I believe that the virus did leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And yes, it very much matters. The pandemic has shown a disturbing lack of critical thinking and just plain common sense in our populace.
People were frightened, and more than willing to cede all authority to the scientists who were going to save us. And the wet market theory was easily sold; it conformed to what has happened in previous viral outbreaks, and wet markets are disgusting to American sensibilities. It wasn't difficult for Dr Fauci and his colleagues to convince people that it was purely coincidental that the lab was located in the epicenter. I think it was understandable that people bought this at first.
But as it became clear that there was no evidence to support the wet market origin, institutions dictated that only the pronouncements of their preferred "experts" mattered. Other evidence and contrary expert opinion were deemed "dangerous". As you so eloquently point out, common sense dictated that the obvious should have been investigated.
Have people simply abandoned evidence, logic, and common sense in favor of perceived "safety"? I think many have done exactly that, if they ever had any critical thinking skills to begin with. But I also think many more fear the power of the authoritarian social media if they dare to step out of line and think for themselves.
The pandemic has been horrific. What it has revealed about authoritarianism in our institutions and media is even more frightening. And most frightening of all, it has shown that people will not only accept it, but actively promote the idea that questioning official pronouncements is "dangerous misinformation".
Oh, Heyjude! Thanks for stopping by! I started a (long!) reply to you twice, and both times I got pulled away and the reply vanished. :/
Third time's the charm:
I agree with you that this was a very easy sell to people at first, for the reasons you describe. Add to that, The Lancet and Nature Medicine are both very respectable journals (and my respect for them plummeted, to see them use their credibility as a political cudgel). And Science magazine too -- they just had another article last month, dredging up the wet market hypothesis, which even the Chinese eliminated 18 months ago when all their searching yielded z-e-r-o. (Et tu, Science? And the WHO trip to China for pure optics?)
And it goes without saying that social media obediently took its cues from what our leaders wanted. For months you couldn't even mention the lab leak hypothesis. I got permanently banned from r/COVID19 for stating verifiable facts and providing links to those facts last spring, which now no one claims are in dispute. ( For example, that state department cables had mentioned safety concerns in Wuhan before the pandemic.) And I was completely polite. But even now, to appeal my ban, no one replies.
I think the extent to which the scientific community and media both lost credibility with the public is tragic (but deserved). If even scientists and "independent" media can't be trusted to present the facts, how do we proceed in a disaster like this? How do we fight this virus? How do we protect people? Well, I believe we've seen: Our leaders have responded very poorly, and the people have responded with the degree and amount of trust our leaders justly deserve -- ie, not much.
Disaster upon disaster, tragedy upon tragedy -- and then there's omicron. More on that to come.
I haven’t read much on the origins debate; it didn’t matter much to me at first. Not that it *doesn’t* matter, just that I didn’t have the personal bandwidth to pay attention. So I never really knew why lab leak was considered a conspiracy theory (though I knew it had been called one). Sounds like a lot of ass-covering behavior going on. Thanks for this post.
After reading comments below, a question comes to mind. Why is the default assumption that the virus occurred naturally, and that the lab leak origin is the idea that needs to be proven conclusively?
I am not a scientist, but I really don't see why the natural origin theory should be accepted when the only evidence for it is an appeal to "experts". Yet it seems the demand for "evidence" is pointed in only one direction. Why is that?
Exactly. Great point. I’d guess that a natural origin is the default assumption because previous disease outbreaks have been shown (usually in short order) to be natural. So, to many people the assumption is that it arose naturally.
However it’s only recently that a lab-altered virus has even been possible. It sounds crazy. After all, why would people make a deadly virus and then be so careless as to let it escape? It sounds like Frankenstein’s lab to them.
I get it and yet: There’s been a huge failure of flexible thinking in my opinion.
If all the evidence points very specifically in one direction (altered virus that leaked), and no evidence points toward zoonosis, it’s time for people to leave their cherished assumptions at the gate and take a closer look.
That's coming (in part 2). I'm glad a majority believes it! The majority of people I encounter don't seem to believe it -- or to care either way. Most people seem passively to be expecting our "leaders" to look out for us and to make the situation better. That hasn't worked so well.
This is probably the clearest and most cogent case for the origin of this pandemic being in the lab in question that I've read so far. So, props for that. If all contained herein is true and accurate, and I have no reason to question that, then that handy razor blade, which I believe is an appropriate tool to use in this case, pretty much cuts right to the heart of the matter. But I'm not sure that I agree that "understanding the origin of the pandemic, and applying pressure to world leaders to act accordingly, is the most important thing any of us could be doing. The most important thing." But then I guess that depends on what "act accordingly" means.
Is this important? Absolutely. Very important. A future event such as this certainly has the potential to be even worse. But it's at least possible we haven't seen the worst of this particular event yet, and when the fire department rolls up to a house to extinguish a blaze, at that point that particular task is the priority, figuring out the origin of the flames a bit less so. A simplistic analogy, but the flames are still burning rather hot on this at the moment, so perhaps putting pressure on world leaders to acknowledge that particular fact and to act more in unison to knock this thing down to a level where it may be more easily brought under control should be the higher priority.
