetoric obliterates any of that legitimacy in ways I don't think constructive.
> What value is there in strong institutional collaboration with people who you know aren't telling the truth about the most important question under discussion?
It stands to reason here are plenty of Chinese scientists and Chinese scientific institutions who are in good faith working on complex issues here. Triangulation of them (and anti-china fear-mongering) will only push dangerous negative dynamics even deeper.
Here's a discussion of the significant implications, imo, if you're interested
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chinas-covid-19-response-and-the-viruss-origins/id1121407665?i=1000515387995
> but I'd counter that once we're talking about oligopolistic mechanical control over social interaction,..
That doesn't seem a very reasonable description to me. People have been able to get their opinions out all variety of ways. Just because people feel "censored" doesn't make it so. Imo, a lot of pearl clutching about censorship amounts to agenda-convenient self-victimization, that exploits and trivializes a real problem in many places in the world. Some of the people claiming to be so damaged by censorship are some of the most powerful people in the world with the longest reach on the most powerful platforms. They are among the least silenced and powerless people who have ever lived on the planet. Of course,.slippery slopes exist and suboptimal events occur and overreach does happen - but to make this some kind of systemic and injustice is counterproductive in multiple ways, imo.
And blurring distinctions to equate government censorship with a private enterprise exercising a terms of agreement, again, I think obliterates important aspects. For example, Twitter can exercise its right to control its use to protect or satisfy its customer base and its competitive advantage...
> There's also the side note that much of the "enforcement of terms of service" that's been done lately has been in close collaboration with the government.)
When government has excessive influence on that problem it becomes problematic, but hyperbolic advocacy out of self-interest has greatly complicated that assessment.
> "We need to engage with them in good faith, not push them away" in practice is always implemented as "let's be chumps and ignore them kicking us in the junk over and over again."
I think that's way too categorical and uniform and unnuanced to even engage with with much effort.
Listen to the pod of you're interested. Looking aside your sweeping generalizations (that I think are too hyperbolic to merit interogation) which cross myriad domains, I think a good case is made from an informed perspective why cooperation, in this specific context, could be important.
At some point a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.
Yeah, if you've been kicked off Facetwitterstagram and dropped by your hosting provider and payment processor you can still, I dunno, thumbtack your manifesto to a telephone pole.
Again, bypebole. Your arguments is like there was no way to voice opinions before social media, which is used in limited ways by a limited section of the public.
> But can you in good faith claim that such a person's views haven't been suppressed by an effectively hegemonic force?
Yes, if I don't see some grand unification into a "hegemonic force," and simply observe there are myriad other ways to communicate an opinion. In my experience, most people arguing on social media aren't actually trying to engage in actual discussion anyway. They're mostly just confirming biases by back-slapping with their buds about what idiots the people that disagree with them are. And getting comments edited, or even getting banned, fits perfectly with the tribalistic, self=victimizing view of the world. I will admit my perspective is colored by years of seeing people clutch pearls from feinting couches about CENSORSHIP!!!!!!!!! from having a blog proprietor delete their obnoxious, trolling comments. But I think that the pattern mostly holds.
. I submit that you cannot. "There's always some way to get your message out, so no worries" _simply is not true_.
> First off, how does that mean they're not damaged?
How do you define "damage." No, it doesn't mean that they don't experience a consequence. Pass the violin.
> And second, this isn't about the big names anyway, even if they do have valid complaints. Jordan Peterson will be fine. Random nobodies? They can, and are, unpersoned at the press of a button.
"Unpersoned?" I'm not sure exactly what the definition of "unpersoned" might be - but I'm sure that being booted off Twitter wouldn't match my definition. I dunno, it really seems awfully dramatic and hyperbolic to me. And again, I'm not saying that there aren't any issues - but your rhetoric seems to me to embody pretty much the overwrought rhetoric that I think obscures the real issues at hand.
> And oddly these slopes and suboptimal events and overreach all seem to go in the same direction, exactly unlike how you'd expect if it really was just random screwups. Huh. Weird.
Again, the arguments by assertion that seem overwrought to me. By what standard do you determine that the ALL go in "the same direction?" For one example (of many), implied in that assumption is that there is NO collective gain or valid reason to boot anyone off Twitter. You're certainly entitled to such a view - but it just doesn't seem very useful to me.
> As a side note, I find it very strange how arbitrary and non-negotiable terms of service written up by gigantic unaccountable megacorporations have suddenly become regarded as laws of nature or even Papal encyclicals that no one is allowed to have an issue with.
See above regarding your rhetoric.
> I think my sweeping generalizations are extremely relevant. Don't tell me with a straight face that the problem with how we've faced China over the past couple of decades is that we've not been supine _enough_.
I guess I just clearly have a different view regarding the net effect of such measures as "strategic ambiguity" vis-a-vis the alternatives. It's certainly not that I'm going to claim that they're some overwhelming success in all regards, but I think there are certainly many plausible counterfactual scenarios where alternative approaches might certainly have netted far worse outcomes.
Again, given your rhetoric, I don't see much room for meaningful exchange here. As I said above, you're entitled to your views but they seem to me to be so categorical and hyperbolic that at this point it makes sense for me to let it drop.
For some reason edits won't stick when I save them. So I can't correct the typos and such - but I don't think any are terribly important with the exception of
"they are among the silenced..."
Should be
"they are among the LEAST silenced..."
Ah, they did stick when I want back and completely refreshed.
This is one of the things that frustrates me about the whole debate. Endless charity for anyone except the American "elites". Then it's just innuendos and cherrypicking and taking things out of context.
I think I have a second order Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. Whenever I've seen attacks on the media and bothered to investigate it, the claims about what "the media" said are usually false, or at best misleading. Often, the media piece being attacked comes across as more nuanced and reasonable than the one doing the attack! Even Scott is a perpetrator of this.
Yes. "The media" is an easy target, I suppose in some part because you can make that reference without (1) needing to be specific and (2) calling out any one person in particular.
What I find particularly notable is that advocates on both sides of some issues blame bias on the part of "the media" for public opinions not matching their own preferences. Climate change is a good example; advocates on either side blame "the media" (or "the MSM") for public climate demial" or "alarmist hysteria," respectively
I saw a talk by a member of the WHO team in the early days of the pandemic. They were definitely extremely frustrated about not getting access to any actual evidence, and I think some of the premature definiteness of the WHO report can be put down to "we have to say something/absence of evidence is evidence of absence" type failures.
That said, one point that the WHO team member brought up that I haven't seen discussed much is that there are biomarkers for viruses raised in labs that aren't just biomarkers for genetic manipulation. In particular, viruses kept alive in cells in petri dishes often have adaptations specific to fitness in that environment, which can stick around when the virus makes the leap to humans, and COVID-19 lacks those biomarkers.
Since this was pretty early in the pandemic, I don't know whether this argument has since been refuted, though. Anyone know more?
> "So what should we make of this? Well, as I mentioned before, RaTG13 is no longer the closest known genetic match to SARS-CoV-2, so maybe the whole story is less important as it pertains to the origin of the pandemic. But the discovery of BANAL-52 doesn’t really resolve things either [2]. Laos is very far away from Wuhan (actually even further than Yunnan), so we’re left with the same question as before – how did SARS-CoV-2 make it all the way to Wuhan from such a distant natural reservoir without leaving a trail along the way?"
I'm not an expert by any means, but this looks like a standard sample bias issue. Most Chinese caves are not sampled in search of coronaviruses. This was, but only because of the unlikely event of miners getting sick. If natural reservoirs for viruses are not uniformly sampled, closely related viruses aren't going to show up where they are, but where research has been conducted. Probably this have been said already.
Regarding the issue of the virus being first detected in Wuhan. I wouldn't be so sure as to consider this as unlikely or suspicious. IIRC, for unexposed populations SARS-CoV-2 had an R0 of about three, but most people won't transmit the virus to 3 new hosts, in fact the mode was closer to 0 and the mean was driven up by a small number of superspreader events. The virus may have self extinguished in the countryside and only picked up momentum in a large hub like Wuhan.
Even if there was an earlier or simultaneous rural outbreak outside Wuhan, the combination of asymptomatic/mild cases with the virus causing symptoms similar to other respiratory viruses would have made it more likely to be discovered, as a new illness, in Wuhan.
P.S.: Great review, one of my favorites so far!
I’m not even close to having a working knowledge of virology let alone and expert, and please correct me if I’m wrong and I’ll delete the comment. But I believe you grossed over a pretty important aspect of the “cleavage site” in that there may have been a grant that was rejected for the WIV to research inserting the cleavage sites into bat corona viruses in the couple of years prior to the outbreak. The idea seems to be that they went ahead with this research anyway, otherwise it would be an insane coincidence.
I believe it was Alina Chan who said something along the lines of “imagine if there was a rejected proposal in a city to put horns on horses, then a year later unicorns started showing up right down the street from the lab that was supposed to be doing this research. It could be a strange coincidence, or more likely they did the research anyway.” Since the “cleavage site” had never been found in nature the comparison isn’t much of a stretch.
Did I hear this correctly or am I talking out of my ass? Lol I believe it was on Coleman Hughes podcast over a year ago and I haven’t revisited this topic.
I’m not totally sure on all of your claims, but the “cleavage site” not being found in nature is not the evidence it seems to be.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-00908-w
As this paper points out, infection of humans is largely dependent on the cleavage site--which is presumably why gain of function research was interested in it. Hence, any coronavirus found in nature with a similar mutation... wouldn’t be found in nature. It would be another pandemic.
So the useful analogy isn’t “imagine if there was a rejected proposal in a city to put horns on horses, then a year later unicorns started showing up right down the street from the lab that was supposed to be doing this research.”
This overstates the rarity of the cleavage site, as well as the unlikeliness it could evolve on its own. It’s important to remember evolutionary pressures to infect humans are just as powerful--if not more so--than human engineering. This is the counterargument against teleological creationism, and applies similarly here.
A better analogy would be “a proposal to increase the lethality of lions on human analogues is rejected. A year later, several lions in the vicinity begin to attack humans.” Lions attacking humans isn’t unheard of, or particularly surprising. It is a tad unusual for something to occur so close to this city, but again, not enough to dismiss the possibility of coincidence. The behavior analogue is important here, because we are used to animal behavior changing quite rapidly, but we imagine evolution must be slower. However, viral evolution is often a great deal faster than changes in even human behavior.
It’s a classic case of observer bias. We struggle to observe pandemics capable of infecting humans before they start, but we observe a lot of diseases not capable of infecting humans. This does not mean that all pandemics must be man-made, though neither is it evidence none are.
Ok I get what you’re saying, excuse my ignorance on the subject. So if they finally found that 99% closest relative before it made it jump to humans it wouldn’t contain the cleavage site, because the cleavage site is itself the reason it’s transmissible to humans. Makes sense. That definitely lowers the salience of the concern i was echoing, but I still think it bears mentioning, even if the lion analogy is the correct one.
However, isn’t it possible that the unicorn analogy is still relevant if there are more specific aspects of the virus’s biology related to the cleavage site that stand out, rather than just the mere existence of the cleavage site? I am not at all equipped to answer. I will try to find both the original source of the quote and the time stamp where I heard it! It may have actually been on “the realignment” podcast with saager enjeti of breaking points, and the man was quoting Alina Chan.
I think it’s fine to consider this weak evidence in favor of the Lab Leak Theory, and update accordingly. Unfortunately, the Chinese government, either out of paranoia or active desire to hide guilt, has likely destroyed all of the best evidence, whether exculpatory or damning.