Of course, considering all of the forces aligned against the prospect of either of these scenarios being carried out successfully any time soon, my opinion here is in all likelihood a moot point.
hi, M! I appreciate your comments, and my reasoning for my opinion (that it's the most important thing any of us could be doing) will be in part 2...so...more to come. Long story short, this is very dangerous research which hasn't helped prevent anything, and has seemingly caused millions of people to die -- someone on Twitter said it was "200 Hiroshimas" (so far). I admit I haven't done the math and checked the numbers, but it sounds about right. And we're going strong with it. This is incredibly high-stakes. More to come.
Hey...uh...21? Not sure how I should address you here...Anyway, no argument from me on this sort of thing being very dangerous. It's all of that and probably more. Like nuclear power, it's technically "safe", as long as all the safety technology functions properly, along with all the backup redundancies, and no failure in the system occurs.
Problem with that is that all of these things are conceived of, designed, engineered, built and operated by...wait for it...human beings, who are not necessarily known for their infallibility. And when something put in place to guard against the worst at facilities such as this fails in its task due to either physical breakdown or just good old fashioned human error, things tend to go south in a really big way and in a really big hurry. Can anybody say Three Mile Island?
Guess I'm dating myself a bit there, and as catastrophes go, that was a relatively small one. How about Chernobyl? Fukushima? Well, I guess you get the idea. And the hell of it is that we knew about those facilities, where they were and pretty much what they were up to and why. So, how many more Wuhans are out there that we don't even know about? And what, exactly, are they up to and why?
The entities that conceive of, construct and operate facilities such as this aren't well known for their interest in transparency, regardless of where in the world they are located. And since the bottom line is always the bottom line eventually, neither are they interested in spending any more on safety and security than some bean counter deems appropriate in the end. That and the aforementioned fallibility of the creators and operators of these enterprises is not at all reassuring, or conducive to sleeping well at night. So, I'm all in on Very Dangerous.
I suppose I came at this from the perspective of what is the more immediate threat...the one we know about for sure, that is fairly well defined and is staring us in the face every minute of every day, or the ones lurking in the half-light and the shadows, unknown and perhaps to a large extent unknowable, and therefore much more difficult and time-consuming to address. But I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to do so.
Last time I checked I was still a part of that group that isn't well known for its infallibility, so I won't stake a claim to being 100% correct about this, and I'm looking forward to seeing what's coming in part two.
Yes, things are still blazing, and it's important to put out the fire. But the problem here is that it seems possible that we have allowed the arsonists, or at least the ones who carelessly played with matches, to have sole control of putting out the fire.
Very interesting write up. I agree with your take that the principle of parsimony should be used to find the most likely explanation and it should be investigated without regard to political considerations.
Of course, what you conclude to be the most parsimonous explanation depends on the set of facts you present. After reading your article and being quite convinced of your points, I listened to a popular German podcast about the pandemic. There is one episode from June (so not aware of omicron yet) that does (in my humble opinion) a good job of countering some of your arguments for the lab leak hypothesis.
What I found most convincing:
1. Drosten claims it is normal for viruses to aquire furin cleavage sites naturally (the highly pathogenic avian influenza did this)
2. insertion of a furin cleavage site (FCS) need not be via random point mutations (which are unlikely) but there are two mechanisms: First, replication enzymes in Viruses can "malfunction" to double up the arginine encoding CGG in the RNA (leading to the codon for the rare arginine doublet CGGCGG at the FCS). Second, the FCS is found in many animal cell proteins. When replicating viruses in a cell in large numbers rare mistakes happen regularly and pieces of genes from animal proteines can end up in the viral RNA (inserting the animal-typical CGG codon).
3. To perform the experiment of inserting a furin cleavage site in a bat coronavirus, you would need a reverse genetics system for this specific bat coronavirus that you modified to include the FCS. It takes years to develop such a system (at least it did in 2019). If you do want to perform this kind of GOF-research, why not insert the FCS into a Virus for which an existing reverse genetics system exists, like SARS-1?
4. Even if you grant point 3 and say that some especially ambitious Wuhan scientist created such a system based on a novel bat coronavirus and modified it to include a FCS. Why didn't they publish anything about that in all these years developing such a system?
It is a very long interview and he goes on in length about his discontent with the US reporting on the lab leak hypothesis. It appears to me he is a bit regretful about signing the open letter of solidarity with the Wuhan scientists by Peter Daszak and he certainly criticizes his role in the WHO investigation. It is clear, however that he finds the arguments for the lab leak hypothesis entirely unconvincing at this point in time. He goes on outlining a possible bat-civet-vector.
Thank you for sharing this link. I like this guy and he seems to be speaking fairly and mostly in good faith (although he sets up a straw man or two) but I am not finding it very convincing. Here's why.
Neither the lab-leak origin nor the zoonosis origin can said to have been proven. The virologist and I agree about that.
He says it is possible (but not likely in his mind) that furin cleavage sites would have been put into these viruses in Wuhan. I agree with him that it's possible. I agree with him that no one knows for sure at this time.
I disagree with him that it's "not likely" -- but I don't want to pick on him, because this interview is from June, months before the information was revealed that Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak put in the proposal to DARPA in 2018 to insert furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses.
To my thinking, knowing that piece of information lands me more heavily into the "it happened in the lab" column. How could it not?