I have a peer-reviewed analysis of the FCS here:
https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/39/1/msab327/6426085
And I bring up the unicorn analogy again in my latest summary of the evidence surrounding the origin of Covid-19:
https://ayjchan.medium.com/the-evidence-for-a-natural-vs-lab-origin-of-covid-19-6946407f3310
FCSs do emerge in other distantly related coronaviruses, but it is unique to the pandemic virus across all SARS-like viruses discovered to date. Moreover, we know that scientists, including at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had developed an interest in inserting novel cleavage sites into novel coronaviruses (and SARS-like viruses) they found at least as early as 2015. In this sense, it's like saying that there are other 4-legged horse-like mammals with horns, so is a horse with a horn actually unexpected? Especially if the first time we see one is in a city where the scientists said they were putting horns on horses in the lab? It's not impossible that there are some very rare SARS-like viruses in nature that have such an FCS insertion in their spike - so rare that they're currently beyond detection. However, it seems very coincidental that this SARS-like virus with a unique FCS decided to show up in the one metropolitan hub where there is a lab experimenting with unique FCSs in novel SARS-like viruses.
I also think it's important for people outside of research to understand how we write grants. I shared a recent ACX article on impact markets with a colleague, and he said, "That's kind of like how we write grants. We do 70% of the work asking for the money to do the project."
To me, when I saw they had written a grant asking to do this work I thought, "You mean to polish it off." I'll admit that haven't read the grant proposal, though.
This is a link to the Defuse grant that was submitted to DARPA in March 2018:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal
Yes, many scientists submit proposals on work that they've at least started and seen promising results for. This helps to boost their grant success rates; if the funder sees that you can consistently deliver on past proposals, you're more likely to be funded in the future. Much of scientific research (especially at the cutting edge) is inherently high risk. If you're always pitching research without having done any preliminary work, you're likely to have to frequently report failure (unless we're talking about bad scientists who manipulate data/omit negative results to make it seem as if their ideas always work out).
It's pretty common in research (at least in the fields I've worked in) to apply for grants for work you've already done (but not published yet)-- that way you know you won't have to send an embarrassing "we tried this and it didn't work" progress report to the funding agency. You apply in 2016 for funding for work you did in 2015, and use the money to do research that you'll apply for funding for in 2017.
Furin cleavage sites appear to have evolved independently several times within the coronavirus family: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165
I will try to find the original source and explanation for this quote. It may have been around the specific biology of this particular virus rather than the mere existence of the cleavage site. I’m pretty certain Chan was the source of the unicorn quote.
Also that research is by Chinese scientists after the pandemic. Obviously that doesn’t discredit the paper altogether but of course the incentives are there for China to cover their own ass.
"Viral was published November 16, 2021, nearly two months after the discovery of BANAL-52 was published"
This seems like a weak criticism. Publishing involves a lot of lead time devoted to copy editing, proofreading, typesetting, book design, manufacturing, etc. Even if the authors became aware of BANAL-52 before their book was officially released, it may have been too late to correct the first edition.
Re the location of the WIV, yes, it cannot help but be highly suspicious to any sensible person that the first outbreak occurred in the same city as a major research lab that is known to work with exactly this type of virus. However, I've seen statements in print that went too far with this idea, claiming that the lab is literally across the street from the Huanan Seafood Market. It isn't. They're nearly 8 miles apart, on opposite sides of the Yangtze River. Now, 8 miles, admittedly, is not that much, certainly not enough to discredit the lab leak hypothesis, but it's a lot more than "across the street".
This excellent review has caused me revisit how I formed my beliefs about COVID’s origins in the early days of the pandemic.
I now see that i dismissed the lab-origin theory not because I had evaluated the evidence, but because the Trumpers were pushing it.
Disbelieving something solely because you don’t like those who claim to believe it is an easy error to make. In this case, I assumed the Trumpers didn’t really believe the lab-origin theory either but claimed to because it gave Trump the opportunity to sound tough on China and to undercut the science community, both things he and his tribe were particularly keen to do. For that reason, I dismissed it.
I still think I’m right about why the Trump tribe embraced the lab-origin theory, but I was wrong to dismiss it solely for that reason.
It seems like an instance of a stopped clock being right. (For certain values of right - there were a lot of claims in this camp early on about being e.g. a deliberately released bioweapon that can safely be dispensed with even now).
>"As a non-fiction book on current events, an unavoidable weakness of Viral is that it does not include recent developments that have come out after the book’s publication. At least one of these developments is important enough for me to mention in this review. In February 2022, three scientific pre-prints [1, 2, 3] were released ... "
The paperback edition's epilogue does discuss the preprints. (It isn't able to discuss the first two's final published versions, out this week, though.)
The review says:
<quote>At first I thought maybe the authors didn’t mention BANAL-52 because it was discovered after the book was published, but this isn’t the case – Viral was published November 16, 2021, nearly two months after the discovery of BANAL-52 was published. Although I’m writing an overall-positive review here, I don’t want to go easy on the book where serious criticism is warranted. It’s completely unacceptable that BANAL-52 wasn’t mentioned. Even if it would have been inconvenient from a publishing standpoint, the authors should have rewritten the RaTG13 chapter, or at least included an addendum about the discovery of BANAL-52.</quote>
My understanding of book publishing implies that this criticism is completely off base. The book publishing pipeline does not permit rewriting two months before publication. The period from the text being locked in until the time the book is in customers’ hands is more like four months.
Epistemic status: I’ve dealt with publishers for years, from the author side, and make tens of thousands per year from book royalties. But I’ve never tried a last-minute change to a book, so maybe I’m wrong. I welcome correction from an actual publisher.
Pentagon collected the closest Laos Banal samples, in 2017
https://web.archive.org/web/20181126230256/https://www.pasteur.la/project-carried-on-in-the-lab12/assessment-of-the-potential-vector-threat-of-bat-borne-pathogens-and-the-host-associated-ectoparasites-in-the-provinces-of-vientiane-and-khammouane-of-the-lao-pdr/
site 1 is exact same GPS
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-871965/v1
> To say there was a lab origin, we would have to postulate that scientific institutions in China are lying and successfully engaged in a coverup, for which there have been no credible whistleblowers.
This is clearly not true; many people believe that the virus originated in a US lab.
I was deep into Wuhan lab leak in ~March 2020 till June- July 2020.
What amazed me at the time was how quickly it became political.
Most of the D's thought it was nuts and most of the R's thought it was true.
(1. how can you all be so sure... it became a tribal signal/ flag...)
Anyway I mostly wanted to put this link here.
https://project-evidence.github.io/
(So I could find it again.)
When lab leak came around again in 2021, it was mostly a yawn for me.
The truth has been hidden in China, and who knows if we'll ever learn the truth.
I would totally bet on lab leak, but have no way to prove it.
And has anyone made a Mojiang mine, minecraft reference? Next update needs to infect the bats in the caves with a virus!
The EcoHealth / Daszak saga gets slightly more interesting: there was a DARPA grant proposal by his org to add a cleavage site to a coronavirus sampled by WIV (see https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/) which wasn't funded.
But a WIV PhD thesis seems to have confirmed the research went ahead anyway and in BSL-2 conditions no less (https://www.minervanett.no/china-drastic-sars-cov-2/chinese-researchers-created-new-corona-viruses-under-unsafe-conditions/381476), which would make a lab leak fairly likely. This PhD thesis was by Lei Ping Zeng and was also found by Seeker on Twitter.
I haven't read either document deeply but they seem to at least corroborate that dodgy gain of function research creating similar viruses happened in unsafe conditions at WIV around the same time. Whether this was the source of COVID I don't know, but it's alarming either way.
On the subject of things published too late to make it into this book,
https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-1330800/v1_covered.pdf?c=1644271052
Hungarian scientists studying soil samples collected in Antarctica in 2018, belatedly noticed that they contained traces of a very early strain of SARS CoV-2. Which is ridiculously implausible. So what really happened is, they sent their samples to Sangon Biotech in Shanghai, China for phylogenetic analysis, and Sangon used a technique that is notoriously susceptible to cross-contamination from other samples being sequenced in parallel. Clearly someone else had sent actual SARS CoV-2 samples to Sangon for sequencing at the same time.
The Hungarians sent their samples to Sangon in December 2019. Exact date unknown, but almost certainly nobody was sending samples from the Wuhan outbreak to Sangon in 2019. The first report of genetic sequencing of suspected Covid-19 was 24 December 2019, but that was by Vision Medicals in Guangzhou, which did a lot of the (known) early Covid sequencing. Wikipedia also says that Beijing Boao Medical Laboratory sequenced Covid-19 on 27 December 2019. The Wuhan Central Hospital doesn't seem to have used Sangon in this area, and they didn't tell the Chinese equivalent of the CDC about any of this until 29 December 2019 so probably nobody else was doing so in 2019 either.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology had been using Sangon Biotech as a contract lab earlier in 2019. For research on bat coronaviruses, even, if I read this correctly: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6521148/
Furthermore, the contamination in the Hungarian samples included not just SARS CoV-2, but also Chinese hamster and Vero E6 green monkey genetic material. The Dazhak/EcoHealth proposal for gain-of-function research in bat coronaviruses at WIV, called for culturing in Chinese hamster and Vero E6 green monkey cell lines. I'm not sure, but I don't think that's standard procedure for "we found this gunk in the lungs of a mystery pneumonia patient; can you tell us what it is?"
This isn't quite smoking-gun proof that WIV was working with proto-Covid shortly before the known outbreak, but that's certainly a plausible interpretation.
Alternately, the Hungarians could be simply wrong. Their research by nature can't be replicated, but it could at least be closely scrutinized by outside experts, and I don't think really has been. I'd expect Sangon Biotech could confirm or deny that the sequences in the Hungarian paper are the ones they sent them, which should rule out "the Hungarians are just plain lying"
Also, it's barely possible to massage the timeline so that the Hungarian samples are delayed in processing to January 2020, and that the WIV or someone else in their early-2020 investigation of a natural COVID outbreak rushed their own samples to Shanghai and jumped the queue to get in the same run as the earlier Hungarian samples. But that would require that WIV do a hasty investigation that involves culturing their unknown virus in green monkey and hamster cells (why?), or that the Hungarian samples have been doubly contaminated, first with SARS CoV-2 and then from some completely different source that coincidentally used the same culture media as the proposed WIV GoF experiments.
Not smoking-gun proof, but a strong hint with some good pointers to where one might find smoking-gun proof. But as far as I know, there's been no real follow-up.
Wow! This is super interesting. Hope there's some follow-up eventually.
It's been six months with no serious follow-up or publicity; I wouldn't hold my breath. I think the window for serious discussion of the lab leak hypothesis outside the nerd-blogosphere has closed.
I did a rudimentary investigation a year ago, finding that most of the purported evidence for a lab leak falls apart: https://medium.com/@pseudodionysus/did-covid-19-come-from-a-lab-a-critical-examination-208f0eff7c3
To repeat only a few parts relevant to the book review:
"Probably the most important – the WIV had previously maintained a database of at least fifteen thousand bat samples, including the dates and locations of samples as well as information about the viruses found in them. This database was taken offline and its contents have not been shared with independent researchers since."
That database was only really online for a few weeks in August-September 2019, and 5 days in December. This claim came from the DRASTIC group of freelance researchers, who cite the archives of a database monitoring system to claim that the database went offline on September 12, 2019. But the same monitoring system shows that the database only became reliably available on August 23, 2019. Before that, from June to August 23, the database was online sporadically. It would be online for 1–2 days, and then go down for several days or weeks at a time. Before June 2019, there’s no data, because v2 of the database was released in June 2019. After September 2019, it was online from December 12 to December 16, and access was sporadic through February 26, 2020. After that, the database was down for good.
"So it does seem like a pretty remarkable coincidence that the outbreak happened in Wuhan. "
Then it's a far, far more remarkable coincidence that most of the earliest cases have direct ties to the wet market. Out of all possible locations, SARS-CoV-2 just happened to pick a wet market as its first superspreader location--just like its cousin SARS-CoV-1--and it has nothing to do with the animals there? It didn't spread at a cinema, a school, a convention center, a train station, a mall, a grocery store, a university, an office building, a bar, or even the Wuhan Institute of Virology (which is 15 km from the wet market), but at a wet market, and this is totally a coincidence?