***They planned to do this exact thing in 2018: putting furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses. In 2019 a bat coronavirus in Wuhan is infecting people and it's the only sarbecovirus ever to have a furin cleavage site.***
To me, that looks very much like the toddler on the counter surrounded by crumbs and chocolate bits.
What do any of us really think happened? I would be interested to hear what Drosten thinks now that we have this other information.
Now OK, it's true that other kinds of viruses (like the avian flu example), have developed furin cleavage sites, but not these type of bat coronaviruses. Ever.
Drosten seems fair-minded, because he brings up the other obvious problems, like the arginine codon, twice in a row, in the furin cleavage site that is not seen in coronaviruses. And the fact that this wouldn't have been done by a simple substitution, but by a whole series of new bases, which came from...where exactly?
Those are real problems. To his credit he brings them up, but then he dismisses them by saying, well, it could have happened in nature -- like maybe a couple of viruses combined in a non-bat animal (despite the fact we never saw the bat, or the other animal; and despite the fact that nothing like this has ever happened before; and despite the fact that this seemed to jump to humans in a highly infectious form, not in a fits-and-starts new zoonosis form).
To my ear, Drosten saying it might have arisen naturally sounds more like "maybe the burglar did it, and we just didn't see him anywhere but it could have happened."
So...talking about a bat-civet vector is all well and good, but where's the bat, where's the civet? After two years of looking, there's no animal.
We can say forever and ever that "we don't know for sure" especially if the WIV databases remain "missing" forever. And it will be true. We don't know for sure.
But I think given the available evidence, a natural origin is highly unlikely; and a lab leak origin is much more likely than any other hypothesis we have.
I cannot assess how much of a cookie crumb trail a rejected research proposal is. How many such proposals are made? Do they get shelved once they are rejected or do they become PhD projects for eager young scientists? I simply do not know how these virologists work but Drosten does: According to his description this project would be a major undertaking. Not something you do for fun once the funding has been rejected. So I do not know if he changed his mind regarding the virus origins. I don't think so, seeing that he made this pre-print available in December:
It's not that I blindly believe him, I just think that it is much harder to discount the opinion of an expert in coronaviruses.
I really have not made up my mind, I just tend to side with the scientific consensus which seems to be towards the natural origin story at the moment. Sure, it is an ongoing debate and the consensus might shift, but I do think that a lot of the "cookie crumbs" that are being discussed in public right now, have been known and discussed by the involved scientists a long time ago and are all already being considered in the current consensus.
Have you read Drosten's raccoon dog theory (civet was a mistranslation, sorry)? It is quite elaborate and according to him nobody has been swabbing raccon dogs. We know that in Denmark covid spread like wildfire in fur farms.
It's fair to ask where is the bat and where is the raccoon dog, but it is also fair to ask: where is the scientist? Where is the paper that documents the research? It's easy to dismiss these questions by some handwavy "China being China" argument, however these are internationally recognized scientists. They cooperate with a lot of other international scientists. I would like to know how many people would have to know about such research being actually done. Why is nothing published and noone is talking?
I have a toddler at home, and if he ate the cookies I certainly don't need much theorizing. I don't have to painstakingly search for cookie crumbs. He will talk sooner or later.
Are you Matt Ridley? I ask only because my neural network compared your comments and Matt Ridley's tweets & replies and it suggest with some confidence that you are indeed Matt Ridley. Add to that, it's super weird that you don't follow Matt Ridley on twitter, given how much you love "Viral" and that you mention Alina Chan in the comments a lot but never Matt. Anyway, no big deal, this is just how my brain works.
Also, rightly or wrongly (and maybe this is unfair of me), I think of it as "Alina's book" and maybe Matt helped with the writing? That might be totally off base.
He's a writer, I'm a writer, and that's about all we have in common! :)
If I were Matt, I'd probably be writing something for money, instead of writing on a free and very obscure substack! But he's a good writer, so thanks for the compliment! :)
Less than 1%. There's a non-zero chance that it arose naturally. There's also a non-zero chance that given enough time and effort, a monkey will type out Hamlet.
This post was intended to be the Cliff Notes version for the mildly interested reader. When I tried to type out a suitably detailed reply, the comment got annoyingly long, very quickly.
It comes down to this:
For the natural origin hypothesis to be true, multiple extremely unlikely things all need to have occurred...somehow, and no one can explain how.
For some version of the lab leak to be true, multiple very likely things all need to have occurred, and it's easy to see and explain how.
The author of that link concludes: "Let me be clear: this does NOT prove that CoV2 was synthesized in the laboratory. Yes, as we have seen above, from a technical standpoint, it would not be difficult for a modern virologist to create such a strain. But there is no direct evidence that anyone did this, and strange coincidences cannot pass for circumstantial evidence. On balance, the current chances against this are still higher than for the natural origins of CoV2."
That's hard to parse, but I think he means that he assigns a Bayesian probability of somewhat less that 50% to the "lab leak" hypothesis. But even if he meant somewhat greater than 50%, that's pretty far from your greater than 99%.
Yes. You asked me what I thought today, though, and not what Yuri Deigin cautiously asserted almost 2 years ago in the early months of the pandemic when we had much less information than we do now.
For example, FOIA info reveals that some of the people who were early on promoting the zoonosis hypothesis to the public were actually emailing privately among themselves that they thought it was a lab leak. Why would that be? What might that signify? I can’t say for sure, but it certainly changes the degree to which I think zoonosis is or ever was a very serious hypothesis. It had to be looked at, yes, but “lab leak” was not the crackpot idea it had been portrayed.