"If SARS-CoV-2 originated in an animal somewhere around the Yunnan / Laos area, how did it make it all the way to Wuhan without leaving a trail along the way? "
If SARS-CoV-1 originated in an animal somewhere around the Yunnan area--which we now know it did--how did it make all the way to Guangdong without leaving a trail along the way? And of course, though it's plausible that SARS-CoV-2 originated near Yunnan, we don't know that.
In fact, it's very easy to imagine how both of these viruses could travel thousands of kilometers without leaving a trail along the way. In Yunnan, a villager traps a wild animal and gets infected with the virus. He takes a train to Wuhan--one of China's biggest cities and busiest transport hubs--and sells the animal to the wet market, infecting a few wet market retailers and customers along the way. The animal is sold, butchered, and eaten, but the infected humans start the pandemic.
"Some scientists claim that SARS-CoV-2 reached genetic stability early on, suggesting that it was already well-adapted to spread in humans at the start of the outbreak. Some have interpreted this as evidence that it was engineered for this purpose, or underwent serial passaging to encourage adaptation to human or humanized cells. "
The original virus was moderately transmissible, with R0 of 2-3. Since then, a series of variants have taken over the original strain, making the virus more and more transmissible. Delta had R0=5.1, Omicron BA.1 had R0=9.5, and BA.2, BA.4, and BA.5 are more infectious still. SARS-CoV-2 is now one of the most transmissible diseases in human history. So in what possible way has the virus "reached genetic stability early on", or "was already well-adapted to spread in humans at the start of the outbreak"?
Not sure about your point concerning potential routes for SARS-CoV-2 to get from Laos/Yunnan to Wuhan. Of course it's possible to imagine a variety of routes, of varying degrees of probability; the question is which are actually plausible, and which have direct evidence for them.
I would describe your suggested route as unlikely, in the absence of further evidence. Can you take live pangolins/bats/etc on a direct train from the areas of Yunnan where SARS-CoV-2-like viruses have been found to Wuhan? Would it be economically viable for a villager to do so? Do we have any evidence that anyone actually does so?
On the other hand, we do know one way that bat viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 were being transported from Yunnan and Laos to Wuhan. The WIV was definitely doing so. We don't have to imagine interesting ways that they might have done it.
Unless there's evidence for the Long Distance Villager theory I'm unaware of, the question of transmission to Wuhan remains a point in favour of the lab leak hypothesis, I think.
If a WIV employee was infected while in Yunan and brought it to Wuhan that way, I would count that as zoonotic. But I guess both sides would probably claim vindication in such a scenario.
Why have we not discovered checkouts or snapshots from the missing WIV database(s) on someone's lab server or laptop?
Sounds like it was only up for a little while in the first place. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-viral/comment/8080326
Not satisfying answer to my question.
Researchers + students commonly scrape/download, such resources because these systems have terrible uptime.
This is Alina Chan, one of the co-authors of the book VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.
I really enjoyed reading this review and the comments, and I also appreciate the reviewer creating a list of other sources to check out. In particular, this line by the reviewer characterizes many of the moments I've experienced in the past 2 years spent looking into the origin of Covid-19 : “what the hell is going on if some random Twitter users are consistently correcting world-renowned virology institutes on various mistakes and omissions?”
Similar to the reviewer, Matt and I were also late to the lab origin hypothesis. The early information coming out of China seemed to point to a repeat of the 2003 SARS outbreak in China, and I didn't question this, assuming that they would very quickly find the infected animal source as they had in the case of SARS and MERS (I also recommend Laura Kahn's piece in the Bulletin Atomic). It was only later, as key evidence failed to turn up for a market origin, that I was motivated to consider the lab leak hypothesis. By May 2020, the Chinese CDC director had told the press that the market was most likely a victim, ie a sick person had ignited a superspreader event there (the CCDC director recently retired from his position, some speculate it was because he was a "loose cannon" and said too many things about the origin of Covid-19 and China's vaccines that didn't adhere to the official Party line).
One observation that raised my eyebrows (but is still consistent with both natural and lab origin hypotheses) was the highly transmissible nature of the virus right from the get go. And I wasn't the only scientist who was struck by the well adapted/pre-adapted nature of the virus. The natural origin proponents who wrote Proximal Origin in early 2020 were among the first to describe the virus as well adapted for human transmission. They later reversed their stance in their Critical Review in mid 2021. Now, in their latest preprints/papers in Science in mid 2022, they've gone back to saying that the virus needed no adaptive mutations to spread in humans. See my twitter thread for more details: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1513586519159697410
I also liked the coin flip analogy by the reviewer. I've been accurately described as a fence-sitter in the past 2 years. Back in 2020 it was very controversial for a scientist to be a fence-sitter on the origin of Covid-19 issue (and I took a lot of heat from other scientists, the press, and even friends for just saying we have to consider a lab origin, regardless of how likely or unlikely), but now it's become too boring for the media to report that a scientist thinks there's a 50:50 chance of a market vs lab origin. The media prefers to report on scientists who are willing to go so far as to say they can put one hypothesis to rest or that they have "dispositive" or "incontrovertible" evidence of one hypothesis. To do so is, imo, more like a form of gambling rather than science. Like the reviewer argues, whether it turns out that your bet was right or wrong, it doesn't justify shutting down one of the two plausible hypotheses.
I'd like to address the unavoidable weakness of the book raised by the reviewer: The manuscript is "locked" at least a couple of months before physical copies of it magically appear on bookshelves across the US and UK (not being sarcastic, as a first time book author, this truly was a magical experience for me!). This means that any developments in the 2 months before the book is released cannot possibly be written into the book unless the authors had insider information and knew that it was ok to write said information into the book (which then has to spend time being vetted by the publisher's lawyers). For this reason, the newly released paperbacks cover the new developments since mid-Sep 2021: the Laos BANAL viruses, the 3 preprints on the Wuhan market, and more FOIA'ed emails from prominent virologists who privately fretted about a lab origin of Covid-19. If the publishers will allow, I'd like to update the book 5 years from now because I'm optimistic about very compelling evidence being unearthed within this time range (at least this evidence should be more compelling than Western virologists misinterpreting data collected with ascertainment bias).