Another example: we learned only in recent months that the WIV was planning to insert furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses according to a 2018 DARPA proposal. Wow, coincidentally, that’s one of the two most surprising and unique features of this virus.
In April 2020, we knew a fraction of what we know now. Anyone who suggested “lab leak” was immediately shouted down, as though they were saying something completely outrageous, perhaps even anti-Asian, bigoted, reckless, or just plain stupid. To say “lab leak” even timidly was to be dragged through the mud of scornful public opinion.
Also in those early months, the jury _was_ still out on zoonosis— we might have still found the smoking gun (smoking pangolin?) in those early months. We didn’t know in those early months that even some of the zoonosis cheerleaders didn’t believe what they were saying.
We thought maybe evidence would emerge as it did with SARS-1 and earlier disease outbreaks.
So I think in the overall context of April 2020, that might have been a more reasonable (or at least a more suitably cautious) estimate, to put it at about 50%. Less information = harder to say.
In December 2021, a year and eight months later, not so much. With the information we have today, I think less than 1% is a reasonable judgment.
I critiqued the only source you gave. Now you are giving more unsourced statements. Where is this "FOIA info" you refer to? (And even if it's true, it's irrelevant: there is no new factual data there, just the opinions of experts whose opinions you reject if they don't agree with yours.)
What the Deigin Medium article does do, which I thought might be of interest to you, is to go into detail about the virus itself and why it's not plausibly a natural virus. I thought it was a good balance between "detailed" and yet "comprehensible."
It also has a long list of resource documents. It's unfortunate that some of the virus people have cute pseudonyms, and I wish they were writing more for a general readership, and I wish they were presenting their information in a form that looked maximally professional, but consider:
These are not media guys. They're not people who write for the general public. They are, however, putting the information out there, and unlike some of the cranks out there, like Malone and company, or the people promoting ivermectin, none of this information about the makeup of the virus has been "debunked" because it's accurate.
What you make of it, of course, is a matter for each of us to decide.
The FOIA emails are described pretty well already on Glenn's substack. Have you already seen those?
It seems to me that you are pretty well set on not looking too hard at this, because anyone who applies himself to looking at the details can't help but come to the conclusion that an unnatural virus leaked from the lab is certainly "more likely than not."
You asked for my opinion of the likelihood and I gave it. You can look at the information yourself and come to your own conclusions.
I admit that I don't remember anything about Bayesian probability, if I ever learned it. You state 50%, so I will defer to that. But doesn't that mean that a lab leak has equal probability? And doesn't that also mean that lab leak should be investigated as a viable possibility, and not shut down as if it were radioactive?
Bayesian probability is just a fancy term for what you personally think is the likelihood of something being true. It's a very useful way to talk about things.
Yes, the lab-leak hypothesis should be investigated, though I doubt we'll ever know the truth if the China virologists involved keep quiet (which they have every reason to do).
I object to our host's claim that it's 99% likely to be true. I don't think the evidence supports anything close to this strong a conclusion.
I’m struggling to understand— and would be glad to hear details— how one could look at the two hypotheses and what each hypothesis requires to be true, and then come to the conclusion, given the available facts, that they are roughly equally likely.
I don't quite understand what means "thousand of miles away". Wuhan is less than 600 miles north of shoreline. Do you mean bats are supposed to hibernate in winter when epidemic started?
I have read, in several different places, that the most closely related virus sampled from a bat is from a mine approximately 1000 miles from Wuhan.
I have also read that the type of bats which had the most closely related virus are typically hibernating at the time the outbreak began in Wuhan.
My point is: If the bats who harbor the virus live very far away, and if they are usually hibernating at that time of year, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which the bat virus naturally got to Wuhan. It’s not completely impossible, just very very difficult.
On the other hand, it is much easier to imagine a bat coronavirus, many of which are kept in the lab in Wuhan, escaping from that lab and infecting the people there.
No one “knows” what happened for sure. (Except possibly the people who deleted the databases.) so my only point is, I find it much easier to believe an easy thing happened (leaked from the lab where it was kept) than to believe a very difficult thing happened (it came from a hibernating bat a thousand miles away, but infected no one on the way until it got to Wuhan, the place where the lab is).
I believe that the virus did leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And yes, it very much matters. The pandemic has shown a disturbing lack of critical thinking and just plain common sense in our populace.
People were frightened, and more than willing to cede all authority to the scientists who were going to save us. And the wet market theory was easily sold; it conformed to what has happened in previous viral outbreaks, and wet markets are disgusting to American sensibilities. It wasn't difficult for Dr Fauci and his colleagues to convince people that it was purely coincidental that the lab was located in the epicenter. I think it was understandable that people bought this at first.
But as it became clear that there was no evidence to support the wet market origin, institutions dictated that only the pronouncements of their preferred "experts" mattered. Other evidence and contrary expert opinion were deemed "dangerous". As you so eloquently point out, common sense dictated that the obvious should have been investigated.
Have people simply abandoned evidence, logic, and common sense in favor of perceived "safety"? I think many have done exactly that, if they ever had any critical thinking skills to begin with. But I also think many more fear the power of the authoritarian social media if they dare to step out of line and think for themselves.
The pandemic has been horrific. What it has revealed about authoritarianism in our institutions and media is even more frightening. And most frightening of all, it has shown that people will not only accept it, but actively promote the idea that questioning official pronouncements is "dangerous misinformation".
So yes, in my opinion it matters very much.
Oh, Heyjude! Thanks for stopping by! I started a (long!) reply to you twice, and both times I got pulled away and the reply vanished. :/
Third time's the charm:
I agree with you that this was a very easy sell to people at first, for the reasons you describe. Add to that, The Lancet and Nature Medicine are both very respectable journals (and my respect for them plummeted, to see them use their credibility as a political cudgel). And Science magazine too -- they just had another article last month, dredging up the wet market hypothesis, which even the Chinese eliminated 18 months ago when all their searching yielded z-e-r-o. (Et tu, Science? And the WHO trip to China for pure optics?)
And it goes without saying that social media obediently took its cues from what our leaders wanted. For months you couldn't even mention the lab leak hypothesis. I got permanently banned from r/COVID19 for stating verifiable facts and providing links to those facts last spring, which now no one claims are in dispute. ( For example, that state department cables had mentioned safety concerns in Wuhan before the pandemic.) And I was completely polite. But even now, to appeal my ban, no one replies.
I think the extent to which the scientific community and media both lost credibility with the public is tragic (but deserved). If even scientists and "independent" media can't be trusted to present the facts, how do we proceed in a disaster like this? How do we fight this virus? How do we protect people? Well, I believe we've seen: Our leaders have responded very poorly, and the people have responded with the degree and amount of trust our leaders justly deserve -- ie, not much.
Disaster upon disaster, tragedy upon tragedy -- and then there's omicron. More on that to come.
I haven’t read much on the origins debate; it didn’t matter much to me at first. Not that it *doesn’t* matter, just that I didn’t have the personal bandwidth to pay attention. So I never really knew why lab leak was considered a conspiracy theory (though I knew it had been called one). Sounds like a lot of ass-covering behavior going on. Thanks for this post.
Thanks for reading Erin, especially about something that isn’t one of your most pressing issues!!
After reading comments below, a question comes to mind. Why is the default assumption that the virus occurred naturally, and that the lab leak origin is the idea that needs to be proven conclusively?
I am not a scientist, but I really don't see why the natural origin theory should be accepted when the only evidence for it is an appeal to "experts". Yet it seems the demand for "evidence" is pointed in only one direction. Why is that?
Exactly. Great point. I’d guess that a natural origin is the default assumption because previous disease outbreaks have been shown (usually in short order) to be natural. So, to many people the assumption is that it arose naturally.
However it’s only recently that a lab-altered virus has even been possible. It sounds crazy. After all, why would people make a deadly virus and then be so careless as to let it escape? It sounds like Frankenstein’s lab to them.
I get it and yet: There’s been a huge failure of flexible thinking in my opinion.
If all the evidence points very specifically in one direction (altered virus that leaked), and no evidence points toward zoonosis, it’s time for people to leave their cherished assumptions at the gate and take a closer look.
Now that a majority of the US population believes the Lab Leak origin, perhaps the bigger question right now is What Can We Do About It?
That's coming (in part 2). I'm glad a majority believes it! The majority of people I encounter don't seem to believe it -- or to care either way. Most people seem passively to be expecting our "leaders" to look out for us and to make the situation better. That hasn't worked so well.
I have also encountered the "doesn't matter" attitude. Truly stunning, after the trauma the whole world has endured for almost 2 yrs.
Absolutely.
This is probably the clearest and most cogent case for the origin of this pandemic being in the lab in question that I've read so far. So, props for that. If all contained herein is true and accurate, and I have no reason to question that, then that handy razor blade, which I believe is an appropriate tool to use in this case, pretty much cuts right to the heart of the matter. But I'm not sure that I agree that "understanding the origin of the pandemic, and applying pressure to world leaders to act accordingly, is the most important thing any of us could be doing. The most important thing." But then I guess that depends on what "act accordingly" means.
Is this important? Absolutely. Very important. A future event such as this certainly has the potential to be even worse. But it's at least possible we haven't seen the worst of this particular event yet, and when the fire department rolls up to a house to extinguish a blaze, at that point that particular task is the priority, figuring out the origin of the flames a bit less so. A simplistic analogy, but the flames are still burning rather hot on this at the moment, so perhaps putting pressure on world leaders to acknowledge that particular fact and to act more in unison to knock this thing down to a level where it may be more easily brought under control should be the higher priority.
Of course, considering all of the forces aligned against the prospect of either of these scenarios being carried out successfully any time soon, my opinion here is in all likelihood a moot point.
hi, M! I appreciate your comments, and my reasoning for my opinion (that it's the most important thing any of us could be doing) will be in part 2...so...more to come. Long story short, this is very dangerous research which hasn't helped prevent anything, and has seemingly caused millions of people to die -- someone on Twitter said it was "200 Hiroshimas" (so far). I admit I haven't done the math and checked the numbers, but it sounds about right. And we're going strong with it. This is incredibly high-stakes. More to come.
Hey...uh...21? Not sure how I should address you here...Anyway, no argument from me on this sort of thing being very dangerous. It's all of that and probably more. Like nuclear power, it's technically "safe", as long as all the safety technology functions properly, along with all the backup redundancies, and no failure in the system occurs.