Thanks again for the review! I'm providing these links in case other readers are interested.
My peer reviewed analysis of the furin cleavage site:
https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/39/1/msab327/6426085
My latest summary of the evidence surrounding the origin of Covid-19:
https://ayjchan.medium.com/the-evidence-for-a-natural-vs-lab-origin-of-covid-19-6946407f3310
And my critique of the recent Worobey et al. Science paper, which the reviewer has already linked to - I will update this in a few days to explain the "2 strain 2 spillover" hypothesis that the authors have come up with to support the market origin hypothesis:
https://ayjchan.medium.com/evidence-for-a-natural-origin-of-covid-19-no-longer-dispositive-after-scientific-peer-review-af95b52499e1
Hi Dr. Chan, thanks for the comment and links!
Yes, some other commenters have also pointed out that I may have been too harsh on the book over the omission of the BANAL viruses, and that 2 months is actually not enough time to update a book before publication. However, from my perspective as the reader, when I buy a book on current events I have the expectation that they'll be pretty up to date, especially when it comes to major developments. So maybe I was too hard on you and Matt Ridley with that criticism, but in that case I feel like it's still a valid criticism of the book publishing industry if they can't move quick enough to incorporate a minor update 2 months out -- for comparison, major newspapers like the New York Times manage to distribute physical copies all around the world with news updates from the previous day.
Anyway, I agree with your and Ridley's fence-sitter position, and I admire the way you've resisted pressure from both sides to express more certainty than can actually be justified. In my view, you've already gotten it right -- you said that neither hypothesis could be ruled out without further investigation, and that turned out to be correct (I just hope the rest of the scientific community also realizes this). Actually I think it was quite brave and heroic of you guys to point this out early on when it was an extremely unpopular thing to say.
Thanks for your comments. Matt Ridley here. We argued long and hard with our publishers for inserting the latest possible updates to our text, because we knew the book risked being overtaken by events. They were sympathetic and helpful and we managed to push it back by nearly a month, and to a much, much shorter time than I have had with any previous book, but we were confronted with the fact that US publishing in particular was hit by severe supply chain constraints of some kind during 2021, including at one point a claim of a "shortage of paper"!!?? Publishers were having to reserve printing dates further in advance and stick to them more than normal - I think it was also something to do with not outsourcing the printing to China. You're right that newspapers manage much shorter deadlines for printing things, but they have their own printing presses and huge distribution networks designed for last-minute work of this kind and publishers don't. Anyway, as Alina says, the paperback deals extensively with BANAL-52, and crucially the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology also received samples from Laos. Could you perhaps add a note to your review that readers should if possible read the paperback (or kindle) version to get the most updated edition. Thank you again for a perceptive and useful review.
I don't know about the timeline for publishing the paperback edition, but were you able to address the Hungarian findings I mentioned in my comment at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-viral/comment/8079797 ?
My layman's read, and what educated commentary I have seen, is that this is something significant but not conclusive. But there's been very little followup, and I'd be interested in hearing what someone who has been following the issue more closely than I have, thinks about it.
John, The Hungarian findings are very intriguing and are not the only ones that suggest contamination of sequencing machines might enable us to shed light on what happened. However until we know for sure what date the Antarctic samples were sequenced, we cannot be sure this was not a contamination that occurred in January - ie after the pandemic was recognised in which case they would be of slightly less relevance. Matt
Yeah, I've long since given up on being sure, and am just looking for evidence to shift my priors towards a "probably this, even if we're not sure" assessment one way or another. And this sort of thing, particularly if there are other examples like it, goes a long ways towards doing that IMHO.
I had read elsewhere about WIV receiving samples from Laos that might include BANAL-52. A few interesting comments from the review pointed out that:
1. There's probably another closer relative that was the origin of COVID-19 (probably also from the Laotian region where they found BANAL-52).
2. That relative could have come directly from Laos - without genetic engineering - to WIV.
3. WIV could have accidentally leaked COVID-19 as part of their sample-processing procedures, not just as part of GoF research.
If so, we should consider (regardless of the actual origins of the pandemic) safety controls related to GoF research, but also safety controls for any and all processes that aggregate viral samples for any kind of study. If close human interaction is a risk factor for crossover events into humans, then researchers collecting, cataloging, and studying any virus could lead to such an event.
The UPDATED paperback is out right now. - I seem to be just the 2nd to note - And Matt Ridley IS updating on his blog "rationaloptimist.com" . So to mimic the review: This review was published July 30, nearly three days after the updated paperback was published. Although I’m writing an overall-positive review here, I don’t want to go easy on the review where serious criticism is warranted. It’s completely unacceptable that the updated paperback wasn’t mentioned!* -
I am very glad to finally see the book mentioned in ACX. I found it irritating to be ignored by the "rationalist" blogosphere (except Scott Aaronson). It seems like a rather decent review too. So, many thanks, really appreciated! -
*(Original: "Why Viral was published November 16, 2021, nearly two months after the discovery of BANAL-52 was published. Although I’m writing an overall-positive review here, I don’t want to go easy on the book where serious criticism is warranted. It’s completely unacceptable that BANAL-52 wasn’t mentioned!")
It’s easy to dismiss the ridiculous claim that COVID began as a bioweapon, but other claims are more difficult to evaluate. <- I don't see where this claim was engaged with. Why is it easy to dismiss this claim?
Well if it was, Cui Bono?
It may seem trite, but the reason we don't talk about Bruno, is because it would help a person who is very bad.
Sorry, I'm lost
COVID is the exact opposite of what you want in a bioweapon. You want something that is highly lethal but relatively easy to contain (so it doesn't just blow back to your own country too). People talk about smallpox, anthrax, ebola, rather than the flu for a reason. Also, my understanding is that it doesn't look much like an engineered virus would.
I hope no one read that I myself was suggesting that it was a bioweapon. I thought it was an odd editorial choice to have as the thesis that, "people prematurely dismissed the lab leak theory without an inquiry, and that was premature." And then to dismiss the bioweapon theory, without an inquiry."
But at the subject level... yes, COVID doesn't seem like it would be a good bioweapon unless the creator hated every nation-state. I know Ron Unz said he thought it might have been a bioweapon leaked against China, with the expectation (hope?) that China was going to contain it at massive cost. I didn't find what I read on it very persuasive though.
Regarding not looking like an engineered virus would... I would need that explained like I'm 5.
>the easy option is to just become an insane person
Love this!
2018 covered up denied DARPA grant seems pretty incriminating, is that not talked about in the book?
It is covered in the book, and in more detail in the updated paperback.
"experts make decisions based on ass-covering, career advancement, and personal risk mitigation. autists make decisions based on spreadsheets. the natural result of this is that experts are useless and autists are good at things that are tractable with spreadsheets"
-- https://rationalists-out-of-context.tumblr.com/post/663451258254999552/
I think a lot of internet sleuthing is a sort of million monkeys effect as well. Crowds are always going to be better at random search than a small number of experts would be.
Great review but (and this is arguably the books fault not the review's fault) I'd have loved to have seen some base rate information. For instance, what fraction of unusual or novel viruses (just on some measure) are lab leaks given our best information.
If even the people warning us about lab leaks are going to say that it's 1000 to 1 or something that seems pretty conclusive.
This base rate changes depending on the location and circumstances of each outbreak.
For example, what are the odds of someone drowning in a natural body of water as compared to a manmade swimming pool? This would change depending on the location, e.g., a seaside area vs the desert.
I lay out the balance of evidence for the Wuhan outbreak here:
https://ayjchan.medium.com/the-evidence-for-a-natural-vs-lab-origin-of-covid-19-6946407f3310
> This is basically how I think we should handle this unwarranted overconfidence from respected institutions – it should decrease our trust in these institutions, but we need to be careful not to start favoring the lab leak hypothesis out of spite. In my opinion this loss of trust should not really affect our view of the object-level question of the virus’s origin at all (although it would be nice to see some of the data being hidden, like that WIV database that was taken offline).
I don't think this amount of compartmentalization is justifiable. Actions of public officials can be important pieces of evidence. They might reflect on the object-level question of whether there was a lab leak, or they might not; in order to find out whether they weigh on the question, we can apply everyone around here's favorite theorem.
P(A|B) = P(A)*P(B|A)/P(B), where A = "lab leak is true" and B = "database deleted". You have some prior credence in the lab leak P(A). Even if that's initially very low, you should ask yourself - if the lab leak were true, would that make it *more likely* or *less likely* that they would delete that database? I think the answer is pretty clearly that this would render the WIV *more likely* to delete the database, so P(B|A) / P(B) is above 1. That means that P(A|B) > P(A), which is to say, learning the database was actually deleted should cause you to update in favor of the lab leak theory.
It's not *conclusive* evidence. It might not even be the strongest evidence out there on the question. But it *is* evidence, and it means these two questions - the one about the origin of COVID, and the one about the trustworthiness of the authorities - can't be fully disentangled. Bayes' Theorem applies here too - why would it not?
Why is it a ridiculous, easy to dismiss claim that it started as a bioweapon?
I don't know anything about the subject, and it sounds ridiculous to me, but on the other hand without any justification it sounds like you're doing the same thing you rightly criticise others for doing with the lab leak hypothesis- dismissing it based on superficial weirdness. I'm sure you're not, but I think it'd be worth briefly explaining why it can be dismissed
Of course RaTG13 and its derivatives like SARS-COV-2 would have been investigated and funded under CCP bureaucracy partially as a bioweapon. And of course these are dual use technologies, so any public facing claims would advertise their harm reduction intent.
If you listen to the shot callers when they think they're speaking in private, many attempt to rationalize the decision of Fauci and NIH to fund GoF at WIV as a strategy of gaining access to spy on China's capabilities and arsenal of bioweapons. I'm skeptical that the decision was anything like a Coventry gambit, but clearly when China is doing GoF on human pathogens, their military is looped in.
If you think about what a good bioweapon for CCP purposes would be: it would be a transmissible virus, for which the releasing party has already developed, manufactured, and administered a vaccine to their military. The virus would be ideally novel, so that any other nation would be puzzled about how to treat it clinically, and how to develop pharmacologic products to defeat it.
It's worth noting that the "military games" - an olympic type competition of soldiers from around the world - took place in October 2019 in Wuhan. Also interesting is the mystery product Moderna had been developing since about 2018; four out five products it was developing were well known, one was never revealed.
COVID is the exact opposite of what you want in a bioweapon. You want something that is highly lethal but relatively easy to contain (so it doesn't just blow back to your own country too). People talk about smallpox, anthrax, ebola as bioweapons, rather than the flu for a reason. Also, my understanding is that it doesn't look much like an engineered virus would.
But why wouldn't they want it to blow back to their country? Killing lots of old people and leaving young healthy people largely unaffected seems like a state's dream outcome.
1. The PRC - the real one, not the one ruled by Fu Manchu inscrutable oriental stereotypes - has no real use for biological weapons. Biological weapons are mostly a crutch for people who don't have nuclear weapons, or don't think they can afford enough nuclear weapons for their purposes. The Chinese can easily afford lots more nuclear weapons than they have, but have instead invested in geopolitical strategies optimized around the existence of a healthy global economy.
2. People who do see a use for biological weapons, want biological weapons they can control. Often that means things like anthrax, which is basically never transmitted between humans. So wherever you dust with anthrax spores, people will get sick, but that's it. If you do use human-transmissible pathogens, you want something other than airborne transmission and you want to have an effective vaccine for your own people.
3. If you're going to use an uncontrolled biological weapon, which inherently risks people figuring out that you did that and deciding to go to war with you over it, the last thing you want is a disease that kills a million or so of their beloved grandparents while giving their military-age males and factory workers a bad case of the sniffles for a week or so.