Problem with that is that all of these things are conceived of, designed, engineered, built and operated by...wait for it...human beings, who are not necessarily known for their infallibility. And when something put in place to guard against the worst at facilities such as this fails in its task due to either physical breakdown or just good old fashioned human error, things tend to go south in a really big way and in a really big hurry. Can anybody say Three Mile Island?
Guess I'm dating myself a bit there, and as catastrophes go, that was a relatively small one. How about Chernobyl? Fukushima? Well, I guess you get the idea. And the hell of it is that we knew about those facilities, where they were and pretty much what they were up to and why. So, how many more Wuhans are out there that we don't even know about? And what, exactly, are they up to and why?
The entities that conceive of, construct and operate facilities such as this aren't well known for their interest in transparency, regardless of where in the world they are located. And since the bottom line is always the bottom line eventually, neither are they interested in spending any more on safety and security than some bean counter deems appropriate in the end. That and the aforementioned fallibility of the creators and operators of these enterprises is not at all reassuring, or conducive to sleeping well at night. So, I'm all in on Very Dangerous.
I suppose I came at this from the perspective of what is the more immediate threat...the one we know about for sure, that is fairly well defined and is staring us in the face every minute of every day, or the ones lurking in the half-light and the shadows, unknown and perhaps to a large extent unknowable, and therefore much more difficult and time-consuming to address. But I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to do so.
Last time I checked I was still a part of that group that isn't well known for its infallibility, so I won't stake a claim to being 100% correct about this, and I'm looking forward to seeing what's coming in part two.
Yes, things are still blazing, and it's important to put out the fire. But the problem here is that it seems possible that we have allowed the arsonists, or at least the ones who carelessly played with matches, to have sole control of putting out the fire.
Yes, leaked. I hope not but I wonder if it was leaked on purpose.
I tend to doubt that. It affected the whole world negatively,
Very interesting write up. I agree with your take that the principle of parsimony should be used to find the most likely explanation and it should be investigated without regard to political considerations.
Of course, what you conclude to be the most parsimonous explanation depends on the set of facts you present. After reading your article and being quite convinced of your points, I listened to a popular German podcast about the pandemic. There is one episode from June (so not aware of omicron yet) that does (in my humble opinion) a good job of countering some of your arguments for the lab leak hypothesis.
What I found most convincing:
1. Drosten claims it is normal for viruses to aquire furin cleavage sites naturally (the highly pathogenic avian influenza did this)
2. insertion of a furin cleavage site (FCS) need not be via random point mutations (which are unlikely) but there are two mechanisms: First, replication enzymes in Viruses can "malfunction" to double up the arginine encoding CGG in the RNA (leading to the codon for the rare arginine doublet CGGCGG at the FCS). Second, the FCS is found in many animal cell proteins. When replicating viruses in a cell in large numbers rare mistakes happen regularly and pieces of genes from animal proteines can end up in the viral RNA (inserting the animal-typical CGG codon).
3. To perform the experiment of inserting a furin cleavage site in a bat coronavirus, you would need a reverse genetics system for this specific bat coronavirus that you modified to include the FCS. It takes years to develop such a system (at least it did in 2019). If you do want to perform this kind of GOF-research, why not insert the FCS into a Virus for which an existing reverse genetics system exists, like SARS-1?
4. Even if you grant point 3 and say that some especially ambitious Wuhan scientist created such a system based on a novel bat coronavirus and modified it to include a FCS. Why didn't they publish anything about that in all these years developing such a system?
It is a very long interview and he goes on in length about his discontent with the US reporting on the lab leak hypothesis. It appears to me he is a bit regretful about signing the open letter of solidarity with the Wuhan scientists by Peter Daszak and he certainly criticizes his role in the WHO investigation. It is clear, however that he finds the arguments for the lab leak hypothesis entirely unconvincing at this point in time. He goes on outlining a possible bat-civet-vector.
google translation of the source:
https://www-ndr-de.translate.goog/nachrichten/info/92-Coronavirus-Update-Woher-stammt-das-Virus,podcastcoronavirus322.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US#Forschung
Thank you for sharing this link. I like this guy and he seems to be speaking fairly and mostly in good faith (although he sets up a straw man or two) but I am not finding it very convincing. Here's why.
Neither the lab-leak origin nor the zoonosis origin can said to have been proven. The virologist and I agree about that.
He says it is possible (but not likely in his mind) that furin cleavage sites would have been put into these viruses in Wuhan. I agree with him that it's possible. I agree with him that no one knows for sure at this time.
I disagree with him that it's "not likely" -- but I don't want to pick on him, because this interview is from June, months before the information was revealed that Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak put in the proposal to DARPA in 2018 to insert furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses.
To my thinking, knowing that piece of information lands me more heavily into the "it happened in the lab" column. How could it not?
***They planned to do this exact thing in 2018: putting furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses. In 2019 a bat coronavirus in Wuhan is infecting people and it's the only sarbecovirus ever to have a furin cleavage site.***
To me, that looks very much like the toddler on the counter surrounded by crumbs and chocolate bits.
What do any of us really think happened? I would be interested to hear what Drosten thinks now that we have this other information.