Who said they were targeting it at foreign nations? For the reasons you outline in point 3, it might be quite useful to inflict on yourself. Which neatly wipes out your points 2 and 3.
As for 1, I think the idea that they have no use for biological weapons needs a lot more justification than a blithe insinuation of racism. It seems reasonable to me that you might want lots of nuclear weapons AND biological ones, and you haven't really attempted to explain why that's not true.
That would be the "Fu Manchu inscrutable Oriental stereotype" China. Well, OK, your scruting them or whatever, but you're casting them in the role of comic-book villains. Real people, and real governments, don't act that way.
Possibly relevant articles:
When Conspiracy Theories are Real: https://questioner.substack.com/p/when-conspiracy-theories-are-real
TrUsT tHe ExPeRts: https://questioner.substack.com/p/trust-the-experts
Can we talk Dr. Limeng Yan for a minute and how she is like Edward Snowden, Rachel Carson, and Bob Woodward rolled into one. I would build a statue to this woman the size of Lady Liberty but I guess I would settle for like a Google Doodle one day?
To be clear, the author, reviewer, and everyone else are all in agreement of certain facts: Tedros, Daszak, and Fauci - and every other academic, public health official and NGO-er - all spouted "no evidence of community spread" (while knowing the opposite to be true), in February 2020 while Yan literally put her life on the line to blow the whistle that this thing was spreading like fire and is the reason all these officials were forced to recant the lie.
Let's see what the reviewer has to say about this doctor: "This is a sad story about a scientist who tried to do the right thing, but ended up intellectually corrupted by forces beyond her control." He writes this about Yan! Whose career is ruined, must be looking over her shoulder everyday for CCP payback, and she's the *one* scientist who had the courage to speak the truth to power make these sacrifices to save millions of lives. Meanwhile if the reviewer ever calls the aforementioned liars "corrupt" or anything half as disparaging, I didn't catch it.
Look, the review itself is excellent, and the reviewer does display a healthy amount of prior updating and introspection into personal bias that were blinding him. Dear reviewer, there is still work to done: If Bob Woodward gives an interview to a left wing source like Mother Jones or worked for left aligned institution like Berkley would you dismiss him as no longer credible? Of course not. The sad fact that shines through every dive into question is that the only journalists or politicians who were ever asking asking questions about this incident are going to be on the right. It was probably the same situation is the 60's for the left looking into ecological concerns of big agriculture or nuclear power. Hopefully one day this balances out, but for now we live in the world that exists.
> Tedros, Daszak, and Fauci - and every other academic, public health official and NGO-er - all spouted "no evidence of community spread" (while knowing the opposite to be true), in February 2020
Really? The strong version of your claim is trivially falisfiable, but I'd be surprised if even one of those people said "no community spread" in February. Rembember, that would be *after* the border closures, the cover issue of The Economist saying "the next global pandemic", the Diamond Princess outbreak, etc.
I enjoyed this review, mostly because it roughly matches my pre-existing beliefs, so of course I'd be pre-disposed to like it. I didn't learn much, but hopefully it will Knock Some Sense Into Those Other EvilWrong People On The Internet.
The one section I found very frustrating was the vague attacks on "public health officials, scientists, journalists, and tech companies". Instead of looking into any specific claims by specific people and assessing how true they are and whether they were justified based on the evidence available at the time and what different actors motivations might have been, you just sort of gesture vaguely about "elites and institutions" and hope the audience will nod along in outrage (which they usually will, since this is a bias that is common in the rat-sphere.) Sometimes it seems like you go to more trouble to understand the action of the Chinese government than Americans!
Review-of-the-review: 8/10
I can't object to anything about this review's conclusions. I find the lab leak theory plausible but not probable. The only clear evidence pointing that direction is the pandemic's Wuhan origin, which would be roughly like a US origin happening to be in Atlanta-- a striking coincidence, but not so unlikely that it demands a causal explanation. And like the reviewer I'm more concerned about institutions not having trustworthy truth-finding processes than about the actual answer they get.
That being said, I'm not satisfied with the reviewer's truth-finding process either. The analysis is a bit too shallow and disorganized to actually reach confident conclusions or contribute to the discussion beyond summarizing the book's points. Nor does it present the evidence in a particularly striking or exciting way, as ACX reviews often do. Also, maybe this is just my filter bubble but I didn't find anything particularly surprising here-- "lab leak has to be acknowledged as a possibility given the evidence" has been well inside my Overton window since the theory was first proposed.
In short, I'm satisfied with this review as far as it goes but it left me wanting considerably more. As always, many thanks for contributing!
"... To say there was a lab origin, we would have to postulate that scientific institutions in China are lying and successfully engaged in a coverup, for which there have been no credible whistleblowers."
Stunning naivete. Countries that maintain gulags where ordinary people are sent to be slaves in the cotton fields, are not to be believed without the weightiest evidence.
Whether it was a lab leak or a virus that jumped out of the endangered species being butchered in a public market without any pretense of sanitation, it makes China look bad. As a propaganda move, the best possibility is to shut up all of the witnesses and destroy all of the evidence, and let the poisonous culture war politics of the US work its magic.
As far as the US is concerned, the real issue is not what happened in China. At best it is item number 10 on the bill of particulars against the regime. The real issue is what Saint Anthony Fauci did in funding research at WIV in apparent violation of Obama administration policy.
"Viral was published November 16, 2021, nearly two months after the discovery of BANAL-52 was published."
Book publishing has a much longer lead time than blogging. My wife just completed the final proof reading of her book in mid July. It will be published in October.
"a 96.8% match is still a long way off in genomic space, and does not imply that this is the same virus as SARS-CoV-2, or even necessarily a progenitor."
By way of comparison, Chimpanzees are 98.8% similar to humans and the last common ancestor lived millions of years ago. Dogs are 94% similar. https://razib.substack.com/p/i-wanna-be-like-you
96.8% for members of the same genus doesn't sound very close at all.