Now OK, it's true that other kinds of viruses (like the avian flu example), have developed furin cleavage sites, but not these type of bat coronaviruses. Ever.
Drosten seems fair-minded, because he brings up the other obvious problems, like the arginine codon, twice in a row, in the furin cleavage site that is not seen in coronaviruses. And the fact that this wouldn't have been done by a simple substitution, but by a whole series of new bases, which came from...where exactly?
Those are real problems. To his credit he brings them up, but then he dismisses them by saying, well, it could have happened in nature -- like maybe a couple of viruses combined in a non-bat animal (despite the fact we never saw the bat, or the other animal; and despite the fact that nothing like this has ever happened before; and despite the fact that this seemed to jump to humans in a highly infectious form, not in a fits-and-starts new zoonosis form).
To my ear, Drosten saying it might have arisen naturally sounds more like "maybe the burglar did it, and we just didn't see him anywhere but it could have happened."
So...talking about a bat-civet vector is all well and good, but where's the bat, where's the civet? After two years of looking, there's no animal.
We can say forever and ever that "we don't know for sure" especially if the WIV databases remain "missing" forever. And it will be true. We don't know for sure.
But I think given the available evidence, a natural origin is highly unlikely; and a lab leak origin is much more likely than any other hypothesis we have.
I cannot assess how much of a cookie crumb trail a rejected research proposal is. How many such proposals are made? Do they get shelved once they are rejected or do they become PhD projects for eager young scientists? I simply do not know how these virologists work but Drosten does: According to his description this project would be a major undertaking. Not something you do for fun once the funding has been rejected. So I do not know if he changed his mind regarding the virus origins. I don't think so, seeing that he made this pre-print available in December:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.15.472779v1.full.pdf
It's not that I blindly believe him, I just think that it is much harder to discount the opinion of an expert in coronaviruses.
I really have not made up my mind, I just tend to side with the scientific consensus which seems to be towards the natural origin story at the moment. Sure, it is an ongoing debate and the consensus might shift, but I do think that a lot of the "cookie crumbs" that are being discussed in public right now, have been known and discussed by the involved scientists a long time ago and are all already being considered in the current consensus.
Have you read Drosten's raccoon dog theory (civet was a mistranslation, sorry)? It is quite elaborate and according to him nobody has been swabbing raccon dogs. We know that in Denmark covid spread like wildfire in fur farms.
It's fair to ask where is the bat and where is the raccoon dog, but it is also fair to ask: where is the scientist? Where is the paper that documents the research? It's easy to dismiss these questions by some handwavy "China being China" argument, however these are internationally recognized scientists. They cooperate with a lot of other international scientists. I would like to know how many people would have to know about such research being actually done. Why is nothing published and noone is talking?
I have a toddler at home, and if he ate the cookies I certainly don't need much theorizing. I don't have to painstakingly search for cookie crumbs. He will talk sooner or later.
Are you Matt Ridley? I ask only because my neural network compared your comments and Matt Ridley's tweets & replies and it suggest with some confidence that you are indeed Matt Ridley. Add to that, it's super weird that you don't follow Matt Ridley on twitter, given how much you love "Viral" and that you mention Alina Chan in the comments a lot but never Matt. Anyway, no big deal, this is just how my brain works.
Hi, no I'm not Matt. I mention Alina a lot because I've been following her progress on this issue since the Boston magazine article in 2020 (see https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-broad-institute-coronavirus/).
Also, rightly or wrongly (and maybe this is unfair of me), I think of it as "Alina's book" and maybe Matt helped with the writing? That might be totally off base.
He's a writer, I'm a writer, and that's about all we have in common! :)
If I were Matt, I'd probably be writing something for money, instead of writing on a free and very obscure substack! But he's a good writer, so thanks for the compliment! :)
"'SARS-2 arose naturally' doesn’t hold up to scrutiny"
"Doesn't hold up to scrutiny" is awfully vauge. What is your Bayesian probability that SARS-2 arose naturally? Mine is currently 50%.
Less than 1%. There's a non-zero chance that it arose naturally. There's also a non-zero chance that given enough time and effort, a monkey will type out Hamlet.
This post was intended to be the Cliff Notes version for the mildly interested reader. When I tried to type out a suitably detailed reply, the comment got annoyingly long, very quickly.
It comes down to this:
For the natural origin hypothesis to be true, multiple extremely unlikely things all need to have occurred...somehow, and no one can explain how.
For some version of the lab leak to be true, multiple very likely things all need to have occurred, and it's easy to see and explain how.
Others have explained it much better and with detail, with charts, tables, graphs, right down to the nucleotides. See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33200842/ or https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 or...a lot of other stuff.
Natural origin, including a special case of "lab leak" in which a natural virus toted to the lab and escaped therefrom: extremely unlikely.
Lab origin, much more likely.
The author of that link concludes: "Let me be clear: this does NOT prove that CoV2 was synthesized in the laboratory. Yes, as we have seen above, from a technical standpoint, it would not be difficult for a modern virologist to create such a strain. But there is no direct evidence that anyone did this, and strange coincidences cannot pass for circumstantial evidence. On balance, the current chances against this are still higher than for the natural origins of CoV2."
That's hard to parse, but I think he means that he assigns a Bayesian probability of somewhat less that 50% to the "lab leak" hypothesis. But even if he meant somewhat greater than 50%, that's pretty far from your greater than 99%.
Yes. You asked me what I thought today, though, and not what Yuri Deigin cautiously asserted almost 2 years ago in the early months of the pandemic when we had much less information than we do now.
For example, FOIA info reveals that some of the people who were early on promoting the zoonosis hypothesis to the public were actually emailing privately among themselves that they thought it was a lab leak. Why would that be? What might that signify? I can’t say for sure, but it certainly changes the degree to which I think zoonosis is or ever was a very serious hypothesis. It had to be looked at, yes, but “lab leak” was not the crackpot idea it had been portrayed.
Another example: we learned only in recent months that the WIV was planning to insert furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses according to a 2018 DARPA proposal. Wow, coincidentally, that’s one of the two most surprising and unique features of this virus.
In April 2020, we knew a fraction of what we know now. Anyone who suggested “lab leak” was immediately shouted down, as though they were saying something completely outrageous, perhaps even anti-Asian, bigoted, reckless, or just plain stupid. To say “lab leak” even timidly was to be dragged through the mud of scornful public opinion.
Also in those early months, the jury _was_ still out on zoonosis— we might have still found the smoking gun (smoking pangolin?) in those early months. We didn’t know in those early months that even some of the zoonosis cheerleaders didn’t believe what they were saying.
We thought maybe evidence would emerge as it did with SARS-1 and earlier disease outbreaks.
So I think in the overall context of April 2020, that might have been a more reasonable (or at least a more suitably cautious) estimate, to put it at about 50%. Less information = harder to say.
In December 2021, a year and eight months later, not so much. With the information we have today, I think less than 1% is a reasonable judgment.
I critiqued the only source you gave. Now you are giving more unsourced statements. Where is this "FOIA info" you refer to? (And even if it's true, it's irrelevant: there is no new factual data there, just the opinions of experts whose opinions you reject if they don't agree with yours.)
What the Deigin Medium article does do, which I thought might be of interest to you, is to go into detail about the virus itself and why it's not plausibly a natural virus. I thought it was a good balance between "detailed" and yet "comprehensible."
Here is another detailed description but it's harder to follow. This was from July, with some updates added in September: https://medium.com/@SherlockGNomes/an-engineered-origin-for-the-sars-cov2-genome-47914a6919ad
It also has a long list of resource documents. It's unfortunate that some of the virus people have cute pseudonyms, and I wish they were writing more for a general readership, and I wish they were presenting their information in a form that looked maximally professional, but consider:
These are not media guys. They're not people who write for the general public. They are, however, putting the information out there, and unlike some of the cranks out there, like Malone and company, or the people promoting ivermectin, none of this information about the makeup of the virus has been "debunked" because it's accurate.
What you make of it, of course, is a matter for each of us to decide.
The FOIA emails are described pretty well already on Glenn's substack. Have you already seen those?
It seems to me that you are pretty well set on not looking too hard at this, because anyone who applies himself to looking at the details can't help but come to the conclusion that an unnatural virus leaked from the lab is certainly "more likely than not."
You asked for my opinion of the likelihood and I gave it. You can look at the information yourself and come to your own conclusions.
I'm curious, Salonniere. Why do you consider Dr Malone, the inventor of mRNA technology, to be a "crank"?
I don't follow him, and don't have an agenda here. Just wondering about the casual dismissal.
I admit that I don't remember anything about Bayesian probability, if I ever learned it. You state 50%, so I will defer to that. But doesn't that mean that a lab leak has equal probability? And doesn't that also mean that lab leak should be investigated as a viable possibility, and not shut down as if it were radioactive?
Bayesian probability is just a fancy term for what you personally think is the likelihood of something being true. It's a very useful way to talk about things.
Yes, the lab-leak hypothesis should be investigated, though I doubt we'll ever know the truth if the China virologists involved keep quiet (which they have every reason to do).
I object to our host's claim that it's 99% likely to be true. I don't think the evidence supports anything close to this strong a conclusion.
I’m struggling to understand— and would be glad to hear details— how one could look at the two hypotheses and what each hypothesis requires to be true, and then come to the conclusion, given the available facts, that they are roughly equally likely.
I don't quite understand what means "thousand of miles away". Wuhan is less than 600 miles north of shoreline. Do you mean bats are supposed to hibernate in winter when epidemic started?
I have read, in several different places, that the most closely related virus sampled from a bat is from a mine approximately 1000 miles from Wuhan.
I have also read that the type of bats which had the most closely related virus are typically hibernating at the time the outbreak began in Wuhan.
My point is: If the bats who harbor the virus live very far away, and if they are usually hibernating at that time of year, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which the bat virus naturally got to Wuhan. It’s not completely impossible, just very very difficult.
On the other hand, it is much easier to imagine a bat coronavirus, many of which are kept in the lab in Wuhan, escaping from that lab and infecting the people there.
No one “knows” what happened for sure. (Except possibly the people who deleted the databases.) so my only point is, I find it much easier to believe an easy thing happened (leaked from the lab where it was kept) than to believe a very difficult thing happened (it came from a hibernating bat a thousand miles away, but infected no one on the way until it got to Wuhan, the place where the lab is).
Where was that place? Why don't mention it in the post?
Because the information it ubiquitous! :) You can do a google or DDG search to see where the bats live.